A quote from Spengler in The Asia Times, 6 November 2007

America's "war on terror" proceeds from a political philosophy that treats radical Islam as if it were a political movement – "Islamo-fascism" – rather than a truly religious response to the West. If we are in a fourth world war, as Norman Podhoretz proclaims, it is a religious war. The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West.

None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address. […]

Radical Islam threatens the West only because secular Europe, including the sad remnants of the former Soviet Union, is so desiccated by secular anomie that it no longer cares enough about its future to produce children. Muslims may form a majority in Russia by mid-century, and may dominate Western Europe 100 years hence. Without the demographic decay associated with the decline of religion, radical Islam would be a minor annoyance to the West rather than a deadly adversary. […]

Revealed religion does not merely teach doctrine to its members, but changes their lives. Whether one can prove that God exists, for example, is not the right question. It is not even the wrong question, for it makes the subject of the discussion existence, rather than God. What Christians and Jews yearn for is the love of a personal God, that is, a God who is not mere Being, but a personality. It is the experience of Divine Love that makes it possible for humane and civilized societies to flourish, for the imitation of God must honor the sovereignty of the weak and helpless within the human family. Modern democracy is a Christian phenomenon, born of the Dutch rebellion against Spain in 1568, and borne by the Puritan migration to the New World. It arose as a religious response to Europe's crisis, not as a political scientist's cookbook recipe.

That is why secular political philosophy fails so miserably in the context of religious war. I have ridiculed Washington's search for a "moderate Islam" and its efforts to "democratize" the Muslim world. One cannot simply teach political systems, or as Immanuel Kant put it, devise a constitution for devils, if only they be rational. More than mere rationality is at stake.

If there were nothing more to human consciousness than knowledge, what one man knows could be taught to any other man. Democracy, rule of law, free institutions, would be techniques to be learned, like brain surgery. Yet we observe Muslims who learned brain surgery as well as any Westerner building car bombs in Britain. There are things we know for certain on the strength of our own intelligence, and things that must be revealed to us. We do not have to take on faith the Pythagorean theorem, but we cannot prove that planting car bombs in front of night clubs is wrong.

[…] [T]he "metaphysics of modernity" […] is the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger and his ilk to substitute the neutral concept of Being for faith in a personal God. Heidegger never produced a consistent theory; God put Heidegger in a circular room, and told him that Being was in the corner. Yet he mesmerized the likes of Leo Strauss, the patron saint of American neo-conservatism, who thought Heidegger the greatest mind of the century, despite Heidegger's public support for Hitler through the whole of 1933-1945, and his refusal to apologize for this or to repudiate Nazism through the rest of his life.

Heidegger, though, imbibed from his teachers the "sawdust Thomism" (Urs von Balthasar) of the 16th-century Jesuit Suarez. As Urs von Balthasar wrote, Suarez thought of Being as the "univocal and neutral principle that is beyond God and the World". God, in other words, is subject to Being, along with things animal, vegetable, and mineral. It is a short hop from this viewpoint to the clockwork universe of 18th-century rationalism. And if Being is superior to God, should we not investigate the metaphysics of Being rather than divine revelation?

That is precisely what Heidegger set out to elaborate, albeit without the appendage of a God who already had become ossified inside Suarez' system. As Kerr reports, Chenu, De Lubac and Urs von Balthasar argued that the irreligious deism of the 18th century followed from the efforts of the Catholic Counterreformation to propagate rationalism against the Protestant emphasis on faith. That opens an investigation in intellectual history not for the squeamish. If the "new theologians" are correct, the secular philosophers beloved of the American neo-conservatives merely added footnotes to the work of 16th and 17th-century Jesuits. Heidegger, supposedly the founder of modernist metaphysics, becomes a minor commentator on the work of Francisco Suarez.

Leo Strauss and his students, as it were, have lived off the intellectual refuse that the Church of Vatican II consigned to the dustbin. The recycled rationalism of the Vatican I Church reappears as the metaphysics of American foreign policy, which in its arrogance proposes to remake the world in the image of Peoria. Where is the Father Merrin who at last will exorcise the dybbuk of Heidegger from America's National Security Council?

All of the really important issues were fought out over generations in the one Western institution with a long enough memory. That is why the Catholic Church remains the world's indispensable institution. I do not know whether that will be true a generation from now. The Church has produced a few great leaders, but it is desperately short of sandals on the ground. Where is the monastic order that will fight the spiritual battles of the Church as the Dominicans did in the 12th century, the Jesuits in the 16th, and the Benedictines in the 19th? Where are the missionaries who will preach Christianity to Muslims? Perhaps they are being trained now in secret Protestant seminaries in China, but not by the Catholic Church.

[…] Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind claimed that the semi-educated American undergraduate is the intellectual slave of some German philosopher. The truth is even more disconcerting: the "American mind", such as it is, runs in tight little circles around issues that the theologians of the Catholic Church have debated for centuries.

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians Author: Fergus Kerr ASIN: 1405120843