THE CITY
single continent. Once unified, now divided, they are yet joined by two crisscrossing lights, two beams in darkness. The guiding light that flows from the one (Jerusalem) illuminates and dignifies the other (Athens), while the searching light that gropes outward from the other loses itself finally in the one. I am a humanist Christian. Though I admit the euphonic superiority of the alternate phrase, Christian humanist, I must still insist on the grammatical precision of the former phrase. Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. I am a humanist Christian in the same sense that I am a Greek American. I, like my parents, was born and raised in America. My self-identity, my allegiance, my very reason for being are linked to America. But my grandparents were born and raised in Greece, and there is a something in my soul that yet responds to this ancestry, that resonates with the legacy of three millennia. My firm citizenship in the one frees me to explore those elemental ties to the other that even now flow along my blood like the sound of Derwent water flowed along the dreams of the young Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. My participation in my Greek heritage individualizes and strengthens me, a strength and an individuality that I carry with me into my primary and fuller citizenship. Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. Of the two, Christian, and all that it implies, is the more real, the more concrete term. In my own experience, it is the “evidence of things not seen” that forms the firm foundation of my life and thought. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, these are my verities, the touchstones against which I measure all earthly manifestations. I am aware that I have just switched the poles. Like Plato, I have suggested that what we loosely term heaven is, in fact, the home of the real, the essential, the actual (the Forms) while this world is but the haunt of shadows: indeed, of the shadows of shadows. Like Descartes, I have suggested that I have more proof—more real proof—of the existence of God and the soul than I do of the physical world of matter. And to some extent I mean to suggest this. The final locus of reality must belong to the one who created reality, to the cause, not the effect, to the mover, not that which is moved. The one who, though outside time, initiated, controls, and will bring to an end human history must be more truly historical than any mere facet of the historical process itself. The Incarnation is not a mere aesthetic expression of the human need for cosmic reconcilia48