✍ Canadian writer, David Warren opines on “The Manhattan Incident” and predicts on “The Inevitable”.
✨ It is best if politicians do not take care of anything important. God arranged the world to be self-governing, even when there is no government, as there is not among all the non-human creatures. Each has been inwardly programmed to know, at least approximately, what it is about, and then to go about, eating or being eaten. Animals and vegetables: there is food to go around! And humans have (in each individual case) a conscience installed, to guide their behaviour, although this still small divine voice can only be heard when we are listening. -David Warren
by David Warren, 11/7/23
“The modernists in the Church believe that they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity. They have forgotten that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.”
This is from the Scholia (to an Implicit Text) of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, 1913–1994, the incomparable Colombian reactionary, previously mentioned in these Idleposts. I am just reading him again, for he is always topical, and better, he can be topical without ever referring to the news. He is habitual in stating the truth, plainly and persistently in a few words. That was the length of his ambition: he did not try for any kind of fame, and would not have been published, even in the few copies he had printed, had he not inherited considerable wealth, and had just the tiniest wee hint of narcissism. (Like me, except for the inheritance.) He never found the time to attend a university, though he helped to found one. He lived in a house wherein he collected a few tens of thousands of books, and for his research, he read them — in most of the modern European languages, and Latin and Greek.
The quotation above is rattling through my head, almost painfully. It explains, for instance, what is happening in Rome. We live in a time when the Christianity that influenced our minds through recent generations, has slipped almost out of circulation. Our 'clerisy' has, at its best and most inspiring, even at its most sincere, discovered a method by which Christianity will not recover.
The human Christ; the biological, fleshly Christ, who isn’t there: We cannot “recover” what was always beyond our knowledge.
But it will recover, for the reality is, Christ is God. Secretly, we still know this.
"In the long game, of human history, all the men of action are failures, and only the Saints leave legacies which moths, rust, thieves, and intellectuals are unable to corrupt."
-David Warren
tail-feathers reblogged
Robert Tavener
“A French newspaper [..] today both cheered & disheartened me, when it described Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as “the last Christian monarch of Europe.” This may in fact be a fair representation of “public opinion” but God in these matters ought to be consulted.” -David Warren
Newspaper Hats is a lithograph by British printmaker, Robert Tavener (1920-2004)
🗝 As Baudelaire says, “Everyone believes in God, although nobody loves Him; no one believes in the Devil, although his smell is everywhere.”
Baudelaire is often misunderstood. He is taken as almost the inventor of modernity in the arts, whereas, his concern was to confute it.
Many centuries before, Augustine anticipated Baudelaire’s simplification, and explained that the Devil cannot be blamed for all sin. In fact men (a term which used to include the women) sometimes committed sins which they had themselves devised. (This is what made them so Original.) He was among the first to openly resist the morbidity that endangers all Christian thought, on the subject of Sin. It is almost as bad as the opposite obsession, which we might characterize as psychotic: to feel no guilt at all.
This is a Christian challenge: to contemplate sin in the lightness of one’s being, finding it deeply implanted in oneself but neither in despair nor indifference.
-David Warren
tail-feathers reblogged
no-not-that-georgia-deactivated
All over the world, the potential for agriculture is actually high, no matter the supply of fertilizers and transport. This is because human labour can replace technology, and always will, except where the people are lazy or sluggish. For hunger, I like to opine, is the great motivator to economic activity. -David Warren
One must be ready, in this world of sin and death, for all one’s best intentions to collapse, and all one’s reasonable calculations to go wrong. We might especially hesitate to gamble with other people’s lives.
-David Warren
I was dawdling this morning, somewhat wearied by the current war hysteria. The mass media cover, at most, one topic at a time, with their round-the-clock blaring. This changes only when a new and more saleable hysteria is selected to replace it. There are currently several wars in progress around the world, of adequate savagery, where human misery may be found, and countless refugees flee for their lives. Sadism may be observed at many locations. But a law of media is strictly “one war at a time.” Something like the Aristotelian unities govern their portrayal of news events. The emotional possibilities of a sensation must not be diffused, in their dramatic unskillfulness; journalism is the opposite of an art form. It is the first draught of every historical fraud. -David Warren, March 14, 2022
The Canadian convoy “is a reminder of the importance of “essential workers” — and that they cannot be identified by government agents and census-takers. For they are called to their stations, spontaneously, by Christ.”
The world is the world, and this applies to every ecclesial denomination as to all forms of human authority. Corruption enters from the start, and hypocrisy everywhere to hide it. One shouldn’t be surprised at this. For the surprise will turn to cynicism, and cynicism kills.
Allow for human nature, as it has always been; as it is incidentally reported even among the glorious characters in the Bible. And do not fail to find analogies to the worst sort of moral behavior, not in other humans, but in oneself.
-David Warren, December 31, 2021
The truth about ourselves:
“America was our champion, but the West as a whole has proved itself unequal to the barbaric will.”
-Excerpt from this essay by David Warren
[T]he worst evils must be stopped: every decent person can know that. But the Good cannot be compelled, by men. It must come to them by Grace. It comes as life itself came to this planet: by inspiration, and in a seeming infinite variety of forms; like a psalm out of the desert.
David Warren
“Evil must be opposed because it is evil, good must be advanced because it is good, and the wise can know the difference. There can be no glib, superficial “progress”; only a way to Heaven, and a way to Hell.”
-David Warren
“The medieval statuary, still clinging to cathedrals in protected locations, is strangely exhilarating. This is not just because it is older, although the patina helps. It is because the “uplift” rises above the squalid.”
-David Warren
The world cannot be fixed
As Confucius would say (not to be confused with Xi Jinping), “Don’t hop on the long chariot.” This is among my mottoes from The Book of Songs, and the moral is, “Don’t concern yourself with the sorrows of the world. …
“You will only cover yourself with dust.”
It is the advice I’ve been neglecting in recent Idleposts.
Or put this another way: “The World Cannot be Fixed.” I know this sounds like a highly unsuccessful James Bond movie title, but it plays well in the cinema of my own mind.
The “long chariot” is the world of policy, or politics, where we are endlessly trying to fix the chariot: to keep it moving, or get it moving again. But the world doesn’t work on policy. In the broadest sense, it works on prayer; if I may define prayer so broadly that it includes ancestor worship. Its principles are those of celestial mechanics. It doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, it turns.
And it will continue turning. It didn’t stop when it was told to stop, and since it is already moving, it cannot be restarted, either.
-David Warren