Jack, Aldous and Jack

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. — John F. Kennedy*  

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. — Aldous Huxley  

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. — C. S. Lewis*  

Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis all died on the same day, November 22, 1963. This interesting factoid prompted a great book by Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley.  Kreeft says in the foreword: 

"It would be part of “The Great Conversation” that has been going on for millennia. For these three men represented the three most influential philosophies of life in our human history: ancient Western theism (Lewis), modern Western humanism (Kennedy) and ancient Eastern pantheism (Huxley).

These three men also represented the three most influential versions of Christianity in our present culture: traditional, mainline or orthodox Christianity (what Lewis called “mere Christianity”), modernist or humanistic Christianity (Kennedy), and Orientalized or mystical Christianity (Huxley)."

*Both Kennedy and Lewis were called Jack by family and friends.

Man as a creature of purpose

The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory--farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well--being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. — Malcolm Muggeridge, in an address at Hillsdale College in 1979.

God and Man

God doesn't learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man?
— Graham Greene, from Our Man in Havana

Man and Art

Lost somewhere in the enormous plains of time, there wanders a dwarf who is in the image of God. who has produced on a yet more dwarfish scale an image of creation. The pigmy picture of God we call man; the pigmy picture of creation we call art. — G. K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters

Paul, John & Paul

I am a rock. I am an island.* --Paul Simon, I Am A Rock.



No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. --John Donne, Meditation XVII.  



Bear one another's burdens, and thus fulfil the law of Christ. --the Apostle Paul, in his Letter to the Galatian church (6:2)  



*Yes, I know Paul Simon was being ironic. But we all know people who could sing this line unironically.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, dramatist and historian, died yesterday in Moscow. Here are two quotes from this remarkable thinker, writer and dissident. 

 It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the fIrst stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life. —FromThe Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) 

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

We are unalike, me and I

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. —Heraclitus

We are unalike, you and I

No two persons ever read the same book. — Edmund Wilson

On God, On Me

God is everything I am not

Yet I am not nothing  

Just nothing without Him. 



W. S.