Category: Quotations

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion”

The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. So it is to a greater or lesser degree with the media in general. It is painful to watch decent and distinguished people struggle to function politically in this non-rational and valueless environment.
Finally, granting that consensus enforcement, and the endless small concessions made to endless small coercions, are no doubt universal in human civilization, they cannot be without cost, precisely because they disable courage. No one can truly submit to unreasonable coercion�by suppressing one’s thinking, one’s identity, one’s metaphysics�without falling a little in one’s own estimation. And no one can deal in coercion without cynicism. Both sides of the transaction compromise.
Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.

Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist” in Light on C.S. Lewis, Jocelyn Gibbs, ed.

[Speaking of differences in apologists] There is what one might call the Munich school, who will always sell the pass in the belief that their position can be more happily defended from foothills to the rear. Such people are not commonly seen as apologists. They are reckoned to be New Theologians. They are too busy learning from their enemies to do much in defence of their friends. The typical apologist is a man whose every dyke is his last ditch. He will carry the way into the enemy’s country; he will yield not an inch of his own.
(…)
The day in which apologetic flourishes is the day of orthodoxy in discredit; an age full of people talked out of a faith in which they were reared. To say that they want to believe if they could only see how is doubtless to simplify, for who are they? Which is the self, among all the warring selves in any breast? The very thing that reconversion does is to persuade a man to take a believing self as his fundamental self. We may say at the best that belief is a real (if smothered) attitude in such minds; and it is that offers an opening to the apologetic approach. ‘You have been rattled and browbeaten,’ says the apologist. ‘You have been sold a false image of faith and an inflated estimate of her enemies. Give faith her rights, and you will again believe.’�’Thank you, we will,’ replies a grateful audience.
(…)
It is commonly said that if rational argument is so seldom the cause of conviction, philosophical apologists must largely be wasting their shot. The premise is true, but the conclusion does not follow. For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
(…)
A voice which says ‘You must adopt the posture of an admittedly de-Christianized world; you may wriggle into a Christian attitude if you can’ is presuming that neither the authority of revelation nor the doctrine of original sin can be taken seriously.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

He fingered the mound of faggots where the wooden martyr stood. That’s where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam’s Herod’s, Judas’, Hannegan’s, mine. Everybody’s. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by the wrath of Heaven. Why? We shouted it loudly enough�God’s to be obeyed by nations as by men. Caesar’s to be God’s policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, nor His heir. To all ages, all peoples�”Whoever exalts a race or a State or a particular form of State or the depositories of power … whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God….” Where had that come from? Eleventh Pius, he though, without certainty�eighteen centuries ago. But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn’t he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people�same rabble that shouted: “Non habemus regem nisi caesarem,” when confronted by Him�God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon. Same rabble that martyred Leibowitz….
“Caesar’s divinity is showing again.”