Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 8:46pm

Christ and History

 

I’ll tell you what stands between us and the Greeks.  Two thousand years of human suffering stands between us! Christ on His Cross stands between us!

Michelangelo, Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

 

 

 

Popular historian Tom Holland, whose work I have admired, writes how his study of history led him back to Christianity:

 

By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values. My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” Swinburne wrote, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. “The world has grown grey from thy breath.” Instinctively, I agreed.

So, perhaps it was no surprise that I should have continued to cherish classical antiquity as the period that most stirred and inspired me. When I came to write my first work of history, Rubicon, I chose a subject that had been particularly close to the hearts of the philosophes: the age of Cicero. The theme of my second, Persian Fire, was one that even in the 21st century was serving Hollywood, as it had served Montaigne and Byron, as an archetype of the triumph of liberty over despotism: the Persian invasions of Greece.

The years I spent writing these studies of the classical world – living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had triumphed at Alesia – only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical inquiry, did not cease to seem possessed of the qualities of an apex predator. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done – like a tyrannosaur.

Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

“Every sensible man,” Voltaire wrote, “every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” Rather than acknowledge that his ethical principles might owe anything to Christianity, he preferred to derive them from a range of other sources – not just classical literature, but Chinese philosophy and his own powers of reason. Yet Voltaire, in his concern for the weak and oppressed, was marked more enduringly by the stamp of biblical ethics than he cared to admit. His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.

 

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Go here to read the rest.  As faithful readers of this blog know, I love history.  The story of Man absolutely fascinates and enthralls me.  Stephen Vincent Benet put it well in The Devil and Daniel Webster:

 

And he wasn’t pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it—it took a man to do that.

In that grand story, amidst the great parade of human events, divinity enters in with Christ.  His impact on history is beyond description.  Atheist H.G. Wells summed it up:

“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”

Some recent historians attempt to replace BC and AD with the ludicrous Before the Common Era, BCE, and Common Era, CE, attempting to ignore that the only reason we have a “Common Era” is because of Christ.  Christ is the dividing point of history, and only fools deny it.

 

 

 

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Penguin Fan
Penguin Fan
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 5:54am

“And only fools deny it”. Ours is an age of fools.
Entertainment, academia, education, media, government, industry……we are up to are necks in fools.
Did I forget to mention the Vatican? There, too.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 7:30am

Wonderful post. I appreciate how you put together the visual and the text in your posts Donald. Most striking.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 7:41am

Yet history is a moving thing isn’t it- it comes so fast upon us. What is, shortly was.
Think of the hope shown in your recent post from the Lutheran pastor.
What if the devil did have the 20th century- we are in a new millennium and there are sparks among the stubble.
The fires of Christianity are not extinguished.

Wisdom 3:7 In the time of their judgment they shall shine and dart about as sparks through stubble

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 11:40am

“His defiance of the Christian God, in a paradox that was certainly not unique to him, drew on motivations that were, in part at least, recognisably Christian.”
In their Manifesto of the New Right, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier explain the origins of Modernity in this way: “This movement has old roots. In most respects, it represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics, which spread into secular life following a rejection of any transcendent dimension. Actually, one finds in Christianity the seeds of the great mutations that gave birth to the secular ideologies of the first post-revolutionary era.
Individualism was already present in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on earth.
Egalitarianism is rooted in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity.
Progressivism is born of the idea that history has an absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan.
Finally, universalism is the natural expression of a religion that claims to manifest a revealed truth which, valid for all men, summons them to conversion.
Modern political life itself is founded on secularized theological concepts.”
There is more than a little truth in that assessment.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 12:56pm

History is repeating itself as the world continues to fall back into paganism. Christianity perhaps reached it’s zenith sometime before Vatican II after which the Catholic Church embraced Modernism and Communism with devastating results of loss of faith and moral decline.

Note good background information on this site: http://www.traditionalcatholicmass.com/home-m120.html

Philip
Philip
Friday, September 16, AD 2016 5:56pm

All of the Saints have paved the way, narrow and steep, to a people yet to be born. These future people have not been randomly born into this era, rather predestined to be available to follow where Saints have trod. Available doesn’t mean inevitable. Free will, grace and acceptance will define the difference between the two.

You are present.

Be prepared to be chosen by Him who inspired the pathfinders. Be prepared to walk the walk.

Guy McClung
Admin
Saturday, September 17, AD 2016 7:13am

“BCE” = Before Christ Era; “CE” = Christ Era. Re: Voltaire: check out Voltaire the Revert-came back to the one true Church big time before he died. Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas

Guy McClung
Admin
Saturday, September 17, AD 2016 7:16am

Anzlyne-kinda like glory shaking “out like shining from shook foil” – GM Hopkins

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Saturday, September 17, AD 2016 12:48pm

Certainly Christ is the only thing common to era.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Saturday, September 17, AD 2016 9:21pm

😉

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

trackback
Saturday, September 17, AD 2016 11:01pm

[…] Did You Know There Are Proverbs That Didn’t Make It Into The Bible? – Matt Vander Vennet Tom Holland: Why I Was Wrong About Christianity – Donald R. McClarey J.D., TheAmCatholic The Regensburg Address and Western Secular […]

Adam Hovey
Adam Hovey
Monday, October 3, AD 2016 2:58am

You know my brother is an atheist (well, American atheists are usually agnostics) and I am a Cahtolic Christian. He and I both agreed with the dating system of ad, and, bc and the reason for this is historical reasons.

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