Anti Profanity Quotes

Doggerel by a Senior Citizen (for Robert Lederer) Our earth in 1969 Is not the planet I call mine, The world, I mean, that gives me strength To hold off chaos at arm’s length. My Eden landscapes and their climes Are constructs from Edwardian times, When bath-rooms took up lots of space, And, before eating, one said Grace. The automobile, the aeroplane, Are useful gadgets, but profane: The enginry of which I dream Is moved by water or by steam. Reason requires that I approve The light-bulb which I cannot love: To me more reverence-commanding A fish-tail burner on the landing. My family ghosts I fought and routed, Their values, though, I never doubted: I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic Both practical and sympathetic. When couples played or sang duets, It was immoral to have debts: I shall continue till I die To pay in cash for what I buy. The Book of Common Prayer we knew Was that of 1662: Though with-it sermons may be well, Liturgical reforms are hell. Sex was of course —it always is— The most enticing of mysteries, But news-stands did not then supply Manichean pornography. Then Speech was mannerly, an Art, Like learning not to belch or fart: I cannot settle which is worse, The Anti-Novel or Free Verse. Nor are those Ph.D’s my kith, Who dig the symbol and the myth: I count myself a man of letters Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters. Dare any call Permissiveness An educational success? Saner those class-rooms which I sat in, Compelled to study Greek and Latin. Though I suspect the term is crap, There is a Generation Gap, Who is to blame? Those, old or young, Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue. But Love, at least, is not a state Either en vogue or out-of-date, And I’ve true friends, I will allow, To talk and eat with here and now. Me alienated? Bosh! It’s just As a sworn citizen who must Skirmish with it that I feel Most at home with what is Real.

March 1953 saw a surge in arrests and convictions of people charged with “anti-Soviet agitation” for expressing satisfaction with Stalin’s death or otherwise denigrating him. A forty-four-year-old Muscovite named S. M. Telenkov, who worked at a scientific institute, drunkenly proclaimed in a commuter train, “What a fine day it is today; today we buried Stalin. There’ll be one less scoundrel around and now we can get back to living.” R. S. Rybalko, a twenty-eight-year-old working-class woman from Rostov Oblast, was convicted of using profanity in regard to Stalin. Ya. I. Peit, who had been forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan, was sentenced for destroying and stomping on a portrait of Stalin after an official mourning ceremony. Upon hearing of Stalin’s death, P. K. Karpets, a thirty-two-year-old railroad worker from the Ukrainian city of Rovno, swore and exclaimed, “Smell that? The corpse is already stinking.” Ye. G. Gridneva, a forty-eight-year-old female railroad worker from Transcaucasia, was not able to contain herself and commented to a coworker, “A dog dies a dog’s death. It’s good that he died. There won’t be any kolkhozes and life will be a little easier.”7

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest? To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language

A cet égard, il faut remarquer, en outre, que de nos jours que les doctrines du Tasawwuf ont elles-mêmes besoin dans les pays islamiques d'une justification intellectuelle renouvelée et adaptée de façon à répondre aux conditions de la mentalité moderne qui s'est étendue de l'Occident à tous les milieux de culture du monde oriental. En dehors de l'esprit exotériste, il faut donc compter maintenant avec l'esprit anti-traditionnel tout court des progressistes de toutes sortes, et surtout avec la présence d'une génération de savants « orientalistes », d'origine orientales, mais de formation et d'inspiration occidentales et profanes. Par un curieux retournement des choses, l'enseignement de René Guénon peut faciliter lui-même beaucoup cette justification, car il contient les moyens spéculatifs et dialectiques qui permettent d'y aboutir dans toutes les conditions de mentalité qui ressemblent à celle de l'Occident contemporain ; ce travail de justification intellectuelle se trouve déjà en essence dans les références doctrinales que l'œuvre de René Guénon fait à l'ésotérisme et à la métaphysique islamiques.

D’autre part, nous avons eu aussi l’occasion de faire remarquer la faiblesse, pour ne pas dire plus, de l’attitude qu’on est convenu d’appeler « apologétique », et qui consiste à vouloir défendre une tradition contre des attaques telles que celles de la science moderne en discutant les arguments de celle-ci sur son propre terrain, ce qui ne va presque jamais sans entraîner des concessions plus ou moins fâcheuses, et ce qui implique en tout cas une méconnaissance du caractère transcendant de la doctrine traditionnelle. Cette attitude est habituellement celle d’exotéristes, et l’on peut penser que, bien souvent, ils sont surtout poussés par la crainte qu’un plus ou moins grand nombre d’adhérents de leur tradition ne s’en laissent détourner par les objections scientifiques ou soi-disant telles qui sont formulées contre elle ; mais, outre que cette considération « quantitative » est elle-même d’un ordre assez profane, ces objections méritent d’autant moins qu’on y attache une telle importance que la science dont elles s’inspirent change continuellement, ce qui devrait suffire à prouver leur peu de solidité. Quand on voit, par exemple, des théologiens se préoccuper d’« accorder la Bible avec la science », il n’est que trop facile de constater combien un tel travail est illusoire, puisqu’il est constamment à refaire à mesure que les théories scientifiques se modifient, sans compter qu’il a toujours l’inconvénient de paraître solidariser la tradition avec l’état présent de la science profane, c’est-à-dire avec des théories qui ne seront peut-être plus admises par personne au bout de quelques années, si même elles ne sont pas déjà abandonnées par les savants, car cela aussi peut arriver, les objections qu’on s’attache à combattre ainsi étant plutôt ordinairement le fait des vulgarisateurs que celui des savants eux-mêmes. Au lieu d’abaisser maladroitement les Écritures sacrées à un pareil niveau, ces théologiens feraient assurément beaucoup mieux de chercher à en approfondir autant que possible le véritable sens, et de l’exposer purement et simplement pour le bénéfice de ceux qui sont capables de le comprendre, et qui, s’ils le comprenaient effectivement, ne seraient plus tentés par là même de se laisser influencer par les hypothèses de la Science profane, non plus d’ailleurs que par la « critique » dissolvante d’une exégèse moderniste et rationaliste, c’est-à-dire essentiellement anti-traditionnelle, dont les prétendus résultats n’ont pas davantage à être pris en considération par ceux qui ont conscience de ce qu’est réellement la tradition. [La science profane devant les doctrines traditionnelles]

Already early in the twentieth century, René Guénon identified the deep chasm that separates ancient from modern, sacred from profane, and true knowledge from empirical science, a series of deep wounds such as can fully be healed only by the ending of this cosmic cycle and the beginning of another. Is it surprising that a person emerged to explain the nature of the great divide we experience as spiritual beings living in an anti-spiritual world of our own making?

Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest?

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395),