BELIEF

        Starting from a quite general analysis of the basic attitude of "belief", we have arrive directly at the Christian mode of belief.

 For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly. Using rather more traditional language, we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.

 It means affirming that the meaning we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it.

Correspondingly, Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making--though this does not mean that making is reduced in value or proclaimed to be superfluous. It is only because we have received that we can also "make". And further: Christian belief--as we have already said--means opting for the view that what cannot be seen in more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure --knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things. 

To that extent it is undeniable that Christian belief is a double affront to the attitude that the present world situation seems to force us to adopt. In the shape of positivism and phenomenalism it invites us to confine ourselves to the "visible", the "apparent", in the widest sense of the terms; to extend the basic methodology to which natural science is indebted for its successes to the totality of our relationship with reality. 

Again, in the shape of techne it calls upon us to rely on the "makable" and to expect to find in this the ground that upholds us. The primacy of the invisible over the visible and that of receiving over making run directly counter to this basic situation. No doubt that is why it is so difficult for us today to make the leap of entrusting ourselves to what cannot be seen. 

Yet the freedom of making, like that of enlisting the visible in our service by means of methodical investigation, is in the last analysis only made possible by the provisional character that Christian belief assigns to both and by the superiority it has thus revealed.

UGLINESS

     To be in error is by definition to be out of touch with reality as it is. Error is therefore at least misleading, even when it is presented unwittingly and in good faith, and because it is out of touch and often with an element of beguilement, there is in it an element of the ugly. 

        New ageism serves as an example of what we mean. By mingling Oriental texts with a sprinkling of scientific terms and bits of literature and religion that may appear to the unwary to bestow an aura of respectability, contemporary gurus make assertions that are actually nothing more than airy, vague sentiments with no foundations in the actual world: "Field of infinite possibilities . . . the unbounded, ever-loving universe  . . . [we are]all sisters of a mysterious order . . . space and unified field . . . our age of awareness . . . conscious energy field". These romanticized but vacuous feelings may mislead millions into thinking their problems are being solved in some mysteriously ultimate manner. New ageism is pseudosophistication devoid of evidence and serious thought, quite the opposite of the beautiful.

Proposing what may tickle some ears, new ageism makes few or no moral demands, for one need not worry about responsibility to God, about a need to say no. Hence, there is no fear of responsibility and punishment for the choices one makes. A recent critic observed that "the spiritual peace and enlightenment offered by pop gurus doesn't require a lifetime of discipline.  It requires only that  you suspend judgment, attend their lectures and workshops and buy their books or tapes."