Ida Friederike Görres Quotes

Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide...Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods.

the Legion of little Souls does exist, and they did become manifest in the Little Flower. True, they get on our nerves more than they edify us - precisely that awful Martin family with their pompous self-preoccupation, their insufferable family worship, a perpetual mutual admiration society - but, say what you will, such people really do have religion, in the strictest sense of the word - living contact, authentic conversation with God. They do live out of their trust in him, are honestly concerned with seeking and doing his will, they take pains about being kind to their neighbours, for his sake. Is this really not enough? To hell with all esoterics!

Humanly speaking the Church as a whole will never cut a good figure, and her exceptions seem almost like another species.

Larion's Law by Peter Freuchen. An Indian saga written by a Dane who lived for thirty years among the woodland tribes of Alaska and even had an Eskimo wife...Really one is ashamed to belong to a white race...what we did to Indians, Negroes, Australian aborigines (not even out of political fanaticism either, but as a matter of course, en passant)

"From time to time I have the feeling that certain instincts [urges? involuntary impulses?] are being annihilated within me, which have hitherto seemed good and perfect: yet as soon as they are destroyed I perceive how evil and imperfect they were." (Catherine of Genoa). This strikes me as very important, for it shows that the judgment of conscience can change, and precisely in someone whose conscience must already have been particularly highly developed, sensitive and illuminated.

Psalm 118 - my solace and my blessing - unfathomably deep. It is my backbone.

Actually we were brought up to ingratitude - a relentless training through which we were taught to find nothing whatever good in ourselves, whether natural or spiritual..Conquering pride and conceit, they called it, practising humility, self-praise is no praise - all very well...Was pride really crushed by all this snubbing and humiliation? Was it not rather repressed...Worse still, we learnt this way to cultivate the devil's mirror eye of Hans Andersen's Snow Queen , over-vigilant, super-critical sight, sharpened to discover the worm in every bud, even the tiniest plant-louse! For if one practises this sort of discipline on oneself, day and night, it is asking too much - at any rate of a young girl - to judge one's neighbour by another yard-stick. All the time one's lynx-eyed consciousness remained on the alert, quick to pounce on everything negative - in you and in myself...Hans Andersen well knew how near this attitude is to blasphemy.

The sins of our educational system (Catholic): How we ourselves were wronged by it and how we wronged others in its name. What people call moral training is really a political activity - representing a particular community and its vested interests, which is why it is so liable to political sins and blunders.

people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfilment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit...

I've come to the end of von Hügel's voluminous work on Catherine of Genoa. For such outlay in erudition, it's basically an unrewarding book (for me!), but full of interesting side-lights...Curious, for instance, that Catherine, always universally cited as the recognised authority, the most important and competent witness to the nature of Purgatory, should actually never have had a vision of it - neither as shewing nor as visiting in spirit, as other mystics did..Her statements are pure conclusions, analogies, based on her own spiritual experiences of suffering and bliss: "So that's what it must be like in Purgatory!"

The German Youth Movement started quite inconspicuously: a band of secondary schoolboys in Berlin, bored to death by their homes and schools and grown-ups in general, sought to elude this adult world by spending their Sundays and holidays roaming the countryside - what we call hiking, an unheard of pursuit in those days...Hiking became symbolic, standing for Back to Nature against modern civilization; the free-lance spirit as against gregariousness, yet, paradoxically, the urge for comradeship against atomizing individualism...In 1933 the Nazis swallowed up the groups on the nationalistic fringe and shattered the bulk of the Bünde as bulwarks of the individualistic and independent spirit...Today, I suppose, for many of its former members the Youth Movement represents no more than a store of youthful memories. But a small but by no means negligible minority did receive a basic shaping and moulding which held good for the rest of their lives, the essence of that fleeting spirit of the Movement: a shared vision of the true nature of man and his place in the universe,...; a special kind of awareness to Nature; an extremely keen sense of intellectual and spiritual responsibility and a peculiar sanity and sobriety of judgment. This is quite a lot to be thankful for.

Francis de Sales defines jealousy as the expression of a violent but impure love. Does he know how it can be purified, I wonder? Or must it die slowly- in its own festering sore, as it were - burning, oozing out, the way a wound cleanses itself before it heals?

We're always being told that the Fall had nothing whatever to do with sex. No, I can't believe this any more...Not that procreation, as such, would never have been without the Fall. That's nonsense, to my mind; but somehow or other it would have been different...If it's true that St Thomas held other and more optimistic views on this subject, this doesn't disconcert me one bit. Maybe an angel-type, as he was, endowed with the charism of virginity, would be incapable of realizing the depth of the Fall in this domain. What is always attributed to the latent Manicheism in St Augustine might well be the realism of experience.

one's twentieth birthday. That day opened the door to a wider life: I reached out to grasp reality. But in fact it was reality which gripped me with its restrictions and constraints and rules which arrogantly claim to be the laws of life, of the universe. To be grown-up really meant resignation; one gave in (if ruefully), laughing a little at one's young dreams.

Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison.