Okay, so this is a good article, and I'm glad you and Doug brought it to my attention.
But you seem to be rather excited about something therein, whereas I'm sort of shrugging. You seem to find something quite special there that I'm missing. What is it, please?
LOL. That's because ANYTHING that I happen to enjoy I think is EXCITING! It drives my family nuts.
What I found particularly striking is the shift that Spengler chronicles in Rome: "Revealed religion does not merely teach doctrine to its members, but changes their lives. Whether one can prove that God exists, for example, is not the right question. It is not even the wrong question, for it makes the subject of the discussion existence, rather than God. What Christians and Jews yearn for is the love of a personal God, that is, a God who is not mere Being, but a personality."
It was just odd, because last week I was reading this same thing in von Schenk:
"The only thing which can satisfy man's heart is to love God so completely that man becomes the channel of the divine love to his fellowmen. The only love which will affect our fellowmen is the supernatural love. All other love is tainted with self-interest, and this is the reason why we often fail - because we do not love enough with that divine love. If we could only love with the divine love, then our duties to God and to our fellowmen would become an expression of our divine love. This is the one thing we must ever seek in Bethlehem - that Bethlehem begets in us that divine love - a selfless, supernatural love, which is the Bethlehem love, a love which alone can ease the heartaches of the world. When we we fail in our relationships with our fellowmen, either at home or in business, it is because our love is tainted with self-interest. But it is only the divine love which can make us irresistible. And this love alone can save society. The world is always tense with wars, revolutions, global planning. If it is not one thing it is another. ... The only solution, then, for the agony of the industrial world, whether we be in the ranks of labor or capital, is Bethlehem; that divine fact that God came down to earth to lift man up to Himself. Any philosophy, any social order that ignores it, is bound to lead to hell. There are two conflicting forces in life: good and evil; love and self; God and the devil; heaven and hell. And if you find the Bethlehem evangel in your life, then Love and Heaven are yours. If not, you will reap hell. The reason we have hell in our national, political, social and domestic life so often is that men have lost the way to Bethlehem. The reason we church-members are so impotent is that we too often lose sight of the way and, therefore, cannot direct others back to Bethlehem." (Presence, pp. 47,48)
Our Christmas must be based not only upon an historical fact, but it must be a vibrant truth, a reality, an experience. And this truth becomes a reality in the Communion. At the Altar we fling the challenge to the world. We say: Man has not been made for money, or wage-slavery, or mere pleasure or passion; man was not made to be a machine. Man has been made to be God's own, made in the image of Eternity. And this is not the vague dream of a mystic. It sprang into realization at Bethlehem and is brought down to us today at the Altar." (p. 54,55)
He wrote this back in 1945. Where has this man been all my life?
Do you see the coherence, though, with the shift that is chronicled in the original article?
The article captures very well the shift in RC thinking in recent decades, although the point seems to be this makes the RCC the best voice for opposition to Bush foreign policy.
In the pre-conciliar church in which I grew up, Trent was something positive: the Reformers pointed out some true abuses, but from there set upon reform on their own rather than with the church, leading to a Revolt rather than a Reformation, which can only happen with the church, therefore we may more properly speak of the Protestant Revolt and then the real Reformation of the church which happened at Trent.
In the conciliar years and after, this was discarded entirely. Trent was seen as a "circle the wagons" reaction to the Reformation, which led the church into an isolation and sterility based on theological proofs that caused some of the vibrancy of the previous millenium and a half to atrophy, and we now need to emerge from a defensive counter-Reformation mentality to recover what was lost and move beyond the era of Trent and its concerns into the modern world.
Philosophically, it was a shift from Platonic (Augustine) and Aristotelian (Aquinas) idealism and realism to a phenomenology based on lived experience.
It reminds me of a comment made by a lay Australian RC theologian named Frank Sheed -- that people might be more convinced of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist if they saw more of a real presence of Christ in the Christian.
I think though, Spengler's real interest is more an echo of the Spengler from whom he takes his nom de plum -- not religious truth or experience but who will voice a transforming universal spirituality against more tribal forms of religion, one of which appears to be Islam in his estimation.
4 comments:
Okay, so this is a good article, and I'm glad you and Doug brought it to my attention.
But you seem to be rather excited about something therein, whereas I'm sort of shrugging. You seem to find something quite special there that I'm missing. What is it, please?
Anastasia, very curious
LOL. That's because ANYTHING that I happen to enjoy I think is EXCITING! It drives my family nuts.
What I found particularly striking is the shift that Spengler chronicles in Rome: "Revealed religion does not merely teach doctrine to its members, but changes their lives. Whether one can prove that God exists, for example, is not the right question. It is not even the wrong question, for it makes the subject of the discussion existence, rather than God. What Christians and Jews yearn for is the love of a personal God, that is, a God who is not mere Being, but a personality."
It was just odd, because last week I was reading this same thing in von Schenk:
"The only thing which can satisfy man's heart is to love God so completely that man becomes the channel of the divine love to his fellowmen. The only love which will affect our fellowmen is the supernatural love. All other love is tainted with self-interest, and this is the reason why we often fail - because we do not love enough with that divine love. If we could only love with the divine love, then our duties to God and to our fellowmen would become an expression of our divine love. This is the one thing we must ever seek in Bethlehem - that Bethlehem begets in us that divine love - a selfless, supernatural love, which is the Bethlehem love, a love which alone can ease the heartaches of the world. When we we fail in our relationships with our fellowmen, either at home or in business, it is because our love is tainted with self-interest. But it is only the divine love which can make us irresistible. And this love alone can save society. The world is always tense with wars, revolutions, global planning. If it is not one thing it is another. ... The only solution, then, for the agony of the industrial world, whether we be in the ranks of labor or capital, is Bethlehem; that divine fact that God came down to earth to lift man up to Himself. Any philosophy, any social order that ignores it, is bound to lead to hell. There are two conflicting forces in life: good and evil; love and self; God and the devil; heaven and hell. And if you find the Bethlehem evangel in your life, then Love and Heaven are yours. If not, you will reap hell. The reason we have hell in our national, political, social and domestic life so often is that men have lost the way to Bethlehem. The reason we church-members are so impotent is that we too often lose sight of the way and, therefore, cannot direct others back to Bethlehem." (Presence, pp. 47,48)
Oh, and from the next chapter:
Our Christmas must be based not only upon an historical fact, but it must be a vibrant truth, a reality, an experience. And this truth becomes a reality in the Communion. At the Altar we fling the challenge to the world. We say: Man has not been made for money, or wage-slavery, or mere pleasure or passion; man was not made to be a machine. Man has been made to be God's own, made in the image of Eternity. And this is not the vague dream of a mystic. It sprang into realization at Bethlehem and is brought down to us today at the Altar." (p. 54,55)
He wrote this back in 1945. Where has this man been all my life?
Do you see the coherence, though, with the shift that is chronicled in the original article?
The article captures very well the shift in RC thinking in recent decades, although the point seems to be this makes the RCC the best voice for opposition to Bush foreign policy.
In the pre-conciliar church in which I grew up, Trent was something positive: the Reformers pointed out some true abuses, but from there set upon reform on their own rather than with the church, leading to a Revolt rather than a Reformation, which can only happen with the church, therefore we may more properly speak of the Protestant Revolt and then the real Reformation of the church which happened at Trent.
In the conciliar years and after, this was discarded entirely. Trent was seen as a "circle the wagons" reaction to the Reformation, which led the church into an isolation and sterility based on theological proofs that caused some of the vibrancy of the previous millenium and a half to atrophy, and we now need to emerge from a defensive counter-Reformation mentality to recover what was lost and move beyond the era of Trent and its concerns into the modern world.
Philosophically, it was a shift from Platonic (Augustine) and Aristotelian (Aquinas) idealism and realism to a phenomenology based on lived experience.
It reminds me of a comment made by a lay Australian RC theologian named Frank Sheed -- that people might be more convinced of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist if they saw more of a real presence of Christ in the Christian.
I think though, Spengler's real interest is more an echo of the Spengler from whom he takes his nom de plum -- not religious truth or experience but who will voice a transforming universal spirituality against more tribal forms of religion, one of which appears to be Islam in his estimation.
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