10/13/2021 – What is the “summum bonum”, or greatest good?
A Christian answer is Psalm 73:28: “But as for me, it is good to be near God.” Your gift arrived brother Lenny; thank you for Peter Kreeft’s “Making Sense of Suffering”! The summum bonum term is attributed all the way back to Cicero. (ISBN Reference Number: 978-0-89283-219-4)
I am going to share verbatim excerpts directly from the last chapter: “Why Modernity Can’t Understand Suffering.” Y’all can fill it the gaps by buying and reading the book.
Let’s get started! Appropriately, I have no comments of my own from here.:
“Different societies have given different answers to the most important of all questions. But all ancient answers had one thing in common, and that one thing was denied by the new answer of modernity, by post-Renassance, Western, pluralistic, humanistic, secular, democratic, technological society. No one has put the difference more succinctly than C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man:
“For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern mind, the cardinal problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”…
Francis Bacon trumpeted the new era in his slogan “knowledge for power.” The old idea that knowledge was for truth or virtue, the contemplative and moral ideal, was to be replaced by a more practical, efficient, take charge attitude. Truth was a means, not an end. The new end was power, or man’s conquest of nature.
In The Abolition of Man, one of the most important books of the twentieth century, Lewis brilliantly shows the joker in the pack of this new ideal. He shows that man’s conquest of nature must always be men’s conquest of other men using nature as an instrument; and that if the conquerors, or controllers, or conditioners – the intelligensia of our age – step out of the too, the objective moral law, as the enormous majority have done, then they will be controlled not by supernatural ideals but by the natural forces of their own heredity and environment which happen to have determined their prejudices. Thus man’s conquest of nature turns out to be nature’s conquest of man.
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Modernity’s Forgetfulness of Heaven and Hell
“One world at a time,” said Thoreau on his deathbed to the preacher who tried to get him to answer the most realistic question in the world: “Quo vadis?” Where are you going? Thoreau’s is modernity’s typical attitude, blindly sliding sliding into the abyss and erecting billboards at the edge to look at, arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
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“Heaven doesn’t make Christ Christ; Christ makes heaven heaven.”
“When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world. So you have sorrow now but I will see you again and your joy from you.” (John 16: 21-22)
“I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know Whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.” (2 Timothy 1:12, NKJV)
Soli Deo Gloria indeed!