It was with a profound sense of sadness that I read the September 3, 2007 issue of Time Magazine and its "expose" of the correspondence of Mother Teresa. It was not so much that this icon of Christian faith had doubts about her belief as we all go through such times in the wilderness of our lives. It was, when viewed in the grand scheme of our times, another unanswered assault on the spirituality of our world. For if someone so iconic as Mother Teresa can question the very existence of God, one is forced to ask: What hope exists for we lesser mortals in our desperate search for meaning to our lives?

The systematic removal of religious belief from our lives has caused deep tears in the fabric of our society. The ripping we see and hear, according to Russell Kirk, is a direct result of growing popular belief system one can call "scientism" or, if you prefer a philosophical school, "nominalism." This new dogma (which, hardly cutting-edge, is based on the modest surge of scientific discoveries and progress of the last century) offers "truths," preached full-voiced from the pulpits of academia, which declare spirituality as merely a remnant of our barbaric past. Further, these newly-constituted Benthamites asseverate "God is dead" and, even if He were not, He is emphatically unnecessary. The goddess of science will provide all we need to satisfy the bestial, carnal pleasures of our mortal bodies. Science informs us, after all, we are but hairless apes one or two genes removed from the trees. Now grounded, having lost our tails and the facility of climbing, we scurry about with our trivial lives with no greater purpose than to eat and propagate the species. The ephemeral "human spirit" is best removed - if not surgically then through indoctrination - from our consciousness. The soul, merely a misplaced genome in our primitive code, is no longer functional and is, thus, to be ignored.

The movement’s founder was Jeremy Bentham; its messiah figure was Freidrich Nietzsche. Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchins, are the sainted father and high priest, respectively, of the church. Apparently, the congregation continues to grow exponentially. Its holy land is between Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills. It is the excreta spewed by these intellectuals that has "inspired" a nation, founded on spirituality and the search for God, to slither toward the yawning abyss, now soulless and aimless. But, let us talk more to the point and of sensible authors.

If you are not familiar with Russell Kirk you have missed out on a true literary and philosophic genius. He passed from his earthly bonds in 1994 and no one has taken up the fiery sword of his lofty rhetoric since. Our world is much the poorer for it. In one of the many brilliant essays penned by this supreme man of letters, Kirk discussed issues that link directly to the melancholy that I felt as I read of the doubts of Mother Teresa. The essay was "Civilization Without Religion?" and it, in the poetic language used by this remarkable thinker, describes the scourge of scientism (not to be confused with an entirely different ill, "Scientology") on modern civilization. In Kirk’s words:

"How are we to account for this widespread decay of the religious impulse? It appears that the principal cause of the loss of the idea of the holy is the attitude called "scientism"- that is, the popular notion that the revelations of natural science, over the past century and a half or two centuries, somehow have proved that men and women are naked apes merely, that the ends of existence are production and consumption merely; that happiness is the gratification of sensual impulses; and that concepts of the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting are mere exploded superstitions. Upon these scientistic assumptions, public schooling in America is founded nowadays, implicitly." [Emphasis mine]

In the essay, Kirk makes many points but the most important for our purposes is the logical argument he makes which connects, in a straight line, the formation of religious cults to human civilization. The premise of the argument is that the emergence of culture is the one specific pattern of behavior that separates man from the other animals stalking about on our little blue planet. Culture, as distinguished from instinct, is a singularly human characteristic. And, according to Kirk (and others) it was originally based on a overwhelming desire to commune with a Higher Power.

With the founding of the cult, it logically followed that people with similar beliefs cooperated in other ways: common defense, building, agriculture, trade. The word culture, in fact, is derived from the Latin "cultus" which meant to the Romans those who tilled the soil and worshiped the divine. These were the earliest societies of man. If the culture succeeded, as they did in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and India, it may grow into a civilization. The sharing of belief made mutual effort toward other aspects of the group’s lives easier and more harmonious. With sharing and common interests, "culture" (which has been variously defined but, in general, infers a shared language, religion, manners, dress and morality) was the primal driving force in the elevation of mankind above that of barbarians.

Kirk continues the analysis which includes the profound observation that the assault on the basis of culture - belief in a Transcendent Power - is the beginning of the collapse of that culture. As he words it: "...and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brutes that perish. ‘Art is man’s nature," in Edmund Burke’s phrase; and if human arts, or culture, cease to be, then human nature ceases to be. " [Emphasis mine] And this is the fate that I cannot help but see as I gaze about the American landscape of today.

During the past century, this essential kernel of American culture has been under assault. From the relentless secularization of our children’s education to overreaching, presumptuous judicial appointees to "pop culture," the negation of spirituality has proceeded apace. God has been unceremoniously ripped from His Heaven and now sells Gucci knock-offs out the trunk of His car in the Bronx. It must be so, for if someone who dedicated their lives to His Service such as Mother Teresa can doubt that He even exists, He must have been ripped from His Throne. Clearly, He is not in His Heaven nor is all right with the world.

Our culture (or, at least, what remains of it) has been torn from its moorings, is adrift in an uncharted sea and in clear and present danger of foundering. As Thomas Molnar writes in Twin Towers: Politics and the Sacred, our culture has, of late, taken quite a beating:

"Culture has come to mean, of course, anything that happens to catch the fancy of a group: rock concerts, supposedly for the famished of the third world; the drug culture and other subcultures; sects and cults; sexual excess and aberration; blasphemy on stage and screen; frightening and obscene shapes; the plastic wrapping of the Pont-Neuf or the California coast; to smashing of the family and other institutions; the display of the queer, the abject, the sick.."

Mine are not the simple, tired, predictable warnings of a passing generation to those who follow. It is more akin to the mournful, unanswered howl, deep in the deaf woods, of the solitary wolf decrying the loss of love or feast. I ache in my very bones for my beloved nation. The assault on our culture is sufficiently diabolical, extraordinarily well-funded and relentlessly perpetrated. Indeed, the calls to pillage and plunder are raised by the broadcast media; soldiers manuals are printed by The New York Times and the Washington Post and the armies of disconnected, materialistic, hedonistic troops have already seized the cities and the borders. And they are joined by legions more daily. Hollywood and Washington, D.C. are the bi-coastal War Departments and are directing the assault. Bit by bit, thoughts of the hereafter which guided and restrained our actions are chewed away. All that is left is "the now." And, in bleakness of "the now," there is no solace.

We few who doggedly cling to the tattered remnants of Burke’s "unbought grace" and "the decent draperies" of a cultured life are hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. Worse still, we have yet to rise to the barricades. Most have conceded the battle before the first blow is struck. As Harvard historian Christopher Dawson ("Religion and the Rise of Western Culture") has written:

"The events of the last few years portend either the end of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilization has been tried in the balance and found wanting – that there is an absolute limit to the progress that can be achieved by the perfectionment of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values...The recovery of moral control and the return of spiritual order have become indispensable conditions of human survival...This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development." [Emphasis mine]

From cults to society to civilizations to decadence and, finally, decay. Will the well-worn script play out, yet again, as it has before in Egypt, Greece, Rome and countless other once-proud civilizations? Must history always remorselessly repeat itself? When one takes the time to scrupulously examine the rock-steady ground where we once stood (without tails, yes, but tall, straight and proud) and the murky swamp in which we currently repose, it is little wonder one feels a overriding sense of imminent tragedy.

It has come to this: We must retrace our steps or perish.