Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
The one and the many
Land, skill, and markets are eternal ways of economizing, of increasing the peace. And you cannot afford to divide history in this artificial manner and say, “This is old and obsolete, and this is now the type we do today.”
Gentlemen: capitalism, feudalism, and hermitism . . . they are equally obsolete today, all three. And they are equally inevitable today as partial solutions. That is, you can no longer afford to say there is one economy, one type of economy. . . . It is a mania to believe [that] because there is one God, there must also be one economy. One God and many economies. That’s how God created the universe. It’s ridiculous! I mean, how can anybody be a capitalist, and how can anybody be a socialist or anybody a communist; only a monomaniac can be this who mistakes the unity of the divine government and the creation of the universe with his hobby and says, “My hobby is the only way of running things.” . . .
The only answer to Communism is that there is no panacea in economics. There are innumerable ways of doing things. The earlier you wake up to this, the more you can laugh off all these issues. Communism is for a normal person not an issue, because it wants to idolize one way of doing things. And how can any normal person think that this earthly matter should be treated in one way only? God is one, and you are many, and the elements of the earth are an infinity—an infinity. And every one thing has to be taken care of in a different manner. Money has to be treated in one way, and electricity has been treated in another way. And the . . . garden has to be treated in
another way. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
No, not one (2)
Resorting to a psychological explanation [of Peter’s denial of Jesus] is less innocent than it appears. In refusing the mimetic interpretation, in looking for the failure of Peter in purely individual causes, we attempt to demonstrate, unconsciously of course, that in Peter’s place we would have responded differently; we would not have denied Jesus. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees for an older version of the same ploy when he sees them build tombs for the prophets that their fathers killed. The spectacular demonstrations of piety toward the victims of our predecessors frequently conceal a wish to justify ourselves at their expense: “If we had lived in the time of our fathers,” the Pharisees say, “we would not have joined them in spilling the blood of the prophets.”
The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is reenacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment. (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 20)
No, not one
When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions.
The disadvantage of prohibitions, however, is that they don’t finally play their role in a satisfying manner. Their primarily negative character, as St. Paul well understood, inevitably provokes in us the mimetic urge to transgress them. The best way of preventing violence does not consist in forbidding objects, or even rivalistic desire, as the tenth commandment does, but in offering to people the model that will protect them from mimetic rivalries rather than involving them in these rivalries.
Often we believe we are imitating the true God, but we are really imitating only false models of the independent self that cannot be wounded or defeated. Far from making ourselves independent and autonomous, we give ourselves over to never ending rivalries.
The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.
We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration mimetically intensifies, the less aware it is of its own mimetic nature. The more “proud” and “egoistic” we are, the more enslaved we become to our mimetic models. (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 14-15)
Less
[T]he one thing you must know [as a leader] is that you have been exalted into a position, you see, of privilege, because of an historical chain of events, which dignifies you beyond your own merits. . . . [Y]ou know that you are not up to the occasion. You are less than the quality history bestows on you. . . .
Ceremonies warn all men that they are less than the office that has fallen upon [them]. . . . No man is self-made, because the fact that anybody who is willing to listen to you comes to you only as a gift, you see, of the historical process by which you happen to have something the other man needs, or the other man is asking for. The fact that he can speak to you is already something, you see, that is not of your own making. . . .
It is, however, true, gentlemen, that through ceremony . . . and title, and emblems, and symbols, and uniforms, and costumes, we are entering the halls of the past, as in great architecture. Architecture, you see, reflects, of course, this tremendous hall of antiquity out of which we come, and out of which we receive our meaning, our name, our status, our profession, our calling; everything we have: our property. . . .
Honor is reciprocal, gentlemen; love is reciprocal; work is reciprocal; and war is reciprocal. Life is not given you—to us—to individuals. If you analyze these four situations, . . . you will find the miracle of our existence is that it is each time a social birth. Society, the group, gives birth to us in our honor, in our love, in our work, and . . . in our struggles. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
Foundation
To live means to say, “Good–bye,” and to found on this good–bye a new beginning.
You are all too sentimental, and you hang back and you think that you at one time were wonderful. You should only have seen you when you were nine. Terrible brats. I hope you are nicer now. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
The soul is my captain
Nobody is captain of his soul, gentlemen, or he has no soul. Soul is your part in God. And how can you be the captain of your soul, the one thing with which you are not yourself, but better than yourself? It’s a fantastic notion. . . .
You can be a captain of a ship. You can be captain of a thing, you see, which you direct by your mind. But if the soul is anything, it is your captain. If . . . man has a soul, then certainly nothing else is your captain, but your soul. So if the sentence then makes any sense, it would have to read, “The soul is my captain.” That makes sense. But to say, “I am the captain of my soul” means the execution of this soul. It means exactly that . . . it can’t grow. It means exactly that I—I, with my will, my purpose, my aim, my plan, my master plan, my science— that I plan my soul. . . .
That’s what we have today. It is a fantastic sentence. When you begin to think of this, you don’t wonder why people are today all crazy, and lunatics. “I am the captain of my soul” condemns a man not only to . . . loneliness and isolation, but it condemns him even to supervise his only growing point, his soul, from the point of his . . . mind. . . . Mr. Freud tells [you] how to treat your soul. . . instead of allowing your soul to tell you off. Who is master in the house? The devil of your mind or the soul?
Now, gentlemen, you have to decide this . . . So what about it? My mind can never contain me. I’m more than my mind. Tomorrow I’ll have a different mind; I’ll have a change of mind. Gentlemen, the decision is whether the mind, which is fixed, shall govern growth, or whether it shall not. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Circulation of Thought, 1949)
Religion and culture
Peter Leithart opens his recent book, Delivered From the Elements of the World, with the following observation:
No purely secular society exists or has ever existed. Define religion how you will: As a matter of ultimate concern, as belief in something transcendent, as the organizing master narrative for history and human lives, as a set of practices. However religion is defined, all institutions, structures and patterns of behavior have religious features. All cultures are infused with values and actions that have religious dimensions and overtones. Whether they name the name of a known God or not, societies and cultures are always patterned by some ultimate inspiration and aspiration.
By the same token, all religions have social aspects; they are all embedded in and rely on patterns of interaction among persons. Even the retreat of a solitary ascetic into the desert is a social act, since it is a retreat from social relation. And all religions deal with artifacts, symbols and rituals that might as well be called “cultural.”
Religion is not the “soul” of culture, nor culture the “body” of religion. Religions have bodies, and cultures have souls. It is rather the case that in dealing with any group of human beings, we are always dealing with socio-religious or religio-cultural entities. The common contemporary rhetoric of conflicts between religion and politics obscures the reality. Conflicts are never between politics and religion. Conflicts are always between rivals that are both religious and both political.
Islamic terrorists kill themselves and innocent bystanders for overtly religious reasons. In response, the United States sends troops to the Middle East to make the world safe from terrorism, but also to sacrifice themselves to preserve and advance America’s values, freedom and democracy. To say that the terrorist and the Marine are both motivated by religious values is not to make a moral equivalence. But we misread the times unless we recognize that the war on terror is a religious war on both sides.
We think ourselves all secular, all grown-up, but we have our taboos, our pollution avoidances, our instincts of recoil and disgust. Not so long ago, many found homosexual sodomy disgusting. In a matter of decades, the disgust has turned inside out, and now those who consider homosexual conduct sinful and unnatural are outcasts, treated with contempt. The freedom to engage in any form of consensual sex is now considered a right, and a sacred one, as inviolable as the sacred precincts of an ancient temple. (Delivered From the Elements of the World, 11-12)
Irrevocable
Chesterton writes of Utopia, romance, and oaths:
I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. You could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing. And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.
All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. “You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.” (Orthodoxy, ch. 7)
Or screenwriters
Chesterton writes:
though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. (Orthodoxy, ch. 2)
I gotta have my orange juice. 
Light
with 2 comments
Speaking of how the effects of the gospel can dissipate, René Girard writes:
Written by Scott Moonen
May 27, 2017 at 2:56 pm
Posted in Books, Commentary, Quotations