Is this real life?

“life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God.”--Cardinal Ratzinger

Truth from the mouth of the enemy

I have a half dozen posts rattling around in my head, most of them musing about the nature of academia, the state of education in our country and the place of Catholics in the academy.  Unfortunately, the very situation which I am trying to think through makes it impossible to find the the time to do so.  At some point I will get these thoughts down on paper in an attempt to sort through them, for by then the things to which I am responding will be quite dated.  In the meantime here is a quote which resonates strongly with my state of mind.

"Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question". To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk."

                 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

  

Quid est veritas?

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.
--James Cardinal Gibbons

The Truth of the World

We mean all sort of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.--T.S. Eliot

That Rings True

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of thecrater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! 
--Henry Miller

I don't wanna live in the Modern World

“Philosophy is not the reading of books; philosophy is not the contemplation of nature, philosophy is not the phenomenology of personal experience; philosophy is not its history,” Wilhelmsen wrote in a striking passage. “These are indispensable tools aiding a man to come to know the things that are. But that knowing is precisely knowing and nothing else. We once were given this, not too long ago, in the American Catholic academy. With a few honorable exceptions, we are given it no longer. Philosophy ultimately exists in conversation. It needs to "talked into existence." But it first must be “thought” into existence.”

Frederick Wilhelmsen, Modern Age

Remember Remember

This is an interesting passage from Alan Bennett's History Boys about the purpose of memorial day. I am not sure of the degree to which I agree with Irwin, but Irwin would appreciate his lesson taken as a thought exercise and not the truth.

Scripps: But it’s all true.

Irwin: What has that got to do with it? What has that got to do with anything? Let’s go back to 1914 and I’ll put you a different case. Try this for size. Germany does not want war and if there is an arms race it is Britain who is leading it. Though there’s no reason why we should want war. Nothing in it for us. Better stand back and let Germany and Russia fight it out while we take the imperial pickings. These are facts. Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantelpiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise that so far as the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something that by commemorating it.