The Spiritual History of English

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Modernity might be defined as the age when Western man tried for the first time to do without the Church then without Christ and finally without God. Yet cultural expression remained vibrantly alive from the Renaissance to the Baroque from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and into the Modernist reaction-at least for as long as the ancient echoes of Catholicism stirred the imagination. However now that religion has been so effectively removed from our society the impetus for high culture seems to have vanished; arts and letters are uninspired uninteresting and undignified if not parasitical ugly banal and empty. Postmodernism is the end of the line to nowhere.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>In an ambitious critique ranging over 1500 years of literary history the poet Andrew Thornton-Norris argues that the demise of English literature reveals the heavy cost of rejecting objective moral standards and sacred realities. Only the Catholic Faith has power to prevail against the dictatorship of relativism in all its erosive manifestations and to provide once again those underlying norms of mind behaviour and workmanship on which civilization thrives. The Anglophone world will experience cultural rebirth when it embraces anew the divine religion it has tried to bury in successive waves of revolution.</span></p>