Quotes

Tertullian

2008-02-21T00:25:00.001-05:00

The soul, then, we define to be sprung from the breath of God, immortal, possessing body, having form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature, developing its power in various ways, free in its determinations, subject to be changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal soul).

Ante-Nicene Fathers, On the Soul, XII

Søren Kierkegaard

2008-01-24T15:39:00.000-05:00

This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life. It is not merely in isolated moments that I, as Spinoza says, view everything aeterno modo, but I am continually aeterno modo. Many believe they, too, are this when after doing one thing or another they unite or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity does not lie behind either/or but before it. Their eternity will therefore also be a painful temporal sequence, since they will have a double regret on which to live.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 54

Philo Judaeus

2007-12-13T17:15:00.000-05:00

So then after all the other things, as has been said before, Moses says that man was made in the image and likeness of God. And he says well; for nothing that is born on the earth is more resembling God than man. And let no one think that he is able to judge of this likeness from the characters of the body: for neither is God a being with the form of a man, nor is the human body like the form of God; but the resemblance is spoken of with reference to the most important part of the soul, namely, the mind: for the mind which exists in each individual has been created after the likeness of that one mind which is in the universe as its primitive model, being in some sort the God of that body which carries it about and bears its image within it. In the same rank that the great Governor occupies in the universal world, that same as it seems does the mind occupy in man; for it is invisible, though it sees everything itself; and it has an essence which is undiscernable, though it can discern the essences of all other things...

"On the Creation of the World," The Essential Philo, New York: Shocken Books, 1971, 19-20

Victor Hugo

2007-12-12T12:38:00.000-05:00

All the features traced by providence on the surface of a nation have their sombre but distinct counterpart in the depths, and every stirring in the depths produces a tremor on the surface. True history being a composite of all things, the true historian must concern himself with all things. Mankind is not a circle with a single centre but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Les Misérables, London: Penguin Books, 1976, IV, 7, i, 1217

Tertullian

2007-12-09T01:17:00.000-05:00

Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your conception. Whatever you think, there is a word; whatever you conceive, there is reason. You must needs speak it in your mind; and while you are speaking, you admit speech as an interlocutor with you, involved in which there is this very reason, whereby, while in thought you are holding converse with your word, you are (by reciprocal action) producing thought by means of that converse with your word. Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech, and through which also, (by reciprocity of process, ) in uttering speech you generate thought. The word is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness even you are regarded as being, inasmuch as He has reason within Himself even while He is silent, and involved in that Reason His Word! I may therefore without rashness first lay this down (as a fixed principle) that even then before the creation of the universe God was not alone, since He had within Himself both Reason, and, inherent in Reason, His Word, which He made second to Himself by agitating it within Himself.

Against Praxeas, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III, V

Aristotle

2007-12-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

Another line of thought was that they observed that all nature around us undergoes change. So a fortiori nothing true could be said about that what was changing at all points in all ways. It was from the seed-bed of such thinking that there flowered the most extreme of the views we went through above. This is the position of those who approrpiated the legacy of Heraclitus, notably of Cratylus. His mature position was that speech of any kind was radically inappropriate and that expression should be restricted exclusively to the movement of the fingre. He was appalled that Heraclitus had claimed that you could not step twice into the same river. In his, Cratylus', opinion it was already going far too far to admit stepping into the same river once.

The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred, London: Penguin Books, 101

Karl Marx

2007-12-02T17:41:00.000-05:00

My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human being, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real wold is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, no the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

"Capital," quoted in Karl Marx: selected writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: University Press, 2007, 457

Saint Augustine

2007-12-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

All that I have said about the light of the mind is made clear by that same light. By it I know that what I have said is true, and that I know that I know it. I know that that light has extension neither in space nor in time. I know that I cannot know unless I am alive, and I know more certainly that by knowing I attain a richer life. Eternal life surpasses temporal life in vivacity, and only by knowing do I get a glimpse of what eternity is. By looking at eternity with the mind's eye I remove from it all changeableness, and in eternity I see no temporal duration, for periods of time are constituted by the movements, past or future, of things. In eternity there is neither past nor future. What is past has ceased to be, and what is future has not yet begin to be. Eternity is ever the same. It never "was" in the sense that it is not now, and it never "will be" in the sense that it is not yet. Wherefore, eternity also could have said to the human mind "I am what I am." And of eternity alone could it be truly said: "He who is hath sent me" (Ex. 3:14).

Of True Religion, Chicago: Henry Regenry Compnay, 1953, 92-3

Saint Augustine

2007-12-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

Accordingly, there is nothing of what we call evil, if there be nothing good. But a good which is wholly without evil is a perfect good. A good, on the other hand, which contains evil is a faulty or imperfect good; and there can be no evil where there is no good. From all this we arrive at the curious result: that since every being, so far as it is a being, is good, when we say that a faulty being is an evil being, we just seem to say that what is good is evil, and that nothing but what is good can be evil, seeing that every being is good, and that no evil can exist except in a being. Nothing, then, can be evil except something which is good. And although this, when stated, seems to be a contradiction, yet the strictness of reasoning leaves us no escape from the conclusion. We must, however, beware of incurring the prophetic condemnation: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness of light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." And yet our Lord says, "An evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil. Now, what is an evil man but an evil being? for a man is a being. Now, if a man is a good thing because he is a being, what is an evil man but an evil good? Yet when we accurately distinguish between these two things, we find that it is not because he is a man that he is an evil, or because he is wicked that he is a good; but that he is a good because he is a man, and an evil because he is wicked. Whoever, then, says, "To be a man is an evil," or, "To be wicked is a good," falls under the prophetic denunciation: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil!" For he condemsn the work of God, which is the man, and praises the defect of man, which is the wickedness. Therefore every being, even if it be a defective one, in so far as it is a being is good, and in so far as it is defective is evil.

The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1961, 13-4

Saint Augustine

2007-12-02T11:15:00.000-05:00

Accordingly, in the case of these contraries which we call good and evil, the rule of the logicians, that two contraries cannot be predicated at the same time of the same thing, does not hold. No weather is at the same time dark and bright: no food or drink is at the same time sweet and bitter: no body is at the same time and in the same black and white: none is at the same time and in the same place deformed and beautiful. And this is found to hold in regard to many, indeed nearly all, contraries, that they cannot exist at the same time in any one thing. But although no one can doubt that good and evil are contraries, not only can they exist at the same time, but evil cannot exist without good, or in anything that is not good. Good, however, can exist without evil.For a man or an angel can exist without being wicked; but nothing ca be wicked except a man or an angel: and so far as he is a man or an angel, he is good; so far as he is wicked, he is an evil. For a man or an angel can exist without evil. And these two contraries are so far co-existent, that if good did not exist in what is evil, neither could evil exist; because corruption could not have either a place to dwell in, or a source to spring from, if there were nothing that could be corrupted; and nothing can be corrupted except what is good, for corruption is nothing else but the destruction of good.

The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1961, 15-6

G.K. Chesterton

2007-11-25T15:58:00.000-05:00

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough suff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probablity of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The cave-man may have been no better than the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short there details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them; but unfortunately I have never been able to find it.

The Everlasting Man, Collected Works, Volume II, San Francisco, CA.: Ignatius, 1986, 160

G.K. Chesterton

2007-11-25T15:54:00.002-05:00

And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final act of faith fixes a man's mind because it satisfies his mind. But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot...They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey gadiations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of the gods, it is not the daylight of men.

The Everlasting Man, Collected Works, Volume II, San Francisco, CA.: Ignatius, 1986, 147

Miguel de Cervantes

2007-11-22T01:15:00.000-05:00

"History is like a sacred thing; it must be truthful, and wherever truth is, there God is; but despite this, there are some who write and toss off books as if they were fritters."

Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman, New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2005, 479

Miguel de Cervantes

2007-11-22T00:10:00.000-05:00

"It seems to me," said Don Quixote, "there is no human history in the world that does not have its ups and downs, especially those that deal with chivalry; they cannot be filled with nothing but successful exploits."

"Even so," responded the bachelor, "some people who have read the history say they would have been pleased it its authors had forgotten about some of the infinite beatings given to Señor Don Quixote in various encounters."

"That's where the truth of the history comes in," said Sancho.

"They also could have could have kept quiet about them for the sake of fairness," said Don Quixote, "because the actions that do not change or alter the truth of history do not need to be written if they belittle the hero. By my faith, Aeneas was not as pious as Virgil depicts him, or Ulysses as prudent as Homer depicts him."

"That is true," replied Sansón, "but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth."

Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman, New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2005, 476

Hans Küng

2007-11-21T23:13:00.000-05:00

In his Philosophy of World History>, Hegel intended to give not only a highly concise and impressively profound interpretation of world history, but also an essentially Christian one. We are obliged to acknowledge this fact, whatever we may make of the concrete realisation of Hegel's intentions. To buttress his contention 'that the modern philosophy of history corresponds to the biblical faith in a fulfillment and that it ends with the secularisation of its examplar', K. Lowith was moved to chart a line of development which led backwards as follows: Burckhardt - Marx - Hegel - Proudhon, Comte, Turgot, Condorcet - Voltaire - Vico - Bossuet - Joachim of Fiore - Augustine - Orosius. The same author has alleged: 'In other words, the history of the world is to Hegel a history B.C. to A.D. not incidentally or conventionally but essentially. Only on this presupposition of the Christian religion as the absolute truth could Hegel construct universal history systematically, from China up to the French Revolution. He is the last philosopher of history because he is the last philosopher whose immense historical sense was still restrained and disciplined by the Christian tradition. In our modern universal historics and historical maps, the Christian time-reckoning has become an empty frame of reference, accepted conventionally like other means of measurement and applied to a material multitude of cultures and religions that has no center of meaning from which these cultures and religions could be organized, as they were from Augustine to Hegel. What distinguishes Hegel from Augustine in principle is that Hegel interprets the Christian religion in terms of speculative reason, and providence as "cunning reason".'

The Incarnation of God, T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1999, 330-1

G.W.F. Hegel

2007-11-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

'I surrender myself to the Infinite,
I am in it, I am everything, I am it alone.'

"Eleusis," quoted in Hans Kung, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Thought as a Prolegomena to a Future Christology, Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1970, 102

Miguel de Cervantes

2007-11-16T21:32:00.000-05:00

Along this rough and difficult road that I have described, they stumble and fall, pick themselves up and fall again, until they reach the academic title they desire; once this is acquired and they have passed through these shoals, these Scyllas and Charybdises, as if carried on the wings of good fortune, we have seen many who command and govern the world from a chair, their hunger turned into a full belly, their cold into comfort, their nakedness into finery, and their straw mat into linen and damask sheets, the just reward for their virtue. But their hardships, measured against and compared to those of a soldier and warrior, fall far behind, as I shall relate to you now.

Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman, New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2005, 330

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-11-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

Time passes, life is a stream, people say, and so on. I haven't noticed it. Time stands still and I with it. All plans I form fly straight back at me, when I want to spit in my own face.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, London: Penguin Books, 1992

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-11-16T21:28:00.000-05:00

Alas, the door of fortune does not open inwards so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outwards and so there is nothing one can do.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 45

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-11-16T21:17:00.000-05:00

My philosophy has, therefore, the advantage of brevity and irrefutability. For if anyone were to contradict it I would surely be justified in pronoucing him insane. Philosophy, then, is constantly aeterno modo and does not have, like blessed Sintenis, just single hours which are lived for eternity.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 55

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-11-16T21:12:00.000-05:00

So it isn't I who am master of my life, I am just one of the threads to be woven into life's calico! Well, then, even if I cannot spin, I can at least cut the thread in two [...]

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 49

Virgil

2007-11-15T15:24:00.000-05:00

But Helenus' commands, his warning stood:
No steering between Scylla and Charybdis,
That channel so near death on either side.

The Aeneid trans. Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Random House; Vintage Books, 1990, III.904-6; 90

Virgil

2007-11-15T15:20:00.000-05:00

I sing of warfare and a man at war.
From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fuguitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air--behind them
Balefule Juno in her sleepless rage.

The Aeneid trans. Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Random House; Vintage Books, 1990, I.1-8; 3

Leopold von Ranke

2007-11-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

Often a certain conflict has been observed between an immature philosophy and history. By way of a priori thinking, conclusions were drawn about what must be. What being aware that such ideas are exposed to many doubts, men went about trying to find these ideas again in the history of the world. Out of the infinite number of facts those were then chosen which seemed to confirm these ideas. This kind of historical writing has also been called philosophy of history.

Tertullian

2007-10-28T09:02:00.000-04:00

(4) No one denies--because everyone knows what nature of its own accord tells us--that God is the Creator of the universe, and that this universe is good and has been made over to man by its Creator. (5) But because they have no real knowledge of God--knowing Him only by natural law and not by right of friendship, knowing Him only from afar and not from intimate association--it is inevitable that they prove ignorant of His commands regarding the use of His creation. Likewise, must they be unaware of the rival power that by its hostile actions seeks to pervert to wrong uses the things of divine creation. For with such defective knowledge of God one cannot know either His will or His adversary.

Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral, and Ascetical Works, The Fathers of the Church, V. 40, New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959, 50

Donald R. Kelly

2007-10-27T23:46:00.001-04:00

What is history? For the past two thousand years few literate men would have had difficulty in giving an answer. History is the memory of human words and deeds without which, as Cicero put it, men would remain forever children.

Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, 2

Donald R. Kelly

2007-10-27T23:41:00.000-04:00

"AMONG THE APHORISMS of the ancients...the most remarkable was that of Chilion, on of the seven sages...: Know theyself. Now this knowledge depends upon history, sacred as well as profane, universal as well as particular." So wrote a learned French jurist of the sixteenth century...Implicitly, the observation offers the basis for a more profound conception of man. It represents him not merely as a creature with certain unique attributes but as a creator, learning as well as living in time.

Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, 1

Tertullian

2007-10-27T22:25:00.000-04:00

The Apostle, also, writing to the Ephesians, says that God hath purposed in Himself, in the dispensation of the fullness of time, to draw back all things in Christ to the head--that is, to the beginning--that are in Heaven and on earth in Him. In this same way the Lord applied to Himself to Greek letters, the first and the last, as figures of the beginning and the end which are united in himself. For just as Alpha continues on until it reaches Omega and Omega completes the cycle back again to Alpha, so He meant to show us that in Him is found the course of all things from the beginning to the end and from the end back to the beginning, so that every divine dispensation should end in Him through whom it first began, that is, in the Word of God made flesh. Accordingly, it should also end in the selfsame manner in which it first began.

...

Just as the beginning carries us on to the end, as Alpha to Omega, and the end returns us once more to the beginning, as Omega does to Alpha, so our own beginning carries us on to Christ, and the animal ends in the spiritual. For what is first is not spiritual. Rather, the animal is first and only then the spiritual. If this is true, then let us see whether this second origin does not place the self-same obligation upon you as the first. Let us see whether the Second Adam does not present Himself to you in the same condition as the first. And so indeed He does, since the Second Adam, Christ, was wholly disengaged from marriage, even as was the first before his exile. This more perfect Adam, Christ--more perfect because more pure--having in the flesh to set your infirmity an example, presents Himself to you in the flesh, if you will but receive Him, as a man entirely virginal. If, however, you are not equal to this perfection, He presents Himself to you in the spirit as a model of monogamy: He has one spouse, the Church, as prefigured by Adam and Eve.

Monogamy 6, Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, To His Wife, An Exhortation to Chastity, Monogamy, trans. William P. Le Saint, S.J., S.T.D., Ancient Christian Writers, V. 13, New York: Newman Press, 1951, 78-80

C.S. Lewis

2007-05-25T14:21:00.000-04:00

Time is the very lens through which ye se—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourself parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through an inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freeom… Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time’s lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the reality of her choice?

The Great Divorce, in The Complete C.S. Lewis, San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 2002, 539.

Saint Augustine

2007-05-25T00:15:00.000-04:00

I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is, and a further confess to you, Lord, that as I say this I know myself to be conditioned by time. For a long period already I have been speaking about time, and that long period can only be an interval of time. So how do I know this, when I do not know what time is? Perhaps what I do not know is how to articulate what I do know. My condition is not good if I do not even know what it is I do not know. See, my God, ‘before you I do not lie’ (Gal. 1:21). As I speak, so is my heart. You, Lord, ‘will light my lamp’. Lord, my God, ‘you will lighten my darknesses’ (Ps. 17:29).

Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: University Press, 1998, XI, xxv (32), 239

Leopold von Ranke

2007-04-29T22:42:00.000-04:00

History is no criminal court.

The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on The Art and Science of History, ed. and trans., Roger Wines, New York: Fordham University Press, 1981, 255

G.W.F. Hegel

2007-04-29T22:38:00.000-04:00

Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Philosophy of Right, "Introduction"

Job

2007-04-29T22:29:00.000-04:00

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Gird up your loins like a man;
I will question you, and you
declare to me.
Will you even put me in the
wrong?
Will you condemn me that you
may be justified?
Have you an arm like God,
and can you thunder with a
voice like his?

Job 40:6-9, NRSV

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-04-29T22:26:00.000-04:00

But this God became transparent and intelligible to himself inside the Hegelian craniums and has already ascended all possible dialectical steps of his becoming up to that self-revelation: so that for Hegel the apex and terminus of world history coincided in his own Berlin existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980, 47

Leopold von Ranke

2007-04-29T22:23:00.000-04:00

To look at the world, past and present, to absorb it into my being as far as my powers will enable me; to draw out and appropriate all that is beautiful and great, to see with unbiased eyes the progress of universal history, and in this spirit to produce beautiful and noble works; imagine what happiness it would be for me if I could realize this ideal, even in a small degree.

The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on The Art and Science of History, ed. and trans., Roger Wines, New York: Fordham University Press, 1981, 259

Leopold von Ranke

2007-04-29T22:22:00.000-04:00

In all of history God dwells, lives, is to be found. Every deed testifies to Him; every instant preaches His name, but above all, I think, the great interactions of history. He stands there like a holy hieroglyph, perceived only in its outlines and preserved lest it be lost from the sight of future centuries.

The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on The Art and Science of History, ed. and trans., Roger Wines, New York: Fordham University Press, 1981, 241

Saint Augustine

2007-04-29T22:20:00.000-04:00

N.T. Wright

2007-04-22T18:08:00.000-04:00

And when the cynic reminds us that people fall off crags, get lost after sunset, and are drowned by waves and eaten by lions; when the cynic cautions that faces get old and lined and forms get pudgy and sick--then we Christians do not declare that it was all a mistake. We do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape but expecting to be repaired.

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, San Francisco: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006, 46

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-22T17:58:00.000-04:00

The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’.

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 279

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-22T17:57:00.000-04:00

Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being it Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. “Fallenness” into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiousity, and ambiguity.

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 220

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-22T17:55:00.000-04:00

Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death.

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 426

C.S. Lewis

2007-04-22T14:05:00.000-04:00

In the second place, I think Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda--they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental--and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

The Abolition of Man, The Complete C.S. Lewis, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002, 699

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-20T17:33:00.000-04:00

Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities, yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis.

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 62

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-20T17:31:00.000-04:00

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguishable by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being--a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 32

C.S. Lewis

2007-04-20T17:26:00.000-04:00

I think all Chistians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity sems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with that we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eye can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.

Mere Christianity, The Complete C.S. Lewis, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002, 122-3

C.S. Lewis

2007-04-18T20:03:00.000-04:00

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I means the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Mere Christianity, The Complete C.S. Lewis, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002, 50

C.S. Lewis

2007-04-18T19:58:00.000-04:00

But surely the reason we do not excute witches is that we do not believe that are such things. If we did--if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather--surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

Mere Christianity, The Complete C.S. Lewis, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002, 22-3

Christopher Dawson

2007-04-18T13:57:00.000-04:00

In Nietzsche's view this crisis could only be overcome by the discovery of a new spiritual aim which could create new values and give a new meaning to life. This aim could not be found in humanity itself. For in spite of Nietzsche's humanism he realized that Man was not an end, but the way to an end. If the old religious faith was dead, and the old philosophic and moral idealisms had become hollow abstractions, man could only escape from spiritual destruction by finding a new goal beyond humanity. Here Nietzsche was at one with Christians whom he condemned. His thesis is essentially a religious one, and he saw far more clearly than most of his Christian contemporaries that the crisis of Western civilization was neither political nor economic but essentially spiritual--a crisis in the soul of Western man. On the other hand, his attempt to provide a solution to the problem by the gospel of the Superman and the Will to Power is even more fallacious and irreligious than any of the solutions propounded by the socialists or the secular humanitarians and had a most disastrous influence on European, and particularly on German, thought in the early twentieth century. For what is the Superman but a distorted shadow of the heroic ideal cast on the abyss by the setting sun of humanist culture? And what is Nietzsche's Will to Power but the prevalent moral disease of modern culture in an exaggerated form?

Understanding Europe, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952, 219

Walter M. Miller Jr.

2007-04-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

His certainty of his vocation had not been broken, but only slightly bent, by the scorching adminstered to him by the aboot, and by the thought of the cat who became an ornithologist when called by Nature to become an ornithophage. The thought made him unhappy enough to permit him to be overcome by temptation, so that, on Palm Sunday, with only six days of starvation remaining until the end of Lent, Prior Cheroki heard heard Francis (or from the shriveled and sun-scorched residumm of Francis, wherein the soul remained somehow encyster) a few brief croaks which constituted what was probably the most succinct confession that Francis ever made or Cheroki ever heard:

"Bless me, Father; I ate a lizard."

Prior Cheroki, having for many years been confessor to fasting penitents, found that custom had, with him, as with a fabled gravedigger, given it all "a property of easiness," so that he replied with perfect equanimity and not even a blink: "Was it an abstinence day, and was it artificially prepared?"

A Canticle for Leibowitz, New York: Bantam Books, 1997, 58-9

William Chester Jordan

2007-04-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

Out of this desperate situation arose the first great sequence of events that would mark the crusade - in the crusaders' mind at least - as undeniably God's work. Visionaries among the beseiged claimed to have received comfort and inspiration personally from Jesus. The Blessed Virgin's appearance was reported, as were the appearances of St Andrew and St Peter. And, miracle of all miracles, thanks to a poor peasant, a lance was found under the floor of the Cathedral of Antioch which was said to be, though not everyone at first credited the tale, the lace with which the centurion had stabbed the dead Christ on the Cross (John 19:34). The Holy Lance, regarded as a relic, was interpreted as a sign for the crusaders to abandon the relative safety of Antioch's defences and confront the Turks directly. On 28 June, they did just that. Completely surprised and unnerved by the crusaders' daring, the Turks fled. Equally surprised at the failure of the Muslim army, the citadel garrison, which until that moment had courageously held out, also surrendered to the crusaders. Antioch, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians, was now entirely in crusader hands.

Europe in the High Middle Ages, London: Penguin Books, 2002, 109

John MacQuarrie

2007-04-16T19:46:00.000-04:00

The central place which Heidegger gives to temporality in his analysis implies that his philosophy is a secular one, in the strictest sense of the word "secular". Yet although the existent is constituted by temporality and although his life is one of care, terminated by death, he is not simply "in time". In so far as he transcends the "now" and attains to genuine selfhood, he is realizing a kind of "eternal life" in the midst of time.

Martin Heidegger, Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1969, 35

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-04-16T14:54:00.000-04:00

Quite correct. And no human being can come further than that. No human being is able to say, of his own and by himself, what sin is, for sin is the very thing he is in. All his talk about sin is at bottom a glossing over of sin, an excuse, a sinful extenuation. For this reason, Christianity begins in another way, by saying that for man to learn what sin is there must be a revelation from God, that sin does not consist in man's not having understood what is right, but in his not wanting to understand it, and in his unwillingness to do what is right.

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by ANTI-CLIMACUS, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 127

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-04-16T14:51:00.000-04:00

And the very same thing is really the whole secret of modern philosophy. For what it say is this: cogito ergo sum [I think there I am], to think is to be. (I Christian terms, on the other hand, it goes, "As thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee', or 'As thou believest, so art thou'; to believe is to be.)

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by ANTI-CLIMACUS, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 125-6

Fredric Jameson

2007-04-16T13:53:00.000-04:00

After the end of history, what? No further beginnings being foreseen, it can only be the end of something else. But modernism already ended some time ago and with it, presumably, time itself, as it was widely rumored that space was supposed to replace time in the general ontological scheme of things. At the very least, time had become a nonperson and people stopped writing about it. The novelists and poets gave it up under the entirely plausible assumption that it had been largely covered by Proust, Mann, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot and offered few further chances of literary advancement. The philosophers also dropped it on the grounds that although Bergson remained a dead letter, Heidegger was still publishing a posthumous volume a year on the topic. And as for the mountain of secondary literature in both disciplines, to scale it once again seemed a rather old-fashioned thing to do with your life. Was aber war die Zeit?

What is time? A secret-insubstantial and omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time, if there were no motion? No motion, if there were no time? What a question! Is time a function of space? Or vice versa? Or are the two identical? An even bigger question! Time is active, by nature it is much like a verb, it both "ripens" and "brings forth." And what does it bring forth? Change! Now is not then, here is not there-for in both cases motion lies in between. But since we measure time by a circular motion closed in on itself, we could just as easily say that its motion and change are rest and stagnation-for the then is constantly repeated in the now, the there in the here. . . .

"The End of Temporality," Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003): 695-718, at 695

Walter M. Miller Jr.

2007-04-15T16:49:00.000-04:00

Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible--that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and they human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, New York: Bantam Books, 1997, 145-6

William Chester Jordan

2007-04-15T16:42:00.000-04:00

Recently this picture has been criticized as idealized or even as a more or less deliberate distortion on the narrative of pre-Reconquest Spanish history by liberal and anti-clerical scholars writing in the modern period. Hating what Spain was preceived to have become - a priest-ridden, racialist, and economically and politically backward society when elsewhere in Europe 'Enlightenment' came to prevail - many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars imagined a time when the Church had little power, pureness of Christian blood or lineage was irrelevant and work and play among people of all faiths made for a prosperous and forward-looking society. But if convivencia of this sort is a myth, it remains true that the great fissures among the three religious communities in Spain were accompanied by less violence than we have come to associate with the late Middle Ages when the peninsula returned to more or less full Christian political domination.

Europe in the High Middle Ages, London: Penguin Books, 2002, 24

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-04-14T17:50:00.000-04:00

The reserved despairer lives on horis successivis [hour after hour], in hours which if not lived for eternity still have something to do with the eternal, occupied as he is with his self's relation to itself. But really he comes no further. When it is done, after the longing for solitude has been satisfied, it is then as though he goes outside--even when he goes into his wife and family or invovles himself in their affairs. Aside fom his good-nature and sense of duty, what makes him so gentle a husband, so solicituous a father, is the confession he has made to himself, in the inner recesses of his reserve, about his weakness.

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by ANTI-CLIMACUS, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 95-6

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-04-14T17:46:00.000-04:00

No, being in error is, quite un-Socratically, what people are least afraid of. One sees amazing examples of this which illustrate it on a stupendous scale. A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc.--and if one then turns attention to his personal life one discovers to one's astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor's quarters. If one took it upon oneself to draw attention but a single word of this contradiction, he would be insulted. For so long as he can complete the system--with the help of this error--being in error is not what he is afraid of.

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by ANTI-CLIMACUS, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 74

Walter M. Miller Jr.

2007-04-14T13:05:00.000-04:00

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of way such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: 'Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m'Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought."

But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.

Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, New York: Bantam Books, 1997, 62

Søren Kierkegaard

2007-04-13T23:47:00.000-04:00

However much it eludes the despairer, however much (as must be the case with the kind of despair which is ignorance of being in despair) the despairer has succeeded altogether losing his self, and in such a way that the loss is not in the least way noticeable, eternity will nevertheless make it evident that his condition is that of despair, and will nail him to his self so that the torment will still be that he cannot be rid of his self, and it will be evident that his success was an illusion. And this eternity must do, because having a self, being a self, is the greatest, the infinite, concession that has been made to man, but also eternity's claim on him.

The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by ANTI-CLIMACUS, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 51

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-04-13T20:12:00.000-04:00

That as men of the "historical sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed:--we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant--but with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful." Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works of men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to good taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, and with compulsion the small, short, and happy godsends and glorifications of human life as they shine here and there: those moments and marvellous experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,--when a super-abundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by a sudden checking and petrifying, by standing firmly and and planting oneself fixedly on still trembling ground. Proportionateness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern, we semi-barbarians--and are only in our highest bliss when we--are in most danger.

Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1997, 92-3

Ecclesiastes

2007-04-13T01:34:00.000-04:00

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun— all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Ecclesiastes 9.7-10, NIV

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-04-13T01:26:00.000-04:00

This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners', the Chandala within Judaism to oppose the ruling order - in language which, if the Gospels are to be trusted, would even today lead to Siberia - was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society. This is what brought him to the Cross: the proof is the inscription on the Cross. he died for his guilt - all ground is lacking for the assertion, however often it is made, taht he died for the guilt of others.-

The Anti-Christ, 151-2, in Twilight of Idols and The Anti-Christ, London: Penguin Books, 2003

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-04-13T01:13:00.000-04:00

24. In order to look for beginners one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards.

Twlight of Idols, 35, in Twilight of Idols and The Anti-Christ, London: Penguin Books, 2003London: Penguin Books, 2003

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-04-13T01:09:00.000-04:00

What justifies man is his reality--it will justify him eternally. How much more valuable an actual man is compared with any sort of merely desired, dreamed of, odious lie of a man? with any sort of ideal man?...And it is only the ideal man who offends the philosopher's taste.

Twlight of Idols, 96, in Twilight of Idols and The Anti-Christ, London: Penguin Books, 2003

Saint Augustine

2007-04-13T01:06:00.000-04:00

Our likeness to God cannot be holy if we wish to be like Him in such a way as to rest in ourselves from our works as He rested in himself from His work. For we must rest in an immutable God, that is, in Him who made us. This will be our most exalted state of rest, a truly holy state, free from all pride. Just as He rested from all His works because He Himself, and not His works, is His good and the source of His happiness, so we must hope that we shall find rest only Him from all works, whether ours or His; and this is what we must desire after our good works, which, though taking place in us, we recognize as His.

The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol. I; Books 1-6, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., New York: Newman Press, 1982, 4.17 (29), 122-3

Saint Augustine

2007-04-05T00:50:00.000-04:00

The true Mediator you showed to humanity in your secret mercy. You sent him so that from his example they should learn humility. He is ‘the mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ’ (I Tim. 2:5). He appeared among mortal sinners as the immortal righteous one, mortal like humanity, righteous like God. Because the wages of righteousness are life and peace (Rom. 6:23), being united with God by his righteousness he made void the death of justified sinners, a death which it was his will to share in common with them. He was made known to the ancient saints so that they could be saved through faith by his future passion, just as we are saved through faith in his passion now that it is past.

Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: UP, 1998, X.xxxiv (53), 210

Saint Augustine

2007-04-05T00:46:00.000-04:00

Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery, my God, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature? It is characterized by diversity, by life of many forms, utterly immeasurable. See the broad plains and caves and caverns of my memory. The varieties there cannot be counted, and are, beyond any reckoning, full of innumerable things…I run through all these things, I fly here and there, and penetrate their working as far as I can. But I never reach the end. So great is the power of memory, so great is the force of life in human beings whose life is mortal. What then ought I to do, my God? You are my true life. I will transcend even this my power which is called memory. I will rise beyond it to move towards, you sweet light.

Confessions, , trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: UP, 1998, X.xvii (26), 194

R.A. Markus

2007-04-05T00:42:00.000-04:00

Only the two ‘cities’ are in the relevant sense ‘unmixed’--but in their historical existence they can never be discerned in their unmixed state. This invisibility of the presense of eschatological categories in historical realities is the foundation of Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. In order to insist on the ultimate eschatological ambivalence of all empirical human groupings and institutions Augustine had to by-pass their collective, institutional character, and to break them down (though with the rider that this could never in fact be carried out with assignable named individuals) into terms of individuals with their personal loyalties to different, and very mixed, ultimate values.

Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, Cambridge: University Press, 1970,, 151

Martin Heidegger

2007-04-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

...the ek-sistence of historical man begins at the moment when the first thinker takes a questioning stand with regard to the unconcealment of beings by asking: what are being? In this question unconcealment is experienced for the first time. Being as a whole reveals itself as physis, "nature," which here does not yet mean a particular sphere of being but rather beings as such as a whole, specifically in the sense of emerging presence (aufgehendes Anwesen). History begins only when beings themselves are expressly drawn up into their unconcealment and conserved in it, only when this conservation is conceived on the basis of questioning regarding beings as such. The primordial disclosure of beings as a whole, the question concerning beings as such, and the beginnings of Western history are the same; they occur together in a "time" which, itself unmeasurable, first opens up the open region for every measure.

"On The Essence of Truth", in Truth Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, eds. Jose Medina and David Wood, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 250

Isaiah

2007-03-31T23:25:00.000-04:00

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David's throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty
will accomplish this.

Isaiah 9:6-7, NIV

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-03-31T23:15:00.000-04:00

But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?

Innocent is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.

Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: its own will, willeth now the spirit; his own world winneth the world's outcast.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999, 14

Friedrich Nietzsche

2007-03-30T19:21:00.000-04:00

XV The Thousand and One Goals

Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and bad of many peoples. No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than good and bad.

No people could live with first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbour valueth.

Much that passed for good with one people was regarded with scorn and contempt by another: thus I found it. Much found I here called bad, which was there decked with purple honours.

Never did the one neighbour understand the other: ever did his soul marvel at his neighbour's delusion and wickedness.

A table of excellencies hangeth over every people. Lo! it is the table of their triumphs; lo! it is the voice of their Will to Power.

...

Older is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the ego: and as long as the good conscience is for the herd, the bad conscience only saith: ego.

Verily, the crafty ego, the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of the many--it is not the origin of the herd, but its ruin.

...

A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking the one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal.

But pray tell me, my brethren, if the goal of humanity be still lacking, is there not also still lacking--humanity itself?--

Thus spake Zarathustra.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999, 36-8

Paul Ricoeur

2007-03-24T21:23:00.000-04:00

This philosophical place is Da-sein, the name given to "this being which we ourselves in each case are" (6). Is it man? No, if by man we designate a being undifferentiated with regard to being; yes, if this being emerges out of its indifference and understands itself as that being who is concerned about its very being (10).

Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer, Chicago: University Press, 2006, 354

Herni Daniel-Rops

2007-03-24T21:18:00.000-04:00

...the child of Israel, upon coming of age, must understand that he belongs to a community.

Furthermore he has a duty, one which the community requires of him: but is it no more than a duty? 'A young man is like a colt that whinnies,' says the Talmud again, 'he paces up and down, he grooms himself with care: this is because he is looking for a wife.' The realistic rabbi to whom the observation is due adds, "But once married, he resembles an ass, quite loaded down with burdens'.

Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, London: Pheonix Press, 1988, 114

Paul Johnson

2007-03-22T20:31:00.000-04:00

There was, it is true, a pacifist movement within the Church as well. But this, paradoxically, was canalized to reinforce the idea of sanctified violence. The motive behind it was to protect innocent peasants from the aimless brutality of competing lords...Various oaths were taken by landowners at public assemblies, while the priests and congregations shouted 'Peace, peace, peace'. Leagues of peace were organized, and every male of fifteen or over asked to swear to take up arms against peace-breakers. But mobs of peasants interpreted the campaign as a license to smash castles, and after one such incident were massacred, 700 clerics with them. Throughout the eleventh century the Church tried to keep the peace movement alive, but the popes eventually surrendered to the temptation to divert what they regarded as the incorrigible bellicosity of western society into crusades against the infidel.

A History of Christianity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976, 242

Paul Johnson

2007-03-22T19:47:00.000-04:00

In many cases the Church found that most efficient returns could be secured by settling manors with coloni, peasant tenant-farmers. In this way the Church led the move away from slavery, and hopelessly unproductive slave-farming. It had never opposed slavery root and branch, while always urging that manumission was meritorious. What the monastery showed was that slavery was economically unnecessary - indeed, undesirable. Of course close supervision was needed: the St. Germain records show that the closer the estate lay to Paris the more effectively it was worked. So branch houses were set up further alfield; and often these in turn expanded into major houses and so began a new cycle of growth.

A History of Christianity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976, 149

Bob Sweetman

2007-03-20T22:57:00.000-04:00

But if Scripture does not enable us to overcome all our fallen disabilities much less our created limitations, does not therefore allow us would-be consumers to “have it all”, it does work with divine power in a most miraculous way. It reconstitutes part to be wholes, i.e., strange partialities capable of entertaining the wondrous presence of the All-in-All. There has, of course, been a grave fracturing of reality consequent upon the Fall, a fracturing linguistic and perspectival, social, political and personal. Nevertheless, redemption impregnates the resultant fragments with a sacramental virtue powerful enough to raise the very dead. Consequently, divine power reconstitutes the fragments of our fallen world into things capable of sustaining faith in hope, things capable of bearing the weight of Love actively present in our broken lives, in our broken science, in as well as in spite of fragmentation.

"Of Tall Tales and Small Stories: Postmodern 'Fragmatics' and the Christian Historian," Fides et Historia 28.2, 1996, 68

Christopher Dawson

2007-03-20T22:55:00.000-04:00

[E]ach age has its own peculiar vocation which can never be replaced, and each, to paraphrase Ranke’s famous saying, stands in direct relation to God and answers to Him alone for its achievements and its failures. Each too bears its own irreplaceable witness to the faith of all.

“The Six Ages of the Church,” Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998, 45

Christopher Dawson

2007-03-20T22:53:00.000-04:00

The process of reducing the unintelligible multiplicity and heterogeneity of the sensible world to order and unity is co-extensive with the history of humanity. It is never completed since there is an irreducible element that escapes the utmost efforts of science and philosophy…

Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001, 69

Christopher Dawson

2007-03-20T22:51:00.000-04:00

If, therefore, I have had to follow my own line of studies and plow a lone furrow for thirty-five years, it is not because I could afford to dispense with the help of others, but simply because the study to which I have devoted myself — the study of Christian culture — has no place in education or in university studies.

quoted in Daniel Callahan; Mildred Horton; Francis Rogers; Bernard Swain; George H. Williams, “Christopher Dawson: 12 Oct. 1889-25 May 1970,” Harvard Theological Review 66.2 (1973): 161-176, at 161

Christopher Dawson

2007-03-20T22:49:00.000-04:00

The Kingdom of God appears in the Gospel as at once a fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of the restoration of Israel, and as a new world order which would renew heaven and earth, but it was also a new life, a transforming leaven, a seed in the heart of man. And the source of the new order was found, not in a mythological figure, like the Savoir Gods of the mystery religions, nor in an abstract cosmic principle, but in the historical personality of Jesus, the crucified Nazarene. For Christianity taught that in Jesus a new principle of divine life had entered the human race and the natural world by which mankind is raised to a higher order. Christ is the head of this restored humanity, the firstborn of the new creation, and the Church consists in the progressive extension of the Incarnation by the gradual incorporation of mankind into this higher unity. Hence the Absolute and the Finite, the Eternal and the Temporal, God and the World were no longer conceived as two exclusive and opposed orders of being standing over against one another in mutual isolation. The two orders interpenetrated one another, and even the lower world of matter and sense was capable of becoming the vehicle and channel of the divine life.

Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001, 124

Saint Augustine

2007-03-20T22:42:00.000-04:00

As it is, there is one road, and one only, well secured against all possibility of going astray; and this road is provided by one who is himself both God and man. As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way.

The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books, 2003, XI.2, 431

Saint Augustine

2007-03-20T22:40:00.002-04:00

But I am struggling to return from this far country (Lk 15:13) by the road he has made in the humanity of the divinity of his only Son; and changeable though I am, I breathe in his truth the more deeply, the more clearly I perceive there is nothing changeable about it…”

The Trinity; de Trinitate, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P (New York: New York City Press, 1991), IV.Pro.1, 153

Saint Augustine

2007-03-20T22:40:00.001-04:00

Since, therefore, we must enjoy to the full that truth which lives unchangeably, and since, within it, God the Trinity, the author and creator of everything, takes thought for things that he has created, our minds must be purified so that they are able to perceive that light and then hold fast to it. Let us consider this process of cleansing as a trek, or a voyage, to our homeland; though progress towards the one who is ever present is not made through space, but through integrity of purpose and character. This we would be unable to do, if wisdom itself had not deigned to adapt itself to our great weakness and offered us a pattern for living; and it has actually done so in human form because we too are human. But because we act wisely when we come to wisdom, wisdom has been thought by arrogant people to have somehow acted foolishly when it came to us… But ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men’ [I Cor. 1:25] So although it is actually our homeland, it has also made itself the road to our homeland.

On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green, Oxford: University Press, 1997, I.10 (22-3), 13

Saint Augustine

2007-03-20T22:39:00.001-04:00

Rational creatures find their most perfect nourishment, so to speak, in the Word. And, though the human soul is rational, it was held captive by the bonds of death as a penalty for sin, debased to the point that it must toil to grasp things invisible by inferences drawn from things visible. This Food of rational creatures has been made visible to our eyes, not by any change in His nature, but by putting on our nature, that He may recall us from the pursuit of visible things to His divine nature which is invisible to our eyes. In this way the soul discovers the outward lowliness of Him whom it had inwardly abandoned in its pride, and by imitating the visible example of His humility, the soul will return to the heights of things invisible.

The Free Choice of the Will, III.10 (30), in The Teacher; The Free Choice of the Will; Grace and Free Will, trans. Robert P. Russell, O.S.A The Fathers of the Church V. 59, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968, 194

Saint Augustine

2007-03-20T22:37:00.000-04:00

[I]f anyone reads this work and says, ‘I understand what is being said, but it is not true,’ he is at liberty to affirm his own conviction as much as he likes and refute mine if he can. If he succeeds in doing so charitably and truthfully, and also take the trouble to let me know (if I am still alive), then that will be the choicest plum that could fall to me from these labors of mine.

Saint Augustine, The Trinity; de Trinitate, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P, New York: New York City Press, 1991, I.1 (5), 68.

Martin Heidegger

2007-01-18T14:03:00.000-05:00

The way which we have so far pursued in the analytic of Dasein has led us to a concrete demonstration of the thesis which was put forward just casually at the beginning--that the entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is the farthest. The reason for this lies in care itself. Our Being alongside the things with which we concern ourselves most closely in the 'world'--a Being which is falling--guides the everyday way in which Dasein in interpreted, and covers up ontically Dasein's authentic Being, so that the ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis. Therefore the primordial way in which this entity is presented as a phenomenon is anything but obvious, if even ontology proximally follows the course of the everyday interpretation of Dasein. The laying-bare of Dasein's primordial Being must rather be wrested from Dasein by following the opposite course from that taken by the falling ontico-ontological tendency of interpretation.

from Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 359

Martin Heidegger

2007-01-17T22:10:00.000-05:00

What gets taken as a sign becomes assessible only through its readiness-to-hand. If, for instance, the south wind 'is accepted' ["gilt"] by the farmer as a sign of rain, then this 'acceptance' ["Geltung"]--or the 'value' with which the entity is 'invested'--is not a sort of bonus over and above what is already present-at-hand in itself--viz, the flow of air in a definite geographical direction. The south wind may be meteorologically assessible as something which just occurs; but it is never present-at-hand proximally in such a way as this, only occassionally taking over the function of a warning signal. On the contrary, only by the circumspection with which one takes account of things in farming, is the south wind discovered in its Being.

from Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 111-2

Michel Foucault

2007-01-13T22:19:00.000-05:00

What came into being with Adam Smith, with the first philologists, with Jussieu, Vicq d'Azyr, or Lamarck, is a minuscule but absolutely essential displacemment, which toppled the whole of the Western thought: representation has lost the power to provide a foundation - with its own being, with its own deployment and its power of doubling over on itself - for the links that can join its various elements together. No composition, no decomposition, no analysis into identities and differences can now justify the connection of representations one to another; order, the table in which it is spatialized, the adjacencies it defines, the successions it authorizes as so many possible routes between the points on its surface - none of these is any longer in a position to link representations or the elements of particular representations together...

Representation is in the process of losing its power to define the mode of being common to things and to knowledge. The very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself.

from The Order of Things, New York: Routledge, 2002, 259-60

Christopher Dawson

2007-01-13T22:04:00.000-05:00

[T]he range of man’s rational activity is bounded on the one hand by the depth of his unconscious mind and on the other by the transcendent element in external reality. And this element of transcendence is a primordial element in human experience. Man is born into a world that has not made, that he cannot understand and on which his existence is dependent.

from Religion and Culture, New York: Meridian Books, 1965, 29

Bernard Lonergan, S.J.

2007-01-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

Thus, if for brevity's sake we denote the various operations on the four levels by the principle occurrence on that level, we may speak of the operations as experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. These operations are both conscious and intentional. But what is conscious, can be intended. To apply the operations as intentional to the operations as conscious is a fourfold matter of (1) experiencing one's experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding, (2) understanding the unity and relations of one's experienced experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding, (3) affirming the reality of one's experienced and undstood experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding, and (4) deciding to operate in accord with the norms immanent in the spontaneous relatedness of one's experienced, understood, affirmed experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding.

from Method in Theology, Toronto: UP, 2003, 14-5

Michel Foucault

2007-01-10T00:39:00.000-05:00

But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is vain that we attempt to show by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achiece their splendor is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax. And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents.

from The Order of Things, New York: Routledge, 2002, 10

Saint Augustine

2007-01-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

Your will, which is identical with your self, has made all things by a choice which in no sense manifests change or the emergence of anything not present before. You did not make the creation out of yourself in your own likenes, the form of all things but out of nothing, which is a formless dissimilarity to you, though, nevertheless, given form through your likeness. So it returns to you, the One, according to the appointed capacity granted to each entity according to its genus. And all things are very good, whether they abide close to your or, in the graded hierarchy of being, stand further away from you in time and space, in beautiful modification which they either actively cause or passively receive. To the limited extent that they can grasp the light of your truth in this life those who see these things rejoice.

from Confessions, Oxford: UP, 1998, xxviii(38); 267-8

Saint Augustine

2007-01-08T21:34:00.000-05:00

Nor are any times or created thing coeternal with you, even if there is an order of creation which transcends time.

from Confessions, Oxford: UP, 1998, xxx(40); 244

Saint Augustine

2007-01-08T21:26:00.000-05:00

But how does this future, which does not yet exist, diminish or become consumed? Or how does the past, which now has no being, grow, unless there are three processes in the mind which in this is the active agent? For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers. Who therefore can deny that the future does not exist? Yet already in the mind there is an expectation of the future. Who can deny that the past does not now exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of the past. none can deny that present time lacks any extension because it passes in a flash. Yet attention is continuous, and it is through this that what will be present progresses towards being absent. So the future, which does not exist, is not a long period of time. A long future is a long expectation of the future. And the past, which has no existence, is not a long period of time. A long psat is a long memory of the past.

from Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: UP, 1998, xxviii(37); 243

Paul Johnson

2007-01-08T03:16:00.000-05:00

All this made him an influential individual. As he became known, he held his court, like a famous rabbi, and people came to see him from long distances. What made him the founder of a movement, however, was his creativity. He was responsible for two new institutions. The first was his revival of the ancient concept of the zaddik, or superior human being - superior because of his special capacity to adhere to God. The idea was as old as Noah. But the Ba'al Shem Tov gave him a special role. With the apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi, messianism had become discredited. The Besht had no time for Frankism or any messianic sect which moved away from Jewish monotheism. As he put it, 'The Shekinah wails and says that as long as a limb is attached to the body there is hope of a cure. But when it is severed it cannot be restored, and every Jew is a limb of the Shekinah.' So he had no intention of travelling down the road to severance. But he recognized that the vanished Messiah had left a hole in Jewish hearts. He filled it by reviving the zaddik, who (he taught) descends from the heights, rather like God's grace and mercy. The zaddik, in Ba'al Shem Tov's teaching, was not a messiah, but not quite like an ordinary human being either - somewhere between the two. Moreover, since the zaddik did not claim a messianic role, there could be many of them. Thus a new kind of religious personality arose, to perpetuate and spread the movement.

from A History of the Jews, New York: Harper Perennial, 1987, 296

Paul Johnson

2007-01-08T03:11:00.000-05:00

Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. Maimonides disapproved of this anthropomorphic nonsense but he agreed with the notion of the world to come being an abstract version of a heavenly academy. He would have agreed, too, with Judah's practical injunctions that a man should never kneel on a big folio to fasten its clasps, or use pens as bookmarks, or employ the books themselves as missiles or instruments to chastise scholars - and with his splendid maxim: 'A man should have regard to the honour of his books.' Temperate in all things save learning, Maimonides had a passion for books, which he wished all Jews to share.

form A History of the Jews, New York: Harper Perennial, 1987, 190

Paul Johnson

2007-01-08T03:05:00.000-05:00

There is a further contradiction. How can man be made in God's image, if the image of God is unimaginable, and therefore forbidden? Yet the idea of man as conceived in the divine image is as central to that religion as the ban on idols. In a way, it is the foundation of its morality, being an enormously comprehensive principle. As man is in God's image, he belongs to God; the concept helps man to grasp that he does not possess real and permanent ownership even over himself, let alone over anything else he receives from God's bounty. His body is a leasehold; he is answerale to God for what he does to and with it. But the principle also means that the body - man - must be treated with respect and even dignity. Man has inalienable rights. Indeed, the Mosaic cod is a code not only of obligations and prohibitions but also, in embryonic form, of rights.

from A History of the Jews, New York: Harper Perennial, 1987 ,40

Herman Dooyeweerd

2007-01-04T21:31:00.000-05:00

For the problem of the "totality of reality" to be susceptible of philosophical solution, it must be understood as an epistemological problem. Philosophy does not deal with reality as "mere reality", but with the problem of the knowledge of reality. It seeks to understand the theoretical values which are not really, but which hold good and which lead the knowledge of reality so that this latter thereby acquires anchorage and coherence. The philosophical problems of reality, in other words, are to be understood only as question of the theory of knowledge, as theoretical problems of meaning and value. Theoretical philosophy of reality is an epistemology. It wants to interpret the meaning of knowledge and this is possible only on the basis of values

from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1969, I, 131