Popularity: -1
Vote:   | After dominating Western culture for four centuries humanism today is on the retreat on all fronts, and it seems as though the world is moving in the direction of a non-humanist and even an anti-humanist form of culture. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | At the same time Western culture has lost its faith in Man. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | At the same time, the state has armed itself with the new weapons of psychological warfare, mass suggestion and disintegration which threaten mankind with a spiritual tyranny more formidable than anything that the world has hitherto known. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | But if society as a whole abandons all positive beliefs, it is powerless to resist the disintegrating effects of selfishness and private interest. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Christian culture is not the same thing as medieval culture. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Heaven forbid that we should try to solve our educational problems in this way by imposing a compulsory political ideology on the teacher and the scientist! |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Humanism was a real historical movement, but it was never a philosophy or a religion. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In her doctrine of man the Catholic Church has always held the middle path between two opposing theories, that which makes man an animal and that which holds him to be a spirit. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In reality there is another tradition which is even more important then humanism in the development of European culture--the Christian tradition. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | In the United States, however, there is a general agreement today that nationality provides too narrow a basis for historical study and there is consequently a general move towards some wider alternative. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Inevitably in the course of history there are times when this spiritual energy is temporarily weakened or obscured, and then the Church tends to be judged as a human organization and identified with the faults and limitations of its members. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | It is therefore necessary for educators to make a positive effort to exorcise the ghost of this ancient error and to give the study of Christian culture the place it deserves in modern education. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It is therefore of vital importance to maintain the key position of the liberal arts college in the university and to save the liberal arts course from further disintegration. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Nevertheless Protestant culture was by no means completely humanist. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Nevertheless the decline of classical studies does not necessar-ily involve the decline of liberal education itself. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | No doubt humanitarianism is on the decline in the modern world, but it is still strong and nowhere is it stronger than among English and American Christians. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The majority of men, whatever their political beliefs may be, are prepared to accept science and democracy and humanitarianism as essential elements in modern civilisation, but they are far less disposed to admit the importance of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The mission of the Church is essentially universal and it is common to all nations and races--to those of the East equally with those of the West. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The naturalist conception of man has above all been influenced by the Darwinian doctrine of the Origin of Species, and by the evolutionary theories to which this gave rise. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for. |