Wrath of Gnon 1

I don't remember now how I found Wrath of Gnon, though I've been saving certain posts I liked for a while now. They don't do any good sitting in a folder so I'll copy them here and come back to them sometimes. They say things I want to come back to again and again.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

— On Reading Old Books, C.S. Lewis.

There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self- discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

— C.S. Lewis

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again;" and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The past, our past, has perhaps many dark aspects, it saw many crimes and much nonsense, but it has—at the very least—a dual advantage: firstly, it existed, while no one knows whether the future will exist; secondly, and what is more important: it produced us, whom it has placed in position to judge over it.

— Rémi Brague

I have nothing positive to say about popular culture, and nothing positive to say about the cultural establishment… We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work. Popular culture contains pockets of gentleness and melody. Architects, writers and composers produce works which are neither kitsch nor ‘kitsch’. Prayer and penitence have been interrupted, but not forgotten. To those who wish for it, the ethical life may still be retrieved. Ours is a catacomb culture, a flame kept alive by undaunted monks. And what the monks of Europe achieved in a former dark age, they might achieve again.

— Sir Roger Scruton

The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens this social contract in which each supposedly limits his or her freedom in order to live in peace with others. Such universalism of interest is another aspect of the modern illusion. There is no such thing as scientifically based human solidarity.To be sure, I can convince myself that it is in my interest not to rob other people, not to rape and murder, because I can convince myself that the risk is too great. This is the Hobbesian model of solidarity: greed moderated by fear. But social chaos stands in the shadows of such moral anarchy. When a society adheres to moral norms for no other reason than prudence, it is extremely weak and its fabric tears at the slightest crisis. In such a society, there is no basis for personal responsibility, charity or compassion. We need instruments of human solidarity that are not based on our own instincts, self-interest or on force. The communist attempt to institutionalize solidarity ended in disaster.

— Leszek Kołakowski, 1991

While we are swept onward upon the stream of physical time, we move at the rhythm of the inner processes constituting physiological duration. Indeed, we are not mere grains of dust floating on a river. But also drops of oil spreading out over the surface of the water with a motion of their own, while being borne along by the current. Physical time is foreign to us, whereas inner time is ourself. Our present does not drop into nothingness as does the present of a pendulum. It is recorded simultaneously in mind, tissues, and blood. We keep within ourselves the organic, humoral, and psychological marks of all the events of our life. Like a nation, like an old country, like the cities, the factories, the farms, the cultivated fields, the Gothic cathedrals, the feudal castles, the Roman monuments of Europe, we are the result of a history. Our personality is enriched by each new experience of our organs, humors, and consciousness. Each thought, each action, each illness, has definitive consequences, inasmuch as we never separate ourselves from our past. We may completely recover from a disease, or from a wrong deed. But we bear forever the scar of those events.

— Alexis Carrel

The only palliative to the stuffiness of the present is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

— C.S. Lewis

A person who is deprived of something he can call ‘his own’, and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community. In contrast, from the Christian vision of the human person there necessarily follows a correct picture of society. According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good.

— Pope John Paul II, 1991

There is an essential bond between human freedom and truth, so that freedom which refused to be bound to the truth would fall into arbitrariness and end up submitting itself to the vilest of passions, to the point of self-destruction.

— Pope Leo XIII

Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

— Miguel de Unamuno

So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

— Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith.

What the divorce regime has done is to infect with transience what ought to be the most intimate and enduring of human bonds. It has eradicated from our minds the very idea of a complete and irrevocable self-donation. It is easy to be loyal when loyalty costs you nothing. But when the hard times come, as come they must; when conversation is strained, and even the bed brings no real pleasure; when the future seems but an interminable stretch of cloud and rain; then only the vow stands between marriage and divorce, and then it is that married couples most need the moral suasion and support of a genuine culture about them. To say, ‘We will not hold you to your vow’ is to say, in effect, ‘You cannot really make a vow to begin with.’

But it is essential to our humanity to promise ourselves; we can only find happiness by giving away our pursuit of it; we know joy when we open ourselves up to its free arrival; it is better to be chosen than to choose. Many men and women in difficult marriages would learn these things eventually, if we did our duty by them and held them to their vows when they were weak.

— Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage

Liberalism undoes nations and systematically destroys their sense of history, tradition, loyalty and value. Instead of helping man to elevate himself to the sphere of the superhuman, it divorces him from all ‘grand projects’ by declaring these projects ‘dangerous’ from the point of view of equality. No wonder, therefore, that the management of man’s individual well-being becomes his sole preoccupation. In the attempt to free man from all constraints, liberalism brings man under the yoke of other constraints which now downgrade him to the lowest level. Liberalism does not defend liberty; it destroys the independence of the individual. By eroding historical memories, liberalism extricates man from history. It proposes to ensure his means of existence, but robs him of his reason to live and deprives him of the possibility of having a destiny.

— Alain de Benoist (and Tomislav Sunic)

When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for us.’

— John Ruskin

If I am to answer the question, ‘How would Christ solve modern problems if He were on earth today’, I must answer it plainly; and for those of my faith there is only one answer. Christ is on earth today; alive on a thousand altars; and He does solve people’s problems exactly as He did when He was on earth in the more ordinary sense. That is, He solves the problems of the limited number of people who choose of their own free will to listen to Him.

— G.K. Chesterton