How should one respond to the death of realism, the death of the idea that thoughts in our minds can represent to us the way things actually are in the world? For such a death seems to be widely proclaimed by contemporary philosophers.

In summary, they argue that since we only have access to the world via knowledge, it is impossible to check knowledge against the world in order to see if it corresponds with it. This is a powerful and some might say unanswerable contention, and yet if we accept it, it seems to follow that there can be no such thing as truth at all. But how can Christians accept such a state of affairs, or accommodate themselves to it, since truth has always been held to be a predicate of God himself, and of Jesus Christ, the truth incarnate?

While I was preparing this article, I read some remarks on the same subject by a U.S. politician with whom I found myself in substantial agreement. I then discovered, to my consternation, that the politician’s opinions had been compared with those of Adolf Hitler. So the reader must be warned that she can expect something pretty shocking in what follows.

We desperately need a philosophy of the humanities, both in the popular and in the narrower professional sense of the term ‘philosophy’. That is to say, we need to be able to spell out clearly and distinctly what the place of the humanities is in the good life, why they are important, and why (to put the matter in the most basic terms) they are worth paying for. I read that in parts of the U.S. the obvious obscurity and apparent triviality of the work of many representatives of the humanities has led to a cutting of funds and a precipitous fall in the number of students. I also note with some regret that, for the construction of a philosophy of the humanities in the sense that I have just given, recent trends in philosophy have been of very little help. In general I find a gaping hole in most prevailing modes of contemporary philosophy where the means for defending civilization— sustained reflection on the true and the good, and the best means of achieving them—should be.

In the opening chapter of David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, set in 1952, two Catholic students at London University are comparing the merits of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh:

In the assertive English Catholic culture of the time the achievements of Catholic novelists, like those of Catholic sportsmen or soldiers, could be flaunted as marks of the superiority of the Faith. Waugh was happy to appear before the world as a Catholic writer, but Greene disliked the term and preferred to regard himself as a writer who happened to be a Catholic.