Another View of My Favourite Quote

Not too long ago I posted my favourite Chesterton quote, from his stupendous The Everlasting Man. The quote refers to the moment which is the pivot of all history, and the strange news of a God who dwelt with us.

There are some works of historical fiction - books like Ben Hur and Dear and Glorious Physician - which are set in that time period, and I wonder why there aren't more which explore this era from the Roman side.

(I'd be interested in any recommendations if you have any, or perhaps you're working on a new story? Let me know.)

Anyhow, recently I found the following excerpt which hints at this most dramatic revelation. Coming as it does from a writer who is both a theologian and a nuclear physicist, but who works as a historian of science, it may give a variant view of the same picture.
--Dr. Thursday

All systems, indeed all fixed ideas, are so many witnesses to this natural urge in man. In the middle of the second century B. C. the Roman playwright, Terence, could still think that his dictum, homo sum; humani nil alienum puto, [I am man (human) - human [things] I reckon not as alien.] could raise no questions about the completeness of humanism. There must have been a great appeal to the view that man as a microcosmos was a condensation of the macrocosmos and therefore human nature comprised everything and was wholly sufficient to itself.

When about that time the Romans first made an official contact with a small and strange people off the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, they did not suspect how differently that people, or at least some of them, kept thinking of nature, including human nature. It must have appeared enormously strange that the Maccabees refused to fight at the end of the week as they counted it. But even stranger had to appear their reason for doing so. The reason was an experience which by then the Jews had shared for over a millennium, an experience utterly transcendental to all humanism. They were convinced that they, or rather their forefathers, had been exposed to something really supernatural. It burst the framework of what is merely human and natural.

This experience, which kept the Jews in its grip, received an even more powerful manifestation in those whom the Romans first took for a Jewish sect. At the time they were still Jews in great numbers, but the other Jews had already disavowed them in no uncertain terms. What could not be ignored, either by the Jews or by the Romans, was that members of that sect, whose supreme allegiance was to a Jew, Jesus the Christ, displayed even more concretely and persuasively the grip of the supernatural. By the time of Decius the Roman Empire itself felt threatened by the growth of the Christian Church, and within another two generations the Empire capitulated, without knowing what that outcome was really about.

But almost exactly at that point, at the Council of Nicaea, the Church itself was forced, by an internal dissension within it, to take stock of what that supernatural was ultimately about. It meant nothing less than that the heavenly Father effected a most spectacular entry of the supernatural into the natural by sending His only Son in the form of man among men in the fullness of time. However human, the Son remained what He always was, consubstantial with the Father, having joined a human nature to a divine nature in one single divine person.

The dogma defined at Nicaea was therefore, among other things, also a thorough corrective to the humanist perspective as capsulized in Terence's dictum. There was now on hand a human experience that demanded a rewriting of that dictum. In order to do justice to the completeness of his experience man henceforth had to say: homo sum; humani divinique nil alienum puto. [I am man (human); human and divine [things] I reckon not as alien.]

[S. L. Jaki, A Mind's Matter: an intellectual autobiography viii-ix]