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

  

Ennui

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
Sylvia Plath

Fortress of Solitude

City churches are sometimes quiet and peaceful solitudes, caves of silence where a man can seek refuge from the intolerable arrogance of the business world. One can be more alone, sometimes, in a church than in a room in one’s own house. At home, one can always be routed out and disturbed (and one should not resent this, for love sometimes demands it). But in these quiet churches one remains nameless, undisturbed in the shadows, where there are only a few chance, anonymous strangers among the vigil lights, and the curious impersonal postures of the bad statues. The very tastelessness and shabbiness of some churches makes them greater solitudes, through churches should not be vulgar. Even if they are, as long as they are dark it makes little difference.

Let there always be quiet, dark churches in which men can take refuge. Places where they can kneel in silence. Houses of God, filled with His silent presence. There, even when they do not know how to pray, at least they can be still and breathe easily. Let there be a place somewhere in which you can breathe naturally, quietly and not have to take your breath in continuous short gasps. A place where your mind can be idle, and forget its concerns, descend into silence, and worship the Father in secret.

There can be no contemplation where there is no secret.

– Thomas Merton,"New Seeds of Contemplation"

The Hungry Soul

"Our troubles are not economic or political, they are intellectual, moral, and spiritual. Our souls still crave the drama of what Tolstoy called "real life": immediately meaningful work, genuine love and intimacy, true ties to place and persons, kinship with nature, family, and community, dignity, understanding, and an openness to the divine. But real life has become nearly impossible as we have ceased to know and honor its forms. We are, of course, too sophisticated to allow ourselves to be self-deceived, to embrace any grand illusions. We would sooner quit the scene than live a noble lie, and so we continue (nervously) to applaud the intellectual demystifiers and debunkers of our traditions and mores. We fuss over our decadent art, our atonal music, and our haute cuisine. But when the lights grow dimmer and we look into the mirror, we do not like what we see: We look even to ourselves like hungry men who have been offered nothing but sawdust and tinsel." --Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul