Having said that I am reading Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age” and he has a real appreciation for the Age of Faith that I find very appealing and comforting. I am not sure why you said that I—and other phantom writers—don’t.

As for your thesis, I don’t think its so “out there” or taboo. I don’t bring it up not for fear but because I don’t find it compelling as you do.

I agree that an Age of Faith is a challenge to our Secular Age, I am proposing an Age of Love.

Obviously they’ve never really understood Hamlet or Macbeth or Oedipus Rex, if they make a statement like this:

“I find very little that is concrete about the politics of the day or yesteryear. Where do they come from? What makes them legitimate?”

What made a Christian monarch “legitimate” was the Christ-like willingness to sacrifice himself for his people. This pre-disposition was necessarily built into the theoretical framework of divinely-ordained monarchy. It’s part of King David’s concept of his own “legitimacy,” and it should be, in principle, perfectly possible for a society with a democratic ethos, to have a constitutional monarch.

So I will say what nobody else here dares to say, obviously: a constitutional monarchy (and all of them until the Age of Absolutism were; it’s complete misconception of medieval monarchy to allege that the sovereign’s powers weren’t limited)IS, indeed, superior to the corrupt, plutocratic and ersatz republic in America that calls itself a “democracy” and is willing to kill people the world over for not “democratizing” their political and economic systems.

Regarding your comment, and others like it, the answer is ‘no.’ I do not think that the Enlightenment was bad and life before that was good. I also am not advocating for a pre-Enlightenment way of living. What I am advocating for might even be called a hyper Enlightenment, i.e. an Elightenment that doesn’t end. This is the major flaw of the Elightenment: It seems that we take its products—secular nation-states, Liberalism and so on—to be “the Light.” Moving beyond the Enlightenment politcally does not mean to return to the Middle Ages.

As for the concrete and the mysterious, I find very little that is concrete about the politics of the day or yesteryear. Where do they come from? What makes them legitimate? Politics of any kind are steeped in mystery, as I see it. But here is a bigger problem: We should not (in my view) divorce theology from politics, or anything else for that matter. This is one of the main aspects of secularism that I reject.

Sorry I cannot give more details as of yet, I see these posts as opening moves to begin a conversation.

By what system do you get a king (or queen) or sovereign who is a lover? Would the office be hereditary? Would sovereigns be elected? Are you talking about a world government in which the pope rules?

It seems to me that the Kingdom of God is a very murky concept in general, and even within Catholicism. The Catechism: “1042 At the end of time, the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness. After the universal judgment, the righteous will reign for ever with Christ, glorified in body and soul.” So what you’re talking about would seem to be trying to make progress toward the Kingdom of God with the realization that it’s only going to be fully achieved after the end times. But apparently you seem to believe that during the last few hundred hears, at least, movement has been in the wrong direction.

In any case, mysteries may be fine for theology, but when it comes to setting up a political system, distant visions and mysteries won’t do. You’ve got to give at least some reasonably specific ideas of the kind of real-world political arrangement you are thinking about.