Status Updates From Roman Catholicism and Polit...

"Those moments in which man's longing for solitude in God is already fulfilled in this life are allowed only to the elect few, as recompense and consolation for long and active service."
Then my question concerning asceticism is settled.

Perhaps I can even sense some influences he had on Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Still, his conduct under the Nazis discredits him to a significant degree.

"Every power was something evil and inhuman to his [Dostoevsky's] fundamentally anarchistic (and that always means atheistic) instinct. In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity."

Not "identical". "Congruous". That would be a better term. There might be an even better one but I gotta continue with this book.

It doesn't follow from it that ONLY private religion turns privacy into something sacred. There is also still the fact that protestantism and private interpretation or even religious relativism only became identical through a dialectic process. Many protestant figures were extremely political with their religious views, to the point where they preferred hypocritical conformists over conscientious noncomformists.

"Without its religion of privacy, the structure of this social order would collapse. The fact that religion is a private matter gives privacy a religious sanction. In the true sense, the unconditional guarantee of absolute private property can exist only where religion is a private matter, where again it is also the governing principle."
While that sounds plausible, I am really not sure it is also historical.

Calling Auguste Comte "the greatest of sociologists" is never a good sign.

"Economic thinking has its own reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with things. The political is considered immaterial, because it must be concerned with other than economic values."
Definitely not true from an austrian standpoint, although I now get what he means. I think he mistakes economics as a discipline with what he understands as an economic worldview.

"Genuine Catholic anxiety derives from the knowledge that here the concept of the rational is warped fantastically, in a manner alien to Catholic sensibility, because a mechanism of production serving the satisfaction of arbitrary material needs is called "rational" without bringing into question what is most important-the rationality of the purpose of this supremely rational mechanism."
That is why we have ethics

"Throughout the Middle Ages, as Duhem has well shown, it suppressed superstition and sorcery. Even Max Weber has ascertained that Roman rationalism lives on in the Roman Church, that it knowingly and magnificently succeeded in overcoming Dionysian cults, ecstasies, and the dangers of submerging reason in meditation."

He rightly criticizes the contemporary mechanistic worldview, but falsely attributes it to "economists" as a whole. Granted, in his day, economics was different from how it is now.

"It is a striking contradiction, again demonstrating the curious complexio oppositorum,that one of the strongest Protestant perceptions finds in RomanCatholicism a debasement and misuse ofChristianity because it mechanizes religion into a soulless formality,while at the same time Protestants return inRomantic flight to the CatholicChurch seeking salvation from the soullessness of a rationalistic and mechanistic age."

"Probably most emigrants have been Catholic, because most simple Catholics were by and large poorer than Protestants. Poverty, peril, and persecution have impelled them. But they never lose the longing for their homeland."
Carl Schmitts thoughts on the relationship between catholics and their land versus that of protestants are very interesting, I must admit.

Finally got to the actual essay. This introduction was dry, only the notes on prior translations had a certain wit.

"[A]ll [economists] unite in the demand that the immaterial domination of politics over the materiality of economic life come to an end."
Yeah, quite "immaterial" that domination is, with its mix of oppressive taxation and "free" gifts to the voter.

History, of course, proved Schmitt wrong: Economics have asserted their privacy over politics. Pious wishes build no tanks and bribe no voters.