"...for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and widest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph..."
T.S. Eliot: from 'Francis Herbert Bradley' (1927)
"...For Eliot, words had begun to lose their precision—not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Our modern ways of speaking no longer enable us to "take a word and derive the world from it": on the contrary, they veil the world, since they convey no lived response to it. They are mere counters in a game of cliché, designed to fill up the silence, to conceal the void which has come upon us as the old gods have departed from their haunts among us.
That is why modern ways of thinking are not, as a rule, orthodoxies, but heresies—a heresy being a truth that has been exaggerated into falsehood, a truth in which we have taken refuge, so to speak, investing in it all our unexamined anxieties and expecting from it answers to questions which we have not troubled ourselves to understand. In the philosophies that prevail in modern life—utilitarianism, pragmatism, behaviorism—we find that "words have a habit of changing their meaning. . .or else they are made, in a most ruthless and piratical manner, to walk the plank." The same is true, Eliot implies, whenever the humanist heresy takes over: whenever we treat man as God, and so believe that our thoughts and our words need be measured by no other standard but themselves..."Read it all here
"...Because over the last few decades, the Corporation has become a mouthpiece for the sort of people it employs: young, trendy Lefties, disproportionately gay and from ethic minorities, who see nothing to be learned from institutions, from history, and from religion in particular. (Unless it’s Islam, of course. I’ve lost count of the number of gushing documentaries about the Prophet Mohammed churned out over the last few years, replete with “authentic” pronunciation of Arabic terms and the occasional “peace be upon him” thrown in for good measure.)..."Personally I don't think the BBC has a specific anti-religious agenda - I've always found their religious broadcasting personnel a joy to work with. The problem is one of corporate ethos - a matter of clear institutional bias. The kind of people the Corporation tends to employ, nationally if not always in the regions, as presenters, production staff and managers, if not part of a well heeled, well-connected metropolitan elite sharing a common set of unquestioned liberal values, tend to be heavily weighted in favour of ethnic minorities or those with minority sexual preferences. There are very clear taboos as to who or what may be subject to criticism, leaving the Christian faith, those whose political views are right of centre, and those who are unfashionable enough not to share the prevailing social liberalism as among the only acceptable targets. There seems to be a complete lack of concern (not, I think, awareness) that there may be people out there who share neither the Corporation's views nor it's values. It approaches the level of contempt.
"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day by day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be for ever violated with impunity."
Boris Pasternak: 'Doctor Zhivago'
"Accordingly, at a certain period, when he had nothing except his arms and his simple military dress, in the middle of winter, a winter which had shown itself more severe than ordinary, so that the extreme cold was proving fatal to many, he happened to meet at the gate of the city of Amiens a poor man destitute of clothing. He was entreating those that passed by to have compassion upon him, but all passed the wretched man without notice, when Martin, that man full of God, recognized that a being to whom others showed no pity, was, in that respect, left to him. Yet, what should he do? He had nothing except the cloak in which he was clad, for he had already parted with the rest of his garments for similar purposes. Taking, therefore, his sword with which he was girt, he divided his cloak into two equal parts, and gave one part to the poor man, while he again clothed himself with the remainder. Upon this, some of the by-standers laughed, because he was now an unsightly object, and stood out as but partly dressed. Many, however, who were of sounder understanding, groaned deeply because they themselves had done nothing similar. They especially felt this, because, being possessed of more than Martin, they could have clothed the poor man without reducing themselves to nakedness. In the following night, when Martin had resigned himself to sleep, he had a vision of Christ arrayed in that part of his cloak with which he had clothed the poor man. He contemplated the Lord with the greatest attention, and was told to own as his the robe which he had given. Ere long, he heard Jesus saying with a clear voice to the multitude of angels standing round -- "Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe." The Lord, truly mindful of his own words (who had said when on earth -- "Inasmuch as ye have done these things to one of the least of these, ye have done them unto me"), declared that he himself had been clothed in that poor man; and to confirm the testimony he bore to so good a deed, he condescended to show him himself in that very dress which the poor man had received. After this vision the sainted man was not puffed up with human glory, but, acknowledging the goodness of God in what had been done, and being now of the age of twenty years, he hastened to receive baptism. He did not, however, all at once, retire from military service, yielding to the entreaties of his tribune, whom he admitted to be his familiar tent-companion. For the tribune promised that, after the period of his office had expired, he too would retire from the world. Martin, kept back by the expectation of this event, continued, although but in name, to act the part of a soldier, for nearly two years after he had received baptism."from the Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus (c. 360 - 420-25)
"....By this means Eutyches, who seemed to be deserving of honour under the title of Presbyter, is now shown to be exceedingly thoughtless and sadly inexperienced, so that to him also we may apply the prophet’s words, “He refused to understand in order to act well: he meditated unrighteousness on his bed.” What, indeed, is more unrighteous than to entertain ungodly thoughts, and not to yield to persons wiser and more learned? But into this folly do they fall who, when hindered by some obscurity from apprehending the truth, have recourse, not to the words of the Prophets, not to the letters of the Apostles, nor to the authority of the Gospels, but to themselves; and become teachers of error, just because they have not been disciples of the truth. For what learning has he received from the sacred pages of the New and the Old Testament, who does not so much as understand the very beginning of the Creed? And that which, all the world over, is uttered by the voices of all applicants for regeneration, is still not grasped by the mind of this aged man. If, then, he knew not what he ought to think about the Incarnation of the Word of God, and was not willing, for the sake of obtaining the light of intelligence, to make laborious search through the whole extent of the Holy Scriptures, he should at least have received with heedful attention that general Confession common to all, whereby the whole body of the faithful profess that they “believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary.” By which three clauses the engines of almost all heretics are shattered. For when God is believed to be both “Almighty” and “Father,” it is proved that the Son is everlasting together with himself, differing in nothing from the Father, because he was born as “God from God,” Almighty from Almighty, Coeternal from Eternal; not later in time, not inferior in power, not unlike him in glory, not divided from him in essence, but the same Only-begotten and Everlasting Son of an Everlasting Parent was “born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary.” This birth in time in no way detracted from, in no way added to, that divine and everlasting birth; but expended itself wholly in the work of restoring man, who had been deceived; so that it might both overcome death, and by its power “destroy the devil who had the power of death.” For we could not have overcome the author of sin and of death, unless he who could neither be contaminated by sin, nor detained by death, had taken upon himself our nature, and made it his own. For, in fact, he was “conceived of the Holy Ghost” within the womb of a Virgin Mother, who bore him as she had conceived him, without loss of virginity..."from the 'Tome' * of Pope St Leo the Great, translated by William Bright.
Almighty God, who dost call thine elect from every nation,
and dost show forth thy glory in their lives:grant that, following the example of the Saints of Wales
and strengthened by their fellowship,we may be fruitful in good works to the glory of thy Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[The Collect for the Saints of Wales from the Church in Wales Prayer Book of 1984]
from The Matter of Wales by Jan Morris (O.U.P. 1984)"Near Devauden, in Gwent, there stands on an isolated hump the tiny church of the Holy Cross at Kilgwrrwg, where the hermit Gwrrwg established his cell........ It is the most tranquil place in the world. A circular churchyard surrounds the building, there is an ancient crooked cross among the trees, a wooden boot-remover stands in the porch, for it can be a muddy clamber up there, and through the roof the ivy creeps. The Church is lit only by candles, from a candelabra in the chancel, and it stands in absolute silence, far from all traffic in a bowl of the low Gwent hills, looking westward to the distant outlines of the Black Mountains, Pen-y-Fal and Holy Skirrid..."
"...Don’t get me wrong. Heresy is stupefyingly boring. Just off the top of your head, which would you call the more interesting story even if you didn’t believe it: that the Creator of the entire universe became a human being on an out of the way planet in the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, performed miraculous deeds, changed lives and hearts, encountered opposition from the Powers that Be, was betrayed, arrested, subjected to a kangaroo court and murdered in the most heinous way imaginable, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and now offers eternal ecstasy to the miserable species that killed him, or,Read it all here - particularly if you're a fan of G.K. Chesterton
Jesus was a dead rabbi with a girlfriend. Jesus said that niceness was nice. Jesus was pretty much indistinguishable from a commentator on TV who urges bromides about gender equality and tariff reform..."
"… The danger of ‘service,’ as an ideal, is that it fosters the spirit of patronage: the glory of worship is to elicit the grace of humility. Without humility there can be no service worth the name; patronizing service is self-destructive - it may be the greatest of all disservices. Hence to serve his fellows at all - to avoid doing them harm greater even than the good he proposed to confer on them - a man must find a place for worship in his life. The truth is not that worship (as the advocate of action allowed us to assert) will help him to serve better. The alternative lies not between service of a better and worse kind; it lies between service and no service at all. If we would attempt to do good with any sure hope that it will prove good and not evil, we must act in the spirit of humility; and worship alone can make us humble. There is no other course…"
"…. It is not likely that such a apologia would satisfy the heroes of Christian saintliness whose ideals have been considered in preceding chapters. With a faith which the modern world finds it hard to share, they started from the conviction that the life of heaven would be more akin to adoration rather than to labour. ‘Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium’ is their definition of heaven; and where desire and achievement are simultaneous, there is no longer any place for effort, as we understand it. But there is still, and always, a place for contemplation. Service here on earth is no more than a preparation for the contemplation of heaven, and in heaven contemplation is the only service required of the redeemed. In earthly worship man does not merely secure for service than which alone can make it serviceable; he anticipates the essential and all-engrossing activity of eternal life."
Kenneth E Kirk: The Vision of God (1931) from Lecture VIII
