They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth.Only in loving creation's beauty-only in seeing that creation truly is beauty-does one apprehend what creation is. … It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. … Creation is only a splendor that hangs upon that life of love and knowledge, and only by grace it is first and foremost a surface, a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love. Creation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's glory beauty reveals the shining of an uncreated light.Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division.Such an account must inevitably make an appeal to beauty. Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire.Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power.There is a sense in which Ivan's love of that little girl is always in danger of becoming a kind of demonic compassion: a desire that she not exist at all, a conviction that it were better she had never been summoned into the wounded freedom of cosmic time or called into rational union with God than she suffer the wrongs done her at the hands of fallen creatures.If all the tribulations of this world were to be written off as calculably necessary contributions to redemption - part of the great "balance" of things - then Christ's sacrifice would not be a unique saving act so much as the metaphysical ground for a universe of "sacrifice," wherein suffering and death are part of the sublime and inevitable fabric of finitude and divine providence would be indistinguishable from fate. The cross of Christ is not, after all, simply an eternal validation of pain and death, but their overthrow.The secret irony pervading these arguments is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.
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