Gil Bailie Quotes

The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.

It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.

This is the splendid and memorable wisdom of legendary sage Howard Thurman, who once advised someone seeking vocational guidance, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, [New York: Crossroad, xv]). Yielding to your sacred inner flame is your best offering to the world.

Humans, in short, desire something both unknown to them and inaccessible to the strategies of acquisition that desire sets in motion. We are creatures in whom has been implanted and to whom has been entrusted a world-consuming desire, and if misdirected, it will sooner or later lay waste the world.

The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.

The very word, religio—to bind (ligio) back (re)—suggests exactly this. Thus these ancient cultures remained profoundly backward oriented. This ritualized return to a primordial past, the very essence of mythological forms of recollection, is what de Lubac perceptively characterized as a “deliberate (though admittedly still instinctive) refusal of history.

In sharp contrast to their pagan contemporaries, Israel’s remembrance of the past was marked by two tendencies: a faith in Yahweh’s fidelity to the Abrahamic covenant, on which Jewish confidence in the future was based, and the contrition that accompanied the remembrance of Israel’s own violations of that covenant.

It is when we ask about the nature of this catharsis that we discover that culture itself represents something like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As we shall see below, without that tinge of moral remorse, however, there would have been no catharsis, and therefore no surviving culture.