The tragedy of our situation today is that men and women are being fundamentally affected by the new way of looking at truth, and yet they have never even analyzed the drift which has taken place. Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth. Then they are subjected to the modern framework. In time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives with which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment, and before long they are overwhelmed.
There was a moment; not a single afternoon but a historical turning; when Western thought stopped believing that rational man could reach objective truth and meaning. It did not happen loudly. Hegel died. Kierkegaard leaped. And by the time anyone noticed, the line had already been crossed. Below that line, truth became a word you use in science class and meaning became a feeling you chase on Sunday. They do not talk to each other anymore. And philosophy, having declared the enterprise hopeless, now writes eulogies and calls them dissertations.
Philosophy has a problem it has never solved on its own: how do you get from the individual thing to the universal category without losing one or the other? If you start with the particulars; this chair, that tree, this person; you cannot build a universal without doing violence to the particular. If you start with the universal; Chairness, Humanity, abstract Being; the particular dissolves into a shadow. Every system eventually collapses into one side or the other. Except one. The Christian answer is not a system; it is a person, actually three of them, who are simultaneously one and many without contradiction. The Trinity is not an appendix to theology. It is the only answer to the oldest philosophical question in the book. The One and the Many share the same last name because they share the same nature. And they always have.
There is a kind of intellectual death that happens when you sit with an argument long enough to let it kill the version of you that walked in. Not because the argument won. Because you let it finish its work.
You cannot rush grief into coherence. It has its own syntax; recursive, non-linear, sometimes purely sonic. The people who skip it are carrying something they don’t have words for. You can see it in how they respond to other people’s loss.
To name a thing exactly is to kill the cloud of vagueness it was living in. And that vagueness was comfortable. Precision feels like aggression until you realize the fog was what was doing the harm.
The decision to stay; to follow through; always requires the death of some alternative version of yourself. Not the worst version. Often a version you genuinely liked. That loss is real and should not be minimized.
