The Best Catholic Writing 2007 -Edited by Jay Manney

-Buy this book.
-About the editor.

I'm copying out below, two selections from this volume in full, because: 1) they are short, and 2) I like them...a lot.

-About the author of the 1st selection: Brian Doyle.

-Rod Dreher's BeliefNet Blog


1) Introduction -Brian Doyle

"Some time ago I gave a characteristically rambling talk to a group of Benedictine nuns at their monastery in Oregon. As usual I set out to tell stories and sing prayers and tell jokes and draw tears and foment cheerful chaos and try to connect at some deep, inexplicable level that has everything to do with laughing and weeping, and as usual I was granted more epiphany and delight than I could ever have delivered, which happens to me all the time, which is one of the reasons why I feel like the richest man on the earth, even though my back is sore all the time and my wife is a confusing country and my children never make their beds and it rains so much here that everyone gets a little mossy come winter.

Anyway, I arrived early at the monastery and wondered around the grounds for a couple of hours, out of respect for my hosts, trying to see and sense something of their lives and loves: their salty days, the way the wind slid through their fir trees, the geometry of the gravestones in their tiny cemetery, the way the hop fields and vineyards stretched away in corduroy rows beneath their little hill, the keening of hawks overhead, the secret words that dragonflies and damselflies spelled in the air among the old stone buildings. I wandered and wondered. I walked the simple stations of the cross that someone had carved in trees along a path. I examined the old washhouse, where millions of prayers had been murmured over socks and frocks during the last century. I sat in the tall grass and prayed quietly for all sorts of things, even for the one-eyed cat glaring at me balefully from the brambles, and then I went to give my talk.

The Faithful Departed; The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture -Philip F. Lawler

-Buy this book.

-About the author

-Review by Richard John Neuhaus (First Things)

-Review by Brian Kelly (Catholicism.org)

Our Lady of Guadalupe; Mother of the Civilization of Love - Carl Anderson and Msg. Eduardo Chavez

Buy this book.


-About the author (Carl Anderson)


-Wikipedia Page for Our Lady of Guadalupe

article: Bad Reason and the ‘Manhattan Declaration’ by R. J. Snell

view article in original form at The Public Discourse

-About the author(with cool short video)

January 8, 2010

A good deal of online commentary about a recent ecumenical statement misunderstands the nature of human reason.

In issuing the “Manhattan Declaration,” Christian leaders across the nation declared their intent to stand for the dignity of the unborn and the institution of marriage even up to the point of civil disobedience. Unsurprisingly, this declaration has spurred much commentary, not all of it sympathetic. One could predict the standard objections from groups and persons committed to the culture of death, but more noteworthy are objections rising from a camp one might expect to agree with the document: namely, a certain kind of conservative Protestant, often, although not always, of a strongly Calvinistic tendency.

One might expect this group to value traditional marriage, oppose abortion and embryo-destructive research, and defend religious liberties strongly, and they do, and yet many in this group have reacted quite negatively to the document. The reaction intensified, at least in the blogosphere, after a New York Times Magazine piece on Robert P. George, one of the leading signers of the declaration.

Some of this is the usual antipathy towards Roman Catholicism, which remains severe enough to prompt even a signatory like Dr. Albert Mohler to feel the need to explain his association with the document. The main intellectual objection is precisely the one mentioned in the Times piece, namely, “that [George] puts too much faith in the power of reason, overlooking what Christians describe as original sin and what secular pessimists call history.” The notion that the natural law forgets sin and thus depreciates the necessity of Christ and the supremacy of Scripture is an old one, to be sure, and is a common objection raised against the ethics and theology of Thomas Aquinas by this same group of Protestants. For example, James White states that George’s position is “a direct refutation of the biblical view of the supremacy of divine revelation and the corruption of human reason through sin,” and Phil Johnson claims “the biblical truths of original sin and human depravity [pose] a fairly fundamental challenge to Robert George’s notion that society can be won to righteousness through human reason alone.” And these are among the more moderate objections. The influential Protestant apologist Francis Schaeffer spoke for many when he characterized Aquinas as believing “the will was fallen or corrupted but the intellect was not affected.”

Certainly Thomas held that the first principles of the natural law could not be erased from the human being (ST I-II 94. 6), and neither did sin fundamentally negate human nature, for if human nature were to be essentially changed by sin then our first parents were of a different species before and after the first sin. A nature cannot change essentially without changing the essence of a being, after all.

But only a wooden and uncharitable reading of Aquinas stops here, for Aquinas has a sophisticated view on the question. He holds that the prelapsarian human was endowed with the grace of original justice, a rectitude whereby reason is subject to God, the lower human powers subject to reason, and the body subject to the soul. Such a person would not sin because he or she is properly ordered; without concupiscence, the unfallen human would always follow the dictates of right reason. Original sin, among other consequences, deprives the human of this original justice, destroying the harmonious relation of human powers to each other and to God.

Since the will is for Aquinas a rational appetite, the will is directed to the good of the whole person rather than to some power or part of the person. While a particular appetite, say for food or sex, seeks only its particular satisfaction, the will integrates and directs all these competing desires into a whole, into a human act, which is why humans can, for the sake of their own and the common good, control their desires to consume too much food or fornicate with this or that person. Particular appetites are directed and placed in order by the rational appetite.

Given original sin, the rational appetite is inordinate and can act counter to right reason. We do disobey the divine mandate, we do allow lower appetites to dominate reason, and we do allow the goods of the body to triumph over the goods of the soul. Further, given original sin and the loss of human integrity and rectitude, we do suffer what Thomas calls the wound of ignorance, that is, we can voluntarily ignore truth and the desire for truth. We can, and do, act in cunning fashion, whereby reason is bent to devise new and clever evils in service to inordinate desire.

There is no cheery optimism in Aquinas with respect to reason. The human is disordered;, one might even say we suffer a totality of depravity since not a single human capacity or function remains in the state of original justice. Yes, humans are utterly messed up, but they are still human beings, and as human beings, as rational animals, they still possess the natural law, for to lose the natural law would be a loss of humanity, actually to become a beast. Not, that is, to act bestially—humans do so—but to be a beast. And this has not happened, since original sin does not change our essence—nor could it. The basic human goods remain the same basic human goods for Adam and for Hitler, and the flourishing of human persons qua persons has not changed. But sin does change our willingness to function as we ought, as we can all attest.

There is, then, no contradiction between the natural law and original sin, at least as understood by Thomas Aquinas. The “Manhattan Declaration,” therefore, remains the declaration of cosmopolis, for insofar as the declaration is reasonable it is reasonable for all, even us sinners.


R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Blessed Simplicity; The Monk as Universal Archetype - Raimundo Panikkar

Buy this book.


-About the author.


-Authors website



"By monk, monachos, I understand that person who aspires to reach the ultimate goal of life with all his being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it, i.e., by concentrating on this one single and unique goal." (11)


"The monk is compelled, as it were, by an experience that can only articulate itself in the praxis of one's life. It is an experience of the presence of the goal of life, on the one hand, and of its absence (of not having reached it), on the other." (12)


"To speak of a Buddhist monk or a Hindu monk or a Jaina monk or a Christian monk does no violence to the words. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Jaina . . . are only qualifications of the search for that center, for that core which monkhood seeks. The monastic vocation as such precedes the fact of being Christian, Buddhist, or secular (we shall speak about that too), or Hindu, or even atheist." (16)


"Simplicity is not just given. It has to be conquered, and conquered precisely by overcoming the world of multiplicity. Dazzled by the many facets of the world and the many desires of our hearts, we have to retrieve the essential unity of things and of ourselves if we are to be what we really are. In our first incursions into life we might have been decieved, if not wounded.

...The monk is not just someone who wishes to be a monk. It requires a breakthrough, an initiation, a diksa , a new birth. You have to be twiceborn, a dvija, in order even to begin. All monastic traditions stress the compunctio cordis, the conversio morum, the true metanoia, the firm resolve to leave behind the 'things of this world', the laukika and the stern urge for liberation, plus the practice of all the virtues. Shankara's Vivekacudamani could serve as a classic example here. The desire for liberation (moksa), mumuksutva has to be a burning fire. You have to knock again and again at the door to the monastery, or touch repeatedly the feet of the guru to be taken seriously. Not all who say Lord.Lord! are fit for the Kingdom.

There has to be a rupture of planes, as any initiation requires, but the proper plane here is especially the tissue of one's own heart.

The heart here stands, of course, for the core of the person. This heart has to be broken, or rather, once the heart is broken open one can begin anew by setting out to make it whole again in a wider and deeper way than before. The heart breaks because harmartia, sin, duhkha, suffering avidya, ignorance, injustice . . . pervade the world. 'Save me from death, afflicted as I am by the unquenchable fire', is a typical plea of the Hindu candidate to the monastic way, as Shankara writes. . . . the Christian tradition can speak of the baptism of desire only because the desire for purification is essential to the Christian initiation. The primitive monks, for instance, never claimed to do anything but take seriously the baptismal initiation, the plunge into the waters of death and resurrection which begins one's growth into that Christic sphere where the entire renewed Body of Creation commences its expansion. Christian monks did not want to be special Christians, but just Christians...." (39-40)


"There can be no monasticism without this experience of conversion, of turning around and turning inward, of stripping off the very many things that cling to us, of abandoning the 'usual',
the 'normal', and even the secure and often reasonable way. as one Upanisad says: "On the very day that one is 'brokenhearted', on that same day one becomes a renouncer"; one brokenhearted, i.e., one indifferent to the world, a disillusioned person. . . .

". . . The 'broken heart' is only a one-sided metaphor, for in truth it is only a negative expression when seen from this shore of samsara, of mere creatureliness. It is the 'old' heart that is broken open, often with violence, so that it may give way to a 'new' heart and a healed person with the incipient throbbings of the new life of compassion, love, and true understanding. The metephor is one-sided because, seen from the far shore, from the new life, it is not a broken but a renewed heart. Monastic life is also a life of peace, joy, and serenity. The heart that has been - that could be - broken was a wounded heart, a sinful heart, a heart of stone. It had to be broken because the human condition is unjust, ignorant, sinful. The monk has to break through the thick walls of this heart, the walls of callousness and selfishness in himself and around him; he has to break through mere temporality and inauthenticity in order to be on his way. Ahamkara and abhimana, selfishness and conceit have to be, so to speak, 'exposed', broken wide open, so that the true atman, the real 'I' may emerge." (41-2)


"The monks with whom I lived recently in a Tibetan monastery would not understand that you 'enter' a monastery. You do not enter into a family, you are born into it. The whole is prior to it's parts." (70)


"The principal of simplicity is at work here in a peculiar way. It entails getting rid of the complexity of the individual in favor of the simplicity of the person. An individual is a closed system. Its boundaries are clear-cut. The mine and the thine can not be mixed. A person is an open system. Its limits depend only on the power of the center. Each person is an expanding universe. You need not keep anything for yourself because the real self is not a private substance of your own." (71)


"The holy is neither the sacred nor the profane. The profane is everything that happens outside the temple. The sacred is the realm within the temple. It is the domain of the priest, not the monk.....The sacred stands in relation to the profane, but the holy is the center of everything and of every activity." (82-3)


"Authentic work is not a means to an end, but a basic form of human creativity. Anything short of this is slavery. And when the machine imposes it's conditions on human productivity, it dehumanizes and condemns that activity. Modern technological society cries out to be redeemed from the enslavement into which it has fallen. The contemporary monk withdraws from that society, not to abandon it to its slavery, but to incarnate the authentically human - which turns out to be the most divine." (86)


". . . a fundamental monastic archetype could be described as the life of those who....adopt a solitary journey beyond the supportive environment of their culture, of social life, of religious traditions, etc. The monk is called to go beyond what the culture - even the religious culture - in which he lives allows him to be, or leads him to." -Armand Veilleux (146)

The Unknown Christ of Hinduism; Towards an Ecumenical Christophany - Raimundo Panikkar

Buy this book. -About the author. -Author's website


"There are ex-Catholics, ex-Marxists, ex-Buddhists and so forth, but I know of no ex-mystic. Once the transformation due to an authentic mystical experience has happened, it is irreversible." (22)


"Nothing is so dangerous in the Christian apostolate as the paternalistic attitude and false security of one who thinks he is in full possession of the truth. the true Christian ( as also the true Hindu) possesses nothing, not even the truth. Rather, he is possessed by the truth, as Thomas Aquinas points out. He knows God because God knows him." (76)


"Two propositions are universally accepted by Christian Theology: one, salvation comes exclusively through Christ,and two, God does not condemn anybody. Now, this second proposition amounts to saying that God provides every Man coming into existence with the means of salvation.

We have mentioned God's universal will to save. Now if he created Men for union with him, then surely he also provided them with a means whereby to attain this end. If these means were exclusively in the viable Church or in 'official' Christianity, other people could not be saved, but this, in fact, is not so. If it be true that 'outside the Church there is no salvation', this 'Church' should not be identified with a concrete organization, or even with adherence to Christianity.....

....The ultimate reason for this universal idea of Christianity, an idea which makes possible the catholic embrace of every people and religion, lies in the Christian conception of Christ: he is not only the historical redeemer, but also the unique Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the only ontological -temporal and eternal- link between God and the World....

...(..his providence, even in the 'supernatural' sphere, follows ordered and ordinary ways. And in this sense he provides normal, natural means for leading peoples and individuals to himself.) The normal and natural means within the Christian Church are the sacraments....By virtue of their divine institution those sacraments, when received with the proper dispositions confer the divine grace that they symbolize.

....If we take the concept of the sacrament not in the restricted sense used by the Church when she speaks of the sacraments of the New Law - to distinguish them from other sacraments - but in a more general sense, as applied by Christian Scholastics when speaking of the sacraments of the Old Testament and of the sacramenta naturae (sacraments of nature), then we may well say that sacraments are the ordinary means by which God leads the people of the earth towards himself.

No true sacrament is magical. Nevertheless the sacraments have a special causative strength because of their extrinsic connection with the will of God. Thus the efficacy of the Christian sacraments does not reside in themselves...but depends on the action of Christ within them as instruments of grace. One may or may not assume that the same efficacy is conferred upon all other sacraments....Yet it remains true that Christ may be active and at work in the human being who receives any sacrament, whether Christian or any other.

....The good and bona fide Hindu as well as the good and bona fide Chrsitian are saved by Christ - not by Hinduism or Christianity per se, but through thier sacraments and, ultimately, through the mysterion active within the two religions. This amounts to to saying that Hinduism also has a place in the universal saving providence of God and cannot therefore be considered as negative in relation to Christianity. (83-86)

My purpose is to recall and emphasize that, according to Christian doctrine, the Father in heaven makes his sun to rise on the good and on the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45), that Christ is the expectation of the peoples (Gen. 49:10), that his spirit is at work among non-believers (Rom. 15:21, quoting Isa. 52:15), that he is already found by those who did not seek him (Rom. 10:20;cf. Isa. 65:1), and that he is a hidden God (Isa. 45:15) who has sometimes hidden himself either in an unknown God (Acts 17:23) or in the hearts of Men of good will (Cf. Luke 2:14). Christians often need reminding that Christ himself taught Peter not to call profane or impure anything that God has made clean (Acts 10:15), for he already has other sheep which are not following the visible flock (John 10:16) and other disciples who work miracles and are not acknowledged by his visible followers (Mark 9:37). It was Christ also who sent a non-Jewish woman not to sow but actually to reap where others (non-Jews) had toiled, reminding his closest disciples of the meaning of this action (John 4:38). In ancient days God spoke to our fathers in many ways and by many means, now in recent times he has spoken to us through his own Son (Heb. 1:1), in whom everything is summed up (Eph. 1:10), for he is the atonement not only for our sins, but for the defilement of the whole world (1 John 2:2). (88-89)


"If there is a God, he cannot be comprehended by any human intellect, but must transcend all human forces and capacities since, if he exists, he is more than Man. He can be transparent, fully knowable, only to himself. For us he is a mystery in the real sense of the word. A comprehensible, a plainly under-standable God would not be God at all, for I would then be his ground and not he mine, the very source of my under-standing. No human formula, therefore, can give an adequate expression of God." (103)


"If there is a God, his being Ground and Principle is not to be taken only as origin or commencement, but also as end and achievement. He is the timeless and pure ontological foundation of everything. God is not only in the ontic beginning of the universe, but also at its termination and consummation. God is not only the inspiring and originating force and source of all, but at the same time the attracting term and conclusion of all being and activity. God is the fullness toward which each particle of being aspires and each movement tends. God is the goal of the world as well as the destination of history." (104)


" If there is a God, his relation with me can not be an abstract, 'universal' one, but must be real, concrete, definite, constitutive and existential. This is to say, my relation with God is not numerical, quantitative, as if I were a "case" or a 'number' as regards the Absolute, the being, but must be a personal, intimate and particular one, having God as my source, my Being, my maker, my sustainer, my utmost self, my father. My approach to God cannot therefore be simply 'generic' or purely intellectual, but most be integral, total, involving body and soul, intellect and will, and also knowledge, service and love - and all this in a personal, unique and unchangeable way." (105)


"...if God exists, this hypothesis is not irrelevant to anything, is not superfluous in any action of the cosmos, but is in very truth the hypothesis or underlying support of the whole universe along with all our being and acting." (105)


"For Indian philosophy 'reason alone' has but little meaning - and this for two reasons: 1. reason is not isolated from the rest of our human faculties, our human nature; and 2. it is not self-sufficient even in the highest form of knowing.

1. If it is reason that discovers the existence of God, it is a reason incarnated in a human person who has reached some degree of purification, objectivity, freedom of will, and so forth. Reason may be the instrument, but it is not effective unless it is properly used. It is the whole Man who uses it, and he will only use it properly when he is pure, detached, moral. 2. It may be that the light, the power , God has given to reason enables us to discover his existence, but Man has not, in fact, received reason alone. After all, 'reason' is an abstraction, though a very real one, and the Indian mind abhors its conversion into a hypothasis. To those who do not believe in God, the Indian tradition does not say: 'Inquire, think, try to investigate with your reason!' but rather: 'Do penance, gain perspective by detaching yourself from the World, look for a spiritual master, search with your whole being. It is not your reason that is weak, it is you who are ill'....

...The problem thus can only be posed as an epistemological hypothesis: what is the instrument by which we come to know of the existence of God? Among the various instruments reason undoubtedly has a special role, a very important one, for it makes intelligible the structure of the World - that it is contingent, that it is not its own cause. But at the same time, reason has a very weak role, because it can say almost nothing about the nature of this cause. Reason, says Indian philosophy, only functions in its proper place when it listens to the Scriptures and tries to work together with faith to find a basis for a higher understanding." (128-29)

Whoever would grasp what he must believe must use reason. Yet reason must not resist faith, but rather walk with her, waiting on her as a handmaid. And even though at times reason seems contrary to faith, yet in truth faith never gets along wihtout her. . . . Therefore, let your powers of reason be well trained.

--St. Thomas More

The Christian Universe -E.L.Mascall

Buy this book -About the author  
- blog article: Mascall as Anglican Patrimony (The AngloCatholic)

"To put the matter quite simply, I hope to show that the affirmations about God, man and Christ which the Christian Church has taught throughout it's history, and the manner of living which these affirmations imply, are more satisfying to our intellect, more enriching to our imagination and more fulfilling to our whole personality than either the secularist humanism which is so widespread today or the etiolated substitutes for orthodox Christianity which are frequently offered for our consumption. I hope, in short, to show that the faith which the Church has proclaimed throughout the ages is fuller, more interesting, more comprehensive, more demanding, more liberating, more satisfying, that it synthetises a wider range of human thought, embraces and co-ordinates a wider range of human experience, opens up more possibilities of human living and offers in the end a deeper and richer ecstasy of fulfilment than any alternate way of life and thought; that it is in every way grander, more inspiring and more fruitful." (10-11)


"What I have tried to show is that the world in which we live and of which we are part does not make sense of itself. So we are presented with this choice. We may, if we so decide, make the best of a world which is in the last resort a sensless and hostile desert, in which we must either bury our heads in the sands or make, each for himself our little private oasis. Or we may look for the world's meaning in some order of reality outside and beyond it, which can do for the world what the world can not do for itself." (45)


"...it is significant that the church has adopted the luxuriant nuptial imagery of the Song of Solomon as an analogy of the love of God for man and of man for God; for our enjoyment of God in heaven will be more, not less, ecstatic than the most passionate sexual experience on earth. And, if we want to acquire some remote understanding of the wonder and glory of the Christian God, we may well find the poets more helpful than the theologians." (53)


" "The true alternative", it has been well said, "is not mystery or clarity, but mystery or absurdity"". (65)


"...to penetrate to the heart of the truth of God, it is not enough to have been given it; you must love it, cling to it, and live by it." (71)


"Then there are men who are seeking the God they do not know, in shadowy imaginings; God is not far from men of this kind, for he gives to all men life and breath and all we have..." (73)


"He can either accept his dependence upon God and turn to God in gratitude and loving obedience, and by so doing he will be acting in accordance with his nature; or he can rebel against it and claim the right to self-sufficiency which he doers not in fact posses." (102)


"...two classic facts of Christian teaching stand out clearly: first, that sin is basically falshood, it is, as we say, "acting a lie"; secondly, it is frustration, for it is fighting against the law of our own being. Division between man and man, and division within our own selves, are the natural consequence of man's separation of himself from God." (103)

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith - Stephen M. Barr

Buy this book - About the author -Wikipedia Page

"It is a very curious circumstance that materialist, in an effort to avoid what Laplace called the unnecessary hypothesis of God, are frequently driven to hypothesize the existence of an infinity of unobservable entities." (157)


"The idea that quantum theories of the Big Bang are competing against God as Creator is based on some crude misunderstandings. The real question that monotheism is attempting to deal with is a much more basic question than whether the Big Bang can be described by a mathematically consistent set of laws. It is rather why anything exists at all. Why are there any physical system, any "states", any laws, any anything?

Just having a mathematical framework which describes a universe with a beginning, whether the framework is classical or quantum, or whether the beginning is smooth or melodramatically singular, does not explain why the mathematical framework describes anything real.

The crucial question was lucidly posed by Stephan Hawking, who pointed out that a theory of physics is "just a set of rules and equations", and then went on to ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe."" (278)


"There is a circularity about the materialist position that becomes obvious whenever its logic is carefully examined. The idea that everything may not be reducible to physics or mathematics is said to be mysticism, mysterianism, or mystery-mongering because it supposedly involves a rejection of rational explanation. That, in turn, follows from the supposition that all rational explanation must be explanation in terms of equations and quantities. This supposition is based on the fact that such quantitative explanations have been found to be sufficient in the realm of physics and on the assumption that what is true in physics must be true of all reality. But what justifies that last assumption? Why, simply the idea that all of reality is nothing but physics!" (256)



"Religion is sometimes attacked by materialists as a realm of make-believe and speculation in which untestable assertions are made about things that cannot be observed. It is true that the things that are of most concern to religion are things that cannot be smelled, or touched, or tasted - such as freedom and rationality, good and evil, truth and falsehood, love and beauty. It is true that these will never register in the devices of experimentalists, or appear as quantities in the equations of theorists. but, as we have seen, religion does make claims even about the physical world. One would be quite justified in calling these claims predictions.

One of these predictions is that the physical world cannot be "casually closed". One hundred years ago this prediction seemed well on the way to being falsified. Everything in the history of physics up to that time pointed to a most rigid determinism. And yet that determinism did in fact give way in the face of new discoveries. Why shouldn't this be counted as a successful prediction?"

The God of Faith and Reason; Foundations of Christian Theology - Robert Sokolowski

Buy this book. -About the author.

"To someone trained as a historian it might appear that the most urgent scholarly task in New Testament studies would be to determine the very words and actions of Christ and to distinguish them from additions and interpretations that others made later. This might permit us to reconstruct an original core for the Gospels and to measure the later modifications, as well as the later forms of Christian life, against what proceeded them. It would permit a criticism within the New Testament itself. Such a task is, of course, extremely difficult to carry out, but we may also ask whether it is desirable in principle. Christ did not speak and act by himself; he spoke and acted with and toward others. And no one speaks until he is understood; the understanding of Christ's words achieved by those who heard him and by those who thought about him after he left is the completion of the speaking of Christ. The disciples complete the words of Jesus by responding to them." (120)

A Guide For The Perplexed - E.F. Schumacher

Buy the book. - About the author


"While the logical mind abhors divergent problems and tries to run away from them, the higher faculties of man accept the challenges of life as they are offered, without complaint, knowing that when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, then, just then, life really makes sense: as a mechanism providing and almost forcing us to develop toward higher Levels of Being." (135)


"...faith in modern man's omnipotence is wearing thin. Even if all the new problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder, and corruption would remain. It existed before the present crisis became acute, and it will not go away by itself. More and more people are beginning to realize that the "modern experiment" has failed. It received its early impetus from what I have called the Cartesian revolution, which, with implacable logic, separated man from those higher levels that alone can maintain his humanity. Man closed the gates of heaven against himself and tried, with immense energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth. He is now discovering that the Earth is but a transitory state, so that a refusal to reach for Heaven means an involuntary descent into Hell." (139)

Love In The Western World -Denis De Rougemont

Buy this book. -About the author. 
-article: The Myth of Romantic Love, Micheal Novak (FirstThings)

"Sin,it has been remarked by R.dePury, is not Eros, but the sublimation of Eros." (312,note 1)