The Great Zero Gate

"Anarchy, Anti-Germanism, Apathy… Bankruptcy, Barbarization, Bathing …’ — a German scholar recently..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:34:00 +0200

““Anarchy, Anti-Germanism, Apathy… Bankruptcy, Barbarization, Bathing …’ — a German scholar recently produced a remarkable and fascinating list of the 210 explanations of the fall of the Roman empire that have been proposed over the centuries. In German they sound even better, and certainly more portentous: Hunnensturm, Hybris, Hyperthermia, moralischer Idealismus, Imperialismus, Impotenz. (For those who are intrigued, Hyperthermia, brought about by too many visits to overheated baths, could cause Impotenz.)””

- Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization

"Sad people are unloved unless they let themselves be consoled, unless they can give others the rare..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:01:29 +0200

“Sad people are unloved unless they let themselves be consoled, unless they can give others the rare satisfaction of knowing that they are good, generous, and strong. A sad person who refuses consolation becomes boring, uninteresting, tiresome. The would-be comforter cannot reveal his great goodness, he cannot satisfy his legitimate pride in consoling and encouraging— that is, his feeling of being strong and generous, of growing in his own moral estimate. How much more agreeable, on the contrary, are those unfortunates who let themselves be consoled and encouraged, whom you find in tears and leave with a smile on their lips, saying, ‘Thank you for coming! Your being here has done me so much good,’ etc., or ‘What would I have done if it hadn’t been for you in such difficult moments?’”

- Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal

"In 393 the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending that..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:35:06 +0200

“In 393 the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending that they publicly slaughter each other in gladiatorial games held to honour his son. However, before they were exhibited, twenty-nine of them committed suicide by the only means available to them — by strangling each other with their bare hands. For us, their terrible death represents a courageous act of defiance. But Symmachus viewed their suicide as the action of a ‘group of men viler than Spartacus’, which had been sent to test him. With the self-satisfaction of which only Roman aristocrats were capable, he compared his own philosophical response to the event to the calm of Socrates when faced with adversity.”

- Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization

"Suffering has long been a component of many religious traditions, and often practiced in wild,..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:21:00 +0200

“

Suffering has long been a component of many religious traditions, and often practiced in wild, forbidding places. Milarepa, the eleventh-century Tibetan mystic, spent months wandering in the Himalayas, protected only by a thin cotton sheet and living off nettles. Manchurian shamans of the ninth century tested themselves by swimming underneath the ice of a frozen river, between air holes cut far apart in the ice. Missing a hole meant death.

The Tamang shamans, or bombos, of Nepal completed their initiation with trances brought about by fasting for seven days in a gufa, a barrel set high on a pole. In the first century A.D., Simeon the Stylite of Syria spent thirty-three years perched on a high pillar and Saint John of Rila lived much of his life in caves and among tree roots on the slopes of his namesake mountain in Bulgaria.

Early last century, Igjugarjuk, a member of the Caribou Inuit tribe in Northern Canada, was dragged on a sled into the wilderness by his teacher, Perqanaq, and sealed inside an igloo. For a month. In the depth of winter. Igjugarjuk wanted to become an angakoq, or shaman, and this was his initiation, which he later described to the Danish ethnographer Knut Rasmussen. During the thirty days of dark solitude he had no clothing, no food, barely any water, and only a piece of hide to lie on. His suffering was so great, he said, that at times he ‘died a little.’ But it was only the beginning of a lifetime of fasting and privation, which, he learned, were essential to accessing shamanic powers.

‘All the true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in the great solitudes, and it can only be attained through suffering,’ Igjugarjuk told Rasmussen. ‘Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the mind of man to that which is hidden from his fellows.’

”

- Maria Coffey, Explorers of the Infinite : The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes

(A fantastic book, highly recommended)

"Being ecstatic means being flung out of your usual self. When you’re enraptured, your senses..."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:01:13 +0200

“Being ecstatic means being flung out of your usual self. When you’re enraptured, your senses are upright and saluting. But there is also a state when perception doesn’t work, consciousness vanishes like the gorgeous fever that it is, and you feel free of all mind-body constraints, suddenly so free of them you don’t perceive yourself as being free, but vigilant, a seeing eye, without judgment, history or emotion. It’s that shudder out of time, the central moment in so many sports, that one often feels, and perhaps becomes addicted to, while doing something dangerous.”

- Diane Ackerman, On Extended Wings

"Man overcomes himself, affirms himself and realizes himself in the struggle toward the summit,..."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:53:52 +0200

“Man overcomes himself, affirms himself and realizes himself in the struggle toward the summit, toward the absolute. In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple. As on the crest of a wave, or in the heart of a cyclone, we are strangely calm — not the calm of emptiness, but the heart of action itself.”

- Lucien Devies, Annapurna

"Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:01:24 +0200

“Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, ‘you can’t turn the clock back.’ By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideas and values, we are looking forward toward an ontological realm that is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists that passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another…

Now the return which idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"It seems plain that the democrats are ignoring a contradiction. Had they the courage to be logical,..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:00:33 +0200

“It seems plain that the democrats are ignoring a contradiction. Had they the courage to be logical, they would do as their predecessors in ancient Greece and choose their governors by lot. An election, is after all, a highly undemocratic proceeding; the very term means discrimination. How is it possible to choose the best man when by definition there is no best? If a society wishes to be its natural self, that is to say, if it wishes to flourish wild, unshaped by anything superior to itself, it should make a perfectly random choice of administrators. Let youth and age, wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice, self-control and dissoluteness, sit together on the bench. This will be representative; this is a cross-section, and there seems no room to question that it would create that society ‘filled with wonderful variety and disorder’ which Plato called democracy.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:00:45 +0200

“The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society. Rational society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension. The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge. For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"It is inevitable that the decay of sentiment should be accompanied by a deterioration of human..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 08:00:35 +0200

“It is inevitable that the decay of sentiment should be accompanied by a deterioration of human relationships, both those of the family and those of friendly association, because the passion for immediacy concentrates upon the presently advantageous. After all, there is nothing but sentiment to bind us to the very old or to the very young. Burke saw this point when he said that those who have no concern for their ancestors will, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendants. The decision of modern man to live in the here and now is reflected in the neglect of aging parents, whom proper sentiment once kept in positions of honor and authority. There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason. Children are liabilities. As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"The man of self-control is he who can consistently perform the feat of abstraction. He is therefore..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:00:58 +0200

“The man of self-control is he who can consistently perform the feat of abstraction. He is therefore trained to see things under the aspect of eternity, because form is the enduring part. Thus we invariably find in the man of true culture a deep respect for forms. He approaches even those he does not understand with awareness that a deep thought lies in an old observance. Such respect distinguishes him from the barbarian, on the one hand, and the degenerate, on the other. The truth can be expressed in another way by saying that the man of culture has a sense of style. Style requires measure, whether in space or time, for measure imparts structure, and it is structure which is essential to intellectual apprehension.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"[S]ince modern man has not defined his way of life, he initiates himself into an endless series when..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 08:00:41 +0200

“[S]ince modern man has not defined his way of life, he initiates himself into an endless series when he enters the struggle for an ‘adequate’ living. One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of ‘slow economic strangulation,’ his sense of never having enough to meet the requirements which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties. As the abundance for simple living is replaced by the scarcity for complex living, it seems that in some way not yet explained we have formalized prosperity until it is for most people only a figment of the imagination. Certainly the case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, of an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to the happier condition.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the..."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:00:56 +0200

“The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see ‘fact’ substituted for ‘truth,’ and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract ideas and speculative inquiry. The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"[The] story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many..."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:00:36 +0200

“

[The] story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact — which can be established — and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.

Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars do we observe this insentience. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

That is why, when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the failure of men to rise to the challenge of them. In the past, great calamities have called forth, if not great virtues, at least heroic postures; but after the awful judgments pronounced against men and nations in recent decades, we detect notes of triviality and travesty. A strange disparity has developed between the drama of these actions and the conduct of the protagonists, and we have the feeling of watching actors who do not comprehend their roles.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. Hope of restoration depends upon recovery of the ‘ceremony of innocence,’ of that clearness of vision and knowledge of form which enable us to sense what is alien or destructive, what does not comport with our moral ambition. The time to seek this is now, before we have acquired the perfect insouciance of those who prefer perdition. For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment ag when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.

In view of these circumstances, it is no matter for surprise that, when we ask people even to consider the possibility of decadence, we meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we are in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance of sterner obligation; we are making demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapersonal, and we cannot expect a more cordial welcome than disturbers of complacency have received in any other age. On the contrary, our welcome will rather be less today, for a century and a half of bourgeois ascendancy has produced a type of mind highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts. Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by many springs, which will scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.

”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is obligated..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:00:47 +0200

“

After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philosophers of the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for their thesis that human beings act always out of economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the will.

The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and resolution. Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.

Finally came psychological behaviorism, which denied not only freedom of the will but even such elementary means of direction as instinct. Because the scandalous nature of this theory is quickly apparent, it failed to win converts in such numbers as the others; yet it is only a logical extension of them and should in fairness be embraced by the upholders of material causation. Essentially, it is a reduction to absurdity of the line of reasoning which began when man bade a cheerful goodbye to the concept of transcendence.

There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be ‘abysmality.’ He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals — ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless — and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.

His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.

”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:17:40 +0200

“In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex. Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.”

- Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"Unlike the United States, India never became a great ‘melting pot’ where many kinds of people came..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:26:18 +0200

“Unlike the United States, India never became a great ‘melting pot’ where many kinds of people came together and learned to speak a common tongue, intermarry, and share a common civic outlook. Rather, more like Europe, it has been a huge ‘mixing pot’ — a continent where countless numbers of different kinds of people have mingled but have never lost their most distinctive features. Groups never lost their elemental identities because, from the outset and for the most part, they did not allow members to intermarry across ethnic, cultural, and/or class lines. As much as possible, each distinct ethnic group strove not to intermarry and, to that end, developed sophisticated social technologies for retaining its own unique place in the universe. In doing so, each community perfected some incredibly complex and durable systems of social control — by means of customs, rituals, and other institutions. As a consequence, for century after century, despite the perpetual coming of one people after another people into the continent, each group has managed to preserve its own identity.”

- Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present

"Thomas Christians of India have themselves tended to fashion their own full rich heritage of..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:42:10 +0200

“Thomas Christians of India have themselves tended to fashion their own full rich heritage of historical understandings in ways comparable to how such understandings of ancient India were long fashioned by virtually all other elite communities within the Indian continent. Each community, from out of its own store of cultural and material resources, sought to preserve its own oral traditions, its own epic historical narratives (itihasa-puranas), and its own narrative genealogies or lineages (vamshâvalis). Family members told and retold their own stories — about how their own family and their own community first came into being; how much adversity they suffered or how great the good fortune that came to them or brought them honour and status; how their own people first settled onto special lands or gained special distinction; and, among other things, how they first developed their own unique institutions. From generation to generation, children listened: during evenings, after the sun went down and in times before lights were abundant, enthralled by stories that told about their own ancestral origins. Embedded in what was heard, in the form of bardic songs and oral traditions — and in what eyes beheld, in epigraphic copper and stone inscriptions, as well as on palm-leaf manuscripts — were hallowed sources of narratives that were ritually celebrated, danced, and sung.”

- Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a..."

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 23:10:38 +0200

““You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.””

- Sir Charles James Napier (10 August, 1782 – 29 August, 1853)

"[Calvin] abominated ‘mixture,’ one of the most pejorative terms in his vocabulary;..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:20:12 +0200

“

[Calvin] abominated ‘mixture,’ one of the most pejorative terms in his vocabulary; mixture in any area of experience suggested to him disorder and unintelligibility… Mixture, for Calvin, connoted ‘adulteration’ or ‘promiscuity,’ but it also set off in him deep emotional and metaphysical reverberations. He repeatedly warned against ‘mixing together things totally different.’ ‘When water is mixed with fire,’ he observed, ‘both perish.’ He abominated the papacy above all because it had, as he believed, mixed human invention with divine ordination, earthly with heavenly things…

The positive corollary of Calvin’s loathing of mixture was his approval of boundaries, which separate one thing from another. He attributed boundaries to God himself. God had established the boundaries between peoples, which should therefore remain within the space assigned them, a painful thought for an exile. ‘Just as there are in a military camp separate lines for each platoon and section,’ Calvin observed, ‘men are placed on the earth so that each nation may be content with its own boundaries.’ In this manner, he concluded, ‘God, by his providence, reduces to order that which is confused.’

”

- William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait