No final consolation, no otherworldly relativity but only gray, inescapable fate.

This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The “happy end” of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude.22 The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the “happy end” and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L’Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a “vale of tears.”

It has frequently been emphasized that the French Revolution aided at least the cause of reason and reasoning. One remembers the worship of reason on the Champs de Mars; yet it was a very one-sided form of reasoning which made such headway during the French Revolution, a reasoning without that deeper understanding which Peter Wust calls  Vernunft in juxtaposition to Verstand. It was a distorted and rather Cartesian Verstand which became the measure of all things, and thus made possible the smooth evolution from theocentrism, over anthropocentrism, to geocentrism. Due to the elimination of the firm belief in another world the point of gravity was shifted to our earthly existence, and the happenings and events of this life became automatically “weighty,” final, irrevocable, unbearable. Humor died a lingering death. The transcendental levity of Christian culture was gone; there was no final consolation, no otherworldly relativity but only gray, inescapable fate.

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The Menace of the Herd or
Procrustes at Large