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The greatest Christian thinkers of modern times have been those who have proposed the faith as something fresh and invigorating. In doing so, we continue the work of Jesus himself; his task was to call people back to the faithful keeping of God’s word, and our task now is to allow ourselves to be called back to authentic Christianity.

An important element in conservative philosophy is the belief in decline—the gradual decay (by no means total) of Western civilization and thought. Conservatives feel that Western thought took a wrong turn somewhere during the modern era, that we have in some sense lost our way. The conservative sees Western intellectual history as a decline because it involved a progressive loss of beliefs that are core truths, embodied in classical philosophy and, especially, Christianity. Western thought, so the narrative goes, started out under the inspiration of a fervent Christian theism and ended up in nihilistic despair.

Of course, we can admit that the legacy of modernity is mixed and presents a complex picture, but the fact remains that decline, in the sense of a loss of intellectual and spiritual unity and a general lack of clear direction and purpose in Western culture, is present to varying degrees everywhere. Intellectual history is not a matter of the mind only, but is also related to behaviors, practices, feelings, and the sense of life’s purpose. Lack of unity or agreement (although sometimes presented euphemistically as diversity) is itself a sign of decline because it means that the civilization lacks a clear direction.

There are of course any number of angles from which to approach the question of decline. Here I would like to call attention to the idea of worldview, our sense of what the ultimate ground of reality is. For most of us reading this, our idea of ultimate reality is embodied in the Supreme Being or God. How did this change over time? Where have we ended up? As an antidote, I would like to throw a small light on the great tradition of Christian philosophy, ancient and modern. While it’s true that belief in decline can make conservatives seem like gloomy naysayers and pessimists, by uncovering great thought of the past we can show the positive and joyful force of truth.

As signposts along the way, I will include some quotations from a text that is a great and accessible guide to many of these questions: the encyclical letter On the Relationship between Faith and Reason (Fides et ratio) by Pope John Paul II.

“Worldview” is a very popular term today, yet few know how old it is or where it came from. As it so happens, the term derives from 19th-century German Idealism. It is an exact English translation of the German term Weltanschauung, which is sometimes used in its own right (but just be sure you can pronounce it). Immanuel Kant was the first writer to use Weltanschauung, and it was taken up later in the 19th century by his countryman Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey was trying to develop a methodology for the humanities and social sciences, and the concept of “worldview” played a role in this. His argument was that every interpretation (say, of a historical event or a work of literature) happens within a larger understanding of the world that is historically conditioned—i.e., a worldview.

A worldview is not the same as a formally defined philosophy, although it can certainly be related to such. It is a set of assumptions and beliefs, more or less consciously or unconsciously held, through which one views life and reality. Worldviews shape thought and culture through history. They answer basic questions about purpose, reality, and existence, thus directing behavior and action.

By adopting the concept of “worldview” with hindsight, we can look at Western history as a succession of worldviews. In the ancient world, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Platonism were powerful worldviews (and well-developed philosophies with a serious literature). From ancient times to today there have been a series of worldviews, each morphing into the next. Each worldview brought out the logical consequences of the previous one. Yet the transitions from one worldview to the next were often subtle. Rather than disappearing entirely, worldviews tend to blend seamlessly into one another; aspects of each worldview remain in culture and society, intermingling with aspects of succeeding worldviews. The public at large simply takes ideas as natural assumptions without studying their history or development.

Yet from the fall of the Roman Empire to the dawn of what we now call the modern period, a period of about 1000 years, one single worldview held sway over Western men and women. This is the worldview of Christian theism, promoted by a Church believed to be divinely appointed. This church, understanding itself as Catholic or Orthodox, eventually divided into an Eastern and a Western half—with the Western half further undergoing a painful split in the early modern period resulting in the birth of Protestantism. Any disagreements in the intellectual world of Christendom, at least before the Reformation, were family quarrels—disputes over smaller theological or philosophical points within broad parameters of agreement.

Why this worldview had so much power for such a long time, and why it changed, is the question intellectual historians have sought to answer.

Founded in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christian message was spread throughout the Mediterranean world by Jesus’ disciples and with its adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire became the foundational worldview of the West.

Central to the time when Christianity held unquestioned sway is the period of about a thousand years that we have come to call, for better or worse, the Middle Ages. The medieval period was one of remarkable intellectual unity, organized by the spiritual and intellectual force of the church. Christian theism saw in back of reality an infinite, personal, all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent God who reveals himself both through natural reason and through revelation. Humanity rebelled against God and fell into sin, but God sent his Son, Jesus, to redeem human beings and show them a way back to God; he could do this because he was both human and divine.

Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, faith in the orthodox Christian worldview began to loosen. In many ways, the authority and power of the church was becoming weakened. Philosophers were aspiring to an independence of Christian teaching. The new belief systems or worldviews that came into being, including skepticism, rationalism, materialism, and scientism (or scientific materialism) can, I think it’s fair to say, all be summed up under the head of one single term: naturalism. In essence, the naturalist argues that nature is all that exists. There is nothing beyond nature, natural processes, and the matter that makes up the cosmos. Descartes’s division of the cosmos into mind and matter was easily interpreted to mean that mind was itself the product of matter—that anything spiritual was explainable as the result of an interplay of physical and chemical forces. (This demonstrates a truth about worldviews, that they often have implications or consequences unforeseen by their originators.)

Any worldview must establish a first cause, a basic ground for all reality. Rejecting the idea of a transcendent God, the naturalist simply pushes matter back in the place of God. The world simply is; we don’t know how. Humanity showed up, for some reason or another. Eventually, a theory of evolution was put forward to account for the emergence of human beings. But naturalism has never succeeded in positing an overarching purpose for anything, and some naturalists have bit the bullet and concluded that life and the universe are inherently meaningless.

There was a stepping stone, an intermediary stage, between Christian theism and naturalism. It was called deism. (Deism, like theism, means “God-ism,” but from the Latin rather than the Greek root.) Up-to-date thinkers concluded that many of the things that orthodox Christians believed about God were fabulous. Perhaps, though, there was a core of truth underneath the “superstitious” trappings of Christianity. Before the time of Jesus, philosophers like Aristotle had speculated on the existence of God as an all-powerful cause or force. Perhaps this conception of God was more “rational.” Thus, we have systems like Spinoza’s in the 17th century, which posited that God was an immanent force equivalent to nature itself.

How did such a reduction of Christianity—for that is historically what it was—come about? Why orthodox Christian beliefs came into question is the subject of endless discussion on the part of historians of thought. The whole process of decline can be traced to inner tensions within Christendom and Christian thought itself. The Christian world had become tragically divided, as seen first in the split between the Eastern and Western churches and, then, within Western Christendom itself in the Protestant Reformation. Religious wars followed, which were actually about politics and territory as much as about religion, and which depleted and exhausted Western Europe. At the end of it all, many Western thinkers came to feel not only that disputes about religious doctrine were pointless but that the doctrines themselves were no longer credible. This, incidentally, demonstrates the close relationship between behavior and belief. If the proponents of a worldview are acting in a bad way, it will seem to compromise the objective credibility of the belief system itself.

If it appears that elements of a belief system are malleable, then some thinkers will try to strip away what seem to be unnecessary accretions from the tradition. Deists were essentially motivated by a conviction that there was something good and worth preserving in Christian theism. But because this whole process is one of subtraction, it was ultimately revealed to be artificial. We are merely playing in a sandbox, shifting and rearranging elements of the given system, not making any advance in discovery or revealing what is really true.

Ultimately, deism was too thin, vague, and unstable to last. It was parasitic on memories of Christianity rather than being a strong worldview in its own right. Thus, it gradually dissolved. But, true to the way worldviews work, aspects of it survived in Western culture, intermingled with other beliefs and worldviews. (For example, in modern times we have what has been termed moralistic therapeutic deism, a form of “soft Christianity” in which God appears as an approving, undemanding father figure.) With naturalism, the process of erasure went one step further: the weak God of deism lost his existence entirely.

Naturalism proved itself far more durable than deism but still riddled with problems. The main problem with naturalism is that it presents us with (in the words of James W. Sire) “a fact without a meaning.” Naturalism tells us what is the case, but not why it is the case. Even if we are to assume that mere survival is the motive for what happens in the universe, how do we derive an ethical principle from this? Why should things survive? Why is life worth preserving? Why is it better to exist than not to exist? Naturalism is subjectively unsatisfying, failing to present us with any compelling reason to go on living.

“As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth” (p. 71)

Subsequent mainstream Western thought has been an attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole of nihilism. Thinkers such as Nietzsche were acutely aware of the degradation to which Western thought had fallen. But lacking faith in the supernatural claims of Christianity, they could not “go back.” Instead, they could only fall back on human willfulness, with disastrous historical consequences.

Various existentialist thought systems emerged as ways out of nihilism, attempting to find meaning in a seemingly senseless world. There was theistic existentialism, allied with Christianity, and there was atheistic existentialism, both of which of course came to very different conclusions. In the words of James W. Sire, the two existentialisms were “siblings in style though not in content.” This needs to be distinctly understood because what most people today mean by “existentialism” is simply the atheist variety, the one with the most press.

The last act of what the conservative sees as the tragedy of modern thought is postmodernism, which posits the supposed relativity of all values. But suffice to say that all of these tendencies branch off from naturalism.

The worldview of naturalism has become deeply ingrained in our social and moral attitudes, in popular culture and discourse, in educational institutions. It informs the worldview of much of modern society. Millions of people live under the assumption that human life has no transcendent purpose, that we are mere collections of atoms that evolved from pure chance, that values are created by us for pleasure and convenience, and that death is oblivion. Religious insights into life, death, and afterlife are nothing but “comforting fairy tales,” to echo Bertrand Russell’s characterization of religion.

In most cases, such ideas are assumed dumbly and unconsciously, not as the result of any philosophical reflection or learning. And this is another aspect of worldviews as opposed to conscious philosophies: they are often mindless and unreflective. This is because the drift toward naturalism, with its thoughtless belief in progress and overreliance on science, has been accompanied by a neglect and increasing ignorance of the intellectual and cultural heritage of the past. Mistaken worldviews must be therefore opposed by conscious and intelligent philosophic reflection based on the best traditions of thought.

Reframing the narrative

A first step is to acknowledge that the historical worldviews of the philosophical conservative and the philosophical progressive are diametrically opposed to each other. For the progressive, Western thought has been a continual improvement in understanding in insight. For the conservative, it is necessary to reframe this narrative of progress as a history of errors. He must show that we are not morally and intellectually better off than we were. On one level this is not difficult to do. It is hard to maintain that modern Western worldviews, unstable and shifting as they are, are the result of improved understanding and insight. Instead, they seem to be a series of stumbles leading to a dead end. It is a dead end because naturalism, nihilism, and postmodernism are all ultimately self-refuting. By contrast, a worldview that grounds truth in the existence of a transcendent supreme being is at least reasonable and credible. Showing why it is so is the task for serious conservative thinkers.

Second, we must reframe the idea that Christian theism has been completely abandoned. This is far from the case. The defection away from Christian theism was really more of a schism. Only parts of society actually formally abandoned the Christian faith, with cultural norms gradually following suit, while a great many people continued to take Christian theism seriously. Christianity has continually renewed itself, finding new defenders and heroes and fresh converts. Essentially, we have ended up with two cultures: a secular culture, well represented in organs of thought, education, and mass media; and a traditional, theistic culture predicated on timeless beliefs predating the rise of naturalism. Instead of a linear decline, a more helpful image might be that of a body (Western civilization) that has acquired a debilitating disease.

We tend to present intellectual history in a straight line: this led to this, which led to this, which led to this. The reality is not so clear-cut. Worldviews are not simply replaced; they overlap. They may be enunciated by professional thinkers and then slowly absorbed by society at large over generations.

And the older worldviews never go away. One implication of this is that Christian orthodoxy itself never went away. It became a marginal view, but still with power in reserve. Thus, in a sense, to reembrace Christian theism is not to “go back”—not to turn back the clock—but merely to reorient oneself. If one is going in the wrong direction, then progress will mean turning around. But take note: this maneuver is not simply a retreat, something negative, but a reorientation, something positive and dynamic.

Christian philosophy: the personalist answer

A second stance adopted by philosophy is often designated as Christian philosophy […] The term seeks […] to indicate a Christian way of philosophizing, a philosophical speculation conceived in dynamic union with faith […] The term Christian philosophy includes those important developments of philosophical thinking which would not have happened without the direct or indirect contribution of Christian faith. (p. 110)

As it so happens, Christian thought itself had something to contribute when it came to the widening gap between modern secular Western thought and orthodox thought and belief. There is a tradition of modern Christian and Catholic philosophy that takes its cue from modern concerns and redirects us back to the path of faith. It was articulated in many different shades and by many different thinkers and goes by names like personalism or Christian existentialism.

Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. (9)

It was Christianity that introduced the concept of person into our vocabulary—a concept quite unknown to ancient thought. The term persona (taken from the world of Greek theater) was part of the attempt of early Christian theologians to articulate who Christ was. But although the concept of person is of ancient vintage in Christian thought, it was not until modern times that it fully came into its own, and this came as a response to the modern crisis of thought. Yet at the same time it was rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, who stated that “Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature.” Drawing on ancient and medieval Christian wisdom, personalism posed a challenge to the dehumanizing and mechanistic tendencies of the modern world, born of the naturalist worldview. As a philosophical perspective, Christian personalism is related to the broader cultural idea of Christian humanism, also rooted in the biblical idea that mankind is created “in the image and likeness of God.”

Christian personalism asserts that the personal is the basis of all reality, and that personhood finds its apex, its highest individual instance in Christ, the Son of God, who in turn becomes the model of our own personhood. As a philosophical movement chiefly of the 20th century, Christian personalism answered some of the major weaknesses of naturalism. As science itself has discovered, the universe is not a “machine” but is far more complex and subtle. Similarly, the miracle of human consciousness and personality is not easily explained by mechanism or by the force of “chance.”

An example comes to mind of how the modern mechanistic mind spoils the Christian imagination, and how personalism solves this problem. It has to do with ethics. When Christ preached on the dangers of lust (Mt 5:27–28) and anger (Mt 5:21–22), he was implying virtue as a goal. Your interior disposition is what counts. Morality is about character, not simply about what rules you follow. God sees into the inner being of the person, beyond external acts, and can read our thoughts and intentions. This is the first step toward what we now call virtue ethics, a view also articulated in Plato and Aristotle.

What happened in modern thought? Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative emphasized universal duty. Other schools of ethics emphasized results or abstract principles instead of virtue. The original Christian ethical vision became distorted. One thinks of the joyless form of religiosity that consists chiefly in trying to avoid hellfire.

Personalism corrected this legalistic, rule-following tendency by emphasizing Christianity as a personal relationship with Christ, the supreme Person. This was nothing new at all, but a restoration of classic Christian insights. What personalism accomplished was to restore to us the original vision of Christianity in its humanistic fullness: a way of life that addresses the whole person. Personalism sees the human being as a unity of body and soul. Personalism emphasizes the subjectivity (not the same as subjectivism) of human experience. Strong in their conviction that persons are prior to and more important than things, personalist thinkers believe that “personal subjectivity embraces the moral and religious dimensions, which are part and parcel of the person’s nature as a conscious, intelligent, free, willing subject in relation with God and others” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

In short, personalism had an element that was new and an element that had its origin in ancient wisdom. This is how truth advances, not by convulsive “revolutions” but by a constructive building upon the past. Not least of the effects of personalism was to put human beings back at the center of things after scientific naturalism had demoted them (i.e., us) to cogs in the machine of the physical universe. As Jacques Barzun explains it, scientific naturalism split knowledge into “scientific fact” and “human experience.” Either man appeared as merely an insignificant part of nature, or else he had to be seen as radically apart form nature, which now appeared as an enemy, something to be “conquered.”

Rediscovering the great Christian thinkers

John Paul II in one significant passage puts his finger on the essence of the spiritual crisis of modern times:

One of the most significant aspects of our current situation, it should be noted, is the “crisis of meaning.” Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper, have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. This makes the search for meaning difficult and often fruitless. Indeed, still more dramatically, in this maelstrom of data and facts in which we live and which seem to comprise the very fabric of life, many people wonder whether it still makes sense to ask about meaning. The array of theories which vie to give us an answer, and the different ways of viewing and of interpreting the world and human life, serve only to aggravate this radical doubt, which can easily lead to scepticism, indifference or to various forms of nihilism. (p. 119)

The spiritual crisis, in short, is not some supposed return of “paganism” or even primarily a problem of immoral behavior. It is quite simply a loss of clear meaning and standards. It is an “option paralysis” in which we are overwhelmed by mental and psychic overload, an overproduction of thought, ideas, and commentary with a million notions jostling for attention—the result of the modern West’s loss of intellectual unity and agreement about core truths

Hence the need for a definite canon of thinkers and ideas, embodied in classic Christian philosophy. We need to clear our minds and fill them with fresh material. The pope uses the term “philosophy” very deliberately. He himself was an eminent philosopher, and he states clearly in his encyclical that every human being has the desire and potential to be a “philosopher.”  By this he cannot possibly mean that we all aspire to an academic degree from a university philosophy department. What can he mean?

[St. Justin Martyr] called the Gospel “the only sure and profitable philosophy.” Similarly, Clement of Alexandria called the Gospel “the true philosophy.” (p. 58)

And John Paul II himself characterizes philosophy as “universal wisdom and learning.” Philosophy in this sense is not so much an academic subject (with attendant technical vocabulary and methods and repertoire of standard textbook figures) but an attitude or way of life, embodying the search or love for wisdom. And wisdom can come to us from many sources, including revelation. Philosophy is thus brought down from a rarefied academic sphere and brought close to the common man and woman.

St. Augustine and other early Christian thinkers are excellent pathways to reorienting our worldview. Interestingly, as the scholar Vernon J. Bourke informs us, Augustine never considered himself a theologus, a theologian. Rather, he (and other Church Fathers) considered themselves to be engaged in philosophia—love of wisdom, enlightened by Christian revelation. This is an excellent example of how applying modern terms retrospectively to historical figures can be misleading. The language we use is historically conditioned. We are part of a continuous historical heritage, but we should be aware that words do not have a fixed meaning from age to age. For example, Augustine did not know what a “worldview” was, though he certainly had one.

Perhaps the larger point is that “Christian philosophy” is a very real thing, and we should think hard about what it means and how it affects our lives. Augustine and the other Church Fathers are key thinkers for us to sample, as are such medieval figures as Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas—especially the latter, the founder of a mighty system of thought. Aquinas’s Summa was intended as a manual for seminary students, not for general readers, yet selected articles from the massive work make very stimulating reading, like the passage on the five arguments for God’s existence and the aforementioned article on the person. There is something deeply reassuring about St. Thomas’s rational method, which goes to meet every objection.

In modern times we have such illustrious names as Newman, Maritain, von Balthasar, Marcel, Guardini, von Hildebrand, and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, all of whom met modern challenges in the light of ancient wisdom. They are essential, no less than the classical thinkers, because they are close to us and directly deal with our modern problems and predicaments.

The lack of general familiarity with many of these thinkers is due to a loss of cultural literacy as well as the overabundant pluralism that characterizes our culture. In surveys of philosophy, the likes of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche appear as the cornerstones of modern thought—not Pascal, Kierkegaard, and the 20th-century Christian philosophers I mentioned above. That is not to say that the former set of thinkers are without value or have nothing to teach us. Indeed, John Paul reminds us that

even in the philosophical thinking of those who helped drive faith and reason further apart there are found at times precious and seminal insights which, if pursued and developed with mind and heart rightly tuned, can lead to the discovery of truth’s way. (p. 73)

Yet the fact remains that the secular modern thinkers are part of the downward slide. Add to this the fact that the word “personalism” is unknown to most persons and “existentialism” is only associated with hardcore atheists, and it is astonishing how we have allowed secular folk to run roughshod over our intellectual heritage.

It is time, then, to rediscover the great tradition. Considering my roll call of Christian thinkers (to which you may add your favorites) as a group, as a cultural phenomenon, also helps us overcome the fragmentation of thought and culture in modern times. Further, in rediscovering the great Christian thinkers, I think we will find that such philosophy, at its best, is literature. That is to say, it is something we would want to read—and something that could affect our worldview and the way we live—and not merely a dry recital of abstract ideas.

John Paul II himself articulates this existential dimension of knowledge in his encyclical when he writes the following:

It is essential, therefore, that the values chosen and pursued in one’s life be true, because only true values can lead people to realize themselves fully, allowing them to be true to their natures. (p. 42)

Turning Back the Clock?

In his popular study of worldviews The Universe Next Door, James W. Sire argues that Christian theism offers the only route out of nihilism and credible explanation of reality: “For those who follow the decline of religious certitude through its trek from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, the way forward is not to go beyond nihilism. It is rather to return to an early fork in the intellectual road.”

Hence the conservative conviction that we must make a return, go back, even as some call it “set back the clock.” But is this really what we are doing?

On some level, it seems strange that we should need to counterpose Christianity and “modernity.” Christianity is modern; Christ was the bringer of something new, which changed the whole ancient world. But pause for a minute. To what was Jesus calling his Jewish followers? To greater fidelity, deeper authenticity—to an adherence to the spirit of the Law as intended from the beginning. This sounds a bit like conservation and restoration. True, the idea of Christianity being something we need to return to is the reverse of the historical origins of the faith. Christianity from its beginning signified novelty, surprise, the unexpected. Yet there is a sense in which Jesus came to call people back to origins, back to the truth they had been given and which had become obscured through sin and ignorance.

So, there is a sense that “going back”—not in the sense of resetting a clock, but in the sense of inner reformation, renovation, and restoration, regeneration.

Perhaps we are too beholden to the chronological timeline. Our duty is to pursue the truth. If we are on the wrong path, we should change course. We should not value an idea because it is new, or because it is old, but because it is true. Such a great thinker as Thomas Aquinas harmonized past and present in his intellectual synthesis. The greatest Christian thinkers of modern times have been those who have proposed the faith as something fresh and invigorating. In doing so, we continue the work of Jesus himself; his task was to call people back to the faithful keeping of God’s word, and our task now is to allow ourselves to be called back to authentic Christianity.

There is always need for renewal in our souls. In a sense we do need periodically to reset the clock, to return to first principles. Christ quite literally reset the clock, his birth becoming the beginning of our new calendar. Perhaps the journey into darkness and nihilism is all part of the divine plan, a step that had to happen to help us clarify the issues; the darkness serves to throw the light into stark relief.

The question that fascinates me is this: If things have deteriorated so far, how is it that we can still sense this?

The fact that some of us can see that things are not right means that the darkness is not total. Further, there must be a principle in us that is able to stand outside the situation and judge it. Despite the degradation, there is some part of us that still senses the truth, that remembers what has been lost.

The dangers when a conservative, or anyone with a definite point of view, attempts to analyze the history of worldviews is that they can get painted with a broad brush, with the necessary nuances lost. This is unfortunate. It is incumbent upon us to understand adversary worldviews and philosophies as best we can and with all the sympathy that they deserve. We must try to see how shifts in worldview happened, not always from sinister motives, but because a certain step was perceived as a logical conclusion, something inescapably true. There are plenty of people who would like to believe in God, in the soul, in a life after death, but cannot credit these things as real. We must then show that they are absolutely true—beliefs upon which we can stake our lives.

We are not unarmed in this task; we have at our disposal the rich arsenal of Christian thought, both ancient and modern. Our task then is to trace our steps back to where we started from. Or to change the metaphor, unwind the chain of mistakes, find the faulty link and repair it. The health of our souls and our peace of mind depends on this act of renewal, which is ultimately a positive and joyful thing.

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The featured image is “Knight of Malta With a Clock” (c. 1550) by Titian, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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