Forwarded from The Exaltation of Beauty
"All great art is praise; the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own."
~John Ruskin
~John Ruskin
Forwarded from Fixed Centre Art
'for in the age of technics the tendency is for creativeness to become dehumanised, for contrivance to usurp imagination, for the will towards shape to become almost indistinguishable from a mere will toward power. There is a deflection, a mass-deflection, from the proper “habit of art” towards forms which owe their existence and meaning to what they effect rather than to what they are. Power-extension and multiplication become the objectives, and the utile is the sole factor determining the forms, and the symbolic loses altogether its central and presiding position.' - David Jones
"Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments."
~Dr. Amir Azarvan
~Dr. Amir Azarvan
Forwarded from Revolt Against The Modern World
"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."
~John Locke
~John Locke
"The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform."
~Christopher Dawson
~Christopher Dawson
"We have the material conditions for world unity, but there is as yet no common moral order without which a true culture cannot exist. The entire modern world wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, and watches the same films, but it does not possess common ethical values or a sense of spiritual community or common religious beliefs. We have a long way ot go before such a spiritual community is conceivable, and meanwhile what we call modern civilization remains an area of conflict - a chaos of conflicting ideologies, institutions, and moral standards.[...] Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces."
~Christopher Dawson
~Christopher Dawson
“Unless men believe that they have an all-powerful ally outside time, they will inevitably abandon the ideal of a supernatural or anti-natural moral progress, and make the best of the world as they find it, conforming themselves to the law of self-interest and self-preservation which governs the rest of nature. And thus the philosophy of Progress, which had inspired such boundless hopes for the future of the human race, resulted in negation and disillusionment. The Cartesian Reason, which had entered so triumphantly on its career of explaining nature and man to itself by its own unaided power, ended in a kind of rational suicide by explaining itself away.”
~Christopher Dawson
~Christopher Dawson
"The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero."
~Carl Jung
~Carl Jung
Forwarded from The Exaltation of Beauty
"Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope."
~Frithjof Schuon
~Frithjof Schuon
"Meaning is disappearing from our lives. The amount of information being dumped on our heads is increasing exponentially. New technologies make primary sources more and more accessible, but this does not lead to an accumulation of knowledge. Not only has clarity not increased, but on the contrary, we understand the world around us less and less. This happens because the criteria of understanding have been lost, the instance in our consciousness, in our culture, in our society, which give life meaning, interprets reality, puts disparate facts into appropriate boxes, has disappeared. Westerners "killed God" according to Nietzsche, but along with him man himself disappeared as a reasonable, active being, as something vertical, capable of establishing clear guidelines and giving definite sense to the world. All they are left with is a meaningless mosaic of post-modernist culture, where the pathos of humanism has dried up and civilizational fatigue has accumulated, depriving life of meaning."
~A.G. Dugin
~A.G. Dugin
"The New Paganism, should it ever become universal, or over whatever districts or societies it may become general, will never be what the Old Paganism was. It will be other, because it will be a corruption. The Old Paganism was profoundly traditional; indeed, it had no roots except in tradition. Deep reverence for its own past and for the wisdom of its ancestry and pride therein were the very soul of the Old Paganism; that is why it formed so solid a foundation on which to build the Catholic Church, though that is also why it offered so long and determined a resistance to the growth of the Catholic Church. But the New Paganism has for its very essence contempt for tradition and contempt of ancestry. It respects perhaps nothing, but least of all does it respect the spirit of "Our fathers have told us."
The Old Paganism worshipped human things, but the noblest human things, particularly reason and the sense of beauty..."
The Old Paganism worshipped human things, but the noblest human things, particularly reason and the sense of beauty..."
"...In these it rose to heights greater than have since been reached, perhaps, and certainly to heights as great as were ever reached by mere reason or in the mere production of beauty during the Christian centuries.
But the New Paganism despises reason, and boasts that it is attacking beauty. It presents with pride music that is discordant, building that is repellent, pictures that are a mere chaos, and it ridicules the logical process, so that, as I have said, it has made of the very word "logical" a sort of sneer.
The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see. The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing..."
But the New Paganism despises reason, and boasts that it is attacking beauty. It presents with pride music that is discordant, building that is repellent, pictures that are a mere chaos, and it ridicules the logical process, so that, as I have said, it has made of the very word "logical" a sort of sneer.
The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see. The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing..."
"...the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.
The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing... The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.
There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."
~Hilaire Belloc, The New Paganism
The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing... The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.
There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."
~Hilaire Belloc, The New Paganism
“There will come a time when it will be recognized that man does not live on horsepower and tools alone. There are also goods which he does not want to and cannot do without. And he will learn to economize, and he will not seek to win one thing, only to lose everything else with it. For if man had gained everything that could be gained with his technology, he would have come to the realization that life on the now disfigured earth—which has been made so excessively easy and simple—is actually no longer worth living; that we have indeed snatched everything that our planet had to give away, and in the process we have destroyed it, and thus ourselves, in this extractive work. Each one of us has to take care of his own part, so that the change may come before it is everywhere too late forever!”
~Paul Schultze-Naumburg
~Paul Schultze-Naumburg