Lactantius on the Free Will of Religious Association

"Oh with what an honorable inclination the wretched men go astray! For they are aware that there is nothing among men more excellent than religion, and that this ought to be defended with the whole of our power; but as they are deceived in the matter of religion itself, so also are they in the manner of its defense. For religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt, but by good faith. … For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion; in which, if the mind of the worshiper is disinclined to it, religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist."
Lactantius, “The Divine Institutes, in “Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 156-7.

L’abbé Laberthonnière on the Triumph of the Church in Society

"The triumph of the Church in society? That would be excellent. But then, it is necessary to examine by what means our religion permits us to pursue it. Moreover, it has not been promised us. And then, it is not, perhaps, the most pressing of our tasks... Her power does not consist in giving orders, to which external obedience is required, backed up by threats or favors. Her power is to raise souls to the life above. It is to give birth to and to cultivate in consciences the supernaturalizing obligation to live for God and for others, through Christ, and to pass through temporal defeats to a triumph that is timeless. 'Do not indulge in childish dreams, when you have in your grasp eternal realities that invite you. Understand, all you who would triumph and reign on earth – Et nunc, reges, intellegite."

Monsignor Ronald Knox's Test for Defining Christians

"The fideles, be they many or few, be their doctrine apparently traditional or apparently innovatory, be their champions honest or unscrupulous, are simply those who are in visible communion with the see of Rome… And in fact there can be little doubt that, in the West, our labeling of this party as orthodox and that as heterodox in early Church history comes down to us from authors who were applying this test of orthodoxy and no other."

The Then Cardinal Ratzinger Addressing The Bundestag On Political Morality

“It is of course always difficult to adopt the sober approach that does what is possible and does not cry enthusiastically after the impossible; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry for the large-scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passion of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted. But, in truth, political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away. It is not the adventurous moralism that wants itself to do God’s work that is moral, but the honesty that accepts the standards of man and in them does the work of man. It is not refusal to compromise but compromise that, in political things, is the true morality.”
Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, addressing the Catholic members of the Bundestag on 26 November 1981

Nicolás Gómez Dávila On the Incomprehensibility of the the Reactionary for the Progressive

“That the reactionary protests against progressive society, judges it, and condemns it, and yet is resigned to its current monopoly of history, seems an eccentric position. The radical progressive, on the one hand, does not comprehend how the reactionary condemns an action that he acknowledges, and the liberal progressive, on the other, does not understand how he acknowledges an action that he condemns. The first demands that he relinquish his condemnation if he recognizes the action’s necessity, and the second that he not confine himself to abstention from an action that he admits is reprehensible. The former warns him to surrender, the latter to take action. Both censure his passive loyalty in defeat.”

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Hegel on the Problem of Relating the State With Civil Society

Hegel points out that

“If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state is something optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different from this. Since the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life. Unification pure and simple is the true content and aim of the individual, and the individual’s destiny is the living of a universal life. His further particular satisfaction, activity and mode of conduct have this substantive and universally valid life as their starting point and their result.”

This is what Aristotle means when he defined man as a political animal; the polis is to man what the hive is to the bee.

Paolo Conte- Sparring Partners

Pour moi c'est la  un plus belle chanson du monde.C'est un morceau qui rappelle mon cœur de toute sa mélancolie et de joie

Merci Paolo

Carl Scott on Disco

Professor Carl Scott on What We Should Make of Disco

      Some quotes of interest from the latest entry in an excellent blog series written by Professor Carl Scott entitled: "Carl's Rock Song Book." This particular post (linked here and above) begins what I believe will be a series of posts on the pervasiveness of the disco form in all international dance-pop music for the last 40 years and what it means for us dancers.

(If you have yet to come across his song book, I suggest you follow the link above and check out the whole series):

"...[W]e first need to think about disco as a music, and to recognize that there are two distinct ways of speaking about it:
1) Classic 70s Disco.
2) Disco in the Broad Sense—the family of disco-esque Dance Musics that start from 70s disco and continue on into the far future.
In common speech, and in this essay, both of these get called “disco.”"

"[T]he first lesson: it is pointless to get all worked up about disco, about how bad it is, about how a bazillion ignorant people have “liked” Justin Beiber or T-ARA but hardly anyone knows about _________(fill in the blank). The fact is, some beautiful young person is probably learning to dance for the very first time to whatever disco tune it is you’re showering curses upon."

"[I]f we ask the question, “Who’s Afraid of Disco Music?” Geoffrey O’Brien, who in his day-job as editor of The Library of America really is a keeper of our literary heritage, has to sheepishly poke his hand up and say “I am.” And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, not a few of us will poke our hands up also. His fears are not just the concoction of feverishly creative writing, but are frighteningly plausible ones. They are fears akin to the “salutary ones” we find sometimes in Tocqueville:

When I come to imagine a democratic society of this kind, I immediately believe I feel myself in one of those low, dark, stifling places where enlightenment, brought from the outside, soon fades and is extinguished. It seems to me that a sudden weight is crushing me, and I drag myself in the midst of the darkness that surrounds me to find a way out… Democracy in America, II, 1.9, #16

To update his dark imaginary place all we need is a disco ball and some bone-rattling bass."

"Make no mistake, disco will be with us until the end of time, and depending on your theology of hell, certain forms of it may be eternal. From the moment Edison invented recording, various trends were preparing the way for it, and its full advent in the 70s and 80s was inevitable. Certain folks will always be figuring out that it can be made better, more like the R+B, soul, and funk it came out of, insofar as one brings live musicians thoroughly trained in Afro-American music into the “mix,” and into the “command booth,” so to speak. Various Dee-lites of that sort will always remain possible, and always ready to push back against robotic rhythms and canned sounds while winning over the dancers that have become used to them. One can hope that in our time, given the long dominance of pretty bad forms of disco, given the popularity of artists like Amy Winehouse and Adele,and  given a growing movement in favor of older recording and composing techniques, that a more serious push-back becomes possible, bringing us to the point where we might again be moved to call our dance music soul. Yes, the petering out of certain lines of musical apprenticeship do mean that certain elements Afro-American musical artistry may have been lost forever, but so long as we still have musicians, there is cause for hope."

Lord MacCauly On Relating A Man's Thoughts to His Conduct

"To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked..."

Again:

"The doctrine of reprobation, in the judgment of many very able men, follows by syllogistic necessity from the doctrine of election. Others conceive that the Antinomian heresy directly follows from the doctrine of reprobation; and it is very generally thought that licentiousness and cruelty of the worst description are likely to be the fruits, as they often have been the fruits, of Antinomian opinions. This chain of reasoning, we think, is as perfect in all its parts as that which makes out a Papist to be necessarily a traitor. Yet, it would be rather a strong measure to hang all the Calvinists, on the ground that if they were spared, they would infallibly commit all the atrocities of Matthias and Knipperdoling. For, reason the matter as we may, experience shows us that a man may believe in election without believing in reprobation, that he may believe in reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that he may be an Antinomian without being a bad citizen. Man, in short, is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his belief to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another."

(both quotations may be found on pg.117 and 118 of The Critical and Historical Essays, Contributed to the Edinburgh Review by Thomas Babbington MacCauly