Substack Notes Roundup #4
Heaven, sacrifice, sin, and more...
The 4th collection of my most recent Substack notes. Enjoy!
"The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home."
— C. S. Lewis
“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the skepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape.”
— G. K. Chesterton
Sacrifice is the basis of community.
Now ask yourself, what is the ultimate sacrifice and through what means does one embody it?
“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
— C. S. Lewis
“A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.”
— Gustave Le Bon
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers
“It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”
— C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
An attempt at demolishing a virtue doesn’t actually hurt the virtue since its value is inherent. Rather, it makes the accuser himself less virtuous. An attack on truth doesn’t dethrone it from its place among the highest of values. Rather, it distances the attacker from it, it separates him from what is good.
The same is true for anything that is objectively of high value. Beauty, art, stories, faith; no matter how much we try to make these things unimportant, or even worse optional, we’ll only end up making ourselves poorer instead.
“Active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The Devil favours the small sins. A lustful look, an unnoticeable burst of anger, cowardice masked as pacifism, the slow buildup of inarticulate resentment caused by the dullness of everyday life.
He doesn’t need murderers and great evildoers to populate his halls, though he desires them the most. He will gladly settle for self-deceiving humans whose despair and faux-virtue pulls them ever closer to him. For they are more in number and quantity is all that matters in the end.
“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”
— Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927)
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