Meanwhile, the secular society which believes it has freed itself entirely from its roots resembles nothing so much as the image drawn by Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen (ISI, £14.95) — the condition of Icarus had he survived the fall. All of our hopes — every religious and political dream we ever had — came crashing around us. And yet we are still here. So what do we do? There are a number of possibilities including that we might, in time, gird ourselves for another effort at the absolute, perhaps once those with a memory die out. Or perhaps we will just accept that we have landed here, are still alive and decide to give ourselves over solely to lives of pleasure. This is not an uncommon or unprecedented conclusion. It happened to the Soviet leaders when they lost faith in their own utopia. As Delsol observes, “The great collapse of ideals often draws in its wake a kind of cynicism: if all hope is lost, then let us at least have fun!”

Perhaps we are living through something like that cynicism at the moment. And it is not the worst position in the world to find yourself in. When politicians say “spend” and everything in the world around us celebrates our lives as consumers then it certainly suggests that is one position we have come to. But it has the potential to be deadly, not only because it is contagious, but because it has a hole of meaning and purpose at its centre which every society in history has attempted to address and which something else will try to fill if our own societies do not apply themselves. A society that sells itself solely on its pleasures is a society that could swiftly lose its attractions. That post-nightclub convert had the pleasures and knew they were not enough. A society which says we are the bar and the nightclub, the licence and the fun, cannot be said to have deep roots of survival. One which says that our culture is the cathedral and the playhouse, the shopping mall and the library has more than a chance.

There is one part of this that is noticeable by its absence. In the 19th century, when the possibilities of literal religious faith began to fade, the idea arose that a cultural renewal could come about by replacing religion with art. Part of that notion was not just that art could pick up where religion had left off, but that it might do even better than religion because it could live without its “encumbrances”. At the start of his 1880 essay “Religion and Art” Wagner argued: “While the priest stakes everything on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention.”

Wagner had certainly read his Schopenhauer, and he had also read his Feuerbach, from whom he gained the notion of religion as the expression of our innermost desires. The role of art, he believed, was to “save the spirit of religion”. And what he was attempting to speak to, in his music and essays was the source of that other-worldly, subconscious voice that speaks to us, asks questions and seeks answers. From Tannhauser right through to Parsifal, Wagner’s ambition and achievement was to create a kind of religion which could stand up on its own and sustain itself. Even this foundered, of course, and those who try to live their lives by the Wagnerian religion tend to find themselves living rather unhappy lives. And as we can learn from Wagner himself, culture on its own cannot make anyone either happy or good.

Perhaps it was the realisation of the partial failure of this mission that persuaded so many contemporary artists to stop aiming to connect to any enduring truths but instead simply to say to the public, “I am down in the mud with you” — a moral replay of the moment when the public’s technical attitude to art moved from pre-Duchamp (“I wish I could do that”) to that of today (“A child could do that”). If you walk through a gallery like Tate Modern in London or Moma in New York the only thing more striking than the lack of technical skill is the lack of ambition. The works may tell us about death, suffering, cruelty or pain but few have anything to say about these subjects. Almost everybody knows these things exist, and if they did not then they will hardly be persuaded in an art gallery, but the art of our time seems to have given up any effort to kindle something else in us. In particular, it has given up that desire to connect us to something like the spirit of religion or that thrill of recognition — what Aristotle termed anagnorisis — which grants you the sense of having just caught up with a truth that was always waiting for you.