February 2012
23 posts
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A meditation on two epistemological approaches to...
When you play the role of the Master, where you have to fit all reality inside your head, get outside it and underneath it and hold it in your hand so as to Know it and be its Master, the overwhelming size of reality can crush the spirit and leave you in despair.
When, on the other hand, you are a Recipient, then, like a child on Christmas morning, the greater the size of the gift, the more...
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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