The Age of Reason
In the seventeenth century
a Frenchman
by the name of Descartes
discarded Thomistic philosophy
and formulated
a philosophy of his own.
St. Thomas’ philosophy
starts with Aristotle
and helps the reason
to accept revelation.
For St. Thomas Aquinas
reason is the handmaid of faith;
not so for Descartes.
The eighteenth century
became known
as the age of enlightenment
or the age of reason.
An American
by the name of Thomas Paine
wrote a book entitled
The Age of Reason.
The Age of Treason
The use of reason
was discarded
by the intellectuals
of the nineteenth century.
Romanticism,
positivism,
pragmatism,
one after another,
became the fashion
in the nineteenth century.
In a book entitled
The Treason of the Intellectuals
Julien Benda,
a French Jew,
says the intellectuals
gave up the search for truth
and consented to become
the paid propagandists
of nationalists
as well as capitalists.
So the age of reason
of the eighteenth century
was followed
by the age of treason
of the nineteenth century.
The Age of Chaos
And we are now
in the age of chaos.
In an age of chaos
people look
for a new order.
Because people are becoming aware
of this lack of order
they would like to be able
to create order
out of chaos.
The time
to create order
out of chaos
is now.
The germ of the present
was in the past
and the germ of the future
is in the present.
The thing to do
is to give up old tricks
and start to play new tricks.
The Age of Order
If we make
the right decisions
in the age of chaos
the effect of those decisions
will be a better order.
The new order
brought about
by right decisions
will be functional,
not acquisitive;
personalist,
not socialist;
communitarian,
not collectivist;
organismic,
not mechanistic.
The thing to do right now
is to create a new society
within the shell of the old
with the philosophy of the new.
which is not a new philosophy
but a very old philosophy.
a philosophy so old
that it looks like new.