Friday, January 10, 2020

Christ Answers the Absurd!


I came across a passage in a Christopher Dawson biography in which he disparages the formal education systems of his training. Home-school was his best school.
I got nothing from school, little from Oxford, and less than nothing from the new post-Victorian urban culture; all my 'culture' and my personal happiness came from that much-derided Victorian rural home life. (From an unpublished letter to E. I. Watkin, 1925.)
Christina Scott, A Historian and His World, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1992, 34.

That passage reminded me of the present "Word on the Street" Times Square poster campaign, "Embrace the Absurd."

"Absurdism" is a philosophy, that of Camus, also related to Kierkegaard.
The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus stated that individuals should embrace the absurd condition of human existence. He then promotes life rich in willfull experience.
--Wikipedia.

Life, for the absurdist, is willfulness, which sounds like a cruel and violent blind world of survival of the fittest, the world of Machiavelli. We, of course, reject the premise of an absurd world, since the world is God's, and Jesus Christ is the center of the world and of human history.
Redemptor hominis Iesus Christus est centrum universi et historiae...
JPII, Redemptor hominis, 1.

Christ and His Cross fully confront and answer the problem of theodicy, the central problem of the absurdist. The answer is divine love, love and mercy. Meaning comes from sacrifice for love. All of creation tells of the glory of God!
Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13

Cf. Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 2007.

From College Chaos to Catholicism => Christ.