Here’s a quote from The Brothers Karamozov (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) that encapsulates well what David Hicks points out as being one of the main faults of “modern education” as well as the modern/atheist attempt to dismiss Christ as the Ideal Type. Father Paissy is giving Aloysha advice as he leaves the monastery to back into the “world” to deal with the chaos and depravity that is so rampant in his own family and in their relationships with others in the town:
“Remember, young man, unceasingly,” Father Paissy began directly, without any preamble, “that the science of this world, having united itself into a great force, has, especially in the past century, examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and, after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of what was once holy. But they have examined parts and missed the whole, and their blindness is even worthy of wonder. Meanwhile the whole stands before their eyes as immovably as ever, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Did it not live for nineteen centuries, does it not live even now in the movements of individual souls and in the movements of the popular masses? Even in the movements of the souls of those same all-destroying atheists, it lives, as before, immovably! For those who renounce Christianity and rebel against it are in their essence of the same image of the same Christ, and such they remain, for until now neither their wisdom nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create another, higher image of man and his dignity than the image shown of old by Christ. . . .”
