Would Christianity, as regards truth and peace, faith and charity, fare worse, would it not fare better, without any Church at all, than with a thousand Churches, scattered through the world, all supreme and independent?
-Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen’. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
From the Confessions of St. Augustine, II.6.13:
For in vice there lurks a counterfeit beauty: pride, for instance–even pride apes sublimity, whereas you are the only God, most high above all things. As for ambition, what does it crave but honors and glory, while you are worthy of honor beyond all others, and eternally glorious? The ferocity of powerful men aims to inspire fear; but who is to be feared except the one God? Can anything be snatched from his power or withdrawn from it–when or where or whither or by whom?
Flirtatiousness aims to arouse love by its charming wiles, but nothing can hold more charm than your charity, nor could anything beloved to greater profit than your truth, which outshines all else in its luminous beauty. Curiosity poses as pursuit of knowledge, whereas you know everything to a supreme degree. Even ignorance or stupidity masquerades as simplicity and innocence, but nothing that exists is simpler than yourself; and what could be more innocent than you, who leave the wicked to be hounded by their own sins? Sloth pretends to aspire to rest, but what sure rest is there save the Lord? Lush living likes to be taken for contented abundance, but you are the full and inexhaustible store of a sweetness that never grows stale.
Extravagance is a bogus generosity, but you are the infinitely wealthy giver of all good things. Avarice strives to amass possessions, but you own everything. Envy is contentious over rank accorded to another, but what ranks higher than you? Anger seeks revenge, but whoever exacts revenge with greater justice than yourself? Timidity dreads any unforeseen or sudden threat to the things it loves, and takes precautions for their safety; but is anything sudden or unforeseen to you? Who can separate what you love from you? Where is ultimate security to be found, except with you? Sadness pines at the loss of the good things with which greed took its pleasure, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away
Joseph Sobran on the typical atheist’s argument against God:
Mean old nuns whacked my knuckles with a ruler, ergo God does not exist. This is less inductive reasoning than simple free association with a grudge.
(read the whole essay, too…)
Jacques Maritain on “bourgeois liberalism” (i.e. unrestrained capitalism):
Christian in appearance, it has been atheistic in fact. Too skeptical to persecute, except for a tangible profit, rather than defy religion, which it deemed an invention of the priesthood and gradually dispossessed by reason, it used it as a police force to watch over property, or as a bank where anyone could be insured, while making money here below, against the undiscovered risks of the hereafter–after all, one never knows!
I think this can be applied safely to our American society today…
Liberals hold us individually responsible for nothing but collectively responsible for everything.
-Thomas Sowell
(Yes, this is true, but I think my brain just exploded trying to figure out how anyone could hold to something so self-evidently self-contradictory.)
(HT: B’ob)
Sorry for the lack of activity… 32 hrs work the past two days…
Anyway, here’s another quote for you, this time from a fellow blogger, the Roving Medievalist:
It is absolutely impossible to be a traditionalist Catholic and set yourself up in judgement over a Council of the Church. That is a completely irreconcilable form of arrogance. If you can’t accept the real Vatican II ( we’re not talking the non-existent “spirit” ) you’re not a traditionalist. You’re not even a Catholic. You’re a Protestant with delusions of orthodoxy.
(HT: Miss Cannonball)
We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can establish contact. This I do. I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.
- Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being
…it has now turned out that modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms.
- Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge
Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world.
We can do nothing to alter the context, for it is reality. As I have said we cannot escape from it, there is nowhere to escape to, for apart from it is only nothingness. The only thing left to our choice is the mental attitude we shall adopt to it. No subordinate choice that we can make can ever be as important as this fundamental choice. What choices are open to us? Roughly, three. We can do our best to understand reality, the context in which we are, and harmonize ourselves with it. Or we can understand the context and rebel against it, that is rebel against reality, and what could be bleaker? Or we can ignore the context, and either invent one of our own by selecting such elements in the context as we happen, mentally or temperamentally, to find appealing, or else act in no context at all.
Maturity lies with the first choice.
- Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity
I’ve been working through St. Josemaría Escrivá’s Christ is Passing By as devotional reading in the mornings, and ran across this quote today, about the temptation of our Lord by Satan in the wilderness:
It’s worth thinking about the method Satan uses with our Lord Jesus Christ: he argues with texts from the sacred books, twisting and distorting their meaning in a blasphemous way. Jesus doesn’t let himself be deceived: the Word made flesh knows well the divine word, written for the salvation of men — not their confusion and downfall. So, we can conclude that anyone who is united to Jesus Christ through Love will never be deceived by manipulation of the holy Scripture, for he knows that it is typical of the devil to try to confuse the Christian conscience, juggling with the very words of eternal wisdom, trying to turn light into darkness.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://missionterritory.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
Recent Comments