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1 " Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. "
― Emil M. Cioran
2 " All that is worthy of love [*die Liebenswürdigkeiten*], from the viewpoint of God's comprehensive love, might have been stamped and created by this act of love; man's love does not so stamp or create its objects. Man's love is restricted to recognizing the objective demand these objects make and to submitting to the gradation of rank in what is worthy of love. This gradation exists in itself, but in itself it exists " for" man, ordered to his *particular* essence. Loving can be characterized as correct or false only because a man's actual inclinations and acts of love can be in harmony with or oppose the rank-ordering of what is worthy of love. In other words, man can feel and know himself to be at one with, or separated and opposed to, the love with which God loved the idea of the world or its content before he created it, the love with which he preserves it at every instant. If a man in his actual loving, or in the order of his acts of love, in his preferences and depreciations, subverts this self-existent order, he simultaneously subverts the intention of the divine world-order―as it is in his power to do. And whenever he does so, his world as the possible object of knowledge, and his world as the field of willing, action, and operation, must necessarily fall as well.This is not the place to speak about the content of the gradations of rank in the realm of all that is worthy of love. It is sufficient here to say something about the *form* and *content* of the realm itself.From the primal atom and the grain of sand to God, this realm is *one* realm. This " unity" does not mean that the realm is closed. We are conscious that no one of the finite parts of it which are given to us can exhaust its fullness and its extension. If we have only *once* experienced how one feature which is worthy of love appears next to another―or how another feature of still higher value appears over and above one which we had taken till now as the " highest" in a particular region of values, then we have learned the essence of progress in or penetration into the realm. Then we see that this realm cannot have precise boundaries. Only in this way can we understand that when any sort of love is fulfilled by an object adequate to it the satisfaction this gives us can never be definitive. Just as the essence of certain operations of thought which create their objects through self-given laws (e.g., the inference from *n* to *n* + *I*) prevents any limits from being placed on their application, so it is in the essence of the act of love as it fulfills itself in what is worthy of love that it can progress from value to value, from one height to an even greater height. " Our heart is too spacious," said Pascal. Even if we should know that our actual ability to love is limited, at the same time we know and feel that this limit lies neither in the finite objects which are worthy of love nor in the essence of the act of love as such, but only in our organization and the conditions it sets for the occurrence and *arousal* of the act of love. For this arousal is bound up with the life of our body and our drives and with the way an object stimulates and calls this life into play. But *what* we grasp as *worthy of love* is not bound up with these, and more than the *form and structure* of the realm of which this value shows itself to be a part." ―from_Ordo Amoris_ "
3 " The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of " chronological snobbery" . Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term " the past" was once " the present" , which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors. "
4 " The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality...The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us...But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention. "
5 " Test-oriented teaching strikes me as anti-educational, a kind of unpleasant game that subverts the real aim of education: to waken a student to her or his potential, and to pursue a subject of considerable importance without restrictions imposed by anything except the inherent demands of the material. "
― Jay Parini , The Art of Teaching
6 " He was eager to tell me about his latest work, which consisted of him vomiting on a footpath, then cordoning it off. Each artwork lasted until the first ‘philistine’ thought to take the rope down.‘In that way, the philistine is drawn – whether he likes it or not – into my art. He becomes part of it…and the vomit part of him. Essentially, it is the cosmic vomit. We all spew it. It blurs the boundaries, subverts the liminal… "
― , Reveries of the Dreamking
7 " Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung. "
― John Allison