The religious crisis of our culture

Louis Dupré

pp. 205-218

in: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed), The crisis of culture, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1976

Abstract

A crisis originates when man is no longer able to recognize the primary ideals of his culture in the society to which he belongs and yet, consciously or unconsciously, continues to maintain a basic loyalty to those ideals. Yet how do we know those primary ideals? Clearly, the idea of a culture is far too complex to yield a definition of its first principles. Nevertheless even an ordinary awareness of its history provides a sufficient ‘real apprehension’ of its recurring aims and aspirations to recognize whether they continue to shape the present. If we fail to detect their guidance in our time, we experience what we, since Hegel, have come to know as cultural ‘alienation’. Most of us are to a greater or lesser degree familiar with such an unsettling feeling, though we remain in the dark about the factors which brought it into our cultural consciousness.