>>In his book The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton describes the power of orthodoxy to renew itself, in a chapter titled "Five Deaths of the Faith". Christianity, he tells us, was never really reborn, because it never really died. The cultures it lived in died, so Christianity was rediscovered five times in the history of the West, as one cultural epoch was superseded by another. This happened after the fall ofRome, then in the twelfth century at the end of the feudal era, again when the medieval synthesis gave way to the secular energies of the Renaissance, again when the Renaissance fell to the new rationalism of the Enlightenment, and yet again, as Enlightenment values have begun to dissolve with the arrival of our postindustrial age.
In each instance, the end of civilization and death of God were proclaimed - but what was really dying was a complex set of institutional arrangements wedded to particular cultural premises. In each case, a new cultural age emergered when Christianity was rediscovered as something above and beyond the culture that claimed to embody it. It wasn't that the faith evolved to fit the times, nor did it exactly conquer. It was more that after each subsequent culture faced up to its illusions and its misrepresentations of the creed, orthodoxy simply reemerged whole cloth out of the ashes of history: unscathed, clarified, and renewed.<<