The second question that I then want to ask is: why has it happened? Here I want to turn to two extraordinary prophets who saw it happening long before the rest of us did. One of them was Alasdair MacIntyre, the great philosopher, once a Marxist, today a Catholic. In 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre published one of the great books of the 20th century, After Virtue. For me and many others it was a life-changing book. Its argument was that the Enlightenment attempt to build morality on rational foundations, the Enlightenment Project, had, in fact, failed. We were now, he said, entering a new dark age or, as he put it, it’s not the case that the barbarians are at the gates. Actually the barbarians have been governing us for some time. The only thing to do, he said, was to retreat into closed communities and do what Saint Benedict did in the sixth century, build monasteries.

That has become known this year, actually, as the Benedict Option. Some of you will have seen or read the book with that title by Rod Dreher, and other Catholics like Charles Chaput have written the same thing. His book is called Strangers in a Strange Land. Alasdair MacIntyre saw this happening in 1981. The second one was 16 years earlier, by a great rabbi, no longer alive: Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. (Alasdair MacIntyre is alive and we wish him good health, or as we Jews say, “May you live to be 120.” Although my grandmother, my bubbe, used to go around wishing everyone, “May you live to be 120 and three months.” They used to ask, “Why the three months?” “I don’t want you to die suddenly,” she said.) In 1965, Rabbi Soloveitchik published a book called The Lonely Man of Faith. He argued that the two accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not simply different documents: they are two different dimensions of the human condition.

The humans of Genesis 1, made in God’s image, were told to “fill the world and subdue it.” That is what he called “majestic man”, what we would call secular humanity, the dominating nature. In Genesis 2 the humans are created from the dust of the earth into which God breaths life. They’re placed in the Garden of Eden not to subdue it and conquer it, but to guard it and protect it, and that Rabbi Soloveitchik called “covenantal man”. So he said these are always present in us, the secular urge to dominate and control nature and the religious urge to be in awe of nature.

Everyone read that bit of The Lonely Man of Faith, and they all assumed that Rabbi Soloveitchik was what we call a Modern Orthodox Jew. He was saying: that’s good stuff. But always read the last chapter of any book. People got him completely wrong because in the last chapter he said that until now, those two elements have always been part of each of us and we wrestle with them. But today, he said, the majestic, secular man of Genesis 1 is so powerful, so dominant, that the covenantal, spiritual man of Genesis 2 simply can’t compete any more. Therefore, if you want to keep your spirituality intact, you have to withdraw from the world. That was the Jewish account 16 years before Alasdair MacIntyre. Jews wouldn’t call it this, but it was the Jewish equivalent of the Benedict Option: withdraw from the world if you want to keep your faith. These were real prophets because they saw it coming a long time in advance.