Welcome to the Charles Malik Archive

It is enough if the mind is whetted in absolute love and humor and seriousness to face the issue; for truth has a way always of revealing itself in time to the inquiring mind. (p. 34)

“Two lights alone guide us: truth and love. In their company alone we propose to walk, and if we stray from the right path it cannot be the fault of our lights, but our own. It can only be because we have not loved enough to deserve a fairer measure of the truth. But surely he who sets his heart in all purity and love upon the vision of the truth may hope that he will be granted a glimpse of it. It is this faith that sustains us.” (p. 2)

The state of being shut in on oneself and the state of being open to the world. There is a great and fundamental distinction between those who are shut in—narrow, timorous and self-sufficient—and those who are seekers—trusting, open to the good and the right. (p.162–p. 5)

When therefore a well-meaning Lebanese or foreigner comes along and says to me, ‘Forget about your religion which is the deepest you know, and adopt with me a new deepest based on economics or politics or philosophy,’ I tell him: ‘I have the highest respect for these things and we desperately need them in Lebanon and the Near East, but do you realize what you are asking me? Can I be ashamed, need I be ashamed and embarrassed, about the deepest I know when this deepest matured in these lands and when this is its status throughout the world? When people in Pakistan and India and Africa turn to Mecca in their prayers, and when people in Paris and Rome and London and Berlin and New York turn to Bethlehem and Nazareth and Jerusalem in their deepest adoration and love, are you seriously asking me to be different from all these men—me, me, who come myself from Lebanon and the Near East? No, my friend, I have the greatest possible honor of sticking to my deepest, and of adjusting every other deepest to the deepest I know.’

Let no Arab nationalism, let no Jewish Zionism, let no Middle Eastern Christian fear or sentimentalism, let no Western materialism, let no Christian secularism anywhere, beguile any man into believing that the Near East will ever cease to be a cosmic magnet for all those who know and love Jesus Christ.  This is its unalterable destiny.  We did not create it, we had nothing to do with it; in fact many of us, scared and limited as we are, wish it and have wished it otherwise: it was all determined by Jesus Christ himself.

The Orthodox are keenly conscious of their existential status as a Christian minority group in a vast Muslim sea, although in Lebanon this sense, so far as Lebanon thinks only of itself, namely, so far as Lebanon is independent from the rest of the Middle East, is considerably mitigated by the knowledge that they belong to a total body politic which is itself a community of minorities, some of which indeed are themselves Muslim.

The conflicts and contradictions and impossibilities which riddle the Middle East at this moment could, in God’s own day and in God’s own way, precisely on account of their intensity and depth, generate new creative potencies bursting forth into one of the greatest flowerings of the spirit. In the meantime, let us hold fast to the deepest we know, seeking ever the deeper still.

The conception of history as unitary and purposeful first dawned in the Middle East. And today the greatest service that history can perform in the Middle East, both as the making of history and the writing of history, is to help in restoring wholeness and integrity to its future and unity and continuity to its past.

There is no new thing under the Sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 and 3:15), except the new creature in Jesus Christ. Only the radical change of heart in Jesus Christ is new. Only grace and the Holy Ghost is new. Everything else is as old as the hills. All discovery is only the uncovering of what is already there. In repentance and grace there is new creation. All else is the spinning out of laws and norms spun out a million times before. Repetition, repetition of the same thing. No essential newness.

I am only interested in ultimate matters.  It is not easy in man’s confused and mixed motives to single out anything pure.  But if I accepted my present responsibilities, I can say in all truth that the dominant motive was the possibility of being of some service to my Lord and country.  There is no meaning to life apart from him and his service.