Originally submitted for the newsletter of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy
It might initially strike us as a bit odd that Professor Anthony Esolen of Providence College presented a talk entitled “Catholicism: The Last Hope for a Dying Culture” for the Tocqueville Forum, an organization dedicated to enriching conversation and dialogue about the roots of American democracy. As a professor of Renaissance English Literature, what does Esolen have to contribute to our understanding of American culture, which is of such enormous gravitas in the successful functioning of American society?
Esolen’s fundamental thesis is not so much that American culture is dying but that it is already dead, that it has lost its devotion to and appreciation of the cultus. Contemporary society is endlessly busy, filled with an overwhelming noise which silences the human desire for beauty. The lecture centered around Josef Pieper’s conception of the feast, which “has the power to embrace us all.” It is only within the feast, the communal collection of all individuals, regardless of education, class, race, or any number of other segregating characteristics, that the person “is most free and most human when he celebrates feast in honor of the divine.”
We have lost our collective memory, we have no common source of knowledge to return to, and we therefore have nothing for which to celebrate the feast. Ultimately, in order to restore our culture, we must reestablish the preconditions of culture, we must rediscover our commonality, we must return to the feast in which we are freed from the divisive enslavement of segregation. Esolen believes that as “primitive moderns,” we “have re-imagined Heaven to be the place where all our daily appetites are filled,” and a profound change of heart is required in order to remedy this tragic situation.
-Dave Gregory
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