miniZibaldone

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor Oh God please make my mind clear. Please make it clean. I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You. Please help me to get down under things and find where You are. I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be. Please help all the ones I love to be free from their suffering. Please forgive me.

The Plague by Albert Camus 'In short, this epidemic has done him proud. Of a lonely man who hated loneliness it has made an accomplice. Yes, 'accomplice' is the word that fits, and doesn't he relish his complicity! He is happily at one with all around him, with their superstitions, their groundless panics, the susceptibilities of people whose nerves are always on the stretch; with their fixed idea of talking the least possible about plague and nevertheless talking of it all the time; with their abject terror at the slightest headache, now they know headache to be an early symptom of the disease; and, lastly, with their frayed, irritable sensibility that takes offense at trifling oversights and brings tears to their eyes over the loss of a trouser-button.' [. . .]  And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.  It must, however, be admitted that our fellow citizens' reactions during that...

Fear governs the world. Power by its very nature avails itself of fear. Human society was built up on fear and, therefore, it was built up on lies, for fear is the father of falsehood. [. . .]   Fear always conceals truth and truth tends to reveal itself when the experience of fear lived through, leads to the overcoming of it, to emancipation. Fear is connected not only with falsehood but also with cruelty. It is not only those who inspire fear who become cruel, but also those who feel it. The masses are not only governed through fear but the masses themselves govern by fear. Fear in the life of society is the mistrust of man; and fear is always conservative although outwardly it has at times been revolutionary in form. . . . Anxiety, insecurity of life, in the last resort give rise to fear. But what is most serious is this; fear distorts thought and hinders the knowledge of truth. . . . Fear lowers the dignity of man, the dignity of free spirit. Fear has always been regarded ...

“What I grasped most covetously in my clenched fist came apart like the rose under the vault of eternity. . .the more so for what I most treasured.” The more one loves, the more he needs Christ, because Christ saves what man loves, forever. At least from this point of view, we have to accept Him. Either we love nothing or, the more we love, the more Christ is necessary to safeguard what we love, to maintain what we love, otherwise we lose it. The day after tomorrow it’s gone. —Luigi Giussani

From the possibility of doubting everything, it does not follow that it would be good to do that. The necessity of positing the reality of the living is not a theoretical compulsion but is itself a kind of moral evidence. Whoever loves a human, whoever has friends, cannot at the same time doubt the beloved's or the friend's existence. That person must hold the other's being alive as irreducible. And when I say one cannot doubt, I do not mean a physical or logical impossibility, but a moral and,  therefore,  absolute impossibility. Insofar as I doubt his reality, I do not merely bracket somewhat the reality of the friendship; rather, I destroy it. Friendship does not allow for an ontological abstinence, for an epoche . It implies an ontological affirmation. In the case of friendship, this affirmation is not a postulate but a necessary implication. But there, where the relationship to the other does not have the intensity of friendship but is defined by the claim of each to...

[T]he slow progress of the knowledge of the human being, as compared with the splendid ascension of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and mechanics, is due to our ancestors' lack of leisure, to the complexity of the subject, and to the structure of our mind. Those obstacles are fundamental. There is no hope of eliminating them. They will always have to be overcome at the cost of strenuous effort. The knowledge of ourselves will never attain the elegant simplicity, the abstractness, and the beauty of physics. The factors that have retarded its development are not likely to vanish. We must realize clearly that the science of man is the most difficult of all sciences. —Alexis Carrel

Impossibility of abstaining and of holding myself in reserve, inability to satisfy myself, to be self-sufficient and to cut myself loose, that is what a first look at my condition reveals to me. That there is constraint and a kind of oppression in my life is not an illusion, then, nor a dialectical game, it is a brute fact of daily experience. At the principle of my acts, in the use and after the exercise of what I call my freedom, I seem to feel all the weight of necessity. Nothing in me escapes it. If I try to evade decisive initiatives, I am enslaved for not having acted. If I go ahead, I am subjugated to what I have done. In practice, no one eludes the problem of practice; and not only does each one raise it, but each, in his own way, inevitably resolves it. It is this very necessity that has to be justified. And what would it mean to justify it, if not to show that it is in conformity with the most intimate aspiration of man? —Maurice Blondel

"Art is the language of the human being. It is the language of that being, who, before being himself in the multiplicity of things or allowing himself to be absorbed by countless activities that give us the illusion of living intensely, has the capacity for wonder." Wonder, and the poetry that arises from its purpose, is for that which does not pass away. . . . Of the things of this world, only two remain, two alone: poetry and goodness, and nothing else. . . . That which is beautiful is not that what pleases today or has pleased but what should please; just as what is good is not what gives the most pleasure but what makes us better. Artist: the torrent of beauty flows through you, but you are not beauty.   Those who know how to suffer lives from vision and silence. Desire leads us to live paschally.   Beauty is mercy. —Stanislaw Grygiel

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love , except to give them endless duration . After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man. You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman. Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial , an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny . This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive . The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, ho...

Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack “philosophers,” of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. There is probably no age in history that has as many “professional philosophers” as we do, with scores of new PhDs waiting to compete for every slot that opens in the philosophy departments of scores upon scores of colleges and universities. Outside of the academy, we have an even greater array of “professional thinkers” of every sort. There is the novel phenomenon of the “think tank,” an institution whose employees are not paid to produce any tangible goods, but simply . . . to think. There is the rapidly growing sector of “white collar” labor, made up of those who work with their minds rather than with their hands, as do the “blue collar” workers. This sector includes, not only those whose thinking remains tied to industry in some respect—advertisement, management, and so forth—but those in more “liberal” fields, such...

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don't really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man's insurance system. It's never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can. Anyhow, I don't think it's a matter of wanting miracles. The miracles seem in fact to be the great embarrassment to the modern man, a kind of scandal. If the miracles could be argued away and Christ reduced to the status of a teacher, domesticated and fallible, then there'd be no problem. Anyway, to discover the Church you have to set out by yourself. The French Catholic novelists were a hero to me in this—Bloy, Bernanos, Mauriac. In philosophy, Gilson, Maritain an...

The expression "postsecular" does more than give public recognition to religious fellowships in view of the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societally desirable. The public awareness of a post-secular society also reflects a normative insight that has consequences for the political dealings of unbelieving citizens with believing citizens. In the postsecular society, there is an increasing consensus that certain phases of the "modernization of the public consciousness" involve the assimilation and the reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities. If both sides agree to understand the secularization of society as a complementary learning process, then they will also have cognitive reasons to take seriously each other's contributions to controversial subjects in the public debate. —Jürgen Habermas

It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some thing if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea  would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wron...

The blind man who goes out at night between one o'clock  and four with another blind friend. Because like that they are sure of not meeting anyone in the street. If they bump into a lamppost, they can laugh in comfort. They do. Whereas by day, other people's pity prevents them from laughing. "I ought to write," says the blind man. "But no one's interested. What interests people in a book are the signs of a sorrowful existence. And our lives are never like that."   To write, one must always remain just this side of the words (rather than go beyond them). In any case, no gossip. The "real" experience of loneliness is one of the least literary there is — a thousand miles away from the idea of loneliness that you get from books. Cf. the degradation involved in all forms of suffering. One must not give in to emptiness. Try to conquer and "fulfill." Time — don't waste it. —Albert Camus

One need think about the entire world, need worry about Christianity in Africa and Asia, and not only busy oneself with daily occasions of disobedience and errors. . . .Only what is great, what is total, and what brings everything together can help a man put up with the humiliation of care for and attention to details. If one bears within him or herself a sense of the world, then he or she can remain in jail for his or her whole life with the fantastic serenity of a cloistered monk. Yet, if one has not within him or herself the vastness that human nature demands, then tackling the daily fatigue in the name of an energy one is supposed to possess becomes a grueling and exhausting work. —Luigi Giussani

Men are not egoists. They are not able to be. Their misfortune is in not being capable of it. God is the only egoist. Man can only approach a certain shadow of love for himself when he knows how to see himself as God’s creature, loved by God, redeemed by God. Otherwise a man cannot love himself. —Simone Weil

The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident. In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them. To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators. —W. H. Auden

[arrest, freedom, prison]