Heroism, Liturgical Humanism, & Handmaids in Age of Anxiety

​​​​First as rivals, then as mistress and servant, then as rivals again, but sometimes as friends and coadjutors, these two great traditions have together been the conscious spiritual and intellectual sources of Western culture.

​​Today both of them are threatened, and threatened on the whole by the same enemies, but both still exist, and as long as they exist Europe still survives.

On the one hand Hellenism provided a humane ethos and a philosophy of human nature which were not to be found among other cultures, while on the other hand Christianity is distinguished from other religions by its doctrine of the Incarnate Word, through whom the Divine and Human Natures have been substantially united in the historic person of Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and Man.

It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life, which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

tends essentially to render man more truly human, and to manifest his original greatness by having him participate in all that which can enrich him in nature and in history (by “concentrating the world in man,” as Scheler said approximately, and by “dilating man to the world”); it at once demands that man develop the virtualities contained within him, his creative forces and the life of reason, and work to make the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom.

It is high time for Christians to bring things back to truth, reintegrating in the fullness of their original source those hopes for justice and those nostalgias for communion on which the world’s sorrow feeds and which are themselves misdirected, thus awaking a cultural and temporal force of Christian inspiration able to act on history and to be a support to men.

For this Christians must have a sound social philosophy and a sound philosophy of modern history. Thus they would work to substitute for the inhuman regime in agony before our eyes a new form of civilization, which would be characterized by an integral humanism and which would represent for them a new Christendom.

Revelation presupposes a God who is personal and free: if such a God engages us, addresses us, our human identity becomes something we don’t control. We are who we are because we are spoken to by an agent irreducibly and unimaginably other; to be human is to be summoned to answer. But this also means that to be human is to be summoned to “communion”: there is no life for us without that awareness of and coming to terms with the call to answer to, and for, what is not ourselves. Every other person is the object of God’s free address, and to look at the face of a human other is to look at a reality that is the focus of an infinite attention. In the light of revelation we see human faces for the first time. The “humanism” to which the Christian rightly lays claim is a vision of every human face as the focus of self-forgetting love; so that there is no conditionality about human worth or dignity, no more or less that depends on status, achievement, age, race, or whatever. The invitation to engage with the act of love that has eternally engaged me is at the same time the invitation to engage with the human other who, like me, is already seen by God and addressed by God. Hence we can speak, as does Olivier Clement, of the “sacrament of the brother/sister.” To believe the Christian revelation is to be immersed (the word is deliberate) in this “circulation” of attention and invitation, always invited to the contemplation of the divine in the face of the revealer, Jesus, always invited to the recognition and service of the human other—and, as Clement does not fail to insist, the non-human other as well, since the renewed human subject is also liberated to see the world itself as loved by God and inviting humanity to discover how to live in reconciliation with its processes, neither absorbed in them nor struggling to defeat them.

Why was Lewis so concerned with moral education in the midst of a literal World War? Alan Jacobs’ book expands that question and asks: What were five major—and very different—Christian thinkers (Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil) doing in 1943 thinking about how western civilization would morally educate its people?

Apolytikion of Synaxis of John the Theologian - Second Tone: Beloved Apostle of Christ our God, hasten to deliver a people without defense. He who permitted you to recline upon His bosom, accepts you on bended knee before Him. Beseech Him, O Theologian, to dispel the persistent cloud of nations, asking for us peace and great mercy.

Kontakion of Synaxis of John the Theologian - Second Tone: Who can recount your greatness, O virgin, for miracles flow and healing springs forth from you. You intercede for our souls, as the Theologian and friend of Christ.

Greetings in God, my most devoted and venerable son Gregory, from Origen.

¶1. As you know, the pursuit of understanding, since it calls for asceticism, can involve exertion, which leads as much as possible (if I may put it that way) toward the goal of that for which a person wishes to train. Thus your pursuit can have made you an expert Roman lawyer and a Greek philosopher of those schools which are deemed significant. But I would wish you to employ the full power of your pursuit ultimately for Christianity; therefore as a means I would beseech you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks all those general lessons and instruction which can serve Christianity, and whatever form geometry and astronomy will be useful for interpreting the holy Scriptures. Thus, what the children of the philosophers say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy, as handmaids to philosophy, w also may say concerning philosophy itself in relation to Christianity.