Catholics From Germany

"The real argument against Christianity is the experience of life, this experience of darkness. And I have always observed that the elemental force and the arbitrary prejudgment which lie behind the technical arguments of the learned — or rather of individual learned men — against Christianity always spring from these ultimate experiences of existence which plunge mind and heart into darkness, fatigue and despair."

"Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art."

"My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family. He led an honest, God-fearing life. His character was gentle and patient. He was friendly towards all and full of gratitude to his Maker. He cared little for society and nothing for worldly amusements. A man of very few words and deeply pious, he paid great attention to the religious education of his children. His most earnest hope was that the high principles he instilled into their minds would render them ever more worthy of divine protection and the sympathy of mankind. He told us every day that we must love God and be honourable in our dealings with our neighbours."

"There is no man on earth who can give a final judgment on what the most beautiful shape may be. Only God knows."

"The new art must be based upon science — in particular, upon mathematics, as the most exact, logical, and graphically constructive of the sciences."

"But I shall let the little I have learnt go forth into the day in order that someone better than I may guess the truth, and in his work may prove and rebuke my error. At this I shall rejoice that I was yet a means whereby this truth has come to light."

"Whoever … proves his point and demonstrates the prime truth geometrically should be believed by all the world, for there we are captured."

"Since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art."

"Die deutsche Einheit und die europäische Einigung sind zwei Seiten ein und derselben Medaille."

"Of course, peace might have come to Europe without the Union. Maybe. We will never know. But it would never have been of the same quality. A lasting peace, not a frosty cease-fire. To me, what makes it so special, is reconciliation. In politics as in life, reconciliation is the most difficult thing. It goes beyond forgiving and forgetting, or simply turning the page. To think of what France and Germany had gone through …, and then take this step … Signing a Treaty of Friendship … Each time I hear these words – Freundschaft, Amitié –, I am moved. They are private words, not for treaties between nations. But the will to not let history repeat itself, to do something radically new, was so strong that new words had to be found. For people Europe was a promise, Europe equalled hope. When Konrad Adenauer came to Paris to conclude the Coal and Steel Treaty, in 1951, one evening he found a gift waiting at his hotel. It was a war medal, une Croix de Guerre, that had belonged to a French soldier. His daughter, a young student, had left it with a little note for the Chancellor, as a gesture of reconciliation and hope. I can see many other stirring images before me. Leaders of six States assembled to open a new future, in Rome, città eterna … Willy Brandt kneeling down in Warsaw. The dockers of Gdansk, at the gates of their shipyard. Mitterrand and Kohl hand in hand. Two million people linking Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius in a human chain, in 1989. These moments healed Europe."

"It's been quite a journey this decade, and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are reaching our destination. The fact is, from Grenada to the Washington and Moscow summits, from the recession of '81 to '82, to the expansion that began in late '82 and continues to this day, we've made a difference. The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I'm proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created—and filled—19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership. Something that happened to me a few years ago reflects some of this. It was back in 1981, and I was attending my first big economic summit, which was held that year in Canada. The meeting place rotates among the member countries. The opening meeting was a formal dinner of the heads of government of the seven industrialized nations. Now, I sat there like the new kid in school and listened, and it was all Francois this and Helmut that. They dropped titles and spoke to one another on a first-name basis. Well, at one point I sort of leaned in and said, "My name's Ron." Well, in that same year, we began the actions we felt would ignite an economic comeback—cut taxes and regulation, started to cut spending. And soon the recovery began. Two years later, another economic summit with pretty much the same cast. At the big opening meeting we all got together, and all of a sudden, just for a moment, I saw that everyone was just sitting there looking at me. And then one of them broke the silence. "Tell us about the American miracle," he said."

"But German reunification was, nonetheless, an unsettling prospect, not just for the Soviet Union but for all Europeans who remembered the record of the last unified German state. This anxiety transcended Cold War divisions: Gorbachev shared it with Jaruzelski, French President François Mitterrand, and even Margaret Thatcher, who warned Bush that "[i]f we are not careful, the Germans will get in peace what Hitler couldn't get in the war." The one prominent European who disagreed was West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who surprised everyone by coming out in favor of reunification a few days before the Malta summit. Bush thought he had done so because "he wanted to be sure that Gorbachev and I did not come to our own agreement on Germany's future, as had Stalin and Roosevelt in the closing months of World War II." Kohl, then, was leading, but only barely because the East Germans themselves—having broken through the wall—quickly made it clear that they would accept nothing less than reunification. Hans Modrow, who had replaced Krenz as prime minister, informed Gorbachev at the end of January, 1990, that "[t]he majority of the people in the German Democratic Republic no longer support the idea of two German states." The government and party itself, K.G.B. chief Vladimir Kryuchkov confirmed, were falling apart. Confronted with this information, Gorbachev saw no choice: "German reunification should be regarded as inevitable.""

"Once democratised, Communism had become redundant, and the same process affected the very state of East Germany. Currency union with West Germany took effect on 1 July, East Germany came to an end as a separate state on 3 October, and all-German elections followed on 2 December 1990. Thatcher was unhappy about German re-unification, while President Mitterrand of France wanted two democratic Germanys and not the speedy creation of an over mighty Germany. However, in response to the victory of the pro-unification parties in the East German election in March 1990, he proved more accommodating, not least because of a promise from Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, that French companies would be allowed to acquire East German state-owned companies in the rapid privatisation that was pushed through. Kohl traded subsequently on his role in securing unification, and this helped him win re-election, as Chancellor of the united Germany, in 1994."

"We Germans have learned from history. We are a peace-loving, freedom-loving people. For us, love of our native country, love of freedom, and the spirit of being a good neighbor always belong together."

"I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany. We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the Euro. That's quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three…. If a Chancellor is trying to push something through, he must be a man of power. And if he's smart, he knows when the time is ripe. In one case – the Euro – I was like a dictator ... The Euro is a synonym for Europe. Europe, for the first time, has no more war."

"Das ist der schlimmste Präsident seit Hermann Göring."

"Eine erfolgreiche Industrienation, das heißt eine Nation mit Zukunft, lässt sich nicht als kollektiver Freizeitpark organisieren."

"I am not the one trying to speed things up. We are being driven."

"Von deutschem Boden muss in Zukunft immer Frieden ausgehen."

"Erträge und Kosten müssen im richtigen Verhältnis zueinander stehen."

"The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most visible expression of the moral gulf between free democracy and totalitarian dictatorship."

"As long as there is a wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot, there can be no talk of normality in Germany."

"Die jungen Leute in Deutschland haben kein Problem mit dem Judentum. Ich gehe ja auch manchmal mit meinen beiden Jungs über den jüdischen Friedhof in Oggersheim."

"Die Visionäre von gestern sind die Realisten von heute."

"Die Existenzgrundlage unseres Landes geht kaputt, wenn erst die Schleusen für die Ausländer geöffnet sind."

"Stalin war also so ein Typ wie wir, nicht nur, daß er sich auch als Revolutionär verstanden und gelebt hat, sondern er war im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes eben auch ein Typ." … [Wir müssen] "diese psychische Kaputtheit aus uns endlich rauslassen … Es ist unser und mein dunkelstes Kapitel, ich weiß, oder ahne es besser nur, weil ich da selber wahnsinnig Angst vor bestimmten Sachen in mir habe. Bartsch und Honka sind Extremfälle, aber irgendwo hängt das als Typ in dir drin … dann wurde dann leicht auch, ja, die Lust am Schlagen draus, ein tendenziell sadistisches Vergnügen."

"Ich sehe uns schon mit Dreadlocks da sitzen und eine riesige Tüte rauchen, im Hintergrund Reggae-Music und vor uns ein dampfendes Bier. Im Ernst: Wie stellen Sie sich das vor?"

"Let’s forget the reunification, let’s just shut up and don't talk about that topic for the next 20 years."

"Mit Verlaub, Herr Präsident, Sie sind ein Arschloch."

"/.../I would never shake the hand of a person like the German foreign minister, nor would I let him in my house. He is the prototype of a shameful politician; the one who makes a career as a protester and a friend of the peace, in order to use his official ideals to get a well paid position as a war mongering foreign minister. A political scum."

"Excuse me, I am not convinced."

"My name is Mr. Fischer. What’s your name?"

"Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity" — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. […] Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real."

"All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due."

"To the virtue of temperance as the preserving and defending realization of man's inner order, the gift of beauty is particularly co-ordinated. Not only is temperance beautiful in itself, it also renders men beautiful. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal. The beauty of temperance has a more spiritual, more austere, more virile aspect. It is of the essence of this beauty that it does not conflict with true virility, but rather has an affinity to it. Temperance, as the wellspring and premise of fortitude, is the virtue of mature manliness. The infantile disorder of intemperance, on the other hand, not only destroys beauty, it also makes man cowardly; intemperance more than any other thing renders man unable and unwilling to 'take heart' against the wounding power of evil in the world"

"Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will."

"The eye of perfected friendship with God is aware of deeper dimensions of reality, to which the eyes of the average man and the average Christian are not yet opened."

"A friend and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend's decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend's problem his own, the friend's ego his own (so that after all it is not entirely "from outside"). For by virtue of that oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility. Therefore it is possible for a friend - only for a friend and only for a prudent friend - to help with counsel and direction to shape a friend's decision or, somewhat in the manner of a judge, help to reshape it. Such geniune and prudent loving friendship (amor amicitiae) - which has nothing in common with sentimental intimacy, and indeed is rather imperiled by such intimacy - is the sine qua non for geniune spirtual guidance. For only this empowers another to offer the kind of direction which - almost! - conforms to the concrete situation in which the decision must be made."

"The truth is the good of our knowing mind, upon which the mind fixes itself by nature; it is not granted to the mind to choose or not choose that good (truth!) on the basis, again, of knowledge. The finite mind does not comprehend itself so profoundly, and does not have such power over itself, that it follows its own light."

"Modern religious teachings have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues."

"Being precedes Truth, and … Truth precedes the Good."

"“The essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica) … What is implicit in this sentence? This is implicit: the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight. The perfectly happy person, the one whose thirst has been finally quenched, who has attained beatitude—this person is the one who sees. The happiness, the quenching, the perfection, consists in this seeing."

"Now one may ask, How could a Christian philosophy have something over a non-Christian philosophy, if it does not reach to a higher level of solutions, if it cannot get handy answers, if the problems and questions are still there? Well, perhaps a greater truth could be present in its ability to see the world in its truly mysterious character, in its inexhaustablity. It could even be the case that here, in the very experience of being as a mystery, that it is not to be grasped in the hand as a "well-rounded truth" — herein is reality more deeply and truly grasped than in any transparent system that may charm the mind of the student with its clarity and simplicity. And this is the claim of Christian philosophy: to be truer, precisely because of its recognition of the mysterious character of the world. In no way, then, does philosophy become easier. Plato appears to have discovered and felt that too — if a certain interpretation of Plato is correct, maintaining that Plato understood philosophy to be something tragic for this reason, that it must constantly have recourse to mythos, since the teaching of philosophy can never close itself into a system."

"Now this structure of hope (among other things) is also what distinguishes philosophy from the special sciences. There is a relationship with the object that is different in principle in the two cases. The question of the special sciences is in principle ultimately answerable, or, at least, it is not un-answerable. It can be said, in a final way (or some day, one will be able to say in a final way) what is the cause, say, of this particular infectious disease. It is in principle possible that one day someone will say, "It is now scientifically proven that such and such is the case, and no otherwise." But […] a philosophical question can never be finally, conclusively answered. […] The object of philosophy is given to the philosopher on the basis of a hope. This is where Dilthey's words make sense: "The demands on the philosophizing person cannot be satisfied. A physicist is an agreeable entity, useful for himself and others; a philosopher, like the saint, only exists as an ideal." It is in the nature of the special sciences to emerge from a state of wonder to the extent that they reach "results." But the philosopher does not emerge from wonder. Here is at once the limit and the measure of science, as well as the great value, and great doubtfulness, of philosophy. Certainly, in itself it is a "greater" thing to dwell "under the stars." But man is not made to live "out there" permanently! Certainly, it is a more valuable question, as such, to ask about the whole world and the ultimate nature of things. But the answer is not as easily forthcoming as for the special sciences!"

""None of the gods philosophizes," Plato has Diotima say in the Symposium: "nor do fools; for that is what is so bad about ignorance — that you think you know enough." "Who, then, O Diotima, I asked, are the philosophers, since they are neither those who know nor those who don't know?" Then she answered me: "It's so obvious, Socrates, that a child could understand: the philosophers are the ones in between." This "in-between" is the realm of the truly human. It is truly human, on the one hand, not to understand (as God), and on the other hand, not to become hardened; not to include oneself in the supposedly completely illuminated world of day-to-day life."

"Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know."

"He who knows does not feel wonder. It could not be said that God experiences wonder, for God knows in the most absolute and perfect way."

"It should now be clear that "wonder" and philosophizing are connected with each other in a more essential sense than may at first appear in the statement, "Philosophy begins in wonder." For wonder is not merely the beginning, in the sense of initium, the first stage or phase of philosophy. Rather, wonder is the beginning in the sense of the "principle" (principium), the abiding, ever-intrinsic origin of philosophizing. It is not true to say that the philosopher, insofar as he philosophizes, ever "emerges from his wonder" — if he does depart from his state of wonder, he has ceased to philosophize."

"If someone needs the "unusual" to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being. The hunger for the sensational, posing, as it may, in "bohemian garb," is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the true power of wonder, for a bourgeois-ized humanity."

"And in this, that philosophy begins in wonder [Plato, Theaetetus 155d], lies the, so to speak, non-bourgeois character of philosophy; for to feel astonishment and wonder is something non-bourgeois (if we can be allowed, for a moment, to use this all-too-easy terminology). For what does it mean to become bourgeois in the intellectual sense? More than anything else, it means that someone takes one's immediate surroundings (the world determined by the immediate purposes of life) so "tightly" and "densely," as if bearing an ultimate value, that the things of experience no longer become transparent. The greater, deeper, more real, and (at first) invisible world of essences is no longer even suspected to exist; the "wonder" is no longer there, it has no place to come from; the human being can no longer feel wonder. The commonplace mind, rendered deaf-mute, finds everything self-explanatory. But what really is self-explanatory? Is it self-explanatory, then, that we exist? Is it self-explanatory that there is such a thing as "seeing"? These are questions that someone who is locked into the daily world cannot ask; and that is so because such a person has not succeeded, as anyone whose senses (like a deaf person) are simply not functioning — has not managed even for once to forget the immediate needs of life, whereas the one who experiences wonder is one who, astounded by the deeper aspect of the world, cannot hear the immediate demands of life — if even for a moment, that moment when he gazes on the astounding vision of the world."