Main news for 16 November 2018

The reaction of the Athenian amateurs of philosophy to Paul's words about the resurrection is indicative: they begin to laugh at him. Of course, it would have been possible to attribute it to the fact that Paul tried for the first time to preach in an environment not at all connected to the Synagogue, in an environment, for which words such as "Judgment", "the Messiah", "the Kingdom" were a hollow sound. But is it only in this the problem? Because here there were all the same two, who managed to hear and who wanted all the same to understand. It thus turns out that the problem was not only on the environment, unaccustomed to this kind of witnesses. The problem was also still as seen in the atmosphere of this kind of assembly, of which the Athenian Areopagus was perhaps best known in the Antiquity. And the problem here is not in the philosophy, as such.

The problem is in the philosophers, or, more exactly, in those who considered themselves as such. And above all the problem is that, for the Athenian amateurs of wisdom, philosophy has long ceased to be the search for the truth, such as it was for those whom these people considered as their spiritual predecessors. For Socrates, his philosophy was a question of life or death, and he once gave his life for the truth, which he opened. For those who listened to Paul philosophy was only an interesting intellectual pastime.

Nobody of them not only planned to give his life for any truth, but also generally, probably didn’t imagine that philosophy could become for them a source of any kind of life discomfort. And here is, now it must be they caught in Paul's words a certain seriousness. The same seriousness, which sometimes feels even the idle reader or listener for the words read or listened. This feeling can not be too clear and distinct, but it allows to understand that what was read or heard now requires an answer. If one begins to get a grasp or to listen in these very words, they will necessarily and irreversibly change his life.

The reaction to such words can be either a spiritual awakening, when the reader or listener, having shaken of him the intellectual semi-slumber, begins to get a grasp or to listen more attentively and attentively, trying to understand what he has to do next, or the rejection of what is heard and read, rejection in order that nothing disrupts the normal rest. From Paul’s words were awaken two. Is that many or little? God knows. Be that as it may, the first step was made.