Coincidentally, the best description of the Western collapse may have been offered by the diplomat George Kennan when he wrote, in our age “..there is a real danger that we may lose altogether our ability to distinguish the real and the unreal, and, in doing so, lose both the credibility of the true moral behaviour and the great force such behaviour is, admittedly, capable of exerting.” Perhaps, we have reached that point.

The brilliantly conceived thesis proffered by Dr. Walsh may illustrate the desire to challenge the notion of a closed “system” that would draw the soul into a seductive embrace of an ‘unreal’ gnostic existence in a cosmos devoid of “ignorance and suffering.” But the danger as Stefan Rossbach pointed out in his seminal study, “Gnostic Wars,” is that “..if gnosis elevates the soul above the cosmos, beyond Plato’s chorismos, the unbridgeable gap which the classical thinkers perceived between the human and the divine realms mutates into a gap between those with gnosis and those without.” Thus, “the common bond of mankind,” as Professor Rossbach explicates, will be torn asunder by two disparate groups with absolute visions of truth, order, and reality and these groups will engage in constant wars, “driven by gnosis.”

We find then the apocalyptic tone of a ongoing “Gnostic War” in contrast to what Walsh identifies as a modern project, the “existential dynamic by which the liberal soul is enlarged to fulfill its indispensable civic responsibility” perhaps stand as another example of the poles of the tension of existence. But that is a dangerous thing to say because as Kierkegaard realized and Walsh explicated, “Modernity cannot in this sense (from within) be comprehended, for to do so would be to remove oneself from living it.”

You conclude by pushing us toward some connection of the good of the soul with the good of the city. However, based on what you say about Walsh, he seems to emphasize the good of the soul as distinguished from the good of the person. That is, the individual soul in is put right order and perspective when someone comes to understand the differentiated reality of the transcendent. But that does not really accord with classical conceptions of the Good – not just because classical conceptions preferred to think of the polis over the person, but because “Good” to them meant not just a correct understanding of the whole, but the practice of living rightly within that whole.

In this sense, the opposition (that I thought you were leading up to) was between the existential/spiritual/ascetic conception of the Good, and the Aristotelian/participatory/anti-dualism conception of the Good. And I thought you might work to show how the modern contemplation of abstract and non-embodied Truth could work as a powerful compliment to the more practice-oriented understanding. This is what Postmodern Conservative would be all about, I would think.

I bring this up simply because I don’t know that modern philosophy has had much of a problem with thinking about the good of the polis – rather, the errors committed in this arena have been in the way they tried to combine abstract/transcendent truth with the good of the whole, since they confused the whole polis with the whole transcendent order. Thus, modern philosophy is still open to acceptance for its “illumination” but open to criticism for its failure to connect acceptably the practical good with the beholding of transcendent reality.