/lit/ - Literature

It is way easier to be an "Orthodox" than a Catholic. It is actually unfortunate for the "Orthodox" church, which is in schism even with itself, that this is the case. You get to maintain your pride and prelest, and feelings of superiority, by the very act of sagely telling others that they are in danger of pride and prelest. The fact of the matter is that people like St. Francis of Assisi lived holier lives than 99% of "Orthodox" people who ever lived - and that if you believe after such a penance, prayer, sacrament, and service-filled life of dedication to the poor and hungry, that St. Francis is burning in Hell for all eternity, you are, in fact, simply incorrect. If you accept that this holy man was far more likely to go to heaven than the average "Orthodox" layman, you either take up the doctrine of invincible ignorance (at minimum), or remain in your whitewashed tomb, calling a man greater than yourself in literally every way a heretic burning in Hell for eternity. The one, true, holy Catholic and apostolic church has the most rational position - those saints from the schismatic churches which have invincible ignorance could be in Heaven. Please repent, and join the true church, the most ancient church founded by Jesus Christ on the rock of St. Peter, the Catholic church - who has the only rational metaphysical position. I love you, brothers, but do you not see how rebelling against your father causes great pain to the body of Christ?

>>19054069
As expected - because nobody who reads St. Irenaeus, while acknowledging his degree of closeness to the apostolic tradition, can remain a gnostic. If "to be deep in history is to cease being Protestant", how much moreso is it to cease being a gnostic, who reject even the earliest apostolic church creeds?

Gnosticism is simply a stepping stone on the spiritual path of the disenfranchised dead, who are rebelling against their archetypal father, God as He is, and their archetypal mother, the holy Church. I pray that the people stuck on this ideology of prelest and ignorance realize that there is a reason no gnostics did anything worthwhile for the world in their ~2000 years of pitiful existence - they are spiritually impotent escapists, who delude themselves into thinking they are superior through peddling "hidden knowledge" that everybody with discernment rightly evaluated as a fruitless distraction.

Pic related: with nothing more than traditional Catholic spirituality and a Bible, this man accomplished more than every gnostic on the planet, throughout history, combined. Surely, as the gnostics will say, because he was unaware of the gnostic teachings, he was unenlightened and lost. And yet he was a prolific mystic and saint by any standard, through whom many miracles were performed - yet no gnostic of value has ever appeared in history - no healings, no miracles, and providing nothing of value to the world. Gnosticism is, in the end, a symptom of a lack of self-awareness in the cosmic story of salvation, and where one fits into it.

It is simply vain spiritual masturbation, and its adherents are similarly drained.

>>18865394
>I'm more against the idea that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" and marriage is just a compromise to prevent fornication, not a beautiful thing, a ladder to God in itself.
This is misrepresenting the orthodox and Catholic view on marriage. St. Paul's words are only to indicate that it is very good, and indeed superior, to dedicate one's life to becoming a saint who is worried solely about the work of the Lord, if one can bear that cross. To explain his position further, St. Paul says in the same epistle:
"I want you to be free from concern. The unmarried man is concerned about the work of the Lord, how he can please the Lord. But the married man is concerned about the affairs of this world, how he can please his wife, and his interests are divided.". I think we can both agree that this is definitely true.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

""The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage."
The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity,88 some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. "The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life."

God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"

Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone."92 The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help.93 "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."94 The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh.""

What's /lit/s favourite English translation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship?

>inb4 learn German
I will eventually but I'm studying other language first

"O friend who with us shared in sport and fest,
To a bride, thy passions spent afresh?"
"Yea, a bride more fair than you have seen,
Yet, not of blood, and not of flesh."