February 2012
22 posts
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“It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds...”
– William Ellery Channing, Self-Culture
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“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the...”
– Job 38:4,7
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“Americans today know everything about the last twenty-four hours, not that much...”
– Os Guinness (loosely quoting Bill Moyers), lecture on Coming Conflict of Civilizations
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“The religion of Christ is not a tidbit after one’s bread; on the contrary, it is...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas
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Interesting statement on how civil liberty and civil law interact, suggesting that when people have no higher reason and good by which to govern themselves, naked law and legislation (i.e., the state) is the only thing left for them to submit to:
Men are fitted for civil liberty in exact proportion of their ability to place chains upon their own appetites. The more order there is within the less...
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Bonhoeffer as young assistant pastor in Spain:
Every day I am getting to know people, at any rate their circumstances, and sometimes one is able to see through their stories into themselves— and at the same time one thing continues to impress me: here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of “the Christian world”; people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims,...
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Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait by Jessie Coulson
This book, Jessie Coulson’s Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait (currently out of print but can still be purchased cheaply), is an interesting idea. It’s the story of Dostoevsky told through a selection of his letters (which make up the majority of the text), and the narrative is linked together by intervening editorial commentary. So it’s kind of a cross between biography and...
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“[Martin] Luther’s influence cannot be overestimated. His translation of the...”
– Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer
On busy, machine-driven American life:
Americans have clocks. Africans have time.
~African saying
Written before the recession—it’s likely to be substantially worse now:
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, in the United States, more than 3.5 million people experience homelessness during a given year. That means that more than one percent of our population this year will be eating out of trash cans and sleeping under bridges.
~Mike Yankoski, Under the Overpass
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The mortality, and potential misery, of Eros (unless supported by higher love):
And all the time the grim joke is that this Eros whose voice seems to speak from the eternal realm is not himself necessarily even permanent. He is notoriously the most mortal of our loves. The world rings with complaints of his fickleness. What is baffling is the combination of this fickleness with his protestations...
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Eros illegitimately claims the highest place (but does bear a likeness to that which is truly highest):
It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed. He has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world.
And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God...
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The grandeur and terror or Eros:
Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise. Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is not only because they will disbelieve you. They usually will, no doubt. But even if they believed, they would not be...
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The nature of Eros (not “sex” but more like “romantic love”):
Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious,...
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Unfortunately, what many women are to many men:
We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after...
Love (in one of its forms):
Oh, my friend, her love for me was boundless and I loved her too beyond measure, but we were not happy. [A]lthough … we were decidedly unhappy together we could not cease to love one another; indeed, the unhappier we were, the more closely we were bound together. However strange this may seem, it was so.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait by...
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On his own time (written 1865), but a funny parallel with our own:
Our time may be characterized in these words: it has no opinion, … all opinions are tolerated, they all exist side by side; there is no general opinion, no common belief. … [E]verybody says anything that comes into his head, and the oddest opinion has all the rights of a citizen.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Dostoevsky:...
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“Gil-galad was an Elven-king.
Of him the harpers sadly sing:
the last whose...”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
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“The moon has climbed into the sky,
Where golden stars shine bright and clear....”
– From a German folk song, The Moon Has Risen, quoted from Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
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Dostoevsky’s suffering, faith, and doubt (soon after release from Siberian prison):
I have often heard, N.D., that you are very religious. But it is not because you are religious but because I have experienced and felt it for myself that I say to you that in such moments one thirsts like ‘parched grass’ for faith, and finds it precisely because the truth shines in misfortune....
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“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old...”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
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At age 17 (from a letter, 1839):
Man is a mystery. It must be solved, and if you spend all your life trying to solve it, you must not say the time was wasted; I occupy myself with this mystery, for I wish to be a man.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait, by Jessie Coulson
January 2012
14 posts
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“It is probably impossible to love any human being simply ‘too much.’...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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Between Heaven & Hell by Peter Kreeft
I found this small book, Peter Kreeft’s Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley (yes, an extremely long subtitle), to be a surprisingly good read. The premise of the book itself greatly attracted me. It’s not generally well known that C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley all died on the very same day in...
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“Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
– C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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The arbitrariness of the terms “liberal” and “conservative”:
[T]he radicals of one generation become the conservatives of the next. Their new teachings become the old truisms of their tradition.
~Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley
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This resonates somewhat with my experience:
I’ve always thought liberal and conservative were terms used not to think but to avoid thinking. You can classify anything as liberal or conservative, then simply declare yourself one or the other, and all your thought for the rest of your life can be a knee jerk.
~Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with...
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“No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist,...”
– G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography
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Vanity of vanities, all is vanity … and yet He has also set eternity in the hearts of men:
Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river, and that will be my lot also. Indeed I know it is so, for whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot...
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On the person of Christ:
Aut deus aut homo malus [Either God or a bad man].
~Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley
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“[T]he key to far-sighted vision [is] good teachers.”
– Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley
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Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley:
The whole point of debating … is not for me or you to win but for truth to win; not to see who’s true but see what’s true.
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Meaning of authority:
The root meaning is ‘right, based on origin.’ It is the author who has authority, author’s rights. The authority of Christ … is based on his identity as the divine Author of the world.
~Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley
Top ten books read in 2011 (part II)
The Death of Adam (1998) by Marilynne Robinson
This was the first contact I had with Robinson (better known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead), and she is a fasincating thinker. She’s one of these types that makes you feel you are coming into contact with the full force of the Western canon distilled in a singular and distinctive mind, who therefore adds to it even as she...
Top ten books read in 2011 (part I)
“Lay of Leithian” (incomplete, abandoned after 1931), in The Lays of Beleriand by J. R. R. Tolkien
This is a verse form of the story of Beren and Luthein (edited by Christopher Tolkien), a story best known through the Silmarillion. It is beautiful poetry, sometimes achingly so. It’s pretty much a completely new side of Tolkien for those only familiar with his prose (though, of...
December 2011
19 posts
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“[M]y spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the...”
– Winnie-the-Pooh, from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
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“‘Hallo!’ said Piglet, ‘what are you doing?’
...”
– A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
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“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to...”
– A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
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“Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like...”
– Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524)
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A great fear:
[T]he deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world.
~C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933)
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On the presentation of women through popular culture, media, and advertising:
It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender … than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. … As a result we are more and more directing the desires...
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“This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all her actions, having an...”
– Plato, The Republic (c. 380 BC)
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“The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would...”
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Interesting relativizing of Western assumptions and worldview:
[T]here are still today entire cultures that—on irreproachably rational grounds—find the prevailing prejudices of Western modernity almost comically absurd. I know three African priests—one Ugandan and two Nigerian—who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians...
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Luther on the text “There was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7):
Luther baited his audience by offering a stinging chastisement of the innkeepers, as well as Bethlehem generally, for not making room for Christ. His listeners were undoubtedly shaking their heads in agreement. Luther continued, “There are many of you who think to yourselves, ‘If only I had been there!...
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CSL really is master of the metaphor.
I am talking of Affection as it is when it exists apart from the other loves. It often does so exist; often not. As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate.
C....