“Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’ So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illuminated the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the new Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with the brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’. Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’ So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had merged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesman for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

G.K. Chesterton as standalone manuscript-illustration style image in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It’s fun to watch/Satan is a feminist now/ The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills… Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple. Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple (which is not to be confused with the very different Church of Satan) is not about devil worship. Rather, it is about raising hell to fight for freedom from the religious right’s crusade to impose their beliefs on everyone else…. Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the Satanic Temple uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them. When a Ten Commandments monument was erected at the Oklahoma state capitol in 2012, for example, the temple submitted an application to put a 7ft-tall statue depicting Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, alongside it…. In the end, the Ten Commandments statue was removed by order of the state’s supreme court and the Horned One did not get immortalized in Oklahoma. Over the years, the Satanic Temple has taken on issues like prayer in the classroom, after-class Bible study groups, and the distribution of Bibles in schools. Now, for obvious reasons, it’s increasingly turning its not-so-evil eye to abortion rights. Last year, it opened an online abortion clinic in New Mexico called The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic, in reference to the conservative justice who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade. ‘In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened,’ Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of the Satanic Temple said at the time. As with its other causes, the Satanic Temple brands abortion as a core part of its religious beliefs. Women are asked to recite a ritual (‘By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done’) before taking abortion pills to ward off ‘unjust persecution’. The temple has also sued states that have banned abortion, arguing that abortion is a religious rite for their congregation and that denying them access to these ritual abortions would be a constitutional violation. All of this has had the desired effect of driving the satanists’ adversaries bonkers.”

Arwa Mahdawi in “The Week in Patriarchy” in The Guardian Oct. 19, 2024 [including hed, deck and start] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/19/satanic-temple-fight-against-religious-right].

“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.”

Proverbs XXIV:10 [KJV].

“Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilizations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently is nothing real about it’. To think otherwise was imbecility.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [The author in question is the Marquis de Sade, who Holland takes very seriously as a philosopher and not in a good way.]

“1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile. Many had opted to leave Spain; more, including the chief rabbi of Castile himself, had accepted baptism. It was hardly to be expected, then, three decades on, that agents of the Spanish monarchy would spare the altars of the people who knew nothing of the God of Israel. Traveling to Mexico in Cortés’ wake, Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexicans gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexican who is temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the flayed one’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favors could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep. Such cruelties cried out to the heavens. ‘It was the clamor of so many souls, and so much bloodshed is an affront to their Creator,’ wrote one Franciscan, that had inspired God to send Cortez to the Indies – ‘like another Moses in Egypt.’ Yet even Cortés himself had lamented the cost.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World