What a read. At times a breath-taking experience as the “Age of Utopia” outlines the consequences of the argument that a humanist secular idea of Utopia gradually replaced an inner search for Paradise and a connection to something beyond us, something Divine. The first half of the 19 hundreds is hard to look at in this context. Also as a fulfilling of the widespread warnings from writers and philosophers in the 18 hundreds.
A strongly recommended book, though it might be important to start with the first volume “The Age of Paradise” to get a deeper sense of the first millennium, and what was later lost after the Great Schism and the Papal Reforms in Western Christendom.
As an aside, it’s also interesting to see how well this aligns with the ideas of McGilchrist and how the culture of Europe gradually started to be more unbalanced and left hemisphere oriented after the Renaissance. It gives pause.