As Percy argues in several places, the fundamental error of modernist is his absolute, nearly religious, belief that “reality” cannot exist anywhere but in matter. Percy contradicts this premise on very Catholic grounds: Christ was made incarnate and historical two thousand years, and—further—He is made incarnate every Sunday in the Eucharist. This sacramental view is premised on the idea that the non-material can in fact be “real.” And this reality, including God, can be known to some degree.

These ideas for Percy are hardly philosophical abstractions; this discussion is precisely the watershed which either blinds or illumines modern man to the supernatural. The sociologist Peter Berger once argued that recent events in the West have reintroduced the “rumor of angels” to modern man. Percy would certainly agree with this report. The Cartesian dualism of spirit and body was a four hundred year-long disease which progressively crippled Western man’s ability to sense and believe and have faith in the evidence of things not seen. Modern man cannot find pleasure because pleasure is inextricably linked with the supernatural, and modern man actively flees the supernatural.

Percy illustrates this in a very insightful passage in Love in the Ruins. While hiding out in a motel, More remembers back to when he and his wife Doris (who later left him for another man) were vacationing on a road trip:

Sunday mornings I'd leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and pluming, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape country side to a—town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing here? says the bemused expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—

Back to the motel then, exhilarated by—what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.

"My God, what is it you do in church?"

What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.

For More, ironically, it is not the Christian, but the modernist, who is bound like a satellite to orbit the earth and never partake in its earthiness. Percy turns the tables paradoxically on the modernist by foisting this redefinition of “spiritual” on them. The modernist, by disintegrating the spiritual from the material, de-materializes and de-personalizes matter. The consequence of this is the loss of beauty, intimacy, communion, pleasure, love, and every one of the cardinal virtues. As the devil, Art Immelmann, expresses it, love is necessarily replaced by science in the mature Cartesian world: “love has its counterpart in scientific knowledge: it is neutral morally, abstractive and godlike…. in the sense of being like a god in one’s freedom and omniscience.”

From the opposite angle, Percy argues that Christianity—far from being immaterial and distantly spiritual—is intensely earthy. In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy comments on how Kierkegaard argued that it was Christianity which “first brought the erotic spirit into the world.” This is not to say, Percy would qualify, that desire and passion cannot exist outside Christianity. However, it is Christianity which renews the spirit of desire and grants it supranatural meaning. Modern man for at least four hundred years has been searching for wonder in sex and science and nature—as things non-renewable by the supernatural. After hundreds of years, the search is expended, and “the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages.” In other words, modern man dug himself into a pit too deep to crawl out of; matter not infused with the spiritual is expendable. Eventually, everything turns out to be vanity, and an endless grasping for the wind. But in the Christian view, because things like sex and art and nature are incarnational sources of mystery, they are therefore sources of infinite enjoyment. A beautiful woman can be a thing of infinite mystery and joy and revelation to her Christian husband—precisely because he cannot pretend to know her by exhaustively quantifying her chemical properties. Nor will he approach her body like a scientist dissects a dead cat; her body is mysterious and welcoming and an incarnation of Beauty. Her beauty is inexhaustible precisely because it is mysterious. The Christian husband cannot explain scientifically why the curve of his wife’s back drives him to distraction. In an interview Percy explained that sex is often viewed “simply as a piece of over-behavior which can be studied as stimulus and response.” The Christian view of sex is what saves love-making from the pale skeletal analytical fingers of the clinical psychiatrist.

An interesting point of contrast between Waugh and Greene, and Walker Percy is how the latter views (true) sexuality as the anti-dote to modernism. Paradoxically, and seemingly running against the usual Catholic grain, Percy sees modern “sex” as anything but sensual. Evelyn Waugh saw sex as a distraction from deeper issues confronting—which Percy would agree with, as far as that analysis goes. Graham Greene, the “bad Catholic,” saw sex as the anti-type to salvation. But Percy takes both a step farther. True Christian passion must confront and defeat the façade of modern passion. In this, Percy seems to agree more with the Protestant C.S. Lewis than with his fellow Catholics. Each, in fact, brings their most famous dystopian novels to an end with a sexual consummation. C.S. Lewis ended his Space Trilogy with an estranged married couple going to bed with one another—symbolizing the fact that all had finally been made well, and that the spiritual world of “Logres” had returned to Britain. Walker Percy ends Love in the Ruins with Tom More seducing his Presbyterian wife into bed (while drunk, even): “To bed we go for a long winter’s nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on a floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong.” The irony is picturesque. When confronted with the question, How can we fix a world so full of immorality and murder and pornography and rebelliousness and debased acts? The Christian answers: With sex, of course.