[GeraldCortis]

Dear Antonios,

Thank you for the link. It seems the movie is making enough of an impact for the GO archdiocese to feel the need to respond, so it is definitely something of a problem. The number of people I've met who now claim Christianity was cooked up by the Emperor Constantine and 'his' bishops for purely political reasons, suggests to me we need to respond with more than monosyllabic answers. The temptation to believe Jesus was 'only a man' is enormous in this scientistic post-modern deconstructionist age. Although we should certainly be able to respond academically, I don't see how that can be done effectively unless we familiarise ourselves with the enemy, both as book and film. As Fr Raphael indicates, to study a subject does not necessarily mean to become involved in it personally. The 8 quid for watching the movie does trouble me, though, as does the money for buying the book (my wife has read it in Greek, but I'd prefer to read it in the original). I wonder if there is a legal way around that.

I also appreciate Fr Raphael's perceptive comments about our contemporary way of thinking: This occurs I think from an increasing tendency in our society to not think personally but rather in splendid isolation to bounce our own ideas around our head as if this was reality. We don't [b]think, live & act[b] as personally as we used to so this allows us to see situations and people in much more theoretical way. And as this comes from within ourselves rather than being checked by the challenges of reality there is something cold and selfish about the results. It's hard to recognise this in ourselves because these are the unrecognised results of social values that appear proper. We're much more 'open' & expressive ('real' is how we think of ourselves) than previous generations so it's very difficult to see how the fruits could come from how we perceive the tree. Could it be that self-control is far more personal than we have been led to believe? This suggests to me that knowledge (of another person or indeed of a system of ideas) is 'cold and selfish' when it is not personal in some way; yet paradoxically, the 'openness' and 'expressivity' of our generation, which prides itself on being more 'real' than its predecessors, may in fact be less truly personal than they were in the self-control which characterised their values and behaviour. This may be because apparent 'openness' and 'expressivity' can also be masks for a lack of genuine commitment. Also the perception of reality that "comes from within ourselves rather than being checked by the challenges of reality" makes me think of a point made by Christos Yiannaras at a talk of his I had the good fortune to attend; he pointed out that young children today do not learn to have a genuine relationship with reality, because everything is subject to control by buttons. If a child wants light in the room, it learns to press a buton; if it wants heat, the same, sound and image also. Is this the same as a child 100 years ago who had to learn to chop wood and start a fire, feel the resistance of the material he used? For entertainment, this child depended on his parents' and his own imagination and storytelling capacities - is this the same as having one's sounds and images served up? Perhaps a reality which offers us some resistance is also the foundation of a more personal way of being-in-the-world, just as thought, action and life which is characterised by self-control is more genuine and more personal than non-commital reportage.

In Christ
Byron