[T]here are in America about a hundred different types of "democracy," each held to be "real democracy, democracy as it was meant by the Founding Fat… - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

These expressions — "culture" and "civilization" — have to be used in their Continental sense to make the point clear. "Culture" is the sum of all products which represent a personal manifestation, like painting, poetry, religion, philosophy, and the humanities. "Civilization" is nonpersonal. It is the sum total of all efforts which contribute to the increase of comfort or "usefulness" in the practical sense. Bathtubs, dentists' tools, railways, and traffic regulations are products of civilization. […] Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity as being something "uncomfortable." […] It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always "magnificent." […] Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven.

The traditional European of the prereformation period lived and believed in the patriarchal principle which was one of authority based on love. Medieval man had not only a physical father, but also a Father in Heaven, a Holy Father in Rome, the Monarch (the Pater Patriae), the godfathers, and a "Father" in the person of his confessor. It was his physical father who had brought him into being, cooperating with the Divine Power of Creation. The physical father was truly regarded to be the auctor (in a similar, not identical sense, as God is creator mundi) and human beings looked upon themselves to be existing ex voluntate viri. Woman was merely in the position (physically as well as psychologically) to accede to man's will, to reject it or to influence man's free will through her power of attraction.

The personal mystery of medieval man has been largely destroyed by capitalistic technicism and bourgeois scientism. There was always something mystical in personal creation as well as a "secret" in manual, artistic skills; convents and monasteries jealously kept the secret of their liquors; craftsmen had their secrets and so had doctors, alchemists, astrologers, and pharmacists in their more or less dark trades. Mystics, hermits, midwives, cooks, and violin builders harbored their secrets. Nature was full of unpenetrable mysteries and strange events; the scarcity of written documents furthered the growth of sagas, folklore, and legends. But not only man, nature, and life had their mysteries; even today we speak of the mysteries of the Rosary, of the Mass. In the Armenian Rite of the Catholic Church a veil is spread between the altar and audience during the Consecration of the Host. These mysteries on the other hand, personal as they might be, were far from creating walls between human beings who were by them not less magnetically attracted than by distance. Bodies are mutually attracted by nearness, knowledge, and pleasure but souls by distance, mystery, and suffering.