[The handwriting is neat, but is canted to the side, as if blown by a high wind. Evidently much of it was written at high speed.]
I received a letter today from S. L. She reviewed the latest chapters I gave her, and had quite a bit to say about my view of nationhood.
"I don't see why you take such a conciliatory stance towards human institutions- for instance, the American government. I do understand why one might take up such a position, because one has to exist somewhere, after all; I don't understand why you in particular have allowed yourself to slide into such a paltry explication of the Gospel. The Word of Life is not to be diluted by checks and balances, Father. The Church is a new radix, and while not supplanting nature, it takes it into a new order of being that leaves all merely natural concerns by the wayside.
"This is a hard saying, I know, because after all: man may not live by bread alone, but he does live by bread. Man has to work in the sweat of his brow. The Gospel does not deny nature, and so it cannot deny work; this is the problem that the Socialists don't acknowledge. The Gospel does, however, elevate nature, and so Christian work is inherently different than that of an ordinary human being.
"Why do humans work? Because he who does not work, does not eat. Well and good. But why do modern men work? To get ahead, to amass a little bit for tomorrow, to save up for the future, to ensure the material increase of his progeny and the safety of his family. This is not wrong. Pope Leo said so himself. The desire to provide for the daily bread of one's children is fundamental to the race, to the health and indeed the being of humanity. The radical question, implicit in the New Dispensation, is: what is your children's daily bread?
"Bread is the staff of life. It is food, proportionate to our nature, fundamental and steady. You can rely on bread. Not for nothing is it one of the temptations with which Satan tempted Our Lord. It is food for men. But Christians are more than men: they are gods. They are sons in the Son. Given that we have a new nature, anything and everything proportionate to our previous selves is now necessarily insufficient. What is the daily bread for a Man-God?
"The work of the Christian is ordered to contemplation. We are called to know God as He Is. Thus, no longer can we merely labor for increase of wealth and try to save for the future. The future is now, and always will be. Therefore we cannot be any longer concerned with the things of this world, but are to use them for heaven.
"Human institutions that perpetuate the merely human mentality - concern for the world on its own terms - are most effectively Christianized by polite subversion."
She is a most interesting woman. I'll need to think this through, although I'm not sure she'd understood what I've been trying to say. I'll have my turn to understand and critique when she sends me her next story; she has hinted that it will be released to her "test audience" in the next month or so.
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