—Ronald A. Knox
A Retreat for Lay People (1955)

In teaching people, [Fr. Arsenie] emphasized another provision for living an authentic Christian life: love of enemies. He considered that people theorized about this virtue more than they put it into practice. As one who had practiced love of enemies and tasted the spiritual joy and freedom it brings even from childhood, he would tirelessly urge the attainment of it. “Love of enemies is a commandment, not a suggestion. Strive to truly love your enemies, regardless of the state you find yourself in. If you’re unable to love them from the beginning, at least try not to hate them. God rejoices. God will help you if you always persist as a beginner in this virtue. And if death comes, it finds you fighting to love your enemies, and God does the rest. The important thing is for you to be on the path.”

—Sorin Alpetri
Eternity in the Moment: The Life and Wisdom of Elder Arsenie Papacioc (2018)

Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny.

This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private associations are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves.

The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite.

—Robert H. Bork
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1997)

—David Stove
Darwinian Fairytales (1995)

—Joshua T. Katz
The New Criterion (April 2024)

The fact of death alone gives true depth to the question as to the meaning of life. Life in this world has meaning just because there is death; if there were no death in our world, life would be meaningless. The meaning is bound up with the end. If there were no end, i.e., if life in our world continued for ever, there would be no meaning in it. Meaning lies beyond the confines of this limited world, and the discovery of meaning presupposes an end here. . . .

Our existence is full of death and dying. Life is perpetual dying, experiencing the end in everything, a continual judgment passed by eternity upon time. Life is a constant struggle against death and a partial dying of the human body and human soul. Death within life is due to the impossibility of embracing the fullness of being, either in time or in space. Time and space are death-dealing; they give rise to disruptions which are a partial experience of death. When, in space, we part with a person, a house, a town, a garden, an animal, and have the feeling that we may never see them again, this is an experience of death. The anguish of every parting, of every severance in time and space, is the experience of death. I remember what anguish I felt as a boy at every parting. It was so all-embracing that I lived through mortal anguish at the thought of never seeing again the face of a stranger I met, the town I happened to pass through, the room in which I spent a few days, a tree or a dog I saw. This was, of course, an experience of death within life. . . .

The emotional as distinct from the spiritual attitude to death is always melancholy and colored by the sadness of memory, which has no power to raise the dead; only the spiritual attitude to death is victorious. The pre-Christian view of it implies resignation to fate. Christianity alone knows victory over death.

—Nicholas Berdyaev
The Destiny of Man (1937)