“Regular armies are the only thing today that prevents civilization from losing itself in barbarism.
Today we see a spectacle new in history, new in the world: when, gentlemen, did the world see, except in our day, that we are heading towards civilization through the arms and towards barbarism through ideas? Well, the world is seeing it as I speak. This phenomenon, gentlemen, is so serious, so strange, that it demands some explanation on my part. All true civilization comes from Christianity. This is so true that the whole civilization has been concentrated in the Christian zone. Outside this zone there is no civilization, everything is barbarism. And this is so true that before Christianity there were no civilized peoples because the Roman people and the Greek people were not civilized peoples. They were cultured people, which is very different. “Christianity has civilized the world by doing these three things: it has civilized the world by making authority inviolable, obedience a holy thing, self-denial and sacrifice, or better, charity a divine thing.
In this way Christianity civilized the nations. Well (and here is the solution of a great problem), the ideas of the inviolability of authority, the sanctity of obedience and the divinity of sacrifice, these ideas no longer exist in civil society. : they are in the churches where we adore the just and merciful God, and in the camps where we adore the strong God, the God of battles under the symbols of glory. And because the Church and the army are the only ones which have preserved the notions of the inviolability of authority, the sanctity of obedience and the divinity of charity, they are also the two representatives of European civilization. "I don't know, Gentlemen, if your attention will have been drawn like mine by the resemblance, the quasi-identity between the two persons who seem to be the most distinct, the most opposite, the resemblance between the priest and the soldier. Neither of them live for themselves, neither live for their families. For both, it is in sacrifice and self-denial that their glory is found. The soldier's job is to ensure the independence of civil society. The office of the priest is to watch over the independence of the religious society. The duty of the priest is to die, to give his life as the good shepherd for his sheep. The duty of the soldier, like a good brother, is to give his priestly life, the priesthood will appear to you, and indeed it is, like a veritable militia. If you consider the sanctity of the military profession, the army will seem to you a veritable priesthood. What would the world be, what would civilization be, what would Europe be if there were no priests or soldiers? »
Author: Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti
Hannah Arendt on human life
Modern theories whose raison d'être is to blur the nature of man and thus give him a superabundant belief in his person maintain this permanent blurring. This permanent jamming uses the thought of Simone de Beauvoir on human life. Permanent scrambling, uprooting, infantilization… Man must be told that he is strong in order to weaken him, push him to succumb to all his desires in order to enslave him. Uproot him to allow him to believe himself sole master of his destiny. Vanity and pride will do the rest of the work.
"It is only insofar as he thinks (…), that he is a 'he' and a 'someone', that man can, in the full reality of his concrete being, live in this gap of time between the past and the future. »*
* Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of Culture .
Unamuno on human life
“I don't want to die, no I don't want to, nor want to want to; I want to live always, always; and to live me, this poor me, that I am and I feel myself to be today and here, and this is why the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own, tortures me. »*
The strength of Unamuno's assertion is that it expresses the desire for human life beyond the slightest thought of pleasure. We are here in the presence of a quote that asserts itself as a challenge to the modern world when the theory of action as meaning can be used by all modern ideologies.
*The Tragic Feeling of Life.
Yeats on human life
"When I think of all the books I've read," Yeats said, "of all the wise words I've heard, of all the anguish I've given my parents...all the hopes I've had , all life weighed in the balance of my own life seems to me to be a preparation for something that never happens. »*
*quote from Journal of Yeats.
Simone de Beauvoir on human life
“To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be won.*”
Tremendous declaration of impotence draped in an expression of the will to power or how envy must regulate, rule life. This sentence is of course a revolutionary manifesto. Simone de Beauvoir defines the class struggle and all the actions of the left since the French Revolution: envy as an act of faith. Envy is always the daughter of immanence. Simone de Beauvoir tells us: “God is dead, let us now know that we are masters of our lives and that they are fulfilled in action. By acting in this way Simone de Beauvoir ignores religion but also ancient philosophy, she affirms that permanent struggle is the only way. This permanent struggle is maintained by envy; envy has this unstoppable force, it feeds on its defeats as well as its victories. It is the evil force par excellence. She faces life.
Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy of life is adulescent, as Tony Anatrella would say, and in fact it is a negation of life because it denies its quality and its thickness in order to resolve it into a permanent and pathetic struggle.
We also see the form of modernism. This action immediately becomes a negation of the inner life. Or rather it wants to be a replacement for the inner life because it is common to hear, by a spectacular reversal of meaning, that action is the inner life of the militant. We also understand that this declaration in no way wishes to find a solution, appeasement would be its end. She only delights in noise and violence.
*An Ethics of Ambiguity.
Pascal on human life
And this excerpt from Pascal, avowed and forced intimacy:
“When I consider the small duration of my life, absorbed in the eternity preceding and following, the small space that I fill and even that I see, damaged in the infinite immensity of the spaces that I ignore and that ignore me, I am frightened and surprised to see myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me there? By whose order and conduct was this place and time destined for me. Memoria Hospitis unius diei praetereuntis* . »
Taken from the Book of Wisdom, V, 15: “The hope of the wicked is (…) like the smoke that the wind blows away or *like the memory of a guest who passes and who is only one day in one same place ”.
Tolstoy on human life
This morning, I stumbled* — literally — on this passage from Confession which is a pure marvel and which announces The Death of Ivan Ilitch written seven years later:
“At first it seemed to me that they were gratuitous, inappropriate requests. I believed that all this was already known, that if I ever wanted to tackle these questions head-on, it would give me no trouble, that for the moment I did not have the time, but that as soon as I wanted to , I would immediately find the answers. Now these questions assailed me more and more often, demanding the answer with ever more vehemence, and as they all fell in the same place, in a multitude of points, these unanswered questions formed a single black spot. (…)
“It happened to me what happens to all who have contracted a fatal internal disease. First, we see the appearance of an insignificant symptom to which the patient attaches no importance, then the symptoms return more and more often and merge into a single indivisible suffering over time. (…)
“My life stopped. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep; but I had no life, for there were no longer any desires the fulfillment of which would have seemed reasonable to me. »
It takes the quality of Tolstoy to express so perfectly this rise in power (which some might confuse with the will to power), this progressive invasion of anxiety. La Mort d'Ivan Ilitch, a condensed masterpiece of this masterpiece that is life, will perfectly give this impression of falling into another universe. In an innocuous moment life bifurcates and routs. Life is made only of the assembly of these intimate moments shared with oneself.
* By reading my notes from the very interesting little book by Monique Canto-Sperber: Essay on human life .
The abandonment of Benedict XVI
“Eli, Eli lama sabachtani?” 1 When Benedict XVI signifies, in a few simple words, that he renounces the office of pope, it is an earthquake that shakes the world and strikes Catholics. The wildest rumors are circulating and everyone wonders about the causes of this decision which, even if it is not unique, causes amazement. Personally two feelings inhabit me: abandonment and sadness, its pilot fish, not to say desolation. The abandonment resembles an echo that keeps reproducing and growing, like a haunting complaint.
The death of intimacy
Everywhere, on the Internet, in newspapers or on television, personal experience is displayed, exhibited and intended to be a reference. This indecency is based on an inversion of values. It is based above all and everywhere on the idea of the same. The idea of the same thinks: “I lived that, my experience reflects a universal feeling. I mean what I experienced. I pose as an essential witness”. This is to confuse the universal with the general. What is forgotten, misunderstood, is the difference that resides between each man; and each man is unique. Not singular by his sexual orientations or by his manias, but intrinsically. This is an old new concept at the beginning of the 21st century. By his experience, by his culture and by his nature, each man shows a facet of Man, and each facet is unique. Create in the image of God . Now it is impossible for us, except by looking at men and considering them as all singular, to embrace God. Forgetting God leads to the same thing. Everyone goes there with their nursery rhyme which, even if it can tell the tragedy of an existence, is only a nursery rhyme because it does not even begin to tell the tragedy of Man.
A short history of Envy, from hero to scapegoat
The modern world keeps presenting us with scapegoats. Lance Armstrong, Richard Millet, Jérôme Kerviel, John Galliano, to name but a few, each in a field, with completely different causes and reasons, have recently embodied the scapegoat, the justly punished culprit, the impediment in a circle put back in its place. The scapegoat is linked to egalitarianism, itself linked to envy. From hero to scapegoat, only the desire does not change. The modern world has the spectacle in its blood, the scapegoat has a cathartic function there.
In the era of modern democracy, everything goes through Twitter or Facebook. The real information is there. Not being there is tantamount to disappearing, to maintaining a life in the shadows, a shadowy life. On social networks, the height of modern democracy is allowed: rub shoulders with the idol, live with the idol, to the rhythm of the idol, knowing everything about her, seeing her when she gets out of bed, embracing good evening; only tactile contact is missing. This proximity transforms the role of the idol that has always been known, it changes it forever. If the idol were a simple statuette, it would not speak, it would not respond, it would only occupy the place left to it, it would gather on its effigy all the mental images that the brain can produce. The modern world does not know the mental image, it is beyond fantasy. He hates what is hidden, let alone what is secret. Hence the often-used phrase: fantasy come true. The fantasy - phantasmata , the mental image for the ancient Greek - cannot be, must not be, a reality. Otherwise horror awaits. Otherwise we can only pray while waiting for everything to return to its place. There is a possible wildness in rubbing shoulders with the idol too closely. Through this proximity, the modern world has undertaken to create a cathartic lever to control consciences. The idol can be a hero or a scapegoat, it can serve the society of the spectacle and its soft dictatorship. It also allows you to fill in boxes: hero, scapegoat, fallen, condemned, victim... A sheet of cigarette paper separates these qualifiers. Against a background of moralism, society shows its cards and distributes the good or bad points. All areas are affected, but some are more “popular” than others. The scapegoat allows you to get a makeover, to deceive, or to affirm your responsibility and your incorruptibility. But no one should be fooled by such schemes. The society of the spectacle is a simulacrum of society based on intrusion, indecency and denunciation.
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