The Enlightenment Is Over

According to this rather fascinating article.  The whole thing is well worth a read, but here we hit the thesis:

...What liberals have awoken to, and what many orthodox Catholics thinkers, unfortunately, have not, is that the Enlightenment is over. As Jurgen Habermas stated in his remarkable 2004 exchange with the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Western culture is now “post-secular.” Liberalism has finally recognized and accepted the contingent, particularist, historically and culturally conditioned, non-necessary, non-self-evident (pace Thomas Jefferson), and eminently debatable character of its first principles.
The post-modern, traditionalist liberal no longer has to bear the impossible burden of identifying his philosophical system with reason itself, and, now that it has become firmly established as a living tradition, where before it was only an abstract system of thought, he can defend liberalism in the same manner as Catholics defend Catholicism, as both our tradition, and as the best tradition, as both good for us and for others, as historical and limited in origin and embodiment, but timeless and universal in scope and significance...

An interesting piece, overall, well worth reading the whole thing--but doesn’t the work of Vatican II and C. S. Lewis (especially The Abolition of Man) offer a way towards a real pluralism, a real space for people to live even while they embrace different religious traditions? Take George Weigel’s discussion in The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God of the Polish Constitution, where the Polish state commits itself to the good, the true and the beautiful, pointing all citizens towards these things, whether theist or atheist. Indeed, there are many lived experiences today of people from different faiths and of different convictions able to live amicably with each other, and it would seem that such true community would be the ideal place for the Catholic to offer Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of every desire of the human heart.

Wouldn’t the language to break through the philosophical differences be the language of the transcendentals, desired by every human heart, especially as laid out by Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, in Healing the Culture? If every human heart truly does have that intrinsic longing for God, then no matter what has gotten in the way (traditions, sin, etc.), God can still break through, grace can still break through, truth and beauty and love and being and goodness can all draw humans like iron to a magnet? And isn’t a community where neighbor loves neighbor, no matter the religion of the other, the best place for a person to encounter God as these transcendentals?