De Lubac
We promised last week to post passages from The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (see "The Cube and the Cathedral," Friday, April 15, 2005). The task proved harder than we anticipated. Not because there aren't a lot of great passages, but because de Lubac's text is woven so finely that it's troubling to tear quotes from their context. On well, we've done it anyway:
"Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism."
On Nietzsche's goal, following Feuerbach's lead, to rid the world of God: "Bereft of the God in whom it used to repose, to whom it used to appeal, mankind must henceforth go forwards and upwards. It is forced into creating."
Quoting Berdyaev: We are proving by experience that 'where there is no God, there is no man either.'"
"In any case the profoundly disturbing question arises which Nietzsche was not the only one to raise: as soon as man ceases to be in contact with great mystical or religious forces, does he not inevitably come under the yoke of a harsher and blinder force, which leads him to perdition? It is what Vico called the age of 'deliberate barbarism,' and that is the age in which we live."
On Nietzsche's death of God and Comte's explicit attempt to found a secular and scientific religion: "Lost faith cannot long remain unreplaced. . . The virtue of a religion in which there is nothing transcendent, of a mysticism in which there is nothing supernatural, must soon show signs of exhaustion." We're guessing this is one of the emphases in Weigel's account of current Europe.
On Dostoyevsky: "He was present at the 'death of God.' He saw the murderer springing into the saddle for a stupendous career. He envisioned both atheism and the ideal of the superman in all their force. Then–despite all the complicities which he was aware of harboring–he very deliberately, though not without repeated struggles, decided against them."
Note to reader: This should be the last dry post of the weekend. Our hangover from last night's neighborhood cookout has pretty much cleared up, and our humor, such as it is, slowly returns as we type this.
