We live in an age of willful blindness and willful forgetfulness. Philistines do not know that virtually every thrust that they make against Christian belief was anticipated and articulated in the sed contra objections of the doctors of the Church themselves. They do not know that the debates of which the moderns are so proud ultimately resolve into arguments that arose in past ages among Catholic philosophers and theologians—realism versus nominalism, the limits of natural human knowledge, the tension between philosophical skepticism and rational dogmatism. To cite one example among so many, in seventeenth–century France one found scholasticism of various philosophical stripes, Thomist and Scotist revivals, an Augustinian revival, Cartesian, Aristotelian, and Malebranchist schools of Catholic natural philosophy, a flowering of mysticism as well as debates about the dangers of mysticism. There were deep disputes between Jansenists and Jesuits. Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits debated each other over the nature of non–Christian cultures and the scope and limits of natural law and natural reason. Montaigne, Charron, Mersenne, Gassendi, and the singular Aristotelian Barbay; Pascal, Arnauld, Fenelon; devotees of Suarez, Salamanca, Louvain, the Sorbonne, and Port Royal—–all living and flourishing within the bosom of the Catholic Church.
This is a truly sad and tragic situation.
I swore to myself after leaving college that I would never read a book again. I used to tell people, "If it's a book, I haven't read it." Why? Because I was given nothing but garbage to read and had associated reading with pain. Looking back, it was probably a good survival mechanism – it saved me from jumping out a window.
In fact, I didn't pick up a book again until four or five years after graduation. By the grace of God I picked up a Bible, played some "Bible roulette," and things have improved steadily since then.