From the Abyss of Anthropological Despair: Three Cases of Fear & Fortitude in Modern Christendom - Plenary III

By Fr John Strickland

I will open by introducing the anthropological pessimism of “late-medieval” Western piety as a crisis of heavenly immanence and then present the way in which Petrarch, in his text Secretum, handled the fear it provoked—by secularizing Christendom’s imperative toward personal transformation. Next, I’ll jump forward in time to the “desecration of the world” that occurred during the so-called Enlightenment to frame a second case of anthropological fear and fortitude: the poet Percy Shelley’s project of cosmological reenchantment (using works like Hymn to Intellectual Beauty). Finally, I’ll sketch the rise of totalitarian ideologies as context for Albert Camus’s struggle against anthropological despair from The Plague to The Fall. My goal is to present the history of modern Christendom as a cause of agony not only for Christian intellectuals but for secularists like the “father of humanism” (Petrarch) and a pair of atheists as well. 

Presentation at 10:00am on Saturday, January 14 in St George Cathedral Fellowship Hall