Maritain, MacIntyre, and Christendom

Are the dreaded barbarians coming? Are they already at the gate? Or are they already within and among us? In the concluding paragraph of his magnum opus, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously opines that, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” In MacIntyre’s view, we are living in a new Dark Ages, one in which a shared conception of justice and the common good has been irrevocably lost. The best that we can do, as people ruled by barbarians, is to form local, self-sufficient communities oriented around a shared view of the world, and then hope that the barbarians will leave us in peace.