The Death of Christian Culture

Description

What is Christian culture? -- The perennial heresy -- Eastward ho! hum -- The real absence -- The emperor's new literature -- Be ye therefore perfect -- To each his own -- The risk of certainty -- The emperor of ice cream -- Dark night of the church -- Black but beautiful

First published in 1978 by Arlington House in New Rochelle, New York.

4. The Real Absence

04/18/254. The Real Absence : 65

We have come to expect a spiritual, like an artistic, event to be greater than reality; and by the same process, have come to think reality a paltry thing.

04/18/254. The Real Absence : 67

Guénon, The Reign of Quantity, London, 1953;

5. The Emperor’s New Literature

04/20/255. The Emperor’s New Literature : 79

George Gissing, in a remarkable and largely overlooked novel published in 1891 called New Grub Street, prophetically satirizes the triumph of the new ignorance:

describes twitter!

04/20/255. The Emperor’s New Literature : 80

Whelpdale says, “I would have the paper address itself to the quartereducated . . . the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools . . . young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention.”

Twitter!

7. To Each His Own

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 107

Justice in the popular imagination is that minimum amount of coercion necessary to permit freedom.

:(

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 108

European philosophical tradition teaches that this common usage of the people is actually a reflection of immutable Natural Law, which, Christianity says, is ultimately rooted in the will of God.

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 112

the word student means “zealous” in Latin

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 113

If you get someone into science, philosophy, or literature, if you get him into Plato or Newton or Shakespeare, he will see for himself why men have fought and died for civilization.

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 115

If you are liberal, if you really believe in Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, the Bill of Rights, the Rights of Man – if you believe that justice is freedom and freedom to let men do what they want – it is absolutely necessary to see that these freedoms can only be maintained by members of the human race. The rights of man means at least the rights of man, not anything less.

Is he advocating this‽
He did quote Voltaire positively before. Such "freedom of speech" is insanity.

04/23/257. To Each His Own : 115

Every man has the right to speak, to write, to teach the truth as he sees it. That is precisely what we must defend.

hmm... 🤔

04/24/257. To Each His Own : 118

The greatest evil in the world is to do wrong without being punished.

04/24/257. To Each His Own : 119

It is not really capital punishment that bothers sentimentalists, though they use it as the cutting edge of their argument. They object to punishment itself;

04/24/257. To Each His Own : 121

The primary purpose of war is retributive justice – punishment inflicted on nations that have injured innocent victims.

Not pax?

04/24/257. To Each His Own : 122

St. Thomas Aquinas in his treatise on Charity in the Summa Theologica: Question 40, De Bello – “On War.” Note that war is taken as a species of Charity.

8. The Risk of Certainty

04/24/258. The Risk of Certainty : 133

We must distinguish contraries, between which there is a mean, from contradictories, between which there is none.

contraries have a mean?

10. Dark Night of the Church

04/25/2510. Dark Night of the Church : 153

Those who seek God by themselves in an undisciplined private monasticism “live in their own sheepfold and not the Lord’s,” says St. Benedict.

04/25/2510. Dark Night of the Church : 162

Of course he is the priest at whose feet, that dark October night of 1845, Newman fell, to be received into the Church.

Dominican or Passionist converted Newman?

04/25/2510. Dark Night of the Church : 163

Newman delivered a famous sermon on the theme of Father Dominic’s whole life.

11. Black but Beautiful

04/26/2511. Black but Beautiful : 174

Plato said that all philosophy is a meditation on death.