www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy Inconsistency in Translation?

But nearly all
people I have ever met in this western society in which I live
would agree to the general proposition that we need this life
of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange
with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to
combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be
happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.
It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in
these pages.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern
world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.
When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered
at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose.
The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.
But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander
more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern
world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues
have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other
and are wandering alone.

XX. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy


Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too
little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found
our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has
not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument,
that there has been in the past, or will be in the future,
such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself,
there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against
the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern
notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned
with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting
away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth,
it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions,
into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming
to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty.
When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of
something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms.
It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down
a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut.
Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal
who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools,
in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined
as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine
and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous
scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense
of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human.
When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism,
when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has
outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality,
when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form
of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process
sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals
and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas.
Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

Originally posted by Serge Keleher:
Many, many thanks!

Fr. Serge