The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity by Daniel J Mahoney, 152 pages
In The Idol of Our Age, Daniel Mahoney uses the thought of Orestes Brownson, Vladimir Soloviev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to critique what he calls, following Aurel Kolnai, the religion of humanitarianism, itself the product of the replacement of a traditional understanding of reason as the faculty by which men could apprehend the underlying order and harmony of Creation with a truncated this-worldly view of reason as a tool of manipulation and conquest. The Enlightenment rationalists naively imagined that they could organize a world where a soulless humanity could live in peace and plenty, but Mahoney argues that their immanentist project, by substituting the idol of the mere man for the icon of the God-man and putting the love of an abstract humanity above the love of God, ends by elevating sentimentality over reason and the easy appearance of virtue over the hard work of becoming virtuous. The hubris of humanitarianism, which vastly overestimates the power of the human mind and therefore fails to recognize the seriousness of evil, is nevertheless powerfully seductive to Christians, being in fact a fragment of a disintegrated Christianity, and, as the subtitle implies, exposing this specific temptation is the primary purpose of Mahoney's book.
The Idol of Our Age began as a series a separate essays, and these have been not very artfully welded together, the whole functioning primarily as a commentary on the appended 1944 essay by Kolnai. The whole work might be stronger if that essay had been placed at the beginning, or if the reader skips to the end to read it first and then returns to Pierre Manent's introduction. Yet even if all he did was draw attention to such a powerful essay, Mahoney's work would be worthwhile. He does more, using his sources to elaborate on Kolnai's insights, and to demonstrate their continuing significance for the world and Church of today.
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