Tempestuous plains tell the tale,Windswept wastes do bewail,Haunting Spirit of the land,Seeks the living, seeks the damned.Horizoned edge sheared with grass,tttDark Storm Rising in the pass,Ageless Spirit seeks the path,To torment souls to the last.Brooding Spirit upon the plain,Thunderhead gathers for the rain.ttttLight grows dim then bolts with pain,On dry Earth her sin is stained.(Frightened creatures do stampede,Into night, they do recede).Ungodded hand on seasoned blade,Reaps the harvest of the Age.Released from her eternal din,Spirit of the Age rises again.Seeking to plunder and consume,ttThose who were proud, those who presumed.Spirits rage while storm draws nigh,Upon burning plain and emblazoned sky.It is said giants grapple in the Earth so deep,To contend for souls that they might keep.ttThe Storm spirit now searches the high and the low,To seek her manchild victim in the fields below.Leaves bad wasteland to claim but a fallen man,Denying it Heaven, crowning it, ‘Son of the Damned.’Treacherous Spirit of the far lost night,tttTramples souls down denying them light.Storm seethes with furious hiss,Leads men on to bottomless pit.This most ancient of foes has come from her den,To seek the living, to make ready those dead.tA living sacrifice is her soul desire,To snatch the soul for black funeral pyre.A double-damned devil, that is she,This one who lies, who claims to make free.A lying spirit, that is her domain,tttttA storm-wracked Fury of self-proclaim.Onward she seeks, this bleak Northern wind,Searching for naught but for a soul akin.Amidst the howling and the rage,To murder again, that is her trade.ttttAs this spirit of graves left the plain,She left a wake of dead in shrouded train.tttNow down from the plain Storm did come,Unto those cities wherein was no sun.There with whirlwind she did rip and scour,ttFor those souls of whom she could tear and devour.She comes to seek the living and the dead,Those who were frightened, those with no dread.Thus upon those she did acclaim,“I am the Mistress of the living and the slain.”ttO’ haunting Spirit of this land,Taker of life, maker of the damned. --On Villainess Storm, Ch. One Valley of the Damned
But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.
I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20...This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued.Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.
Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late Roman world. He explains that the emphasis of early Christian preaching on judgment, on the human need for redemption from sin, brought to the minds of common people — among whom Christianity was early successful — their social and political condition. Having strictly limited powers to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing, they turned, when they could, to their social betters in hope of aid. If a local patrician could befriend them — could be, at least for a time, their patron — then they had a chance, at least, of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus. For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes, and to bridge with the warm breath of personal acquaintance the great distances of the late-Roman social world. In a world so sternly organized around sin and justice, patrocimium [patronage] and amicitia [friendship] provided a much-needed language of amnesty.”As this cult became more and more deeply entrenched in the Christian life, it made sense for there to be, not just feast days for individual saints, but a day on which everyone’s indebtedness to the whole company of saints — gathered around the throne of God, pleading on our behalf — could be properly acknowledged. After all, we do not know who all the saints are: no doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went: and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it would only be four hundred years later that Pope Gregory III would designate the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints.