Presenting book review Reason in Mortal Danger Marcel De Corte published by Andegavenum. It depicts a devastating diagnosis of a modern man who has denied his reasonable relation with nonsubjective reality and lives in a planet of intellectual and sensual fantasies.
A well-known Christian apologist operating in Napoleon's time and after his fall – François-René de Chateaubriand survived an episode in his youth erstwhile a married female with passion imposed herself on him in his own estate. However, he did not usage the chance to start an affair (for luckily!), just a feverish closed himself up and began to live in a planet of imagination, where he constructed a image of the perfect woman. This ghost haunted him for any time and made him “live in the clouds” where he gave himself to pleasures with his dream beloved, and besides defrauded himself of his nature to join with the ghost female and even identify with her! Chateaubriand felt that in this projection he was falling into madness and the deficiency of real anticipation of reuniting with his ghost began to receive as hell torture. Chateaubriand, in his delirium, is the equivalent of a contemporary man, and his image of a lover corresponds to the non-reality that modern civilization, according to Marcel De Corte, creates.
De Corte's diagnosis is devastating. Modern civilization suffers from idealism in all possible fields – scientific, political, religious, etc. It won't be an exaggeration if I inform people who are curious in reading Understanding in the Fatal DangerThat's the work De Corte put this crushing diagnosis that it's a book for people with strong nerves. erstwhile you read it you can experience shock, reevaluate your reasoning and start to look at the planet (understanded as the order of human hearts, not nature), which has derailed so much that, at least at first glance, there is no chance of saving from destruction.
De Corte, following Aristotle, mentioned 3 basic functions of human reason: “The function learning (Theory) allowing to discover what beings and things are in a planet that does not depend on reason, but it is reason that depends on it; function Actions (praxis) – reason strives to accomplish a goal to which man does not cease to prosecute and which does not depend on his will: the fulfilment of his existence and happiness; function fiction (poiesis) – reason produces works which depend entirely on it erstwhile it comes to their condition. Of these 3 functions, the only 1 remaining is the 3rd – the lowest in the hierarchy."
Reason has devoid of its nature (see the case of Chateaubrianda), does not give in to metaphysical speculation, and even despises it, just as it does not respect natural law which it traditionally recognized within a pre-industrial, agrarian society which was organic and remained faithful to common sense. All he does is make a fresh model of social life, a imagination of a fresh man, a neo-religion that is realized by the alleged post-conservative Church, finally, which seems the most hard and requires the top explanations, to effect a fresh physical-mathematic science, which, according to De Corte, besides does not discover reality, or at least not in its entirety, but with material and mathematical tools, constructs it.
In my opinion, the issue of the doctrine of discipline presented by the Belgian aristocrat remains an component of the book, which requires not so much to be discussed in a short article of popular science, as in a comprehensive technological article, referring to many sources (De Corte himself, in his deliberations on science, referred to the statements and views of respective very celebrated scientists of the 20th century: Einstein, Eddington, de Broglie and others). Chapter Romanticism of discipline requires the reader to focus most of all parts of the book. This is simply a chapter for the brave, but, as I signaled, no 1 without this virtue should take up Reason in Mortal Danger De Corte.
Marcel De Corte, in this book, was made known as a fierce opponent of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who embodies (neo)modern idealism in the Catholic Church. Thus, he (De Corte) can be joined by a full scope of more or little conservative authors (Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, von Hildebrand), who expressed their passion for the mad imagination of becoming the “lover of evolution” promoted by this Jesuit. In De Corte's book, it is critical to present besides another adepts of the doctrine of becoming functioning within the Catholic Church like wolves in sheep's clothing, headed by physicist Leprince-Ringuet, who nominally admitted to Catholicism and wanted to improvement it, but following the model of modernists condemned in 1907, by St. Pius X.
Many more themes in De Corte's work are asked for a reference: democracy as a facade, information in mass society as a tool for shaping people by technocrats, the function of first Descartes, and then the philosophers of enlightenment in the formation of this idealistic way of being modern civilization, the question of Marxism and its delusions, etc., etc. I do not have the slightest chance to present, at least briefly, the full wealth of De Corte’s book.
What matters at the end is that De Corte wrote about this nightmare of idealism destroying people and society in the second half of the 20th century. What would he say about the circumstances in which people came to live in the first half of the 21st century, erstwhile we are faced with specified a massive bombardment of information that the flood of information attacking people in the second half of the 20th century seems only drizzle and with specified pervasive ideologies that possibly even Hitlerism is nothing more than a minor, transient problem with them (in the end of abortion in demoliberal societies, according to my best knowledge, reap much greater harvest in the death of human beings than the Second planet War)? Or possibly he would no longer speak, but he would quiet down in the bosom of nature and contemplate the Truth, the Good and the Beauty, which are eternal and last even erstwhile this planet reaches a disaster to which it strives.
Dr. Krzysztof Kotula
Marcel De Corte, Reason in Mortal Danger, crowd. P. Tylus, Andegavenum 2024, 364 pages
See also:
Who is simply a actual Conservative and how does the Revolution effort to destruct it?
![[MC DATA] Experts sound the alarm. The vast majority of Poles do not yet have a PESEL number withheld](https://dzienniknarodowy.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/dowod_osobisty_c_mondaynews_pl.jpg?v=1751964025)
