Harry Blamires > Quotes

“You're arguing in a circle," I said. "In a spiral," said Lamiel, "which is the best way to argue.”
― Harry Blamires

“The marks of truth, as Christianly conceived, are that it is supernaturally grounded not developed within nature; that it is objective and not subjective; that it is a revelation and not a construction; that it is discovered by inquiry and not elected by a majority vote; that it is authoritative and not a matter of personal choice.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“The bland assumption that the Church's life will continue to be fruitful so long as we go on praying and cultivating our souls, irrespective of whether we trouble to think and talk Christianly, and therefore theologically, about anything we or others may do or say, may turn out to have dire results.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life. When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept, for purposes of discussion, the secular frame of reference.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“The Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking, and Christian thinking is the prerequisite for Christian action.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“The collision between a Christian mind and a solidly earthbound culture ought to be a violent one.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“We are all caught up, entangled, in the lumbering day-to-day operations of a [social] machinery, working in many respects in the service of ends which we as Christians reject. This situation, the present [schizophrenic] situation of thousands of thinking Christians is the end product of a process that began the day Christians first decided to stop thinking Christianly in the interests of national harmony; the day when Christians first felt that the only way out of endless public discussion was to limit the operation of acute Christian awareness to the spheres of personal morality and spirituality.

From that point, the spheres of political, cultural, social, and commercial life became dominated by pragmatic and utilitarian thinking.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“An important contributory factor to the loss of mental morale in the church has been a misguided conception of Christian charity. It has been assumed that the charitable man suppresses his views in the same way that he subordinates his personal interests. A wild fantasy has taken hold of many Christians. They have come to imagine that just as an unselfish man restrains himself from snatching another piece of cake, so too, he restrains himself from putting forward his point of view. And just as it is bad form to boast about your private possessions or loudly recapitulate your personal achievements, so too it is bad form announce what your convictions are.

By analogy with that charity of the spirit which never asks or claims but always gives and gives again, we have manufactured a false "charity" of the mind, which never takes a stand, but continually yields ground. It is proper to give way to other people's interests: therefore it is proper to give way to other people's ideas.

The damage done by this false deduction has been enormous. It is urgently necessary to clear the air on this matter. A man's religious convictions and understanding of the truth are not private possessions, in the sense that his suit and the contents of his brief case are private possessions.

Your beliefs as a Christian are not yours in the sense that you have rights over them, either to tamper with them or to throw them away. Of course, the very fact that we view convictions as personal possessions is a symptom of the disappearance of the Christian mind.

One of the crucial tasks in reconstituting the Christian mind will be to reestablish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinions. The sphere of the intellectual, the sphere of knowledge and understanding, is not a sphere in which the Christian gives ground, or even tolerates vagueness and confusion. There is no charity without clarity and firmness.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“A resistance stirs within us. Do we *want* our theology paraded thus? As natural men, no. We do not want it any more than we want the discipling of the Christian moral law, repentance, the painful call of self-surrender. but if it is the intellectual expression of that faith by which we live, how can our minds work Christianly without it? Wherever men think and talk, the banner will have to be raised.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“...the wise words of a friend and guide rang in my head. 'How would you distinguish a true servant of God from a traitor?...You should take especial notice of how a person speaks, not of other things, but of God.”
― Harry Blamires, Highway to Heaven

“And here, right at the start, one encounters a new difficulty. For the task of reestablishing the notion of God's authority is obstructed not only by the depreciation of authority itself, but also by a false, pre-established picture of God- found even within the church.

Certainly, the church has preserved the concept of a loving God, a merciful God, a compassionate God. But have Christians generally themselves any vivid sense of God's power and dominion? Do we, when we worship God, or when we reflect on His nature, catch a clear echo of His resounding and indomitable majesty?... It cannot be denied that this is the God we are supposed to worship- not just a companionable God who is to be sidled up to and nestled against, but and awesome God before whom the worshipper prostrates himself, a wrathful God whose raised right arm can shake the universe.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“Looking back to [Christendom's] youth, we recall the emotional stirrings, the deep sense of Christian purpose, when a temple, say, challenged the existing social order... Where is our Christian duty, our Christian aim? We do not know, we cannot say. Yet our ignorance and silence are certainly not due to the fact that the welfare state has made Christian thinking out of date and irrelevant.

The reason we have nothing to say to the contemporary situation is that we have not been thinking about the contemporary situation. We stopped thinking about these things long ago. We stopped thinking Christianly outside the scope of personal morals and personal spirituality. We got into the habit of stepping out of our Christian garments whenever we stepped mentally into the field of social and political life. Becuase the subject was social or political, we left all of our well-tried and well-grounded Christian concepts behind us, and adopted the vocabulary of secularism. We put aside all talk of vocation, or God's providence, or man's spiritual destiny, and instead chattered with the rest about productivity, assembly line psychology, and deployment of personnel.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“Do we as Christians mentally inhabit the world presented to us by faith as the real world?”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“In so far as the church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the fill man, faculties, and forces blended and united in the service of God. The church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that- to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“The mental secularization of Christians means that nowadays we meet only as worshipping beings and as moral beings, not as thinking beings.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“If only there were an inhabited field of discourse where Christians were thinking Christianly about everything, there would be something nutritive for Christian minds to feed on. But Christians are being truncated and deformed by the fact that men and women have to leap about from one tradition of discourse to another as they move in thought and discussion from moral matters to political matters, from ecclesiastical matters, to cultural matters.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“May God even yet deliver us from the sin of loyalty!”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“You have heard that evil is a perversion of the good. The greatest goods can be perverted into the greatest evils. The poor man has not the opportunities for covetousness and self-indulgence which the rich man enjoys. The unlettered man has not the opportunities for intellectual pride and arrogance which the scholar may succumb to. An irreligious man may prostitute the flesh; but it takes a 'religious' man to prostitute the things of the Spirit and the Church of God. Every gift, every insight, ever vision, every talent brings its demand for self-forgetfulness in sanctified service: each brings its opportunities for richer worship or for more damnable self-love. The slum labourer may pervert beer and steak to the sole end of abusing an indulged body. It takes a bishop to pervert episcopacy to the service of self-indulgence; it takes a monk to pervert the religious life to the service of pride.”
― Harry Blamires, The Devil's Hunting Grounds

“When a man falls in love, he sees the beloved in an idealized vision which to the rest of the world seems unjustified by the facts of the woman's character and appearance. The lover feels towards his beloved, thus idealized, a rapture of devotion, which seems to blend humility with exultation, self-giving with grateful receiving, in a joyful interchange of laughter and courtesy. What is the real significance of this vision and the mutual relationship which can emerge from it? [Charles] Williams tells us that the lover sees his beloved as all men would see one another, and all things, had not man fallen from his state of original innocence. He sees his beloved as all men ought to see their fellow-men 'in God'. The relationship between lover and beloved which emerges is (at its best) the relationship of joyful giving and receiving which ought to join all men together. Already such relationships exist among the perfected in Heaven. And the archetype of such perfected relationships is the coherence of the Three Persons of the Trinity.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?

“There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about christianly.”
― Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A Christian Think?

“Of late--during the last hundred years or so--our heroes and idols have been one-sided creatures, and that is peculiarly the case today. We have come to take one-sidedness for granted.”
― Harry Blamires, The offering of man