Quotes

How to Save the World

Published on August 1st, 2009.

It is good to work for peace in whatever social and political ways really do work, whether this means working for disarmament or for stronger armaments. We do not know with certainty which way will work best on the political level (though we nearly always claim we do). But we do know with certainty (because God himself has told us) what will work on the spiritual level, and we also know that that level cuts deeper and works at the roots. So to anyone who is concerned with peace and with the life and survival of our civilization, here is a summary in a single paragraph of what I have learned from my master C. S. Lewis:

Sodom and Gomorrah almost made it. If God had found but ten righteous men, he would have spared two whole cities. Abraham’s intercession nearly saved Sodom, and it did save Lot. We must be Abrahams. Charles Williams said that “the altar must often be built in one place so that the fire from heaven may come down at another.” It is also true that the altar must be built and prayer and sacrifice made at one place so that the fire from heaven may not come down at another. It can be done. The most important thing each of us can do to save the world from holocaust and from Hell, from nuclear destruction and from spiritual destruction, is the most well-known, most unoriginal thing in the world: to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

You the individual can make a difference. You can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the vote that wins the election. You can save the world.

–

Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 31-2.

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Between Modern and Medieval

Published on July 31st, 2009.

The Great Divide between medieval and modern has its origins in the forces that dissipated this medieval energy: philosophical Nominalism and skepticism, clerical corruption, economic mercantilism, and biological plague. But it did not define itself until a new suumum bonum appeared on the horizon. Bacon announces the new age with the slogans “knowledge for power” (rather than for its own sake), and “man’s conquest of nature” (rather than of himself).

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Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 21.

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