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Articulating modern problems in a traditional vocabulary strips away their false pretenses.
Only the soul anchored in the past is not shipwrecked by night storms.
As a criterion of what is best, modern man only knows past achievements.
In the cultivated soul, the noise of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.
To innovate in liturgical matters is not sacrilege, but stupidity. Man only worships immemorial routines.
Tired of sliding down the comfortable slope of daring opinions, intelligence finally settles in the rugged landscape of commonplaces.
Traditionalism can only be a theoretical attitude, the doctrine of historical continuity; it will never be a firm basis for action.
Conservatism is the liberalism of the intelligent man.
Intelligence is strengthened by the timeless commonplaces. And weakened by those of its time and place.
We should resign ourselves to the fact that a thing will not last, but refuse to hasten its demise.
Before today’s Church- the clergy, liturgy, theology- the old Catholic at first becomes indignant, then troubled, and finally he bursts out laughing.
You must appreciate the commonplaces and despise fashionable places.
For the Catholic, the sacrifice of the mass today is the torturing of the liturgy.
To appreciate the ancient or the modern is easy; but to appreciate the obsolete is the triumph of authentic taste.
Let us replace all those declarations regarding the “dignity of man,” which are merely ecstatic outbursts, with one that is plain and simple: “do everything slowly.”
Catholics do not realize that the world feels swindled by every concession to it Catholicism makes.
Civilization is not an endless succession of inventions and discoveries, but the task of ensuring that certain things endure.
To reiterate and revive the old aphorism is a civilizing task in itself.
The Catholic liturgy can definitely only speak in Latin. The “vulgar” language, indeed, makes it vulgar.
When respect for tradition dies out, society, in its incessant desire to renew itself, consumes itself in a frenzy.
To be a revolutionary one must be a little foolish; to be a conservative, a little cynical.
New evidence is no better than old evidence. It is merely new evidence.
Today, the fight against evil is the fight of the rearguard.
To deem “obsolete” what is no longer easily understood is a vulgar error.
The traditional commonplace scandalizes modern man.
The most subversive book in our time would be a compilation of old proverbs.
Rationalizing dogma, softening morality, simplifying the rite, does not make it easier for the unbeliever to approach the Church, but rather for the Church to approach the unbeliever.
Far from paralyzing us in dogmatic complacency, systems compel us to develop insight.
There is no intellectual originality but within the historical continuity of a spiritual tradition.
Hatred of the past is an unequivocal sign that a society is tending toward the plebeian.
Courageous and daring thought does not shy away from the truism.
To restore an old liturgical gesture in a new context can approach heresy. For example, for a Roman Catholic to receive communion standing is now a gesture of pride.
Opinions, customs, institutions, cities- everything has become tawdry, since we gave up mending the old to every day buy some gaudy novelty.
Our contemporaries denigrate the past so that they do not commit suicide out of shame and nostalgia.
Once the intoxication of youth has passed, only proverbs seem worthy of careful examination.
Eras that refuse to admit they lack what others possessed are debased by the substitutes they worship.
The gesture, rather than the word, is the true conduit of tradition.
Surviving fragments of the past put to shame the modern landscape in which they stand.
The period in which an idea was formed is important to know in order to understand it, but it is not a reason for it to be accepted or rejected.
We must not simply echo the voices of others, but intelligently articulate ancestral whispers.
In order to bear fruit, intelligence need not free itself from the past it inherits, but from the overwhelming present.
The radical conservatism of someone like Gogol is just as utopian as radical liberalism, but less stupid.
The disappearance of the peasantry and the classical humanities has broken any continuity with the past.
No past is ideal.
But only from the past do ideals emerge that are not lymphatic, ideals with blood in their veins.
We naively believe that a recently published book, rich in scholarly knowledge and providing some new category of interpretation, deserves to be read without hesitation. In truth, it would be better to reread the old but intelligent book.
The desire for originality is tamed in the sincere.
When the fragments of a thought can be traced to the pre-Socratics or Upanishads or even to the myths of primitives, it inspires within us something more than a secret confidence; a sense of veneration and respect.
Restlessness stems from an overabundance of faith in the stability of things.
Tradition is the work of the spirit. In turn, the spirit is the work of tradition.
When a tradition perishes, the spirit is extinguished, and the things that embodied those traditions revert to the status of tools.
The past is the source of poetry;
the future is the arsenal of rhetoric.
Dying cultures try to survive by systematically imitating themselves or by radically innovating.
Spiritual health, on the contrary, lies in prolonging without imitating and innovating without abolishing.
The intelligent are capable of discovering new truths by rediscovering old truths.
If we were actually walking on stable ground toward a clear goal, the commonplaces would be considered the tested doctrine of man. Instead, on these shifting sands, the commonplaces are regarded by new generations as tales of tribulations past.
Today’s conservatives are nothing more than liberals who have been mistreated by democracy.
When Christianity abolishes its old liturgical languages, it degenerates into strange, crude sects. Once contact with antiquity is broken, the medieval and patristic inheritance is lost, and any simpleton becomes an exegete.
To do what we must is the essence of Tradition.
I have no pretensions to originality: the old commonplace, for me, is enough.
By suppressing certain liturgies we suppress certain evidence.
To cut down sacred forests is to erase divine footprints.
Anything that interrupts a tradition obliges us to start over.
And every origin is bloody.
Unless we inherit a spiritual tradition to interpret it, life experience teaches us nothing.
Conservatism should not be a party, but the natural attitude of any decent man.
It is enough to oppose a new error so that the aged truth is refreshed.
Our spiritual inheritance is so opulent that it’s enough for a cunning fool to exploit it in order to seem clever to the dim-witted.
The reactionary is the guardian of every heritage.
Even the heritage of the revolutionary.
Ideas less than a thousand years old are not fully reliable.
The young man has finally matured when the old no longer appears automatically bad and the new automatically good.
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: Strahov Library, Prague. source
