We vs. Me

     The second respect in which Jung's notion of archetypes is appropriate here is in the justice it does to their formative powers: they "create" or project forth the terrestrial plane, which is no more than their exterior covering. Several times in this study we have enveighed against reductionism, but let us be clear. Its error does not lie in its attempt to understand one type of reality in terms of another. Virtually all explanation proceeds in this fashion, and explanation is needed, for true reality is never the most obvious; one might almost say that one of the ways truth betrays the fact that it is such is in the care it takes to remain elusive, if one may put the matter paradoxically. The mistake of reductionism — spirit reduced to metamorphosed matter (Darwinism), truth reduced to ideology (Marxism), psyche reduced to sex (Freud: there is no way "to sweeten the sour apple") — lies in its attempt to explain the greater in terms of the less, with the not surprising consequence that the greater is thereby lessened. It is this, at root, that sets us against the modern outlook and turns us back toward tradition where the drift is always the reverse: to explain the lesser by means of the more, a mode of explanation that tends to augment rather than deplete....
— Houston Smith, Forgotten Truth, pp. 41-42.

     Mechanists consider mind to be a part of the body, but this is a mistake. The brain is a part of the body, but mind and brain are not identical. The brain breathes mind like the lung breathes air.
— Houston Smith, Ibid., p. 63.

     If you assume (as they unconsciously do) that there is no such thing as the wisdom of the ages and that there is nothing to be learned from even the mistakes of the past, then perhaps they are right in being happily ignorant of it. But I find it hard to believe that the slate should be wiped quite so clean.
     Presently I found myself thinking, in my old-fashioned way, about Matthew Arnold's classification of his contemporaries, and I think that it requires some modification if it is to be applied this hundred years later. What he called the cultured are perhaps as numerous (which is also as few) as they were in his time. But if I understand aright another of his distinctions, there are fewer Philistines and more Barbarians, i.e., fewer who have rejected culture and chosen vulgarity, more who are simply unaware that culture exists. The values of the Philistine — comfort, money, and power — are consciously held and therefore not wholly unexamined. His thinking may be vulgar and directed toward the achievement of vulgar ends but it is at least thinking of a sort, and the choices are deliberately made. The Barbarian does does not really think or choose at all with his conscious mind. He merely finds himself living in a world of physical sensations, quite unaware that any other existence is possible. I know that we spend millions on schools, that no other nation is so supplied with libraries, that paperbacks proliferate, and that even TV devotes hours to "education." But I have the feeling that a very large number of youths of both sexes are as untouched by all this as though it did not exist.
     In addition to Arnold's categories one must of course extablish a new one either nonexistent or unnamed in Arnold's day: the category of the Alienated. This category includes two subdivisions, into one or the other of which the existentialist and the beatnik are placed. Both have one thing in common with the Philistine because both have rejected "culture" in Arnold's sense, though they often know more about it than his Philistines did. They differ from one another in that the highly intellectual existentialist is depressed while the beatnik has taken only one step away from the fun-oriented society and finds the summum bonum to be not fun but "kicks."
— Joseph Wood Krutch, "Can We Survive the Fun Explosion?", in Edge of Awareness: Twenty-Five Contemporary Essays, Ned Hoopes/Richard Peck (eds.), pp. 73-74.

     God does not protect us against catastrophes. He is neither a lightning rod nor a breakwater. But he comes to our aid in catastrophes. It is in the very midst of the tempest and the misfortune that a wonderful zone of peace, serenity, and joy bursts in upon us before we have helped ourselves. God does not relieve us before we have exhausted our own strength. But when we are at the end of our resources, when everything is going the worst, when everything is taking place as if he did not exist or could not do anything, at this moment he manifests himself, and we begin to know that he has been there all along....
     Your powerlessness, your total misery will make your liberation. You will learn that existence is a gratuitous gift and not an anxious personal industry. And the intensity of the hope which will bloom so simply in your heart will reveal to you the violence with which you had repressed it until then.
— Louis Evely, in Strength for the Soul, Dorothy Mason Fuller (sel. & ed.), pp. 62-63.

     When life puts something up to us we need not react; we can respond. That is different. That takes our spiritual contribution in....
     In our capacity to make that spiritual response to life our freedom lies.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick, in Ibid., p. 69.

     Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
— Rabindranath Tagore, in Ibid., p. 91.