It is a dark age when learning is despised; when violence prowls our streets; when the cherished teachings of our wisest culture falls disused and forgotten. Apocalypses are not fashionable, though innovation and disruption are. We celebrate the piracy of wanton wealth and mock the traditionalists who sit in their cells and speak alone with their gods in the poems without which they could not love.
In the ruins of the crises of the tenth century, Western European culture was born and indeed so was the glory of Kievan Rus. Monasticism, a resurgent faith and a reform of the church, a flowering Renaissance, the emergence of order in modern government, law, conscience, mysticism and on it goes. Who will speak like Abelard and Heloise across the centuries in this new dark age?
The Burning Archive 
2 replies on “A new dark age”
Reblogged this on The Burning Archive and commented:
A reblogged post from early 2016.
Dark pessimism or seed of hope?
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[…] Yet I was struck by the resonance between Dreher’s question and McIntyre’s 1981 words (his book I have long been aware of, from days in the University of Melbourne Library in the 1980s, but have never read), and my own occasional evocation of the monastic tradition as a response of virtue in troubled times. In January 2016 I posted some thoughts on a New Dark Age: […]
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