I've been reading a lot lately. Among my current books are 'Heretics' by G.K. Chesterton, and 'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy. I am about 2/3 through the latter - it is the finest book I've ever read.
Tolstoy really gets human nature. He wrings the very last drop of humanity out of his characters, and conveys with a direct and honest hand the fickle nature of men, and the mystery that, in the midst of all the bad we make for ourselves, God still interjects himself into our midst, and there we find love. I've realized lately how many people hate God for interjecting himself into our lives. They wish he'd go away and let them do what they think is best for themselves. They call such an aspiration 'liberty'. G.K. Chesterton describes this misguided philosophy in his book 'Heretics'. (aside: he wrote that book circa 1900, establishing that all important truth that, in the realm of failed and failing philosophy, there are no new ideas, just new people who don't read old books.)
In short, Chesterton's charge is that liberty was intended to loose the chains of the inquisitioned - the heretic and orthodox alike; that an equal dialogue should be established to uncover truth and goodness. The contrasting effect of philisophical liberation is, in an age where the most radical have a voice and a freedom to use it, governing philosophies are forbidden from discussion. A man can have opinions on the weather, the athlete, beer, the President, and traffic. A man can opinion any thing, so long as he dares not opinion all things. The general philosophy is outlawed, and those who seek such are mocked as 'fundamentalist' or 'idealogue'. The joke of the matter is, until a very short time ago, the great aspiration was to be those things - to be orthodox. Now, the aspiration is to be the heretic - the provacateur who will stand for comfort, so long as he must not stand for an ideal that transcends comfort.
Enlightenment unlocked the doors of liberty - the freedom of all voices in the common pursuit of good. What was a noble idea has since become a terrible perversion. Good is no longer the aim of liberty. Rather, liberty has become the aim of liberty. We cannot say what good is, but we seek greater freedoms to pursue what we cannot and shall not define. We are in effect widening the net to catch the great fish, and never daring to cast it into the water. We have mistaken netbuilding as our occupation, and we are thence utterly useless as fisherman. If we would only remove our attention from that ever-liberating, ever-unproductive task of widening nets, and but lift our eyes, we would see a stranger on the shore, daring to interject; daring to impress upon us what is good - that we drop our nets and follow him.
