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: faith
Trobadourism: The Idolization of Romance and Its Decadent Consequences, Past and Present
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
– William Shakespeare
Postmodern Pygmalion
“‘Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland’: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso — not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.”
– Plotinus
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
Right and Might: The Reign of Christ the King and National Identity (Part II)
“Now it is God who is, for you and me, of a truth the ‘measure of all things,’ much more truly than, as they say, ‘man.’” – Plato
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: Lord of the World by Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson
“And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh, and he is now already in the world.”
– 1 John 4:3
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
Light and Darkness
“I am the light of the world: he that followeth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
– John 8:12
Book Review: Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson
“If I lose myself, I save myself!”
– Galahad
(HG 178)