“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation”
—T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages”
February 2012
25 posts
“So I said to myself that people are consumed by boredom. Naturally, one has to ponder for a while to realise this—one does not see it immediately. It is like some sort of dust. one comes and goes without seeing it, one breathes it in, one eats it, one drinks it, and it is so fine that it doesn’t even scrunch between one’s teeth. But if one stops up for a moment, it settles like a blanket over the face and hands. One has to constantly shake this ash-rain off one. That is why people are so restless.”
—The Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
“
The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.
A courier’s or a dragoman’s speech may indeed be often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and its obvious derivation from them.
So travellers from one religion to another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have.
Yet a moment’s probing of the conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first unfolding.
Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a converted people.
Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or no—is what we mean by having a religion.
” —Reason in Religion by George Santayana
“Paul speaks of an abundance of grace to show that what we have received is not just a medicine sufficient to heal the wound of sin, but also health and beauty and honor, and glory and dignity far transcending our natural state. Each of these in itself would have been enough to do away with death, but when they are all put together in one there is not a trace of death left, nor can any shadow of it be seen, so entirely has it been done away with.”
—St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10, as translated in Ancient Christian Devotional. (via wesleyanrudy)
“The mind of a child envisions a world of adventure and purpose while the mind of an adult longs for a world of comfort, ease, and power.”
—John Dyer, from From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology (via settledthingsstrange)
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And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.
Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love…. As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will “represent” it and signify it, in art and beauty.
” —Schmemann, For the Life of the World (via poeticfaith)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
—Richard Buckminster Fuller (via Fred Smith on Facebook)
“We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.”
—
Marilynne Robinson (via ayjay)
[Hulga-Joy’s comment:] This certainly reflects my own experience. When I first began to move to a true rejection of science/faith dualism (extraordinarily difficult to do, even with a reasonable education), I was frequently disturbed by the vastness and complexity of nature, by the mind-blowing age of the universe, by the sheer, barely comprehensible size of the thing. It made me feel so small. How could humans possibly matter?
But then I actually remembered 1) the Incarnation and 2) how the Psalms, for instance, speak of God’s wonderful works, and their incomprehensibility; of His true greatness and mystery. And I realized that what I had come up against was not a dethroning of God, but of the limits of my own mind. It was—and continues to be—mighty, mighty humbling.
“
At the heart of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is the call to love one another in the image of the Trinity, and that means establishing a genuine “unity in diversity.” Our differences, even our theological differences, can and should serve to unite us in our common journey towards the fullness of the truth.
Very often the resolution of theological debate involves finding the right balance between what appear to be competing truths, but are rather complementary aspects of the whole truth that must be held together in their proper “tension.” Finding that proper tension is like tuning a guitar—we inevitably go sharp, then flat, then back again until we find just the right tension in the string. When we understand this, we come to see how we need one another’s different emphases. Push-back from either direction is a healthy thing, so long as it’s offered charitably, and with a willingness to affirm the truth the “other side” is rightly seeking to uphold.
” —At the Heart of the Gospel: A Book Excerpt
“Just as the reality of the Word of God in Jesus Christ bears its possibility within itself, as does also the reality of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Word of God comes to man, so too the possibility of the knowledge of God and therefore the knowability of God cannot be questioned in vacuo, or by means of a general criterion of knowledge delimiting the knowledge of God from without, but only from within this real knowledge itself. Therefore it is quite impossible to ask whether God is knowable, because this question is already decided by the only legitimate and meaningful questioning which arises in this connexion. The only legitimate and meaningful questions in this context are: how far is God known? and how far is God knowable? These questions are legitimate and meaningful because they are genuine questions of Church proclamation, and therefore also genuine questions of dogmatics—genuine objects of its formal and material task.”
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 6 quoted in Adiaphora: Genuine Questions of Church Proclamation
“There are good and bad amongst them as in every class. But one thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spuitual nature so much as respectable selfishness.”
—George MacDonald, Robert Falconer (via georgemacdonald)
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”
—Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians
“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”
—Thomas Aquinas, Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum (qtd. here)
Adiaphora: Rant: Book Design →
preciseandtowering.tumblr.com
I have been noticing this too. Book publishers should be competing with e-readers by making their physical books more artistic and usable, not by making them even more difficult to parse.
And three cheers for a proper critique of Baskerville, that unreadable face.
Caveat: I know next to nothing about the book publishing industry, especially from the inside.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that some publishers pay very little attention to the readability and design of their books and make enjoying them quite difficult on the reader. Gaudy and attention-less…
“Interestingly, when smart people feel less alienated, they seem to buy different sorts of books. Instead of condemning American society for not honoring the author’s personality or tastes, the new bestsellers explore the mysteries of human behavior. Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s various books or Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Perhaps once you accept that people really are different — that nobody’s normal and, at least when it comes to food or entertainment or vacations, there’s no one best way to live — you can, paradoxically enough, start to think about the commonalities known as human nature.”
—
Postrel: Can You Pass the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ Test? - Bloomberg (via ayjay)
I love her synopsis of the themes of several mid-century best-sellers.
“All God’s deeds are inexpressible. We can dishonor them all by speaking about them in an irreverent way. But all God’s deeds want to be confessed, in spite of—no, on account of—their inexpressibility. God wants us to love him with all our mind and with all our strength. True theology is an act of love. In this act we cannot be silent about a single one of God’s mighty inexpressible deeds.”
—Hendrikus Berkhof, Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 9 (quoted here) (h/t)
“Disillusion can become itself an illusion if we rest in it.”
—T. S. Eliot
“Human beings are responsible for what they say, not only publicly but privately… . Language is a very responsible thing. It’s not merely a question of style, or even vocabulary. Every choice of a word is essentially a moral choice.”
—
John Lukacs (on Mars Hill Audio Journal 75).
A related thought in The Future of History 88
“If he came to reveal his Father in miniature, as it were (for in these unspeakable things we can but use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest), to tone down his great voice, which, too loud for men to hear it aright, could but sound to them as an inarticulate thundering, into such a still small voice as might enter their human ears in welcome human speech, then the works that his Father does so widely, so grandly that they transcend the vision of men, the Son must do briefly and sharply before their very eyes.”
—George MacDonald - Miracles of Our Lord (via georgemacdonald)
“The strength of our faith is tried by those things wherein our wits and capacities are not strong. Howbeit because this divine mystery is more true than plain, divers having framed the same to their own conceits and fancies are found in their expositions thereof more plain than true.”
—Richard Hooker (via wesleyanrudy)
“The supernatural vitality of hope overflows, moreover, and sheds its light also upon the rejuvenated powers of natural hope. The lives of countless saints attest to this truly astonishing fact. It seems surprising, however, how seldom the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints is noticed; especially of those saints who were active in the world as builders and founders. There is hardly anything comparable to just this youthfulness of the saint that testifies so challengingly to the fact that is surely most relevant for contemporary man: that, in the most literal sense of these words, nothing more eminently preserves and founds “eternal youth” than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady perseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them loveable.”
—Josef Pieper. Reminds me of that marvelous passage in Chesterton that concludes with, “our Father is younger than we.” (via wesleyhill)
“Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. True diversity in literature would be to read authors in circumstances as different from our own as possible, because we might then imagine ourselves as different than we are — not the creature of circumstances, but their master. Reading is fundamental, all right: to a person’s ethical development.”
—So Why Read (Fiction) Any More? « Commentary Magazine (via ayjay)
“Good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar.”
—Victor Davis Hanson, So Why Read Anymore?
