Past and Present
PAST AND PRESENT -
Thomas Carlyle
1843
Book III. The Modern Worker.
Phenomena
But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the sky,' minatory or confirmatory! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime. It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten God;'—in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible Perhaps; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables,—whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the Truth of this Universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man. There is no longer any God for us! God's Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency: the Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at:—in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period,—begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force and desperateness next hour. For actually this is not the real fact of the world; the world is not made so, but otherwise!—Truly, any Society setting out from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The Unveracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its corresponding Misery and Penalty; the Phantasms, and Fatuities, and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at noonday,—must needs be numerous! The Universe being intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite Humbug,' why should any minor Humbug astonish us? It is all according to the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton Aristocracies; giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism,—this, in all its branches, in its thousand-thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to us.
Distracted from distraction by distraction...
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God .
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
T.S. Eliot, from The Rock.
...when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, Maximilian Kolbe sheltered as many as 2,000 Jews in his monastery outside Warsaw. Kolbe would probably have agreed with the poet’s conclusions about man’s unavoidable contradictions. In the final issue of The Knight of the Immaculata, in December 1940—the Nazis had allowed him to keep publishing in hopes that he would incriminate himself—Kolbe wrote: “No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69162/the-doubter-and-the-saint
Cynthia Haven
In the bitterly cold predawn, icy winds sliced through Viktor Frankl’s threadbare uniform. Yet another eternally long day was beginning for him and his fellow inmates as they wearily marched through the gates of Auschwitz to the day’s work site. Trudging through puddles and slush down a stony, gutted road, the group clustered together to keep warm. From behind an upturned collar, a man next to him whispered, “If our wives could see us now! I do hope that they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.” Thoughts of his own wife suddenly flooded into Frankl’s mind. In his mind’s eye, he could see her with uncanny clarity — her warm smile, her frank but encouraging nod, the way her eyes squinted when she laughed. A powerful wave of love for her overwhelmed him, carrying him away from his bleak, hopeless reality. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes: I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved…. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
In his darkest hour, love for his wife filled him with such joy that he grasped why the angels could spend all of eternity in worshipful love of God. For a few moments, Frankl glimpsed the essence of the greatest commandment, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
Lois Tverberg
Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus
“To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile. “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part … whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” Only love never faileth (1 Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the “content” of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life.”
For The Life Of The World
by Alexander Schmemann
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| Maximillian Kolbe |
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