Aphorisms of E.H. Looney, Part Two

A little preface: E.H. Looney was one of the foremost traditionalist reactionaries on Twitter back in the good ol’ days (@Gaelic_Norseman). His aphoristic tweets on Christianity, democracy, history, and culture were among the very best in terms of substance and wit. Although a majority of them are lost, there are still a small handful that I’ve preserved in an Evernote notebook, and I simply find them worthy of sharing. Credit to Wrath of Gnon for also preserving and sharing some of them over the years, too. This is part two; part one is here. — E

“Beauty is the splendor of the True.”

“If you aren’t content to be a peasant, you should never be a lord. If you couldn’t be a servant, you should never be king.”

“The one thing the hippies got right was that girls should always have flowers in their hair.”

“If the Greeks spent as much time praying for the Roman Church as they did refuting her, they might see an end to the schism. If traditionalist Catholics spent as much time praying for the Roman Church as they did complaining about her, they might see an end to the modernist apostasy.”

“Not understanding the absolute necessity of the papacy in the history of the post-Imperial West is the source of the schism with the Greeks and the heresy of Protestantism. Not understanding that the Greeks and the Germans might naturally lack this understanding is the problem of the Ultramontanists.”

“The Roman Pontiff is the first among equals. The Greeks have a problem with ‘the first.’ The Ultramontanists have a problem with ‘among equals.'”

“Lifting and prayer solve all forms of depression in men.”

“Time is both circular and linear; a wheel rolling towards a foreordained destination.”

“The Roman Church built the West in a particular way. The social and ‘secular’ were not swallowed up into the religious (as in a theocracy), but rather incarnated by the Church the way the soul incarnates the body. The ever-increasing insanity in the West and the seemingly hapless and directionless state of the Roman Church can only be likened to the corruption of the soulless body and the aimless wandering of a ghost. They are not meant to live apart.”

“Groups of children going door-to-door at night to demand candy is the fruit of a high-trust Christian society. Who benefits by destroying this custom?”

“Feudalism wouldn’t encourage exploitation any more than any other system. Far less. Feudalism is gloriously inefficient and ridiculously inexpensive. It’s the anti-bureaucracy.”

“Constant stimulation is fatal to the arts and social graces. A sort of ‘pregnant boredom’ is required for the formation of a high culture.”