Anselm of Canterbury endeavours to prove by “plain reasoning and fact”, without resort to revelation, “as if nothing were known of Christ”, that it is necessary for the death of a God-man to save man from death so that he may enjoy eternal life. Justice, Dignity and Offense If, as Plato writes in Republic, justice is to give each his due, what is the just due creatures ought to give […]
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Augustine’s City Of God: Christianity for Platonists
In his Confessions, Augustine writes that he studied Platonism before converting to Christianity. Of all philosophies, Platonism most approximates Christianity, so the former serves to prepare his mind for the latter. But perhaps more importantly, familiarity with both enables him to discern the preeminence of Christianity over philosophy. Augustine devotes the last three books of Part I of City of God, Books VIII to X, to a discussion of Platonism. […]
Read moreOn the Dignity of the Person: Human Worth and Gift-giving
Man as Scrooge Watching the movie “Scrooge” (1951) starring Alastair Sim has become part of Christmas tradition for me. I’ve seen other film adaptions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, but no actor conveys the joy of reclamation as infectiously as Sim did in the 1951 film. Scrooge was rich, but he lived as a poor wretch. He had no appreciation of human worth, neither the worth of his fellow human […]
Read moreIncarnation: III. Why Tolstoy is Wrong about Christ
A story of Tolstoy was related by Prof. Irwin Weil [1]: A young Jewish man wrote to Tolstoy a few months before the latter died, and asked how a Jew could believe his teachings which were based on the words of Jesus Christ. Tolstoy replied, “The words of Christ are not important and applicable because they were said by Christ, on the contrary, they were said by Christ because they […]
Read moreIncarnation: II. Seeking Evidence of God
I asked, “Let us suppose, sir, that after you have left this sorry vale, you actually found yourself in heaven, standing before the Throne. There, in all his glory, sat the Lord—not Lord Russell, sir: God.” Russell winced. “What would you think?” “I would think I was dreaming.” “But suppose you realized you were not? Suppose that there, before your very eyes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was God. […]
Read moreIncarnation: The Evidence of Truth
Truth is Its Own Evidence The word evidence comes from the Latin root meaning “to see”. When we demand evidence of something, we want to “see” it in some sense, although the thing itself may be absent by circumstance, or invisible by nature. The scientific method is evidence-based. It presupposes a correspondence between true abstract theories and natural phenomena. This is why theories in physics must be corroborated by experiments […]
Read more“Four Quartets: III. Freedom” by T. S. Eliot
The Dry Salvages Eliot weaves together almost seamlessly the teachings of Eastern and Western religions and philosophies in “The Dry Salvages”. First, there is a lesson from the Hindu scripture The Bhagavad Gita, “Do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward”, which seems very similar to the deontological ethics of Kant and the ancient Stoics. We’re not to think of the fruit of action, for it is not […]
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