Giovanni Miegge

“…Now that man in his isolation, in his self-sufficiency and his autonomy, has become the measure of all things, it seems to have become impossible for man to measure either himself or anything else.  The idea of man swings backwards and forwards between the hieratic independence of the self-creating spirit and ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’; between these two poles, all the insignificant Titanisms and Machiavellianisms of a cynical animal without ideals seek to justify themselves.  In the meantime more thoughtful spirits in the effort to transcend themselves seek in vain to find anything that will take the place of the lost faith in God and of the stable morality that was connected with it.

            But if we look for a moment at the humanity of Jesus, the humanity that gives itself for the love of others, that finds its highest glory in service carried to the point of ultimate sacrifice, we shall at once see that the boldest imaginations of the present day, those that claim the future as their own, are in reality archaic and long since out of date.  They are not related to a higher phase of evolution.  They are not the future.  They are the atavistic, prehistoric past, re-emerging in the over-sensitive consciousness of a sick humanity, sick of an egoistic concentration on itself and of a profound spiritual disarray.  To understand this is perhaps the starting-point of faith.  It may be that the ‘imitation of Christ,’ of the simple, human Jesus of the Gospels, is to-day the only possible way to a new discipleship, as it was in other ages in which faith rose again fresh and living out of crises of moral and intellectual depravity…”

from Christian Affirmations in a Secular Age, by Giovanni Miegge