WHERE THE HELL ARE WE NOW?

By the end of the Middle Ages Western Christian thought and culture had been growing for more than two thousand years. Much of its metaphysical underpinning derives from Greek philosophy as it developed since before the time of Socrates. The structure that still existed, in all its essentials, in the year 1450 – though constantly shaken, especially in its political manifestations – seemed to most Europeans the permanent face of humanity as understood in Christian terms. Yet within the next two hundred years the foundations of an alternative culture were being laid, often unbeknown to its architects: a culture which, in Europe and still much influenced by Christian origins which as yet it was uninclined to deny, was to become first the rival, later the successor of Christianity as the apparently dominant mode of human perception. In earlier chapters I noticed some of the political, social, ethical and aesthetic effects of this new culture. In the present chapter I want to look at some of its principal anti-Catholic features before considering what attitude Catholicism has taken and should take towards it. Over the last five hundred years during which anti-Christianity was still comparatively weak even where anti-Catholicism was strong, the Catholic Church has been on the defensive.