Faith Quotes by Charles Malik

A free Lebanon is of priceless value in the general existential-humanistic design of the Middle East, and the Maronites are entrusted with this value, perhaps even more than others are. (3)

I come from a country and a people who have known more history than any other people. I tell you the excitement of time is important only if measured on the peace of eternity. What matters in the end is that which abides, that which remains immovable when everything else moves, even if it should be moved by it. And this is none other than the eternal spirit of truth and love, reaching for man, claiming and forgiving him, and sealing him with the seal of its adoption. For I tell you man will die unless, remembering his origin, awakening to his plight, he is constantly replenished, amidst tears of joy, by celestial food. (p. 244)

I know how embarrassing this matter is to politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, and cynics; but, whatever these men think, the irrefutable truth is that the soul of America is, at its best and highest, Christian. (p. 243)

“We are all members one of another, and no matter how much we may try one another, surely goodness, patience, and trust—whether or not deserved—will prove exceedingly rewarding in the end.” (p. 242)

Political systems vary, but the need of man for truth and salvation will never cease. One therefore must press beyond politics, beyond the sheer framework of freedom, beyond the least common denominator which makes everybody feel comfortable and happy; one, I say, must press beyond these things into the domain of qualitative excellence, where, far from pleasing everybody, one may find one’s self standing absolutely alone. (p. 241)

In particular, failure to understand that all political problems in the Near East are interwoven with religion, so that a true attitude to those problems can rest only upon a basis of true doctrine, and a false attitude to them will have disastrous effects upon the whole relationship between the great religions. (p. 43)

“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)

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.