Interesting comment.
"Fascinating. I was particularly interested in the section on the Pope's view that reason can help man to know God. However, in his "Jesus of Nazareth", the pontiff seems to accept that the Sermon on the Mount is difficult for reason to swallow. In support of this, he cites remarks such as , "Woe to those who laugh." He further says that today people find it hard to reason themselves into religion. Is this because our underlying philosophy is no longer of the Greek or Platonic variety which led so many ancients to faith? And haven't some of the hardest blows against Platonism come from the Liberal thinkers who have, in a way, founded our society?
Few today use "Sophist" as a term of abuse. The weak sophist position - that knowledge may exist, but that we only gain a fragment of it - does battle with the strong sophist position - that knowledge is impossible - and Plato is cut out. Laughter is the natural weapon of this sceptical, sophistic tradition: "Blessed are the cheesemakers" - a much cleverer joke than is at first apparent. It packages all the objections to faith in one, clever, deflating parody. Who knows what was said? Doubting its provenance, can we accept the remark's authority? And so on. Elaborate, earnest, transported metaphysics are now looked on with contempt and some degree of horror. Admittedly, I share the wariness. Plato and slab faced orthodoxy have been responsible for some dreadful horrors - the whole history of communism, for example. And it is significant that jokes played their part in bringing the communist edifice down. We can gain our "transports" in the safety of the operal house - or can we?
For it is notable that a society based entirely on sceptical good living is strangely empty. Our operas - the really good ones - come from a past in which a host of beliefs were still available - honour, patriotism, fidelity and - of course - religion. One has the feeling that they gave life a certain ballast or depth. Communism has shown, above all, that one cannot simply reinvent human society or reattach faith to supposedly rational doctrines. Renewal must be a sort of Tory renewal - or revival, indeed, picking up the few threads of tradition which remain to us and patiently weaving them together again into Shelley's painted veil." |
