Readings: Needles from the Haystack

Following are some brief excerpts which, to me, resonate truth. The quotes are taken from books I read over the winter of 2006-2007, during a period when I was chiefly engaged in the reading of The Notebooks of Simone Weil, The Book of Acts, and the Epistles of St. Paul:


“My generation wanted to shed unnecessary guilt, irrational respect, emotional dependence; but the process has become altogether too much like sterilization. It may be a remedy for one problem, but it has created another. We are saved from breeding relationships we cannot feed; but we are also prevented from breeding those we need.”

--John Fowles, Daniel Martin

“One of the monsters in my father’s seventeenth-century theological bestiary was quietism; it always sounded attractive to me when he denounced it…the notion that both virtue and vice were the enemies of grace.”

--John Fowles, Daniel Martin


--Allen Ginsberg, in the poem “Kaddish”; the concept: “sanity, a trick of agreement.”


“The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.

--Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“The will of heaven cannot be conceived as though it were the will of earth. Heaven has very different views; what seems to us important is to it insignificant, and vice versa. What we avoid may, in its eyes, be useful, necessary; what we regard as central is to it peripheral; and what we fail altogether to discern is viewed by it, as the focal point of human life.”

--Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

Reflections: Authenticity Revisited

As I mentioned in my initial post, it has been my habit, when reading, to enter into a notebook some of those words which I come across that either resonate with a truth I have previously internalized, or which, although not patently true, seem to be worthy of additional contemplation. The excerpt below, from a book by the Catholic writer and thinker, Hans Urs von Balthasar, falls into the latter category.

I previously posted a piece on the authentic life, my stated position therein being that it is only saints, artists, and outlaws who have a good shot at actually living one. Here, Balthasar seems to me to be expounding upon the mechanics involved in a saint attaining his sanctity. Note also the second-to-last sentence, with reference to the Simone Weil aphorism on contemplation in the sidebar:


The man obedient to his mission fulfils his own being, although he could never find this archetype and ideal of himself by penetrating to the deepest center of his nature, his superego or his subconscious, or by scrutinizing his own dispositions, aspirations, talents, and potentialities. Simon, the fisherman, before his meeting with Christ, however thoroughly he might have searched within himself, could not possibly have found a trace of Peter. Yet the form “Peter”, the particular mission reserved for him alone, which till then lay hid in the secret of Christ’s soul and, at the moment of this encounter, was delivered over to him sternly and imperatively – was to be the fulfillment of all that, in Simon, would have sought vainly for a form ultimately valid in the eyes of God and for eternity. In the form “Peter” Simon was made capable of understanding the word of Christ, because the form itself issued from the word and was conjoined with it. When ever Simon follows the light of “Simon”, his own self, he will always be wrong and dangerously so; he only acts truly when he “takes no heed to flesh and blood”, but is obedient to his mission, through which he knows the Father’s will.
Once we see this, we must admit the possibility of a real hearing of the word, and so of contemplation.
…Here the Trinitarian background of faith is fully evident – we are rooted in the Son analogously to the way in which the Son is rooted in the Father.

 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

The question that this raises for me is: does a man, by being "obedient to his mission" and thereby fulfilling "his own being", live an authentic life (such as would satisfy a secular existentialist), even though, as Balthasar claims, "he could never find this archetype and ideal of himself" on his own?