War of the Cosmoses - 2a

In War of Cosmoses - 1 (below), I began with a quotation from Chesterton: "A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in." Then I looked briefly at two faith presuppositions held by the Scimitar; namely, the belief in Mohammad as the "perfect man" worthy in every way of imitation and his having received the inalterable revelation from Allah, the Koran. On these two a priori first principles all of Islam hangs, and, aided by the Ahadith, radical Islamists make Jihad upon the faltering Christian West in utter logical and legalistic certitude.

I meant to turn next to the second combatant in the "cosmos wars," Christianity, however, it seems more important to look at the third combatant, Modernism, since it is its present bombardment that has left Christendom enervated before Islam's current attacks. It is, as I said, "Legion", because it is comprised of characteristics of all the Christian faith's attackers in its two thousand year history.

Many books have been written and much cyber-ink spilt describing this Modernist combatant: DeLubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism, DeMarco and Wider's Architects of the Culture of Death, to name only two fine resources. But I think going back further, one sees with an acerbic yet tonic eye the outlines of this foe in Hilaire Belloc's great surmise, The Great Heresies. The great historian even struggles to give this new assault on the Christian faith a name:

...save the vague term "modern." I should have preferred, perhaps, the old Greek word, "alogos"; but that would have seemed pedantic. And yet it is a pity to have to reject it, for it admirably describes by implication the quarrel between the present attackers of Catholic authority and doctrine, and the tone of mind of a believer. Antiquity began by giving the name "alogos" to those who belittled or denied, though calling themselves Christians, the Divinity of Christ. They were said to do so from lack of "wit," in the sense of "fullness of comprehension," "largeness of apprehension." Men felt about this kind of rationalism as normal people feel about a color-blind man. [12-13]

Belloc names the central tenet of this combatant: "the proposal to treat all transcendental affirmation as illusion." One sees how little distance Modernism has traveled when scanning the titles the books of Hitchens, Dawkins, and their ilk.

Belloc did not say newer, different assaults would not come upon Catholic truth in the future; he said "the main kinds of attack would seem to be exhausted by the list which history has hitherton presented." He summed upon these attacks as: the Arian; the Mohammedan; the Albigensian; the Protestant; and "the Modern." The Arian attacked the root of the Faith, the Incarnation. The Mohammedan worked without, forming a new world in their fashion. The Albigensian grew a "foreign body" cancer-like from within the Church. The Protestant attacked the personality, the unity, of the Church. In my opinion, the Modern attack is willing to use any and all of these former attacks as MEANS to win. Here is what Belloc said:

...the modern phase (the "cosmos wars") has abandoned reason. It is concerned with the destruction of the Catholic Church and the civilization proceeding therefrom. It is not troubled by apparent contradictions within its own body so long as the general alliance is one for the ending of all that by which we have hitherto lived. The modern attack is materialist because in its philosophy it considers only material causes ... Being Atheist, it is characteristic of the advancing wave that it repudiates the human reason ... (it) is indifferent to self-contradiction ... It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone ... there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue. In a word, either we of the Faith shall become a small persecuted neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, "Christus Imperat!" [146-147,155]

I would add this: the Modern attack, now nearly two-centuries old, has used psychology wearyingly well, as C. S. Lewis depicted the witch using it as a weapon in The Silver Chair -- all that is transcendent is merely "projection", as Feuerbach proposed.

The effect of the Modern attack is a moral, ethical, and faith playing field that is level, Darwinian, and brutally violent. For an accurate taxonomy, one must delve into the mimetic theory of René Girard to see where Modernism intends to take the human race: back to the "dark gods of blood."