[Or maybe I should blame Schoonenberg because he anticipated the yawning gap that was about to separate postmodernism from modernism.  Every paragraph sets out an idea then withdraws it, clarifies it, nuances it, or balances it.  Each idea comes from tradition, has been refined by countless controversies, and may be stated with precision.

At the same time, the entire tradition (symbolic order) has been vaporized, sublimated into a single term: “superstition”.  Its intellectual presence has been replaced by longings for some utopian dream world as constituted by the Social Sciences.

In sum, my flights of neoscholastic and postmodern speculation come from the fact that Schoonenberg was both scholastic and modern.  Neither symbolic order remains alive. Neither remains truly dead.  The chasm between 1964 and 2012 can only be bridged through speculative flight, on the wings of the spirit of the Fourth Age of Understanding.]