Traditionalists frequently criticize the current state of Western intellectual life and culture, arguing that our civilization lacks a genuine spiritual dimension. This fact is painfully obvious to many, including more moderate conservatives. But we can occasionally run into some difficulty when explaining that we believe this decline to have begun during the Renaissance. For many conservatives eras such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are the high points of Western civilization when great scientific discoveries and artistic achievements were made. In order to explain our position it is important to emphasize that for us the main goal of intellectual activity (reason) is closeness with the divine, or transcendence. We value many intellectual pursuits, but for us a modern mathematician is not as important as an ancient Pythagorean mathematician. They might both be equally capable of solving a particular mathematical problem, but the modern sees nothing beyond the numbers and the their relations with each other, while the Pythagorean sees the numbers and their relations as a symbolic language for theology.

A good analogy for this idea can be found in the realm of morality and personal behavior. A religious man and an atheist can share a moral belief, for example, that adultery is wrong, and they can both succeed in avoiding adultery because of this belief. But the moral belief and the associated behavior has an extra dimension for the man who acts in this way because God commands it, a dimension medieval_writingthat is absent from the man who acts in this way merely because he does not wish to cause any distress to his fellow human beings, or whatever his mundane reason might be.

For the religious man, avoiding adultery is a spiritual exercise, a manifestation of God’s will in his own psyche and activity. Something on a higher metaphysical plain is gaining mastery over something on a lower plain (the human individual). In the case of the moral atheist there is no interaction between metaphysical levels, no transcendence. Rather there are two things on the same level interacting with each other, the desire for adultery and the desire for not causing distress. Both desires are concerned solely with mundane actions. The actions of the atheist are purely horizontal, while the actions of the religious man have a vertical dimension. The latter’s action exist on several different levels, and that which is viewed on this physical level is but a small part of the entire action. They are unified across the different vertically ordered hierarchical levels, and the part of the action on the lower level serves as a symbol for the corresponding parts on higher levels. Thus it turns out that the two actions, that of the religious man and that of the atheist, share a goal, avoiding adultery, but that the action of the religious man has the added goal of following God’s will. In the same way intellectual activity can have two goals, effecting a mundane change and making a connection with a higher level of reality.

It was during the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment that Western intellectual life began focusing too much on the former goal and neglecting the latter, and in more recent times the latter has been vigorously attacked and deliberately removed. For this reason many see the decline of the West beginning at a much later period, when vociferous and explicit deniers or God became popular, but it is important to keep in mind the true root of the problem, for that is the only way to find an effective remedy.