[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.

Part of the problem is that the modern mind cannot make a distinction between individuals and persons. You can have individual rocks and individual buffaloes, but these are not persons. Stalin may have been a great individual, in the sense that Ayers rock is a really great individual rock, but he was not a great person. The concepts of individual liberty and individual greatness are nothing like personal liberty and personal greatness. And yet it is the former which everyone runs after, not the latter. As Solzhenitsyn says in this thread: a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil... and this would correspond to what people call "individual liberty", whereas personal liberty follows naturally from the freedom to do what is good.

[AlbionGirl]

I've been on a life-long quest for beauty and never knew it until recently. And I don't think it's a conscious quest. It may follow from Baptism, I don't know. The following from David Hart, an Orthodox genius who writes of God and beauty, and who speaks, I think to your idea on personal liberty.

Hell is the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight, the soul’s work of legislation for itself, where ethics has achieved its final independence from aesthetics. Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell. [H]ell is the purest interiority. [I]t is a turning in, a fabrication of an inward depth, a shadow, a privation, a loss of the whole outer world, a refusal of the surface.

Before I ever knew who Mr. Hart was though, I was a big fan of Leonard Cohen, who wrote the following song. At first glance, it may seem at odds with the ideas of Mr. Hart, but I think they are similarly beautiful.

I Came So Far For Beauty

I came so far for beauty
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned
I thought I'd be rewarded
For such a lonely choice
And surely she would answer
To such a very hopeless voice
I practiced all my sainthood
I gave to one and all
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all
I changed my style to silver
I changed my clothed to black
And where I would surrender
Now I would attack
I stormed the old casino
For the money and the flesh
And I myself decided
What was rotten and what was fresh
And men to do my bidding
And broken bones to teach
The value of my pardon
The shadow of my reach
But no, I could not touch her
With such a heavy hand
Her star beyond my order
Her nakedness unmanned
I came so far for beauty
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned