An Unfamiliar Faith

 From Fr. Benedict Kiely at The Catholic Thing:

As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the “constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language.”

Chesterton’s point, in what he called the “specially Christian case,” was the near impossibility of making the “facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue.” He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.

That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.

Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of “seeing through a glass darkly,” or the “blind leading the blind,” will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor’s degree. (Read more.)