Untimely Meditations

Desejais -- dizia Benedetto Croce -- fugir da baixa atualidade e ficar sempre atual? Refugiai-vos naquilo que jamais teve atualidade!

Minha vida foi um outono. Mas o outono também tem o seu encanto -- uma luz muito nobre

Aos protestos acumulados contra o passado juntam-se terrores imaginários, e à vontade de tudo mudar se junta a vontade de vingar-se dos vivos, em lugar dos mortos, os únicos inacessíveis.

A crise é a passagem das massas por um período de soberania; massas incapazes de compreender e de conservar o que foi, incapazes de conceber e de construir o que será. A crise é uma fase intermediária entre a democracia nascente e a democracia abolida, única época da democracia realizada; segue-se-lhe o despotismo, que restabelece a ordem, a ordem dos cemitérios, cemitério daquilo que não voltará nunca.

As vozes proféticas do passado ensinam-nos a interpretar a nossa situação; interpretação que equivale a um julgamento do mundo e de nós mesmos, a um exame de consciência. É só a luz interior que pode iluminar o caminho das trevas, para conferir um sentido moral ao purgatório dos nossos dias, para acender, na cinza do que foi, a vacilante luz duma nova esperança. Era o meu caminho também: ainda sinto na boca o travo amargo da cinza do purgatório; já devo agradecer a aurora duma vida nova. Quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…

The fake philosophical terminology of mathematical logic has misled philosophers into beleiving that mathematical logic deals with the truth in the philosophical sense. But this is a mistake. Mathematical logic deals not with the truth but only with the game of truth. The snobbish symbol-dropping found nowadays in philosophical papers raises eyebrows among mathematicians, like someone paying his grocery bill with Monopoly money... The prejudice that a concept must be precisely defined in order to be meaningful, or that an argument must be precisely stated in order to make sense, is one of the most insidious of the twentieth century.

The present study aims to disengage this holiness, not in order to preach some way of salvation (which there would be no shame in seeking), but in order to understand on the basis of the supreme abstractness and the supreme concreteness of the face of the other man those tragic or cynical accents, but always that acuteness, that continue to mark the sober description of the human sciences, in order to account for the impossible indifference with regard to the human which does not succeed in dissimulating itself in the incessant discourse about the death of God, the end of man and the disintegration of the world (no one is able to minimize the chances of that), but in which the wreckage preceding the catastrophe itself, like rats abandoning the ship before the shipwreck, come to us in the already insignificant signs of a language in dissemination.

Goodness is always older than choice; the Good has always already chosen and required the unique one.

If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help... So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation... But if I am to be REALLY saved -- what I need is certainty -- not wisdom, dreams or speculation -- and this certainty is faith. And faith is what is needed by my heart, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection.