“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)
“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
“Miley Cyrus said her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” is her attempt to reimagine what “beautiful” means: her beloved grandmother’s death, for instance, or the emotion of rage.”
New York Times email teaser June 6, 2025, joining in transvaluing all values
“I may have my faults but being wrong isn’t one of them.”
Poster (with picture of a rhinoceros) on wall of a guy working on Dead Sea Scrolls, evidently the project director who went mad and antisemitic, on PBS October 15, 1991 19:50-55
“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
“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].