The Restoration of Christian Culture

Description

First published in 1983 by Ignatius Press in San Francisco, California.

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04/27/25: 16

The restoration of reason presupposes the restoration of love, and we can only love what we know

04/27/25: 17

music – the etymological root of which means “silence,” as in “mute” and “mystery.” Music is the voice of silence,

04/27/25: 24

what you read enters directly into the intelligence and has therefore an even stronger effect. We must put our greatest effort into restoring reading in the home,

04/27/25: 25

There is nothing on the television which is not filtered through the secular establishment. “How wonderful to see the Pope!” But you didn’t see the Pope. You saw commentators interpreting the Pope through their media, not only by commentary but by selection and angle of the shots.

04/27/25: 25

If I want to see the Pope, I’ll go four thousand miles to Rome, but I shall not receive him from the hands of CBS. The whole of television is misdirected because its managers are not just non-Christians but anti-Christians.

04/27/25: 26

electronic devices are not only evil in their misdirection of the end, but in the very means themselves they are destructive, as television is, of imagination and sensibility. Electronic reconstitutions of disintegrated sounds are not real sounds any more than reconstituted, sterilized lactates are milk.

04/27/25: 26

The greatest pianist of the last generation, Joseph Hoffman, refused to make records because he said it horrified him to think someone could clone a single performance, iterating it over and over; whereas in concerts he struck each note fresh as if for the first time.

04/27/25: 31

there is the tender scene in Little Women where the French servant explains the Rosary to the incredulous but amazed and edified little Amy.

04/27/25: 32

Adolescent” comes from a Latin word meaning “to burn,” and it is certainly a burning age.

04/28/25: 37

The humanities today are dominated by a philosophy whose meditation on death concludes to the radical insignificance of human life, and they have nothing to offer us but the amelioration of pain through entertainment and technological change.

04/28/25: 38

Technology new or old is pessimism in an optimistic disguise;

Luddite?

04/28/25: 38

it proposes in self-contradiction to its essential gloom what appears to be a hopeful enterprise – the transformation of nature to human use.

04/28/25: 39

happiness consists – exactly opposite to what the technologists say – in conformity with nature, not against it or reconstructing it according to our desires.

04/28/25: 39

technology is the inevitable consequence of Epicureanism; it is the dedication of our lives to the pursuit of happiness defined as pleasure; it is the dedication of our lives entirely to ourselves, self-serving, taking everything as means, as if there were no end, no end to things or to ourselves, as if our lives have no ultimate purpose, no goal against which their progress can be measured; and so we spend these lives, as Shakespeare said, in a “waste of shame,” endlessly multiplying instruments, turning ourselves and our friends into instruments – we call it behaviorist psychology, Shakespeare called it lust: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action . . . .

Luddite!?

04/28/25: 40

anyone can see that taste insures nutrition, not the other way around. Pleasure is nature’s way of encouraging us to do necessary things in themselves not always pleasant.

04/28/25: 43

preserved by the unprejudiced democracy of its dumping grounds.

garbagology

04/28/25: 47

In Greek, nostalgia means “home-sickness.”

04/28/25: 49

Microphones amplify but, far from improving, distort the voice; Shakespeare wrote all the better for the lack of typewriters; Homer perhaps better yet for the lack of writing at all; electric lights have not improved the content of our reading, nor literacy the quality of our poetry and prose.

04/28/25: 49

technology anyone can see is killing everything worth living for?

it is?

04/28/25: 50

that families don’t gather around the stereo and sing. Families don’t draw their chairs up closer to the central heating duct. No one sings while attending to the automatic dishwasher. But husbands and wives washing and drying dishes together have actually conversed and sung; and washing clothes, as we remember from the Odyssey, is a recreation for princesses.

04/28/25: 51

Alas it is true, as Belloc said, that you can change a farmer’s son into a college student in a single semester, whereas it will take three generations to change a college student into a farmer.

04/28/25: 52

John Dewey taught that schools are instruments of social change rather than of education, and that is one reason why Johnny neither reads nor writes nor dreams nor thinks; but real schools are places precisely of un-change, of the permanent things.

04/29/25: 57

A test of your own good work would be to think what you will say some day to your grandchildren when they ask, “What did you do in your day, Grandpa?”

04/29/25: 60

To follow Christ all the way as a religious, or halfway, making up the whole with a husband or wife in marriage, is to participate in the great Sacrament reenacted at Mass. Sacrament means sacrifice: it is a participation in the work of the Cross.

04/29/25: 61

The chairman of one of the largest state-controlled corporations in the world wrote a best-seller just before his recent death in which he advocated not just the obvious desirability from the human point of view, but even the economic necessity, of returning to Catholic social principles to save the dying economy of socialist England. E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful is chiefly remarkable for its hardheaded realism; the author is not an academic dreamer but a very successful business man; it is a stunning

04/29/25: 61

E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful

no: He wrote foreword to Dempsey sj Usury that mentioned Duhem and article that was in part ginst CŁm‘s seeming Luddism
Also, this is remniscent of Mĩses inst book arguing for decentralization and succession

04/29/25: 62

witness to the timeliness, urgency and practicality of the Catholic Agenda in the order of immediate ends.

04/29/25: 62

We shall never find economic, domestic or political and social security contra naturam, in a society contraceptive of children and of everything natural and real.

04/29/25: 64

Without publicity or the raising of large amounts of money, because grace is not visible or audible in itself and is very poor, just one small house of a few virgins consecrated to the total life of prayer will reinvigorate the spiritual life of a dying town.

04/29/25: 65

They pray eight hours, sleep eight hours and divide the other eight between physical work and recreation. The second degree is the mixed life in the active orders and secular priesthood, which is still primarily devoted to prayer. These pray four hours, sleep eight, work eight – preaching, teaching, caring for the sick and poor – and have four hours for recreation. The third degree is for those in the married state (or single life) who offer a tithe of their time for prayer – about two and one-half hours per day – with eight hours for work, eight for sleep and the remaining five and a half for recreation with the family.

04/29/25: 65

Every layman owes his tithe of time – two and onehalf hours per day!

04/29/25: 65

In the order of work, I really do recommend reading Small is Beautiful and if you have access to a good bookstore or library, the works of those great crusaders of the last generation: Hilaire Belloc, whose pamphlet The Restoration of Property is the best Catholic economic and social manifesto in English,

04/29/25: 66

quit the absurd and unhealthy exhibitionism of jogging.

04/29/25: 66

unless we restore order in work and recreation of course there will never be time for prayer.

04/29/25: 66

Work needs prayer as dry cracked leather needs oil; prayer fills the pores of work and makes it flexible, useful to God.

04/29/25: 67

St. Philip Neri, when someone asked him for a reading list, replied, “Read anything by anyone with the word Saint in front of his name!”

04/30/25: 75

Malinowsky – describes savages in Melanesia, cut off from the mainland parent culture for a hundred years, worshipping farm implements which they hung in trees, no longer having any idea of their function. The theology of St. Thomas has become something like that, a superstition among twentieth-century Catholics, including conservatives and traditionalists, his formulas, like rakes and hoes, hanging in our theological ginkgo trees; and it is no wonder that the younger generation has decided it is time to junk them.

neoscholasticism

05/01/25: 82

St. Thomas holds a special place among theologians analogous to that of the Blessed Virgin among saints: he holds the mean between dogma and opinion, what we might call hyper-doxy, as Mary by hyperdulia holds the mean between veneration and worship.

05/01/25: 83

I must emphasize the fact, too, because it isn’t sufficiently admitted, that all studies at colleges and universities are now technical, even the study of literature, music and art.

05/01/25: 86

When a child looks up to learn astronomy at the city planetarium, he spontaneously invokes a strange new psalm: The ceiling proclaims the glory of man!

05/01/25: 88

When a brilliant young lady asked the greatest scholar in the world at the close of the fourth century where she could get the best education, St. Jerome replied, You can’t because the world is through. And he advised her to enter a convent.

05/02/25: 95

Ausculta, O fili, præcepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui.

05/02/25: 96

Ausculta, O fili, præcepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui, et admonitionem pii patris libenter excipe.

05/02/25: 96

the purpose of a university is not research but friendship.

05/02/25: 97

Ausculta, O fili, præcepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui, et admonitionem pii patris libenter excipe, et efficaciter comple.

05/02/25: 100

the vast majority of men are farmers.

05/02/25: 100

According to the Gos­pel, Deus agricola est, God is a farmer.

05/02/25: 110

It is not the loss of faith among the people so much as the disintegration of reason among the managing classes, the judges, writers, teachers and especially the clergy.

Fr GL malady of the intellect

05/02/25: 112

when the gods offered him either truth or the search for truth, chose the search! Good as reading the Great Books is, even the best Great Books will fail without a certain rule of truth by which the conflicting ideas in the books can be judged true or false.

05/02/25: 116

The semi­nar as a means of learning

05/02/25: 117

these seminars slide down into bull-sessions in which the strongest bull or the most artful dodger wins; and if such sessions become habitual, they result in arrogant skepticism, which is where Plato’s Academy ended.

05/02/25: 117

where does “class dis­cussion” come in? Well, it isn’t on the list at all, and not because the ancients didn’t think of it, but because they rejected

05/02/25: 119

The chief reason why sex is tearing itself to shreds in all the violent varieties of induced sterility is that very few are leading lives of con­secrated, fecund virginity;

05/02/25: 121

if you leave out God, the existential, actual cause of everything, you are not just in ignorance but have committed what St. Thomas calls the intellectual sin of certain malice.

05/02/25: 121

Questions about curricula are reducible to the final questions of philosophy, which are religious.

05/02/25: 124

The best teachers in any university rank almost without exception in the lower half of the pay scale, while the worst occupy prestigious chairs.

05/02/25: 124

You can’t reform the means until you know the end and that is finally the religious question.

05/02/25: 127

when you concentrate on man alone, then God becomes alien.

05/02/25: 128

Admit that you are less than angels or you will think yourself more than God.

05/02/25: 129

anthropos, a combination of ana, meaning “upward,” and tropos, meaning “turn”; man is the upward-turning animal who walks erect,

05/02/25: 130

Virgil uses the Latin vertere, “to turn,” in the opening lines of his great poem on farming, the Georgics,

05/02/25: 131

houses without interior walls in them, are all signs of the slow, soft movement toward that second Fall,

pace Frank L. Wriɣt

05/02/25: 132

If farming reflects Divine attributes, farmers through their work become something like God.

so can scientists

05/02/25: 137

St. Odilo of Cluny, her mercy and her nature are so united that when she was assumed into Heaven a physical shock went through the universe and the pains of Hell were momentarily suspended; and he thinks that in commemoration there is some degree of respite for the damned each year on the Feast of the Assumption.

05/02/25: 137

St. Alphonsus Liguori says that when the Bridegroom cries to his Beloved in the Canticles, “Feed your goats!” it means the Holy Ghost, who is the Groom, gave to Mary, His bride, the power to feed even sinners with his saving grace.

05/02/25: 139

Christian Humanism, more properly Christian Culture, is the human use of instruments in the service of the Blessed Virgin Mary.