“Optimism is a mood; it passes. Hope is a virtue…”

If the civilization we call the West seems to be in crisis at the moment – crippled by internal conflict, irrational politics, moral malaise, and pervasive anxiety – that’s because it is.  In his book Lost in the Chaos, R.J. Snell tracks in precise scholarly detail how and why we landed in the frying pan where we now sit.

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg, 1850 [Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany]

As Snell notes, today we live in a disenchanted world, a world deprived of transcendent meaning in the name of “reason,” even as reason itself is now under assault by the scientism (as opposed to true science) it helped create.  As a result:

It’s not that moderns are necessarily secular in the sense of not believing in God or not practicing a religion, but the context in which people believe is secular.  Everyone knows there are other options, everyone knows there are competing accounts [that are] not viewed as abnormal in the current milieu.  It was perhaps. . .difficult to be an atheist in thirteenth-century Paris, while it is exceptionally easy in the City of Lights of the twenty-first.  Belief persists. But it is not an obvious, self-evident starting point.  Faith is optional, needing to defend itself as a live option in ways quite different from previous moments in the West.

Thus even many people who do believe, the author argues, are shaped in part by our materialist times.  The result is a widespread inner emptiness; a spiritual infertility that easily morphs into despair.

The great appeal of Snell’s text, however, is not its analysis of what’s gone wrong with the modern world,  but its argument for the power of Christian hope.  Optimism is a mood; it passes.  Hope is a virtue; a very different creature of tougher material that roots itself, against the odds, in the human heart, mind, and will.  It thus has staying power. . .which is why it sustains the Christian Church century after difficult century, including this one.  The author writes that, “In God’s love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit, we apprehend something outside the locked room” of the modern world’s despair.  We see something vastly better and more beautiful.

Nothing could be truer; history and personal experience bear it out; and the author makes his case with impressive intellectual zeal. 

Source: https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/01/31/confessions-of-a-book-hoarder/