I’ll break the news up-front. I’ve decided to extend my philosophy foray into a third week. I was going to do two and switch gears for a bit, but you know how it is. Desperate times. Desperate measures. The world is facing apocalyptic danger and I haven’t quite had time to save it yet! We’ve got to see this plotline through!
Less dramatically: working on this week’s two major essays, I realized it would make more sense to break them each into two. This week I’ll explore the question: Why, if the Thomistic synthesis was so amazing, did it lose its hold on the world? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put your best workhorses out to pasture. Why the heck did we do that?
Next week I want to look at the Thomistic and Aristotelian revivals of the 20th century and beyond. They’re coming back. I think they can come back further. But there are also some daunting challenges that need to be taken seriously. That’ll be next week’s topic.
After that, I’ll try to think of some fun, lighthearted topic to do as a palate cleanser. Ferris Wheels and Why We Need Them. How Jean-Luc Picard will restore Christendom.
But first we need to dig into the problems of modernity. Tomorrow I’ll talk about materialism and the allure of mechanistic explanation. Thursday I’ll get into postmodernism and the rejection of truth and rationality. Some big, chasm-like, Western-civilization threatening rapids ahead!
Let’s do this, people.
The labeling is a bit off here.
Great thinkers like Descartes and Locke, who launched philosophical modernity, did not reject "the Christian synthesis." They *were* Christians.
Christianity persuaded them. Scholasticism didn't. So they wrought a physical revolution *within* Christianity, against a philosophy whose reach was not coextensive with Christianity, but much more recent and regional.
"Modernity" didn't reject a "Christian" synthesis. Christianity retained its hegemony for generations after philosophy took its Enlightened turn. Christianity kept experiencing revivals, and was as strong in the 19th century as at any time in history, without bringing back scholasticism.
To the extent that there was a slow turn away from Christianity in modern times, I think the blame is sufficiently allocated by saying it's a reaction against persecution. Christianity has persuaded so many intelligent people that it has to be taken seriously unless you have some blanket reason to dismiss their faith as insincere or shallow. But there is: the Inquisition and its partners in crime across a thousand years of European history.
Because the Inquisition betrayed Christ by burning heretics, all subsequent generations could say, "Those people had to pretend to believe because to tell the truth was illegal." And the developments in thought that could have defended Christianity better were long prevented.