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Modern hygienic practices do not seek high-tech order and regulation as much as they search for a gesture of atonement. Microbes are the demons of our age, and the hygienist a less picturesque and more fearsome sort of wizard.
More irritating than a person’s own foolishness is their parroting a scientific vocabulary.
The cult of medicine should come as no surprise, in this age when man cannot see beyond himself, and does not comprehend the realities and values lost to centuries past. That everything is uncertain, fleeting, doubtful, vain, and it is not just his own pain and old age which troubles him. Who can blame him for prostrating himself before the one who offers relief, before the one who promises him peace?
For the common man, the increasing incomprehensibility of the laws, theories, and principles of modern science means they soon resemble mysterious formulas. The primacy of science actually creates a pre-logical mindset.
In the human sciences the latest trend is regarded as the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.
The judgment of language as being either “scientific” or “emotional” is itself not scientific but emotional.
It is used to discredit theses that make modern man uncomfortable.
The limits of science are revealed more clearly in the light of its triumphs.
Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper.
Stupidity appropriates the inventions of science with diabolical ease.
All mythology is in a way certain, while all philosophy is in a way false. To believe that science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.
Science threatens to lead man to unsuspected excesses of baseness and degradation.
First, because scientific propositions, propositions to the indicative, are susceptible, as the prestige of science grows, of being arbitrarily and cunningly transformed into propositions to the imperative. Thus, any scientific fact comes to refute or justify any norm.
Second, because the morality proper to science is hidden in its farthest limits: scientific thought, experimental research, and the qualities that they demand.
Third, because the epistemological placement of science, the determination of its jurisdiction and its rights, will become, compared to the apparent successes of science, every day more suspicious in its subtleties, increasingly arbitrary, and its complex reasonings, increasingly self-serving sophisms.
Science as an absolute system is the resignation of the human.
Metaphysically speaking, the victory of science will succeed only in proving the existence of the world. A bare and naked existence, mere existence, empty of meaning.
Science, which teaches us to see in each person a mere transitory example of a general and abstract principle, is chilling.
The scientific truths are specific, they are the truths of a special order. They are not the truths of the entire nature of man, but truths of a specific methodological scheme.
Men of science are like those species of animals which have adapted excessively to their environment, that is, the precision of their composition halts their development, and if their environment changes they are destroyed.
How many times have we been told that providentialism comes from an ignorance of natural laws? But perhaps the “laws of nature” are no more than a lazy interpretation of the obstinate presence of a miracle.
Nothing is more alarming than the stupid scientist.
Science presently threatens us by imposing a set of truths. The society that welcomes them can, using some dishonest extrapolations, transform them into instruments of unlimited despotism.
Skepticism and metaphysical irrationalism are the necessary tools for individuals to remain as such, and to survive this.
The modern Catholic looks upon “scientific ideas” with idiotic reverence.
The greatest triumph of science is apparently the speed with which the fool can transport his idiocy from one place to another.
The fool always imagines himself to be corroborating in whatever stupidity he presumes to be the latest science.
The progressive dreams of the scientific stabling of mankind.
Religion and science should not sign boundary agreements, but treaties of mutual ignorance.
The man who resorts to physiological interpretation is a man who fears the soul.
The thaumaturge is revived, and the processions of lamentation leave the sacred grottoes, the hallowed forests, the temples illuminated by trembling candles, making their way to where a new shaman awaits. The now obsolete feathers and furs are replaced with a white blouse, tortoiseshell glasses, and a pen.
The doctor inspires within me a secret contempt. “”Slave trade,”” I murmur, like the crude patrician in Rome at the gestures of the knowing Greek who attends him. I, the petty-bourgeois with aspirin and morphine.
And maybe I’m not wrong. The cult of the doctor reveals the ultimate submission of the spirit, the body nothing more than an instrument, and the health of the body the ultimate end of human activity.
When the state is ordered toward science, it is nearly indestructible. Nobody is wanting, and so no one will risk destroying it. Science can smother souls under an abundance of bodily comforts and dominate bodies with a power beyond belief. In this, all baseness is intertwined with the life of ease, an inability to achieve the noble, and an incomparable capacity for the mediocre.
What some call “religion” barely astonishes us more than what others call “science.”
Modern society only respects science as a means to feed its inexhaustible desires.
The abandonment of the “what for?” in the sciences has indisputably resulted in productivity, but it is an admission of defeat.
He who preaches of any goal in the name of science is a fraud or a fool.
As long as the physiological explanation is not enough for us, someone will say we don’t want the truth.
He who appeals to the sciences in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust in his honesty or his intelligence.
Why fool ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.
The sciences tend to become bureaucratized, like everything else.
The law of inertia and the idea of natural selection eliminated the necessity of attributing meaning to facts, but they did not demonstrate that meaning does not exist.
As it is unable to explain the consciousness which creates it, science, when it finishes explaining everything, will have explained nothing.
One of the worst intellectual catastrophes has been the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabularies by mediocre intellects.
19th century Western thought regarded science as liberation and religion as captivity. Today we see that science adds technology to serfdom and religion opens the doors to adventure.
Nothing reveals the limits of science as much as the opinions of the scientist on any subject not strictly related to his profession.
The grave mistake of the (Latin) Church was not in condemning Galileo, but in attaching any importance to the problems he raised.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Marbled paper by Gail Ritter. Source
