Philosophers From France

"It is not enough for the past to be past. It must also be truly overcome – it must have lost all causal connection with the present – so that only the spiritual connection remains, which is the connection between image and reality, between figure and fulfilment."

"For a Christian, what we call life is a preparation for what we call the “afterlife”, the other life."

"I find that at twent it is easy to be a hero, a saint, an extraordinary man. I believe, however, that at ninety it is very difficult to live up to the moment."

"What is the charm of a person? It is difficult to say, because charm is indefinable. It is a certain presence of the person beyond their limits, like the radiance of certain pure faces."

"I have always made it a rule to speak in a timeless manner, true today, tomorrow and always."

"Love always envelops us: it is we, with our attitude towards it, who transform it into fire or light."

"Unlike Calvino, you bring the soul into the designs of merciful predestination without any element of anguish."

"Beauty is a splendour that must detach itself from those who possess it without them noticing and without returning to them."

"Discovering herself as the end of history, the Madonna now had the light to interpret the time that had gone before."

"Every segment of time shines, even if it is finite. It takes death, conversion, or interruption for us to understand any fragment of our lives."

"So today Mass risks resembling a liturgy of the word? A:"

"Paul VI's intention regarding the liturgy, regarding the vulgarisation of the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy so that it would coincide more or less with the Protestant liturgy... with the Protestant Supper. And further on: "... I repeat that Paul VI did everything in his power to bring the Catholic Mass – beyond the Council of Trent – closer to the Protestant Supper. He was particularly helped by Monsignor Bugnini, who did not always enjoy his confidence on this point. [...] Of course, I did not attend the Calvinist Supper, but I did attend Paul VI's Mass. And Paul VI's Mass presents itself first and foremost as a banquet, does it not? It insists very much on the aspect of participation in a banquet, and much less on the notion of sacrifice, of ritual sacrifice, in the face of God, while the priest shows only his back. So I do not think I am mistaken in saying that the intention of Paul VI and of the new liturgy that bears his name is to ask the faithful for greater participation in the Mass, to give a greater place to Sacred Scripture and a lesser place to everything else in it, some say “magical”, others “consubstantial consecration”, [correcting himself] transubstantiation, which is the Catholic faith. In other words, Paul VI had the ecumenical intention of removing – or at least correcting, attenuating – what was too “Catholic”, in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and of bringing the Catholic Mass – I repeat – closer to the Calvinist Mass."

"(Referring to Marthe Robin) was simple.... What prevailed in Marthe was her capacity for sacrifice, in imitation of Christ.... With simple words, she aroused in us one of those rare, sudden, sweet, somewhat melancholic and yet radiant emotions that make you aware of your destiny."

"Joan of Arc possesses more genius than talent, more heroism than courage, more intuition than intelligence, more immediacy than endurance and, if we may say so, more glory than grace. That is why she seems more angelic than human, a traveller from another world, parachuted into this one. (p. 7)"

"Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being."

"Before the Council, Mass was Mass. Obviously, in Latin, we didn't understand anything, but we had the impression (impression???) that it was Mass. Now, however, we have the feeling that it is the translation of a Protestant service. From my point of view, the liturgical reform as desired by the Council (Vatican II) was good; certainly it did not want the Mass, the Eucharist, to be sacrificed, nor above all reduced to what Protestants do during their ceremony, which we call supper. For example, when it was decided that the priest should not say Mass facing the altar, with his back to the faithful, but facing them, a decisive reform was carried out that truly disturbed many Christians. With good reason (With good reason???) — so that the faithful could understand — it was decided to celebrate the liturgy in the common language, but without any desire to abolish the sacred. Today, in practice, the Eucharist no longer has the sacred, serious and divine character it had in the past. (p. 103)"

"The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”."

"I believe in God because of encounters. All explanations are useless; I believe in encounters."

"Teresa of Lisieux will give new splendour to the word. What she says, she does. And her words are oracles. I said “words”; I distinguish them from “phrases”. Teresa's phrases, in truth, are imperfect. Imperfect because of the weakness of men, who have given her a very mediocre language."

"The real way to resist temptation is to turn away and walk away."

"Joan is not a theologian; in fact, she cannot tell A from B. However, listening to her answers during her trial, we sense in her a theological intelligence, a ready ability to resolve cases brought before her conscience, which, if developed, would have made her equal to the greatest minds. (p. 9)"

"Atheism is not only complicated and rare, it is also a recent phenomenon, a peculiarity supported by few and only recently in certain Western intellectual circles."

"Joan puts God's will above her virginity. She says that she “has offered her virginity as a vow for as long as God pleases”. This concern for the hierarchy of values, this idea of “God first”, is always evident in her. Joan is a virgin because God inspired her to be so; she is not a virgin of her own free will or choice. (pp. 34-35)"

"In Giovanna, purity was more than a virtue. It was her mark, her reason for existing and her implicit glory, her resemblance to the mother of Christ. Being a country girl, accustomed to seeing life in all its gestures, she probably had very accurate knowledge of purity in the physical sense. In the countryside, ignorance is never what the 19th-century bourgeoisie falsely calls innocence. And when, at the age of thirteen, Joan gave her virginity to God during the angel's first visit, she knew clearly what it meant. (p. 30)"

"After about forty centuries of oral civilisation, the Word is an inflated currency."

"Ordinary people have more confidence in those who have suddenly arrived at that state and are naturally honest than in those who have had to make a painful and painful effort to get there."

"Generals do not fight with the fear of the troops, they prefer to keep them busy."

"Stoicism, which generally disappeared as the official School, was the most important of the Hellenistic elements in the semi-oriental religions of vanishing paganism."

"My own writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother."

"Woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display."

"I shall speak about women’s writing about what it will do."

"I never thought I was at home [in Algeria], nor that Algeria was my country, nor that I was French."

"the idea of nations without a state, or nations 'before' the state, is thus a contradiction in terms, because a state always is implied in the historic framework of a national formation (even if not necessarily within the limits of its territory). But this contradiction is masked by the fact that national states, whose integrity suffers from internal conflicts that threaten its survival (regional conflicts, and especially class conflicts), project beneath their political existence to a preexisting 'ethnic' or 'popular' unity."

"Science has been separated from wisdom in the sense that the organization of means has become independent of the reflection on ends. In all other cultures, for example in those of India, China, Islam (so far as Asia is concerned), one recognized two uses of reason: one proceeded from cause to effect and permitted adaptation to nature, and the other proceeded from ends to ends, from intermediate ends to higher ends, and gave direction to life. Western thought has let the second use of reason atrophy. Cut off from wisdom, occidental reason has become infirm, mutilated and monstrous, indifferent to all human finality."

"The world reduced to a market (the ‘monotheism of the market’, according to Roger Garaudy's accurate formulation) is indeed a senseless world, completely abandoned by God, regardless of the fact that crowds of religious dignitaries are often present at public ceremonies dominated by the economic, political and, above all, military leaders of the planet."

"Why should we now restrict ourselves to the Jewish Pantheon when we have been illuminated by this light which has begun to spread right across the horizon? ... Should we only recognize in humanity that isolated branch which is called Christianity, the revelation of Moses and that of Jesus? No. We desire a more ample Pantheon, one which answers to the name, so recently coined, of HUMANITY... We are not sons of Jesus or of Moses; we are sons of humanity.... On what principle of distributive justice can you place all the great religious lawgivers of humanity at the feet of one of them who lived in a comparatively recent age? .."

"Majorana thought that the notion of symmetry allows one to grasp what is permanent in the flow of phenomena...In the world of elementary particles, interesting symmetries operate within spaces that only mathematicians know how to represent and that are distinct from three-dimensional physical space. These symmetries are directly related to the dynamic properties of physical systems, i.e. the way they behave under the effect of a force. And it may prove very fruitful to begin by identifying the fundamental symmetries that govern phenomena because they are at the source of the invariant quantities or structures that are capable of revealing deep reality."

"Journalist: Does he share the opinion of Sciascia [...] that "for others science was a matter of will, for him a matter of nature"? To write Il était sept fois la révolution, I studied a lot the works of the founding fathers of quantum physics: Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Schrödinger, Heisenberg... In all of them one can feel moments of discouragement, doubt, fatigue, alternating with moments of enthusiasm of intellectual joys. In Majorana, on the contrary, things have the air of advancing continuously, without obstacles, without the onset of any Eureka! Physics seems to flow through him with nothing to hold it back, without barriers."

"I'm a great believer in popularising science, but I've noticed that it's not very effective [...]. We treat our knowledge a bit like beliefs, and that creates a lot of confusion."

"We no longer exercise our critical faculties as soon as we like the thesis put forward. The role of a scientific council is to act as a lighthouse and beacon, to enlighten the political authorities, who must not make decisions without taking account of what the scientists say, i.e. not do what Donald Trump does."

"Journalist: [...] in Italy a scandal was caused by the dossier [...] Majorana and Eichmann, the secret in a photograph, in which the hypothesis that the physicist, after having joined Heisenberg in Germany, worked on the creation of the Nazi atomic bomb took shape. [...] Majorana, or rather someone who looked a lot like him, is portrayed next to Eichmann escaping to Argentina. It seems to me that you discard the Argentinian track..."}} I did not even raise this thesis because it seemed to me at least outlandish. After all, how can one support a thesis based solely on the alleged similarity of a photo taken thirteen years after Majorana's disappearance? On the other hand, there is no trace of Majorana in the German archives concerning his work on the atomic bomb - which are open to all and can be consulted -. And the Italian physicist's name did not even come up in 1945, when German scientists arrested in Germany were transferred to a secret residence in England, and conversations recorded without their knowledge for several months."

"Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire (1861) remonstrated that "Mr. Max Muller would have done well not to have fixed things so precisely, and not to have circumscribed things so neatly""

"These elements in French society were now to be given a lead by a man of genius whose power of argument, of sophistry, of tenacity, served to give an appearance of life to the dead monarchy and who provided a framework of political doctrine within which nearly all the critics of the Republic on the Right were to work and which was not without its influence on some critics of the Left."

"Maurras was no optimist; human life at best was hard; the wise man accepted this fact and adjusted himself to the world as it was and ever would be, a world in which the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, in which mere sentimental pity was a weakness and an intellectual crime. Like Nietzsche, Maurras despised Christianity and thought its politically dangerous sentiments of "he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble" order highly noxious. In his early writings he gave free expression to this hostility, but as a realist, a positivist, he had to admit that France had been profoundly marked by the teaching of the Church; and as a practical politician, he had to face the fact that many of his potential supporters were likely to be alienated by the frank expression of his distaste for Christianity. So whatever regrets he had for the old gods, he had to recognize that they were conquered, that the day of the "laurel, the palms and the paean" was over. He accepted the fact that the French tradition was Christian, but, fortunately, Christian with a Roman and Hellenic superstructure."

"Maurras, like Bannon, was a Catholic nationalist, and he argued in the early 1900s that the Enlightenment had elevated the individual over the nation. (One person who knows Bannon said he has spoken of the coming end of the Enlightenment.) To Maurras, a hero of the modern French right wing, the French Revolution ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were a liberal cosmopolitan corruption of France's authentic identity. Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras' distinction between the "legal country," led by elected officials, and the "real country" of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway. Maurras even warned about the nefarious influence of Islam in Europe."

"There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity? Hitlerism. These French "conservatives" crawl on their bellies before Hitler. These former nationalists cringe before him. A few zealots wallow in dirt, in their own dirt, with endless Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all!"

"We are at the end of the Enlightenment. Have you read Charles Maurras?"

"Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. The Dreyfus Affair convinced him that the Republic had fallen into the hands of the "four confederate states" of Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners, and that only a restored monarchy could bring back a strong state, a united nation and national greatness."

"Comte put to flight the pernicious and artificial doctrine according to which there is an opposition between the interests of the ruler and the ruled, for the latter derives his greatest benefit from being directed and guided... Renan finally made me aware of the service any élite, when it sincerely concerns itself with the highest considerations, renders and must render to the multitude, even unconsciously."

"Official orators have agreed amongst themselves to leave out one essential point: that to undertake the liberation of the fatherland, Joan had to go directly to the Dauphin Charles, acknowledge the right of his royal blood, and have him crowned and acclaimed on the cathedral square of Reims."