Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that the state grew more despotic as it grew more civilized; it is arguable that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilized.

According to the real records available, barbarism and civilization were not successive states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that existed side-by-side, as they still exist side-by-side.

If there’s one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic.

…the family is the unit of the state…Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city; property is but the family farm; honor is but the family flag.

…reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us.

This creature [i.e. man] was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.

Art is the signature of man

The church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men, and not merely for children.. . When its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoiled realism and objectivity of innocence…to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.

“Which pagans, Chesterton asks, would consider a child superior to a man?” - when considered in themselves, probably none. But I bet they still considered some individual children i.e. a prince to be better than some other individual man i.e. a slave.

Always be lovers of your souls and those of all your sisters. And may you always be eager to observe what you have promised the Lord. May the Lord always be with you and may you always be with Him. Amen.

Gaze upon that mirror [Jesus] each day… and continually study your face in it…Indeed, in that mirror, blessed poverty, holy humility, and inexpressible charity shine forth as, with the grace of God, you will be able to contemplate them throughout the entire mirror.

…gaze, consider, contemplate desiring to imitate Your Spouse…

…you know the kingdom of heaven is promised and given by the Lord only to the poor because she who loves what is temporal loses the fruits of love.

He [St. Francis] was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving

… it is really quite right and quite desirable that St. Francis should never have heard of Virgil. But do we really desire that Dante should never have heard of Virgil?… It is well to have the Sybil as well as David in the Dies Irae.

He had become a vagabond for the sake of a vision, he who had denied himself all sense of place and possession, he whose whole gospel and glory it was to be homeless, received like a Parthian shot from nature, the sting of the sense of Home.

… so far from being a revival of paganism, the Franciscan renascence was a sort of fresh start and first awakening after a forgetfulness of paganism.

The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy.

(Of lovers) …it was because the thing was not demanded that it was done.

Debt and dependence do become pleasures in the presence of unspoilt love…

A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed, though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.

The mystic will have nothing to do with mere mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery of iniquity.

St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased.

On how recapitulation happens

The way to build a church is to build it.

The whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved round the idea of a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate recovery, not the ultimate refusal of natural things.

Pagans were wiser than paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians.

The truth is that people who worship health cannot remain healthy. When man goes straight he goes crooked.

“To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and people, is practically to hate nearly everything that has happened.”

A French philosopher of a certain school put it one way by saying that the worst tragedy is not to be a saint; Chesterton agreed in his own way by saying, in many Clarion phrases, that the best comedy is to be one.