The Year of Our Lord 1943 Quotes

“If everything is a matter of opinion, and if everybody is entitled to his own opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value”; but it was tragically wrong “in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”16”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“modern democracy has been derived from, and can only be justified by, the theological dogmas of Hebraic-Christianity according to which all men are created by God and equal before Him.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“it was disbelief in the universality of moral truth, and the failure to see that human beings are by nature capable of gaining access to moral truth, that created the intellectual perversions of pragmatism and positivism alike.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“Henry Wallace: “The idea of freedom . . . is derived from the Bible with its extraordinary emphasis on the dignity of the individual. Democracy is the only true political expression of Christianity.”39 And Christianity is the only genuine source and sustainer of democracy”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.35”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“our dear old bag of a democracy” is sustained, not by itself, but by belief in something deeper and greater than itself.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“What Herod realizes is that this Child and the message he brings of universal forgiveness and reconciliation with God do not offer a rival source of power and order but a radical alternative to what the classical world understands as “power” and “order.” They do not seek to replace him on the throne of his kingdom but to usher in a wholly new Kingdom, not providing “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” but replacing that city with a new one: the City of Man passes away, the City of God abides forever.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“God has been born . . . we have seen him ourselves. The World is saved. Nothing else matters.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“What Herod realizes is that this Child and the message he brings of universal forgiveness and reconciliation with God do not offer a rival source of power and order but a radical alternative to what the classical world understands as “power” and “order.” They do not seek to replace him on the throne of his kingdom but to usher in a wholly new Kingdom, not providing “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” but replacing that city with a new one: the City of Man passes away, the City of God abides forever. This Child marks the end of the machine, the end of the military-industrial complex, the end of force.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“a prayer that Thomas Cranmer had composed when England was at war with Scotland in 1548: Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who hast willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourself, and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can: . . . Give to all us desire of peace, unity, and quietness, and a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility, and enmity to all them that be our enemies; that we and they may, in one heart and charitable agreement, praise thy most holy name, and reform our lives to thy godly commandments.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“But Auden was not prepared for the viewers’ reactions to this film. Whenever the Poles appeared on the screen—always as prisoners of the Wehrmacht—the audience would shout, “Kill them! Kill them!” Auden was utterly taken aback. “There was no hypocrisy,” he recalled many years later: these people were unashamed of their feelings and attempted to put no “civilized” face upon them. “I wondered, then, why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value.” On what grounds did he have a right to demand, or even a reason to expect, a more “humanistic” response? His inability to answer this question, he explained, led him by a circuitous yet sure route back to the Christian faith in which he had been raised.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel in it. Therefore no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“the biblical teaching that human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), while elevating us to a great height within Creation, came eventually to be perceived, by many Western intellectuals, as a curb on our greatness: thus “the time came when man was no longer moved by” that account. “On the contrary, he began to think that henceforward he would forfeit his self-esteem and be unable to develop in freedom unless he broke first with the Church and then with the Transcendent Being upon whom, according to Christian tradition, he was dependent.” That breaking with Transcendent Being began with “a reversion to paganism,” but ultimately “came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the only genuine kind and inevitably regards a Christian humanism as absurd.”16 And so arose “atheist humanism (l’humanisme athée), which sought to protect and extend human greatness by emancipating it from bondage to God. But this, de Lubac argued, ended by unleashing bestiality and evil. The Nazis were the logical culmination of the attempt to construct humanism without God.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“As war comes to an end, and its exigencies ease, and people return to a freedom absent for so long that its return is discomfiting, they think of the apparent lawlessness of Nature and Man alike: “it seemed impossible to them that either [Nature or humanity] could have survived so long had not some semi-divine stranger with superhuman powers, some Gilgamesh or Napoleon, some Solon or Sherlock Holmes, appeared from time to time to rescue both, for a brief bright moment, from their egregious destructive blunders.”7”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“In fact, Hutchins continues, by splitting the human lifeworld in the way they do, positivism and pragmatism leave us with “a colossal confusion of means and ends. Wealth and power become the ends of life,” because the realm of value is the realm of opinion, in which I seek nothing more than easy justifications for my desires.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

“positivists were people without firm moral commitments and therefore without any means of resisting the dogmatic certainties of communism and fascism.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis