Author: Tim

• Vladimir Nabakov: “the symbolism racket in schools”

  “The notion of symbol…has always been abhorrent to me…The symbolism racket in schools…destroys plain intelligence as well as poetic sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all the capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art…In the case of a certain type of writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence…

• David Hart: “A Hermeneutical Labor”

  Theology is not first a speculative science, but a hermeneutical labor… The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 32

• David Hart: Delight As A Mode Of Knowledge

  Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth…

• David Hart on Beauty and Love

  …beauty is present only where there has been love, but only vanity where the light of love has not fallen…love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential “mood” that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it… – The Beauty of the Infinite, p 238, 240

• David Hart on Primal Distance

  The distance between God and creation is not alienation, nor the Platonic chorismos or scale of being, but the original ontological act of distance by which every ontic interval subsists, given to be crossed but not overcome… The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 194

• David Hart: “The contents of the creed…”

  The contents of the creed do not constitute simply some system of metaphysical affirmations, but first and foremost a kind of “phenomenology of salvation”; the experience of redemption – of being joined by the Spirit to the Son and through the Son to the Father – was the ground from which the church’s doctrinal grammar…

• It Takes Three, Actually (outline)

  Equality is not a relationship. The word implies that two things have the same relationship to a third thing, but they may have no necessary relationship with each other. If two people are equal before a common entity, and that is the extent of their commonality, they in fact have no relationship. Since equality has…

• Start With a Person Or Do Without Them

  “In the Beginning God..”Something must be postulated. This is not a “proof” of God’s existence (there can be no such thing) but is simply a feature of our minds, which implies God’s existence. Our minds are such that something must be postulated. This initial postulate can be matter only, of course, but that requires that…

• G.K. Chesterton on Design

  When there is no longer even a vague idea of purposes or presences, then the many colored forest really is rag-bag and all the pageant of the dust only a dustbin.  We can see this realization creeping like a slow paralysis over all those of the newest poets who have not reacted towards religion.  Their…

• G.K. Chesterton on Children at Play

  …the real child does not confuse fact and fiction. He simply likes fiction. He acts it, because he cannot as yet write it or even read it; but he never allows his moral sanity to be clouded by it. – Autobiography, chapter II