15 March 2022
Tuesday in the Second week of Lent
Ignatius of Loyola gave as prudent advice the recommendation to flee from honors, riches, and pride. For Ignatius, nothing led one quicker and faster down perdition’s path than choices made to satisfy these three desires. In the gospel today, Jesus calls out those who seek positions of honor. The recognition of God as the source of true strength and the virtue of humility to accept this fact have been the bullwork of Christian identity. But this identity has not gone without comment and criticism. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), such humility led to the decline of civilization
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.
Nietzsche, a century later, pulled no punches in his estimation of the virtue of humility and attributed Christianity’s meekness with a reversal of the natural laws of survival of the fittest.
The poison of the doctrine “equal rights for all” –this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity.
The tendentious relationship between Christianity and some aspects of modernity have identified a Darwinian insistence that the best only occurs at the expense of the weak. For many, the virtue of humility perhaps could be attributed to those aspects of creation that are now extinct. The choice of how we view the world, of course, is ours and the desire for honors, riches, and pride perhaps is playing out as we speak among the Ukrainian people. It would seem that the desire for honor, riches and pride and the power it occasions is clearly part of the natural order. This natural order, however, is viewed by some within the context of the supernatural order which looks at things in a very different way.