Rod Dreher: Pitirim Sorokin and the Benedict Option

Is the Crisis of Our Age worth getting and/or reading? Does he really agree with Richard Weaver with respect to nominalism?

As order developed and wealth began to spread, the ideational culture of the early Middle Ages, gave way to the idealistic culture of the High Middle Ages, perfected intellectually in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. But then, in the 14th century, the Scholastics lost the great medieval debate to the Nominalists, who taught that the only truths we can know for sure are those revealed to us through our senses. That was the critical moment, the first cause of the transition between idealistic and sensate culture.

Is this version of intellectual history still sound? Or has it been rendered obsolete? Do we look to the intellectual trend-setters and the leading lights of the age to explain the change in morals and political economies?

According to Mr. Dreher:

He believed that civilizations cycle through three basic states, based on the dominant view of the nature of truth within that civilization:

1. The ideational, in which a culture is built around God, or some other transcendental source of truth. Material concerns are secondary to spiritual ones.

2. The idealistic, which synthesizes spiritual and material values through reason.

3. The sensate, in which a culture is built around material concerns, and de-emphasizes the spiritual as the foundation upon which the culture is built.

Is it possible to have an authentic ideational culture without grace? I would think not. So is the model correct? Does it take into account what happened with the Incarnation? Are pagan cultures the same as post-Christian cultures?


Pitirim A. Sorokin
Pitirim A. Sorokin | American Sociological Association
Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems ... - Google Books Result