The Christian Humanist View of Being Human in the Renaissance

by Robert M. Woods

In the history of ideas, there are ideas that need to be rescued from those who should know better, but simply do not.  For example, all the false views about the Middle Ages. Way too many to even get started in this blog.  Interestingly, even the Renaissance has its share of misreadings.  There are some Christians who look to blame all the ills of the modern world on the Renaissance.  If you look long enough, one discovers those who see the roots of secularization in the Renaissance or the foundation of modern atheism in the Renaissance.  While ideas do have consequences, one should be extra careful on blaming an age, person,or book for the woes of later generations.  One extremely helpful reader on this is The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, and Vives edited by Ernest Cassier and Paul Oskar Kristeller. This volume is a fine place to start before moving onto the entire longer works of these authors.

The God of Men—and of Elves: How C. S. Lewis became a Christian

by Martin Cothran

C.S. Lewis

The following article will appear in the spring issue of my Classical Teacher magazine:

From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it.

An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway in schools from the Middle Ages until fairly recent times was a familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, a mastery of the history of these great civilizations, and an immersion in their literature. Medieval philosophers and theologians drank deeply from the well of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle in their quest to make intellectual sense of and to articulate Christian truths. And Christian thinkers since then have not only availed themselves liberally of the classical heritage in history and literature, but have been on the vanguard of classical learning.

The Christian Humanists Challenge the Machine

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-Editor

  

The nineteenth century witnessed the flourishing of progressivist thought: in social relations, political relations, religion, and biology. Everything was evolving, or so it seemed, for the better. Smiles were more frequent, as the blessings of modernity were entangling everything, East to West, West to East. Life just kept getting happier, and the citizens of the world were becoming one, homogenized, contented mass. In a word, according to men such as H.G. Wells, it would soon be “utopian.”

It was all a lie.

Modernity was a trap, and we—humanity—were its greatest victims. We failed to resist, and it greedily fed on us. In democratic regimes, the brightly colored and candy-coated machines of bureaucracy and large corporations mechanized us, making us far less than human. In non-democratic regimes, the damage was worse, nearly irreparable. Indeed, beginning with the assassination of a relatively minor figure by an obscure terrorist group in 1914, the twentieth century drowned in its vast killing fields, gulags, holocaust camps, trench warfare, and weapons of mass destruction. All that was sacred became irrelevant. All who remained relevant were shot. And, the State and its faithful companion, War, demanded the sacrifice of much blood to the restored gods, Demos, Mars, and their many companions.

The Methodist as Philosopher: Lynn Harold Hough, Irving Babbitt, and Christian Humanism

by Lee Cheek

The First World War and the Great Depression provided myriad challenges to the mission of the Methodist Church. As a nation began to doubt its role in the modern world, one of the country’s most dominant and politically-engaged religious denominations sought to respond to the chaos by reconsidering its own attachment to the historical sources of Christian order. Amidst the crisis, Lynn Harold Hough, Methodist theologian, philosopher, and educator, offered an intellectual framework, guided by hope, and devoid of the messianic tendencies of the emerging ideological movements that had begun to influence many aspects of American Christianity, including Methodism.[1]

Hough was one of the greatest Methodist theologians and preachers of the 20th century;[2] however, his contribution has not received the sustained attention of scholars. For half a century, he published at least a book a year, served as a regular writer for numerous theological journals, was a contributing editor to the Christian Century--and these were his avocational interests.[3] Hough was deeply influenced by the scholarship of his friend and philosophical mentor, Irving Babbitt. It was Babbitt's attempt to renew the notion of humanism that most interested the young pastor, who was deeply embroiled in the religious debates of the 1920s and 1930s. Hough was attracted to the balance of sympathy and selection in Babbitt's presentation of the doctrine. The purpose of this essay will be to present Hough's elucidation and utilization of Babbittian Humanism, and demonstrate how Hough's understanding contributes to some of the important questions of philosophy and religion.

Liberal Education and Christian Humanism

By Bradley J. Birzer

A friend of mine recently told me about a banner she saw hanging inside the entrance of an American public elementary school. “You’re all number one,” the banner read. I must admit that my reaction to this was rather strong, if not downright irate. Two immediate problems sprang to mind. First, the message of the banner is a blatant lie. If each of the children is number one, then each child is also number 300 as well as being number 270,000,000 or even number six billion in our heavily populated world. Additionally, this lie struck me as heinously anti-western, in the sense that the West in each of its cultural highpoints—in the best of Hellas, the Rome Republic of Cato the Elder, Medieval Christendom, and the foundation of the American Republic—has always celebrated the differences of each individual person, especially in terms of abilities and contributions, as created in a certain time and place for an unknown but definitive purpose.

Such a proposition as “you’re all number one” might also lead to the opposite conclusion: that “you’re all number zero,” worthless, and should be put up against the wall. Images of “The Killing Fields” rushed into my already angry thoughts. Ideologies, after all, which reigned throughout the twentieth-century, and unfortunately show no sign of abating so far in the twentieth-first century, wrecked incomprehensible havoc on humanity in four of the seven continents. Based on the finite minds of men and women, drowning in the two-dimensional unrealities of their own subjectivities, ideologues and their ideological regimes murdered—not through war, but through the gulag, the holocaust camps, and forced famines—nearly 200 million persons in past century. While American educational theorists have the best intentions in mind, we all know what paves the way to Hell.

Second, at its most basic level, a seductive slogan such as “you’re all number one” indoctrinates the youngest members of American society with an illogical falsehood. We might as well have “war is peace.” Aristotle has every right to roll in his grave. Since the War of 1812 and the Second Great Awakening of the early part of the nineteenth century, American society has continued to democratize, promote egalitarianism and nationalism to absurd degrees. Such public school pronouncements as “you’re all number one” reveal how far (and how low) American society has come in the past two centuries. We’ve dismissed the founding fathers’ understanding of virtue, natural aristocracy, and a layered republic as simply too elitist and, therefore, unacceptable in the modern world. The founders, after all, failed to believe every American was number one. As Russell Kirk, arguably certainly one of the most important social thinkers of the twentieth century, has warned, American democracy in its extreme form will not end in each person being equal, but in each person owning every other person.[1] After all, George Orwell’s Big Brother asks, isn’t freedom slavery?

These thoughts lead one to ask: what is the role of true education in twenty-first century America? During the Cold War, as the West was attempting to find and define itself in the early 1960s against our communist enemies, historian and social critic Christopher Dawson made a fundamental point. Culture, he argued along the lines of the great Anglo-Irish statesmen Edmund Burke,

is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of ‘folkways’ into which the individual has to be initiated. Hence it is clear that culture is inseparable from education.[2]

If one is to transmit the norms and essence of a culture, he must do so through education.

Education, though, takes on many forms, most of them informal and uncontrollable by society at large. The most important education comes in the family. Indeed, a child learns more between birth and the age of three than almost everything combined from the age of three to death (assuming a normal lifespan for the person in question). Equally important, most of a person’s character is formed by the time he or she is six or seven.[3] Both of these critical dates occur before a child becomes fully immersed in fulltime formal schooling. Education and character formation also occur with siblings and peers, at church, and, too soon, in the market place, bombarded by advertisers, marketers, and a variety of Willy Lowmans. In a sense, for any person, survival and success demand that one become at some level and in some way an autodidact, adaptable to a variety of new situations.

Education also, unfortunately, occurs in a multitude of other ways, most of them perverse and decadent, such as when watching the vast majority of television programs, reading the headlines in the grocery store checkout lines, looking at the quasi-pornographic covers of most fiction in airport bookstores, innocently searching on the web, and playing video games. Everywhere a person looks in this culture, he or she becomes inundated with images of adultery, sexual perversion, the bizarre, and the violent. All of this, the poet T.S. Eliot warned, is a product of nothing less than the “diabolical imagination.”[4] In our modern cynicism and decadence, we have left the moral imagination—that is, the use of one’s reason, rooted in the tradition of our ancestors, and anticipating the generations to come—to our great grandparents it seems, considering them hopelessly naïve, as we warehouse them and even their children in old folks homes. They are, to employ a true cliché, “out of sight and out of mind.” So, it should not surprise us, is their wisdom, locked away with their suffering.[5] And, hence, the tradition of the ages has failed to be passed down, and our culture, not surprisingly, turns to the faddish, the “improved,” the new, and the sleek. Continuity has turned to mere innovation for innovation’s sake.

From their outset, though, the first universities, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, attempted to capture the wisdom of the best of the Greeks and establish education on a moral and timeless foundation. Far from embracing the trendy and ephemeral, such as Socrates’ opponents, the Sophists, did, the followers and students of Socrates desired to uncover within the natural and human orders the true, the beautiful, and the excellent. Classical education in both the republican Greek City-States, the more sane polities of the Hellenistic period, and the Roman Republic and even the Empire, followed the model of Socrates.[6]

Books Don’t Make Us Human: Julie Robison

Can books make us human or are we born human?

I would like to re-word the thesis of this symposium, and present my list of books that are known to make people humane, and thus be a catalyst to make the reader an enlightened, knowledgeable, and truth-seeking missile of a human being.

People are homo sapiens, even if they lack a proper understanding of the human condition. Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa were both human; the difference between them, however, was not the question of their biological classification, but their choices. Stalin demeaned and killed humans and Blessed Teresa cared for and defended them. For at "the Day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done; not how well we have spoken, but how holy we have lived,” wrote St. Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ.

I am thus providing ten books which I believe best encapsulate and understand what it means to be a humane human; that is, sympathetic to the whole person, have a foundation in God, and outwardly show an ability to love transcendentally (opposed to hiding their candle beneath a bushel).

Furthermore, I’ve resisted including books-I-like or books-everyone-should-read if they do not fit the prompt. Aquinas’ brilliant Summa Theologica is a perfect example of this; as are Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and Vile Bodies, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (my three favorite books). They do address aspects of humanity, but not to the degree to which this symposium prompts me to choose.

I also did not comment on any of my book selections. This was intentional. For those who know me, I am quite chatty. For those who read me, I enjoy explaining and diving into ideas. For this symposium, however, I thought it much more apt to let the books and their authors speak for themselves. Too much commentary can set up unintentional expectations, and perhaps ruin the experience of diving into a new read. All of these books have profoundly affected my character, challenged my thinking, and have prompted me to act accordingly.

All books selected were written in the not-so-distant 20th century, and remind me of something Tom Bombadil said to the hobbits: "You've found yourselves again, out of the deep water. Clothes are but little loss, if you escape from drowning."

Children’s literature

1. The Little Prince by Anotoine De Saint-Exupery

“Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.”

“No,” said the little prince, “I’m looking for friends. What does tamed mean?”
“It’s something that been too often neglected. It means, ‘to create ties’… The only things you learn are the things you tame,” said the fox. “People don’t have time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!”

2. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Comics

3. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Poor Pico Della Mirandola: A Misunderstood Christian Humanist?

By Robert M. Woods

When the intellectual likes of Russell Kirk calls for a rethinking of a great Christian Humanist such as Pico Della Mirandola, we should at least pause and reflect.  I can remember as a college student being told about this "liberal" who took Renaissance humanism down the wrong path.  I even remember reading Marion Montgomery's The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality (a fantastic book!) where Montgomery puts a great deal of blame on the young and misguided Pico.

Despite my undergraduate professor and Dr. Montgomery, I have found myself more in the camp of Dr. Kirk.  While I am not saying that Pico got it all right, because that pleasure is not due any mortal, I read Pico as having numerous insights.  Here are a few:

• "Nothing greater on earth than man, nothing greater in man than mind and spirit." 
• "Man is the intermediary between creatures, the intimate of the gods, the king of the lower beings, by the acuteness of his senses, by the discernment of his reason, and by the light of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the interval between fixed eternity and fleeting time."
• "Whatever seed each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear him their own fruit."
• "Although born to a privileged position, we failed to recognize it and became like wild animals and senseless beasts of burden."
• "Let us bathe in moral philosophy as if in a living river."
• We shall be made perfect with the felicity of theology..."

Finally, I agree with Russell Kirk's assessment of Pico and most Renaissance humanists that "A world of wonder and discovery lay before the Renaissance humanist.  Yet all this dignity of human nature is the gift of God: the spiritual and rational powers neglected--and through free will man is able to neglect them--man sinks to the level of the brutes.  The humanist does not seek to dethrone God: instead through the moral disciplines of humanitas, he aspires to struggle toward the Godhead."

Kirk's reading of Pico's Oration and my own reading detect elements of humility.  Pico, as well as most Renaissance humanists imagined human dignity resided in the Biblical truth of humans being as created by God and the creature redeemed by Christ was most dignified indeed.

Kirk concluded his thoughts on Pico by writing that, "A real man, in any age, is dignified and nobly human in proportion as he acknowledges the overlordship of One greater than man."

Dr. Robert M. Woods is Director of the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University. This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

The Case for Christian Humanism.....Twenty Years Later

by Robert M. Woods

     While there have not been many books of recent decades that stand as a solid articulation of Christian Humanism that are worth reading.  The Case for Christian Humanism is one that is twenty years old this year and is still of  great value.  Most books about Christian Humanism tend toward the humanistic and not the Christian.  Franklin and Shaw have a fine volume that gives  insight into the nature and promise of Christian Humanism.  There is a leaning toward the left throughout this work, but numerous insights and the key issues are explored.  Historically and theologically informed, the authors make a convincing case "that Christian humanism was once the mainstream of Western thought." (4)  This will undoubtedly surprise many within Christendom and all humanists of the atheistic bent.  Certainly, this and many other facts and truths will come as a shock to those critical of and yet ignorant of Christian Humanism. 

     Some of the many strengths of this rich study is a rather lengthy exercise in getting at the definition of Christian Humanism.  This alone distinguishes this work from others exploring similar issues.  In truth, from a logical and rhetorical perspective, this is where the book stands apart from most other books of this nature.  Few works spend much time on defining key terms and this is essential to making a sound argument.  Additionally, the authors have mined Scripture for the contours of Christian Humanism. 

     The authors also examine the central role that worship has within a Christian humanistic frame of thinking and living.  One dated section of the book is about living in the machine age.  Someone reading this work may want to skim this section, but then read Neil Postman's Technolopy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology or Jacques Ellul's The Technological Bluff.  It is my hope that someone within the next several years writes an updated and expanded case for Christian Humanism that has more solid roots within traditional Christian faith and calls for a robust Christian Humanism in an increasingly anti-humanistic social order and Christian-lite church.  

Dr. Robert M. Woods is Director of the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University. This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

Isaiah and Christ: Don't Miss Him

By Bradley J. Birzer

Please note: this is a personal religious observation, not a Kirkian-type comment on our culture, politics, or economics. 


Instead, it is a reflection on Isaiah 55:6, "Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near." 


If you're not a Catholic, you might find this somewhat--if not patently--absurd.  


If, however, you keep reading. . . .

At first sight this verse from Isaiah seems—and indeed is—a hauntingly beautiful and complex verse. There’s a truly mystical quality to it, and the words are intensely poetic. One can sense the real communion and communication with Grace. And, one can sense both the anxiety and the hope of Isaiah—certainly not atypical for the Old Testament Prophets, itself a stunning tradition.

So, for what they're worth, I offer some various and very personal thoughts on this verse.

The Great Tradition: Reading Ourselves Back to Cultural Sanity

by Robert M. Woods

If you surveyed one hundred “educators” to define education, after the initial shock, and painfully long pause of silence you would probably be given the most recent acceptable version of educationese. Some would offer a definition by way of describing outcomes, assessments, goals, objectives, torrential techniques, maddening methodologies, and pet pedagogies but, that is not what, thankfully, Dr. Richard Gamble does in The Great Tradition.

“Readers looking for up-to-the-minute advice about innovative teaching methods and classroom technology, or about how to prepare students for the ‘real world’ and tomorrow’s top-ten careers, will be gravely disappointed” (xvi).

The Great Tradition, masterfully edited by Richard Gamble, is a unique anthology best described in the term given by Mortimer Adler years ago—conversation. This dynamic dialogue reaches from the ancient to the early nineteen seventy’s about the aspirations, needed learning environment, and the meaning of the most authentic education. The excerpts are all given the historical context with notes about the author and the specific reading. Approximately sixty writings on genuine education are generously provided. The wonderful movement from information about the author and the times, to knowledge about what is to be expected in the reading, and then to the ever present wisdom in the readings including Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Eric Voegelin.

Obviously among this list anyone who knows anything about the history of education also notices who is not a part of the conversation. The educational utilitarian calling for “practical” education and “job training”, also not invited are the educational Romantics with a deeply flawed view of human nature, and last, the offer of joining the group was not extended to the all too present “Progressive”. One reason they may not have been invited to the conversation is that many could not understand the others at the table, but mainly because this ill-informed indoctrinational presence reigns supreme in education departments in state, private, and even religious institutions.

As with any good conversation, there are points of dissent, but solid reasoning is provided. In addition, with all great conversations there is a convergence of truth and wisdom that is fine tuned and clarified by the ebb and flow, tone and tenor, and conclusions reached with others in the conversation.

Different from many books about education written in the past few decades, in particular, liberal education, is the tone of this volume. While authors from the ancient world to the present bemoan various ills of the process, content, teachers, and students, the vast majority are hopeful in tone.

The Real Meaning and Value of a Liberal Arts Education and Saving Our Cultures

by Robert M. Woods

Yes, it is cultures in the title, and I am proposing that a true Liberal Arts education can help us save our cultures.  By cultures I am referring to the most impressive and insightful book by John W. O'Malley, The Four Cultures of the West. Couple that book with a most extraordinary article by David Lyle Jeffrey The Pearl of Great Wisdom: The Deep and Abiding Biblical Roots of Western Liberal Education and we are on the path to the nature of our cultures and the ways of saving them.  The truth is that the Liberal Arts that could help save our cultures need saving.  My strong suspicion is that if the Liberal Arts are saved, it will be by Classical Christian Schools and Home school families.  A few years ago I would have held out hope that select universities under the banner of Christ would have helped.  That day has passed due to a misguided sense of priorities inherited from the dominate American culture.  Priorities of consumption and pragmatism have become triumphant.  While it was an older occurrence that Behemoth University lost its way decades ago, the Christian University was bound to eventually catch up, since much of what it did was ape the worldly institutions. 

On a most positive note, I have a sense that while some academic institutes are in decline, we are seeing a Renaissance  among Classical Christian schools and Home schoolers.  We are probably just a few years away from seeing the birth of Classical Christian Universities. I am hopeful. 

As particular people, even outside of institutions, we can all get a quality Liberal Arts education. Start with the article and book mentioned in this article.  Then start a Great Books reading program or take classes that offer a Great Books curriculum.  Another helper is found in James Schall.  His Another Sort of Learning is delightful and instructive.

Dr. Robert M. Woods is Director of the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University. This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

Quote of the Day: Christopher Dawson on Christian Humanism

The spirit of Christian humanism finds expression in Alcuin’s own letters to Charles the Great: ‘If your intentions are carried out,’ he writes, ‘it may be that a new Athens will arise in France, and an Athens fairer than the old, for our Athens, ennobled by the teaching of Christ, will surpass the wisdom of the Academy. The old Athens had only the teachings of Plato to instruct it, yet even so it flourished by the seven liberal arts. But our Athens will be enriched by the gift of the Holy Spirit and will, therefore surpass all the dignity of earthly wisdom’. –Christopher Dawson

Tolkien and the Hope of Christian Humanism

[Dear TIC Reader, below is an essay I wrote on Tolkien but never published.  It's deeply influenced by Stratford Caldecott, Winston Elliott, and Phil Nielsen.  I've decided to publish it now because Paul E. Kerry has just released an excellent edited collection on Christianity in THE LORD OF THE RINGS entitled THE RING AND THE CROSS (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2011).  A piece I wrote for Paul, "The 'Last Battle' as Johannine Ragnorak: Tolkien and the Universal," appears as the concluding piece of THE RING AND THE CROSS.  My chapter originated as a talk I gave in between performances of "The Ring" at the Seattle Opera in August 2005, comparing Tolkien's understanding of northern mythology with Richard Wagner's.  I hope you enjoy the following.]

*****

Myth connects us to those of the past and to those of the future. Through myth, we grasp the continuity of all of God’s Creations, of all of the soldiers in the Army of Christ: those who came before Him to prepare the way, those who fought beside Him during his 33 years on earth, and those who came and come after Him to do His Will against the Enemy, even unto death. “Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world,” Chesterton wrote in 1925 in the chapter on myth in The Everlasting Man. “To touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.” Myth then, leads us to beauty, which leads us to truth. Truth leads us to the Good of the One, the Creator of time, space, and all things, who sent His only Son to redeem the world.

“Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours,” Samwise says in The Lord of the Rings, as he and Frodo reluctantly follow Gollum to the stairs of Cirith Ungol, entering Mordor. Sam, looking at the light of the Phial from Galadriel, realizes that the quest to destroy the Ring is a continuation of the story of The Silmarillion, a story that took place thousands of years prior to his own War of the Ring. “You’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s still going.”

Christian Humanists Rage Against the Machine

By Bradley Birzer

[This was a originally a talk I gave at Piety Hill, Mecosta, Michigan, in March 2003.  Some of it is dated, but only a little bit.  And, I've even softened some of my views regarding the Reformation and modern liberalism.  But, overall, I'm happy with this talk.  

It was intended to be a celebration of the Christian Humanist (and especially Kirk) love and pursuit of all things Incarnation-al as opposed to the maddening rule by the will or wills of men.  It seems appropriate to post it as the liturgical calendar opens the celebration of the birth of the Incarnate Word.  

Merry Christmas to all readers of the Imaginative Conservative, and thank you for helping us grow so profoundly in 2010.] 

*****

The nineteenth century witnessed the flourishing of progressivist thought: in social relations, political relations, religion, and biology.  Everything was evolving, or so it seemed, for the better.  Smiles were more frequent, as the blessings of modernity were entangling everything, East to West, West to East.  Life just kept getting happier, and the citizens of the world were becoming one, homogenized, contented mass.  In a word, according to men such as H.G. Wells, it would soon be “utopian.”

It was all a lie. 

Augustinian History: As Understood by Kirk and Dawson

By Brad Birzer

One would be hard pressed to find a greater influence on two of the finest Catholic Humanists of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson and Russell Amos Kirk, than St. Augustine.  One only has to employ the imagination to jump back sixteen centuries to see the parallels.  At midnight, August 24, 410, Alaric and his Gothic warriors entered the gates of Rome and sacked the city, pillaging, raping, and murdering for nearly three solid days.[1]  Though the western empire had been crumbling for years due to cultural, political, and economic decadence, the actual event of the breach of Rome’s walls stunned and shattered the western world.  Rome, the common thought ran throughout the Occident, was to last forever.  It was, after all, as Jupiter had promised Venus in the Aeneid, the eternal city. 

And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, [Jupiter had promised]
Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate:
Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far)
In Italy shall wage successful war,
Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field,
And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build,
Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become,
The people Romans call, the city Rome.
To them no bounds of empire I assign,
Nor term of years to their immortal line.

Whatever the promises of Virgilian Stoic Myth, Germanic reality hit the western empire hard.