dunces against the world !

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality.
---Sen.

There's a tendency to think that only we are truly free, really rational and, therefore, only we can with any justification call ourselves human. Everyone else, the sages, the saints and artists, the philosophers, poets and prophets: everyone before the Enlightenment wasn't quite there-and this includes Russia, the 'otherland,' with her suspect distrust of reason. Despite the monstrous absurdity of such a thought there arises the question of what is meant by 'true humanity' and why "the west" has thought of those who weren't 'modern' as dunces, as being 'without mind' (Hugh Brody, 'The Other Side of Eden'). [The same can and has been said of women, black people etc.] Of course, it goes without saying that this confidence in reason has itself been undermined. One only has to mention the word Auschwitz to regain one's humility. And what of the Trenches, the Bomb, the Gulags-and at another level: Freud, Darwin...

No, sorry, one cannot take seriously the claims that the Enlightenment represents the only enlightenment, that humanity reached its apex in the 20 th century, or that socio-economic progress is an unequivocally good thing. That doesn't translate into: you're 'against' the world-you'd still rather live in this period rather than any other (who wouldn't?) and why always this stark choice? Might we not return to the fundamental questions, not to reproach, not to score points, but to simply ask again: what does it mean to be a human being. That we have to ask already says something...

From Jacques Maritain, 'True Humanism':

For the medievals the mysteries of man's nature were not studied for themselves (scientifically, psychologically). The focus was on the objective side, rather than on the subjective. Man was guaranteed by the 'object', so to speak. A certain richness of comprehension was foresworn in favour of a 'metaphysical modesty'. It might be said, that modern man wanted to know himself in time, and not just in space.

It would be absurd to pretend that in the Middle Ages the act of self-awareness in the creature was not implicitly accomplished, in the very movement of metaphysical or theological thought towards being and towards God, and in the movement of artistic and poetic thought towards the work of creation. It was on the side of deliberate and express reflection that this self-consciousness was lacking.

They lived these things, experienced certain interior states and did not need to reflect on them. They were known in life, more than in an act of reflective consciousness. The 'deed' is both thought and action.

The dissolution of the Middle Ages is the birth of an 'anthropocentric rehabilitation' of the creature, it is the very rehabilitation of nature. Man is the measure of all things. No longer is man a half-fallen angel; at last he can find his home, here on earth.

The three R's: Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution:

The 'Protestant discovery' is a solution of despair: the creature declares its nothingness. But this declaration is its own. Calvinism is a theology of grace without freedom. The absolute humanist theology, on the other hand, the theology of naturalism, seeks to save human freedom at the expense of divine causality: freedom without grace. Man makes his own destiny-the self-made man, the man without any qualities. The universe is given over to geometric determinism, necessity, and man barely exists as bright spark swamped by so much gloom (Gnosticism).

Humanism suggested a perfect natural wisdom independent of faith or revelation. Nature was the explanation of itself (a substance in Spinoza's terminology, rather than a mode of substance). The perspective of 'heaven and earth' becomes a mechanical dichotomy rather than an organic subordination. We now have knowledge and faith, and it is not too hard to imagine the latter's importance dwindling, shrinking to an unreachable point beyond the horizon, only to be reached by a tremendous leap. 'Heaven' becomes something heteronomous, something imposed on truth, lyingly added, and therefore something that can be rejected. What remains is natural man who is naturally good.

Hegel dissolves the whole content of religion in the supreme metaphysical enumeration of the pure reason and makes of the State the mystical body through which man attains to the liberty of the sons of God. Man, completely detached from the supernatural order, makes himself his own centre.

Pessimism cuts every connection between the creature and a higher order. Then, since the good life is necessary, the creature takes things easy and becomes himself the centre of his own lower world. A rehabilitation of the creature turned back on itself and cut off, so to say, from the transcendent principle of its life.

The incontestable enrichments of of civilisation have given entrance to the interior torture chamber of man become a prey unto himself.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself (Blake)

The polemic of rationalism condemns any outside intervention (revelation, grace) or the authority of a law which has its origins outside man.

A miracle is simply not admissible to this way of thinking.