And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
Romano Guardini:
Those who maintain that these values and cultural attitudes are simply one with the autonomous development of human nature misunderstand the essential role of a Christian economy of Revelation, Faith and Grace. In fact the misunderstanding leads—permit me to speak plainly—to a kind of dishonesty which, as anyone who takes a clear-eyed view can see, is integral to the contemporary world itself.
… This truth becomes clear, however, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation … When man fails to ground his personal perfection in Divine Revelation, he still retains an awareness of the individual as a rounded, dignified and creative human being. He can have no consciousness, however, of the real person who is the absolute ground of each man, an absolute ground superior to every psychological or cultural advantage or achievement.
Robert Inchausti:
The incarnation, like the resurrection, and like the very notion of divinity itself, cannot be reduced to a precept, fact, or theory; nor is it even, strictly speaking, a doctrine. It is, rather, a revelation that must be experienced in order to be understood, a reality wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, miniaturized into a narrative that proves itself apodictically true by the realities it reveals.
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More from Guardini:
No man truly aware of his own human nature will admit that he can discover himself in the theories of modern anthropology—be they biological, psychological, sociological or any other. Only the accidents of man—his attributes, his relations, his forms—make up these theories; they never take man simply as he is. They speak about man, but they never really see man. They approach him, but they never truly find him. They handle him, but they never grip him as he actually is. They take hold of him by statistics; they integrate him into organizations; they put him into use. Forever they play out the same grotesque and fearful comedy, but its incidents strike always upon a phantom. Even when man is subjected to forces which misuse him or mutilate or destroy him, he is not the creature at all which those forces aim to subject.
As seen by the contemporary mind man does not exist. The mind of today attempts continually to lock man into categories where he will not fit. Mechanical, biological, psychological or sociological abstractions are all variations of [the same] basic urge…
The threefold result is evident. Insofar as modern man saw the world simply as “nature,” he absorbed it into himself. Insofar as he understood himself as a “personality,” he made himself the Lord of his being, and insofar as he conceived a will for “culture,” he strove to make of existence the creation of his own hands.
… Culture arose before the vision of modern man and took its stance opposite God and His Revelation.
It is cheap and false to condemn the medieval use of authority as “slavery.” Modern man makes this judgment not merely because he enjoys the discovery of autonomous investigation but because he resents the Middle Ages. His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution. But authority is needed not only by the childish but also in the life of every man, even the most mature. Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque—force.
Again we must insist that the utterly crucial truth for medieval man was the fact of Divine Revelation. Above and beyond everything given man in this world Revelation was the absolute fulcrum. Set forth within the dogma of the Church, Revelation was accepted upon faith by the individual. From one point of view the Church bound and limited man by its authority; from another point of view the Church made it possible for man to surmount his world. She gave a vision which of itself was vast and liberating in scope. Revealed truth was conceptualized by means of a delicate logic which distinguished and then united all of reality. The theological system erected upon these foundations unfolded itself as a great synthesis. In the modern sense of the term, however, scientific explanation was almost unknown.