Category Archives: Quotes

In Case You Can’t Tell, I’m Clearing Out Old Drafts of Blog Posts

I suspect that the continual return of natural law is best explained as an indication that our “nature” seldom tells us what we ought to do but often tells us what we are doing is inappropriate. Thus natural law is primarily a test, as the “principles” of natural law are means to sensitize us to ways our nature can and may be distorted. The traditional claim that the Christian life is in harmony with natural law is a promissory note that Christian existence stands ready to be challenged by “nature.” It has been a mistake, however, to assume that Christian ethics can therefore begin on the basis of clearly articulated “principles” of natural law. For the “principles” of natural law are known only through the articulation of a positive tradition.

Stanley Hauerwas

In other words, natural law does not tell us what to do. It tells us what not to do. Let those in the so-called “manosphere” hear.

The Makers by Dorothy Sayers

The Architect stood forth and said:
“I am the master of the art:
I have a thought within my head,
I have a dream within my heart.

“Come now, good craftsman, ply your trade
With tool and stone obediently;
Behold the plan that I have made—
I am the master; serve you me.”

The Craftsman answered: “Sir, I will
Yet look to it that this your draft
Be of a sort to serve my skill—
You are not master of the craft.

“It is by me the towers grow tall,
I lay the course, I shape and hew;
You make a little inky scrawl,
And that is all that you can do.

“Account me, then, the master man,
Laying my rigid rule upon
The plan, and that which serves the plan—
The uncomplaining, helpless stone.”

The Stone made answer: “Masters mine,
Know this: that I can bless or damn
The thing that both of you design
By being but the thing I am;

“For I am granite and not gold,
For I am marble and not clay,
You may not hammer me nor mould—
I am the master of the way.

“Yet once that mastery bestowed
Then I will suffer patiently
The cleaving steel, the crushing load,
That make a calvary of me;

“And you may carve me with your hand
To arch and buttress, roof and wall,
Until the dream rise up and stand—
Serve but the stone, the stone serves all.

“Let each do well what each knows best,
Nothing refuse and nothing shirk,
Since none is master of the rest,
But all are servants of the work—

“The work no master may subject
Save He to whom the whole is known,
Being Himself the Architect,
The Craftsman and the Corner-stone.

“Then, when the greatest and the least
Have finished all their labouring
And sit together at the feast,
You shall behold a wonder thing:

“The Maker of the men that make
Will stoop between the cherubim,
The towel and the basin take,
And serve the servants who serve Him.”

The Architect and Craftsman both
Agreed, the Stone had spoken well;
Bound them to service by an oath
And each to his own labour fell.

(Discovered in Sayers’ The Man Born to be King)

Two Quotes on Dying

They, who in matters of war seek in all ways to save their lives, are just they who, as a rule, die dishonorably; whereas they who, recognizing that death is the common lot and destiny of all men, strive hard to die nobly: these more frequently, as I observe, do after all attain to old age, or, at any rate, while life lasts, they spend their days more happily. This lesson let all lay to heart this day, for we are just at such a crisis of our fate. Now is the season to be brave ourselves, and to stimulate the rest by our example.

Xenophon, Anabasis

A man’s thoughts [when death draws near] seem to be double-powered, and the memory becomes very sharp and clear. I don’t know what was in the others’ minds, but I know what filled my own… I fancy it isn’t the men who get most out of the world and are always buoyant and cheerful that most fear to die. Rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling most fiercely to life. They have not the joy of being alive which is a kind of earnest of immortality … I know that my thoughts were chiefly about the jolly things that I had seen and done; not regret, but gratitude.

Dick Hannay in John Buchan’s Greenmantle

At first glance, these two quotes express the same thing, that those who cling to life never really live at all, and those who are willing to risk everything enjoy it all the more. But Hannay is able to trace his sentiment to a source that Xenophon (apparently) knew nothing of: gratitude.

I also love that phrase, an “earnest of immortality,” meaning, of course, a pledge or promise of things to come. The real joy of life comes in knowing there’s more life to come.

When I was in the process of conversion, it was, as it often is, terrifying. One of the things that was terrifying was that there was so much that I loved about being human—good fiction and music and intellectual adventures and experiencing nature and careful thinking—and I didn’t know how of all those human things would look in light of the Gospel, with all its urgency.

Susannah Black Roberts

Preparing for the Apocalypse

I knew an old couple that sat many evenings out on their porch. Sometimes both, sometimes one. They’d sit longer into the night than seemed reasonable, as if they were waiting for something that never came. It wasn’t until after the disaster that I believed I understood why.

Every subsequent evening, almost the entire street went, and sat, and talked, and shared, and played, for hours, around THEIR porch. Stubborn habit? Or had they just never forgotten a normal that everyone else briefly remembered?

Source

Using a Scythe

So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

Before All Things Else

What distinguishes [the artist] here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work. Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labour passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power. It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing—more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Work by the Standard of Eternity

That the eyes of all workers should behold the integrity of the work is the sole means to make that work good in itself and so good for mankind. This is only another way of saying that the work must be measured by the standard of eternity; or that it must be done for God first and foremost; or that the Energy must faithfully manifest forth the Idea; or, theologically, that the Son does the will of the Father.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Those With Ears to Hear

A passing hostile comment in the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in Christian worship (which he seems to have heard) were not only unusual to his pagan ears but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect as an instrument for dulling the critical faculty.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

The Maturity of the Church

It is a paradoxical law of early liturgical study that the greater the biblical element in any given prayer the less primitive it is likely to be.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church