From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond

From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond: The Long Jagged Trail to the Postmodern Void by Thomas Storck, 207 pages

The central theme in this volume of Thomas Storck's collected essays is the exhaustion of the West as the consequence of the Western rejection of absolutes, beginning with the rise of nominalism in the 14th century.  This alienation of Western culture from its roots, he argues, has led to an increasingly narrow outlook divorced from reality, an antinomian utilitarianism which has conquered the intellectual, political, and economic worlds, combining usurious capitalism, social contract political theories, and sexual revolution antihumanism.  This is the essence of postmodern nihilism - a blanket rejection of intangible goods in pursuit of material wealth and pleasure, trading justice for avarice, solidarity for solipsism, genuine politics for tribalism, true virtue for moral preening.  The alternative he offers is the social reign of Christ, built on justice and solidarity, a true and therefore a moral community, the "civilization of love" of Bl Paul VI and the "culture of life" of St John Paul II.

The first thing that must be said about Storck's book is that it is not entirely, or even primarily, negative - Storck praises post-modernism for rejecting many of the errors of modernism, discerns signs of hope for renewal in leftist protest movements, and tends to blame the wrong turns of history, not on sinister cabals, but on Catholics not being sufficiently Catholic.  Throughout, he demonstrates the impact of two divergent views of the Church and the world, one of which represents the Church as one institution among many in the world, and the other which recognizes the truth of Chesterton's observation that the Church is bigger than the world.  The former, he demonstrates, produces apostasy and certain failure, the latter, faithfulness and the only hope of success.