Bookbag: Speaking of being untethered...

I can't remember which of his books it's in, but P. J. O'Rourke wrote that society could be cleared of much liberal cant if everyone came to accept this basic fact: a thing can never be "worth" more than what someone is willing to pay for it. In that straightforward spirit, then, this from Owen Bradley's A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre:

The first service of religion is to show to man, "isolated in the universe and unable to compare himself to anything," "how much he cost." The sacrifice of the god himself demonstrates "the enormity of the crime that demanded such an expiation; the inconceivable grandeur of the being that could have committed it; the infinite price of the victim who said here I am."

The inconceivable grandeur of man that required to redeem it an infinite price is emphasized all the more when Maistre cites Aeschylus's Prometheus: "Look at me, it is a God who has made a God die."