Significant Books, Part IV (The Everlasting Man)

"On the Man Called Christ."

The paradoxical, yet universal nature of Christ is both mystifying and so fulfilling.

"It revolutionised their very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsy-turvydom topsy-turvy."

Why is Christ is any different from other men? Why Christianity is different from any other "religions?" The reason is that myth and truth are united in that person of Christ.

"...in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom...there has never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers."

Men wrote myths because they longed for the story in which God touches man. Never did they dream that God would actually become man, and make Himself so man could touch Him.

"It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story."

The polytheism of the Greeks & Romans was a search to fulfill the imaginative side of man, but it could do little for the realistic side. The principles & proverbs of the ancient Orientals sought to fulfill the philosophical man, but couldn't satisfy his wild imaginings.

"The philosophy of the church is universal...Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave [the stable], they would have known that their own light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search...For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child."