Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Their souls have shrunk

tip to Athos over at Chronicles of Atlantis

(Can you say that your soul has not shrunk as well?)

Nevertheless, the intellectual junk-food that pop-culture and mainstream education has been feeding them since their youth has become satisfying, for their souls have shrunk in adjustment, and they have never tasted rich spiritual food by contrast with which they could detect the other as counterfeit. Because of this, as German philosopher Josef Pieper suggests, they have made their peace with illusions:

For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.
Today’s barbarians, with all their myriad choices, are in truth choiceless, for they do not themselves feel chosen in their heart of hearts, as the great conservative Jewish sociologist Philip Rieff has written:

There is no more feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously.

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(2 cents from me) Sadly I have witnessed soooo many souls wondering, particular in the youth - the 20 somethings - lost without any apparent dream or mystery. Their eyes closed so as to avoid any remote chance of bumping into wonderment or joy that cannot be easily explained.

Read this article by Thaddeus J. Kozinski, A new Benedict for a new Dark Ages where he sheds hope to those few who may still have their eyes ajar (though I am afraid that we have already lost very many to the Hocus Pocus slide-of-hand artists).

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