Contemplative realism addresses the civilizational crisis in which we find ourselves: as Josef Pieper has it, our “ability to see is in decline.” Our very sense of life, of experience, of interior and exterior sensation, our ability to sort between the specious and the precious—all are threatened with obscurity, blinkered by ideologies and technological innovations that promise to provide clear windows but instead function as unreal filters, distorting the mind’s rapprochement with reality. Such influences, all the while claiming to expand our vision, radically hamper the soul’s depth perception.
What Bernanos so ably argued all those years ago has only gained in truthfulness: “we can witness a lethal slackening of men’s conscience that is attacking not only their moral life, but also their very heart and mind, altering and decomposing even their imagination . . . the menacing crisis is one of infantilism.”