The contradictory call to life

Affluence and leisure have created a higher psychic temperature. These have focused us on interpersonal, sexual, artistic, athletic and scientific achievement. In a word, they have focused us on self-expression. In our culture meaningful self-expression is everything; lack of it is death. Yet it is this death that paschally we must enter.—Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten among the Lilies: Learning to Love beyond the Fears, 13

Obscurity

In the end all of us live in obscurity, unknown, frustrated. Our lives are always smaller than our needs and our dreams. Ultimately we all live in small towns, no matter where we live; and save for a few brief moments of satisfaction, spend most of our lives waiting for a fuller moment to come, waiting for a time when we will be less hidden.—Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten among the Lilies: Learning to Love beyond the Fears, 11

Spiritual exhaustion

We no longer see our longing as a congenital and holy restlessness put in us by God to push us toward the infinite. Instead it becomes a tamed and tame thing, domesticated, anesthetized and distracted. We are restless only in a tired way (which drains us of energy) and not in a divine way (which gives us energy).—Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten among the Lilies: Learning to Love beyond the Fears, 5

True knowledge

Man the knower pursues two related but distinct kinds of knowledge. As homo sciens, man the knower ofscientia, he tends to matters of fact, quantity, matter, and the physical realm; as homo sapiens, man the knower of sapientia, he shows his interest in the qualities of meaning, purpose, value, idea, and the metaphysical realm. If we are to have truth, neither kind of knowledge can be denied or ignored. The denial of the reality and importance of scientia is characteristic of the radical transcendentalism of Eastern religions, but today the even greater and more damaging imbalance is found in the pervasive radical immanentism of much Western culture and thought that attributes validity only to scientia. Enthusiasts of scientism fail to see that scientia is utterly dependent on sapientia for direction and meaning; their fervent attempts to pursue scientia in isolation from sapientia amount to a tragic rush into meaninglessness—the very antithesis of a genuine search for knowledge.—Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 48

A means to an end, not the end in itself (Tozer for Tuesday)

I must caution here that the Bible is not an end in itself. We were not given the Bible as a substitute for God until we get to heaven. Rather, the Bible is to lead us straight into the heart and mind of God. Contemporary Christians do not seem to get this.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 207

Dehumanization

The danger of mechanized civilization, of an industrial and commercial society, is that it tends to degrade the distinctive nature of man by emphasizing speed, size, quantity, and the maximization of physical pleasure by applied technical power at the expense of more crucial human values. The catastrophically dehumanizing means by which the Industrial Revolution came into being was as apparent to Lewis as it had been to the great Victorian social critics before him.—Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 79–80

A yawning chasm

Deterministic thinking eats away at the common reason: scientific thinking starts by scouring away superstitions and falsehoods, but then scientistic thinking, its appetite having grown after continual eating unrestrained by philosophical common sense, ends by devouring truths as well, leaving only the bones and orts of physical reality, with subject and object staring at each other across a yawning faithless chasm.—Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 44

But what do you do with all that knowledge?

Second things suffer, as Lewis was fond of repeating, when put first. Science is a good servant but a bad master, a good method for investigating and manipulating the material world, but no method at all for deciding what to do with the knowledge and power acquired thereby.—Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 33