Strange Bedfellows

"What, then, is the position of the thinking Christian, face to face with the cultural situation which I have described? As he reads the things worth reading, whether imaginative or polemical, he is continually meeting with accounts of the human situation or with critical analyses of man's current lot, which make him sit up and say: This is profound and penetrating. This represents a deep and wholly human response to present-day life. It is so crucial, fundamental, and illuminating that it cannot be overlooked. It touches me pre-eminently as a Christian. Yet this writer is not a Christian. I share his vision for a moment over this issue or that, and the next minute I am jerked back into awareness that he and I are poles apart, separated by a chasm, by a contradiction in our most basic presuppositions. But (and this is the tragedy) the only way I can pursue this vital current of thought further is by more reading of non-Christian literature written by sceptics, and by discussion of it within the intellectual frame of reference which these sceptics have manufactured. In short, there is no current Christian dialogue on this topic. There is no Christian conversation which I can enter, bringing this topic or this vision with me.

"There is no Christian dialogue in which the issues are being thrashed out that disturb the rebellious artist and the rebellious prophet. Thus the thinking Christian who is concerned over these issues finds himself fitfully and perversely at one with fiercely - and even blasphemously - non-Christian writers and, at the same time, mentally out of touch with his fellow-Christians. And he scarcely dares to say (how difficult it is to clinch the thing in words anyway) exactly what it is, hidden away among the rabid obscenities of a Henry Miller or the irritable resentments of a Martin Green, which hits him in the eye and searches him out, not just as a man but as a Christian."


Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A Christian Think? (Servant Books, 1978), 11-12

Spring Break

I'll be computer-free for the next five days, enjoying extended time with my family, so I won't be posting anything.

In The Christian Mind, Harry Blamires identifies six marks of the Christian mind and devotes a chapter to each. They are: its supernatural orientation, its awareness of evil, its conception of truth, its acceptance of authority, its concern for the person, and its sacramental cast. Here's a selection from his chapter on its supernatural orientation:

The Catholic tradition of our Church is that the Christian life is a life for the full man. There is no room in Christendom for a culture of the spirit which neglects the mind, for a discipline of the will which by-passes the intellect. It may be that the dominant evil of our time is neither the threat of nuclear warfare nor the mechanization of society, but the disintegration of human thought and experience into separate unrelated compartments. . . In so far as the Church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the Church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the Church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the full man, faculties and forces blended and united in the service of God. The Church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that - to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God.