"is the light of our own reality still faintly reaching us only from the death of our own star, far back in time?"

Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs

"Liberalism seeks to sustain history beyond its 'end,' beyond the collapse of a civilization, such that all the imperial voyaging of the West has been but the voyaging of a specter, of a Flying Dutchman always uneasily aware that its mariners have shot the symbolic albatross, to mix my allegories.  The upshot of this voyaging has been the pillaging and destroying of all other histories, with the consequence that the liberal ending of history has now indeed been universalized.  Yet this liberal ending seems to be now itself threatened with extinction, even if what could come next remains wholly obscure.  Or in other terms, the reality that, back in port, Latin civilization ended several hundred years ago returns to haunt what could now be our universal voyage to literal extinction.
     "So is the light of our own reality still faintly reaching us only from the death of our own star, far back in time?  One could argue so."

     John Milbank, "Beyond progressivism:  toward a personalist metaphysics of history," The hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 25, no. 2 (Summer 2023):  54-55 (46-61).  Nietzsche might say, Yes, the death of God; Milbank might say, Yes, the loss of an adequate metaphysics of history.