Quotes from Gil Bailie

The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.

Humans, in short, desire something both unknown to them and inaccessible to the strategies of acquisition that desire sets in motion. We are creatures in whom has been implanted and to whom has been entrusted a world-consuming desire, and if misdirected, it will sooner or later lay waste the world.

The very word, religio—to bind (ligio) back (re)—suggests exactly this. Thus these ancient cultures remained profoundly backward oriented. This ritualized return to a primordial past, the very essence of mythological forms of recollection, is what de Lubac perceptively characterized as a "deliberate (though admittedly still instinctive) refusal of history.

In sharp contrast to their pagan contemporaries, Israel's remembrance of the past was marked by two tendencies: a faith in Yahweh's fidelity to the Abrahamic covenant, on which Jewish confidence in the future was based, and the contrition that accompanied the remembrance of Israel's own violations of that covenant.

As we shall see below, without that tinge of moral remorse, however, there would have been no catharsis, and therefore no surviving culture.

It is when we ask about the nature of this catharsis that we discover that culture itself represents something like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.