“‘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
“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
The soul, the mind, needs food and exercise just as the body does; but the food of the mind is not bread, and its exercise is not games. It feeds on visions of truth and beauty as supplied by the master word artists in literature; its exercise is to wrestle with ideas enshrined in noble books, even as Jacob wrestled all the night with the angel; and its reward is, like Jacob’s, to receive a joyful blessing at the dawn.
“Even if Epictetus did see the way clearly, he only told men: ‘You are on the wrong track.’ He shows us that there is another, but he does not lead us there. The right way is to want what God wants. Christ alone leads to it. Via veritas…”
– Blaise Pascal (Pensées, fragment 466)
“If I lose myself, I save myself!”
– Galahad
(HG 178)
“These wall-stones are wondrous —
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.”
– “The Ruin”, an Anglo-Saxon poem by an anonymous author
“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.”
“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
“No, the more I think of her,” he cried, “the more I think her prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures, scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly dispensary of souls…”