## Metadata - Author: [[Wendell Berry]] - Full Title: Standing by Words - Category: #books ## Highlights - One of the oldest doctrines of specialist-poets is that of the primacy of language and the primacy of poetry. They have virtually made a religion of their art, a religion based not on what they have in common with other people, but on what they do that sets them apart. For poets who believe this way, a poem is not a point of clarification or connection between themselves and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other, nor is it an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves. It is a seeking of self in words, the making of a wordworld in which the word-self may be at home. ([Location 76](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=76)) - The world that once was mirrored by the poet has become the poet’s mirror. This explains, I think, the emphasis upon personal terror and suffering and the fear of death in much recent poetry. When the self is one’s exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words. And this gives to one’s own suffering and death the force of cataclysm. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=94)) - It is surely no accident that Yeats, perhaps the most spiritual poet in our language in our era, was also perhaps the most political. As regards this connection between humans and the world, the specialization of poetry is exactly analogous to the specialization of religion. Putting exclusive emphasis upon a world of words has the same result as putting exclusive emphasis upon heaven; it leads to, and allows, and abets the degradation of the world. And it leads ultimately to the degradation of poetry and religion. Renunciation of the world may sustain religious or poetic fervor for a while, but sooner or later it becomes suicidal. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=101)) - words as fulcrums across which intelligence must endlessly be weighed against experience. ([Location 123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=123)) - it seems to me more likely that the praises of chaos must come from people whose lives are so safely organized. ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=151)) - Contemporaneity, in the sense of being “up with the times,” is of no value. Wakefulness to experience—as well as to instruction and example—is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical—a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having. ([Location 169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=169)) - there is much that we need that we cannot get from our contemporaries—even assuming that the work we have from them is the best that is possible: they cannot give us the sense of the longevity of human experience, the sense of the practicable, af proven possibility, that we get from older writing. Our past is not merely something to depart from; it is to commune with, to speak with: ([Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=179)) - If we fail to see that we live in the same world that Homer lived in, then we not only misunderstand Homer; we misunderstand ourselves. The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. If, as I believe, one of the functions of tradition is to convey a sense of our perennial nature and of the necessities and values that are the foundation of our life, then it follows that, without a live tradition, we are necessarily the prey of fashion: we have no choice but to emulate in the arts the “practical men” of commerce and industry whose mode of life is distraction of spirit and whose livelihood is the outdating of fads. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=182)) - James Dickey says: “I think there is a terrible danger in the overcultivation of one’s sensibilities, and that’s what poets are forced to do in order to become poets.” And: “In order to create poetry, you make a monster out of your own mind.” He explains that some poets use alcohol or other drugs, first to coax the monster, and then to protect themselves from it. He mentions, as victims, John Berryman, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas, and calls poetry one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=190)) - Song is natural; we have it in common with animals. For humans, it is also artificial and traditional; it has to be made by someone who knows how to make it and sung to someone who will recognize it as song. Rhythm, fundamental to it, is its profoundest reference. The rhythm of a song or a poem rises, no doubt, in reference to the pulse and breath of the poet, as is often repeated, but that is still too specialized an accounting; it rises also in reference to daily and seasonat—and surely even longer—rhythms in the life of the poet and in the life that surrounds him. The rhythm of a poem resonates with these larger rhythms that surround it; it fills its environment with sympathetic vibrations. Rhyme, which is a function of rhythm, may suggest this sort of resonance; it marks the coincidences of smaller structures with larger ones, as when the day, the month, and the year all end at the same moment. Song, then, is a force opposed to specialty and to isolation. It is the testimony of the singer’s inescapable relation to the world, to the human community, and also to tradition. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=225)) - Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstance by adding the new to the old? ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=247)) - “The old story ... followed some figure—Odysseus, or Ruth, or King David—through time; and it remains the most pure image that we have of temporal life, tracing the journey which we shall take.” Narrative poetry records, contemplates, hands down the actions of the past. Poetry has a responsibility to remember and to preserve and reveal the truth about these actions. But it also has a complementary responsibility that is equally public: to help to preserve and to clarify the possibility of responsible action. Ezra Pound, perhaps more than anyone else in our time, insisted on this as the social value of “the damned and despised litterati: ” “When their work goes rotten ... when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.” ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=257)) - One would like, one longs in fact, to be perfect family man and a perfect workman. And one suffers from the inevitable conflicts. But whatever one does, one is not going to be perfect at either, and it is better to suffer the imperfection of both than to gamble the total failure of one against an illusory hope of perfection in the other. The real values of art and life are perhaps best defined and felt in the tension between them. The effort to perfect work rises out of, and communes with and in turn informs, the effort to perfect life, as Yeats himself knew and as other poems of his testify. The use of life to perfect work is an evil of the specialized intellect. It makes of the most humane of disciplines an exploitive industry. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=304)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - One of the great practical uses of literary disciplines, of course, is to resist giibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extra-linguistic considerations; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=390)) - If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole. ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=480)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - The only way, so far as I can see, to achieve an accounting that is verifiably and reliably y external is to admit the internal, the personal, as an appropriate, necessary consideration. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, for example, had spoken a good common English, instead of the languages of their specialization and of public relations, then they might have spoken of their personal anxiety and bewilderment, and so brought into consideration what they had in common with the people whose health and lives they were responsible for. They might, in short, have sympathized openly with those people—and so have understood the probably unbearable burden of their public trusteeship. To be bound within the confines of either the internal or the external way of accounting is to be diseased. To hold the two in balance is to validate both kinds, and to have health. I am not using these terms “disease” and “health” according to any clinical definitions, but am speaking simply from my own observation that when my awareness of how I feel overpowers my awareness of where I am and who is there with me, I am sick, diseased. This can be appropriately extended to say that if what I think obscures my sense of whereabouts and company, I am diseased. And the converse is also true: I am diseased if I become so aware of my surroundings that my own inward life is obscured, as if I should so fix upon the value of some mineral in the ground as to forget that the world is God’s work and my home. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=604)) - And so a reliable account is personal at the beginning and religious at the end. This does not mean that a reliable account includes the whole system of systems, for no account can do that. It does mean that the account is made in precise reference to the system of systems—which is another way of saying that it is made in respect for it. Without this respect for the larger structures, the accounting shrinks into the confines of some smaller structure and becomes specialized, partial, and destructive. It is this sort of external accounting that deals with connections and thus inevitably raises the issue of quality. Which, I take it, is always the same as the issue of propriety: how appropriate is the tool to the work, the work to the need, the need to other needs and the needs of others, and to the health of the household or community of all creatures? And this kind of accounting gives us the great structures of poetry—as in Homer, Dante, and Milton. It is these great structures, I think, that carry us into the sense of being, in Gary Snyder’s phrase, “at one with each other.”15 They teach us to imagine the life that is divided from us by difference or enmity: as Homer imagined the “enemy” hero, Hector; as Dante, on his pilgrimage to Heaven, imagined the damned; as Milton, in his awed study of the meaning of obedience, epitomized sympathetically in his Satan the disobedient personality. And as, now, ecological insight proposes again a poetry with the power to imagine the lives of animals and plants and streams and stones. And this imagining is eminently proprietous, fitting to the claims and privileges of the great household. Unlike the problems of quantity, the problems of propriety are never “solved,” but are ceaselessly challenging and interesting. This is the antidote to the romance of big technological solutions. Life would be interesting—there would be exciting work to do—even if there were no nuclear power plants or “agri-industries” or space adventures. The elaborations of elegance are at least as fascinating, and more various, more democratic, more healthy, more practical—though less glamorous—than elaborations of power. Without this ultimate reference to the system of systems, and this ultimate concern for quality, any rendering of account falls into the service of a kind of tyranny: it accompanies, and in one way or another invariably enables, the taking of power, from people first and last, but also from all other created things. In this degenerative accounting, language is almost without the power of designation because it is used conscientiously to refer to nothing in particular. Attention rests upon percentages, categories, abstract functions. The reference drifts inevitably toward the merely provisional. It is not language that the user will very likely be required to stand by or to act on, for it does not define any personal ground for standing or acting. Its only practical utility is to support with “expert opinion” a vast,… ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=728)) - These lines of Milton immediately suggest what is wrong, first, with Mr. Fuller’s sentence, and then with the examples of tyrannese that preceded it. They all assume that the human prerogative is unlimited, that we must do whatever we have the power to do. Specifically, what is lacking is the idea that humans have a place in Creation and that this place is limited by responsibility on the one hand and by humility on the other—or, in Milton’s terms, by magnanimity and devotion. Without this precision of definition, this setting of bounds or ends to thought, we cannot mean, or say what we mean, or mean what we say; we cannot stand by our words because we cannot utter words that can be stood by; we cannot speak of our own actions as persons, or even as communities, but only of the actions of percentages, large organizations, concepts, historical trends, or the impersonal “forces” of destiny or evolution. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=789)) - The technological determinists have tyrannical attitudes, and speak tyrannese, at least partly because their assumptions cannot produce a moral or a responsible definition of the human place in Creation. Because they assume that the human place is any place, they are necessarily confused about where they belong. Where does this confusion come from? I think it comes from the specialization and abstraction of intellect, separating it from responsibility and humility, magnanimity and devotion, and thus giving it an importance that, in the order of things and in its own nature, it does not and cannot have. The specialized intellectual assumes, in other words, that intelligence is all in the mind. ([Location 827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=827)) - What we know, on the contrary, is that in any culture that could be called healthy or sane we find a much richer, larger concept of intelligence. We find, first, some way of acknowledgingin action the existence of “higher intelligence.” And we find that the human mind, in such a culture, is invariably strongly placed, in reference to other minds in the community and in cultural memory and tradition, and in reference to earthly localities and landmarks. Intelligence survives both by internal coherence and external pattern; it is both inside and outside the mind. People are born both with and into intelligence. What is thought refers precisely to what is thought about. It is this outside intelligence that we are now ignoring and consequently destroying. ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=838)) - As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection. And it destroys the landmarks by which they might return. Often it destroys the nature or the character of the places they have left. The very possibility of a practical connection between thought and the world is thus destroyed. Culture is driven into the mind, where it cannot be preserved. Displaced memory, for instance, is hard to keep in mind, harder to hand down. The little that survives is attenuated—without practical force. ([Location 844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=844)) - The enlargement of industrial technology is thus analogous to war. It continually requires the movement of knowledge and responsibility away from home. It thrives upon the disintegration of homes, the subjugation of homelands. It requires that people cease to cooperate directly to fulfill local needs from local sources and begin instead to deal with each other always across the rift that divides producer and consumer, and always competitively. The idea of the independence of individual farms, shops, communities, and households is anathema to industrial technologists. The rush to nuclear energy and the growth of the space colony idea are powered by the industrial will to cut off the possibility of a small-scale energy technology—which is to say the possibility of small-scale personal and community acts. The corporate producers and their sycophants in the universities and the government will do virtually anything (or so they have obliged us to assume) to keep people from acquiring necessities in any way except by buying them. ([Location 850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=850)) - People who are willing to follow technology wherever it leads are necessarily willing to follow it away from home, off the earth, and outside the sphere of human definition, meaning, and responsibility. One has to suppose that this would be all right if they did it only for themselves and if they accepted the terms of their technological romanticism absolutely—that is, if they would depart absolutely from all that they proposeto supersede, never to return. But past a certain scale, as C. S. Lewis wrote,21 the person who makes a technological choice does not choose for himself alone, but for others; past a certain scale, he chooses for all others. Past a certain scale, if the break with the past is great enough, he chooses for the past, and if the effects are lasting enough he chooses for the future. He makes, then, a choice that can neither be chosen against nor unchosen. Past a certain scale, there is no dissent from a technological choice. ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=871)) - Because love is not abstract, it does not lead to trends or percentages or general behavior. It leads, on the contrary, to the perception that there is no such thing as general behavior. There is no abstract action. Love proposes the work of settled households and communities, whose innovations come about in response to immediate needs and immediate conditions, as opposed to the work of governments and corporations, whose innovations are produced out of the implicitly limitless desire for future power or profit. This difference is the unacknowledged cultural break in Mr. Fuller’s evolutionary series: oxen, horse-drawn vehicles, horseless vehicles, ships of the sky. Between horse-drawn vehicles and horseless vehicles, human life disconnected itself from local sources; energy started to flow away from home. A biological limit was overrun, and with it the deepest human propriety. ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=891)) - I come, in conclusion, to the difference between “projecting” the future and making a promise. The “projecting” of “futurologists” uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future. If the promise is serious enough, one is brought to it by love, and in awe and fear. Fear, awe, and love bind us to no selfish aims, but to each other. And they enforce a speech more exact, more clarifying, and more binding than any speech that can be used to sell or advocate some “future.” For when we promise in love and awe and fear there is a certain kind of mobility that we give up. We give up the romanticism of progress, that is always shifting its terms to fit its occasions. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said. ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=908)) - One’s work may be defined in part by one’s visions, but it is defined in part too by problems, which the work leads to and reveals. And daily life, work, and problems gradually alter the visions. It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and if one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it. Vision, possibility, work, and life—all have changed by mutual correction. Correct discipline, given enough time, gradually removes one’s self from one’s line of sight. One works to better purpose then and makes fewer mistakes, because at last one sees where one is. Two human possibilities of the highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one knows. ([Location 1029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1029)) - It is the thought of not writing poetry down that returns us to its mnemonic (its musical) character. Poetry is an art based on memorability: the memorability of event and insight; the memorability of phrase, sentence, and verse. If the technique of memorability is upheld, it may act as a discriminating threshold, admitting only what is worth remembering. Thus poetry may serve at once to make memorable and to determine what should be remembered. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1250)) - Real—that is, living—art and culture, on the other hand, rise from and return to action, the slightest as well as the grandest deeds of everybody’s everyday life. How much excellence in “the arts” is to be expected from a people who are poor at carpentry, sewing, farming, gardening, and cooking? To believe that you can have a culture distinct from, or as a whole greatly better than, such work is not just illogical or wrong—it is to make peace with the shoddy, the meretricious, and the false. I have made my motto: No high culture without low culture—which, Gary Snyder says, can also be stated : The lesser truths are also true. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1273)) - Ken Kesey: “If you’ve got it all together, what is that all around it?” That applies to all human structures, explanations, ideas. Any circle we can draw will leave things out. We cannot comprehend what comprehends us. How much “thought” has subsisted upon the infinite human capacity to be wrong about what is not known? The chief criterion of thought therefore must be propriety—fittingness to our place in the world, in the order of things, and to our relations of dependence and responsibility with other creatures—which would enable humility, restraint, the practice of the virtues. ([Location 1289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1289)) - To preserve our places and to be at home in them, it is necessary to fill them with imagination. To imagine as well as see what is in them. Not to fill them with the junk of fantasy and unconsciousness, for that is no more than the industrial economy would do, but to see them first clearly with the eyes, and then to see them with the imagination in their sanctity, as belonging to the Creation. To imagine the place as it is, and was, and--only then—as it will or may be. To imagine its human life only in harmony with its nonhuman life—as one, only one, of its possibilities. In that imagining, perhaps we may begin to see it in its sacredness, as unimaginable gift, as mystery—as it was, is, and ever shall be, world without end. ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1313)) - We live only one life, and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1333)) - A certain awesome futurity, then, is the inescapable condition of word-giving—as it is, in fact, of all speech—for we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown. But that it is unknown requires us to be generous toward it, and requires our generosity to be full and unconditional. The unknown is the mercy and it may be the redemption of the known. The given word may come to appear to be wrong, or wrongly given. But the unknown still lies ahead of it, and so who is finally to say? If time has apparently proved it wrong, more time may prove it right. As growth has called it into question, further growth may reaffirm it. ([Location 1345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1345)) - Form is the means by which error is recognized and the means by which correctness is recognized. ([Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1382)) - A set verse form can, of course, be used like a cookie cutter or a shovel, including and excluding arbitrarily by its own rule. But a set form can be used also to summon into a poem, or into a life, its unforeseen belongings, and thus is not rigid but freeing—an invocation to unknown possibility. ([Location 1389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1389)) - It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1406)) - In Taking the Path of Zen, Robert Aitken Roshi says: “ It is not unusual to find true resonance with a so-called advanced koan in just a single dokusan, though often more time is necessary, and sometimes one gets stuck, and must stay there for a while.” That necessity to “stay there for a while” is the gist of the meaning of form. Forms join us to time, to the consequences and fruitions of our own passing. The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife—none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying “a while”: to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed. ([Location 1411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1411)) - The exploiter and the Shelleyan romantic (who are often the same person) are always in flight from consequence, the troubles of duration. The religious disciple, the husband and wife, the poet, like the true husbandman, accept the duration and effort, even the struggle, of formal commitment. They must come prepared to stay; if they mean to stay they will have to work, and they must learn the difference between good work and bad—which is to say that the capability of good work must be handed down from old to young. ([Location 1419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1419)) - The freedom that depends upon or results in the breaking of words and the breaking of forms comes, I think, from a faith in the individual intelligence, in “genius,” as opposed to a faith in the community or in culture. Belief in culture calls for the same disciplines as belief in marriage. It calls, indeed, for more patience and more faith, for it requires dedication to work and hope of more than a lifetime. This work, as I understand it, consists of the accumulation of local knowledge in place, generation after generation, children learning the visions and failures, stories and songs, names, ways, and skills of their elders, so that the costs of individual trial-and-error learning can be lived with and repaid, and the community thus enabled to preserve both itself and its natural place and neighborhood. ([Location 1446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1446)) - Ambition fulfillment, as we still understand when talking of politics or war, is a dangerous enterprise—for a mental appetite may be larger and more rapacious than a physical one, may require to be refulfilled more frequently and is less likely to be twice appeased by the same refulfillment. ([Location 1460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1460)) - Marriage is a form of sexual love which allows its fulfillment in both senses: in satisfaction and in responsibility for its consequences, and it sets a term to this responsibility—“until death”—at which it may be said to be fulfilled. ([Location 1464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1464)) - For apparently one can break out of the human place in only one direction. To move beyond the human toward the godly is only to move toward the bestial: “Who dares do more, is none.” Or as Blake puts it: “Attempting to be more than Man we become less. . . .”46 ([Location 1878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1878)) - It is the mind that, as Gurney Norman says, “believes there is no context until it gets there.” In one of its aspects, this is the mind of the exploiters of the “unknown,” from Cortes and Pizarro down to the scientists of nuclear energy, genetic engineering, space conquest, and war in our own day. In another of its aspects, it is the romantic puritanism of Shelley. And these aspects are not so far apart as one might believe. ([Location 1900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1900)) - When want of Learning kept the Laymen low, And none but Priests were Authoriz’d to know . . .   Then Mother Church did mightily prevail: She parcel’d out the Bible by retail . . . ([Location 1931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1931)) - Fierce to her foes, yet fears her force to try, Because she wants innate auctority; For how can she constrain them to obey Who has herself cast off the lawfull sway?   As long as words a diff‘rent sense will bear, And each may be his own Interpreter, Our ai’ry faith will no foundation find: The word’s a weathercock for ev’ry wind . . .   So hardly can Usurpers manage well Those, whom they first instructed to rebell . . .57 ([Location 1965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1965)) - The Catholic Church is declared infallible, one must feel, not because it is infallible in any absolute sense, but because it is willing to assume that it is and Dryden is willing to allow that it is. ([Location 1986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1986)) - Reason and sense must not be asked to do the work of faith, and faith must not be substituted for reason and sense. Intelligence is offended by the overweening claim to “know” a great deal about God, and is equally offended by a disposition to accept on “faith” a proposition subject to proof. And yet, left as it stands, this distinction becomes part of a series of dichotomies—faith and work, spirit and flesh, mind and body, Heaven and earth, thought and action, management and labor, poets and executives—that are ruinous in both directions. It becomes, that is, one of the sanctions of the practical divorce between quantity and quality, substance and form, work and worth, that plagues us now. ([Location 1995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=1995)) - it is possible for an idea accepted on faith to produce worldly results that are demonstrably bad or good. If some Christians make it an article of faith that it is good to kill heathens or Communists, they will sooner or later have corpses to show for it. If some Christians believe, as alleged, that God gave them the world to do with as they please, they will sooner or later have deserts and ruins in measurable proof. If some Christians really believe that pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth are deadly sins, then they will make improvements in government that will sooner or later be tangible and quantifiable. That it is thus possible for an article of faith to be right or wrong according to worldly result suggests that we may be up against limits and necessities in our earthly experience as absolute as “the will of God” was ever taken to be, and that “the will of God” as expressed in moral law may therefore have the same standing as the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. ([Location 2023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=2023)) - If I step off the roof, I will fall immediately; if, in this age of nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, rampant destruction of soil, etc., we do not love one another, we or our children will suffer for it sometime. It is a critical difference, for it explains why people who do not ever willingly step off a roof will fearlessly regard their neighbors as enemies or competitors or economic victims. The uncertainty of the term between offense and punishment under moral law licenses all our viciousness, foolishness, and pride. ([Location 2033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=2033)) - See dying vegetables life sustain, See life dissolving vegetate again: All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath, and die] . . .   Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-reserving Soul Connects each being, greatest with the least; Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast; All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone. ([Location 2157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GPSL46&location=2157))