A Thomistic Philosophy of Culture
Graduation Date
Spring 1949
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
Nicolas Berdyaev in The End of Our Time characterizes modem history as "an unfolding of ideas and events wherein we see Humanism destroying itself by its own dialectic, for the putting up of man without God and against God, the denial of the divine image and likeness in himself, lead to his own negation and destruction."* He is thus unequivocal in declaring the real cause of the contemporary chaos in every phase of human activity, that Is, the defacing of the image of God, the only real tragedy In human history. This tragedy we can trace from its inception as it is revealed so simply and poignantly in Sacred Scripture.
And God said, Let us make man, wearing our own image and likeness; let us put him in command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on earth. So, God made man in His own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, He created them. .... And so, it was done. And God saw all that He had made and found it very good.
Such is the perfect description of man as he came from the creative hand of God, he who was to occupy the unique position of intermediary between the world of natter and the world of spirit, the microcosm who could reflect in his being all creation. God made man In His own image in both the order of nature and the order of grace, the latter which does not replace nor destroy nature, but rather builds on it and perfects It. God mode man in his own Image in the order of nature, by endowing him with n spiritual form, a soul whose faculties of intellect and will faintly mirror the divine Relations