�There are two powers on earth: the sacred authority of the pontiff, and the imperial power. Of these two, the responsibility of the priest is the graver, since at the Last Judgment, priests must give an account not only for themselves but also for kings� (Pope Gelasius). [Gelasianism]

�Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.�

�I urge the advocates of artificial methods to consider the consequences. Any large use of the methods is likely to result in the dissolution of the marriage bond and in free love.�

"History . . . is indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"

"It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right."

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them to become what they are capable of being."

"The great people of the earth today are people who pray. I do not mean those who talk about prayer nor those who say they believe in prayer nor yet those who can explain prayer. I mean those men who take time to pray. Those men haven�t got the time but they take the time from something else."

�Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect� (Why Catholic?).

"The faith for which human reason gives proof has no merit."

"When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice" (CCC 2446).

"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime" (1914).

"Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. For the longest time we didn�t pay the cultural price for that because we had the numbers, the social zeal, and the spiritual passion for the gospel. But today we are beginning to pay the cultural price. And you can see that most evangelicals simply don�t think. . . . It has always been a sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls. . . . We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend[ing] that this is something other than what it is�that is, sin. . . . Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ."

(Cardinal Newman and Apologetics. Oslo: Naper Boktrykkeri, 1952.)

"This conviction that truth can be found, ultimately rests on faith in an almighty and merciful creator who does not and will not let his creatures be deceived. Belief in truth ultimately depends on belief in God, and the existence of God implies the existence of truth" (18-19).

"It is unreasonable to seek mathematical evidence for religion, [for] this is rather the domain of the argument from converging probabilities" (25).

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint."

ABOUT: "The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well" (George Tyrrell (1861-1909) quoted in McGrath 29).

"the apologist, in attempting to prove that a certain type of supernatural event occurred, asks us to suspend that loosely connected set of assumptions and beliefs that enable us to make any nuanced judgments at all, including those concerning the miracle claims that are before us. Were we to doubt those assumptions, then we would have to doubt a great deal more that we assume when appraise the claims presented to us. In asking us to suspend all those things we take for granted, the Christian apologist is really asking us to reject our modern worldview, as at least some Christian theologians have candidly conceded. Meanwhile that apologist for miracles assumes this same worldview in his or her everyday life" (Harvey xxiii)

[There are] two kinds of beliefs . . . the belief that the actual Jesus was as the perspectival image [in the Gospels] pictures him, and the belief that the perspectival image does illumine our experience and out relationship to that upon which we are absolutely dependent. The former is a belief about a contingent fact remote form my own experience. Consequently, it can never have the immediacy of an event that impinges on my own life. . . . The later is also a belief, to be sure, but of a different order. In the first place, it is not a belief about a past event, but a belief that an image cast up by a past event illumines some present experience. . . . No remote historical event�especially if assertions about it can solicit only a tentative assent�can, as such, be the basis for a religious confidence about the present. Even if it were historically probable, say, that Jesus was a man who was completely open to transcendence, this belief in no way makes it easier for someone two thousand years later to be so open�unless, of course, the silent presupposition is present that the object of faith is the same and can be trusted. But this silent presupposition is precisely what is at issue in the decision of faith and no reference to a past event can establish that. Or even if we were to believe that the corpse of Jesus was resuscitated, this fact could be the basis for a religious confidence only if that event were already interpreted as revelatory for the being with which one has to do in the present. But this, again, is precisely the affirmation of faith.

The difficulty with all the traditional orthodox attempts to ground the credibility of revelation in something objective like miracles or the fulfillment of prophecy is that they fail to see that there is no intrinsic connection between such external events and faith, unless faith is already presupposed. This, in turn, tells us something about the nature of faith. . . . faith is not believing things but the fundamental attitude one has toward the whole of existence. it is basically confidence in the nature of being itself. this confidence must have some basis in one�s present experience. . . . A fact cannot provide the ground or the object of faith when faith is properly understood, although it can awaken faith and provide the symbols that faith uses (Harvey, 282-83).

"[Barth] argued that only when we recognize the incompleteness, triviality, anxiety, and transitoriness of life can we even begin to understand the message of the gospel�a gospel that does not have to do with the salutary effects of religious belief or experience but with the "qualitative distinction" between God and the world, which is to say, with the "fact" that human beings live in an ambiguous and transitory world surrounded by an unfathomable mystery that they are always trying to understand and domesticate.

Religion, Barth claimed, is the primary human means of that domestication. . . . Indeed, since sin is the attempt to abrogate the distance between time and eternity, and since religion (law) is the human embodiment of this attempt, it follows that religion is the principal locus of sin. And it is in religion that human beings attempt to deny and conceal the ambiguity of their existence.

Revelation, in this view, is not the abolition of the ambiguity of life; nor is it the communication of propositions that, when believed, are saving truths. It is, rather, the full disclosure of this ambiguity, this chasm between time and eternity. Revelation is what Barth termed "the Krisis" (judgment), in which all human pretensions are called into question: "Genuine faith is a void, an obeisance before that which we can never be, or do, or possess." Faith, according to Barth, is knowing that one does not know. . . . the utter dissolution of man and all of the possibilities in which he takes pride. . . . The revelation, for example, can be found in the law, which condemns unrighteousness, or in a cry of complete despair, or by a calm, unprejudiced religious contemplation of the triviality of human life, which is to say, that man is not God.

Grace, in Barth�s view, does not bridge the gulf between God and men, but exposes it, and the exposure is such that men are able to accept God as the one they do not know.

. . . what Jesus revealed is simply what the law and the prophets also revealed�namely, the pretensions of human pride and the unknowability of God. If one asks, as Paul [in Romans] did, What advantage then is the law and religion? the answer is that religion forces human beings to see that they cannot complete existence for themselves. Religion keeps alive the question of whether there is meaning in life. Jesus is not to be regarded as some supernatural event that visibly disrupts the causal nexus. He is not a religious genius, a new law giver, an inspired prophet, or a superman. His significance does not lie in his ethics or his teaching. It lies, rather, in his identification with human despair and his giving up all claims to be a religious hero or genius. . . .

Barth did not interpret the Resurrection as a supernatural reversal of a tragic course of events, one event among other events, but as the symbol for the nonhistorical relation of the whole life of Jesus to God. Faith in the Resurrection, then, does not consist in believing in events that are dubious by our normal canons of reasoning. Rather, it is the identification with the crucified one, which is to say, it is the embracing of the ambiguity of existence with him. (xviii).

. . . the point he is making is this: the way to a genuine and nonidolatrous affirmation of human life is through the way of negation, through the crucifixion of the self. . . . it is only when man despairs of being able to complete his own tower of Babel that �he has his hands free for joining in the work of building all the smaller towers of the earthly city, which is dear to him in all its transitory nature, in its relativity and limitations, because it points to the entirely different heavenly city for which he is waiting. He no longer seeks to make the titanic stride of educating man into a superman, or even into a noble person; therefore he may and can rejoice in the many thousand steps that must be made on earth in the present. . .

. . . not only [is] faith compatible with radical intellectual doubt, but it necessarily implies a recognition of the partial and ambiguous character of any claim to truth, especially any religious claim. . . . knowledge is historically conditioned . . . . [so] the morality of knowledge is not the antithesis to faith but its expression.

-------Neibuhr---------------

[For H.R. Neibuhr, faith] is the ability to trust in "the Void," by which he meant that "last shadowy and vague reality, the secret of existence by virtue of which things come into being, are what they are, and pass away" and against which there is no defense. To have faith is to have confidence in this last reality in which we move and have our being. It is to be able to day, "Though it slaw us yet we will we trust it." Niebuhr called this "radical monotheism." (xviii-xix)

Because radical monotheism accepts the relativity of everything finite and sees the absolutization of anything human as idolatry, it regards even its own theological articulations as relative and provisional. Consequently, it opens the way to knowledge and inquiry, removing the taboos surrounding the intellectual life. . . . Faith enables human beings to be free to take responsibility for their world. . . . Our beliefs, to use the biblical term, are works. Consequently, we do not need to be defensive about science, evolutionary theory, or biblical criticism. . . .

-------Bultmann---------------

[According to Bultmann,] the intention of the Biblical writers is not to win assent to certain objective doctrines but to bring man to an authentic self-understanding, to a radical faith. The New Testament writers were primarily concerned to confront man with the self-destructiveness of trying to secure his existence on his own terms (to justify himself) and to proclaim to him the possibility of a new mode of existence (faith), an existence in which he finds his security in the unseen, in God. Faith, in short, is an existentiell self-understanding and, therefore, something quite different from holding certain objective beliefs to be true. It is a proclamation which . . . precipitates a decision, holding as it does before men�s eyes the two possibilities of faith and unfaith, authentic and unauthentic existence. . . . [T]he proclamation is that . . . one must identify his own life with Christ, must die to himself, if he would experience new life. . . . the christology of Paul and John does not consist in a theory about Christ�s divine nature but in a proclamation concerning the significance of his death for the believer. . . . Paul�s doctrine of justification (his view that man can only experience new life when he gives up trying to justify himself) could be said to be his real christology, that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Christology is not a speculative belief concerning Christ�s divine nature but the articulation of a new understanding of existence. One does not first believe that Jesus was divine and experience a liberation of the self; rather, by grasping the significance of the event one experience a liberation of the self and calls Christ divine. . . . [M]an is the kind of being that can win or lose himself. He must choose to become fully human, and he can do this only when he ceases to live anxiously in an attempt to secure his life on his own terms and opens himself up to the possibilities of the present and the future (141). . . . [M]an can achieve authenticity only by resolution and decision . . . [F]aith is no mysterious supernatural quality but simply the fulfillment of true human nature. It is a possibility that belongs to a man as man, a possibility for which he is accountable if he forfeits it. So also, love is not "some mysterious supernatural power, but is man�s �natural� mode of relationship. . . . [T]hrough the appearance of Jesus, the world and man are brought into a new situation and thus are called to a decision for or against the world. . . . [T]he Revelation is represented as the shattering and negating of all human self-assertion and all human norms and evaluations, And, precisely by being such negation, the Revelation is the affirmation and fulfillment of human longing for life, for true reality. . . . To believe in the cross is to be crucified with Christ and to believe in the resurrection is to experience new life. . . .

-----------Tillich---------

Tillich interprets faith, as both Barth and Bultmann do, as the experience of grace when all the human securities of belief and action are shattered. It was this insight, he claims, which was the essence of the Protestant Reformers� doctrine that man is justified by faith; hence it may be called the Protestant Principle. The Reformers, however, explored the significance of this principle only in the religious-ethical sphere of life, whereas Tillich is impressed by its importance for the religious-intellectual sphere as well. Just as the Reformers argued that man is justified by faith even though a sinner, Tillich insists that man is reconciled to God even though he exists in the state of doubt, even doubt about God. "There is," he writes, "faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth." . . . [F]aith has to do with the question of the final meaning of life, man�s stance towards being itself. . . . [F]aith can appear when all traditional Christian belief and symbolism are rendered unintelligible. . . . It is, Tillich writes, " a disastrous distortion of the meaning of faith to identify it with the belief in the historical validity of the Biblical stories." . . . Faith is certain of only one thing, namely, the "appearance of that reality which has created the faith." One�s own participation in faith "guarantees a personal life in which the New Being has conquered the old being." Faith cannot, of course, guarantee that Jesus was the person who was the New Being, but whatever his name, the New Being occurred. No historical criticism can threaten this immediate awareness of those who have been actually transformed into faith. . . . It is the picture of Jesus that conveys the power which grasps the religious imagination . . . [All questions about the historicity of Bible stories] "must be decided, in terms of more or less probability, by historical research. They are questions of historical truth, not of the truth of faith. Faith can say that something of ultimate concern has happened in history because the question of the ultimate in being and meaning is involved. Faith can say that the Old Testament law which is given as the law of Moses has unconditional validity for those who are grasped by it, no matter how much or how little can be traced to a historical figure of that name. Faith can say that the reality which is manifest in the New Testament picture of Jesus as the Christ has saving power for those who are grasped by it, no matter how much or how little can be traced to the historical figure who is called Jesus of Nazareth." . . .

The function of these [New Testament] stories is not to convey historical information or to elicit assent to supernatural claims but to provide a rich series of narratives that the members of the Christian community can use to reflect on their lives. . . . [T]he most important thing about the Gospels . . . is that they provide pictures and imagery within which the imagination, so to speak, can dwell and that can be the basis for a call to a renewal of one�s life. In an important sense, it is religiously irrelevant whether this narrative is historically accurate or not. . . .

Indeed, if we understand properly what is meant by faith, then this faith has no clear relation to any particular set of historical beliefs at all. Faith has to do with one�s confidence in God, which is to say, with one�s surrender of his attempts to establish his own righteousness and his acceptance of his life and creation as a gift and a responsibility. It is trust and commitment. . . . The decision of faith [is] . . . Can the last power be trusted? Is God gracious? Is my life significant in some sense that transcends the world? (Harvey, xvi-xx, 280-281, 132-134, 138-142, 144-148, 150, 152-155).

----------Letters to Olga-----------------

"the most important thing of all is not to lose hope and faith in life itself. Anyone who does so is lost, regardless of what good fortune may befall him. On the other hand, those who do not lose it can never come to a bad end. This does not mean closing one�s eyes to the horrors of the world�quite the contrary, in fact: only those who have not lost faith and hope can see the horrors of the world with genuine clarity" (141). [Chesterton, flag of the world]

"the purpose of the play is not to have the viewer leave with this, or any other, exclusive conceptually clarified awareness of its �meaning�; if we can explain and name everything too well, we will come to terms with it too quickly, our interpretation sooths us, the work ceases to tantalize and irritate us and we quickly forget it. . . . I would rather the play disturbed them in some indeterminable way; I would rather their experience of it were ambivalent and full of contradictions. On the one hand they should be delighted to some extent by its artful construction, by having understood its rhythm and allowing themselves to be swept along by it. On the other hand, they should feel that it all has something compelling to do with the most serious questions of their own existence; they should even experience it as a strange and provocative �probe� into their own existence, but without dismissing it too quickly by explaining that �probe� away. . . . �thrusting the viewer into his own situation,� �opening him up� to thought about it and provoking him into experiencing it more deeply. And no matter what he realizes after having been thus provoked, no matter what he ultimately decides, it is always, in my view, more valuable than the profoundest words of wisdom accepted passively by the playwright" (171-172).

"faith . . . is simply a particular state of mind, that is, a state of persistent and perpetual openness, of persistent questioning, a need to �experience the world,� again and again, in as direct and unmediated a way as possible . . . [achieved through] a ceaseless process of searching, demystification and penetration beneath the surface of phenomena in ways that do not depend on allegiance to a given, ready-made ideology" (190).

"If one is after truth, however, one had better look for it in oneself and the world fate has thrown one into. If you don�t make the effort here, you�ll scarcely find it elsewhere. Aren�t some of these departures an escape from truth instead of a journey in search of it?" (229). [Chesterton]

* "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" (237).

"How does this crisis manifest itself? In thousands of ways: man becomes a molecule with the same properties as those structures; that is, he loses his face, his will, his power fo speech and becomes a materialized clich�, as it were. He grows used to being manipulated and ultimately he identifies with that manipulation, which means he surrenders himself all over again. Deprived of the horizon of history�to which, as a subject of history, he might establish some kind of creative relationship�he sinks into �timelessness� . . . He blindly identifies with the irrational flow of the �world of appearances� and gives up trying to understand the world and his responsibility for it. This blurs the human �I� and makes it uncertain: the locus of that connection between what was or should be and what is has been shifted once and for all outside itself and outside the sphere of man�s proper concerns, which of course destroys any connection between what he is in a given moment and what he is at any other time. Thus in ceasing to vouch for himself and his life, he necessarily loses the self-assurance and dignity of an autonomous personality and becomes a lump of mud, entirely dependent on his affiliation to the mire" (295).

"The world modern man creates is [like a] . . . magnetic field dragging man deeper and deeper into his own helplessness, alienation, depersonalization and ultimately�something that may represent the bottom itself�into a state of apathetic contentment with his condition" (295).

"[A]ccepting full responsibility for one�s own failures is extraordinarily difficult, from the point of view of the �interests of our existence-in-the-world,� and frequently it is virtually unbearable and impossible . . . if one wants to live even slightly �normally��i.e., exist in the world (guided by the so-called instinct for self-preservation) . . . For it is only by assuming full responsibility here for one�s own elsewhere, only by assuming full responsibility today for one�s own yesterday, only by this unqualified assumption of responsibility by the �I� for itself and everything it ever was and did, does the �I� achieve continuity and thus identity with the self. This is the only possible way it can become something definite, limited and defined, related to its environment is a graspable way, not dissipated in it, not haplessly caught up in its random processes. To relinquish this full responsibility for oneself, to compromise one�s integrity and sovereignty, not to widen and strengthen, but on the contrary to narrow and weaken the control of one�s �I� over one�s actions . . . means dissolving oneself in the world, in the world of phenomena, particular aims, random occurances, isolated things, �mereness� and disjointed worries. It means apparently simplifying one�s life�but at the cost of losing oneself, the miracle of one�s separated being" (351) "swim painlessly through life from one �worldly� event to another, without overtaxing myself with the question of who I really am" (357).

"[O]ne�s identity is never in one�s possession as something given, completed and unquestionable, as an entity among entities, as something one can husband like anything else, that one can use depend on, draw on and every so often, give a new coat of paint. I had to learn the hard way that the opposite is true: one can, at any time�in the space of a few minutes�deny one�s entire history and turn it upside down: all it takes is a moment of inattention, of self-indulgent relaxation, of careless trust that one is what one is, and must be so always. I understood that my identity is what I seek, do, choose and define today and everyday; that it is not a path I choose and now merely proceed along, but one that I must redefine at every step, wherein each misstep or wrong turn, though caused only by neglecting one�s bearings in the terrain, remains an irradicable part of it, one that requires vast and complex effort to set right."

"to pose the primordial questions again and again, and from the beginning, constantly, to examine the direction one is going in. And regardless of how honorable a history a human existence has, it can never rest on it as one would on a pillow" (355).

"morality seldom sees itself as purely utilitarian, and even less would it admit publicly to this. It always pretends, or tries to persuade itself, that its roots go deeper . . . Would anyone, for example, dare to deny that he had a conscience? There are no two ways about it: the �voice of Being� has not fallen silent�we know it summons us, as as human beings, we cannot pretend not to know what it is calling us to. . . . And regardless of how selfishly we act, of how indifferent we remain to everything that does not bring us immediate benefit . . . we always feel, in some corner of our spirit at least, that we should not act that way and that therefore we must find a way to defend and justify our actions" (366).

"But who should begin? Who should break this vicious circle? . . . it is I who must begin [and] . . . as soon as I begin . . . I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road. For the hope opened up in my heart by this turning toward Being has opened my eyes as well to all the hopeful things my vision, blinded by the brilliance of �worldly� temptations, could not or did not wish to see, because it would have undermined the traditional argument of all those who have given up already: that all is lost anyway. Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost" (369).

"the first little lie told in the interests of truth, the first little injustice committed in the name of justice, the first tiny immorality defended by the morality of �things,� the first careless lapse in this constant vigilance, means the certain beginning of the end" (372).

(Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.)

-------------Power of the Powerless-------------

"those apparently powerless individuals who have the courage to speak the truth out loud and stand by what they say body and soul, and are prepared to pay dearly for doing so, have�astonishingly enough�greater power�however formally disfranchised they are�than thousands of anonymous electors in other circumstances" (Havel. Jan Vladislav, ed. Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber, 1985, xviii).

"In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology [communism] inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is believe, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one�s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority" (38-39).

"Individuals need not believe all these mystifications [of Stalinism], but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system" (45). . . . "This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie" (50).

"Their mutual indifference to each other�s slogans is only an illusion: in reality, by exhibiting their slogans, each compels the other to accept the rules of the game and to confirm thereby the power that requires the slogans in the first place. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments" (52). . . .

"[they] surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so they may become agents of the system�s general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals" (52).

"everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system" (53).

"human beings have created and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity" (53).

"not only does the system alienate humanity, but alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people�s own failure as individuals" (54).

"The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity�s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his or her inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict of identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself" (54).

"Initially, this confrontation [takes place on] . . . the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. . . . . this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were, that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth" (58).

"Why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his country? Certainly not because he represented a unit of real power, that is, not because any of the regime�s representatives felt he might unseat them and take their place in the government. Solzhenitsyn�s expulsion was something else: a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might someday produce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences. And so the post-totalitarian system behaved in a characteristic way: it defended the integrity of the world of appearances in order to defend itself. For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, �The emperor is naked!��when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game�everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably" (59).

"A genuine, profound and lasting change for the better . . . can no longer result from the victory (were such a victory possible) of any particular traditional political conception, which ultimately be only external, that is, a structural or systemic conception. More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. . . . A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed. . . . We know from a number of harsh experiences that neither reform nor change is in itself a guarantee of anything. We know that ultimately it is all the same to us whether or not the system in which we live, in the light of a particular doctrine, appears �changed� or �reformed.� Our concern is whether we can live with dignity in such a system, whether it serves people rather than people serving it" (70-72).

"[we should] reflect concretely on our own experience and . . . give some thought to whether certain elements of that experience do not�without our really being aware of it�point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits, and whether right here, in our everyday lives, certain challenges are not already encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will be read and grasped.

For the real question is whether the �brighter future� is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it" (121-122).

"I don�t want to be a doctor and live by men�s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don�t see there�s anything left for me but to be an author."

"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it."

�Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.�

"But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil...The chain that bound [Hestor] here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken...Here...had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because of the result of martyrdom" (Scarlet Letter 61-2).

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitudes, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true" (Scarlet Letter 173).

"It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another: each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician [Chillingworth] and the minister--mutual victims as they have been--may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love" (Scarlet Letter 209).

"We can do it if we will."

�all men, so far as their nature is nor perverted, are Catholics, and if they but knew their real wants they would have to do violence to themselves not to enter the Catholic Church� (Allitt 70).

"Seek for food and clothing first, then the kingdom of God shall be added unto you" (1807).

"What experience and history teach is this�that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

"We do not lose by renunciation, we gain. We gain the inexhaustible strength of simplicity."

"It is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime, and justice should weigh not what was done but the spirit in which it is done" (115).

"How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires? It is easy enough for anyone to confess his sins, to accuse himself, or even to mortify his body in outward shows of penance, but it is very difficult to tear the heart away from hankering after its dearest pleasures" (132).

"For a man�s worth does not rest on his wealth or power; these depend on fortune, but worth on his merits" (114).

"Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought" (Sir Arthur Helps).

Ernest Hemingway

"Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs" (Old Man and the Sea 37).

"He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run. If I were him I would put in everything now and go until something broke. But, thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able" (Old Man and the Sea 63).

"I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and intelligence" (Old Man and the Sea 64).

"'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.' I am sorry that I killed the fish" (Old Man and the Sea 103).

"It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides, I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems without sin. Also I have no understanding of it. I have no understanding of it and I am not sure I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are born to do it. Let them think about it. You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish" (Old Man and the Sea 105).

"Regardless of the parables, allegories, emotive phrases and rhetorical questions used by these [biblical] writers, their literary devices have a logical point which can be propositionally formulated and is objectively true or false" (in McGrath 172).

"Everything flows and nothing stays."

"You can�t step twice into the same river."

"Holiness is not the monopoly of any particular religion or tradition. Wherever a deed is done in accord with the will of God, wherever a human thought is directed toward Him, there is the holy."

Hippocrates

"The best inheritance a parent can leave a child is a will to work."

"I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature" (Guiness 155).

"Pure Christianity, the Christianity of the catacombs, is concerned in translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of metaphysics" (in Johnson HoC 490).

"The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one" (Mein Kampf).

"If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race (like the Germanic race) should inter-mingle with an inferior (like the Jewish race). Why? Because, in such a case her efforts, throughout hundreds and thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile" (Mein Kampf).

"Why should we quarrel? They will swallow everything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognize a firm will, and we need only them once or twice who is the master" (487).

"I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality . . . we will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence�imperious, relentless, and cruel."

"The universities have become to this nation (England) as the wooden horse was to the Trojans" (Leviathan, concerning the revolutionary free-thinkers).

"The mind grows by what it feeds on."

"Truth is the majority vote of that nation that could lick all the others" (Schaeffer, Vol 5, p.218).

"The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God."

"Any attempt to identify moral principles with divine commands must run up against a dilemma first formulated in Plato�s Euthyphro. Is the good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, then morality is the product of arbitrary will, and obedience to morality is mere obedience to authority. If the latter, then morality is independent of God�s will, and knowledge of the divine will is at best redundant" (Honderich 587-588).

Jim Holt

Jim Holt: "Yet even if Darwin�s theory is fundamentally sound . . . that doesn�t mean the design argument is defunct. For in recent decades, physicists have noticed an astonishing thing about the fundamental laws of nature. The 20 or so parameters they contain�numbers governing the strength of gravity, the ratio of the proton�s size to the neutron�s, and so on�appear to have been fine-tuned so that, against astronomically unfavorable odds, conscious organisms could emerge. Make gravity the slightest bit weaker and no galaxies suitable for life would have formed; make it the slightest bit stronger and the cosmos would have collapsed upon itself moments after the big bang" (Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1997).

Horace

"When things are steep, remember to stay level-headed."

"You are bloated by ambition? take advice: Yon book will ease you if you read it thrice" (Epist. i.1.36,37).

"Rule over an ambitious spirit, and thou hast A wider kingdom than if thou shouldst join To distant Dabes Lybia, and thus Shouldst hold in service either Carthaginian" (Carm. ii.2).

Hsun Tzu

"He who tries to travel two roads at once will arrive nowhere; he who serves two masters will please neither. . . . Thus does the gentleman bind himself to oneness" (Hsun Tzu 19).

"Hence if you set aside what belongs to man and long for what belongs to Heaven, you mistake the nature of all things" (Hsun Tzu 86).

"through the combination of rites and music the heart is governed" (Hsun Tzu 117)

"Man�s nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity. The nature of man is such that he is born with a fondness for profit. If he indulges this fondness, it will lead him into wrangling and strife, and all sense of courtesy and humility will disappear. He is born with feelings of envy and hate, and if he indulges these, . . . all sense of loyalty and good faith will disappear" (Hsun Tzu 157).

"Therefore, man must first be transformed by the instructions of a teacher and guided by ritual principles, and only then will he be able to observe the dictates of courtesy and humility, obey the forms and rules of society, and achieve order" (Hsun Tzu 157).

"any man . . . may become a gentleman" (158)

"sage kings realized that man�s nature is evil [and] . . accordingly they created ritual principles and laid down certain regulations in order to reform man�s emotional nature and make it upright, in order to train and transform it and guide it in the proper channels" (158).

"Mencius states that man is capable of learning because his nature is good, but I say this is wrong. It indicates that he has not really understood man�s nature nor distinguished properly between the basic nature and conscious activity. The nature is that which is given by Heaven; you cannot acquire it by effort. . . . That part of man which cannot be learned or acquired by learning and brought to completion by effort is called conscious activity" (Hsun Tzu 158).

"It is the way with man�s nature that as soon as he is born he begins to depart from his original naivete and simplicity, and therefore he must inevitably lose what Mencius regards as his original nature" (Hsun Tzu 159)-> since the child heart is inevitably lost, it cannot be regarded as the source of goodness

Aspects of man�s nature "are instinctive and spontaneous; man does not have to do anything to produce them. But that which does not come into being instinctively but must wait for some activity to bring it into being is called the product of conscious activity" (160-161). Cf child-well

diff bet sage and common man: "In respect to human nature the sage is the same as all other men and does not surpass them; it is only in his conscious activity that he differs from and surpasses other men" (161). "Heaven did not bestow any particular favor upon [sages] that it withheld from other men. And yet these men among all others proved most capable of carrying out their duties as sons and winning fame for their filial piety. Why? Because of their thorough attention to ritual principles" (Hsun Tzu 165).

"Every man who desires to do good does so precisely because his nature is evil. . . . Whatever a man lacks in himself he will seek outside. But if a man is already rich, he will not long for wealth . . . man in the state in which he is born neither possesses nor understands ritual practices [which are required to bring about ordered behavior]. . . . man in the state in which he is born possesses this tendency towards chaos and irresponsibility" (Hsun Tzu 162).

"All men in the world, past and present, agree in defining goodness as that which is upright, reasonable, and orderly, and evil as that which is prejudices, irresponsible, and chaotic. This is the distinction between good and evil" (Hsun Tzu 162).

"Now suppose that man�s nature was in fact intrinsically upright, reasonable, and orderly�then what need would there be for sage kings and ritual principles? (Hsun Tzu 162).

Test: "Now let someone try doing away with the authority of the ruler, ignoring the transforming power of ritual principles, rejecting the order that comes from laws and standards, and dispensing with the restrictive power of punishments, and then watch and see how the people of the world treat each other. He will find that the powerful impose upon the weak and rob them, the many terrorize the few and extort from them, and in no time the whole world will be given up to chaos and natural destruction" (Hsun Tzu 163).

"Now Mencius states that man�s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid. One may sit down and propound such a theory, but he cannot stand up and put it into practice, nor can he extend it over a wide area with any success at all" (Hsun Tzu 163).

Petty men are despised because they "give free reign to their nature, follow their emotions, and are content to indulge their passions, so that their conduct is marked by greed and contentiousness. Therefore it is clear that man�s nature is evil, and that his goodness is the result of conscious activity" (Hsun Tzu 165).

"the essential faculties needed to understand such ethical principles and the potential ability to put them into practice must be part of his make-up" (166-167).

"Why is it, then, that everyone is not able to accumulate good acts in the same way? I would reply: everyone is capable of doing so, but not everyone can be made to do so. The petty man is capable of becoming a gentleman, yet he is not willing to do so; the gentleman is capable of becoming a petty man but he is not willing to do so" (Hsun Tzu 167).

"�Man�s emotions are very unlovely things indeed! . . . Once a man acquires a wife and children, he no longer treats his parents as a filial son should. Once he succeeds in satisfying his cravings and desires, he neglects his duty to his friends" (Hsun Tzu 168).

Victor Hugo

�Grief is a fruit; God does not make it grow upon a branch too feeble to bear it.�

David Hume

Hume: "Supposing now, that this person were brought into the world, still assured that it was the workmanship of such a sublime and benevolent being; he . . . would never retract his former belief . . . since such a limited intelligence must be sensible of his own blindness and ignorance, and must allow that there may be solutions of these phenomena, which will for ever escape his comprehension. But supposing, which is the real case with regard to man, that this creature is not antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevolent, and powerful, but left to gather such a belief from the appearances of things; this entirely alters the case, nor will he ever find any reason for this conclusion. . . . I repeat the question: Is the world, considered in general, and as it appears to us in this life, different from what a man or such a limited being would, beforehand, expect from a very powerful, wise, and benevolent deity? It must be strange prejudice to assert the contrary" (Hume Dialogues 115).

Charles Hummel

"Our greatest danger in life is permitting the urgent things to crowd out the important."

Aldous Huxley

"I believe in meaninglessness . . . not because I believe the world has no meaning, but meaninglessness, to me, is an instrument of liberation" (Ends and Means).

"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that�s your own self" (Pilot One).

"Science has �explained� nothing; the more we know, the more fantastic the world becomes, and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

T.H. Huxley

"Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people is one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners of one�s own mind" (TH Huxley).

"I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything" (TH Huxley).

"If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer" (TH Huxley).

"the thoughts to which I am giving utterance and your thoughts regarding them are expressions of the molecular changes in the matter of life" (in Joad 34).

Henrik Ibsen

"Take away the life lie from the average man, and you take away his happiness" (Guiness 313).

Ibn Tufayl

"Hearing Hayy�s [account of his mystical vision] . . . the eyes of [Absal�s] heart were unclosed. . . . Reason and tradition were at one within him. All the paths of exegesis lay open before him. All his old religious puzzlings were solved; all the obscurities clear" (144).

"problematical elements of the tradition" (154).

"the great number of corrupt idea that have sprouted up and are being opening spread by the self-styled philosophers of today, so widely that they have covered the land and caused universal damage" (155).

Hayy "understood all this and found none of it in contradiction with what he had seen for himself from his supernal vantage point. He recognized that whoever had offered this description [the doctrines of Absal�s religion] had given a faithful picture and spoken truly. . . [He] bore witness to his mission as apostle of God" (145).

"naive belief that all men had outstanding character, brilliant minds and resolute spirits. He had no idea how stupid, inadequate, thoughtless, and weak-willed they are, �like sheep gone astray, only worse�" (147).

"Hayy now understood the human condition. He saw that most men are no better than unreasoning animals" (153).

"if I tell you of the highest levels I reached without first going over the preliminary [philosophical] steps that lead there, it would do you no more good than blind faith" (18).

St. Ignatius

"Let me become the food of the beast, through whom it will be given me to reach God" (CCC 2473).

"Now I begin to be a disciple. Nothing whether of things visible or invisible, excites my ambition, as long as I can gain Christ. Whether fire, or the cross, the assault of wild beasts, the tearing asunder of my bones, the breaking of my limbs, the bruising of my whole body, let the tortures of the devil all assail me, if I do but gain Christ Jesus" (Eusebius 121).

William Inge

"If you marry the spirit of your own generation, you will be a widow in the next" (in McGrath 70).

Irenaeus

"God did not make the first human beings because He needed company, but because He wanted someone to whom He could show His generosity. God did not tell us to follow Him because He needed our help, but because He knew that loving Him would make us whole."

St Isaac the Syrian

"Just as a man whose head is submerged in water cannot breathe the subtle air which is poured upon the atmosphere�s empty gulf, so he who immerses his mind in the cares of the present life cannot take in the breath that is a perception of the new world" (Divine Ascent 26).

�Believe that life in worth living and your belief will help create the fact.�

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

"Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis [where the believer�s] . . . intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of its truth" (Smith Atheism: The Case against God185).

* "Objective evidences and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"

* "The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That�with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success�is our national disease."

-------Pragmatism (1907)-----------

"pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demands. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts" (18).

"Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will" (19).

"The pragmatic method is primarily a way of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? � fated or free? � material or spiritual? � here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What differences would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion was true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other�s being right" (26).

Pierce: "our beliefs are really rules for action. . . . to develop a thought�s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole signification. . . . All realities influence our practice and that influence is their meaning for us. . . . In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense" (26-27).

"It is astonishing how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence" (27).

"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definitive difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of out life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one" (27).

The pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power . . . always appealing to particulars . . . emphasizing practical aspects . . . [and disdaining] verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions" (28).

"it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only" (28).

"The observable process . . . is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble . . . from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives" (31).

Pantheistic God is practically useless: "You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute�s aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature" (35).

"no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. . . . If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism" (36).

"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for assignable reasons" (37).

"If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits. . . . Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?" (57).

Pragmatism�s "only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience�s demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God�s existence?" (38).

Test case: Materialism (naturalism) vs. Theism (spiritualism)

"It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author. . . . supposing the theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is. . . . Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant. . . . Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience" (47, 48, 49-50).

Laws of mechanical evolution are "fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the last state of the universe, which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour�s words: �The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will b at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. �Imperishable monuments� and �immortal deeds,� death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or worse for all that labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.� . . . This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood" (50).

"the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. . . . We make complaint of it . . . for what it is not � not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, nor a fulfiller of our remotest hopes" (50).

Theism "guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. . . . tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. The need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast" (51).

"Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism � not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter�s inner existence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for any one who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophical debate" (51).

If you argue that the difference is so remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind, "you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. . . . the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man" (51).

"our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? . . . �Freedom� in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse . . . Free will thus has no meaning unless it be as a doctrine of relief" (56).

"Determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world" (55).

Critics unfairly read into our teachings hedonism and utility: "Schiller says that the true is that which �works.� thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives �satisfaction.� He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant" (104).

"We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father�s neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. . . . The way of escape from evil . . . is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name " (131).

"Between the two extremes of crude naturalism one the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require" (154).

--------------The Will to Believe-------------

* It is important for me to "preach the liberty of believing" because "academic audiences, fed already on science, have a [need to be free to believe] . Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessness may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to them. What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility, �such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize danger in case they met defeat. I do not think anyone can accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there" (x-xi).

"Lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith"; "our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, I spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced" (1-2).

- Hypothesis = anything which may be proposed to our belief

Option = decision between two hypotheses

- Live option: both hypotheses live (individual thinker willing to act irrevocably)

- vs. dead option

- Forced option: dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing or of remaining indifferent

- vs. avoidable option

- Momentous option: unique opportunity, significant stake, or irreversible if it later proves unwise

- vs. trivial option

-Genuine option = live, forced, and momentous

Talk of believing by our volition (e.g. Pascal�s Wager) seems silly or even vile

Huxley: "�My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage to so pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of immorality�" (7-8).

* Clifford: "�If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though the belief be true . . .] the pleasure is a stolen one. . . . It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town. . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence" (8).

Our beliefs are mostly determined by the "intellectual climate" and the prestige offered for sharing its opinions. "Our faith is faith in some one else�s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case" (9).

* "Our passional nature no only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, �Do not decide, but leave the question open,� is itself a passional decision,�just like deciding yes or no,�and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth" (11).

- The two commandments to would-be knowers are 1) We must know the truth, and 2) We must avoid error

- We can make one or the other more important

- Clifford gives priority to avoidance of error; "Believe nothing, he tells us keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies."

- Others find the possibility of error minor compared to blessings of real knowledge, and ready to be duped many times in their investigation rather than postponing indefinitely the chance of guessing true.

* "I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford�s exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound" (19).

- In scientific questions, "the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all" (20). "Science has organized this nervousness not a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her" (21).

- There are some forced options; we cannot (as men interested at least as much in gaining truth as in merely escaping error) always wait with impunity until coercive evidence comes.

- Moral questions: solution cannot wait for sensible proof; Both moral skeptic and moral believer must stick to it that there is truth and so with their whole natures, resolved to stand or fall by the results, without certain proof

- Questions concerning personal relations: Standing aloof waiting for evidence that someone else likes you before initiating with them is bound to lead to no friendship; A social organism works precisely because people act in trust on others without proof of trustworthiness

- "There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in their coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the �lowest kind of immorality� into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutes pretend to regulate our lives!" (25).

- "In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing" (25).

- Religion

* "We cannot escape the issue [of religious commitment] by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in the way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as decisively as if he went and married someone else? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of the option; it is the option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error�that is your faith-vetoer�s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field" (The Will to Believe 26).

* "To preach skepticism to us as a duty until �sufficient evidence� for religion be found, is tantamount to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law . . . what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist�s command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature . . . to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting on the winning side,�that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right" (Will to Believe 27).

God is offered as a personal Thou, making a veto on active faith even more illogical.

* "We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we meet the hypothesis halfway. . . one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods� acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately feeling there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really true, would be an irrational rule" (28).

- "we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will" (29).

* "When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait�acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true�till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and sense working together may have raked in evidence enough,�this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. . . . Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. There whole defense of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis give to the world an expression which specifically determines our actions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief" (The Will to Believe29-30).

Fitz James Stephen: religious questions "in some way or other we must deal with them. . . . In all important transactions in life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, this is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. . . . We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. We take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we so? �Be strong and take good courage.� Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better" (31).

"His essence is exempt of quality, quantity, and all spatial attributes. Intellect stands baffled before the essence of God: it is quite inept to pursue him along that path. If he in his kindness did not step nearer to us, our distance from him could only increase. So it better behooves us, bundle of lusts that we are, to clean our mirror of the rust of desire�to forget our own existence, and kneel henceforth in silence" (Jami, Yusuf and Zulaikha 2).

"Since it is through our own indolence that we are now crying out in distress, grant us the willpower to make an effort! We see the wise succomb just like the ignorant: what difference, then between wisdom and ignorance?" (Jami).

". . . this tale has no end and there is neither a language nor a poet that is equal to it. So it is better for us simply to be involved in love; for without that we are nothing, absolutely nothing" (Jami).

"Remember that knowledge is vast and life is short. Life does not come again for anyone; so go in search of indispensable knowledge. And once you have obtained it, strive to put it into practice; for theory without practice is a prison without an antidote" (Jami).

"I myself shall become non-existent, and losing all trace of self-importance, I shall become totally absorbed in ecstasy. It will no longer be myself that you see occupying my body: the soul animating that body will be yours. All idea of personality will be put aside; and when I look for myself, it is you that I shall find. . . . she escaped from her own self into the delights of non-existence. . . . Rise above time and space, and build your nest in the palace of Reality. Reality is one: appearances thousandfold. . . . it is better to flee and take refuge in the fortress of Unity. . . . Enter the domain of non-existence. Formerly you did not exist and no harm ever befell you because of that. Likewise today it is in ceasing to be that your advantage lies. . . . Renounce all desire and lose yourself in that splendor like a mote in a sunbeam: thus lost you will be released at last . . . What is the mark of perfect maturity? � To have landed on the ground of non-existence. . . . Root our greed and desire in yourself through contenting yourself with your lot and resigning yourself to God�s will. . . . turn from existence towards annihilation" (Jami 37, 56, 58, 107, 139, 143, 144).

"There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any adequate fashion be understood juridicially, or politically, or morally" (Cone 24).

"The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it, would make our country one of the happiest upon earth. Experience during the war proved this; as I think every man will admit that under the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period he slept sounder and waked happier than he can do now. Desperate of finding relief from a free course of justice, I look forward to the abolition of all credit as the only other remedy which can take place."

"Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment in it."

"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it."

"Advertisements are the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between a man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their own firm basis- a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"

"Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you and act accordingly."

"I know well that it is through good and evil report that we make our way to the kingdom of heaven" (in Abelard 98).

"Religion�s in the heart, not in the knees."

"We love peace, as we abhor pusillanimity; but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body. Chains are worse than bayonets."

"[Modernists and Relativists] persistently suggest that some things are better, higher, truer, more beautiful, more civilized, more moral, or more edifying things. And they make this suggestion, because they cannot help themselves. Granted then the necessity under which we all labor of making judgments of moral and aesthetic import, I do not see with what logic we can avoid the implications of our necessity by seeking to deny the existence in the universe of certain absolute standards and values in terms which alone our moral and aesthetic judgments have meaning and content. These standards and values cannot, as I have tried to show, be a part of the process which they are invoked to measure" (Joad, God and Evil, 158).

"I must, as a matter of psychological compulsion, adopt the most rational hypothesis, the most rational being that which seems to cover most of the facts and to offer the most plausible explanation of our experience as a whole. . . . It is because, as I said above, the religious view of reality seems to me to cover more of the facts of experience than any other that I have been gradually led to embrace it. . . . I propose to argue that the religious hypothesis is the one that covers more of the facts of experience tan any other, among which must be included the fact of the desire to believe and the fact of moral conflict" (Joad 13-14, 16, 17).

* "Suppose for a moment that you think the Christian view of earthly existence as a course of training in moral discipline is correct; then you cannot help but try to act as if you were at school. If the purpose of your existence is not to win personal happiness but to improve your character much that you would have light-heartedly done on the former assumption will be forbidden to you on the latter . . . [though] Christianity, as I have been taught, insists that this is a false opposition, since for it, true happiness is to be found only in conformity to the dictates of moral obligation" (Joad 14-15). "Our life here is, then, to be looked upon as a period of training and discipline designed to teach us, if we are willing to learn, how to become better, and since it is mainly through suffering that men learn, suffering is to be expected. We cannot, then, expect to be very happy here on earth, and we cannot expect to be very good" (80).

"If I cannot find good grounds for my beliefs, I shall certainly not persuade myself to act in conformity with them; thus, if I do not accept the attribution of personality to God I shall not succeed in inducing myself to act towards Him as if He were a Person; that is, I shall not seek to know and to love him, or to pray to Him" (Joad 17).

"God did not wish to create a race of virtuous automata, for of what merit is the virtue, if virtue it can be called, of those who have no choice but to desire, o will, and to act as they do? Of what value, then to be praised or loved by such as these? And what joy or merit can there be in loving them in return, even if it were possible to do so? Hence God created beings possessed of free will in order that they might be in a position to acquire merit by acting rightly when it was possible for them to act wrongly, with the result that the amount of virtue in the universe would be increased�of virtue and also of love, since those who acquired virtue by their own efforts as a result of their resistance to temptation and their endurance of suffering would be worthy objects of God�s love. Now if they are free to choose wrongly, it will follow that some wrong choices will almost certainly be made. The evil in the universe is the consequence of wrong choices or, alternatively, we may say that evil must already be present in the universe in order that it may be chosen" (23).

* "The view of human evil (that evil is merely the product of heredity and environment and can be eradicated through progress) which I adopted unthinkingly as a young man I have come fundamentally to disbelieve. Plausible, perhaps, during the first fourteen years of this century when . . . the state of mankind seemed to be improving�though the most cursory reading of human history should even then have been sufficient to dispose of it�it has been rendered utterly unplausible by the events of the last forty years. To me, at any rate, the view of evil implied by Marxism, expressed by Shaw and maintained by modern psychotherapy, a view which regards evil as the by-product of circumstances, which circumstances can, therefore, alter and even eliminate, has come to seem intolerably shallow and the contrary view of it as endemic in man, more particularly in the Christian form, the doctrine of original sin, to express a deep and essential insight into human nature" (Joad 63).

"I am not, of course, suggesting either that I or that people in general are wholly wicked. Far from it; merely that all of us are wicked in some degree, all of us wicked on occasion, and that we are so because strands of evil are inextricably woven into our fundamental make-up" (Joad 65).

"the only satisfactory basis for the facts of moral experience, if they are taken seriously, is a supernatural one" (Joad 78).

"just as the explanation of the facts of the natural world must lie outside it, so, too must the explanation of the facts of moral experience lie beyond it, since, while modes of explanation which rely purely on natural causation may explain how things behave according to their natures . . . they cannot explain why creatures should go against the dictates of their nature, as man does when he opposes duty to desire and recognizes the imperative of �ought�" (Joad 79).

"It is hard to credit in practice and it leads to self-contradiction in theory to suppose that nature has constituted man in such a way that he can only survive and prosper if he holds a belief in something which is not. . . . if it [the materialist account of the origin and nature of human beings and their wishes] is true, then the needs and wishes which religion seeks to fulfill and to satisfy must point to some factor in the external world which has generated them, and which guarantees the possibility of their satisfaction, in which event religion cannot be merely subjective" (Joad 91, 93).

"the species of creatures that are successively evolved countenance no doctrine of progress in the sense of a discerned development towards an end or goal. Nor, indeed, could they do so, for the notion of a goal implies a standard by reference to which the goal is assessed and seen to be desirable. Suppose, for example, we say, as many have done in the past, that natural selection promotes the survival of �better� or �more desirable� stocks. The observation, if it is to have meaning, must entail the acceptance of some agreed concept of �better� and �more desirable.� Now the words �better� and �more desirable� suggest an ethical criterion. But what sot of ethical criterion could the process of evolution itself provide? The so-called science of evolution records a number of successive changes. It tells us, in fact, what has occurred but it does not tell us, nor could it do so, what ought to have occurred. In informing us that certain events have taken place, it does not assure us that it is desirable that they should have taken place. Science, in a word, is concerned with facts, not with their valuation. Of Natural Selection, we are entitled to say no more than that it serves as the sieve through which those forms of life, which happen to be adjusted to their environment, pass. Hence, the types which survive are deemed to be valuable by no other criterion than that of the fact of their survival" (Joad 108).

"if the contrast in scale between man and the galaxies has any significance, it is not to diminish but rather to exalt mind as embodied in man in comparison with the matter of the physical world" (Joad 110).

"[N]atural law, on determinist principles, also determines the movements of brains, and therefore, of minds. Thoughts are movements of and events in mind. Thoughts, then, are determined by natural law. How, then, can thoughts be false" (Joad 144).

"these Values [truth, goodness, and beauty] . . . are, in fact, the ways in which God reveals himself to man. Hence those human activities which consist in or which arise out of the pursuit of Truth, the cultivation of moral Goodness or the creation and enjoyment of Beauty, are such that we cannot help but value and revere them" (Joad 177).

Heaven: the "mode of existence in which what in these experiences is precarious is made secure, what is obscure is made clear, and what is fleeting becomes eternal" (Joad 181).

"A religion which is in constant process of revision to square with science�s ever-changing picture of the world might well be easier of belief, but it is hard to believe that it would be worth believing" (Joad 240).

"Holiness is not simply righteousness . . . it is such a height of righteousness that people are so filled with the grace of God that it flows from them even upon those who associate with them. Great is their blessedness, which from their direct contemplation of the glory of God" (Divine Ascent 49).

"The existence or non-existence of God is the most important question we humans are ever called to answer. If God does exist, and if in consequence we are called to another life when this one ends, a momentous set of consequences follows, which should affect every day, every moment almost, of our earthly existence. Our life then becomes a mere preparation for eternity and must be conducted throughout with our future in view. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, another momentous set of consequences follows. This life then becomes the only one we have, we have no duties or obligations except to ourselves, and we need weigh no considerations except our own interests and pleasures. There are no commands to follow except what society imposes upon us, and even these we may evade if we can get away with it. In a Godless world, there is no obvious basis for altruism of any kind, moral anarchy takes over and the rule of the self prevails" (Johnson Quest 1).

"It seems to me that the quantitative argument works more cogently against atheism or humanism than against deism. The more our radio-telescopes enlarge our notions of how big space is, the less likely it seems that physically fragile creatures like ourselves, living in space and time, can ever achieve mastery of the universe�or think and behave as if we could�and the more likely it is that something metaphysical, like God, whose powers are not limited by any system of measurement, must exist, to keep it all in order" (Johnson Quest 95).

"A man who is converted from Protestantism to popery parts with nothing; he is only superadding to what he already had. But a convert from popery to Protestantism gives up as much of what he has held sacred as anything that he retains."

 �I�expect with serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to possess in a better world, that happiness which here I could not find, and that virtue which here I have no attained� Dr Johnson�s Rasselas

"The greatest part of a writer�s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

"There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business."

"If you are idle, be not alone� if you are solitary, be not idle" (Samuel Johnson).

"The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction" (Samuel Johnson).

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful" (Samuel Johnson).

�Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth�

"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand--that is art."

"It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind�s greatest danger."

"The mission of the Church is still to bring about in her members the conviction that the proper state of human personhood is composed of immortality and eternity and not of the realm of time and mortality, and the conviction that man is a wayfarer who is wending his way in the sway o time and mortality towards immortality and all eternity" (Divine Ascent 20).

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."

"Count it the greatest sin to prefer mere existence to honor, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living" (Juvenal).

"There is no God, but there has to be a God."

"I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it? What we need are books that affect us like some really grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished to distant forests, away from everybody, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us."

Kaunda

"Those people who are dependent upon and live in closest relationship with Nature are the most conscious of the operation of these forces: the pulse of their lives beat in harmony with the pulse of the Universe; they may be simple and unlettered people and their horizons may be strictly limited, yet I believe that they inhabit a larger world than the sophisticated Westerner who has magnified his physical senses through invented gadgets at the price, all too often of cutting out the dimension of the spiritual" (Biko 85).

Immanuel Kant

"Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name."

"Enlightenment is man�s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man�s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] "Have courage to use your own reason!"�that is the motto of enlightenment" ("What is Enlightenment? VIII, 35).

"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind . . . remains under lifelong tutelage . . . It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay�others will readily undertake that irksome task for me" (VIII, 35).

"human nature, the proper destination of which lies precisely in this progress" (VIII, 39).

"religious incompetence is not only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all" (VIII, 41).

"I have limited reason to make room for faith."

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me" (Critique of Practical Reason).

"I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law" (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals).

"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only"

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no good thing can ever come"

"�Beauty is truth, truth beauty,��that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Ode on a Grecian Urn).

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart�s affections and the truth of the imagination�what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth�whether it existed before or not"

"Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author"

"Call the world if you please �The vale of soul-making�" (Keats).

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced�even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it"

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."

"To live wisely, you must know much. For a beginning, remember two important rules: 1) it's better for you to go hungry than to eat whatever happens to be around, and 2) it's better to be alone than with whomever happens to be around."

----------Rubiyat----------

17

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two - was gone.

29-38

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd Of the Two Worlds so learnedly are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scatter'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door as in I went.

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with my own hand wrought to make it grow; And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd "I came like Water, and like Wind I go."

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing Nor Whence, like Water willy - nilly flowing; And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not Whither, willy - nilly blowing.

What, without asking, hither hurried Whence? And, without asking, Whither hurried hence! Ah, contrite Heav'n endowed us with the Vine To drug the memory of that insolence!

Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; And many Knots unravel'd by the Road; But not the Master - knot of Human Fate.

There was the Door to which I found no Key: There was the Veil through which I could not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was - and then no more of Thee and Me.

Earth could not answer; non the Seas that mourn In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn; Nor Heaven, with those eternal Signs reveal'd And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.

Then of the Thee in Me who works behind The Veil of Universe I cried to find A Lamp to guide me through the Darkness; and Something then said - "An Understanding blind."

Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn I lean'd, the secret Well of Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur'd - "While you live, Drink! - for, once dead, you never shall return."

47-48

And fear not lest Existence closing your Account, should lose, or know the type no more; The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

When You and I behind the Veil are past, Oh, but the long long while the World shall last, Which of our Coming and Departure heeds As much as Ocean of a pebble - cast.

56-58

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit Of This and That endeavour and dispute; Better be merry with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

You know, my Friends, how bravely in my House For a new Marriage I did make Carouse; Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

For "Is" and "Is - Not" though with Rule and Line And "Up - and - down" by Logic I define, Of all that one should care to fathom, I Was never deep in anything but - Wine.

59

Ah, but my Computations, People say, Have squared the Year to human compass, eh? If so, by striking from the Calendar Unborn To - morrow, and dead Yesterday.

66-68

Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is certain - This Life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; The Flower that once is blown for ever dies.

Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road, Which to discover we must travel too.

The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd, Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep They told their fellows, and to Sleep return'd.

71-74

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After - life to spell: And after many days my Soul return'd, And said, "Behold, Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire, And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire, Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.

Heav'n And Hell: Heav'n the vision, Hell the shadow.]

We are no other than a moving row Of visionary Shapes that come and go Round with this Sun - illumin'd Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

Impotent Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Chequer - board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.

77-78

For let Philosopher and Doctor preach Of what they will, and what they will not - each Is but one Link in an eternal Chain That none can slip, nor break, nor over - reach.

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help - for It As impotently rolls as you or I.

80

Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare; To - morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair: Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

84-96

What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke A conscious Something to resent the yoke Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!

What! from his helpless Creature be repaid Pure Gold for what he lent us dross - allay'd Sue for a Debt we never did contract, And cannot answer - Oh the sorry trade!

Nay, but, for terror of his wrathful Face, I swear I will not call Injustice Grace; Not one Good Fellow of the Tavern but Would kick so poor a Coward from the place.

Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: For all the Sin the Face of wretched Man Is black with - Man's Forgiveness give - and take!

As under cover of departing Day Slunk hunger - stricken Ramazan away, Once more within the Potter's house alone I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.

And once again there gather'd a scarce heard Whisper among them; as it were, the stirr'd Ashes of some all but extinguisht Tongue, Which mine ear kindled into Living Word.

Said one among them - "Surely not in vain My substance from the common Earth was ta'en That he who subtly wrought me into Shape Should stamp me back to shapeless Earth again?"

Another said - "Why, ne'er a peevish Boy Would break the Cup from which he drank in Joy; Shall He that of His own free Fancy made The Vessel, in an after - rage destroy!"

None answer'd this; but after silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make; "They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"

Thus with the Dead as with the Living, What And Why? so ready, but the Wherefore not, One on a sudden peevishly exclaim'd, "Which is the Potter, pray, and which the Pot?"

Said one - "Folks of a surly Master tell, And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell; They talk of some sharp Trial of us - Pish! He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill all be well."

"Well," said another, "Whoso will, let try, My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry: But fill me with the old familiar Juice, Methinks I might recover by and by."

105-109

Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse - if dimly, yet indeed, reveal'd, Toward which the fainting Traveller might spring, As springs the trampled herbage of the field!

Of if the World were but to re - create, That we might catch ere closed the Book of Fate, And make The Writer on a fairer leaf Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate!

Better, oh better, cancel from the Scroll Of Universe one luckless Human Soul, Than drop by drop enlarge the Flood that rolls Hoarser with Anguish as the Ages roll.

Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits - and then Re - mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

But see! The rising Moon of Heav'n again Looks for us, Sweet - heart, through the quivering Plane: How oft hereafter rising will she look Among those leaves - for one of us in vain!

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you."

"Most people run so fast after pleasure, that they surpass it without noticing."

"Among all ridiculous things it seems to me that the most ridiculous is to be busy, to be a man who hastens when he eats or does his errant in a quick manner. When I see a fly land on such a businessman's nose, or mud is thrown at him by the acceleration of a yet hastier car passing by, or Knippelsbro Copenhagen Bridge is blocked for the sake of a boat passing under it, or a stone fall down from a house and kills him, then I laugh out of full lungs. Who could bare himself or herself for not laughing? What good do they accomplish these people of hasting? Do they not end up like that old woman who, from sudden stupefaction of finding out that her house is burning, rescues nothing else than the chimney iron? What else do they rescue from of Life's big fire?"

"Apparently the human being has not been given speech to express what it thinks, but to express that it does not think at all."

"To the Christian love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an unchristian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life."

"It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice."

"This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love."

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." Either/Or Vol 1

"I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity."

"Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others" (Works of Love).

"Is this the same teaching, when Christ says to the rich young man: Sell all that you have and give it to the poor and when the pastor says: Sell all that you have and give it to me?" (Essential Kierkegaard, p.435).

�Oh Luther, you had 95 theses�terrible! . . . The matter is far more terrible�there is only one thesis. . . . The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.428).

�But although I do not dare to say that I venture for Christianity, I remain fully and blissfully convinced that this, my venturing, is pleasing to God, has his approval. Indeed, I know it; it has his approval that in a world of Christians where millions and millions call themselves Christians�that there one person expresses: I do not dare to call myself a Christian; but I want honesty.� Essential Kierkegaard, p.431.

�The thoughts of their hearts are to wretched to be sinful. . . . Their desires are staid and dull, their passions drowsy. . . . That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak are human beings; there they hate, there they love, there they murder the enemy, curse his descendents through all generations�there they sin� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.40).

�In the splendid cathedral the Honorable Right Reverend Private Chief Royal Chaplain comes forward . . . before a chosen circle of the chosen ones, and deeply moved, preaches on the text he has himself chosen, �God has chosen the lowly and despised in the world��and there is no one who laughs� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.434).

�enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.42).

�In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told hem again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed�amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is a joke (Essential Kierkegaard, p.41).

�when I became an adult, when I opened my eyes and saw actuality, then I started to laugh and have never stopped laughing since that time. I saw that the meaning of life was to make a living, its goal to become a councilor, that the rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-so girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars, that cordiality was to say �May it do you good� after a meal, that piety was to go to communion once a year� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.42-43).

�Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. . . . Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. . . . Whether you trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. . . . Whether you hand yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.44).

�I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. �What do you want,� asked Mercury. �Do you want youth, or beauty, or power, or long life, or the most beautiful girl, or any one of the other glorious things we have in the treasure chest? Choose�but only one thing.� For a moment I was bewildered; then I adressed the gods, saying: My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing�that I may always have the laughter on my side� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.45-46).

�boredom is the root of all evil. . . . The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population . . . . To amus themselves, [the people of the world] hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand� (Essential Kierkegaard, p.51).

�if a maiden in love yearns for the wedding day because this would give her assured certainty, if she wanted to make herself comfortable in legal security as a spouse, if she preferred marital yawning to maidenly yearning, then the man would rightfully deplore her unfaithfulness, althogh she indeed did not love anyone else, because she would have los the idea and actually did not love him. And this, after all, is the essential unfaithfulness in an erotic relationship; the incidental unfaithfulness is to love someone else� (192).

�Marital lvoe, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time . . . The individual is not fighting against external enemies but is struggling with himself, struggling to bring his love out of himself� (71).

"Christianity is hard to believe, not because it is hard to understand, but because it is hard to obey."

"When you read God�s word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, It is talking to me, and about me."

"It would not be so hard to believe if it were no so hard to obey"

"Hegel told me everything about the world except one thing: what it is to be a man and to live and to die."

"Every man who has not tasted the bitterness of despair has missed the significance of life, however beautiful and joyous his life might be" (Either-Or).

"It is very doubtful, then, that the age will be saved through the notion of social organization, of association. In our age the principle of association . . . is an evasion, a dissipation, an illusion, whose dialectic is [that] as it strengthens individuals, so it weakens them. It strengthens by numbers, by solidarity, but from the ethical point of view this is a weakening. Not until the single individual has established an ethical stance in despite of the whole world, not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting. Otherwise it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak; a union as unbeautiful and depraved as child-marriage" (Muggeridge).

"...unless the individual learns in the reality of religion and before God to be content with himself, and learns, instead of dominating others, to dominate himself, content as priest to be his own audience, and as author his own reader - if he will not learn to be satisfied with that as the highest, because it is the expression of the equality of all men before God..."

"In order to help another effectively I must understand more than he�yet first of all surely I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... all true effort to help begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands."

----------------------

"[Faith is] the self in being itself and willing to be itself rest[ing] transparently in God" (82).

Despair = wanting to be a self that one is not (~20).

Faith = to will to be the self that one is in truth (~20).

* "There is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that . . . he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain" (22).

Levels of despair according to consciousness: 1) Unconscious Despair: Ignorance of Despair or of having an Eternal Self; 2) Conscious Despair not to Will to be Oneself (feminine form; "despair in weakness"; includes willing to be another self, consuming oneself with externalities); 3) Conscious Despair to Will to be Oneself apart from God ("despair in defiance"; Consciousness of an infinite self severed from any relation to its source; Wants to be master/ creator of itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, and to determine what he will or will not have in his concrete self; Constantly relates itself to itself by way of imaginary constructions, recognizing no power over itself).

Despair defined as finitude lacking infinitude; infinitude lacking finitude; possibility lacking necessity; necessity lacking possibility

"to be unaware of being defined as spirit is precisely what despair is" (25).

"whenever that which triggers his despair occurs, it is immediately apparent that he has been in despair all his life" (24).

* "there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person�s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life�s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, or self, or what amounts to the same thing, never became aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that �he,� he himself, his self exists before this God�an infinite benefaction that is never gained except through despair" (27).

* "When the hourglass has run out and the noise of secular life grown silent, no matter who you are or what you did, eternity will ask you about only one thing: whether or not you lived in despair."

* "And so, if you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you�or still more terrible, it knows you as you we known and it binds you to yourself in despair" (28).

"for the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God"

* "Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss�an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.�is sure to be noticed" (33).

"And yet, precisely by not venturing it is so terribly easy to lose what would be hard to lose, however much one lost by risking, . . . namely, oneself. If I have ventured wrongly, well, then life helps me by punishing me. But if I have not ventured at all, who helps me then? Moreover, what if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become aware of oneself) I cowardly gain all early advantages�and lose myself!" (34-35)

* "And if at times existence provides frightful experiences that go beyond the parrot-wisdom of routine experience, then the philistine-bourgeois mentality despairs, then it becomes apparent that it was despair; it lacks faith�s possibility of being able under God to save a self from certain downfall" (41).

* "Now if what it means to be a human being is compared with such a house, then all too regrettably the sad and ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement. Every human being is a psychical-physical synthesis intended to be a spirit; this is the building, but he prefers to live in the basement, that is, in sensate categories. Moreover, he not only prefers to live in the basement�no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests that he move up to the superb upper floor that stands vacant and at his disposal . . ." (43).

"Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something�every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically-every such existence is nevertheless despair."

Sin = before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself (intensified weakness or defiance).

Faith = the self, in being itself and willing to be itself, rests transparently in God.

Faith = "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (131).

"The real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man�s goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought."

"Sin is not a matter of a person�s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right."

"Sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual�s consciousness."

"Most men are characterized by a dialectic of indifference and live a life so far from the good (faith) that it is almost too spiritless to be called sin�indeed it is almost too spiritless to be called despair. . . . [Most are] so immersed in triviality and silly aping of �the others� that [their action] can hardly be called sin, a life that is too spiritless to be called sin and is worthy only, as Scripture says, of being �spewed out�" (101).

"The trouble is not that Christianity is not voiced . . . but that it is voiced in such a way that the majority eventually think it utterly inconsequential. . . . Thus the highest and holiest things make no impact whatsoever" (102).

* "As a rule, men are conscious only momentarily, conscious in the midst of big decisions, but they do not take the daily everyday into account at all; they are spirit of sorts for an hour one day a week" (105).

"If a man hasn�t found something he will die for, he isn�t fit to live."

"The greatest tragedy is not the brutality of the evil people, but rather the silence of the good people."

"Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and s not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see�an opiate of the people" (Stride Toward Freedom 36).

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it" (51).

"ethical relativism . . . was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean. . . the [Marxist] state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end" (92-93).

"capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to become more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity" (94).

"True pacifism . . . [is] a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the world, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart" (98-99).

"unearned suffering is redemptive" (179).

"Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother�s keeper" (212).

{If

The Light that Failed

"There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but also demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community�which may dispose of it as an experimental rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. . . . Those are the consequences of our consequentialness" (Koestler 128, 130).

* "Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib an inch or so above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant" (Under a Cruel Star, trans. Franci and Helen Epstein, 1986, Penguin, New York 5).

"while evil grows all by itself, good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort" (52).

"I was unable to take the advice of the people who kept telling me that the only way back to life was to forget. I wanted to save everything, to cover up nothing, to pretty up nothing, to keep things inside me the way they had been, and to live with them. I wanted to live because I was alive, not just because by some accident I was not dead" (72).

"once you decide to believe, your faith becomes more precious than truth, more real than reality" (80).

[on communism] "I cannot believe that something inherently good can turn into its exact opposite just because of some mistakes or personal failures. If the system was fair and sound, it would provide ways of compensating for error. If it can only function when the leadership is made up of geniuses and al the people are one hundred percent honest and infallible, then it�s a bad system. It might work in heaven, but its a foolish and destructive illusion for this world. Look at all those idealists who wanted nothing more than to work for the well-being of others; half of them are in jail; the other half start trembling every time their doorbell rings" (104).

"It is astounding how terrified such men of action are of words. No act is too sordid for them to carry out, no act disturbs their sleep, so long as it is not called by its proper name, so long as it is not put into words. In this lies the great power of words, which are the only weapon of the defenseless" (169).

[in 1968] "Groups of students would sit around the Jan Hus monument in the Old Town Square playing their guitars and singing until dawn. Tourists from abroad and our own people would join them, listening, and pondering those beautiful, deceitful words carved into the stone: Truth Prevails.

Does it? Truth alone does not prevail. When it clashes with power, truth often loses. It prevails only when people are strong enough to defend it" (182).

"A man with God is always in the majority"

�it is the business of a good controversialist not merely to show where his opponent is wrong but to show what was his temptation to go wrong� (Knox Enthusiasm 479).

There is a story of a convert in Newcastle who was asked why he became a Catholic, and he said he tried all the other places of worship, and everywhere they thrust a hymn-book into his hand, and stood at the door asking him to come again--except the Catholic church, where nobody took any notice of you at all (Off the Record).

lonely and alienated moviegoer "is attracted to the cinema because it gives him the illusion of vicariously partaking of life in its fullness" (169).

"What redeems the film addict from his isolation is . . . the sight of people mingling and communing . . ." (170).

"contentment devoid of content" (290).

"we actually do not confine ourselves to absorbing [images] but feel stimulated to weave what they are telling us into contexts that bear on the whole of our existence" (308).

"The large waves roused in the soul bring ashore propositions regarding the significance of the things we fully experience. Films which satisfy our desire for such propositions may well reach into the dimension of ideology" (308-309).

"all attempts to establish a hierarchy among these propositions or messages [which films evolve inductively] have proved futile so far" (309).

"The range of equally legitimate propositions is inexhaustible" (310).

"This is a very personal book, written by someone who believes in God and in the goodness of the world, someone who has spent most of his life trying to help other people believe and was compelled by a personal tragedy to rethink everything he had been taught about God and God�s ways. . . . the books I turned to were more concerned with defending God�s honor, with logical proof that bad is really good and that evil is necessary to make this a good world, than they were with curing the bewilderment and the anguish of the parent of a dying child. They had answers to all of their own questions, but no answer for mine. . . . There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people? All other theological conversation is intellectually diverting . . . Not only the troubled man or woman who has just come from a discouraging diagnosis at the doctor�s office, but the college student who tells me that he has decided there is no God, or the total stranger who comes up to me at a party . . . and says, �I hear you�re a rabbi; how can you believe that . . .��they all have one thing in common. They are all troubled by the unfair distribution of suffering in the world" (Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People 1,4,6).

"I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize his limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and human moral freedom. . . . I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason. . . . God may not prevent the calamity, but He gives us the strength and the perseverance to overcome it. . . . Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bas luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him, despite his limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be" (134, 141, 148).

On Love in a Socialist state:

"the ideal of love in mutual relations between the sexes . . . is already being formed and crystallized in the midst of the working class, namely, of love-comradeship. . . . Proletarian ideology values chiefly that these given qualities be aroused and nurtured in humanity and be manifested not only in community w the one chosen of the heart, but in community w all the members of the collective. . . . Contemporary love is always at fault in that it preoccupies the thoughts and feelings of �loving hearts,� but at the same time isolates and separates the loving pair from the collective. . . .

The ideal of love of the working class, flowing from working cooperation and spiritual-volitional solidarity of members of the working class, men and women, naturally differs in form and content, from the conception of love in other cultural epochs. of Do not forget that love inevitably changes form and transforms itself together with change in the cultural-economic base of humanity.

If in loving relations blind demanding, all-embracing passion weakens; if the feeling of possession and egotistical desire to forever fasten the beloved around oneself is washed away; if the self-satiety of the man and the criminal renunciation of her own �I� on the part of the woman disappears: then there will develop other valued aspects of love. Respect for the personality of the other and the ability to consider others� rights will grow stronger. A mutual sincere sympathy will develop. The striving to express love not only in kisses and embraces, but in togetherness of action, in unity of will, in joint creation, will grow.

The task of proletarian ideology is not to banish Eros from the social community, but only to rearm its quiver w the arrows of a new structure, to nurture the feeling of love between the sexes in the spirit of the greatest possible force, comradely solidarity" (Rosenburg 102-106).

On Deism "a deistic God, an absentee landlord who ignores his slum" (Fundamentals 56).

"there are only three kinds of people in the world: those who have sought God [or who love Truth, even when that love does not consciously have God as its object] and found him, those who are seeking him and have not yet found him, and those who neither seek him nor find him. . . . The greatest difference is not between those who have found God and those who have not. This is only a temporary difference, for all in the second class will get into the first; all seekers will find [as Jesus promised]. The greatest difference is between seekers and nonseekers, for that is an eternal difference" (Handbook 327).

"It�s time for the Orthodox Church to give to the West its talent for a serious attitude toward the spiritual life, something the West has never known" (194 Vyvoz Ekumenizma).

"The dialogue of religion has become transformed into a religion of dialogue" (82).

"Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars"

"There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does"

"The time of business does not with mw differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament."

"God regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed."

"Our sanctification did not depend upon changing our works, but in doing for God�s sake that which we commonly do for our own."

"The Christian experience is not the achievement of a human effort but a divine effect. Jesus never told men to try to live as He lived by imitation but to let Him live in them by divine initiative."

�A jury's vote's supposed to be secret. Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don't like to do that. Sometimes it's unpleasant" (To Kill a Mockingbird 224).

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do" (To Kill a Mockingbird 116).

"I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man...Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience" (To Kill a Mockingbird 109).

"you cannot make an omelet without breaking the eggs." (i.e. end justifies means)

"We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat�s class struggle. . . . We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist society" (Bolshevik Visions, ed. Rosenberg, p. 33,35).

"Religion is an instrument of spiritual oppression weighing everywhere on the common masses burdened by work and want. The helplessness of the exploited in their struggle with the exploiters also leads directly to a belief in a better afterlife, just as the impotence of savages in their struggle with nature leads to a faith in gods, devils, miracles and other such things. To those who work hard and experience want throughout their lives, religion teaches submission and patience, and promises consolation in a heavenly reward. And for those who live at the expense of the work of others, religion appeals for charity, offering them tickets for heavenly bliss at rather moderate prices. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is spiritual alcohol, in which the slaves of capital drown out their human identity, their strivings for a life worthy of man.

But the slave who recognizes his slavery, who rises up to battle for liberation, has already halfway ceased to be a slave. The conscious worker of our day, raised in the big factory, clears away from himself the darkness found in the service of priests and bourgeois hypocrites, in order to create for himself a better life here on earth. The proletariat of our day is becoming an advocate of socialism, which calls upon science to conduct a struggle with religious darkness, which frees the workers from faith in another life, which leads them to struggle for a better earthly life" (Rosenburg 196-197).

"One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer"

"I never met a single person with a lively faith in heaven without a similar belief in hell" (in Kreeft Fund 163).

"The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God."

"I have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood." CS Lewis "Till We Have Faces"

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things�the beauty, the memory of our own past�are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

A man�s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation in a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man�s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called �falling in love� occurred in a sexless world" (Weight 29, 30).

"The people who keep on asking if they can�t lead a decent life without Christ, don�t really know what life is about; if they did they would know that a �decent life� is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be remade. . . . The ideas of reaching �a good life� without Christian is based on a double error. Firstly, we cannot do it; and secondly, in setting up �a good life� as our final goal, we have missed the very point of our existence" (Grand 85).

"I cannot sufficiently admire the divine tact of thus training the chosen race for centuries in religion before even hinting the shining secret of eternal life. He behaves like the rich lover in a romance who woos the maiden on his own merits, disguised as a poor man, and only when he has won her reveals that he has a throne and palace to offer. For I cannot help thinking that any religion which begins with a thirst for immortality is damned, as a religion, from the outset. . . . For the essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends; the finite self�s desire for, and acquiescence in, and self-rejection in favor of, an object wholly good and wholly good for it. That the self-rejection will turn out to be also a self-finding [i.e. immortality], that bread cast upon the waters will be found after many days, that to die is to live�these are too sacred paradoxes of which the human race must not be told too soon" (Grand 88).

"If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training or correction and it�s not so bad".

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations�these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals with whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit�immortal horrors or everlasting splendors" (Weight 39).

"All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will awake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it�or else that it is within your grasp and you have lost it forever" (in Kreeft Fund 163).

"I felt in my bones that the universe does not explain itself"

"I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don�t" (Weight 13).

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito."

"The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell" (Four Loves).

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: �I�m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don�t accept his claim to be God.� That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic�on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg�or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to" (Lewis, Mere 55-56).

"When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, "Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.� I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. . . . But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is �four bare legs in a bed.� It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong�unless you steal nectarines" (in Eliot Passion and Purity).

"free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata�of creatures that worked like machines�would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman in this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free" (Lewis Mere 52).

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghost may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man "wishes" to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free" (Lewis Problem 127-28).

"If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have show that we prefer everything else to Him . . . It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature�s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature�s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it" (Problem 87).

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world" (Problem 83).

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, �Thy will be done,� and those to whom God says, in the end, �Thy will be done.� All that are in Hell, choose it. . . . this bad man�s perdition [may be thought of] not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is" (Martindale 293, 291).

"Why that creative act leaves room for free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy�s [God�s] nonsense about �Love.� How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it" (Lewis Screwtape 128).

"My Dear Wormwood, I note with displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. . . . There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy�s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mentally and bodily, are still in our favor. . . . Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what he calls his "free" lovers and servants�"sons" is the word he uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own." And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt (C.S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters, p. 15, 17-18).

"Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks . . . in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. . . . If may surprise you to know that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. . . Sooner or later, He withdraws, if not in fact, at least in conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own two legs--to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. . . . Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys" (Screwtape Letters 44-45, 47).

"[N]urse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the 'cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war effort or of Pacificism [or of some other cause]. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more 'religious' (on those terms) the more securely ours" (42-43). . . . "[God's] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. . . . We want an entire race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end. . . . [If the patient] is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once" (78-80). "we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but failing that, as a means to anything--even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. . . . You see the little rift? 'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.' That's the game" (The Screwtape Letters, 120).

"The use of fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. . . . Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of mere 'understanding'" (The Screwtape Letters, 128-129).

�I must warn you not to hope too much from a war. . . . [W]hat permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? . . . We may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity, but if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self. . . . Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy�s party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, . . . withholding all suggesting of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which ear enforces. One of our best weapons, contended worldliness, id rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe he is going to live forever� (Screwtape Letters 30-32).

�It is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. . . . [T]he value we have given to that word [�Puritanism�] is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years. By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life� (Screwtape Letters 51, 55).

�There is a subtle play of looks and tones and laughs by which a mortal can imply that he is of the same party as those to whom he is speaking. That is the kind of betrayal you should especially encourage, because the man does not fully realize it himself; and by the time he does you will have made withdrawal difficult� (Screwtape Letters 53).

�The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity� (Screwtape Letters 58).

�one of my patients said on his arrival down here, �I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.� . . . [We can] steal away a man�s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth og reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off� (Screwtape Letters 64).

�Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one�the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts� (Screwtape Letters 65).

�The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence for what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make him abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favor of the �best� people, the �right� food, the �important� books� (Screwtape Letters 69).

�Let him think of [humility] not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. . . . The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another . . . [in which] he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor�s talents�or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall, He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things� (Screwtape Letters 72-73).

�the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classed and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction. In the second place, the search for a �suitable� church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil . . . [who] does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going� (Screwtape Letters 81-82).

�[With Gluttony,] the great thing is to bring him into the state in which the denial of one indulgence . . . �puts him out� (Screwtape Letters 89).

�[We have been weakening marriage] through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually short-lived, experience which they call �being in love� is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. . . . From the true statement that this transcendental relation [which comes about through any sexual union] was intended to produce . . . affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call �being in love� is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. The error is easy to produce because �being in love� does very often, in Western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy�s designs, that is, with the intention of fidelity, fertility, and good will. . . . [H]umans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-colored and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves �in love,� and thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. (Don�t neglect to make your man think the marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be regarded as �love,� and �love� will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt, and to protect him from all the consequences, of marrying a heathen, a fool, or a wanton� (Screwtape Letters 91, 94-95).

�Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, [�falling in love�] is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material� (Screwtape Letters 100).

�It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual �taste.� This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely� (Screwtape Letters 102).

�Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen, . . . [as assumption] so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. . . . The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men�s belief that they �own their bodies . . . in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another � (Screwtape Letters 107-108).

"Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy's positive Charity. Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them. If each side had really been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would have all kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side's battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years in concealed from tem by the nominal or official 'Unselfishness' of what they are doing . . . Each side is, indeed alive to the cheap quality of adversary's Unselfishness and of the false position into which he is trying to force them; but each manages to feel blameless and ill-used itself, with no more dishonesty than comes natural to a human" (Screwtape Letters 131, 134).

"The dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. . . . The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it--all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. . . [As for prosperity,] it knits a man to the World. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him" (Screwtape Letters 143).

"This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world--a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality" (Screwtape Letters 148).

"[The] Behaviorist theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics . . . was, as is, unbelievable to me. I am using the word �unbelievable,� which many use to mean �improbable� or even �undesirable,� in a quite literal sense. I mean that the act of believing what the behaviorist [purportedly] believes is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility" (Lewis Surprised 115).

"Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die" (Surprised by Joy).

"I do think the State is increasingly tyrannical . . . (it) exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good � anyway, to do something to us or make us something. Hence the new name �leaders� for those who were once �rulers.� We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals."

"Can it be that you fear to die?
Will the world remember you when you fall?
Could it be your life means nothing at all?
Is your life just one more lie?" (Les Miserables).

"In my life there are so many questions and answers that somehow seem wrong. In my life, there are times when I catch in the silence the sound of a faraway song. And it sings of a world that I long to see, out of reach, just a whisper away, waiting for me" (Les Miserables).

"Trust the evolutionary process. It�s all going to work out all right" (Guiness 53).

"Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable, is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence once built."

"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong."

"The better part of one�s life consists of his friendships."

"Nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world."

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate all times and situations. They presented him the words, �And this, too, shall pass way.� How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride�how consoling in the depth of affliction."

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe to liberate the world."

"a state, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all concerns within that state that interfere with the right of no other state, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole."

"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion�kind, unassuming persuasion�should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that a �drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.� So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment or to command his action or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and, though your cause be naked truth itself, . . . you shall no more be able to [reach] him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest."

"All the good from the Savior of the world is communicated through this book; but for the book we could not know right from wrong. All the things desirable to man are contained in it."

"Whatever you are, be a good one."

"I have simply tried to do what seemed best each day, as each day came."

"Many persons who are good at arithmetic do not know how to count even ten of their blessings."

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."

"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right�as God gives us to see the right�let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nations wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan�to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessary of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!"

"Forbid that we should ever consider the holding of a commission from the King of Kings a sacrifice, so long as other men esteem the service of an earthly government as an honor. I am a missionary, heart and soul. God Himself had only one Son, and He was a missionary and a physician. A poor, poor imitation I am, or wish to be, but in this service I hope to live. In it I wish to die. I still prefer poverty and missions service to riches and ease. This is my choice."

"For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be considered a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice that brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealing in and for us. I never made a sacrifice."

Life principle: I will place no value upon anything I have or may possess, except in its relation to the kingdom of God.

"My Jesus, my king, my life, my all. Once more, I dedicate my whole self to Thee."

"the case of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (Oaks (ed.), The Wall Between Church and State, p. 36).

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

"Into each life some rain must fall."

"If we could read the secret history of all our enemies, we should find in each man�s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm hostility."

"The men that women marry, and why they marry them, will always be a marvel and a mystery to the world."

"Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions."

"The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."

"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul" (A Psalm of Life).

"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time" (A Psalm of Life).

"Let us then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait" (A Psalm of Life).

"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence"

"Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage; . . .
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free;
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty"

"Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you" (CCC 2834).

"every good Christian should be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor�s statement than to condemn it. Further, if one cannot interpret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; and if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved" (Spiritual Exercises 22).

"DEAREST LORD,
teach me to be generous;
teach me to serve you as you deserve,
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for any reward
except the knowledge that I am doing
your Most Holy Will. Amen" (St. Ignatius of Loyola's Prayer for Generosity).

"Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of this to save their souls. The other things on the face of the earth are created for the human beings, to help them in working toward the end for which they are created. From this it follows that I should use these things to the extent that they help me toward my end, and rid myself of them to the extent that they hinder me. To do this I must make myself indifferent to all created things, in regard to everything which is left to my own freedom of will and is not forbidden. Consequently, on my own part, I ought not to seek health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, a long life rather than a short one, and so on in all other matters. I ought to desire and elect only the thing which is more conducive to the end for which I am created" (23).

"The Preparatory Prayer is to ask God Our Lord for the grace that all my intentions, actions, and operations may be ordered purely to the service and praise of his Divine Majesty" (46).

"It happens, for example, that many choose first to marry, which is the means, and in the second place to serve God our Lord in marriage, which service of God is the end. Similarly, others first seek to possess benefices, and afterward to serve God in them. Hence these do not go directly to God, but desire God to come to their disordered affections. As a result they transform the end into a means and the means into the end; and what they should fasten on in the first place they take up in the last. For I ought to take up first my desire to serve God, which is the end, and in the second place the benefice or marriage, and whether it is more suitable for myself, which is the means to the end. Therefore nothing whatever ought to move me on to choose such means or deprive myself of them, except one alone, the service and praise of God our Lord and the eternal salvation of my soul" (169).

"�May it please you, merciful Lord, that . . . the last thing I taste may be the blood flowing from my body, dying for your love�"

"I have been married and had children. I have been well-to-do, lascivious, and worldly. Everything that I had in the world I have left that I might honour God, procure the good of others, and exalt the Faith. I have learned Arabic and laboured to convert Moslems. I have been flogged and imprisoned. For forty-five years I have laboured to move the Church and Christian princes, that they may promote the common weal of the Church. Now I am old and poor, yet still I have the same purpose and I trust that, with the grace of God, I may persevere therein even unto death. Does such a life seem to you fantastic? Let your conscience judge."

On Trinity: "Every being which is perfectly good is so perfect in itself that it does not need to do good, nor ask for any, outside itself. You [Muslims] say that God is perfectly good from eternity and for all eternity, therefore he does not need to ask for, nor to do any good outside Himself; for if he did, He would then not be perfectly and absolutely good. Now since you deny the most blessed Trinity, let us suppose that it did not exist; in that case God would not have been perfectly good from eternity until he produced, in time, the good of the world. You do believe in the creation of the world, and therefore, when God created the world in time he was more perfect than before, since goodness is better diffusing itself than remaining idle. This, I claim is your position. Mine, however, is that goodness is diffusive from eternity and for all eternity. And it is of the nature of the good that it be diffusive in and of itself, for God, the good Father, from his own goodness generates the good Son, and from both is breathed forth the good Holy Ghost."

On Incarnation: "[I]n the Incarnation of the Son of God, through participation, that is to say, union, of Creator and creature in the single person of Christ, the first and highest cause agrees and accords with its effect in the most rational way; . . . this becomes apparent in the greatest and noblest degree in the Passion of Christ the Son of God, which He voluntarily and mercifully deigned to suffer in the humanity He had taken on in order to redeem us sinners from the sin and corruption of our first forbear, and to lead us back to that state of glory and divine fruition on account of which and for the final purpose of which the Blessed Lord created us."

"I am told that she is holy, yet I see her full of sinners. I am told that her mission is to tear man away from his earthly cares, to remind him of his eternal vocation, yet I see her constantly preoccupied with the things of the earth and of time, as if she wished us to live here forever. I am assured that she is universal, as open as divine intelligence and charity, and yet I notice very often that her members, through some sort of necessity, huddle together timidly in small groups -- as human beings do everywhere. She is hailed as immutable, alone stable and above the whirlpools of history, and then, suddenly, under our very eyes, she upsets many of the faithful by the suddenness of her renewals." ("Meditation on the Church," in John H Miller, C.S.C., ed., Vatican II: An interfaith Appraisal [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966] p. 259).

"It is precisely because sex is good that celibacy is a worthy offering to the creator of all good things.�

"Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God."

"Be a sinner and sin on bravely, but have stronger faith and rejoice in Christ, who is the victor of sin, death, and the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice: sin must be committed. To you it ought to be sufficient that you acknowledge the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world, the sin cannot tear you away from him, even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders" (Enders, "Briefwechsel", III, 208).

"Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God"

"Who loves not woman, wine, and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long."

"It is living, dying, and even being condemned which makes a theologian�not reading, speculating, and understanding" (in McGrath 79).

"Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that 'the just shall live by his faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through faith[,] grace[,] and sheer mercy[,] God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The words of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the 'justice of God' had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate of heaven."

"Unless I shall be convinced by the testimonies of the Scriptures, or by clear reason...I neither can nor will make any recantation, since it is neither safe nor honorable to act against conscience...Here stand I: I can no otherwise! God help me. Amen."

"Reason is a whore."

"Virtually the whole of scriptures and the understanding of the whole of theology depends upon the true understanding of the law and the gospel."

About Luther�s view of scandal: "the movement of faith is one in which we cast ourselves in utter reliance and trust upon God and that we let all our own vaunted possessions and notions be called in question�this applies to the material content of faith, justification by the grace of God alone, but also to the way in which we reach this knowledge of the divine mercy, for the act of total reliance upon God cuts away the ground for any presupposition or antecedent preparation on our part. To commit ourselves to God in faith means that we let ourselves be called into question so radically that we are stripped of all our presuppositions. Hence in the very knowledge of God the movement of faith means that we refer everything to God in accordance with his absolute priority and nothing to ourselves. . . . [Luther contends] that the point where we feel ourselves under attack from the Scripture, where our natural reason is offended by it, and where we are flung into tumults, is the very point where genuine interpretation can take place and profound understanding can be reached. It is then and only then that the Word of the Lord actually gets across to us, that we can let ourselves be told something which we cannot tell ourselves, and really learn something which we cannot think up for ourselves" (Torrance, Hermeneutics of Calvin 64, 158).

"God conceals His eternal mercy and loving kindness beneath eternal wrath, His righteousness beneath unrighteousness . . . Now, the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful, though He saves so few and damns so many; to believe that He is just, though of His own will He makes us perforce proper subjects of damnation, and seems (in Erasmus� words) �to delight in the torments of poor wretches and to be a fitter object for hate than for love� If I could by any means understand how this same God, who makes such a show of wrath and unrighteousness, can yet be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith. But as it is, the impossibility of understanding makes room for the exercise of faith . . . Doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men. . . . It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been a stumbling block to so many great men down the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace.) This is why so much toil and trouble has been devoted to clearing the goodness of God, and throwing the blame on man�s will. . . . [I]t is inexplicable how God can damn him who by his own strength can do nothing but sin and become guilty. Both the light of nature and the light of grace here insist that the fault lies not in the wretchedness of man, but in the injustice of God. . . . But the light of glory insists otherwise, and will one day reveal God, to Whom alone belongs a judgment whose justice is incomprehensible . . . provided only that in the meanwhile we believe it, as we are instructed and encouraged to do" (Luther Bondage 101, 217, 315f).

"Man�s will is like a beast standing between two riders. If God rides, it wills and goes where God wills. . . . If Satan rides, it wills and goes where Satan wills. Nor may it choose to which rider it will run, or which it will seek; but the riders themselves fight to decide who shall have and hold it" (Luther Bondage 103).

"free will is a downright lie" (Free Will 98)

-----Freedom of a Christian--------

"Nowadays, it is true, we are made so sensitive by the raving crowd of flatterers that we cry out that we are stung as soon as we meet with disapproval. When we cannot ward off the truth with any other pretext, we flee from it by ascribing it to a fierce temper, impatience, and immodesty. What is the good of salt if it does not bite? of what use is the edge of a sword if it does not cut?" (Freedom 35).

"A Christian is perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all" (The Freedom of a Christian, 344).

"Grace is sufficient to enable us to be accounted entirely and completely righteous in God's sight."

"Above all things, bear in mind what I have said, that faith alone without works, justifies, sets free, and saves" (Freedom 348).

"Thus the promises of God give what the commandments of God demand and fulfil what the law prescribes so that all things may be God�s alone, both the commandments and the fulfilling of the commandments. He alone commands, he alone fulfils" (349).

"through faith alone without works the soul is justified by the Word of God, sanctified, made true, peaceful, and free, filled with every blessing and truly made a child of God" (349).

"a Christian has all he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law" (349).

"So the Christian who is consecrated by his faith does good works, but the works do not make him holier or more Christian, for that is the work of faith alone. And if a man were not first a believer and a Christian, all his works would amount to nothing and would be truly wicked and damnable sins. . . . �Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works; evil works do not make a wicked man, but a wicked man does evil works�" (360-361).

"his works do not make him good or wicked, but he himself makes his works either good or wicked. . . . As the man is, whether believer or unbeliever, so also is his work�good if it was done in faith, wicked if it was done in unbelief" (361).

"A Christian has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely. He seeks neither benefits or salvation since he already abounds in good things" (361-362).

"If works are sought after as a means of righteousness, are burdened with this perverse leviathan, and are done under the false impression that through them one is justified, they are made necessity and freedom and faith are destroyed; and this addition to them makes them no longer good but truly damnable works. They are free and they blaspheme the grace of God since to justify and to save by faith belongs to the grace of God alone" (363).

"Through the Christian is thus free from all works, he ought in this liberty to empty himself, to take on the form of a servant . . . and to serve, help, and in every way deal with his neighbor as he sees that God through Christ has dealt and still deals with him (366). . . . He does not distinguish between friends and enemies or anticipate their thankfulness or unthankfulness, but he most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has, whether he wastes all on the thankless or whether he gains a reward (367).

"But in our day we are taught by the doctrine of men to seek nothing but merits, rewards, and the things that are ours. . . . [Rather] our works should be done, not that we may be justified by them, since being justified beforehand by faith, we ought to do things freely and joyfully for the sake of others" (368).

"Our freedom in Christ does not free us from works but from false opinions concerning works, that is, from the foolish presumption that justification is acquired by works" (372-373).

"a believing Christian is free from sin through faith in God, yet bound by love to serve his neighbor" (330).

"Though you were nothing but good works from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, you would still not be righteous or worship God or fulfil the First Commandment, since God cannot be worshipped unless you ascribe to him the glory of truthfulness and all goodness which is due him. This cannot be done by works but only by the faith of the heart. Not by the doing of works but by believing do we glorify God and acknowledge that he is truthful. Therefore faith alone is the righteousness of a Christian and the fulfilling of the commandments, for he who fulfills the First Commandment has no difficulty in fulfilling all the rest. But works being inanimate things, cannot glorify God, although they can, if faith is present, be done to the glory of God" (353).

"When, however, God sees that we consider him truthful and by the faith of our heart pay him the great honor which is due him, he does us that great honor of considering us truthful and righteous for the sake of our faith. . . . It is true that God is righteous and just, and to consider and confess him to be so is the same as being truthful and just" (351).

------ On Temporal Authority-----------

"[a] Christian should be so disposed that he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself . . . [while] On behalf of others; however, he may and should seek vengeance, justice, protection, and help, and do as much as he can to achieve it" (Authority 101).

"God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal, which restrains the un-Christian and wicked so that�no thanks to them�they are obliged to keep still and maintain an outward peace. . . . Both governments must be permitted to remain; the one to produce right, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds" (Authority 91-92).

Christians should "love everyone, and . . . suffer injustice and even death willingly and cheerfully at the hands of everyone" (Authority 89).

* "Christians are few and far between" (Authority 91).

"Since a true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself alone but for his neighbor, he does by the very nature of his spirit even what he himself has no need of, but is needful and useful to his neighbor" (94).

"the sword and authority, as a particular service to God, belong more appropriately to Christians than to anyone else" (100).

"You have the kingdom of heaven; therefore, you should leave the kingdom of earth to whoever takes it" (Authority 102).

"[a] Christian should be so disposed that he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself . . . [while] On behalf of others . . . he may and should seek vengeance, justice, protection, and help, and do as much as he can to achieve it" (Authority 101).

"No Christian shall wield or invoke the sword for himself and his cause. In behalf of others, however, he may and should wield it and invoke it to restrain wickedness and to defend godliness" (Authority 103).