Reactionaries in Our Time

I don’t believe there was ever a Golden Age. St. Augustine, in his City Of God, written after the Sack of Rome in 410, cautioned his readers to remember that the human condition (from a Christian point of view) is exile, and that any peace we have in the earthly city is “the peace of Babylon” — this, referencing the Hebrew exile there. It is true that I start our descent into our particular civilizational fragmentation in the West (I accept Bauman’s “liquid modernity” as accurately descriptive of our time) with the loss of metaphysical realism in the High Middle Ages. But it would be absurd to claim that the West was living in anything remotely resembling a paradise. Nobody who read Dante, and has the slightest clue about the political and ecclesial corruption and decline from which the Commedia grew, can believe that Thomism preserved Europe from decadence.