Powerless Men

The Roman satirist Juvenal mocked religion as naïve “guff,” yet he spent his career lamenting Rome’s moral collapse never realizing that the decay he despised came from the very unbelief he celebrated. St. Paul saw the same rot even within the early church: people who still wore the appearance of godliness while denying its power. When Christian faith stops governing a person’s life, he effectively joins Juvenal’s camp brilliant perhaps, intense perhaps, but ultimately impotent to change anything. Juvenal’s world looks strikingly like our own, where cynicism replaces conviction and moral critique replaces moral transformation. In the end, Juvenal altered nothing; Christ, through faithful men like Paul, changed the world.