After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom.

ONE millennium ago, Christendom was rife with speculation that the Parousia was finally at hand, and with it the end of history. Today, with the year 2000 less than nine years away, Christendom has been replaced by that much more vague abstraction known as "the West," and public speculation regarding the events and conditions accompanying the Second Millennium is limited to such matters as the probable status of women at the dawn of the third one, how large the world population is likely to be, and how small the trade deficit. Nevertheless, at private levels of society, there is subversive talk. A Catholic priest of my acquaintance confided to me at supper two weeks ago that the idea that the Second Coming may indeed be imminent had occurred to him. Likewise, David Walsh, who teaches political thought at Catholic University of America, writes: "Now the sense of living in a transitional phase has become pervasive ... Modernity has been overcome ... All that has been present from the inception of modernity has now been unfolded."

Professor Walsh's understanding of Our Lord's schedule, however, may be inferred from the fact that, rather than don a sandwich board bearing this message, he has written After Ideology. Walsh does not predict the end of history; instead he suggests, as others have done, that history may in a sense be starting over again as humanity, recovering its soul, recovers at the same time its head, and with these its true sense of direction. He agrees with Eric Voegelin that the age of the great ideological thinkers is finished; ideology can be taken no further, and hence has no future.

The atrocities of the twentieth century are now recognized as the inevitable result of Western man's quest for absolute power and total control, over nature and himself, that has been going on since the Renaissance. Is there a necessary link between the promise of universal human progress and the reality of persistent human failure, between the vision of a brave new world and the recognition of its staggering spiritual costs, between the vast expansion of human power and the equally vast abuse of power in our time?" Walsh believes that there is such a link, and that some of the most exceptional thinkers of the past hundred years (he calls them "post-modernists" in recognition of their prophetic powers, not necessarily in point of chronological time) have not only recognized it as an intellectual reality, but have confronted it upon the level of existential truth.

Walsh argues that modernity, having arrived at a dead end plain to all those with eyes to see and ears to hear, has revealed to us the truth concerning our nature as human beings, our place within the created world, and our destiny in the transcendent one. Post-modern man, living after the horrors of the Gulag, of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima, and of Pol Pot's Cambodia, is open to this truth, but remains incapable of being brought to it by the traditional avenues of dogma and authority. Instead, he must experience truth by being led to consider, not the Answer, but the Question upon which the Answer follows.

In Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, Voegehn, and Solzhenitsyn, Walsh identifies five writers who, by pursuing their modernist impulses into the depths of the abyss, discovered that these same impulses, when rigorously and honestly obeyed, lead not toward the rationalism of modernity but toward the Truth that is Christ Himself. (Voegelin isn't really closely described by this formula, Nietzsche seems to have recognized God only to reject Him, and Camus did not live to confess explicitly the Christian implications of his thought; but that's how it goes when you're writing a book.)

The heart of After Ideology consists of Walsh's explication of the work of these five authors, from which one derives two salient impressions: one, how absolutely atrociously Eric Voegelin wrote; and two, how thoroughly, and with how much human sympathy, Walsh has read the greatest prophet of the modem age. I have quite simply never read a better gloss, nor it seems to me half so good a one, as Walsh's on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Walsh is excellent also in demonstrating how the secular millennialism of the past six centuries has been directly inspired by the Christian eschaton; how, in fact, the doctrines of Christianity, when activated by the freedom God offers to human beings, almost guarantee their own misinterpretation at the hands of misguided and impatient people. (This susceptibility to error is, of course, consonant with the whole of Christ's Truth, which, in addition to being a promise, has always functioned as a test as well.) Since Christ, the West-incapable of returning to the "compact" cosmos of the ancient world-has been compelled to face, honestly or dishonestly, the existence of the transcendent one; from the beginning of the modern age until the present, honesty has been the exception rather than the rule in this confrontation.

But Christianity, Walsh says, provides only one part of the truth by which men are meant to live; it is in "philosophical Christianity" that post-modern humanity must discover the remedy for its condition. In a long piece of sustained argument that recalls Chesterton's wonderful discussion (in The Everlasting Man) of how Christianity came into the world at precisely that moment in history when man, needing it most, had been prepared at last to receive it, Walsh explains that the philosophy of the classical world provides the vision of order and of natural virtue that supplements, necessarily and perfectly, the truth of divine order and supernatural virtue that Christ revealed. Voegelin's exaggerated statement of the otherworldliness of St. Paul, Walsh believes, accounts for much of the coolness toward Christianity that is so apparent in his work. On the other hand, Voegelin, writing that "History is Christ writ large," did understand how, in Walsh's words, The opening toward being requires the inclusion of the full range of experiences and symbolizations that have created order in human history."

Since Walsh states, correctly and explicitly, that change is effected in human affairs only by individual repentance and by the personal and singular conversion of the human heart, the final chapters of his book, in which he speculates upon the possibility of the spiritual rebirth of contemporary nations and societies, seem to me to be little more than the usual struggles writers are obligated to undertake in concluding a book of this sort. And After Ideology might have concluded at least ten pages sooner were it not for the author's insistence upon the politically correct "he or she, his or her" usage, which is an unconscionable waste of printer's ink and of the reader's patience. Perhaps in the post-ideological age that Professor Walsh is predicting, men of his intellectual stature will no longer feel a need to stroke and mollify the infantile ideological passions of the present one.