Thus spake Fakespeare…

"If you don't want kids, don't date."

"There should be no safer place in the world than the womb. None, therefore, is more dangerous than he that invades it in the name of the world."

"A woman may be impregnatable, but her womb must remain impregnable."

Wisdom from…

ANDREW OF CRETE (660–720): By the cross the martyrs were strengthened

We who worship Christ on the cross must try to grasp the greatness of his power and all the wonders he has wrought through the cross on our behalf; the holy David says: Our God and eternal King has wrought salvation throughout the world. For through the cross the nations were caught as in a net and the seeds of faith were sown everywhere. With the cross, as though with a plow, the disciples of Christ cultivated the unfruitful nature of humankind, revealed the Church's ever-green pastures, and gathered in an abundant harvest of believers in Christ. By the cross the martyrs were strengthened, and as they fell they smote down those who struck them. Through the cross Christ became known, and the Church of the faithful, with the scriptures ever open before her, introduces us to this same Christ, the Son of God, who is truly God and truly Lord, and who cries out: Any who wish to come after me must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
(Oratio 1 in exaltatione crucis: PG 97, 1041-1045.)

Andrew was a Damascene monk in Jerusalem who represented his patriarch at the Third Council of Constantinople. He was a remarkable orator and one of the principal hymnographers of the Eastern Church.

ST. AUGUSTINE: The Inner Voice

Consider this great mystery. The sound of my words strikes the ears, and the Master is within! Do not suppose that any human is the teacher of another. We can admonish by the sound of our voice; but unless there is one who teaches on the inside, the sound we make is futile. I, for my part, have spoken to all; but those to whom the Anointing within does not speak, those whom the Holy Spirit within does not teach, go back untaught.
-- Sermon on 1 John 3, 12

Prayer. Instruct me, Lord, and command what you will. But first heal me and open my ears that I may hear your words.
-- Soliloquies 1, 5

ST. THOMAE AQUINATIS: ON THE WAY IN WHICH DIVINE TRUTH IS TO BE MADE KNOWN

[1] The way of making truth known is not always the same, and, as the Philosopher has very well said, “it belongs to an educated man to seek such certitude in each thing as the nature of that thing allows.” …

[2] There is a twofold mode of truth in what we profess about God. Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. … But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. …

[3] That there are certain truths about God that totally surpass man’s ability appears with the greatest evidence. Since, indeed, the principle of all knowledge that the reason perceives about some thing is the understanding of the very substance of that being (for according to Aristotle “what a thing is” is the principle of demonstration) [Posterior Analytics II, 3], it is necessary that the way in which we understand the substance of a thing determines the way in which we know what belongs to it. Hence, if the human intellect comprehends the substance of some thing, for example, that of a stone or of a triangle, no intelligible characteristic belonging to that thing surpasses the grasp of the human reason. But this does not happen to us in the case of God. For the human intellect is not able to reach a comprehension of the divine substance through its natural power. For, according to its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on the sense for the origin of knowledge; and so those things that do not fall under the senses cannot be grasped by the human intellect except in so far as the knowledge of them is gathered from sensible things. Now, sensible things cannot lead the human intellect to the point of seeing in them the nature of the divine substance; for sensible things are effects that fall short of the power of their cause. Yet, beginning with sensible things, our intellect is led to the point of knowing about God that He exists, and other such characteristics that must be attributed to the First Principle. There are, consequently, some intelligible truths about God that are open to the human reason; but there are others that absolutely surpass its power.

[4] We may easily see the same point from the gradation of intellects. … He who has the superior intellect understands many things that the other cannot grasp at all. Such is the case with a very simple person who cannot at all grasp the subtle speculations of philosophy. But the intellect of an angel surpasses the human intellect much more than the intellect of the greatest philosopher surpasses the intellect of the most uncultivated simple person…. For the angel knows God on the basis of a more noble effect than does man; and this by as much as the substance of an angel, through which the angel in his natural knowledge is led to the knowledge of God, is nobler than sensible things and even than the soul itself…. The divine intellect surpasses the angelic intellect much more than the angelic surpasses the human. For the divine intellect is in its capacity equal to its substance, and therefore it understands fully what it is…. But by his natural knowledge the angel does not know what God is, since the substance itself of the angel, through which he is led to the knowledge of God, is an effect that is not equal to the power of its cause. … Just as, therefore, it would he the height of folly for a simple person to assert that what a philosopher proposes is false on the ground that he himself cannot understand it, so (and even more so) it is the acme of stupidity for a man to suspect as false what is divinely revealed through the ministry of the angels simply because it cannot be investigated by reason.
(Summa Contra Gentiles I, 3)

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES:

Let us consider for a moment our Redeemer on the cross, where He died for us by a death more loving than love itself! Ah, why do we not cast ourselves in spirit upon Him, to die upon the cross with Him Who for love of us has truly willed to die? "I took hold of him and would not let him go...." [Song 3:4]
(T.L.G. Book 7, Ch. 8; O. V, p. 35)

G. K. CHESTERTON:

MODERN Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens.
('Heretics.')

About me and my non-existent Chevy coupe...

...or any other of my non-existent objects, a class of items which is both infinite and empty. Try cataloguing the non-existent things you own. Or is it the things you own which are non-existent?

Just wanted to catch da peoples up to speed with my life at present. I left Taiwan on September 30 and got into Portland the same day two hours later than I left. I spent the day with my brother, meeting his friends and then helping him pack up for his latest move to the land of Elsewhere. Then a couple days later I got picked up by my friend from Salem, OR. In the meantime I spent my time taking photographs of the wonderful weather and flora, as well as, at last, visiting Powells Books (supposedly the biggest bookstore in the USA, especially when you count Powells as one bookstore distributed over its six content-specific branches in downtown Portland). It was impressive, by all means, but it struck me as too polished for a used bookstore; I guess I was hoping for something more like the catacombs of books in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

Since then, I have spent my time (time which the Chinese and Taiwanese call "American time") driving (or rather, being driven) between Monmouth, Salem, and Portland. My first weekend in the care of my friend, I attended his brother's birthday, ate some pizza, rode some go karts, and then on Sunday, paced with him for nine miles during his first (and last?) marathon. I ended up walking and running, with a backpack on, about 20 miles. Needless to say, my knees were feeling it for days.

Yesterday we went to Multnomah Falls, took some shots up the fall's skirt, as it were, then hiked up to the fall and took some shots down its shirt, as it were. Truly breathtaking (and dizzying) heights from the top. I will get around to posting my photos from the past two weeks on Flickr and then directing your attention there. Last night, pretty much on a lark, my buddy took me to meet up with a couple of his friends who had, on a lark, attended a fashion show in downtown Portland, and then had some after-party tickets to throw around. I kicked off the little dance session among a lake of stiffs in fine clothes.

Today we (including my buddy's girlfriend... and uncluding anyone else?) drove out to the beach, a vastly different experience from my many forays in the beaches of Florida. Nevertheless, I kept true to one of my compulsions and ran into the (starkly cold!) water of one of the world's great oceans. We then drove on to a dune area where people trek up to the top for photography, sunning, painting, and general frolicking. Thereafter we went to the Tillamook cheese plant and museum. I bought "squeaky cheese", which is just cheese curds, as well as some 2-year-aged extra sharp white cheddar. Yumz! On the way back I dozed off, we stopped at Ron's burger joint for some good chowda, an then got back to my buddy's place where we just finished The Royal Tenenbaums.

For the most part I have just been taking in my own foreign American culture. I truly have felt the reverse culture shock: so many choices, so much driving, such outgoing "friendly" behavior, such, ahem, ample bodies, etc. Can you guess what I've been doing a lot of as well? HINT: It rhymes with bleeding. On top of that, however, I would be needlessly coy not to admit I have been doing my share of "gaming", mainly "Portal", "Guitar Hero", and "Rock Band" on the game Cube and X Box 360. It's nice having no cellphone to make be constantly available, like some kind of social MD on call. And while I can certainly get online, I find myself, as you may have sensed, less prompt to do so.

Oh, and today I looked it up ("Googlit!"): the phrase "This too shall pass" is of Hebrew origin (gam zeh yaavor), derived from a folk tale wherein King Solomon asked his wise men for a cure to depression, whereupon they told him to wear a silver ring at all times in which it was carved "Gam zeh yaavor." Abraham Lincoln popularized the phrase in a speech he made in Idaho (?: my memory fails me at the moment on where he made the speech).

That's all for now.I appreciate your prayers! This is a season of discernment and rest. God grant me light and eyes to follow in it.

God and Philosophy (É. Gilson)

Some quotations from the book: Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941)

p. xiv …I discovered that the only context in which the metaphysical conclusions of Descartes made sense was the metaphysics of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

p. 9 note 9: The two notions of life and of blood are inseparable in a Greek mind. Since the Greek gods have no blood, they cannot lose it, and consequently they cannot die.
–– Cf. Iliad, Bk. V, vv. 339–342.

13 A world where everything came to men from without, including their feelings and passions, their virtues and their vices, such was the Greek religious world.

22 By far the hardest problem for philosophy and for science is to account for the existence of human wills in the world without ascribing to the first principle either a will or something which, because it virtually contains a will, is actually superior to it. … The Greek gods are the crude but telling expression of this absolute conviction that since man is somebody, and not merely something, the ultimate explanation for what happens to him should rest with somebody, and not merely with something.

23 …Greek philosophy was a rational attempts to understand the world as a world of things, whereas Greek mythology expressed the firm decision of man not to be left alone, the only person in a world of deaf and dumb things.

23 When Plato says of something tat it truly is, or exists, he always means to say that its nature is both necessary and intelligible.

27 …in Plato's mind the gods were inferior to the Ideas.

31 …the soul is to Plato the very pattern after which men have formed their notion of god.

32 What makes Aristotle's metaphysics an epoch-making event in the history of natural theology is that in it the long delayed conjunction of the first principle with the notion of god became at last an accomplished fact.

33 The only question [vis-à-vis Aristotle's notion of divinity] is: Can we still have a religion? The pure Act of the self-thinking Thought eternally thinks of itself, but never of us.

34 With Aristotle, the Greeks had gained an indisputably rational theology, but they had lost their religion.

37 Provided only that it be somebody or something which they can mistake for somebody, they [men] may eventually worship it. What men cannot possibly bring themselves to do is to worship a thing.

43 What is perhaps the key to the whole history of Christian philosophy… is precisely the fact that, from the second century A.D. on, men have had to use a Greek philosophical technique in order to express ideas that had never entered the head of any Greek philosopher.

44 [Insofar as it worshiped God as HE WHO IS,] Christian revelation was establishing existence as the deepest layer of reality as well as the supreme attribute of the divinity. … As Professor J. B. Muller-Thym aptly remarks, where a Greek simply asks: What is nature? A Christian rather asks: What is being?
–– Muller-Thym, On the University of Being in Meister Eckhart of Hochheim (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939), p. 2

58 note 11: The man of Plato stood in no need of being made partaker of the divinity, because he himself was a god; hence, for Augustine, the necessity of stripping the man of Plato of what made him god, namely, his natural aptness to know truth.* We will find Thomas Aquinas confronted with the contrary difficulty, namely, that of turning the eminently natural man of Aristotle into a being being susceptible of deification.

* Consider also J. Ratzinger: "Using Plato, he [R. Guardini] makes explicit the knowledge of man's incommeasurability with the truth. In reality, man must appear foolish to himself when he risks speaking of the truth yet has no choice but to expose himself to this risk––and he must do so precisely in the recognition of his own absurdity. Only the presence of both elements, that is, the courage to search for the truth and the humility to accept one's ridiculousness, enables man to maintain the right mean between truthless cynicism and self-righteous fanaticism."
–– Cf. Stationen und Rückblicken (Würzburg, 1965), 41–50; as cited in The Nature and Mission of Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), p. 92, n. 20.

59 Time and again… Augustine has attempted the same demonstration of the existence of God as the only conceivable cause of the presence of truth in the human mind.

61 note 12: Augustine… never reached a wholly existential notion of being.

64 …such is the natural order followed by our rational knowledge: we first conceive certain beings, then we define their essences, and last we affirm their existences by means of a judgment. But the metaphysical order of reality is just the reverse of the order of human knowledge: what first comes into it is a certain act of existing which, because it is this particular act of existing, circumscribes at once a certain essence and causes a certain substance to come into being. … In Saint Thomas' own words: dicitur esse ipse actus essentiae––"to be" is the very act whereby an essence is.
–– Cf. Qu. disp. de Pot., qu. VII, art. 2, ad 9.

65 Philosophers have not inferred the supreme existentiality of God from any previous knowledge of the existential nature of things; on the contrary, the self-revelation of the existentiality of God has helped philosophers toward the realization of the existential nature of things.

67 …a decisive metaphysical progress, or, rather, a true metaphysical revolution was achieved when somebody began to translate all the problems concerning being from the language of essences into that of existence.

69 note 17: The primacy of essence, which makes existence out to be one of its "accidents," appears in the doctrine of Duns Scotus as a remnant of the Platonism anterior to Thomas Aquinas. In a straight existentialist metaphysics, it would be much more correct to speak of the essence of an existence than to speak, with Duns Scotus, of the existence of an essence (essentia et eius existentia).

70–71 …existence is not a thing, but the act that causes a thing both to be and to be what it is. … in our human experience, there is not thing whose essence it is "to be," and not "to-be-a-certain-thing."

72 BY revealing to the metaphysician that they [i.e., things, since no thing's essence is to exist] cannot account for their own existence, all things point to the fact that there is such a supreme cause wherein essence and existence coincide. … forcing its way through that crust of essences which is but the outer coating of reality….

73 …"all knowing beings implicitly know God in any and every thing that they know."
––Cf. Qu. disp. de Ver., qu. 22, art. 2, ad 1.

79 …Descartes has come after the Greeks with the naïve condition that he could solve, by purely rational method of the Greeks, all the problems which had been raised in between by Christian natural theology.

82 It is a well-known fact that Descartes always despised history….

86–87 If we look at God as the only possible explanation for the existence of such a world [i.e., a purely mechanical, extended world à la Cartesianism], his main attribute must necessarily be not the self-contemplation of his own infinite Being, but his self-causing all-powerfulness, source of his creative causality. … Since the ultimate philosophical function of his God was to be a cause, the Cartesian God had to be possessed of any and every attribute which was required of the creator of a Cartesian world. … In short, the essence of the Cartesian God was largely determined by his philosophical function.…

88 …a God whose very essence is to be a creator is not a Christian God at all. The essence of the Christian God is not to create but to be.
–– Cf. Pascal's Pensé II, §77: "I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God."

90 "By Nature, considered in general, I am now understanding nothing else either than God, or the order and disposition established by God in created things."
–– Descartes, Méditations, VI, ed. Adam-Tannery, IX, 64.

93 The world of Descartes had been a world of intelligible laws established by the arbitrary will of an all-powerful God; Malebranche's originality was to conceive God Himself as an infinite world of intelligible laws. Nothing more closely resembles the supreme Intellect of Plotinos than the divine Word of Malebranche.

95 [According to Malebranche, this, our, world] is not, absolutely speaking, the most perfect possible world, but it is at least the most perfect world which God could possibly create, given that it had to be a world ruled by universal, uniform, and intelligible laws. A congeries of individually perfect things would not be a whole, nor would it be a world, because it would not be an order of things regulated by laws.
–– Cf. Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion, Vol. II, chap. Ix, sec. 10, pp. 209–211.

96 Clearly enough, the notion of perfection is here taking precedence over the notion of being.

97 Existences are given to a Cartesian only through, and in, essences. God himself could not be posited as actually existing were it not for the fact that his idea is in us, and that, as it is found there, it involves existence.

99 …the God of the Monadology was but the Good of Plato, solving the problem of which world to create….

100 The greatest metaphysician among the successors of Descartes was Spinoza, because, with him, somebody at last said about God was Descartes himself, if not as a Christian, at least as a philosopher, should have thought and said from the very beginning. Descartes had been either religiously right and philosophically wrong, or philosophically right and philosophically wrong; Spinoza has been wholly right or wholly wrong….

101 But a God who "exists and acts merely from the necessity of his nature," is nothing more than a nature. Rather he is nature himself: Deus sive Natura.
–– Cf. Spinoza's Ethics, Part I, Appendix, p. 30 and Part IV, Preface, p. 142 à la Everyman's Library edition.

102 A religious atheist, Spinoza was truly inebriated with his philosophical God. … As a philosopher, and toward his own philosophical God, Spinoza probably is the most pious thinker there ever was.

103–104 I, personally, would not speak lightly of Spinoza's religion. It is a one hundred percent metaphysically pure answer answer to the question how to achieve human salvation by means of philosophy only. … Spinoza is a Jew who turned "Him who is" into a mere "that which is"; and he could love "that which is," but he never expected that he himself would be loved by it. The only way to overcome Spinoza is, in a truly Spinozistic way, to free ourselves from his limitation by understanding it as a limitation. This means, to grasp Being as the existence of essence, not as the essence of existence; to touch it as an act, not to conceive it as a thing. Spinoza's metaphysical experiment is the conclusive demonstration of at least this: That any religious God whose true name is not "He who is" is nothing but a myth.

105 The God of the Deists was not a first intelligible principle like the Good of Plato, the self-thinking Thought of Aristotle, or the Infinite Substance of Spinoza.

108 …the fact that there is no Demiurge does not prove that there is no God.

109 Yet the Criticism of Kant and the Positivism of Comte have this in common, that in both doctrines the notion of knowledge is reduced to that of scientific knowledge, and the notion of scientific knowledge itself to the type of intelligibility provided by the physics of Newton.

110 If we compare it with the Kantian revolution, the Cartesian revolution hardly deserved such a name.

114 Today our only choice is not Kant or Descartes; it is rather Kant or Thomas Aquinas.
––Cf. Rudolf Eucken, Thomas von Aquin and Kant, ein Kampf zweier Welten (Berlin, Reuther and Richard, 1901).

127 Supposing they ultimately consist of nothing else, how can we account for the existence [or, the why] of the very order of molecules which produces what we call life, and thought?

131 note 12: The marked antipathy of modern science toward the notion of efficient cause is intimately related to the nonexistential character of scientific explanations. … Since the relation of cause to effect is an existential and metaphysical one, it appears to the scientific mind as a sort of scandal which must be eliminated.

132 Yet the fact that final causes are scientifically sterile does not entail their disqualification as metaphysical causes, and to reject metaphysical answers to a problem just because they are not scientific is deliberately to maim the knowing power of the human mind.

133 We do not need to project our own ideas into the economy of nature; they belong there in their own right. Our own ideas are in the economy of nature because we ourselves are in it.

134 Through man, who is part and parcel of nature, purposiveness most certainly is part and parcel of nature.

136 A world which has lost the Christian God cannot but resemble a world which had not yet found him. Just like the world of Thales and of Plato, our own modern world is "full of gods." There are blind Evolution, clear-sighted Orthogenesis, benevolent Progress, and others which it is more advisable not to mention by name. … Millions of men are starving and bleeding to death because two or three of these pseudoscientific or pseudosocial deified abstractions are now [in 1941] at war.

140 note 19: Design appears to them [scientists] as a fact whose existence calls for an explanation. Why then should not the protons, electrons, neutrons, and photons be considered as facts whose existence also calls for some explanation? In what sense is the existence of these elements less mysterious than that of their composite? … If the cause for the existence of organisms lies outside the nature of their physiochemical elements, it transcends the physical order; hence it is transphysical…. if there is nothing in the elements to account for design, the presence of design in a chaos of elements entails just as necessarily a creation as the very existence of the elements.

143 The ultimate effort of true metaphysics is to posit an Act by an act, that is, to posit by an act of judging the supreme Act of existing whose very essence, because it is to be, passes human understanding. Where a man's metaphysics comes to an end, his religion begins.

The Nature and Mission of Theology (J. Ratzinger)

Some excerpts from the book (San Francisco, 1995):

p. 5 The most ancient Christian… iconographical canon comprises three figures: the shepherd, the orans and the philosopher.
––cf. F. Gerke and F. van der Meer

6 It is not the universe of the Bible and of sacred history which is the focal point of the most ancient Christian works of art but rather the philosopher, who is interpreted as the prototype of the homo christianus who has received the revelation of the true paradise through the Gospel."
––F. van der Meer, Die Ursprünge christlicher Kunst (Freiburg, 1982), S. 6

23 Death, the one question which it is impossible to ignore forever, is thus a metaphysical thorn in lodged in man's being. … questioning founders where there is no hope of finding an answer.

24 To the extent that the prophets see in the God if Israel the primordial creative ground of all reality, it is quite clear that what is taking place is a religious critique for the sake of a correct understanding of this reality itself.

26 The logos must be so intimately their own that it can be come apo-logia; through the mediation of Christians, the Word [Wort] becomes response [Antwort] to man's questions.

28 Otto Michel has pointed out that the Gnostics avoided the word "philosophy". With the term "gnosis" they expressed an even loftier claim. … Authentic philosophy, with its uncertainty, disgusts us. We want, not philosophy, but gnosis, that is, exact, verifiable knowledge. Moreover, philosophy is to a great extent weary of itself. It shares the impatience to become like the other academic disciplines both in nature and in worth. It wishes to be just as "exact" as they are. Yet it purchases exactitude at the price of its greatness, for in so doing it is no longer able to pose those questions which are proper to it alone. It becoming "exact", it joins the other disciplines in taking, no longer the whole, but the particular as its object.

37 The choice of our time has become that between the freedom of production and the freedom of the truth. But the freedom to produce, unchecked by truth, means the dictatorship of ends in a world devoid of truth and thus enslaves man while appearing to set him free.

38 "I maintain that in the long-run only a truth-oriented society, not a happiness-oriented society, can succeed."
–– H. Dietzfelbinger, "Dimension der Wahrheit", in Kath. Akademie in Bayern, Chronik, 1980/81, 150, citing Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

39 Truth, in fact, is the medium in which men make contact, whereas it is the absence of truth which closes them off from one another. … Hermann Dietzfelbinger has pointed out that the depressing thing about Pilate's question ["An sit verum? What is truth?"] is that it is not really a question at all but an answer.

46 [The subjection of evangelical Christianity in Germany under the Nazis and Heinrich Schlier's resistance thereto] revealed plainly that there can be no office of teaching theology if there is no ecclesiastical magisterium, for in its absence theology would enjoy no greater certainty than any of the liberal arts, that is, the certainty of hypothesis, which may be the subject of debate but which no one can stake his life on.

48 …a church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice.

52 Because Christian conversion throws open the frontier between the "I" and the "not-I", it can be bestowed upon one only by the "not-I" and can never be achieved solely in the interiority of one's personal decision. It has a sacramental structure. The "I no longer live" does not describe a private mystical experience but rather defines the essence of baptism. What takes place is a sacramental event, hence, an event involving the Church. The passive side of becoming a Christian calls for the acting Church, in which the unity of believers as a single subject manifests itself in its bodily and historical dimensions.

54 …according to Paul, the Church is in no wise a separate subject endowed with its own subsistence. The new subject is much rather "Christ" himself, and the Church is nothing but the space of this new unitary subject, which is, therefore, much more than mere social interaction.

56 For theology, in the strict sense of the word, is an exclusively Christian phenomenon, which has no exact equivalent in other religions. … Thus, faith concerns what we must do to attain the rectitude of our being. … Whereas myth, whether in Greece or India, does no more than multiply images of the truth, which for its part always remains incomprehensible, faith in Christ, as it is expressed int its basic assertions, is never interchangeable. … analogy is not the same as metaphor. … In this sense, rationality belongs to the essence of Christianity in a way which the other religions do not claim for themselves.

57 …theology is based upon a new beginning in thought which is not the product of our own reflection but has its origin in the encounter with a Word which always precedes us.

59 Conversion… is delivery into the pattern of doctrine…, or… entrance into the "we" of the Church. … "There is no 'easy access' to God. In contrast to the pretension of the autonomous search for God, … he is the unknown God, who 'dwells in unapproachable light' (I Tim 6:16)."
––R. Guardini, Berichte über mein Leben, 71ff.

60 The one who became flesh has remained flesh. He is concrete. … Obedience to the Church is the concreteness of our obedience. The Church is that new and greater subject in which past and present, subject and object come into contact. The Church is our contemporaneity with Christ: there is no other.

61 Faith is always a participation in a totality and, precisely in this way, conducts the believer to a new breadth of freedom.

62 [The claim that the pastoral office of the Church teaches to the faithful but not to theologians] merely rehashes that division between psychics and gnostics. … [The faith of "babes" in Mt 11:25] establish Christianity as a popular religion, as a religious creed without any two-caste system. … life itself is no hypothesis.
––cf. R. Spaemann, "Die christliche Religion und das Ende des modernen Bewußtseins", in IKZ Communio 8 (1979): 251–270.

65 …the [historical-critical] dismemberment of the Bible has led to a new variety of allegorism [vis-à-vis the Scriptures as mere allegories for the early Church's actual status/aims]

68 The highest ranking good, for which the Church bears responsibility, is the faith of the simple.

79 The reorientation of the idea of truth toward praxis, which occurred under the influence of the Frankfurt school and of the entire neo-Marxist movement, called the old [historicist] positivism thoroughly into question. … Truth is thus no longer excluded but produced by a method of praxis.

80 In the last analysis, the concept of a theology in which praxis has succeeded to the truth makes no provision for pluralism at all, just as little, in fact, as does the Marxist conception of itself. … there can be only one option, that is, only one praxis and, consequently, only one theory to serve it as well. In the long run, the renunciation of truth has no power to liberate. On the contrary, its final result is uniformity.

81 …the Church is not a state. … Pluralism in the interplay of Church, politics and society is a fundamental value for Christianity. It arose from the teachings of Christianity, which inculcates the relative value of all political and social achievements by shifting theocracy, the consummated form of God's rule and reign, into the eschaton.

83–85 the patristic concept of symphonia was four-fold [nach den Vätern]: 1) the unity of the OT and NT, "a structure enriched by manifold tensions"; 2) the unity of Christians with one another; 3) the unity of men with God; 4) man's oneness with himself in Christo.

86 … just as Christ is not half but wholly present, the Church is wholly present wherever he is. … The unity of the universal Church is in this sense an inner moment of the local church.

87 … the monarchical episcopate should rather be termed the principle of personal responsibility. The Church becomes tangible and answerable in real persons; these persons cannot make decisions arbitrarily but only insofar as they are bound in conscience to the faith of the universal Church. … The papal primacy has no real place if it finds no counterpart on the preceding levels––the personal responsibility of a bishop, which this latter cannot delegate to a conference, however important this institution may be to concretize his link to the whole body.

89 …the universal Church could be active in the local church only, and in this fashion contribute to a pluralistic, though ultimately unified, pastoral effort, only if there was a bond to a concrete, theologically grounded organ of the universal Church, the office of Peter.

90 Only the universal Church is capable of safeguarding the distinction of the particular churches from the state and society.

91 …Albert Görres… speaks of a "Hinduization" of the faith, "in which faith propositions no longer matter because the important thing is contact with a spiritual atmosphere which leads beyond everything that can be said."
––A. Görres, "Glaubensgewißheit in einer pluralistischen Welt", in IKZ 12 (1983): 129.

92 …faith… furnishes him [man] with a knowledge which alone makes sense of everything else which he knows.

93 Faith and theology differ in the same way as text and interpretation. Unity rests in faith, while theology is the domain of plurality.

94 The "I believe" of the Creed refers, not to some private "I", but rather to the corporate "I" of the Church. Faith is possible in the measure that I become one with this corporate "I", which does not abolish my own "I" but broadens it out and, in this way, brings it to itself for the first time.

95 The tendency to search for what is most ancient and original behind present developments is the logical conclusion of the loss of the binding element which holds history together and unifies it in the midst of its contradictions. Theology becomes archeaology….

96 …natural science… has achieved its greatest successes thanks, not to a free-floating creativity, but to the strictest adhesion to its object.

97 …pluralism happens, not when we make it the object of our desire, but when everyone wants the truth with all his power and in his own epoch. … The truth is never monotonous….

103 Faith reveals to us that eternal reason is the ground of all things or, put in other terms, that things are reasonable from the ground up.

104 …two roots of theology in the Church. The first is the dynamism toward truth and understanding inherent in the faith; the second is the dynamism of love, which desires to know the beloved more intimately.

112–113 More important than the concept of infallibility is therefore that of auctoritas, which, nevertheless, has well-nigh disappeared from our thought. Yet in reality it can never be wholly absent, because it represents a basic presupposition of community life. What would be the result if from now on the state were to enact as universally binding norm only what can be considered the infallibly correct solution to a given problem?

Wisdom from…

ATHANSIUS OF SINAI: The legacy of the saints

Even while the saints seemed to be with us they were not so in reality, for their minds were turned to God. They lived on earth as citizens of heaven. Having here no lasting city, they sought the heavenly one; having no earthly riches, they sought the riches of heaven. They were strangers and sojourners as their ancestors were. Strangers to the world, to the things of the world, and to the ways of the world, their whole hearts were absorbed in the things of heaven; these were the things they thought about and were concerned about. They longed for the beauty of heaven, its mansions and dwellings, its choirs and hymnody, its feasts and its eternal blessedness.

The saints contemplated, sought, and hastened toward these things, and so at last they attained them. Their striving was rewarded by admission to the heavenly bridal chamber. Because they labored they now exult. Because they were not negligent they now rejoice. Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints.
(Sermon: PG 89, 1192-1193.)

Do Purgatory now or do it later. God's call to glory is common for all Christians, but our response to the fire of glory is often delayed postmortem. Even then, however, God's burning love does not abandon us, but purifies us from our last worldly entanglements and weights, that we stay erect and free in eternity.

Athanasius of Sinai, known for his theological writings, was the patriarch of Antioch.

ST. AUGUSTINE: Vocations in a Monastery

Although good order reigns in my household, I am human and I live among humans. I would not dare to say that my home is better than the community of the Lord Christ, in which eleven faithful souls put up with the faithless thief Judas. Yet with great difficulty have I met persons better than those who have made progress in the monastery.
-- Letter 78, 8-9

Prayer. Thanks be to Him Who is desired before he is seen, whose presence is felt, and who is hoped for in the future.
-- Sermon 24, 1

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES:

Remember to keep in mind that all the past is nothing and that every day we should say with David, "Now I begin to love my God." To work, to exhaust oneself for God, is love. Therefore, apply everything to this love––eating, drinking, repose. Be very devoted to Saint Louis and admire his great constancy in loving.
(Letters 334; O. XII, pp. 367-368)

G. K. CHESTERTON:

THERE are only three things in the world that women do not understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
('What's Wrong with the World.')

ST. THOMAS D'AQUINO:

[I]n the name of the divine Mercy, I have the confidence to embark upon the work of a wise man, even though this may surpass my powers, and I have set myself the task of making known, as far as my limited powers will allow, the truth that the Catholic faith professes, and of setting aside the errors that are opposed to it. …

To proceed against individual errors, however, is a difficult business, and this for two reasons. In the first place, it is difficult because the sacrilegious remarks of individual men who have erred are not so well known to us so that we may use what they say as the basis of proceeding to a refutation of their errors. This is, indeed, the method that the ancient Doctors of the Church used in the refutation of the errors of the Gentiles. For they could know the positions taken by the Gentiles since they themselves had been Gentiles, or at least had lived among the Gentiles and had been instructed in their teaching.

In the second place, it is difficult because some of them, such as the Mohammedans and the pagans, do not agree with us in accepting the authority of any Scripture, by which they may be convinced of their error. Thus, against the Jews we are able to argue by means of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue by means of the New Testament. But the Muslims and the pagans accept neither the one nor the other. We must, therefore, have recourse to the natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent. However, it is true, in divine matters the natural reason has its failings.
(Summa Contra Gentiles I, 2)

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