“For the British the war was a practical necessity, a sentiment captured by the slogan ‘business as usual.’ As one soldier put it in a letter to his parents on October 1, 1914: ‘We are just at the beginning of the struggle I’m afraid, and every hour we should remind ourselves that it is our great privilege to save the traditions of all centuries behind us. It’s a grand opportunity, and we must spare no effort to use it, for if we fail we shall curse ourselves in bitterness every year that we live, and our children will despise our memory.’ For the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy. For the average British soldier there was no question of who was responsible for the war.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Bishops demanded to know of Darwin’s defenders the precise details of their descent from gorillas; satirists delighted in portraying Darwin himself as an ape; Cope declared his belief that humanity had evolved from a lemur. Yet not all the debating society sallies, not all the cartoons of monkeys in frock coats, not all the theorizing about possible lines of human descent could entirely conceal what yawned behind them: an immense abyss of anxiety and doubt. Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilization, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration. For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. And the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable – that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that ‘the public’ does not understand these things; that ‘the likes of us’ cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Mystagogue” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Jerome K. Jerome, author of the enormously successful Three Men in a Boat, took the line that the sporting spirit was the essence of civilization and called on the Germans to treat the war as ‘The Greatest Game of All’: ‘Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both. But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all: the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be really lasting. Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it?’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Modern criticism has come to mean this: that nobody knows what an artist is trying to do, and therefore nobody knows whether he has done it.”

G.K. Chesterton in New York American 30/12/1933, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“As might be expected from [C.S.] Lewis, he gave his lecture a Latin title: ‘De Descriptione Temporum,’ which might be rendered into English as ‘A Description of Time.’ He had long argued that the rigid way of describing the Renaissance as a sudden break with the past was simply incorrect. In fact, all of the great divisions of time lacked clear landmarks to set them apart. Change takes place over a period of many centuries, with one exception. He argued that a change between the period of Jane Austen and when he was speaking in 1954 was unlike any other change in culture throughout world history. He noted the recent symposium on T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘A Cooking Egg’ in which seven leading scholars could not agree on what the poem means. He noted the un-Christianizing of the West, which had accelerated since Austen’s time. He noted the way in which politics had become ‘the organization of mass excitement,’ or what Punch called ‘Govertisement.’ Finally, he noted that with the success of the machine, the culture had moved to viewing what is new is good and what is old is bad. The result was that education has shifted from the development of character to the acquisition of technical skill and the assimilation of data. In his inaugural lecture, Lewis painted a picture of a world in which people had lost the ability to make value judgments because of the disappearance of values.”

Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis

“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]

“Returning to the problem he identified in The Abolition of Man and De Descriptione Temporum, in the great change from one culture to another, Lewis [in The Discarded Image] suggested that something has been lost. Even as Plato and Aristotle once governed the direction of science, new philosophes of science govern the direction and application of science until ‘now, in some extreme forms of Behaviorism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we “go from that” is a dark question.’”

Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis