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Everyone knows that we have a different, much more emphatic view of love between the sexes than the ancient Greeks and the Orientals, and that the modern view of love is an extension of the spirit of Christianity, in however attenuated and secularized a form. But the cult of love is not, as Rougemont claims, a Christian heresy. Christianity is, from its inception (Paul), the romantic religion. The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross). We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contract, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

The modern contribution to this Christian sensibility has been to discoverer the making of works of art and the venture of sexual love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering. It is this that we look for in a writer’s diary. Susan Sontag, ‘The Artist as exemplary sufferer,’ Against Interpretation and Other Essay (Delta, 1961), 48.

One of the catastrophic consequences of capitalism is what it does to rich people at the heart of this economic system by reducing humanity to individuals. Dorothee Sölle, Thinking about God (SCM, 1990), 103.

[For the eighteenth century successors to the minds of the Reformation and the Middle Age] it is in the hearts of the individual that religion has its throne, and to externalize it in rules and instructions is to tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal. Naturally, therefore, they formulate the ethical principal of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 229

The church will be credible in fulfilling its mission only if all its members--the hierarchical church, different groups of Christians, and each Christian in particular--really take seriously their duty to humanity and society in the field of freedom and justice. They must not regard the church as an institution to preserve a given social situation. The church cannot afford to nurture the suspicion that fell on it with the French Revolution, in part right and in part wrong, of being basically only the defender of ancient social structures. The church must show that this suspicion is now without any foundation, that it now has no basis in reality. Karl Rahner, in Conversations with Contemporary Theologians, ed. Teofilo Cabestrero (Orbis 1977), 143.

Back in the twenties Americans across the land were chanting, ten times a day, ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ They were applying to their problems the formula for ‘Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion’ devised by the French druggist-psychologist Émile Coué.

Gradually this formula became pretty well discredited as a way of coping with our basic problems. By 1956 Couéism seemed to be enjoying a hearty revival, particularly in the highest circles of business and government. In almost every day’s newspaper some tycoon was announcing vast expansion plans of unlimited faith in the future. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Longmans, Green, 1957), 185.