Malcolm Guite: You Do not Perceive Fashionable Tradition’s Evil Philosophy

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Malcolm Guite: You Don’t Understand Modern Culture’s Evil Philosophy

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Summary

The guest argues that atheism is intellectually old and unsatisfying, noting that when he read Aquinas as an atheist he found the Summa’s ten reasons against God’s existence more compelling than his own five, which was “totally disarming.” He contends everyone believes something a priori (even that logic works), so the real question is whether Christianity makes more sense of lived experience (choice, responsibility, beauty, personhood) than atheist alternatives that reduce the self to “the unwinding of an enzyme.” His central claim is that modern people have been “dismembered” by trashy inherited philosophies and a culture of constant obsolescence, and that recovery comes through “re-membering” older, deeper stories, which is why the most traditional liturgies (Book of Common Prayer, Latin choral evensong, no cheesy talks) are now the most popular.

Top 5 Key Topics

• Aquinas disarms the modern atheist: The guest recounts that reading the Summa Theologica as an atheist, he found Aquinas’s arguments against God’s existence stronger than his own, having thought of only five of them. This destroyed the modern narrative that “Christianity is for dummies,” since faith, in Aquinas and Anselm (“faith seeking understanding”) and Augustine (“I believe in order to understand”), is the foundation of knowledge rather than a gap-filler.
• Everyone believes something a priori: He argues belief is unavoidable because you must trust that logic works before you can use analytic reason, and even believing other people exist beyond your interior monologue is an act of faith against solipsism. The question is therefore not whether to believe but what to believe and on what grounds, and whether the Christian story makes better sense of the world than the atheist alternative.
• The eternal coming through the temporal: Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, the guest explains that summer is fleeting and problematic (“rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”) yet “thy eternal summer shall not fade” points to something permanent breaking through the temporal. He says material accounts can’t explain this real experience felt by millions, citing folk songwriter Alan Franks’s line that “they give us the wings then dismantle the sky.”
• Re-membering a dismembered mind: Drawing on the etymology of “remember” (to bring back together what has been ripped apart), he describes a friend, a former Nietzschean nihilist who “ripped up his mind” and came to Christ, and argues a culturally and psychologically dismembered generation needs to recover older, deeper stories. He frames Christianity’s longevity as evidence that “we are a story being told by God himself.”
• Tradition over relevance, and the fear of stasis: The guest observed that despite being told to be “down with the kids” with guitars in cafes, the most popular Cambridge services were the most traditional, 1660 Book of Common Prayer evensong, full choir, sometimes sung in Latin, with no explanations. He admits two evangelical guys with a tract and a “set pattern” once delayed his return to faith because of its “western efficiency,” whereas Augustine’s “late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient, ever new” drew him in, and he ties recovery to C.S. Lewis’s idea that Britain is always haunted by “Logres.”