THINKING IS COMMUNAL

'To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound like more like people I approve of." 

This is a point worth dwelling on. How often do we say "she really thinks for herself" when someone rejects view that we hold? No: when someone departs from what we believe to be the True Path our tendency is to look for bad influences. She's fallen under the spell of so-and-so. She's been reading too much X or listening to too much Y or watching too much Z. Similarly, people in my line of work always say that we want to promote "critical thinking" - but really we want our students to think critically only about what they've learned at home and in church, not about what they learn from us.' 

Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p.37. 

THE CHALLENGE OF THINKING

'Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull on the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.'  

Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p.23. 

THE PROBLEM WITH THINKING

'Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?' 

Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed, p.17. 

THE DEVIL

'...the devil on our shoulder is only truly dangerous because of the devil that's already inside us.'

Alan Jacobs, Orginal Sin, p.92.

 

GRACE

'A wonderful story is told about St. Martin of Tours, who was born in what is now Hungary about forty years before Augustine and whose early career was as a Roman soldier. Probably when still in his twenties, he had a dramatic conversion to Christianiaty, abandoned military life, and eventually founded one of the first Christian monastic communities. The story says that because Martin and his fellow monks acheived such deep piety and lived such pure and righteous lives, Satan was angered and began to appear to Martin and tempt him to sin. Failing at that, the Evil One turned, as he so often has throughout his career, to biblical exegesis. Does not the Lord himself counsel us to be perfect (Matt. 5:48)? Does not St. Paul the Apostle simply assume that he and his fellow Christians are perfect (Phil. 3:15)? Does not the beloved disciple John  say that whoever abides in Christ does not sin (1 John 3:6)? Yet Martin and his monks still, sometimes, sin; they are therefore damned. The wages of sin is death. They belong to Satan, not to God: it is clearly demonstrated in Scripture itself!

To this Martin replied - so says the tale - O Prince of this world. not only can I and my monks be saved, thanks to the infinite mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, but you too, if you repent, can be saved! It is not too late! Turn from your dark ways, your rebellion, your pride! Turn to the God who loves you, beg his pardon, and He will forgive! And upon hearing these words Satan departed from Martin and troubled him no further.

This is, I think, my favourite story about any saint. Such zeal for the Gospel! And such hopefulness, to think even the Great Rebel himself is capable of ammendment of life! And why not?'

Alan Jacobs, Original Sin, p.88.

ORIGINAL SIN

'It is, obviously, a belief that violates the most basic notions of justice. No wonder John Taylor of Norwich exclaimed, "What a God must he be, who can curse his innocent creatures before they have a being!" And yet the individual components of the idea are utterly familiar. Everyone knows that some people are born with a malady of some kind: a birth defect resulting from the mistransmission of genetic information, say, or a disorder (HIV, hepatitis) passed from mother to child through the umbilical cord. And we acknowledge that some social circumstances make certain sins all but inevitable. I don't see how I, as a white Southerner, raised in the 1960s and 1970s could have avoided some taint of racism, yet I don't think I should use that upbringing to declare myself innocent. Most of us are also comfortable with talk of "the human condition" - general circumstances shared by everyone, if nothing else "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." So we comprehend inherited affliction, collective and inherited responsibility, universally shared circumstances. It is the joining of these ideas that strains our minds. We struggle to hold together a model of human sinfulness that is universal rather than local, in which we inherit sin rather than choose it, and in which, nevertheless, we are fully, terrifyingly responsible for our condition.'

Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History, p.xiv.