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Submitted by Marcin Bąk on Wed, 11/27/2019 - 09:34
Where's the West? What is the West? A sketch of a cursed identity part II
Kultura


Christianity is the second great pillar of the Wes. While philosophy, and then science, satisfied and still satisfy our purely intellectual and cognitive needs, or - as I mentioned before - they feed our intellect, Christianity formed our heart and soul, emotions and imagination, will and moral sense. Thus almost everything that is most important in life, and thus also in culture. It has brought us cosmological, salvific and eschatological imagery, which man cannot do without, since it concerns the ultimate. Again, without reference to that which is ultimate, fundamental and metaphysical, human life becomes flat, as if it were grey and ephemeral, and everything around it - gradually, but inevitably - loses its significance and meaning. Whether we are talking about art, literature, science, ecology or even politics, all these spheres, without reference to the absolute, are inevitably "reduced to naturalistic" form: "it's nothing but..." Tree is only a board, man is only meat, love only hormones and body fluids, food only future faeces, religion only an anxiety reaction, neurotic art compulsion etc., etc., etc. Only the religious, vertical dimension gives meaning and depth to things and phenomena. Only by accepting and believing that everything is mysteriously rooted in the Absolute, the world becomes worthy of respect and life worth living. Entering the world of religion we enter a fairy tale - but a true, unique fairy tale. And in it, and only in it, everything has meaning, value, purpose and an ending.

Christianity brings good news: suffering and death give birth to a new, everlasting life. Everything that has existed, exists or will ever exist is holy, perfect and, having existed, immortal. But in this miraculous Project there was a Mistake, a Fall, and the cosmos was subjected to futility, suffering, and death. We stopped seeing infinity in ourselves and in the things around us. However, we began to notice the omnipresent decay and entropy. We were afraid of dying and the nothingness that followed. Afraid of nothingness, we began to do evil in order to preserve our existence as long as possible and at all costs. Therefore, God accepted the flesh and human nature to show that life is stronger than death, that there is a narrow path to cosmic Renovation, to reconstruct the broken bonds between Him, man and creation. He thus atoned the first-born sin of the human will for separation and selfishness, which destroyed and crushed the primordial fullness. He showed the sucking emptiness of sin and the lack of its establishment in being. He revealed to us how to get rid of one's own ghostly, light obscuring privacy, how to suffer suffering, take it and endure it within oneself. For Christ as a man took upon himself all our wretches and sins, and as God took them all away, and therefore became the Way. Although “the suffering of the world has not been removed, it has reached its highest dimension in God's co-suffering. The salvation of the suffering person is first of all the co-suffering of God, who has taken his place”[1].

God created the world from which it follows that everything - including what we use and consume - is perfect and complete, because it is the result of his thoughts and the reflection of his glory. We expect, therefore, that the world will be renewed - that our perception and what we perceive will be repaired - for all will be taken back to eternity, to a land illuminated by unchanging stars; that since there has been a fatal exitus, then the blessed reditus will ultimately come. We expect eternal goodness, beauty, life and righteousness, knowing that we will not achieve them by our own efforts. And as Balthasar points out, Christianity teaches that

"Eternity is to be entered not only by some quintessence, an extract of this world, which could be, as its reflection and trace, for example, the 'immortal soul'. It is to be entered by the real world itself, with all its diversity of content, history, becoming and passing, with its grandeur et misere, which cannot be separated from each other [...]. This whole, as it really exists through divine providence and human confusion, receives by the grace of Christ an absolution and 'access to the Father'".[2]

The Great Story of Christianity is a clear moral doctrine. We find it in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Letters of Paul, in the teaching of the Fathers of the Church. Ratzinger is a very good judge of that:

"The blessings respond to our spontaneous existential feelings, our hunger and our desire for life. They postulate a 'conversion' - an inner reversal of the spontaneous direction we would like to take. In this reversal, however, something pure and higher appears. Our existence is in the grip of order. The Greek world, whose joy of life manifests itself so magnificently in Homer's epic, was deeply aware, however, that the proper sin of man, his most serious threat, is the hybris - the conceited self-sufficiency of man who attributes himself to divine attributes and desires to be a god for himself in order to become master of his whole life and to use all the possibilities that it can offer. This awareness that the real threat to man is to be found in his self-sufficiency, which at first seems so attractive, is shown in the sermon on the Mount in all its depths, by reference to the figure of Jesus Christ. We saw that the Sermon on the Mount is a veiled Christology. In its background, it shows the figure of Christ, the Man who is God, but precisely for this reason he humbles himself and barehanded himself until his death on the Cross[3].

And a little further away:

"the authentic 'morality' of Christianity comes down to love. This in turn is, of course, a contradiction of egoism, it is coming out of ourselves. However, it is by doing so that man finds himself. In comparison with the tempting glow of Nietzsche's picture of man, this road seems at first poor, even discouraging. However, this is the road leading to the peaks of life. Only on the path of love, the paths of which are described in the Sermon on the Mount, does life appear in all its richness and greatness of human vocation[4].

This is Christianity, therefore: the story of a dying and resurrected God who, out of love for humanity, went through pain, betrayal and death and overcame them to the rescue of all of us, including, above all, the weakest, the sick, the desperate, the desperate, the internally fallen, the poor and the lonely. In the name of love, the God-Man commanded compassion, gentleness and forgiveness. He commanded us to accept suffering as a way of life, not to oppose it except by faith and prayer. The Rabbi of Nazareth did not despise matter - besides cowardice and hypocrisy, he did not despise anything - he not only healed souls, but also weak, emaciated and afflicted with diseases of the body. For he commanded us to respect the integrity of every person, even in his bodily holiness, but he also taught us to demand, above all from ourselves, justice, prudence, courage and generosity.

What would we be without these ideals? Where do we get our moral norms from if we reject Christianity? Out of your mind? But we have also rejected its rules as repressive, narrow, exclusive, too rigid on the one hand, and so easy to relativise on the other. What will we become, then, if we definitively decide to live without everlasting ethical principles? Many of them have already broken away from their religious roots, and it has been forgotten that they flow from a certain religious image of the world and derive their credibility from it. Virtues such as humility, generosity, compassion, gentleness, chastity and sincerity find their source and foundation in the Christian religion in the West. And even if they can exist completely independently of it, they are largely derived from it and derive their legitimacy and power of attraction from it. Christianity has shaped in us an inalienable - though sometimes deeply hidden - desire and understanding of Truth, Good and Beauty. Even denying the existence of this triad, we still warm ourselves in its rays.

Bartosz Jastrzębski 

[1] J. Ratzinger, Opera omnia. Jesus of Nazareth, transl. by W. Szymona, Lublin 2015, p. 860.

[2] H.U. von Balthasar, Eschatology in our times, trans. by W. Szymona OP, Kraków 2008, p. 72.

[3] J. Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. by W. Szymona OP, Kraków 2007, pp. 91-92.

[4] Ibid. 92.