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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Just Sipping Coffee while Sifting the Ruins of Liberalism

No time for a post. As a consolation prize, how about a few aphorisms that you can easily develop into whole posts inside the privacy of your own head?

Here is a Polanyi-esque one:

To understand is to find confirmation of something previously divined.

This one goes to what I would call our irreducibly Dual Track minds:

Reason is no substitute for faith, just as color is no substitute for sound.

In fact, one might add that a single eye is no substitute for two, since the third dimension only comes into view with the slightly different perspective of each eye. We might say that scientism is the reduction of science from two eyes to one. Conversely, add ears to science, and we have natural philosophy, or the philosophy of science. The integration of all senses and dimensions is metaphysics. The object apprehended is God.

A Catholic should simplify his life and complicate his thought.

In contrast to the liberal, who complicates his life and simplifies his thought. And the simpleminded thoughts are guaranteed to result in more complications, because the world is nonlinear and human nature is not like that.

What is philosophy for the Catholic, but the way intelligence lives its faith.

What is intelligence? It is first and foremost light. When this light illuminates faith, it is as if one finds oneself in a huge cathedral. Conversely, one can shine the same light through materialism, but one finds oneself in a cramped hovel unsuited for man.

Which is why

Words are not enough for civilization to be transmitted. When its architectural landscape crumbles, a civilization's soul deserts.

Liberals always rely on the "youth vote." But

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists

That is all. Pleasant sifting!

5 comments:

  1. A Catholic should simplify his life and complicate his thought.

    Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems as though anyone who takes his faith seriously almost cannot help but to do both of those things.

    Perhaps especially the complicating of thought.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There was a time when a westerner's day, week, month, and year was mapped out by the flow of the liturgical calendar. Heading into autumn, a Catholic gets a sniff of that. Summer is a very worldly period, at least in Maine, where the beauty and brevity of everything are overwhelming, both at the same time. Every day is a challenge for a believer, as life gets complicated by the sun and the stars and the demands that the few warm days and the out of town flocks make on us.

    As the days get shorter there is an excitement building, replacing what used to be, for me, a sadness in the air. The churches are fuller, the choirs and polyphony return, and Advent season approaches. What it must have been like to live in a world where every hour, every day was defined by such glory and purpose.

    Now that liberalism, the Wicked Witch of the West is melting, maybe we will again come to see that we are made for the liturgy, that everything else is lies and slavery.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Simplifying life and complicating thoughts can be misconstrued as depression, imo.
    If a person doesn't have the ability to communicate clearly, much misunderstanding will put a person in the psyche ward.
    I'm glad for my time there though. Learned a lot :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Depends upon who's doing the thinking -- you or the mind parasites.

    ReplyDelete
  5. True.

    I was being treated for depression before having my,what the Psychiatrist said, was a psychosis.
    When in fact, I was released from the depression in a split second.
    No one that knew me could believe that I found happiness in the circumstances I was in.
    I can only attest my experience to Christ and the Ineffable.

    ReplyDelete

I cannot talk about anything without talking about everything. --Chesterton

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite. --Schuon

The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. --Voegelin

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. --Wittgenstein