the human factor

With thanks to JL, who doesn't read this blog and therefore will never know of my gratitude.

------------------------------------------------------


(from David Martin's review of John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia)

Lions do not throw up, shaken to the core, at not being adequately leonine. Elephants do not roll in the mud to vent their desolation at being so grossly elephantine. Whatever else does or does not separate us from animality, the potential to imagine and body forth transfiguration and to acknowledge disfiguration, is what makes us human. Our sense of indignity is the essence of our dignity. Non sum dignus.

------------------------------------------------------

Our sense of indignity - or, in Christian parlance, our awareness of sin, no matter how dimly felt and no matter what name we give it - is one of the things that convinced me that there is a God who is the absolute source of all goodness and truth. For where does it come from - that sense of brokenness, of things being aslant, of there being something rotten in the state of Denmark (or the world, or our hearts)? If there were no absolute truth, if there were no absolute Good, we would not be constantly subjected to this feeling of homesickness, of yearning for something more, something higher - for transfiguration - that no one has ever attained, and that none of us would have any knowledge of, if that yearning were not first placed in our hearts by some Power external to ourselves . The acknowledgement of our disfiguration is what points us, through a glass, darkly, to God.
...
...