The wind blows where it wills; you hear its voice but do not know whence it comes and whither it goest (cf. John 3:8). So does it also occur with anyone who is abandoning the world. In a similar way, the beginning of anyone who undertakes the monastic life is surrounded with signs. Those who begin monasticism know about this. It is more than a desire that entices one toward this life, though this desire is the root of it all. It so happens that there are other occurrences in which the finger of God is clearly seen.
They later serve as hope-bearing supports for the completion of what has been begun, and they convince one to set out and bring to completion one’s purpose. It is impossible to describe what precisely occurs. Everyone has something known only to herself, and only to herself it appears to be quite unusual.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, Kindling the Divine Spirit
Category: DISCERNMENT
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It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting; but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way,—thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravagance.
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic -
Every good human quality is related to a bad one into which it threatens to pass over; and every bad quality is similarly related to a good one. The reason we so often misunderstand people is that when we first make their acquaintance we mistake their bad qualities for the related good ones, or vice versa: thus a prudent man will seem cowardly, a thrifty one avaricious; or a spendthrift will seem liberal, a boor frank and straightforward, an impudent fellow full of noble self-confidence, and so on.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant’. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,
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You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
