Peter Kreeft on Faith

The Faith is not selling well.


Faith is selling well – extremely well: faith in general, faith as an attitude, faith as positive thinking, faith in faith. Also selling well are many strange new faiths: faith in cults, faith in UFO’s, faith in ICBM’s, faith in the Force, faith in ancient astronauts, faith in astrology – faith in almost anything. We are an incredibly credulous age.


The reason for this is probably that "nature abhors a vacuum" spiritually as well as physically. Our modern Western civilization is ready to believe in almost anything to fill the vacuum left by the de-Christianization of the last four centuries.


- Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven, p. 193


This reminds me so very much of Hogfather, from the Discworld series of novels by Terry Pratchett, where people ceasing to believe in the Hogfather (Discworld's analogy for Santa Claus) leaves a lot of 'extra belief' sloshing around. As a consequence, anthromorphic personifications like the Verruca Gnome, the oh God of Hangovers, and the God of Indigestion are created out of all that spare belief. I can't help but wonder what sorts of things we have created with our spare belief when our society turned away from Christianity...


Slenderman, maybe.


O.o.


Then again, we may deserve it for everything we've done.


In Pace Christi,


Elyse

Death is clothed in the darkness of night because his true face is too bright for us to look upon.


Is he Death? Or is he Life? Does he come to kill the body with his cold hand, or does he come with the fire of Life on his fingertips, burning away all that is not Life?


Death is but the gateway. Death within the heart is lasting and Decay. Life-in-Death is Sacrifice and lives eternal.

Choose the life that is the most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.


- Francis Bacon

No one wants to believe in evil, really, and above all not in an evil being, an evil spirit. Everyone wants to abolish the idea. To admit the existence of evil means a responsibility, and no one wants that responsibility. That is the opening through which the evil spirit crawls, stilling all suspicions, making everything seem normal and natural.

- Pope Benedict XVI

In semi-related news, I finally looked up the German for something I've been meaning to for a while now:

"What is this new devilry?"

I now need an opportunity to say this. I have already used, "Das hat dir der Teufel gesagt!" once or twice, to general incomprehension. It was mostly for the lolz, though; I would never really mean something like that. The lolz comes from the fact that I found the quote in a German version of Rumpelstiltskin.

...You know, I'm not actually sure how you do spell 'Rumpelstiltskin'. Weird. O.o

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

Further Catholic Tidbits

Hey, while it is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, make the most of it.

"The mother of Him Who alone saves and condemns is our mother."

 

- St. Anselm of Canterbury

 

I'll stick in this picture as a divider. However, it also has a very valid message:

 

 

"America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is with the broad-minded... In the face of this broad-minded permissiveness, what the world needs is intolerance."

 

- Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen

 

 

 

GKC always knows best. He is just so eminently quotable. I easily have half a dozen of these Chesterton e-cards saved to my computer. And why not? He's one of my top three favorite authors, right up there with Peter Kreeft and J. R. R. Tolkien.

 

 

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

 

- Flannery O'Conner

 

"A man who works with his hands is a laborer. A man who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. A man who works with his hands, his head, and his heart is an artist."

 

- St. Francis of Assisi

 

In Pace Christi,

 

Elyse





After Reading One Too Many Dust Jacket Blurbs

One of these days, I will write a story. That story will not have a blurb that will say anything along the lines of, "In this world/situation, everything is not as it seems."

That is because, in my story, everything will be as it seems. The hero will truly be a hero, the villain will truly be a villain, good will really be good, and evil will really be evil. Appearances may be deceiving, but the truth will not be deceiving. Evil may lie and cheat, but good will not.

That will be my story.

It will bomb, no one will read it, and the critics will bash it from one end of this country to the other.

But I will have said the truth. And the truth will never change.

The most important question really ought to be: How many of us can content ourselves with merely the true and the good? It's not an easy thing.

And so we start bending the rules a little so the world will like us. Compromising, giving a little here and a little there. But is any amount of compromise good?

...This post also appears to have been written after reading one too many philosophy books...

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

GKC For the Win

I have just finished In Defense of Sanity, which is a collection of essays by the amazing Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Among them were included (1) an essay on chese - yes, chese and (2) an essay on Jane Austen.

I knew I loved GKC for a reason.

So now, yes, I am here to share favorite quotes with you all.

p. 309 - Generally, the difficulty is not to tolerate other people's religion. The trouble is to tolerate our own religion. Or rather (to speak more strictly), to get our own religion to tolerate us. Comparatively few modern religious people are intolerant. But a great many modern religious people are intolerable. Nor are these specially those that are called bigots; it is rather, I think, the other way. The person we really find exasperating is he who does not understand our beliefs, and yet also does not agree with his own.

 

p.334 - Some people fear that philosophy will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long words, but a tangle of complicated notions. These people miss the whole point of the modern situation. These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly for want of a philosophy. The politicians and the papers are always using long words. It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong. The political and social relations are already hopelessly complicated. They are far more complicated than any page of mediaeval metaphysics; the only difference is that the mediaevalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and the moderns cannot. The chief practical things of today, like finance and political corruption, are frightfully complicated. We are content to tolerate them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them. The business world needs metaphysics -- to simplify it.

p.337 - 338 - Anyhow, what do modern men say when apparently confronted with [a miracle], something that cannot, in the cant phrase, be naturally explained? Well, most modern men immediately talk nonsense. When such a thing is currently mentioned, in novels or newspapers or magazine stories, the first comment is always something like, "But, my dear fellow, this is the twentieth century!" It is worth having a little training in philosophy if only to avoid looking so ghastly a fool as that. It has on the whole rather less sense or meaning than saying, "But my dear fellow, this is Tuesday afternoon."

If miracles cannot happen, they cannot happen in the twentieth century or in the twelfth. If they can happen, nobody can prove that there is a time when they cannot happen. The best that can be said for the skeptic is that he cannot say what he means, and therefore, whatever else he means, he cannot mean what he says. But if he only means that miracles can be believed in the twelfth century, but cannot be believed in the twentieth, then he is wrong again, but in theory and in fact. He is wrong in theory, because an intelligent recognition of possibilities does not depend on a date but on a philosophy…

Let us not be too severe on the worthy gentleman who informs his dear fellow that it is the twentieth century. In the mysterious depths of his being even that enormous ass does actually mean something. The point is that he cannot really explain what he means; and that is the argument for a better education in philosophy. What he really means is something like this, "There is a theory of this mysterious universe to which more and more people were in fact inclined during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries; and up to that point at least, this theory did grow with the growing inventions and discoveries of science to which we owe our present social organization - or disorganization. That theory maintains that cause and effect have from the first operated in an uninterrupted sequence like a fixed fate; and that there is no will behind or within that fate; so that it must work itself out in the absence of such a will, as a machine must run down in the absence of a man. There were more people in the nineteenth century in in the ninth who happened to hold this particular theory of the universe. I myself happened to hold it; and therefore I obviously cannot believe in miracles." That is perfectly good sense; but so is the counter-statement, "I do not happen to hold it; and therefore I obviously can believe in miracles."

p. 338 - The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, "Whether there can or cannot be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process." The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish. He will then go off and say: "One can't have such things in the twentieth century," which really is gibberish.

I had some nice GKC meme-like things with shorter, much more manageable quotes from him, but Blogger refuses to load them. Bad Blogger.

*goes off to sulk*

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

The Professor Knows Best

 



"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

 - J. R. R. Tolkien

By the way, he is often simply called "the Professor" by his fandom and other groups on the Internet, just as Aristotle was sometimes called merely "the Philosopher" by St. Thomas Aquinas and other greats of the Middle Ages.

Also, here is the Bofur Optimism meme for today:

The words are from "So Bring On the Rain" by Joo Dee Messina. I used to hear it on the radio several years ago when mom had it turned on (I do not listen to the radio myself that much), and finally one day I googled it. It's a very pretty song, so you should go look it up and listen to it.

Or, as the Professor would say: The Darkness cannot conquer forever. There is light and high beauty beyond its reach.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

A Quote, Since I Haven't Done One In Forever

The quote comes with a bonus picture.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating them both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.

For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.

 

-- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

 

Can you say "Saruman"? Can you say "Denethor"? Can you say "your average politician"?

 

To make up for the depressing nature of the quote, here's a Bofur meme.

 

 

Bofur's sheer adorableness coupled with his ridiculously lovely personality coupled with the adorable fact that he is trying to smoke his pipe in the rain... equals WIN.

 

In Pace Christi,

 

Elyse

300th Post - A Tribute to Tolkien

I mean, in what better way could I have commemorated my 300th post on this blog? Really. There simply is not a better way than the celebration of all things J. R. R. Tolkien.

This is quite appropriate, as I have also just finished re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring, and therefore I shall share seven of my favorite quotes from it, along with relevant (or semi-relevant) pictures. Because pictures are worth one thousand words, as the saying goes. And they are pretty to look at. And I have embarked on (ANOTHER) meme-making expedition lately, so I have lots of screencaps and things to play around with...

*Ahem.* Anyway.

1. Elrond: "Yet such is oft the course of the deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."

2. Frodo: "I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way."

3. Gimli: "Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens."

-- On that vein, I was playing around with Paint with this exact same picture and quote, and this is what resulted:

Of course, now that I look at it, it seems as if the text has mysteriously shifted upwards, but oh well... It's just an amateur playing around with Paint, anyway. I found a new favorite font, though. I usually stick to Book Antique, but Lucinda Calligraphy and Lucinda Bright turned out very well for most everything I was doing. It's amazing how little tweaks can change something so much.

Anyway!

4. The Gaffer: "It's the job that's never started as takes the longest to finish."

5. Gandalf: "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

6. Galadriel: "Maybe the paths that you shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them."

7. Legolas: "For such is the way of it, to find and lose, as it seems to those whost boat is on the running stream."

In Pace Christi,

Elyse