Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Things Hard to Believe - Two Quotes from Weekend Reads

As [Samuel] Coleridge says elsewhere in Aids to Reflection, 'Christianity and REDEMPTION are equivalent terms.' The very truth that is most essential to the Christian faith, our redemption in Christ and our dependence on grace for all that is good in us, is also the truth that is hardest to believe; it is now, therefore, that which is most likely to be left out, smoothed away, risen above in a world in which man's confidence in reason and in his own powers is constantly increasing.

It is fascinating to watch Coleridge in this book confronting the old, apparent paradox - we are free, yet we are totally dependent on the grace of God- which can be resolved only in faith, and to see his long-learned love of God, together with his capacity to think, taking him, as similar qualities had taken Pascal, to fully Augustinian conclusions.

-- Lucy Beckett, In the Light of Christ

* * *

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord 'has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,' that 'he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,' and that 'with his wounds we are healed' (Is 53:4-6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing.

-Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth