Jung on Being Gripped by a Truth

... the very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his sufferings. He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth.

---

Source: Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.). Bollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press, 1968.Vol. 9. Part 2. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, p. 78

John Senior on the Artificiality of Modern Art

Though you cannot refute Aristotle, you can deliberately choose to drown. J. K. Huysmans, the paradigm of literary anti-Realism, in his novel A Rebours – “Against” – describes the dining room of his hero Des Esseintes, the perfect modernist, which

resembled a ship’s cabin, with its ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and floor-boards of pitch-pine, and the little window-opening, let into the wainscoting like a porthole … [behind which] was a large aquarium …. Thus what daylight penetrated into the cabin had at first to pass through … the waters …. He could then imagine himself between decks in a brig, and gaze inquisitively at some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forwards behind the porthole window and got entangled in the artificial seaweed. At other times, while he was inhaling the smell of tar which had been introduced into the room before he entered it, he would examine a series of colour prints on the walls, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd’s agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaiso and the River Plate …. By these means he was able to enjoy quickly, almost simultaneously, all the sensations of a long sea voyage, without ever leaving home …. The imagination could provide a more than adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience. 

Aristotle flings his challenge to the physicists: If you deny the law of contradiction, why walk to Megara when you want to go there? Huysmans replies: “I don’t.” And he proceeds one step further in describing the particular techniques for the surpassing of reality in imagination:

The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself …. There can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the Old Crone [Nature!] has by now exhausted the good-humored admiration of all true artists, and the time has come for artifice to take her place wherever possible. Aristotle said art is the imitation of nature; Huysman’s art surpasses her. [...]

In the work of Baudelaire, the first and greatest master of the Modernist movement, the poem is neither the expression of ideas, as the Classicist would have it, nor the expression of emotions, as the Romanticist would have it – the poem is the expression of nothing but the poem itself. This famous art pour l’art, announced but never tried by Gautier, was put into practice, though without success, by Baudelaire and the Parnassians. The slightest examination of the contents of such “pure poetry” shows that the poem is not really a thing in itself, as it claims, but rather a vehicle for the doctrine that poems ought to be taken as things in themselves. Modernists preach what they do not, and cannot, practice. Baudelaire’s enameled verse states but never achieves its purpose because his poems do have meaning; the meaning is that there is no meaning to either poems or anything else. [...]

Le nouveau! The motive force of Modernism is, as the name suggests, the perpetual urge for the new – not the real, not the true, not the ideal, not even the evil, not the power or the glory or the lust, but all these things for the sake of the new. Cut off from reality by “four hundred years of criticism and doubt,” the Modernist, insisting on the new, very quickly exhausts the contents of his memory and proceeds to invent an artificial one. The image – that is, what the “imagination” produces – substitutes for Being. To the Realist, an image must necessarily be of something; and the something can be understood in terms of ideas and feelings. The Modernist, cut off from reality, has nothing but the image, nothing but the mental sensation. Huysmans never said he could imagine a real voyage; he said he could have all the sensations of a real voyage. The Realist asks, “What is the image of?” For art holds the mirror up to nature. The Modernist, a worshipper of Baal in more than one way, replies, “There is nothing but the image.” He is a worshipper of images.

Senior, John. The Death of Christian Culture (Kindle Locations 546-566, 598-605, 636-645). Ihs Press. Kindle Edition.

Fr. Chad Ripperger on Christian Art and Culture

http://www.sensustraditionis.org/ChristianArtCulture.pdf

Kozinski on the Rejection of Imperial, Modern Culture

The “earthly city” has always been opposed to true religion, and what Catholics, in America especially, need to grasp is that the culture in the West is neither liberal, tolerant, rationalist, materialist, religiously neutral, enlightened, morally progressive, secular, nor non-violent. At the heart of culture, pace the Enlightenment, is always the Sacred, and at the heart of our post-9/11 imperial culture is a terrifying sacred power in mortal conflict with the injunctions of compassionate belief. As for the primary Girardian directive for Catholics: it is nothing else than the wholehearted rejection of the imperial culture at the heart of today’s City of Man, one that has eclipsed the City of God through its counterfeit imitation of it. What this rejection looks like when translated into Catholic teaching and everyday life, as well what a blueprint for building an anti-imperial culture in the name of love might look like, are matters that need urgently to be addressed by Church leaders, lay and clergy.

---

Source: Thaddeus J. Kozinski, "René Girard and Modernity’s Apocalypse," in New Directions for Catholic Social And Political Research: Humanity vs. Hyper-Modernity, ed. by Guido Giacomo Preparata (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2016), ch. 6.

---

Comment: Perhaps the blueprint is found in Sacred Tradition.

Archbishop Francisco Javier Martinez on Secular Society and Its Monsters

The secular society lives in daily violence, violence with reality. This violence shows that nihilism cannot and does not correspond to our being. But it shows also, in a very concrete way, how the secular society annihilates itself by engendering the very monsters that terrify it most and that it itself hates most: the twin monsters of fundamentalism and terrorism.

---

Source: Francisco Javier Martinez, "Beyond Secular Reason," Communio 31/4 (Winter 2004), accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/martinez.htm.

Girardian Analysis of Modernity's Katechons

The so called peace-making state, the free market, international law and transnational organizations, a commercialist, utilitarian culture of mass-produced consumer products, technology, science, the privatization of religious belief and practice, the declaration of and enforcement of human rights and the dignity of every human, the universal concern for victims institutionalized in law and government—all of these katechons, according to modernity, prove modernity’s moral superiority, even its more perfectly Christian character; for, these institutions and practices require no scapegoats: no human sacrifices, on the one hand, no suppression of religious freedom, on the other—and they have brought about an unprecedented material prosperity and moral consciousness to boot(!).

However, with a Girardian lens, things look less rosy: the prolongation and escalation of violence and millions upon millions of human sacrificial victims—the unborn, the elderly, the handicapped, the poor and middle-class in the first world, the vast majority in the third world; religiously, culturally, and intellectually starved souls; the normalization of political propaganda; pathological violence and plasticized sex in media and entertainment; massive private indebtedness; masses of brave new world soma addicts (in forms Huxley couldn’t have dreamt of), the so-called collateral damage of millions of innocents in perpetual, epic-scale wars; the perpetual fear and terror of the national security and surveillance state; wars and rumors of wars; the renewed threat of nuclear Armageddon.

---

Source: Thaddeus J. Kozinski, "René Girard and Modernity’s Apocalypse," in New Directions for Catholic Social And Political Research: Humanity vs. Hyper-Modernity, ed. by Guido Giacomo Preparata (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2016), ch. 6.

Repost: Thaddeus J. Kozinski on "René Girard and Modernity’s Apocalypse"

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s720/sh/f206dc1f-6e35-4cf3-96eb-ab52c07065c5/ebfbc47ba4fe730384d86a3e9eb4de3b

Posted at: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/kozinski-on-girard-and-modernity/