The Spiritual History of English

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.In an ambitious critique ranging over 1,500 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.