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Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies,
“A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance."
John 10:10
"I must have been ten years old. In the summer, when school was out, I would go down to my father’s ground-floor law office, where they would put me to work copying legal documents. For four pages without a margin, I was paid one drachma.
Sitting at one of the assistants' desks, I occasionally gazed at the clients of all sorts who were coming and going. One morning, a spirited old man arrived in a snow-white fustanella. I watched the assistant lawyers rise and give him a particularly warm welcome. The first assistant, who seemed to know him well, struck up a conversation with him. And at one point he asked him: “And now, Uncle Mitro, how old are you?”
And Uncle Mitro, whose name was Dimitrios Malamoulis and who had meanwhile settled himself comfortably, answered quietly: “Two.” That is, one hundred and two. He had begun a new numbering system after one hundred.
In the meantime, my father came out. He escorted him into the inner office, spoke with him and his son, a sturdy seventy-five-year-old, and when they came out to the room where I was, he first introduced me and then announced that we would go on Sunday to visit Malamoulis at his winter pasture, somewhere in Oropos.
Uncle Mitro was not one for much talk. Few words, measured, weighty. I had the feeling that he looked at my father’s assistants and me like a small flock of lambs. Small, because Malamoulis had over 3,000 sheep and goats—in Agrafa in the summer and in the mountains of Attica in the winter.
On Sunday, when we arrived at the place where he had set up the tents for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the customary volleys of shots were fired, and afterward, we gathered in the Elder's large tent. Soon the Elder blessed the first loaf of bread with the sign of the cross. And the women, silent and busy, distributed the meat — lamb, goat, all the goods.
I still remember the dairy products, the yogurts. Old Malamoulis, sitting cross-legged in the middle amidst the white woolen blankets, supervised everything, giving orders to the women and the farmhands.
As I was sitting next to my father, I whispered to him: “Qu'est-il ce vieux?” (Who is this old man?). “C'est un grand seigneur” (He is a great lord), my father replied, also in a whisper. And, later turning the conversation back to Greek: “You must understand what lordliness is.” It was my first lesson on that great moral good: lordliness.
Lordliness is not synonymous with aristocracy, nor does it signify any class difference or difference in wealth. But neither is it merely a moral trait. It is a synthesis of pride, decency, self-confidence, and magnanimity. You find Archons (Lords) scattered among all types of people. The Archon never becomes a part of a mass of people, no matter what class he belongs to; he always remains a person.
I cannot, perhaps it is my failing, define lordliness in a single phrase. But when I meet someone who possesses that complex set of virtues that compose it, then I recognize it. I say to myself: This is an Archon. He belongs to that select category of people.
All of us together, with God's help should fulfill our duty, as human beings and Greeks, and leave as our bequest to our children and grandchildren our glorious inheritance.
We have Archons in the legal sense who lack lordliness. But we also have manual laborers who possess lordliness in abundance.
Konstantinos Tsatsos, Words for the Fathers, 1975
"In the mysterious structure of the Church one discovers again the mysterious structure of the world. The world has no meaning, except if we accept it as God’s gift to man. The world is the vine given to men from God. The world became for man, and not man for the world."
Dimitrios Stăniloae
"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but it was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves without grace."
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, posthume 1947
"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
I have long embraced a belief system within my church called 'Christian humanism
It has its roots in the Renaissance, when it was revived by figures like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More who were versed in classical thought and the fathers and doctors of the early church.
Jacques Maritain called Humanisme intégral.
The last quote above from Bonhoeffer seems to capture the essence of it fairly well.
In every case it might be viewed as a reaction against secular humanism and iconoclastic puritanism.
We had our first serious blast of Arctic cold today.
The Dollar is hanging on near the 99 handle.
VIX has now fallen to the 'correction is imminent' level.
Stocks popped and flopped, and then took a little bounce into the close.
Gold and silver were under pressure but were hanging on.
I just don't have the words to describe my disappointment with the anti-human actions of this government, and the Western elites in general.
And it seems as though the majority of the public now tends to agree.
Change will come. The darkness ebbs and flows, but it will never finally prevail.
Have a pleasant weekend.
