[...] In other words, we humans, even we bourgeois humans, cannot get along without transcendence - faith in a past, hope for a future, justified by larger considerations. If we don’t have religious hope and faith, we’ll substitute hope and faith in art or science or national learning. If we don’t have art or science or national learning or Anglicanism, we’ll substitute fundamentalism or the Rapture. If we don’t have fundamentalism or the Rapture or the local St.Wenceslaus parish we’ll substitute our family or the rebuilt antique car. It’s a consequence of the human ability to symbolize, a fixture of our philosophical psychology.
We might as well acknowledge it, if only to keep watch on transcendence and prevent it from doing mischief, as did once a Russian hope for the Revolution and as now does a Saudi Arabian faith in an Islamic past. The Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov, who has seen totalitarianism, warns that 'democracies put their own existence in jeopardy if they neglect the human need for transcendence.' Michael Ignatieff put it well: 'The question of whether . . . the needs we once called religious can perish without consequence ... remains central to understanding the quality of modern man’s happiness.' Evidently the answer is no, religion cannot perish without consequences. There are bad consequences and there will be more. That is not a reason to return to the older sureties. It is a reason to take seriously the transcendent in our bourgeois lives.
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