August 2010
1 post
New weblog - Argus & Phoenix
http://argivephoenix.blogspot.com/2010/08/for-so-whole-round-earth-is-every-way_12.html
I am trying to recompile posts, and give better content. The Inklings will remain a theme, but I am focusing more what I call the four R’s: Revival, Renaissance, Reformation & Restoration.
June 2010
1 post
Gifford Lectures Link →
For those still interested in natural theology, a verboten subject these days, and probably one of the reasons we have such a hard time making the transition in the West into technology, while keeping anything resembling Truth.
April 2010
4 posts
Novus →
Interested in Mozarabic rite…
Austen's Peculiar Place in Western History →
A must read review of a must read book. Austen furthering Aristotle? Indeed, sah…
Crusade →
Was it possible that the Albigenses represented only a partially “Gnostic” community, actually retaining some Christian primal practice opposed to European civilizational trajectories? If so, what does that tell us?
March 2010
2 posts
Osipov →
Quebec →
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
1 post
European Manuscripts →
December 2009
1 post
Strauss and Grant →
Neo-Paganism? →
Switzerland →
November 2009
6 posts
Freiheit
For me the word “freedom” has not the value of a starting-point, but rather that of an actual point of arrival. The word “order” denotes the starting-point. Only on the concept of order can that of freedom rest. Without the foundation of order, the call for freedom is nothing more than the striving of some party after an envisaged end. In its actual use, the call inevitably expresses itself as...
Deutschland Forever →
Art
The countless attempts to expose you and I to the world, to tragedy, starting with a parade of black faces in Macbeth and then to a Touch of Evil, fallen upon deaf ears, transformed, and ultimately crushed, because we must hear, but instead we see, and when we see we see others, but when we hear we might take to heart and transform ourselves. So many offerings tried on the screen, so many...
Let Them Eat Cake →
While the world economy descends in a death spiral, with ghost fleets of shipping marooned off Singapore and millions going out of work every day, our therapeutic “Let Them Eat Cake” elite class is holding Art exhibits at expensive venues in Venice.
October 2009
7 posts
Red vs. Blue →
I am surprised that people are finally figuring out that sociology and psychology, as well as religion, determines worldview, not “prejudice” and “hatred”. Does this mean there’s not a nickel-worth difference?
Was Rome a Solar Power? →
Heilbrun also wrote a book on Cathedrals and the sun. Was religion originally a manifestation of male energy? Thirteenth Warrior…
Sacred Music
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/10/sacred-music-sacred-time
Augustine here proposes not merely a psychology of music but also an ontology: He seems to think that the “numbers of judgment” with which we evaluate rhythm exist eternally and were given to us by God. A thousand years later, the Renaissance philosopher most influenced by Augustine’s treatise, Nicholas of Cusa, put the matter...
Leonard Pitts, Statistics, and Race
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003731134_pitts03.html
“For instance, there’s “Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News,” a 2001 report that concluded: Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in news media as victims of crime and significantly overrepresented as perpetrators, based on crime statistics; newspaper articles about white homicide victims...
Reformed Theosis →
Red Toryism in Scotland
“The legality of any UK component country attaining de facto independence (in the same manner as the origins of the Irish Republic) or declaring unilateral independence outside the framework of UK constitutional convention is uncertain. Prevailing legal opinion following the precedent set by the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on what steps Quebec would need to take to secede is...
“It is this accursed practice of for ever considering only what seems expedient...”
– Coleridge, Table Talk (via jdietz)
September 2009
12 posts
Merlin, by Muir
O Merlin in your crystal cave Deep in the diamond of the day, Will there ever be a singer Whose music will smooth away The furrow drawn by Adam’s finger Across the memory and the wave? Or a runner who’ll outrun Man’s long shadow driving on, Break through the gate of memory And hang the apple on the tree? Will your magic ever show The sleeping bride shut in her bower, The day...
Resurrection Stone
The Eemis Stane
by Hugh MacDiarmid
“I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht The warl’ like an eemis stane Wags i’ the lift; An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift. / Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame An’ history’s hazelraw No’ yirdit thaim.”
The world itself is Rowling’s Resurrection Stone. The snow...
“When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you...”
– Norman Borlaug (via jdietz)
Rowling-Renaissance? →
The Rowling-Renaissance link is critical. The Reformation viewed the Middle Ages as corrupt/hierarchical, and the Enlightenment viewed it as superstitious and chaotic. The Renaissance merely viewed it as incomplete. As such, the Renaissance may share a good deal more with “medievalism” than either of the other two. I may take this blog in the direction of exploring the possibilities of using...
Voldemort
Rowling does not suggest that blood is not important. It is, particularly if it is (say) your mother. What is more important (however) is blood chosen to be spilt - sacrifice. Next to this, what one inherits is merely an idol. However, it is only if it is naked blood. Naked spirit opposed to naked blood give a legalism of the Spirit that is more intolerable than recidivistic atavism. Yes, a...
Moderne Art →
Newman once famously quipped that artists had as much use for traditional aesthetics as birds did for ornithology. Of course, this was infamously and shamelessly recycled much later by the combative and acrid physicist Richard Feynman, who said the same thing about philosophy of science. I feel bound to point out, to myself and anyone who reads this, that Tom Wolfe was absolutely correct: Modern...
Rowling's Politics
“One of ”Goblet”’s biggest themes is bigotry. It’s always been in your books, with the Hitlerlike Lord Voldemort and his followers prejudiced against Muggles (nonmagical people). In book 4, Hermione tries to liberate the school’s worker elves, who’ve been indentured servants so long they lack desire for anything else. Why did you want to explore these...
The Road - Postmodern Times →
“All of life is warfare, in which we drink death like water, and life like wine…” Chesterton
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). At the same time he seems fully aware that all the supporting structures of belief and moral action have been destroyed: “Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in ashen...
Peter Saint-Andre | American Winter →
(via jdietz)
Harry Again...
I am halfway through the Harry Potter series. The one thing becoming clear to me is that, above all else, this particular fantasy series is deceptively well-written. The crucial component is actually the ability of the author to build, develop, and articulate (like a conductor) the implications of a fairly basic magical world. Rowling is a master composer/conductor (arguably, one of her “faults”...
“It felt so good to finally say, ‘Kill! Kill all the Nazis!’” a 20-year-old...”
– The Local | Tarantino’s ‘kosher porno’ thrills Germany (via jdietz)
I suffered through this movie, but only paid the Matinee price. I did have an opinion on it, now I don’t. Suffice it to say, that the Holocaust and the Nazis represents an enormous gaping, blindspot in our moral vision.
August 2009
13 posts
Conrad →
”
The capacity of the intuitive self to breach the historical ego is the life-giving and terrifying objectivity of imaginative art that makes a painting or a poem or a piece of sculpture or a fiction endure beyond the artist’s short lifetime and gives it the strangest beauty or coherence in depth.
This interaction between sovereign ego and intuitive self is the tormenting reality of...
“You might say that progressives escape existence by romanticizing the future,...”
– OneCosmosBlogSpot
From OneCosmosBlogSpot...
“The left has gradually eroded the unifying power of our shared culture. They are ashamed of our Americanism, and would prefer that we all be sophisticated “internationalists,” which is again to have no culture at all. In the 11.03.08 National Review, Michael Knox Beran writes of how the postmodern anticulture fails “to give people the tools they need to amalgamate...
Rene Guenon →
Of particular interest is his concept of “solidification of the world”, analogous to Oswald Spengler’s belief that the eye “hardens the light world” for the purposes of will to power and analysis. The deeper knowledge, let alone wisdom, eludes those for whom materiality (in a narrow, empirical sense) constitute the entire modality of what it means to be embodied...
“The father and his words may be the only sources of meaning for the
boy, but...”
– http://www.marquette.edu/renascence/
Article on McCarthy’s The Road
Deathly Hallows →
John Granger’s developing argument for how Harry Potter is an extended morality play on the journey through life of Christ as Everyman:
“The books themselves – which include paintings opened by a secret word or knowing touch to a greater, concealed world within, offer repeated examples of an “inside being greater than its outside,” 2 and eyes with more and less penetrating insight or...
Inklings, Opera, and Death →
“The Makropulos Affair forms the centre of a classic article by Bernard Williams, in which he argues that a person never has reason to live an immortal life.”
Rowlings’ theme is the overcoming of Death. “With the eyes, one is blind…” The materialist cannot see how Death can be overcome in Death itself.
If one grasps to overcome Death, one is overcome. If one...
“The spiritual faculty of the human person is uncreated; call it conscience, the...”
– http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0908/features/ivory_tower.shtml#top
Harry Potter and Jane Austen
(In the spirit of the Inklings, I give you John Granger…) :http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0908/features/ivory_tower.shtml#top
“Within her comic novels, Austen is writing a philosophical argument against David Hume’s empiricist position. And Rowling, in the tradition of English letters, is doing the same thing. Hume’s position was, ultimately, that nothing could be known certainly...
A New Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mill%C3%A1n-Astray
From somewhere in the auditorium, someone cried out the motto “¡Viva la Muerte!” As was his habit, Millán-Astray responded with “¡España!”; the crowd replied with “¡Una!” He repeated “¡España!”; the crowd then replied “¡Grande!” A third time, Millán-Astray shouted...
““Ich habe nichts dagegen, daß man diesen Gott Jehova verehrt, nicht das...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian
The artistic temperament has often sided with Satan, who always goes first.
Mythopoeia Again... →
Watched Half-Blood Prince.
“Ms. Rowling is creating a masterful alchemical drama, satire, manners-and-morals fiction with components of detective stories, epic journeys, Arthurian romance, and Christian fantasy. Her readers are not looking for the “edifying entertainment” peddled by an industry “Christian youth” and “Family” marketplace that Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, and Williams could hardly...
July 2009
29 posts
We have arrived... →
“The Anglo-American lawyer’s education parallels that of the Catholic seminarian; he is initiated in the intricate, respectful form of labor that appreciates truth can be discovered only in the manifest and organic body of tradition. Precedent serves not so much as an alternative to logic as it does its very ground; without due reverence for and deference to what has been taught, one cannot...