The Divorce of Mind from Being

Change my mind:

The disease afflicting the modern world is in the first place a disease of the mind; it began in the mind, it has now attacked the roots of the mind (Jacques Maritain).

So, it is an autoimmune disorder, i.e., the mind attacking its own substance, or, in a word, college.

There are many ways to conceptualize the disease, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again, i.e. to the rupture of human intelligence from the source of intelligence. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential version.

Thus the mind is no longer docile -- AKA open -- to reality:

Indocile to the object, to God, to being, the mind becomes also and to the same extent indocile to all human authority, a rebel against all tradition and spiritual continuity.

Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a "private person" cut off from rational discourse. The inevitable consequence on the vertical plane is

that by losing its docility to human teaching and its docility also to the object, the mind in our time has proceeded in the direction of an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason...

On the horizontal plane, the consequence is  

that the most profound and at the same time most human bonds of social life must have simultaneously become by an unavoidable consequence gradually loosened and undone. 

I call that a pretty good guess for 1931. 

I like what he says about the simultaneous hardening and weakening of reason, which again has to do with a self-enclosed rationality detached from its proper object. It is at once a hardened fortress against transcendent realities, but then dissolves "every object of speculation in a great fluid jelly called Becoming or Evolution." Modern thought is indeed pillar of gelatin.  

Now, "If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved," and "nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease." 

Can reason save us? No, not if it is not conscious of its intrinsic limits: it cannot "look for its standard in itself and in the face of the mysteries below," rather, must be ordered to the free-flowing transcendent mystery above.

Play us out, Nicolás:

Philosophy has as its object above all to prevent the follies of the day from blocking the windows and walling up the doors.

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries. 

Humility is the epistemological condition of specific perceptions. 

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.  

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.