‘Philosophy undermined my atheism’ - Catholic Herald

Editor: As a Catholic who doesn't believe in objectivity, you're just as ripe for having the rug put back under you. Indeed, why do people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to Oxford when its best graduates spout drivel like this?

And yet: “As university went on I got deeply into philosophy, and the philosophy totally undermined my atheism, by making me realise that there is no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.

“I realised that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic. The Oxford way of teaching it was the western analytical tradition of deconstructing arguments, so for a naïvely dogmatic young atheist I was ripe to have the rug pulled from under me.

‘Philosophy undermined my atheism’ - Catholic Herald

Objectivity, on the contrary, is the romance of Wisdom as Brother Andre-Marie writes:

“Romance” is commonly associated with erotic love and its pursuit. As a literary genre, it has been reduced to the smutty novel mass-consumed in cheap pulp editions by idle housewives. But that is not what a romance is at all. Coming from the Latin word for “the Romans,” romance first of all is a group of languages whose common origin is a low Latin that was diversely Germanized, Celtified, Vandalized, Gothified, and otherwise Barbarized by the foreigners who divided the carcass of the Western Roman Empire among themselves. From low Latin emerged the antecedents of today’s “Romance Languages”: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, etc. These languages developed their own songs, epic ballads, and verse that related important events of history and passed on the culture of the emerging European nations. By the High Middle Ages, these forms had evolved into a rich and diverse literature that became more cultivated as European civilization moved from the chaotic feudalism of the “Dark Ages” to the more orderly era of organized kingdoms. An important part of the developed literature of the day was the verse or prose narrative called “the romance.” 1

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