This is a portion of a sadly incomplete manuscript Fr. Rose
was working on,
which he had intended to deal with the entirety of the
Revolutionary (modern) Age, and its
terrible failure from an Orthodox Christian perspective.
As he makes so very clear in this fragment of his intended work,
the modern age has been a failure of violence, sadness,
despair, ugliness and hatred
precisely because of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment, the framework of modern Western society,
has as its logical conclusion the horrors of Nihilism.
Nihilism, a belief in nothing, itself a Satanic reversal of
the Divinely intended worship of said Divine,
has led to the Revolution
(by which Fr. Rose means not just Marxism, the most obvious,
but the whole evolution of said -
starting with the Jacobins of the French Revolution,
carrying over to the Anarchists of the late 19th Century,
the Marxists/Bolsheviks, as well as the Fascists
and the National Socialists;
all of whom are related to each other,
and all of whom stem from the same root),
and the Revolution has only succeeded in destroying the two
most important things to the life of the human species:
truth and faith.
When discussing the fracturing and hopelessness of society,
it needs to be born in mind that Fr. Rose wrote this in the
60's, and one wonders what his thoughts would be
on the Materialist and radical Individualist nightmare
Western society has morphed into
since his own concerned observations.
Although only a fragment of a larger work never completed,
this is an excellent little work that makes some wonderful
observations on just what truly underpins the darkness
of the present age.
( Heinz Reinhardt at Goodreads.com )