The negation of transcendence

released 4/29/2024

In a 2017 lecture at the Eliot Society, Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism,” one in which no one knows he is being coerced, but in which certain ideas can no longer be thought and certain truths can no longer be perceived. This totalitarianism is new in that it advances not by obvious violence or control, but by negating and disallowing every form of transcendence. Any given order that precedes one’s choosing is dissolved. This leads, Hanby says, to a disintegration of culture. What is needed is the renewal of the Christian mind and the recovery of Beauty. Hanby uses Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town as an example of Beauty that wounds us to make us see what is good and true and beautiful, and he calls for Christian artists-as-prophets who will show us visible manifestations of the mysterious inner depth and unity of reality.

This lecture is provided courtesy of the Eliot Society

32 minutes

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Born in 1927 in Poland, Leszek Kolakowski grew out of his youthful Stalinism to become one of the most penetrating critics of Marxism. In his masterful three-volume Main Currents of Marxism, he concluded: “The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Kolakowski’s diagnosis of the spiritual crisis of modernity goes far beyond his critique of Marxism; in a variety of books, essays, and public addresses, he regularly returned to the problem of modern culture’s denial of the sacred.

This essay by Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, was written on the occasion of the release of a new edition of Main Currents of Marxism, and sets the arguments in that book in the wider context of Kolakowski’s other work. It was originally published in The New Criterion, June 2005, and is read by Ken Myers.

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The negation of transcendence

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