Book Review: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick
“Lord, you gave him great talent, and he used it for your glory. You gave him great suffering, and he accepted it for your blessing…”
– Abbé Fontaine
Tag: Europe
Book Review: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
“The importance of these centuries…is not to be found in the external order they attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man—a change which can never be entirely undone expect by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
– Christopher Dawson
Book Review: The Making of Europe by Christopher Dawson
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
– Pericles, “Funeral Oration”
Book Review: The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order by Otto Von Simson
“Against the darkness of the interior, the windows are in effect grey or black, and one must go inside the church and turn round in order to see the fire of the glass catch alight; the outside is here sacrificed to the inside. Why?
Perhaps, Durtal answered himself, it’s a symbol of the soul illuminated in its innermost places, an allegory of the spiritual life…”
– The Cathedral, J.K. Huysmans
Book Review: Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson
“If I lose myself, I save myself!”
– Galahad
(HG 178)
Book Review of A History of Philosophy, Vol. I: Greece and Rome by Fr. Fredrick Copleston, S.J.
“And a vision was shewed to Paul in the night, which was a man of Macedonia standing and beseeching him, and saying: Pass over into Macedonia, and help us.”
– Acts 16:9
Book Review: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God by Jean Leclercq, O.S.B.
“The love of God is honourable wisdom.”
– Ecclesiasticus 1:14
Book Review of A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy, from Augustine to Duns Scotus by Fr. Fredrick Copleston, S.J.
“Christians believed first of all, and only afterwards, in the desire to defend, to explain and to understand what they believed, did they develop theology, and in a subordination to philosophy, theology.”
– Fr. Copleston, S.J
Book Download: The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans Translated by Clara Bell
“Everything lies contained in that building,” he went on, waving his hand to designate the church; “the scriptures, theology, the history of the human race, set forth in a broad outline. Thanks to the science of symbolism a pile of stones may be a macrocosm.”
Book Review: The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans Translated by Clara Bell
“I will worship towards thy holy temple, and I will give glory to thy name. For thy mercy, and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy holy name above all.”
– Psalm 137:2