(urth) Thecla's "Identity"
António Pedro Marques
entonio at gmail.com
Mon Apr 8 07:57:11 PDT 2013
No dia 06/04/2013, às 00:36, Ross Arlen Tieken <ross.a.tieken at gmail.com
<mailto:ross.a.tieken at gmail.com>> escreveu:
> When I spoke of the Catholic modernists, I should have been more precise.
> The modernists all have weird spiritual proclivities. Eliot wasn't
> technically a Catholic either. I should have clarified what I meant: They
> all have a mystical bent, believe in strong authority, and are inspired by
> myth, myths, and mythic worldviews, and the middle ages. This leads to the
> accusation of fascism (correct in Pound's case, dubious in Eliot and
> Tate's, completely inappropriate in the case of Tolkien and Lewis) and to
> the strong stroke of nationalism and ethnic myth-making in these authors.
> Wolfe definitely shares these preoccupations. See
> http://www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html; an essay on the
> importance of Tolkien which begins with the sentence "There is one very
> real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is
> this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms."
> In this, he echoes a Chestertonian defense of the Middle Ages and Catholic
> civilization. I also see in Wolfe an implicit defense of Neo-Feudalism and
> a strongly relgion-centric worldview.
> Pound was a bad fascist; he didn't understand that it depended upon the
> same assumptions that modernity did, and paid the price for it--he failed
> to see the 'real' problem on which his contemporaries easily picked up;
> not just any mythos is good enough, there has to be real sticking power
> and it has to based in some kind of transcendent truth/experience and
> allow also for the intuitive human good. Fascism of course fails utterly
> at providing this, but Tolkien & Eliot's strong ethnic (non-racial)
> Traditionalism and mystical monarchism worked fine.
Interesting. Do you analyze Evola as well?
> This is what I'm writing on for my dissertation, and I thought about
> including Wolfe although he's a little out of the time period. It's coming
> back though, these mystical traditional neo-feudal myth-making monarchist
> distributist Catholic artists.
>
> On Dan'l Danehy-Oakes note: Distributism is the Catholic economic theory;
> Marxism's assumptions about "the way stuff works" are absolutely not
> compatible with the Catholic vision of humanity--nor is fascism, or
> hyper-capitalism for that matter. Both depend on a pseudo-scientific
> reading of humans--Catholics sort of aren't up for that.
Precisely (whether one admits to the pseudo or not, which I do of course).
> Distributism (championed by Chesterton and Belloc, later by Eliot and the
> Southern Agrarians in America) fulfills the requirements of Catholic
> anthropology while seeking to correct the culture-killing nature of
> transnational corporate capitalism. Look it up, tell me what you think.
>
> Also, Wolfe is probably aware of Distributism and is a Catholic in good
> standing with the Church.
> http://ironicalcoincidings.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/inheriting-tolkien-pt-2-gene-wolfe/
Thank you for the link.
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