The Libertarian Catholic
By Mario J. Haas (Editor’s note: This essay is a response to Ugo Stornaiolo’s Cultural Statelessness & the Mirage of Belonging) This recent article gave me a lot of insight, and it was especially interesting to me, because it is… Continue Reading →
In friendship, we find true equality, both as fellow travelers along the way of life, and as unmovable anchors of reason when our loved ones do wrong. That is the meaning of a friend. And that may be the first and foremost form of love we must cultivate for a virtuous life.
For those suffering of culturally statelessness, being Catholic might be their main cultural identity, because it is the one universal thing that can bring together cultures so dissimilar like the ones that compose their overall fragmented background.
Just like Leo Tolstoy and Mark Fisher did, writing about our emotions is a hard topic, not because it means introspection, but because it leaves us vulnerable to external interpretations, that more than often come not with kindness but with ill intent.
A Christian, a conservative, and ultimately, a decent human outlook on life and love needs to consider that existence is indeed both a gift and a struggle that we could not reject and from which we cannot back down. Its value is both inherent in its nature and given through its ongoing experience, and love, love is the substance that binds it all together, from its conception to its survival.
In an age where both courtly love and the Casanova archetype seem to be dead, I still believe some girls deserve their fifteen minutes of a fairy tale, even if inconsequential. After all, we never know who we might end up meeting on the tram.
Just as beauty and emotion are mutually driven by each other and the perception of beautiful muses inspires further emotions towards the creation of beauty, and just as reason is driven towards truth and truth tends to be as reasonable as it can be, with mentors showing and teaching both the path of reason and the path towards truth as one and the same, the good needs a community of peers to be fully comprehended, and a public perception of it to be rightly spread and understood.
If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupt absolutely, then what happens with passion? Does passion also corrupts, and absolute passion would also corrupt absolutely? Or can passion be a different kind of drive, one that creates a sense of trust and direction towards higher ideals?
Our passion, derived from love, would make us suffer in search of the sublime. And the sublime would be nothing but what already is beautiful but expanded to the same extreme perceptions that are already hurting and making us suffer. Enter the realm of limit-experiences.
Even in such crucibles, even in periods of transition, when we get to choose between greatness and stillness like the ones I now struggle with, there seems to be a single thing that remains untainted by instability and the mortal edge of history: love.
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