“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.]
“This is a paradox of democracy, that though men can be as paltry as their own most paltry aims, they can also be as heroic as their own most heroic aims.”
G.K. Chesterton in Morning Leader 24/2/1904 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
“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
“Men of law had least pardon – believe nothing else!…”
Indirect speech by Truth, I think, in William Langland, William. Piers Plowman. An Alliterative Verse Translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, edited, introduced and annotated by Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson.
“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)
“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Charlie Reese “Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and more importantly, a two-time wearer of the Clerihew Championship Sash” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [he does not further source it].
“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)