Civilization & Barbarism

Hans Urs von Balthasar, quoting and commenting on observations of the French novelist George Bernanos:

“The thing we still call ‘civilization’ has outstripped every form of barbarism in accomplishing works of destruction. It now threatens to destroy, not only the works of man, but man himself. It is capable of modifying man’s nature profoundly, not by enhancing it, of course, but by mutilating it.” In such a world, the Christian begins to run out of air to breathe and space to move around in. We may even say that this is the goal of a deliberate development: “The main thing is to make the experiment irreversible as quickly as possible by destroying all traces of Christian man. The world of tomorrow must be made as uninhabitable for the Christian as the world of the Ice Age was for the mammoth.”