In medieval Europe, trust in God came naturally, given a finite universe where the divine was assumed to suffuse everything.
Today, for the educated Westerner, natural religious trust is no longer possible. The infinite universe revealed by modern science has combined with centuries of secularization to make religious faith much more difficult. But for this very reason, it also becomes more pure.
As Romano Guardini writes in The End of the Modern World (1956), one advantage of our "last age" is that love may very well "achieve an intimacy and harmony never known to this day:"
"If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding 'Christian' culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: 'it will, if possible, deceive even the elect' (Matthew xxiv, 24).
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why?"
The collapse of traditional religious structures and watered-down, modern Christianity will generate a more forceful and authentic reckoning with the mystery of faith.
The faith of the West will grow leaner but stronger, and more beautiful: "Love will disappear from the face of the public world," Guardini writes, "but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another."
Religious belief will no longer rest on inherited assumptions or social conformity; that which persists will do so only based on the strongest personal conviction and direct experience.
Do not envy the natural confidence once enjoyed by medieval man.
Celebrate the opportunity to exceed him.
"The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger," Guardini writes, "but it will be a world open and clean."
