Tom Holland on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?
HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.
If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel. It would probably be Paul’s Letter to the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text — even if you bracket out and remove the “in Christ” from it — that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.
I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I variously compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.
But I think actually, more appropriately, of a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization. And the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with, and they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive. Those echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day.
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Carl Schmitt on liberalism
"Schmitt thought that liberalism had an overly benign, naive view of human affairs, overestimating the extent to which government could function based on rules and procedures alone, or politics on the basis of reasoned discussion. Life was too unruly for that." pic.twitter.com/sfSGBXkp9i
— Peter Hartree (@peterhartree) February 13, 2023
Otto Petras on the conditions for religious awe
A religion that one understands is, for he who understands, no longer a religion. For by comprehending it, he stands above it; he surveys its conditions and possibilities, and to the extent that he does so he no longer feels like the unconditional object of religious demands. One can be possessed and awe-struck only as long as one does not understand how and why that occurs.
Chris Cullen: what do you want to naturalise?
We become our habits. So it’s crucial to ask: what do you want to naturalise? What do you want to come easily?
Whatever the heart frequently dwells upon becomes the shape of the heart.
Richard Meadows & Nassim Taleb on FU money
Humphrey Bogart used to keep a $100 bill in his dresser drawer at all times—a decent chunk of change in the 1920s. He referred to it as his ‘fuck-you money’, because it meant he’d never be forced to take a crappy part. According to Bogie, the only good reason for making money was “so you can tell any son-of-a-bitch in the world to go to hell”.
A sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation.
Money buys freedom: intellectual freedom, freedom to choose who you vote for, to choose what you want to do professionally. But having what I call “fuck you” money requires a huge amount of discipline. The minute you go a penny over, then you lose your freedom again.
— Nassim Taleb
The last homily of Pope Pius XII
Our mouths are filled with the word “love”.
“But I, before anyone else, didn’t know how to define it.
Our mouths are filled with the word “beauty”.
But I, before anyone else, didn’t know how to receive it.
For this, I ask you forgiveness.
Please, forgive me.
At times we confound love with madness.
Beauty with ecstasy.
History has repeated itself.
Madness and ecstasy have once again proven to be irresistible temptations, but they always end the way they did on Ventotene.
With unjust death.
In this case, of a good and innocent priest.
There is a life of happiness to be found in the sphere of gentleness, kindness, mildness, lovingness.
We must learn to be in the world.
And the Church must contemplate the idea of opening up to the love that is possible, in order to fight against the love that is aberrant.
All this, John Paul III, with great humility, calls “the middle way.”
In the past few days I have understood.
It’s not the middle way.
It is the way.
Ever since I came back, you’ve been asking yourselves all sorts of questions.
Is he the father or the son?
Is he God or the Holy Spirit?
Is he man or is he Jesus?
Did he wake up or did he rise from the dead?
Is he a saint or is he an imposter?
Is he Christ or is he the Antichrist?
Is he alive or is he dead?
It doesn’t matter.
You know what is so beautiful about questions?
It’s that we don’t have the answers.
In the end, only God has the answers.
They are his secret.
God’s secret, which only He knows.
That is the mystery in which we believe.
And that is the mystery which guides our conscience.
And now I would like to come down among you, and do what I have wanted to do since the first moment: embrace you, one by one.
