The Sons of Europa

I have been reading through, once again, cultural astrologer (!) Richard Tarnas' 1991 The Passion of the Western Mind. He gives a pretty good outline of the dualism at the heart of Western culture, which is well symbolized by the pairing of Plato and Aristotle in the center of Raphael's School of Athens. 

There is the empirical, skeptical, rational side and there is the universalizing, mystical side.

Raymond Nogar, a Dominican who worked in the field of evolution and theology, pointed out the Western and indeed the universal conundrum of how to endure "the terrors of history" without emptying them of meaning by escape into a myth of cosmic harmony.

Ancestral religions focus on kinship, so that suffering and death are simply accepted as an inevitable part of the flow of family history. A tragic vision of life is normal, with no alternative seriously considered. The horizon is very modest and very realistic. Being honorably gathered to the ancestors in some form is the most that most could hope for, with the hero being more closely associated with the gods...who are themselves, in all ancestral faiths that I know of, subject to Fate. 

Dharmic and sapiential religions make history a mere means to an end, which is Indic or Taoist dissolution into the Original One or, in the atheist paths of Gautama and the Jains, dissolution altogether. History can have no meaning, really, since extinction of history and its illusions is the goal. 

The prophetic religions of the Middle Eastern prophets --Zarathustra, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed--are the ones who ramp up the history problem the most. Ethical monotheism is where the issues of suffering, evil and loss become most psychologically acute. In a world created freely and purposefully by a Single Beneficent Will, and where humans have only a single lifetime to determine their eternal estate, the contradictions of death and blood are magnified. This crunch creates Gnostics...and atheists.

What kind of post-Christian and post-imperial faith can avoid the "pretty lies" of so much spiritual yammering and yet provide a robust sense of hope and purpose for this life while not being limited to this life alone?

Empiricism and rationality vs mysticism and cosmic meaning...Nihilism vs Utopia*.

*Secular Humanist Liberalism --our current ascending religion-- offers the worst of both worlds, being fundamentally nihilist and rabidly utopian. When you ponder on it for more than a minute, a world of universal equality really becomes a kind of hell through boredom.