The top 3

Italy produced Dante, England, Shakespeare and Russia, Dostoevsky. The Italian poet viewed man as an organic part of the objective order of the world, the divine cosmos. Man is one of the grades in the universal hierarchy. God and Satan, Heaven and Hell are not revealed within the human spirit and by human experience; they are given to man from outside and have a reality equal to that of objects in the material world. The poet Shakespeare, living in the humanistic period of modern times, believed that man is no longer bound by any objective world-order given from above; rather he feels free in his world of self-affirmation which opened up a psychic human world endlessly complicated and varied, directed inwards to the psychic not the spiritual aspect of man’s existence. Enter Dostoevsky who probes the depths of the human spirit. Heaven and Hell, God and Satan will no longer be revealed in accordance with an objective order imposed from without but rather by way of a personal meeting at the ultimate depths of the human spirit, an inner reality. Spiritual life is restored; freedom can co-exist with transcendentalism. According to Dostoevsky, true liberty and true equality are possible only in Christ, in following the way of God-made man. The anti-Christ and self-will involve tyranny; any idea of world-wide happiness and the common unity of mankind from which God is excluded means disaster for man and loss of his freedom of spirit. Furthermore, for Dostoevsky, the existence of evil is proof of the existence of God. If the world consisted wholly of goodness, there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be god. God is, because evil is, and that means that God is because freedom is. Neither a man nor a nation can live without a ‘higher idea’ and there is only one such idea on earth, that of an immortal human soul. These conclusions from Dostoevsky lead me to ask ...

What great spiritual thinker has America wrought? How about the current choice between Barack Obama or Rush Limbaugh? From what each man has said, it’s obvious, it’s Rush. On the radio today, he concluded that the slouching of America to Gomorrah is the result of the loss of God. With eloquence he put forward this hypothesis. A secondary cause for the downfall of American culture, Rush postulated, is the influence of liberals, whose tendency is to be insane, unhinged from reality. He questions how only 20% of our country could have led us to our present, debased condition. Which leads me the other name dropped above, Barack Obama, who represents appositional thinking to Rush Limbaugh. Obama’s name fills in the blank for the answer to the question, ‘Who represents the loss of America’s spiritual soul?’ In the summer of 2010, we’ve come a long way from Dante whose hierarchy is obviously obselete, from Shakespeare whose humanism superceded Dante’s truth and from Dostoevsky’s concept of freedom that defines mankind’s inner, conflicted search for God. Rather we have arrived at Obama’s world in which both God and freedom are dead.