The Defining Quality of a Christian Civilization

 Reinhold Niebuhr "suggested that a Christian civilisation was a civilisation which always knew itself to be ethically un-Christian."  Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, p. 32

Prosper, O Lord, our righteous cause?

 Prayer composed by Thomas Cranmer when England and Scotland were at war in 1548:

"Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who has willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourself, and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can: . . .  Give to all us desire of peace, unity, and quietness, and a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility, and enmity to all them that be our enemies; that we and they may, in one heart and charitable agreement, praise thy most holy name, and reform our lives to thy godly commandments."   HT:  Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, p. 11)

Brutality's prestige

 "We should not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than those we are confronting, we will prevail.  Brutality, violence, and inhumanity have immense prestige . . . .  The contrary virtues, so as to have an equivalent prestige, must be exercised in a constant and effective manner.  Whoever is only incapable of being as brutal, violent, and inhuman as the adversary, yet without exercising the opposite virtues, is inferior to this adversary in both inner strength and prestige; and he will not hold his own against him."  --Simone Weil, quoted in Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, p. 4

We have a right to our anxiety

". . . Walker Percy, the novelist, contended that we have a right to our anxiety; it is not a symptom to be eradicated but a sign or gateway to the truth about our purpose as human beings.  To be born, to live, according to Percy, is to be alienated, to be lost or displaced in the cosmos."

Peter Augustine Lawler, Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About our Souls xix (2002).

Augustine: God Wants Us Back

"But our very Life came down to earth and bore our death, and slew it with the very abundance of his own life. And, thundering, he called us to return to him into that secret place from which he came forth to us--coming first into the virginal womb, where the human creature, our mortal flesh, was joined to him that it might not be forever mortal--and came “as a bridegroom coming out his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race.” For he did not delay, but ran through the world, crying out by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension--crying aloud to us to return to him. And he departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find him there. For he left us, and behold, he is here. He could not be with us long, yet he did not leave us. He went back to the place that he had never left, for “the world was made by him.” In this world he was, and into this world he came, to save sinners. To him my soul confesses, and he heals it, because it had sinned against him. O sons of men, how long will you be so slow of heart? Even now after Life itself has come down to you, will you not ascend and live? But where will you climb if you are already on a pinnacle and have set your mouth against the heavens? First come down that you may climb up, climb up to God. For you have fallen by trying to climb against him. Tell this to the souls you love that they may weep in the valley of tears, and so bring them along with you to God, because it is by his spirit that you speak thus to them, if, as you speak, you burn with the fire of love."

Confessions, Book IV, ch. xii, sec. 19 (Albert C. Outler, trans. 1955).

Balthasar on Beauty

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar, THE GLORY OF THE LORD: A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS, VOL. 1 – SEEING THE FORM

What is a human being?

"The concept [of the human being as representative] deals with man as he actually is, the non-autonomous and non-independent creature, unable to rely on himself alone; man, who can find and possess his riches and his glory precisely only in his dependence on and his communion with God."

-G.C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God (Dirk W. Jellema, trans. 1962), p. 114 (emphasis added).