Theologians from France

"Christ has a cosmic body that extends throughout the universe."

"The future is more beautiful than all the pasts."

"Science will, in all probability, be increasingly impregnated by mysticism."

"I am far from denying the destructive and disintegrating forces of passion. I will go so far as to agree that apart from the reproductive function, men have hitherto used love, on the whole, as an instrument of self-corruption and intoxication. But what do these excesses prove? Because fire consumes and electricity can kill are we to stop using them? The feminine is the most formidable of the forces of matter. True enough. "Very well, then," say the moralists, "we must avoid it." "Not at all," I reply, "we take hold of it." In every domain of the real (physical, affective, intellectual) "danger" is a sign of power. Only a mountain can create a terrifying drop. The customary education of the Christian conscience tends to make us confuse tutiorism with prudence, safety with truth. Avoiding the risk of transgression has become more important to us than carrying a difficult position for God. And it is this that is killing us. "The more dangerous a thing, the more is its conquest ordained by life": it is from that conviction that the modern world has emerged; and from that our religion, too, must be reborn."

"The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. Beyond the vibrations with which we are familiar, the rainbow-like range of its colours is still in full growth. But, for all the fascination that the lower shades have for us, it is only towards the "ultra" that the creation of light advances. It is in these invisible and, we might almost say, immaterial zones that we can look for true initiation into unity. The depths we attribute to matter are no more than the reflection of the peaks of spirit."

"What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

"There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. ... Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis."

"The reality of spirit-matter is inevitably translated into and confirmed by a structure of the spirit."

"Through the incarnation God descended into nature in order to super-animate and take it back to him."

"Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World. The scandal for you, is that England and France should have come to this tragedy because they have sincerely tried the road of peace. But did they not precisely make a mistake on the true meaning of "peace"? Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST. ... The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. ... Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world. It is easy to criticize and despise the fifth column. But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column."

"We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole."

"Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love."

"I can truly say — and this in virtue of the whole structure of my thought — that I now feel more indissolubly bound to the hierarchical Church and to the Christ of the Gospel than ever before in my life. Never has Christ seemed to me more real, more personal or more immense."

"Since once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world. Receive, O Lord, in its totality the Host which creation, drawn by your magnetism, presents to you at the dawn of a new day. This bread, our effort, is in itself, I know, nothing but an immense disintegration. This wine, our anguish, as yet, alas! is only an evaporating beverage. But in the depths of this inchoate Mass you have placed — I am certain, for I feel it — an irresistible and holy desire that moves us all, the impious as well as the faithful to cry out: "O Lord, make us one!""

"Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation"

"This soul can only be a conspiracy of individuals"

"If THIS book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a... theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise."

"This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but... with the whole pheneomenon..."

"The degree of concentration of a consciousness varies in inverse ratio to the simplicity of the material compound... Spiritual perfection (or conscious 'centreity') and material synthesis (or complexity) are but two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon."

"In sum, all the rest of this essay will be nothing but the story of the struggle in the universe between the unified multiple and the unorganized multitude: the full application of great Law of complexity and consciousness: a law that... implies a psychically convergent structure and curvature of the world."

"There is no concept more familiar... than... spiritual energy, yet there is none... more opaque scientifically."

"Nowhere... is the need more urgent of building a bridge between the... the physical and the moral..."

"To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul, in a coherent manner: science has provisionally decided to ignore the question... caught up as we are here in the logic of a system where the within of things has just as much or... more value than their without... we must advance."

"Sometimes we need bread, sometimes wine, sometimes a tonic or a hormone injection, sometimes the stimulation of a colour, sometimes the magic of a sound which goes in at our ears as a vibration and reaches our brains in the form of inspiration. ...[T]here is something through which material and spiritual energy hold together and are complementary. ...[T]here must be a single energy operating in the world. ...[T]he 'soul' must be ...a focal point of transformation ...[F]orces of bodies converge, to become interiorised and sublimated in beauty and truth. ...Yet, ...direct transformation of one of these two energies into the other... has to be abandoned. As... we try to couple them... their mutual independence becomes as clear as their interrelation."

"To the cosmic corpuscles we should find it natural to attribute an individual radius of action as limited as their dimensions. We find, on the contrary, that each of them can only be defined by virtue of its influence on all around it. Whatever space we suppose it to be in, each cosmic element radiates in it and entirely fills it. However narrowly the heart of an atom may be circumscribed, its realm is co-extensive, at least potentially, with that of every other atom. This strange property we will come across again, even in the human molecule."

"[W]e realise... the fact and... reason for the diversity of animal behaviour. From the moment we regard evolution as... psychical transformation, we see... a multitude of forms of instincts each corresponding to a... solution of the problem of life. The 'psychical' make-up of an insect is not and cannot be that of a vertebrate ; nor can... [that] of a squirrel be that of a cat or... elephant: this in virtue of the position[s]... on the tree of life. ...[W]e begin to see ...a gradation formed. If instinct is a variable dimension, the instincts will... create, beneath their complexity, a growing system. They will form as a whole a... fan-like structure in which the higher terms on each nervure are recognised... by a greater range of choice and depending on a better defined centre of coordination and consciousness. ...The 'psychical' make-up of a dog... is... superior to that of a mole or a fish. ...[T]he upholders of the spiritual explanation have no need to be disconcerted when they see... in the higher animals (particularly in the great apes) ways and reactions which strangely recall... 'a reasoning soul'. If the story of life is no more than a movement of consciousness veiled by morphology, it is inevitable that... in the proximity of man, the 'psychical' make-ups seem to reach the borders of intelligence."

"When water is heated to boiling... and one goes on heating it, the first thing that follows—without change of temperature—is a tumultuous expansion of freed and vaporised molecules. Or, taking a series of sections from the base towards the summit of a cone, their area decreases constantly; then suddenly, with another infinitesimal displacement, the surface vanishes leaving us with a point. Thus... we are able to imagine the mechanism involved in the critical threshold of reflection. ...[N]ervous systems followed pari passu the process of increased complication and concentration. Finally, with the primates, an instrument was fashioned so remarkably supple and rich that the step immediately following could not take place without the whole animal psychism being... recast and consolidated on itself. ...When the anthropoid... had been brought 'mentally' to boiling point.... Or... had almost reached the summit of the cone, a final effort took place along the axis. ...What was previously only a centred surface became a centre. By a tiny 'tangential' increase, the 'radial' was turned back on itself and... took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution... consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously... was capable of perceiving itself... for the first time."

"Those who adopt the spiritual explanation are right when they defend... a... transcendence of man over the rest of nature. But neither are the materialists wrong when they maintain that man is just one further term in a series of animal forms. Here, as in so many cases, the two antithetical kinds of evidences are resolved in a movement... to the highly natural... 'change of state'. From the cell to the thinking animal, as from the atom to the cell, a single process (a psychical kindling or concentration) goes on without interruption... in the same direction. But by virtue of this permanence in the operation, it is inevitable... that certain leaps... transform the subject of the operation."

"Discontinuity in continuity: that is how... the birth of thought, like that of life, presents... and defines itself."

"A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the 'thinking layer', which, since its germination at the end of the period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the ."

"Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow."

"If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level—indeed in the molecule itself—it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being."

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth."

"A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love."

"The radical defect in all forms of belief in progress, as they are expressed in positivist credos, is that they do not definitely eliminate death. What is the use of detecting a focus of any sort in the van of evolution if that focus can and must one day disintegrate? To satisfy the ultimate requirements of our action, Omega must be independent of the collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven."

"Actuality, irreversibility. ...Omega ...is discovered ...at the end ...[I]n it the movement culminates. Yet... under this evolutive facet Omega still only reveals half of itself. While being the last term of its series, it is also outside all series. ...If by its very nature it did not escape from time and space which it gathers together, it would not be Omega."

"Autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and... transcendence are the four attributes of Omega. In this way... we... enclose the energy-complex of our universe. ...Contrary to the appearances still admitted by physics, the Great Stability is not at the bottom in the infra-elementary sphere, but at the top in the ultra-synthetic sphere. ...[E]ntirely by its tangential envelope ...the world goes on dissipating itself in a chance way into matter. By its radial nucleus it finds its shape and... consistency in gravitating against the tide of probability towards a divine focus of mind which draws it onward. Thus something in the cosmos escapes from entropy, and does so more and more."

"However convergent it be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through a point of dissociation. With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the event which comes nearer with every day that passes: the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon of man."

"Noogenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. ...[T]he closer association of the grains of thought; the synthesis of individuals and of nations or races; the need of an autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary personalities... in an atmosphere of active sympathy. ...[A]ll this results from the combined action of two curvatures—the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of mind—in conformity with the law of complexity and consciousness."

"Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfillment of the spirit of the earth. The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the , which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality. The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega."

"Are we to foresee man seeking to fullfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? ... Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other."

"The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe."

"As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal"."

"At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord."

"God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action."

"By virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here is profane for those who know how to see."

"Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas."

"We are like soldiers who fall during the assault which leads to peace."

"In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it."

"All the communions of a life-time are one communion. All the communions of all men now living are one communion. All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion."

"A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up? Whence does it come? Whither is it going? No man knows."

"The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres."

"In the "Alexandrian" explanation described above, the multiple from which evolution emerges is both secondary and sinful from its origin: it represents in fact (an idea that smacks of Manicheanism and the Hindu metaphysical systems) broken and pulverized unity. Starting from a very much more modern and completely different point of view, let us assert, as our original postulate, that, the multiple (that is, non-being, if taken in the pure state) being the only rational form of a creatable (creabile) nothingness, the creative act is comprehensible only as a gradual process of arrangement and unification, which amounts to accepting that to create is to unite. And, indeed, there is nothing to prevent our holding that union creates. To the objection that union presupposes already existing elements, I shall answer that physics has just shown us (in the case of mass) that experientially (and for all the protests of "common sense") the moving object exists only as the product of its motion."

"In its most general form and from the point of view of physics, love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world, centre to centre. This is how it has been understood by the great philosophers from Plato, the poet, to Nicolas of Cusa and other representatives of frigid scholasticism. Once this definition has been accepted, it gives rise to a series of important consequences. Love is power of producing inter-centric relationship. It is present, therefore (at least in a rudimentary state), in all the natural centres, living and pre-living, which make up the world; and it represents, too, the most profound, most direct, and most creative form of inter-action that it is possible to conceive between those centres. Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis."

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

"Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God."

"The astonishing resonance of his research, as well as the brilliance of his personality and richness of his thinking, have profoundly marked our epoch. In him, a powerful poetic intuition of nature's profound value, a sharp perception of creation's dynanism, and a broad vision of the world's future join together with an incontestable religious fervor. Similarly, his unremitting desire to dialogue with the science of his time and his bold optimism about the evolution of the world have given his intuitions — through the rich variety of his words and the magic of his images — considerable influence. Completely turned to the future, this synthesis, often lyrical and animated with passion for the universal, will help to restore hope to those assailed by doubts. ... What our contemporaries will undoubtedly remember, beyond the difficulties of conception and deficiencies of expression in this audacious attempt to reach a synthesis, is the testimomy of the coherent life of a man possessed by Christ in the depths of his soul. He was concerned with honoring both faith and reason, and anticipated the response to John Paul II's appeal: "Be not afraid, open, open wide to Christ the doors of the immense domains of culture, civilization, and progress.""

"In his own poetic style, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin liked to meditate on the Eucharist as the firstfruits of the new creation. In an essay called The Monstrance he describes how, kneeling in prayer, he had a sensation that the Host was beginning to grow until at last, through its mysterious expansion, "the whole world had become incandescent, had itself become like a single giant Host." Although it would probably be incorrect to imagine that the universe will eventually be transubstantiated, Teilhard correctly identified the connection between the Eucharist and the final glorification of the cosmos."

"In every age, said scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, man has proclaimed himself at a turning point in history. " And to a certain extent, as he is advancing on a rising spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated and is thus particularly justified." Teilhard prophesied the phenomenon central to this book: a conspiracy of men and women whose new perspective would trigger a critical contagion of change. Throughout history virtually all efforts to remake society began by altering its outward form and organization."

"There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on Earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot," a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunate species that we call homo sapiens — the "evolutionary goof." Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, "There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth." In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all."

"It can be said that he applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect and his great spiritual faith to the concept of building up a philosophy that would reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution, that would relate the facts of religious experience to those of natural science. The Phenomenon of Man is Pierre Teilhard's most important book and contains the quintessence of his thought. Its subject could be described as the surging evolution of the world from the primal stuff of the universe, through life, to consciousness and man."

"Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."

"What Teilhard seems to be trying to say is that evolution is often (he says always) accompanied by an increase of orderliness or internal coherence or degree of integration. In what sense is the fertilized egg that develops into an adult human being 'higher' than, say, a bacterial cell? In the sense that it contains richer and more complicated genetical instructions for the execution of those processes that together constitute development. Thus Teilhard's radial, spiritual or psychic energy may be equated to 'information'... in the sense... made... precise by modern communication engineers. To equate it to consciousness, or to regard degree of consciousness as a measure of information content, is one of the silly little metaphysical conceits... Teilhard's belief, enthusiastically shared by Sir Julian Huxley, that evolution flouts or foils the second law of thermodynamics is based on a confusion of thought; and the idea that evolution has a main track or privileged axis is unsupported by scientific evidence."

"You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenom of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist-helped to discover Peking man-and also a man of God. I don't suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things."

"It must be regarded as an important service of Teilhard de Chardin's that he rethought these ideas from the angle of the modern view of the world and, in spite of a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach, nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly and in any case made them accessible once again. Let us listen to his own words: The human monad “can only be absolutely itself by ceasing to be alone”. In the background is the idea that in the cosmos, alongside the two orders or classes of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, there is a third order, which determines the real drift of evolution, namely, the order of the infinitely complex. It is the real goal of the ascending process of growth or becoming; it reaches a first peak in the genesis of living things and then continues to advance to those highly complex creations that give the cosmos a new center: “Imperceptible and accidental as the position they hold may be in the history of the heavenly bodies, in the last analysis the planets are nothing less than the vital points of the universe. It is through them that the axis now runs, on them is henceforth concentrated the main effort of an evolution aiming principally at the production of large molecules.” The examination of the world by the dynamic criterion of complexity thus signifies “a complete inversion of values. A reversal of the perspective... This leads to a further passage in Teilhard de Chardin that is worth quoting in order to give at least some indication here, by means of a few fragmentary excerpts, of his general outlook. "The Universal Energy must be a Thinking Energy if it is not to be less highly evolved than the ends animated by its action. And consequently ... the attributes of cosmic value with which it is surrounded in our modern eyes do not affect in the slightest the necessity obliging us to recognize in it a transcendent form of Personality.""

"And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same — divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its “fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological “fullness”. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”"

"Hardly anyone else has tried to bring together the knowl­edge of Christ and the idea of evolution as the scientist (paleontologist) and theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., has done. … His fascinating vision … has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together. … These brief references to Teilhard cannot do justice to his efforts. The fascination which Teilhard de Chardin exer­cised for an entire generation stemmed from his radical man­ner of looking at science and Christian faith together."

"Man occupies a special place in the Cartesian scheme. He alone is endowed with mind. Descartes believed that animals did not possess one, that they were simply extremely complicated automatons. Other thinkers have rejected this point of view and proposed to endow all matter in the universe — living or inanimate — with consciousness. This "panpsychism" has been promoted by, among others, Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently by the British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who holds that mind is present in every particle of matter."

"The supernatural dignity of one who has been baptized rests, we know, on the natural dignity of man, though it surpasses it in an infinite degree.[…] Thus the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race.[…] Was it not shown […] in Genesis where it was taught that God made man in his own image? For the divine image does not differ from one individual to another: in all it is the same image.[…] Whence comes the notion, so beloved of Augustinianism, of one spiritual family intended to form the one city of God."

"The Church, without being exactly co-extensive with the Mystical Body, is not adequately distinct from it. For this reason it is natural that between her and it—as within the Mystical Body itself between the head and the members—there should arise a kind of exchange of idioms: Corpus Christi quod est ecclesia. "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." [Acts 9:5] "He who beholds the Church", says Gregory of Nyssa, "really beholds Christ.""

"In the interests of refuting such chaotic concepts as those which see a divine Church only in a "Church of the saints", an entirely invisible society which is nothing but a pure abstraction, we must not fall into the contrary error. The Church "in so far as visible" is also an abstraction, and our faith should never make separate what God from the beginning has joined together: […] in ecclesiology just as […] in Christology, […] dissociation of the divine and the human […] is fatal. If necessary, the experience of Protestantism should serve us as sufficient warning. Having stripped it of all its mystical attributes, it acknowledged in the visible Church a mere secular institution; as a matter of course it abandoned it to the patronage of the state and sought a refuge for the spiritual life in an invisible Church, its concept of which had evaporated into an abstract ideal."

"Christian tradition has always looked on heaven under the analogy of a city. Coelestis urbs Jerusalem.[…] It is a city compact like a single house; a close-knit society, gathered like one family under a singe roof […] but at the same time extended to the uttermost.[…] Among those who are received within this heavenly city there is a more intimate relationship than subsists among the members of a human society, for among them there is not only outward harmony, but true unity […], the very consummation of unity, both the image and the result of the unity of the Divine Persons among themselves.[…] The Christian mysticism of unity is trinitarian. The likeness, which in every created soul must be the completion of the divine Image, is not that of a Spinozist God; it is that of a God of Love, of the God whose being is Love."

"Christianity, by those doctrinal aspects that we have just emphasized as well as by others, brought something absolutely new into the world. Its concept of salvation is not merely novel in comparison with that of those religions in existence at the time of its birth. It is a unique phenomenon in the religious history of mankind.For what do we witness outside Christianity whenever a religious movement rises above the domain of sense and effectively transcends the limit of nationality? In every case, though appearances may differ considerably, the basis is the same—an individualist doctrine of escape. It was this that inspired ancient mysticism, whether it sought to escape the vicissitudes of the sub-lunary world or to pass over the outer circle of the cosmos and to penetrate into the realm of intelligible Essences or even beyond."

"Flight, Escape: that in fact was Plato's dictum regarding the soul that acknowledges in itself a principle superior to the world. Plotinus, in his turn, recommended to his disciple the "flight of the alone to the Alone", and then Porphyry expiates on the setting free and the withdrawal of the soul. The same terms may be encountered in the religious philosophies of India.[…] With the Buddhist, too, it is the same act of negation, whether he denies the existence of the world or believes in the reality of his present wretchedness; and he who practises charity to a degree that sometimes reaches the sublime in the last resort relinquishes even that. Asanga, the great mystical doctor of the Mahâyâna, when he starts to map out the path of his bodhisattva's ascent from "world" to "world" until he reaches the very highest state, which is that of Nirvâna, as a matter of course describes it as a whole series of evasions: niryàna; so much so that it has been said that Buddhism's only God is Escape."

"The moral value of the different systems varies very considerably. So does their spiritual depth; but in this connection the achievements of Greek thought, though it reached a very high level, cannot be compared with the heights of Indian thought. Sometimes understanding is imprisoned in myth, and sometimes it is turned inwards in pure reflexion—or what seems to be. Yet running all through these many differences there is always agreement about the basis of the problem and its presuppositions: the world from which escape must be sought is meaningless, and the humanity that must be outstripped is without a history."

"Outside Christianity humanity can doubtless be raised in an exceptional manner to certain spiritual heights, and it is our duty—one that is perhaps too often neglected—to explore these heights that we may give praise to the God of mercies for them: Christian pity for unbelievers, which is never the fruit of scorn, can sometimes be born of admiration. But the topmost summit is never reached, and there is risk of being the further off from it by mistaking for it some other outlying peak. This is a fact noticed by many missionaries. It is often more difficult—though in the last resort more worthwhile—to bring to the fullness of truth souls whom a relatively more developed religion has stamped with its mark. A critical judgement, not of individual souls—for their precise situation in relation to the Kingdom is never known save to God alone—but of objective systems as found in a society and as offering material for rational examination, shows that there is some essential factor missing from every religious "invention" that is not a following of Christ.[…] Outside Christianity all is not necessarily corrupt; far from it,[…] but what does not remain puerile is always in danger of going astray, or, however high it climbs, of ultimate collapse. Outside Christianity nothing attains its end, that only end, towards which, unknowingly, all human desires, all human endeavours, are in movement: the embrace of God in Christ."

"It becomes increasingly clear that […] the Christian's watchword can no longer be "escape" but "collaboration". He must co-operate with God and men in God's work in the world and among humanity."

"No one has the right to say with Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?" [Gen 4:9] No one is a Christian for himself alone."

"She is the Catholic Church: neither Latin nor Greek, but universal.[…] Nothing authentically human, whatever its origin, can be alien to her. "The heritage of all peoples is her inalienable dowry." In her, man's desires and God's have their meeting-place, and by teaching all men their obligations she wishes at the same time to satisfy and more than satisfy the yearnings of each soul and of every age; to gather in everything for its salvation and sanctification."

"To see in Catholicism one religion among others, one system among others, even if it be added that it is the only true religion, the only system that works, is to mistake its very nature, or at least to stop at the threshold. Catholicism is religion itself. It is the form which humanity must put on in order finally to be itself."

"It is […] the very opposite of a "closed society". Like its founder it is eternal and sure of itself, and the very intransigence in matters of principle which prevents its ever being ensnared by transitory things secures for it a flexibility of infinite comprehensiveness, the very opposite of the harsh exclusiveness which characterizes the sectarian spirit.[…] The Church is at home everywhere, and everyone should be able to feel himself at home in the Church. Thus the risen Christ, when he shows himself to his friends, takes on the countenance of all races and each hears him in his own tongue."

"The Church, trusting in the Holy Spirit that leads her, trusts also all the peoples that she comes to free. That is no sign of naïveté on her part. She […] knows […] that all men are one in community of their divine origin and destiny; and that suffices to give her confidence in face of all the theories engendered by pride and egoism.[…] Besides, does not the only efficacious way to bring out the hidden truth and to avoid extinguishing the good that would break forth lie in a systematic desire to study sympathetically those forms of thought that are most remote from us, and in this study to pay particular attention to privileged cases, however rare they may be? It is at its highest reaches that humanity must be understood; the plains—or the depressions—will always be explored soon enough."

"The Church's method is not syncretist any more than it is naïve. Syncretism is artificial, generally the work of rulers or literary men, and presupposes declining faith. It is an insult to the living God. In the energetic language of the prophets, syncretism is fornication. In the spiritual order it is barren, like the political system or philosophy from which it springs. It lowers and vulgarizes all the elements it combines[…]. But here again the history of the Church can teach us. Christianity rejected Gnosticism, a representative of the syncretist system; but such an uncompromising boldness has not hindered her in carrying out her work of assimilation with a breadth of vision that is more clearly manifest every day."

"Protestantism, whether primitive or modern, Lutheran or Calvinist, orthodox or liberal, generally occurs as a religion of antitheses—and liberal theology is not the least marked by this characteristic. Either rites or morals, authority or liberty, faith or works, nature or grace, prayer or sacrifice, Bible or pope, Christ the Saviour or Christ the judge, sacraments or the religion of the spirit, mysticism or prophecy … but Catholicism does not accept these dichotomies and refuses to be merely Protestantism turned inside out."

"[D]oes not the mutual love of two beings complete them both, and call forth in each of them higher and more irreducible qualities? That is, in proportion as this love tends the more to true unity, because it is more spiritualized, so are these qualities more fully, more strictly personal."

"In the One there is no solitariness, but fruitfulness of life and warmth of presence.[…] In the all-sufficient Being there is no selfishness but the exchange of a perfect Gift. The created mind, though so faint a copy of him who is, is none the less a reproduction in some sort of his structure—ad imaginem fecit eum—and practiced eyes can discern the stamp of the creating Trinity. There is no solitary person: each one in his very being receives of all, of his very being must give back to all.[…] Thus it can also be said, to exalt its inner richness and to make clear its character as an end, which all others must acknowledge, that "a person is a whole world", but it must also be added at once that this "world" presupposes others with which it makes up one world only."

"The Holy Spirit that Christ promised to send […] creates in man new depths which harmonize him with the "depths of God" [Job 11:7]."

"Henceforth the idea of human unity is born. That image of God, the image of the Word, which the incarnate Word restores and gives back to its glory, is "I myself"; it is also the other, every other. It is that aspect of me in which I coincide with every other man, it is the hallmark of our common origin and the summons to our common destiny. It is our very unity in God.If, then, there took place in our past some "decisive" event that […] opened out to us the perspective of "the joy of an essentially universal union", we shall know where such an event took place.[…] Anyway, it is a fact that nowhere outside the influence of Christianity has man ever succeeded in defining its conditions; he has always wavered between the imagining of an individual survival in which beings remain separated and a theory that absorbs them in the One."

"We realize that the men of each generation could possess no more than the science of the time, that revelation makes no difference here: its light is of another order. Neither the biblical writers nor the Fathers nor the medieval theologians could have known, obviously, about Neanderthal man or Sinanthropus, nor could they have had precise knowledge about the Chinese. But the material narrowness of their view was no hindrance to its formal breadth. And it is this latter which is proper to Catholicism; however remote the horizons which modern science discovers, Catholicism spontaneously incorporates them. Discoveries in astronomy, at first so disturbing, have resulted in the freeing of Christian thought from the confines of an ancient cosmology, ill-suited to its genius; and what was at first taken to be a dogmatic crisis was only a wholesome surprise. Thus we can be assured that the fresh conclusions forced upon us by our history and our empirical origins will help us, after their own fashion, to probe more deeply into the meaning of our Catholicism, in its concern for the whole history of man and its solicitude for each member of the human family."

"[A] transcendent destiny which presupposes the existence of a transcendent God is essential to the realization of a destiny that is truly collective, that is, to the constitution of this humanity in the concrete. Otherwise it is not really for humanity that the sacrifice is made: it is still, despite assertion to the contrary, for other individuals, who in their transitory outward form contain nothing that is absolute and do not stand for any essentially higher value than those who are sacrificed to them; in the last resort it is all for one generation of humanity—the last—which is yet no greater than the others, and which will pass away like the others.[…] "I have no wish to sacrifice myself to that terrible God called future society," exclaims a character in a contemporary Russian novel. That is a very natural protest, possibly inspired by egoism, but one which cannot be reproved by reason. For no unselfishness can be sustained in face of an absurdity, and to require a worthy object for one's sacrifice is not to transform the sacrifice into self-interest."

"In a non-transcendent society, the reduction of man to his "social relationships" will work inevitably to the prejudice of his personal interiority, and will beget a tyranny of some kind, however novel. Moreover, have we not already the right to think, short as is our experience of this sort of thing, that it provides our analysis with its first confirmation? When Marx's followers eventually become aware of this, they will have no longer any inclination to extol that "total revolution" that they suppose themselves to have achieved in human intelligence before implanting it in society. They will have no longer any inclination to sing of their deliverance from "metaphysical agony" and from the "obsession of God". They will have to return to "those accursed eternal questions", as Dostoievski called them."

"Remember, after all, that the Gospel is full of paradoxes, that man is himself a living paradox, and that according to the Fathers of the Church, the Incarnation is the supreme paradox."

"The Gospel is full of paradoxes, by which the mind is at first troubled. The Savior teaches with great simplicity, yet he says also, "Blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in me." And it is a question, at least, whether all substantial spiritual doctrine must not of necessity take a paradoxical form."

"Decadence, instability, disintegration, corruption, reversal of attitude, all that arises through the simple fact of one's going on existing without self-criticism, self-renewal, constant self-adaptation, without letting anything in one die, through the simple fact of gradually settling down in the vantage point one occupies, the good conscience one enjoys. Such is the permanent danger of all spiritual life. It is an inevitable deterioration which can only be overcome—and painfully at that—by a watchful mustering of strength—unless it be effortlessly vanquished by a wonderful gift of grace.…Whence the necessity of paradox: or rather the perpetual flavor of paradox that truth has, when it is freshly expressed, for the man who clings to a truth when it is in the process of turning into a lie."

"Credulity, sectarianism, and sloth are three natural tendencies of man. Too often he canonizes them under nobler names."

"We must come to see that God is not so much the cause of moral obligation or the sanction of duty as the very substance of Good. Then what we call the moral proof brings us in one leap to the true God, revealing himself as God of Charity."

"The contact of a believer with a nonbeliever must take the form of a dialogue. The all-powerful action of pure sanctity alone is dispensed from it, since it is not bound by any law. But the dialogue will never get underway if it is not first a dialogue with myself."

"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy."

"The fear of falling a prey to error must never prevent us from getting to the full truth. To overstep the limit, to go beyond, would be to err through excessive daring; but there are also errors of timidity which consist precisely in stopping short, never daring to go any further than half-truths.Love of truth never goes without daring. And that is one of the reasons why truth is not loved."

"Everybody has his filter, which he takes about with him, though which, from the indefinite mass of facts, he gathers in those suited to confirm his prejudices. And the same fact again, passing through different filters, is revealed in different aspects, so as to confirm the most diverse opinions.Rare, very rare are those who check their filter."

"The most unbending thoughts are the most vulnerable to change."

"The denser the ignorance, the more enlightened it thinks itself to be."

"To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed; it is to cling to yourself, to have a morbid love of yourself, just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release."

"Nothing is more ingenious, more obstinate, nastier—indeed, in a sense, more clear sighted, than mediocrity harrying every form of superiority that offends it."

"There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy."

"If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts? Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us? Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us. Consequently then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us.... And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.In reality, bias against ‘heretics’ is felt today just as it used to be. Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do. Only, they have turned it against political adversaries. Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix. Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted. Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened: it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less. Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions."

"Though Dogma and theology are always intimately related and can never be separated, yet they are never entirely of the same stuff. Dogma is a vast domain which theology will never wholly exploit. There is always infinitely more in Dogma, considered in its concrete totality, that is to say, in the very Object of divine revelation, than in this "human science of revelation", in this product of analysis and rational elaboration which theology always is. The latter, in its very truth, will always—and all the more in that it will always be rationally formulated—be inadequate for Dogma; for it is indeed the explanation of it, but not the fulness. This weakness is congenital. True theology knows that. It does not confuse the orders."

"[S]ince being is analogical, we are quite correct in using the same words, in particular the word 'being', for both God and his creatures."

"Pierre Teilhard was a consistent personalist. In his youth he may well have experienced the 'fascination of the impersonal and generalized' and confused them with the universal; but as soon as he began to develop his thought, he made a complete change of direction."

"It is not the universal which takes on for us the appearance of the personal in order that it may make itself apprehensible by giving itself mythical expression; the universe does not become more or less personal and so acquire an added attribute. It is the personal which becomes universal, to the degree in which (subject to certain conditions) it realizes more profoundly its own specific character. Universality is the prerogative of the strongest personality. God, apart from whom nothing subsists, is pre-eminently the personal being, and it is for that reason that nothing subsists apart from him: even more, too, for that very reason, he is the 'personalizing' being. In becoming universal, Christ is not dissolved in the universe; he is the 'plasmatic principle' of the universe, he […] imposes his form on it."

"A […] form of present-day secularism is activism, which discounts contemplation and all interiority."

"[T]hough not being absolutely the same as ours, the difficulties for a Saint Peter or a Saint Paul in believing were no less strong. Nor were those of their successors, the Origens and the Cyrils , the Ambroses and the Augustines. Modern man flatters himself when he judges that the Copernican revolution or the Kantian revolution dug out a new hiatus between his thought and the thought of the Ancients. It was as hard to believe then as it is today! It was hard, for a Jewish monotheist—"Listen, Israel! Your God is one!"—to believe in the divinity of a man. It was hard to believe in the crucifixion of the Son of God. It was hard for a reasonable man, who had been able to see up close the Son of Man in his humiliation, to believe in the resurrected Christ."

"There is an easily observable contrast in many men between their secular knowledge and their religious instruction; the former is that of a grown man, who has studied for a long time, who has specialized in some professional skill, who knows life, who is cultivated; the second has remained that of a child, wholly elementary, rudimentary, a mixture of childish imagination, poorly assimilated abstract notions, scraps of vague and disconnected teachings gathered by chance from existence. The disproportion is such that it often ends in an abandonment of faith."

"The human intelligence is made in such a way that, if it has the power to criticize its own representations [of divine matters], it does not have an equal power to replace them. It succeeds in detecting everything inadequate in them: it is precisely in this that its greatness shines. But it will never possess the adequate formula that would put an end to its search. That is why it can seem to the intelligence that through this work of criticism it is carrying out a negative work. At the very least, it seems, through a series of overly subtle steps, to be compromising the truth of which it had at first an assured, total perception, although the expression that was given of it was, as it well knew, only roughly approximate. With its s, in its imaginative conceptions, it at least enclosed a certain truth. It held it in tuto [securely]. Now is this very truth not going to be called into question?Such is the objection—or rather such is the instinctive fear—that any attempt at real reflection always awakens. The life of the spirit, like that of the body, is inevitably the source of "unease". The dead alone are in complete repose. The intelligence is thus in dread of itself. It fears generating its own bewilderment."

"The effort of the intelligence can aim only at better understanding reflexively the given of faith.[…]All minds, however, do not experience equally the need for such an effort. It is nonetheless very often necessary for them, on the level where their natural speculation usually moves, for dogmas to be given a certain coherent view, more systematized than the teaching of the Church, which renders these dogmas more assimilable to them and which prevents ever-possible deviations. Whence the permanent usefulness of theories that are constructed, through the arrangement of concepts, within common sense, starting with uncriticized representations. Their intellectual value can be weak. To admit them is not, however, pure pragmatism, since they are useful, not for any end whatsoever, but for the maintenance of a truth.… [W]e call to mind one case of this kind by citing the theory of the scientia media: it remains a necessary support for those who need to conceive of the relations between grace and human freedom as an organized system and who could not otherwise preserve the idea of freedom.… [Footnote:] Let us observe, however, that such theories, while they serve to maintain a truth on which attention is fixed, generally thereby compromise a complementary truth, which it is sometimes no less important to hold. We know well enough the weak point in Molinism."

"[F]rom the very first, faith had been translated into certain "declarations"—some of which had been gathered from the very mouth of Jesus and others called forth by him. The twofold reflection of Saint Paul and Saint John had soon contributed to enrich and define them. Subsequently, though it was no longer henceforth a matter of revelation, the declarations continued to multiply, following the very laws of human intelligence and under the impulse of all kinds of historical necessities. A divinely instituted authority rules their meaning and use.[…]It follows from all this that dogmatic progress, whose rectitude is guaranteed by the assistance of the Spirit which Christ promised to his Church, […] is not a progressive revelation. […] With Christ, in fact, in Christ, all has been given to us. In him we have all revelation as well as all redemption. […] Henceforth, nothing more that is in fact new is to be expected. The deposit is living, certainly it is fruitful, but it is indeed a deposit. […] No theory of "development" should ever forget this essential principle. […] In the face of a recent mentality that tends to confuse dogmatic progress with a kind of natural progress in human things, it is no less important to recall it today.Besides, to consider, for an instant, only the human intellectual mechanism by which the later work of dogmatic clarification is carried out […] one should recognize that it does not differ essentially from that which gave birth to the first declarations on the lips of Peter and his companions. The structure and the natural laws of the human mind are always the same; supernatural revelation has not suppressed them. A simple "assistance", carried out by the , in order to avoid any error in definitive choices, has succeeded to the positive inspiration of the early times, whose fruits are preserved in the writings of the "New Testament". But it is indeed always a matter of "elaboration"."

"Modern philosophy acts particularly like a critic. In a manner that is more positivistic and scientistic in some, more rationalistic and idealistic in others, its overall action remains corrosive. […] This whole work of thought, whose greatness we must not fail to recognize, is paid for in practice by the loss of the living God. The world then becomes a world of abstractions, when it is not absurdly reduced to a world of phenomena. In losing its mysterious innermost depth, it has lost its soul. Man is isolated, uprooted, "disconcerted". […] The world itself appears "broken". There is, at the innermost part of consciousness, a metaphysical despair.[…]It is then that substitute faiths inevitably present themselves to fill this tragic void. Such is the fourth and final period of the process. Man is not satisfied by ideologies cut off from any source of real efficacy: the hour must come when he is disenchanted with them. He lives still less from criticism and negations. He does not live by and neutrality. Inevitably something like a great call for air is produced in his inner void, which opens him to the invasion of new positive forces, whatever they might be. The latter conquer him all the more quickly, the more coarse and virulent they are. Cut off from a higher life, he gives in to the brutal pressures that, at least, give him the feeling of a life. Having abused criticism to make truth itself vanish, he now dislikes using it[,] to protect his mirages. A troubled credulity succeeds his faith. Rationalism has expelled mystery: myth takes its place."

"For a spiritual and metaphysical crisis, only a remedy of the same nature is appropriate."

"The faithful soul is always an open soul."

"Bergson said that the universe is "a machine to make gods". Teilhard would not take up the expression as his own: in his eyes, the universe is merely a machine to make persons."

"So he [Fernand Guimet] questioned that impoverished faith, which becomes mere religious sentiment, or an impulse without form, or even simple communitarian warmth, or, worse yet, slogans for action."

"A dog barks and stands at bay if he sees any one assault his master. I should be indeed remiss, if, seeing the truth of God thus attacked, I should remain dumb, without giving one note of warning."

"Now among the other things proper to recreate man and give him pleasure, music is either the first or one of the principal;and we must think that it is a gift of God deputed for that purpose'."

"Where there is so much division and separation as we now see, it is indeed no easy matter to still the troubled waters, and bring about composure. You will say he has a vehement disposition and ungovernable impetuosity; as if that very vehemence did not break forth with all the greater violence when all show themselves alike indulgent to him, and allow him to have his way unquestioned. If this specimen of overbearing tyranny has sprung forth already, as the early blossom in the springtide of a reviving Church, what must we expect in a short time, when affairs have fallen into a far worse condition?"

"God promised by the mouth of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the church."

"I cannot think such language either right, or becoming, or suitable. ... To call the Virgin Mary the mother of God can only serve to confirm the ignorant in their superstitions."

"Nor, in truth, is it of little importance to prevent the suspicion of any difference having arisen between us from being handed down in any way to our posterity; for it is worse than absurd that parties should be found disagreeing on the very principles, after we have been compelled to make our departure from the world."

"Jules Bonnet, ed., Letters of John Calvin, 4 vols., (Lenox Hill), vol.II, 1973, pp. 376–377;[http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0833740210&id=bZIcAAAAMAAJ&q=%22letters+of+john+calvin%22&dq=%22letters+of+john+calvin%22&pgis=1."

"I do not doubt that there has been some ignorance in their having reproved this mode of speech, — that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God … I cannot dissemble that it is found to be a bad practice ordinarily to adopt this title in speaking of this Virgin: and, for my part, I cannot consider such language as good , proper, or suitable… for to say, the Mother of God for the Virgin Mary, can only serve to harden the ignorant in their superstitions."

"Now let us consider how many relics of the true cross there are in the world. An account of those merely with which I am acquainted would fill a whole volume, for there is not a church, from a cathedral to the most miserable abbey or parish church, that does not contain a piece. Large splinters of it are preserved in various places, as for instance in the Holy Chapel at Paris, whilst at Rome they show a crucifix of considerable size made entirely, they say, from this wood. In short, if we were to collect all these pieces of the true cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship's cargo. The Gospel testifies that the cross could be borne by one single individual;.."

"Ainsi, ou nous arguerons l'histoire de mensonge, ou ce qu'on tient aujourd'hui de la vraie croix est une opinion vaine et frivole. Or, avisons d'autre part combien il y en a de pièces par tout le monde. Si je voulais réciter seulement ce que j'en pourrais dire, il y aurait un rôle pour remplir un livre entier. Il n'y a si petite ville où il n'y en ait, non seulement en l'église cathédrale, mais en quelques paroisses. Pareillement, il n'y a si méchante abbaye où on n'en montre. Et en quelques lieux, il y en a de bien gros éclats, comme à la Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, et à Poitiers et à Rome, où il y en a un crucifix assez grand qui en est fait, comme l'on dit. Bref, si on voulait ramasser tout ce qui s'en est trouvé, il y en aurait la charge d'un bon grand bateau. L'Évangile testifie que la croix pouvait être portée d'un homme."

"Primo meretur eorum perdita obstinatio et indomabilis, ut immensa miseriarum congerie sine fine et modo oppressi omnes exhilarent suis malis, nemo autem eorum misereatur. (Their [the Jews] depraved and indomitable obstinacy merits that none of them be pitied, as they all delight in their evils while being oppressed by a great mass of miseries without end or measure.)"

"All things being at God’s disposal, and the decision of salvation or death belonging to him, he orders all things by his counsel and decree in such a manner, that some men are born devoted from the womb to certain death, that his name may be glorified in their destruction."

"But, as sculpture and painting are gifts of God, what I insist on is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully, that gifts which the Lord has bestowed upon us, for His glory and our good, shall not be preposterously abused, nay, shall not be perverted to our destruction."

"For just as soon as a visible form has been fashioned for God, his power is also bound to it. Men are so stupid that they fasten God wherever they fashion him; and hence they cannot but adore. And there is no difference whether they simply worship an idol, or God in the idol. It is always idolatry when divine honors are bestowed on an idol, under whatever pretext this is done. And because it does not please God to be worshiped superstitiously, whatever is conferred upon the idol is snatched from him."

"Just as a maistre Fifi mocks those who hold their noses [in his presence]. because he has handled filth for so long that he can no longer smell his own foulness; so likewise do idolaters make light of those who are offended by a stench they cannot themselves recognize. Hardened by habit, they sit in their own excrement, and yet believe they are surrounded by roses."

"We may also fitly remember that Satan has his miracles, which, though they are deceitful tricks rather than true powers, are such a sort as to mislead the simple-minded and untutored [2 Thes, 2:9-10] ... Idolatry has been nourished by wonderful miracles, yet these are not sufficient to sanction the superstition either of magicians or of idolators."

"The papists abuse this text, not only to the end they may commend feigned miracles, which they say are done at the graves of martyrs, but also that they may try and sell us their relics. Why, say thy, shall not the grave, or garment, or the touching of the bones of Peter have as much power to heal, as his shadow had?"

"No religion is genuine unless it be joined with truth."

"We condemn those who affirm that a man once justified cannot sin. ... As to the special privilege of the Virgin Mary, when they produce the celestial diploma we shall believe what they say."

"It is no small honour that God for our sake has so magnificently adorned the world, in order that we may not only be spectators of this beauteous theatre, but also enjoy the multiplied abundance and variety of good things which are presented to us in it."

"Que donc les nonnains demeurent en leurs convents et en leurs cloistres, et en leurs bourdeaux de Satan: ie di mesmes encores qu’elles ne fussent point putains comme elles sont, comme il y a encores pis de ces abominations de Sodome, faisans des choses si enormes et si abominables que c’est une horreur: encores, di-ie, que toutes ces vilenies-là n'y fussent point, si est-ce que toute la chasteté qu'elles pretendent, n'est rien envers Dieu, au prix de ce qu'il a ordonné, c'est asçavoir que combien que ce soyent choses contemptibles, et qui semblent estre de nulle valeur, qu'une femme ait peine d'adresser son mesnage, de nettoyer les ordures de ses enfans, de tuer les poux et autres choses semblables, que tout cela sera mesprisé, qu’on ne le daignera pas mesmes regarder, ce sont toutesfois sacrifices que Dieu reçoit et qu'il accepte, comme si c'estoyent choses precieuses et honorables."

"We must know and be out of all doubt, that the Pope hath but a devilish Synagogue, and that all his Clergy is but filth & stench, all these varlets that have cast aside the Church of God, are but vermin. Although the Pope, who is Antichrist, be set in God’s sanctuary, (as we have seen before [2 Thes. 2.4]) yet notwithstanding, he is not worthy to be taken and accounted for a minister of the Church, nor all his mates."

"It cannot be denied that God in choosing and destining Mary to be the Mother of his Son, granted her the highest honor."

"Helvidius has shown himself too ignorant, in saying that Mary had several sons, because mention is made in some passages of the brothers of Christ."

"We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure.... We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities.... all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement.... they are always spattered and befouled with many stains.... it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth."

"Et ne soyons pas semblables à ces fantastiques, qui ont un esprit d'amertume et de contradiction, pour trouver à redire par tout, et pour pervertir l'ordre de nature. Nous en verrons d'aucuns si frénétiques, non pas seulement en la religion, mais pour monstrer par tout qu'ils ont une nature monstrueuse, qu'ils diront que le soleil ne se bouge, et que c'est la terre qui se remue et qu'elle tourne. Quand nous voyons de tels esprits, il faut bien dire que le diable les ait possédez, et que Dieu nous les propose comme des miroirs, pour nous faire demeurer en sa crainte."

"For what accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by him, the slaves of sin that he may give us freedom, blind that he may enlighten, lame that he may cure, and feeble that he may sustain us; to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that he alone may shine forth glorious, and we be glorified in him?"

"The proper course, therefore, is, in the first instance, to ascertain and examine the doctrine which is said by the Evangelist to precede; then after it has been proved, but not till then, it may receive confirmation from miracles. But the mark of sound doctrine given by our Saviour himself is its tendency to promote the glory not of men, but of God (John 7:18; 8:50). Our Saviour having declared this to be test of doctrine, we are in error if we regard as miraculous, works which are used for any other purpose than to magnify the name of God."

"All the Fathers with one heart execrated, and with one mouth protested against, contaminating the word of God with the subtleties of sophists, and involving it in the brawls of dialecticians. Do they keep within these limits when the sole occupation of their lives is to entwine and entangle the simplicity of Scripture with endless disputes, and worse than sophistical jargon? So much so, that were the Fathers to rise from their graves, and listen to the brawling art which bears the name of speculative theology, there is nothing they would suppose it less to be than a discussion of a religious nature."

"To make everything yield to custom would be to do the greatest injustice. Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error."

"We must not only resist, but boldly attack prevailing evils."

"Be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription. Thus Isaiah formerly taught the people of God, “Say ye not, A confederacy, to all to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;” i.e. do not unite with the people in an impious consent."

"Depraved custom is just a kind of general pestilence in which men perish not the less that they fall in a crowd."

"The hinges on which the controversy turns are these: first, in their contending that the form of the Church is always visible and apparent; and, secondly, in their placing this form in the see of the Church of Rome and its hierarchy. We, on the contrary, maintain, both that the Church may exist without any apparent form, and, moreover, that the form is not ascertained by that external splendour which they foolishly admire, but by a very different mark, namely, by the pure preaching of the word of God, and the due administration of the sacraments."

"Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other."

"Our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us ... that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness. We are accordingly urged by our own evil things to consider the good things of God; and, indeed, we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For what man is not disposed to rest in himself? Who, in fact, does not thus rest, so long as he is unknown to himself; that is, so long as he is contented with his own endowments, and unconscious or unmindful of his misery? Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him."

"Since we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself."

"If all are born and live for the express purpose of learning to know God, and if the knowledge of God, in so far as it fails to produce this effect, is fleeting and vain, it is clear that all those who do not direct the whole thoughts and actions of their lives to this end fail to fulfil the law of their being."

"It is easy to see how superstition, with its false glosses, mocks God, while it tries to please him."

"Those whose inclinations are at variance with the justice of God, knowing that his tribunal has been erected for the punishment of transgression, earnestly wish that that tribunal were overthrown. Under the influence of this feeling they are actually warring against God."

"For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any books however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly."

"It is better to limp in the way, than run with the greatest swiftness out of it."

"We expect salvation from him—not because he stands aloof from us, but because ingrafting us into his body he not only makes us partakers of all his benefits, but also of himself. ... Since Christ has been communicated to you with all his benefits, so that all which is his is made yours, you become a member of him, and hence one with him. His righteousness covers your sins—his salvation extinguishes your condemnation; he interposes with his worthiness, and so prevents your unworthiness from coming into the view of God. Thus it truly is. It will never do to separate Christ from us, nor us from him; but we must, with both hands, keep firm hold of that alliance by which he has riveted us to himself."

"Man doubtless has been made subject to vanity—man here been reduced to nothing—man is nothing. And yet how is he whom God exalts utterly nothing? How is he nothing to whom a divine heart has been given? Let us breathe again, brethren. Although we are nothing in our hearts, perhaps something of us may lurk in the heart of God."

"All nations before thee are as nothing. Observe, before thee; not within thee. Such are they in the judgment of thy truth, but not such in regard to thy affection."

"The wicked do not fear God from any unwillingness to offend him, provided they could do so with impunity. ... But believers, as has been said, dread the offense even more than the punishment."

"Becoming more callous and hardened when God thunders verbally from heaven, they obstinately persist in their rebellion. It is only when actually smitten by his hand that they are forced, whether they will or not, to fear. This fear the sacred writers term servile, and oppose to the free and voluntary fear which becomes sons."

"Faith has no less need of the word than the fruit of a tree has of a living root; because, as David testifies, none can hope in God but those who know his name [Psalm 9:10]."

"The large benefits which the divine liberality is constantly bestowing on the wicked are preparing them for heavier judgment. As they neither think that these proceed from the hand of the Lord, nor acknowledge them as his, or if they do so acknowledge them, never regard them as proofs of his favor, they are in no respect more instructed thereby in his mercy than brute beasts, which, according to their condition, enjoy the same liberality, and yet never look beyond it."

"It is certain that no man can embrace the grace of the Gospel without retaking himself from the errors of his former life into the right path, and making it his whole study to practice repentance."

"He who is off the course, the more swiftly he runs is the more distant from the goal and, therefore, the more unhappy. It is better to limp in the way than run out of the way."

"Some one will say, Does he not know without a monitor both what our difficulties are, and what is meet for our interest, so that it seems in some measure superfluous to solicit him by our prayers, as if he were winking, or even sleeping, until aroused by the sound of our voice? Those who argue thus attend not to the end for which the Lord taught us to pray. It was not so much for his sake as for ours. ... It is very much for our interest to be constantly supplicating him; first, that our heart may always be inflamed with a serious and ardent desire of seeking, loving and serving him, while we accustom ourselves to have recourse to him as a sacred anchor in every necessity; secondly, that no desires, no longing whatever, of which we are ashamed to make him the witness, may enter our minds, while we learn to place all our wishes in his sight, and thus pour out our heart before him; and, lastly, that we may be prepared to receive all his benefits with true gratitude and thanksgiving, while our prayers remind us that they proceed from his hand."

"Let the first rule of right prayer then be, to have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God. This we shall accomplish in regard to the mind, if, laying aside carnal thoughts and cares which might interfere with the direct and pure contemplation of God, it not only be wholly intent on prayer, but also, as far as possible, be borne and raised above itself. ... When I say it must be raised above itself, I mean that it must not bring into the presence of God any of those things which our blind and stupid reason is wont to devise, nor keep itself confined within the little measure of its own vanity, but rise to a purity worthy of God."

"The ceremony of lifting up our hands in prayer is designed to remind us that we are far removed from God, unless our thoughts rise upward."

"Can we suppose anything more hateful or even more execrable to God than this fiction of asking the pardon of sins, while he who asks at the very time either thinks that he is not a sinner, or, at least, is not thinking that he is a sinner; in other words, a fiction by which God is plainly held in derision?"

"He who comes into the presence of God to pray must divest himself of all vainglorious thoughts, lay aside all idea of worth; in short, discard all self- confidence, humbly giving God the whole glory, lest by arrogating any thing, however little, to himself, vain pride cause him to turn away his face."

"Moreover, in order that we may be aroused and exhorted all the more to carry this out, Scripture makes known that there are not one, not two, nor a few foes, but great armies, which wage war against us. For Mary Magdalene is said to have been freed from seven demons by which she was possessed [Mark 16:9; Luke 8:2], and Christ bears witness that usually after a demon has once been cast out, if you make room for him again, he will take with him seven spirits more wicked than he and return to his empty possession [Matt. 12:43-45]. Indeed, a whole legion is said to have assailed one man [Luke 8:30]. We are therefore taught by these examples that we have to wage war against an infinite number of enemies, lest, despising their fewness, we should be too remiss to give battle, or, thinking that we are sometimes afforded some respite, we should yield to idleness. But the frequent mention of Satan or the devil in the singular denotes the empire of wickness opposed to the Kingdom of Righteousness. For as the church and fellowship of the saints has Christ as Head, so the faction of the impious and impiety itself are depicted for us together with their prince who holds supreme sway over them. For this reason, it was said: "Depart, ...you cursed, into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" [Matt. 25:41]."

"It having been said above that God bends all the reprobate, and even Satan himself, at his will, three objections are started. First, that this happens by the permission, not by the will of God. To this objection there is a twofold reply, the one, that angels and men, good and bad, do nothing but what is appointed by God; the second, that all movements are secretly directed to their end by the hidden inspiration of God..."

"If we are minded to affirm Christ's Kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin."

"Lastly, let each of us consider how far he is bound in duty to others, and in good faith pay what we owe. In the same way, let the people pay all due honour to their rulers, submit patiently to their authority, obey their laws and orders, and decline nothing which they can bear without sacrificing the favour of God. Let rulers, again, take due charge of their people, preserve the public peace, protect the good, curb the bad, and conduct themselves throughout as those who must render an account of their office to God, the Judge of all… Let the aged also, by their prudence and their experience, (in which they are far superior,) guide the feebleness of youth, not assailing them with harsh and clamorous invectives but tempering strictness with ease and affability. Let servants show themselves diligent and respectful in obeying their masters, and this not with eye-service, but from the heart, as the servants of God. Let masters also not be stern and disobliging to their servants, nor harass them with excessive asperity, nor treat them with insult, but rather let them acknowledge them as brethren and fellow-servants of our heavenly Master, whom, therefore, they are bound to treat with mutual love and kindness. Let every one, I say, thus consider what in his own place and order he owes to his neighbours, and pay what he owes. Moreover, we must always have a reference to the Lawgiver, and so remember that the law requiring us to promote and defend the interest and convenience of our fellow-men, applies equally to our minds and our hands."

"The whole life of Christians ought to be an exercise of piety, since they are called to sanctification. It is the office of the law to remind them of their duty and thereby to excite them to the pursuit of holiness and integrity. But when their consciences are solicitous how God may be propitiated, what answer they shall make, and on what they shall rest their confidence, if called to his tribunal, there must then be no consideration of the requisitions of the law, but Christ alone must be proposed for righteousness, who exceeds all the perfection of the law."

"We must resist wandering thoughts in prayer. Raising our hands reminds us that we need to raise up our minds to God, setting aside all irrelevant thoughts."

"The worship of images is intimately connected with that of the saints. They were rejected by the primitive Christians; but St Irenæus, who lived in the second century, relates that there was a sect of heretics, the Carpocratians, who worshipped, in the manner of Pagans, different images representing Jesus Christ, St Paul, and others. The Gnostics had also images; but the church rejected their use in a positive manner, and a Christian writer of the third century, Minutius Felix, says that “the Pagans reproached the Christians for having neither temples nor simulachres;” and I could quote many other evidences that the primitive Christians entertained a great horror against every kind of images, considering them as the work of demons. It appears, however, that the use of pictures was creeping into the church already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches. These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of the New 5 In his Treatise given below. 11 or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines [008] of Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of eyes, and could not read writings.6 Such a practice was, however, fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved. It was replacing intellect by sight.7 Instead of elevating man towards God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect, and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan anthropomorphism in the church."

"The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship. Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,—i.e., by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its contact with the school of Plato,—a Christianity which entirely rejected the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and attractive myths of Persia and India,—that gave birth to the images."

"I have already spoken of the effects which the solitary and ascetic life of the early monks produced upon their imagination. The same thing took place amongst the recluses of the convents, but particularly nunneries. “The imaginations of women,” says a celebrated author whom I have already quoted, “as their feelings are more keen and exquisite, are more susceptible and ungovernable than those of men; more obnoxious to the injurious influence of solitude; more easily won upon by the arts of delusion, and inflamed by the contagion of the passions.” Hence we may account for the rapidity with which in orphan houses, cloisters, and other institutions, where numbers of the sex are [122] intimately connected with each other, the sickness, humour, habits, of one, if conspicuous and distinguished, become those of all. I remember to have read in a medical writer of considerable merit, that in a French convent of nuns, of more than common magnitude, one of the sisters was seized with a strange impulse to mew like a cat, in which singular propensity she was shortly imitated by several other sisters, and finally, without a solitary exception, by the whole convent, who all joined at regular periods in a general mew that lasted several hours"

"“The practice of employing images as ornaments and memorials to decorate the temple of the Lord is in a most especial manner approved by the Word of God himself. Moses was commanded to place two cherubim upon the ark, and to set up a brazen figure of the fiery serpent, that those of the murmuring Israelites who had been bitten might recover from the poison of their wounds by looking on the image. In the description of Solomon's temple, we read of that prince, not only that he made in the oracle two cherubim of olive tree, of ten 83 Vide supra, p. 17. 101 cubits in height, but that ‘all the walls of the temple round about he carved with divers figures and carvings.’ “In the first book of Paralipomenon (Chronicles) we observe that when David imposed his injunction upon Solomon to realise his intention of building a house to the Lord, he delivered to him a description of the porch and temple, and concluded by thus assuring him: ‘All these things came to me written by the hand of the Lord, that I may understand the works of the pattern.’ “The isolated fact that images were not only directed by the Almighty God to be placed in the Mosaic tabernacle, and in the more sumptuous temple of Jerusalem, but that [132] he himself exhibited the pattern of them, will be alone sufficient to authorise the practice of the Catholic Church in regard to a similar observance.”—(Hierurgia, p. 371.) All this may be briefly answered. There was no representation of the Jewish patriarchs or saints either in the tabernacle or in the temple of Solomon, as is the case with the Christian saints in the Roman Catholic and Græco-Russian Churches; and the brazen serpent, to which the author alludes, was broken into pieces by order of King Hezekiah as soon as the Israelites began to worship it."

"The belief that the body of the Virgin was not interred on earth, but was taken to heaven, has deprived them of all pretext for manufacturing any relics of her remains, which otherwise might have been sufficiently abundant to fill a whole churchyard; yet in order to have at least something belonging to her, they sought to indemnify themselves for the absence of other relics with the possession of her hair and her milk. The hair is shown in several churches in Rome, and at Salvatierra in Spain, at Macon, St Flour, Cluny, Nevers, and in many other towns. With regard to the milk, there is not perhaps a town, a convent, or nunnery, where it is now shown in large or small quantites. Indeed, had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers in various parts."

"When we hear any mention of our mystical union with Christ, we should remember that holiness is the channel to do it."

"Holiness is not a merit by which we can attain communion with God, but a gift of Christ, which enables us to cling to him, and to follow him."

"Unless we ardently and prayerfully devote ourselves to Christ’s righteousness we do not only faithlessly revolt from our Creator, but we also abjure him as our Savior."

"Since God has revealed himself as a Father, we would be guilty of the basest ingratitude if we did not behave as his children."

"The apostle denies that anyone actually knows Christ, who has not learned to put off the old man, corrupt with deceitful lusts, and to put on Christ."

"We should not insist on absolute perfection of the gospel in our fellow Christians, however we may strive for it ourselves."

"It is not lawful for you to make a compromise with God: to try to fulfill part of your duties and to omit others at your own pleasure."

"No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances."

"Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments. Though we fall short, our labour is not lost if this day surpasses the preceding one."

"The one condition for spiritual progress is that we remain sincere and humble. Let us keep our end in view, let us press forward to our goal. Let us not indulge in pride, nor give in to our sinful passions. Let us steadily exert ourselves to reach a higher degree of holiness till we shall finally arrive at a perfection of goodness which we seek and pursue as long as we live, but which we shall attain then only, when, freed from all earthly infirmity, we shall be admitted by God into his full communion."

"It is a very important consideration that we are consecrated and dedicated to God; it means that we may think, speak, meditate, or do anything only with a view to his glory."

"Pagan philosophers set up reason as the sole guide of life, of wisdom and conduct; but Christian philosophy demands of us that we surrender our reason to the Holy Spirit; and this means that we no longer live for ourselves, but that Christ lives and reigns within us (Rom 12:1; Eph 4:23; Gal 2:20)."

"A Christian ought to be disposed and prepared to keep in mind that he has to reckon with God every moment of his life."

"The denial of ourselves which Christ has so diligently commanded his disciples from the beginning will at last dominate all the desires of our heart."

"There is deliverance in store only for the man who gives up his selfishness, and whose sole aim is to please the Lord and to do what is right in his sight."

"If God has bestowed on us any excellent gift, we imagine it to be our own achievement; and we swell and even burst with pride."

"The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues."

"Hatred grows into insolence when we desire to excel the rest of mankind and imagine we do not belong to the common lot; we even severely and haughtily despise others as our inferiors."

"The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others."

"Everyone flatters himself and carries a kingdom in his breast."

"We should never insult others on account of their faults, for it is our duty to show charity and respect to everyone."

"Scripture urges and warns us that whatever favors we may have obtained from the Lord, we have received them as a trust on condition that they should be applied to the common benefit of the church."

"You cannot imagine a more certain rule or a more powerful suggestion than this, that all the blessings we enjoy are divine deposits which we have received on this condition that we distribute them to others."

"Let this be our rule for goodwill and helpfulness, that whenever we are able to assist others we should behave as stewards who must someday give an account of ourselves."

"The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits. But scripture here helps us out with an excellent argument when it teaches us that we must not think of man’s real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love."

"If he has deserved no kindness, but just the opposite, because he has maddened you with his injuries and insults, even this is no reason why you should not surround him with your affection and show him all sorts of favors."

"We should forever keep in mind that we must not brood on the wickedness of man, but realize that he is God’s image bearer."

"If we cover and obliterate man’s faults and consider the beauty and dignity of God’s image in him, then we shall be induced to love and embrace him (Heb 12:16; Gal 6:10; Isa 58:7; Matt 5:44; Luke 17:3-4)"

"There are people who are known to be very liberal, yet they never give without scolding or pride or even insolence."

"First of all, Scripture draws our attention to this, that if we want ease and tranquility in our lives, we should resign ourselves and all that we have to the will of God, and at the same time we should surrender our affections to him as our Conqueror and Overlord."

"To crave wealth and honor, to demand power, to pile up riches, to gather all those vanities which seem to make for pomp and empty display, that is our furious passion and our unbounded desire. On the other hand, we fear and abhor poverty, obscurity, and humility, and we seek to avoid them by all possible means."

"It must be plain also that we should not anxiously strive for riches and honors by relying on our own diligence or cleverness or by depending on the favor of men or by trusting in the notion of good luck, but that we should always expect the Lord to direct us to the lot he has provided for us."

"Moreover, a true Christian will not ascribe any prosperity to his own diligence, industry, or good fortune, but he will acknowledge that God is the author of it."

"No one has rightly denied himself unless he has wholly resigned himself to the Lord and is willing to leave every detail to his good pleasure. If we put ourselves in such a frame of mind, then, whatever may happen to us, we shall never feel miserable or accuse God falsely because of our lot."

"But a faithful believer will in all circumstances mediate on the mercy and fatherly goodness of God."

"In short, knowing that whatever may happen is ordained by the Lord, he will receive it with a peaceful and thankful heart, that he may not be guilty of proudly resisting the rule of him to whom he has once committed himself and all his belongings."

"For all whom the Lord has chosen and received into the society of his saints ought to prepare themselves for a life that is hard, difficult, laborious, and full of countless griefs. It is the will of their heavenly Father to try them in this manner that he may test them."

"For though Christ was his most beloved Son, in whom the Father was always well pleased, yet we see that he was not treated with indulgence and tenderness, so that it may be truly said that he was not only continuously afflicted, but that his whole life was a perpetual cross."

"Being humbled, we learn to call upon his strength which alone makes us stand up under such a load of afflictions."

"For he [David] confesses that prosperity had so stupefied and benumbed his senses that he disregarded the grace of God on which he should have depended, relied on himself instead, and imagined that he could not fall."

"Warned by such evidences of their spiritual illness, believers profit by their humiliations. Robbed of their foolish confidence in the flesh, they take refuge in the grace of God. And when they have done so, they experience the nearness of the divine protection which is to them a strong fortress (Ps 30:6-7)."

"If everything proceeded according to their wishes, they would not understand what it means to follow God."

"For we are not all equally afflicted with the same disease or all in need of the same severe cure. This is the reason why we see different persons disciplined with different crosses. The heavenly Physician takes care of the well-being of all his patients; he gives some a milder medicine and purifies others by more shocking treatments, but he omits no one; for the whole world, without exception, is ill (Deut 32:15)."

"When we recognize the rod of a father, should we not show ourselves docile children rather than rebelliously desperate men who have been hardened in their evil doings?"

"Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction."

"The more we are oppressed by the cross, the fuller will be our spiritual joy."

"That they may not become too complacent or delighted in married life, he makes them distressed by the shortcomings of their partners, or humbles them through willful offspring, or afflicts them with the want or loss of children. But, if in all these matters he is more merciful to them, he shows them by diseases and dangers how unstable and passing all mortal blessings are, that they may not be puffed up with vain glory."

"But it must be admitted that our heart is never seriously inclined to wish for and to mediate on the future life unless it has first thoroughly learned to forsake the vanities of the present world."

"There is no golden mean between these two extremes; either this early life must become low in our estimation, or it will have our inordinate love."

"Nevertheless, our constant efforts to lower our estimate of the present world should not lead us to hate life or to be ungrateful toward God. For this life, though it is full of countless miseries, deserves to be reckoned among the divine blessings which should not be despised. Therefore, if we discover nothing of God’s goodness in it, we are already guilty of no small ingratitude toward him."

"When we come to a comparison of heaven and earth, then we may indeed not only forget all about the present life, but even despise and scorn it."

"But the present life should never be hated, except insofar as it subjects us to sin, although even that hatred should not properly be applied to life itself."

"But this we may positively state, that nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ unless he cheerfully looks forward to the day of his death and to the day of the final resurrection."

"Even if this earth is only a vestibule, we ought undoubtedly to make such a use of its blessing that we are assisted rather than delayed in our journey."

"For there have been some people, otherwise good and holy, who saw that intemperance and luxury time and again drive man to throw off all restraints unless he is curbed by the utmost severity. And in their desire to correct such a pernicious evil they have adopted the only method which they saw fit, namely to permit earthly blessings only insofar as they were an absolute necessity. This advice showed the best of intentions but was far too rigid. For they committed the very dangerous error of imposing on the consequence of others stricter rules than those laid down in the Word of the Lord. By restricting people within the demands of necessity, they meant abstinence from everything possible. On the other hand, there are many nowadays who seek a pretext to excuse intemperance in the use of the external things, and who desire to indulge the lusts of the flesh. Such people take for granted that liberty should not be restricted by any limitations at all; but to this we can never agree. We must grant, indeed, that it is not right or possible to bind the consciences of others with hard and fast rules."

"Where is our acknowledgement of God if our thoughts are fixed on the glamour of our garments?"

"There is also an old proverb, that they who pay much attention to the body generally neglect the soul."

"If we follow our divine calling, we shall receive this unique consolation that there is no work so mean and so sordid that does not look truly respectable and highly important in the sight of God (Coram Deo!) (Gen 1:28; Col 1:1ff)"

"In the mind perfect intelligence flourished and reigned, uprightness attended as its companion, and all the senses were prepared and moulded for due obedience to reason; and in the body there was a suitable correspondence with this internal order. But now, although some obscure lineaments of that image are found remaining in us; yet are they so vitiated and maimed, that they may truly be said to be destroyed. For besides the deformity which everywhere appears unsightly, this evil also is added, that no part is free from the infection of sin."

"For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God."

"The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring."

"The supreme and only Judge of the universe stands before the tribunal of an earthly judge."

"And at this day, the blessedness brought to us by Christ cannot be the subject of our praise, without reminding us, at the same time, of the distinguished honor which God was pleased to bestow on Mary, in making her the mother of his Only Begotten Son."

""[Elizabeth] calls Mary the mother of her Lord. This denotes a unity of person in the two natures of Christ; as if she had said, that he who was begotten a mortal man in the womb of Mary is, at the same time, the eternal God.... This name Lord strictly belongs to the Son of God 'manifested in the flesh,' (1 Timothy 3:16,) who has received from the Father all power, and has been appointed the highest ruler of heaven and earth, that by his agency God may govern all things."

"Elisabeth, again, while she praises her, is so far from hiding the Divine glory, that she ascribes everything to God. And yet, though she acknowledges the superiority of Mary to herself and to others, she does not envy her the higher distinction, but modestly declares that she had obtained more than she deserved."

"If there had been any unbelief in Mary, that could not prevent God from accomplishing his work in any other way which he might choose. But she is called blessed, because she received by faith the blessing offered to her, and opened up the way to God for its accomplishment."

"To this day we cannot enjoy the blessing brought to us in Christ without thinking at the same time of that which God gave as adornment and honour to Mary, in willing her to be the mother of his only-begotten Son."

"For in the cross of Christ, as in a splendid theatre, the incomparable goodness of God is set before the whole world."

"Some think that He does not call her 'mother' but only 'woman' so as not to inflict a deeper wound of sorrow on her heart. I do not reject this; but another conjecture is no less probable, that Christ wanted to show that now that He has completed the course of human life, He puts off the condition in which He has lived and enters into the heavenly kingdom where He will rule over angels and men. For we know that Christ's custom always was to recall believers from looking at the flesh. This was especially necessary at His death."

"Each church is free to establish whatever form of organisation is suitable and useful itself, for God has prescribed nothing specific about this."

"The name of Christ is used here instead of the Church, because the similitude was intended to apply—not to God's only-begotten Son, but to us. It is a passage that is full of choice consolation, inasmuch as he calls the Church Christ; for Christ confers upon us this honour —that he is willing to be esteemed and recognised, not in himself merely, but also in his members. Hence the same Apostle says elsewhere, (Eph. i. 23,) that the Church is his completion, as though he would, if separated from his members, be incomplete."

"There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice."

"This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church."

"Then let every one of us, being warned by this sentence of the angel, acknowledge that he as yet cleaves to first principles, or, at least, does not comprehend all those things which are necessary to be known; and that therefore progress is to be made to the very end of life: for this is our wisdom, to be learners to the end."

"Where many of you only have an understanding of the eyes. What you see is division and separation, it is indeed troubling that God would share his power with Lucifer and allow him to fight against him, and bring about discontent. You will say that Lucifer must have a vehement disposition and ungovernable impetuosity; as if that was enough to break the power of God. Now with this understanding it is impossible to accept Lucifer as independent from God without falling into the Paganism of Persia and Indiana. This paganism has infiltrated the hearts of Christians and has caused them to forget the power of God, saying he does not have control over all. Now from this we can conclude that Lucifer, who you incorrectly call a Devil, is a loyal servant of God."

"John Calvin whose peculiar fad It was to call God murderous, Which further led that feverish cad To burn alive the Servetus."

"It is true that Calvin and his fellow pastors in Geneva were involved in the death of Servetus.However, it would be difficult to find any church leader in the 16th century who advocated a more gentle approach. Luther called for attacks on German peasants and wrote an angry tract against the Jews, called ‘On the Jews and their Lies'. Zwingli, the Reformer of Zurich, supported the execution by drowning of the Anabaptist leader, Felix Manz. Sir Thomas More, England's Catholic Lord Chancellor, presided over the execution of those he viewed as “heretics” in England during the reign of Henry the VIII. Each country of Europe in the sixteenth century felt that defending its religious views involved taking strong measures against those who disagreed. Toleration and acceptance of doctrinal differences were simply not sixteenth ­century concepts."

"For Calvin, religion and piety are one and the same thing."

"It is remarkable, how much of Roman Catholic tradition and theory survived in Calvin's theology."

"[T]he man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense."

"But seeing the source from which this book came forth, the majesty of the matter surpasses all human eloquence, being privileged and having such force within it that a single sentence has power to ravish, inspire, and give knowledge to the most stupid and ignorant beings alive in what way God wishes to be known, seen, and heard."

"Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures."

"Whatever Calvin was or was not, he was a man to whom religion was the very breath of life. His piety was as profound as it was constant. All that was best, noblest and most influential in him (Rénan calls him the most Christian man of his generation) is traceable to its true source in a heart that was wholly given to God. Never has a more genuinely consecrated life been lived than his."

"Piety was the keynote of his character. He was a God-possessed soul. Theology was no concern to him as a study in itself; he devoted himself to it as a framework for the support of all that religion meant to him."

"He was wonderfully patient for those days and for one in his position with all kinds of creedal vagaries around him. It was only when these threatened (in his view) the foundations of morality and orderly government and therefore of society that he became severe. But (excepting in the case of Servetus) his severity limited itself to expulsion of the offender from Geneva as a disturber of the public peace, as a discordant element in the community whose continuance there might be fraught with insidious and perilous potencies of evil. Calvin in this respect accepted and applied the principle of the Justinian code, Cujus regio, ejus religio, though from a different motive, the motive not of the right of the powers-that-be to command the belief of subjects, but that of expediency in the interests of the public welfare, based as it was in his view on what he jealously regarded as the true religion."

"Calvin states that Muhammad is “the companion of the Pope who has done his very best to seduce those poor people who were enraged and saturated and poisoned by his false doctrine”. Calvin condemns Muhammad and the Pope as the two horns of the Antichrist described in Daniel’s prophetic seventh chapter. For Calvin, both the Pope and Muhammad seduced potential Protestant Christians away from the true path through false teachings and idolatrous practices."

"After witnessing Suleiman reach Vienna in 1529, both Luther and Calvin came to fear the influence of Islam and denigrated Muhammad as a consequence of that fear. Calvin in particular condemned Islam for its veneration of Muhammad as a prophet and claimed that Muslims set Mohammed apart from other men as an idol. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Calvin condemns the treatment of Muhammad as that of an idol. “The Turks in the present day”, he states, proclaim “with full throat that the Creator of heaven and earth is their God”, yet they reject the sovereignty of Christ and “substitute an idol in His place”. The replacing of Jesus with Muhammad is a grievous action for Calvin. He proclaims in a sermon, “[the Turks] set their Mahomet in the place of God’s Son”, for which he questions, “ought such a one be put to death, without forbearing?”"

"Calvin took the position that Islam was not merely a threat to European Christendom, but to potential Christians all over the world. Slomp finds Calvin believed that Muslims were former Christians “deceived by Muhammad”. In this way, Calvin placed the blame for Islam as a false religion that sentenced souls to damnation solely on one man, Muhammad. In Calvin’s Opera, Sermon 26 on Daniel 9, he explains that “Muhammad had corrupted the greater part of the world, setting an example for other sects which always want to say and invent something new. All sects that exist today ... have come out of this mud puddle. ”Thus, Muhammad is not merely responsible for Islam as a false religion, but all other sects that have developed since then that mislead the people who, in Calvin’s mind, rightfully belong to Christ. Calvin blames Muhammad for the damned state of all Muslims, citing Muhammad’s “deceitfulness” that has “bewitched” Muslims to idolize him instead of worshipping Christ."

"Apart from a few poets we see these followers of Calvin contributing very little to the arts and letters. They lacked painters, musicians, architects of originality; hilarity was for them suspect and their humor was limited. In their political activities they displayed strange and disquieting tendencies; in North America they brought the Indians, with the help of bullets, whisky, and infected blankets, almost to a vanishing point. In England they led the first great attack against the institution of monarchy in Christian history, in Ireland they displayed their homicidal talents in the most brutal type of warfare, in South Africa they established republics in which the institution of slavery survived till the threshold of the twentieth century, in Hungary they allied themselves with the pagan Turks and in Japan with the Shintoists against the Catholics."

"Calvin rejected the individualism of Luther and followed in the footsteps of older thinkers like Duns Scotus. The monarchical principle was everywhere gaining ground in Europe. He had a lawyer's love of law, and law reposed in the absolute will of the prince. Hebraize this fact, erect a cosmology upon it, and we have the vital principle of . From this cosmic absolutism, that conceived of God as the stable Will sustaining the universe, binding together what otherwise would fly asunder, two important corollaries were derived: the universality of the moral law, and the necessity of . From the former flowed that curious association of God's will with natural causes which induced Cotton Mather, when suffering from toothache, to inquire what sin he had committed with his teeth, and which left no free spaces or non-moral impulses in the lives of men. From the latter flowed the doctrine of ."

"Vernon Louis Parrington, (1st part of quote 2nd part of quote last part of quote; text at archive.org)"

"Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles."

"From a reading of The Institutes of Christian Religion, The Tracts, and much of the Correspondence of Calvin, I am impressed with the fact that Calvin allowed very little place in his life for purely aesthetic enjoyment of art. His whole attention was directed to theological matters and the precise, and to him the inevitable, relation which these theological matters bore to human conduct. His was a keen, penetrating mind, sharpened by legalistic training, which had never gone through the torment of doubt that so affected Luther. Calvin based every thought on the scriptures. He did not speak for himself, but was only the interpreter of the Scriptures. On the one hand this made him very humble, but on the other since he was admittedly the most astute theologian of his day, he could not conceive of anyone doubting the truth and the authority of his interpretations. Little did he realize that he was attempting to set up a new form of religious tyranny, and in many respect succeeding. Calvin was completely ignorant of any approach to truth except by the way of logic and cold reason. There was nothing of the mystic about him as there was in Luther. He was lacking in imagination and in a sensitiveness to visual and aural beauty. In vain may one search for a single reference in his works to the beauty of Lake Geneva or of the Alps. Any man who would set out looking for a wife with a blue print of the desired qualities of his future mate in his hand, asking his friends for candidates, lacks qualities which we expect to find in a normal human being. But Calvin was not a normal human being. He was an organizing genius, wholly concerned with the matters of theology and conduct. His condemnation of Servetus has usually been cited as an example of his hardness of heart. Calvin's love for the classic poets, and the clear concise style of his own writing stand in welcome contrast to his lack of artistic sensitivity toward the other art media. I would not consider his encouragement of the congregational singing of the Psalms as showing a love of music as such, but only a realization of the power of music to help in bringing the word to the hearts of the people."

"Virginia Presbyterian dissenters firmly followed the Reformation teachings of John Calvin and John Knox, as these had been interpreted and adopted by a mid-1600s British Parliament which had been briefly dominated by the Puritans (whose very name indicated their zealous aspirations and earnest commitments to purify these established Church of England. In 1647 this so-called "Long Parliament" passed a series of Calvinist faith statements which were collectively known as The Westminster Standards. These consisted of a formal Confession of Faith and two instructional documents called the Larger and Shorter Catechisms."

"While Calvin in his preaching did not follow a lectionary of prescribed scripture readings for each Sunday of the year, his preaching did usually follow a previously publicized order of scripture selections, e.g.', a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, or on the Beatitudes, or even on a sequential selection of Psalms. In that sense Calvin used a prescribed lectionary (of sorts) which at least some of his hearers might have studied in preparation for listening to his sermons. On the other hand, the 17th century English Puritan Presbyterian and Congregational preachers (who were the principal models for the 18th century Virginia traveling preachers) just "took (any) text and preached from it.""

"With Calvin the decretum horribile is derived not, as with Luther, from religious experience, but from the logical necessity of his thought; – therefore its importance increases with every increase in the logical consistency of that religious thought. The interest of it is solely in God, not in man; God does not exist for men, but men for the sake of God. All creation, including of course the fact, as it undoubtedly was for Calvin, that only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace, can have any meaning only as means to the glory and majesty of God."

"The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background. And how can I be sure of this state of grace? For Calvin himself this was not a problem. He felt himself to be a chosen agent of the Lord, and was certain of his own salvation. Accordingly, to the question of how the individual can be certain of his own election, he has at bottom only the answer that we should be content with the knowledge that God has chosen and depend further only on that implicit trust in Christ which is the result of true faith. He rejects in principle the assumption that one can learn from the conduct of others whether they are chosen or damned. It is an unjustifiable attempt to force God’s secrets."

"The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis. It must be a fides efficax, the call to salvation an effectual calling (expression used in Savoy Declaration)."

"The ascetic, when he wishes to act within the world ... must become afflicted with a sort of happy closure of the mind regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions. Hence, it is no accident that inner-worldly asceticism reached its most consistent development on the foundation of the Calvinist god's absolute inexplicability, utter remoteness from every human criterion, and unsearchableness as to his motives. Thus, the inner-worldly ascetic is the recognized "man of a vocation," who neither inquires about nor finds it necessary to inquire about the meaning of his actual practice of a vocation within the whole world, the total framework of which is not his responsibility but his god's."

"Nature, or to speak in more Christian fashion, God, the common Father of men, from the outset gave equal rights to all his children to all the things they needed to preserve their lives. None of us can boast of being more privileged than the rest by nature; but through the insatiable desire to amass wealth, it became impossible for this beautiful brotherhood to endure for long in the world. Men had to resort to division and possession, which resulted in constant quarrels and litigation; of this were born the words 'mine' and 'thine'—such cold terms, as the admirable St. John Chrysostom remarks—of this, too, was born the great diversity of conditions, some living in affluence in every respect, others languishing in penury."

"Il faut aller jusqu'á l'horreur quand on se connaît."

"[L]e monde même vous désabuse du monde."

"La foi est une adhérence du cœur à la vérité éternelle."

"[L]es hérésies n'ont jamais été que des opinions particulières, puisqu'elles ont commencé par cinq ou six hommes."

"[C]et inexorable ennui, qui fait le fond de la vie humaine depui que l'homme a perdu le goût de Dieu!"

"L'hérétique est celui qui ha une opinion; et c'est ce que le mot même signifie. Quest-ce a dire, avoir une opinion? C'est suivre sa propre pensée et son sentiment particulier. Mais le Catholique est catholique: c'est-a-dire qu'il est universel; et sans avoir de sentiment particulier, il suit sans hèsiter celui de l'Eglise."

"[L]a felicité de l'homme consiste a vivre selon la raison."

"Honor is like the eye, which cannot suffer the least impurity without damage. It is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by a single flaw."

"Only great souls know the grandeur there is in charity."

"Ainsi il appartient à l'esprit , c'est-a-dire à l'intendement, de juger de la beauté; parce que juger de la beauté, c'est juger de l'ordre, de la proportion et de la justesse; choses que l'esprit seul peut apercevoir."

"[L]'imagination aide beaucoup l'intelligence."

"Le fruit de la démonstration est la science."

"[T]oute vérité démontrée est nécessaire, eternelle et immuable."

"[I]l n'y a rien de pire que l'anarchie, c'est-a-dire de vivre sans gouvernement et sans lois."

"Le plus grand dérèglement de l'esprit, c'est de croire les choses parce qu'on veut qu'elles soient et non parce qu'on a vu qu'elles sont en effet."

"Un homme ne veut point croire qu'il soit orgueilleux, ni lâche, ni paresseux, ni emporté; il veut croire que qu'il a raison; et quoique su conscience lui reproche souvent ses fautes, il aime mieux étordir lui-même le sentiment qu'il en a, que d'avoir le chagrin de les connaître."

"Il n'y a donc rien de meilleur, pour ben juger des animaux, que d'étudier soi-même auparavant. Car encore que nous ayons quelque chose au-dessus de l'animal, nous sommes animaux, et nous avons l'expérience tant de ce que fait en nous l'animal que de ce qu'y fait le raisonnement et la réflexion."

"Ne croyons pas que notre âme sait une portion de la nature divine, comme l'ont revé quelques philosophes. Dieu n'est pas un tout qui se partage."

"[L]e destinée ordinaire de ceux qui refusent de prêter l'oreille à la vérité est d'être entraînés à leur perte par des prophètes menteurs."

"Les uns alléguant toujours que la liberté excessive se détruit enfin elle-même; et les autres craignant au contraire que l'autorité, que de sa nature croît toujours, ne dégénérât enfin en tyrannie."

"Le propre de l'hérétique, c'est-à-dire de colui qui a une opinion particulière, est de s'attacher à ses propres pensées; et le propre du catholique, c'est-à-dire de l'universel, est de préférer à ses sentiments le sentiment commun de tout l'Eglise."

"Mais Dieu se rit des prières qu'on lui fait pour détourner les malheurs publics, quand on ne s'oppose pas à ce qui se fait pour les attirer. Que dis-je? quand on l'approuve et qu'on y souscrit, quoique ce soit avec répugnance."

"[D]éisme, c-est-à-dire […] un athéisme déguisé."

"Le premier de tous les empires est celui qu'on a sur ses désirs."

"C'est le plus grande de toutes les faiblesses, que de craindre trop rie paraître faible."

"Au milieu des déguisements et des artifices qui règnent parmi les hommes, il n'y a que l'attention et la vigilance qui nous puissent sauver des surprises."

"[L]a perfection est la raison d'être."

"Dieu est celui en qui le non-être n'a pas de lieu."

"La sagesse humaine apprend beaucoup, si elle apprend à se taire."

"Bossuet was a man you instinctively approached on all fours."

"La gloire de Bossuet est devenue l'une des religions de la France."

"Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis."

"Liberavi animam meam."

"Bestia illa de Apocalypsi, cui datum est os loquens blasphemias, et bellum gerere cum sanctis (Apoc. XIII, 5-7), Petri cathedram occupat, tanquam leo paratus ad praedam."

"Non est jam dicere, "Ut populus, sic sacerdos"; quia nec si populus, ut sacerdos."

"Qui se sibi magistrum constituit, stulto se discipulum subdit."

"Vulgo dicitur: Quod non videt oculus, cor non dolet."

"Qui me amat, amat et canem meam."

"Ego addo et de pertinacia Græcorum, qui nobiscum sunt, et nobiscum non sunt, juncti fide, pace divisi, quanquam et in fide ipsa claudicaverint a semitis rectis."

""My burden is light," said the blessed Redeemer, a light burden indeed, which carries him that bears it. I have looked through all nature for a resemblance of this, and seem to find a shadow of it in the wings of a bird, which are indeed borne by the creature, and yet support her flight towards heaven."

"The faith of simplicity is mocked, the secrets of Christ profaned, questions on the highest things are impertinently asked, the Fathers scorned because they were disposed to conciliate rather than solve such problems. Human reason is snatching everything to itself, leaving nothing for faith. It falls upon things which are beyond it...desecrates sacred things more than clarifies them. It does not unlock mysteries and symbols, but tears them asunder; it makes nought of everything to which it cannot gain access and disdains to believe all such things."

"Prostrate, see Thy cross I grasp, And Thy pierced feet I clasp; Gracious Jesus, spurn me not; On me, with compassion fraught, Let Thy glances fall. From thy cross of agony, My Beloved, look on me; Turn me wholly unto Thee; "Be thou whole," say openly, "I forgive thee all.""

"Our King [Jesus] is accused of treachery; it is said of him [by the Muslims] that he is not God, but that he falsely pretended to be something he was not."

"Obey your bishop! “Obey those set over you [Heb 13:17],” the teachers of the Church…. I remind you, my dear friends, of what I said when I was with you: do not receive any outside or unknown preacher, unless he be sent by your bishop or preaches with the permission of the pope. For “how shall they preach unless they are sent [Rom 10:15]?”"

"Do what Jesus says,... what he commands through his ministers who are in the Church [see 1 Cor 6:4]. Be subject to his vicars, your leaders, not only those who are gentle and kind, but even those who are overbearing [see 1 Pt 2:18]."

"It’s not as if grace did one half of the work and free choice the other; each does the whole work, in its own peculiar contribution. Grace does the whole work, and so does free choice – with this one qualification: That whereas the whole is done in free choice, so is the whole done of grace."

"I rejoiced so greatly when I heard of your answer in the case of some who seemed to be filled with extravagant ambition for the office of legate, and to hope for it with impudence, even more than I can say. And not only I but all who love your name rejoiced with exceeding great joy. Moreover, when I read your letter written in the cause of the Church of Rodez, then was my mouth filled with laughter and my tongue with joy. Such things as these are worthy of your Apostleship, they honour the highest See, they are just what is becoming to the Bishop of the world. Whence, also, I bow my knees to the Author of your unique Primacy... In truth, you have been raised to this chair for the fall and rising again of many."

"Among us on the earth there is His memory; but in the Kingdom of heaven His very Presence. That Presence is the joy of those who have already attained to beatitude; the memory is the comfort of us who are still wayfarers, journeying towards the Fatherland."

"The reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of our love for Him is to love Him without measure."

"I would count him blessed and holy to whom such rapture has been vouchsafed in this mortal life, for even an instant to lose thyself, as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial. But if sometimes a poor mortal feels that heavenly joy for a rapturous moment, then this wretched life envies his happiness, the malice of daily trifles disturbs him, this body of death weighs him down, the needs of the flesh are imperative, the weakness of corruption fails him, and above all brotherly love calls him back to duty. Alas! that voice summons him to re-enter his own round of existence; and he must ever cry out lamentably, ‘O Lord, I am oppressed: undertake for me’ (Isa. 38.14); and again, ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Rom. 7.24)Seeing that the Scripture saith, God has made all for His own glory (Isa. 43.7), surely His creatures ought to conform themselves, as much as they can, to His will. In Him should all our affections center, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves. And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: ‘Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6.10). O chaste and holy love! O sweet and gracious affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the divine will! To reach this state is to become deified. As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely human remained in man? The substance will endure, but in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory. When will that be? Who will see, who possess it? ‘When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’ (Ps. 42.2). ‘My heart hath talked of Thee, Seek ye My face: Thy face, Lord, will I seek’ (Ps. 27.8). Lord, thinkest Thou that I, even I shall see Thy holy temple?"

"What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous eternity"

"Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis."

"Sunt namque qui scire volunt eo fine tantum ut sciant; et turpis curiositas est. Et sunt qui scire volunt, ut sciantur ipsi; et turpis vanitas est. ... Et sunt item qui scire volunt, ut scientiam suam vendant, verbi causa, pro pecunia, pro honoribus; et turpis quaestus est. Sed sunt quoque qui scire volunt, ut aedificent; et caritas est. Et item qui scire volunt, ut aedificentur; et prudentia est."

"Look at those detractors. Look at those dogs. They ridicule us for baptizing infants, praying for the dead, and asking the prayers of the saints. They lose no time in cutting Christ off from all kinds of people to both sexes, young and old, living and dead. They put infants outside the sphere of grace because they are too young to receive it, and those who are full grown because they find difficulty in preserving chastity. They deprive the dead of the help of the living, and rob the living of the prayers of the saints because they have died. God forbid! The Lord will not forsake his people who are as the sands of the sea, nor will he who redeemed all be content with a few, and those heretics...."

"It is difficult now to look back across the centuries and appreciate the tremendous impact of his personality on all who knew him. The fire of his eloquence has been quenched in the written words that survive. As a theologian and a controversialist he now appears rigid and a little crude and unkind. But from the day in 1115 when, at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed Abbot of Clairvaux, till his death nearly forty years later he was the dominant influence in the religious and political life of western Europe."

"There were some men whose genius and virtues would have adorned any age. Among these was... Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), whose pen was to control Christendom for a generation, and whose sainthood shines through all ages, was in the nursery when the soldiers of the cross started for the East. There were noble women, too. Bernard owed much of his talent and virtue to his mother, Aletta, whose memory is the imperishable ornament of womanhood. ...The intellectuality of this period exercised itself almost entirely with theological and religious subjects. Men in seclusion elaborated and defended existing church doctrines and gave pious flight to their imaginations. But of literature as such there was none; even the Troubadours had not begun to rhyme the Provencal tongue. The hot breath of the crusades themselves forced the debris of the Latin to send out its first flowers of poesy."

"From the days of Charlemagne it had been the custom to signalize entrance upon manhood by buckling about the loins the sword, the investment with "virile arms." The church, in hopeless inability to check the universal passion for fight, sought only to direct it to the suppression of ecclesiastical enemies. ...Bernard, without dispute the holiest man of the twelfth century, offered no excuse or palliation for his harangue to the faithful. "Let them kill the enemy or die. To submit to die for Christ, or to cause one of His enemies to die, is naught but glory.""

"The church steadily compacted its power about thrones and people. The authority of the Papacy was especially augmented in this period by its temporary success against a movement whose ultimate triumph was destined to cost the Roman Church its dominance of Christendom, viz., the impulse towards liberal thought. The standard-bearer of this essential Protestantism was Abelard. This astute reasoner placed the human judgment, when guided by correct scholarship, above all traditional authority. The popularity of his teaching was a serious menace to the doctrines of the church, so far as these rested upon the dictation of the popes. The consternation of ecclesiastics was voiced by Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux who declared, in his appeal to Pope Innocent II: "These books of Abelard are flying abroad over all the world; they no longer shun the light; they find their way into castles and cities; they pass from land to land, from one people to another. A new gospel is promulgated, a new faith is preached. Disputations are held on virtue and vice not according to Christian morality, on the sacraments of the church not according to the rule of faith, on the mystery of the Trinity not with simplicity and soberness. This huge Goliath, with his armor-bearer, Arnold of Brescia, defies the armies of the Lord to battle." The Goliath fell, but by no pebble from the sling of a David."

"Bernard was justly reputed the greatest mind of the age. He hesitated to enter into a learned controversy with Abelard, but smote him with a thunderbolt of excommunication, which he secured from the hands of the occupant of the Vatican throne."

"It was while the papal territory in Italy was... occupied by the adherents of Arnold that the second crusade [1145–1149] was inaugurated. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, was its chief inspirer, both in counsel with the leaders of Europe and with his voice as its popular herald. High above generals and scholars, beyond kings, emperors, and popes, this man stands in the gaze of history. His repute for wisdom and sanctity was extended by miracles accredited to his converse with Heaven. Believed to be above earthly ambition, he commanded and rebuked with a celestial authority. Papal electors came to consult the monk before they announced their judgment as to who should be Pope, and when on the throne, the Pope consulted the monk before he ventured to set the seal of his infallibility to his own utterances. Bernard's humility may have been great Godward, but it was not of the sort to lead him to decline the solemn sovereignty of men's minds and wills."

"When Henry I of England hesitated to acknowledge Innocent II, Bernard's choice for Pope, on the ground that he was not the rightful occupant of the holy see, the monk exclaimed, "Answer thou for thy other sins; let this be on my head.""

"When Lothaire of Germany demanded of the Holy Father the renewal of the right of imperial investitures, the saint threw his spell about the emperor and left him submissive at the feet of the pontiff."

"When Louis VII of France, in his rage against Thibaut, Count of Champagne, carried devastation through the count's domains and burned the church of Vitry, with thirteen hundred of its citizens who had there taken refuge against his vengeance, Bernard openly rebuked the king, and with such effect that the monarch proposed, as a self-inflicted penance, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, there to wipe out his guilt in the blood of Moslems. In this purpose of Louis VII originated the second crusade."

"Pope Honorius delegated Bernard to preach throughout France and Germany the renewal of the holy war. Drawn as much by the fame of the monk as by the mandates of the king and the Pope, a vast assembly of prelates and nobles gathered at Vézelay in Burgundy. A large platform was erected on a hill outside the city. King and monk stood together, representing the combined will of earth and heaven. The enthusiasm of the assembly of Clermont in 1095, when Peter the Hermit and Urban II launched the first crusade, was matched by the holy fervor inspired by Bernard as he cried, "O ye who listen to me! Hasten to appease the anger of heaven, but no longer implore its goodness by vain complaints. Clothe yourselves in sackcloth, but also cover yourselves with your impenetrable bucklers. The din of arms, the danger, the labors, the fatigues of war, are the penances that God now imposes upon you. Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance." As in the olden scene, the cry "Deus vult! Deus vult!" rolled over the fields, and was echoed by the voice of the orator: "Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.""

"The king set the example by prostrating himself at the feet of the monk and receiving from his hands the badge of the cross. "The cross! the cross!" was the response of thousands who crowded about the platform. Queen Eleanor imitated her husband and was followed by such a host of nobles bishops and knights that Bernard tore his garments into strips to supply the enthusiasts with the insignia of their new devotion. Similar scenes were enacted throughout France wherever the saint appeared. Eye witnesses do not hesitate to tell of miracles wrought by his hands emblazoning his mission with the seals of heaven."

"Not distrustful of the king, but credulous of the heavenly mission of Bernard, the multitude, including the most noted warriors, called for the monk to become their military leader. Only the intervention of the Holy Father, who declared that it was sufficient for the saint to be the trumpet of Heaven without wielding the sword, allayed the universal demand."

"St. Bernard said of Henry, "He comes of the devil and to the devil he shall return.""

"Bernard was the best monk that ever lived, whom I admire beyond all the rest put together."

"Before a vast assembly in 1097 Pope Urban II said: "If you must have blood, bathe your hands In the blood of infidels. ...soldiers of hell become soldiers of the living God." Whereupon the multitude shouted: "It Is the will of God." Bernard, the holiest man of his century, cried out: "...Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood." In 1188 the Pope ordered prayers against the Saracens to be said daily."

"Bonam quippe intentionem, hoc est, rectam in se dicimus, operationem vero non quod boni aliquid in se suscipiat, sed quod ex bona intentione procedat. Unde et ab eodem homine cum in diversis temporibus idem fiat, pro diversitate tamen intentione eius operatio modo bono modo mala dicitur."

"O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata, quae semper celebrat superna curia."

"The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that He might illuminate the world by His wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself."

"There are many seeming contradictions and even obscurities in the innumerable writings of the church fathers. Our respect for their authority should not stand in the way of an effort on our part to come at the truth. The obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and may be discussed without impugning the good faith and insight of the fathers. A writer may use different terms to mean the same thing, in order to avoid a monotonous repetition of the same word. Common, vague words may be employed in order that the common people may understand; and sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement. Poetical, figurative language is often obscure and vague. Not infrequently apocryphal works are attributed to the saints. Then, even the best authors often introduce the erroneous views of others and leave the reader to distinguish between the true and the false. Sometimes, as Augustine confesses in his own case, the fathers ventured to rely upon the opinions of others."

"Doubtless the fathers might err; even Peter, the prince of the apostles, fell into error: what wonder that the saints do not always show themselves inspired? The fathers did not themselves believe that they, or their companions, were always right. Augustine found himself mistaken in some cases and did not hesitate to retract his errors. He warns his admirers not to look upon his letters as they would upon the Scriptures, but to accept only those things which, upon examination, they find to be true. All writings belonging to this class are to be read with full freedom to criticize, and with no obligation to accept unquestioningly; otherwise they way would be blocked to all discussion, and posterity be deprived of the excellent intellectual exercise of debating difficult questions of language and presentation."

"I have ventured to bring together various dicta of the holy fathers, as they came to mind, and to formulate certain questions which were suggested by the seeming contradictions in the statements. These questions ought to serve to excite tender readers to a zealous inquiry into truth and so sharpen their wits. The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning. Aristotle, the most clear-sighted of all the philosophers, was desirous above all things else to arouse this questioning spirit, for in his Categories he exhorts a student as follows: "It may well be difficult to reach a positive conclusion in these matters unless they be frequently discussed. It is by no means fruitless to be doubtful on particular points." By doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth."

"Q1 Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?"

"Q2 Does faith deal only with unseen things, or not?"

"Q3 Is there any knowledge of things unseen, or not?"

"Q4 May one believe only in God alone, or not?"

"Q5 Is God a single unitary being, or not?"

"Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore, because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily."

"St. Jerome, whose heir methinks I am in the endurance of foul slander, says in his letter to Nepotanius: "The apostle says: 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.' He no longer seeks to please men, and so is made Christ's servant" (Epist. 2). And again, in his letter to Asella regarding those whom he was falsely accused of loving: "I give thanks to my God that I am worthy to be one whom the world hates" (Epist. 99). And to the monk Heliodorus he writes: "You are wrong, brother, you are wrong if you think there is ever a time when the Christian does not suffer persecution. For our adversary goes about as a roaring lion seeking what he may devour, and do you still think of peace? Nay, he lieth in ambush among the rich." Inspired by those records and examples, we should endure our persecutions all the more steadfastly the more bitterly they harm us. We should not doubt that even if they are not according to our deserts, at least they serve for the purifying of our soul. And since all things are done in accordance with the divine ordering, let every one of true faith console himself amid all his afflictions with the thought that the great goodness of God permits nothing to be done without reason, and brings to a good end whatsoever may seem to happen wrongfully. Wherefore rightly do all men say: "Thy will be done." And great is the consolation to all lovers of God in the word of the Apostle when he says: "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God" (Rom. viii, 28). The wise man of old had this in mind when he said in his Proverbs: "There shall no evil happen to the just" (Prov. xii, 21). By this he clearly shows that whosoever grows wrathful for any reason against his sufferings has therein departed from the way of the just, because he may not doubt that these things have happened to him by divine dispensation. ///Even such are those who yield to their own rather than to the divine purpose, and with hidden desires resist the spirit which echoes in the words, "Thy will be done," thus placing their own will ahead of the will of God. Farewell."

"Sometimes I grieve for the house of the Paraclete, and wish to see it again. Ah, Philintus! does not the love of Heloise still burn in my heart? I have not yet triumphed over that happy passion. In the midst of my retirement I sigh, I weep, I pine, I speak the dear name of Heloise, pleased to hear the sound, I complain of the severity of Heaven. But, oh! let us not deceive ourselves: I have not made a right use of grace. I am thoroughly wretched. I have not yet torn from my heart deep roots which vice has planted in it. For if my conversion was sincere, how could I take a pleasure to relate my past follies? Could I not more easily comfort myself in my afflictions? Could I not turn to my advantage those words of God himself, If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if the world hate you, ye know that it hated me also? Come Philintus, let us make a strong effort, turn our misfortunes to our advantage, make them meritorious, or at least wipe out our offences; let us receive, without murmuring, what comes from the hand of God, and let us not oppose our will to his. Adieu. I give you advice, which could I myself follow, I should be happy."

"When love has once been sincere, how difficult it is to determine to love no more? 'Tis a thousand times more easy to renounce the world than love. I hate this deceitful faithless world; I think no more of it; but my heart, still wandering, will eternally make me feel the anguish of having lost you, in spite of all the convictions of my understanding. In the mean time tho' I so be so cowardly as to retract what you have read, do not suffer me to offer myself to your thoughts but under this last notion. Remember my last endeavours were to seduce your heart. You perished by my means, and I with you. The same waves swallowed us both up. We waited for death with indifference, and the same death had carried us headlong to the same punishments. But Providence has turned off this blow, and our shipwreck has thrown us into an haven. There are some whom the mercy of God saves by afflictions. Let my salvation be the fruit of your prayers! let me owe it to your tears, or exemplary holiness! Tho' my heart, Lord! be filled with the love of one of thy creatures, thy hand can, when it pleases, draw out of it those ideas which fill its whole capacity. To love Heloise truly is to leave her entirely to that quiet which retirement and virtue afford. I have resolved it: this letter shall be my last fault. Adieu. If I die here, I will give orders that my body be carried to the house of the Paraclete. You shall see me in that condition; not to demand tears from you, it will then be too late; weep rather for me now, to extinguish that fire which burns me. You shall see me, to strengthen your piety by the horror of this carcase; and my death, then more eloquent than I can be, will tell you what you love when you love a man. I hope you will be contented, when you have finished this mortal life, to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing, and my tomb will, by that means, be more rich and more renowned."

"Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues."

"Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was the preeminent philosopher of the twelfth century and perhaps the greatest logician of the middle ages. During his life he was equally famous as a poet and a composer, and might also have ranked as the preeminent theologian of his day had his ideas earned more converts and less condemnation. In all areas Abelard was brilliant, innovative, and controversial. He was a genius. He knew it, and made no apologies. His vast knowledge, wit, charm, and even arrogance drew a generation of Europe's finest minds to Paris to learn from him."

"Abelard's best known writings are his autobiography the Historia Calamitatum (The Story of my Misfourtunes), the letters he exchanged with Heloise, and the Sic et Non. The Historia, written after Abelard's escape from St. Gildas, details Abelard's rise to fame and the misfortunes of his fall. It is addressed to an unidentified friend with the hope that this friend will feel better about his own suffering after reading of Abelard's. The real purpose was likely to remind people of Abelard's past fame and to pave the way for a return to Paris. The letters of Abelard and Heloise discuss issues ranging from their relationship to theological and philosophical matters affecting Heloise's nuns at the Paraclete."

"The fundamental commitment behind Abelard's nominalism, that there is nothing that is not individual (or at least particular), is the conceptual core of all his metaphysical thought. Abelard held that the individual is primary, ontologically basic, and requires no explanation. It is notoriously difficult to prove such a claim. If Abelard could be said to have a metaphysical project it would be to show that other "items" that more promiscuous philosophers would add to their ontology can be reductively explained in terms of individuals (or at least of particulars). Abelard asserts that individuals are integral wholes, and he adopts the language of form-matter composites to describe individuals, but the form is nothing other than the arrangement of the parts that comprise the whole. … Abelard holds a doctrine of double creation. God first created the four basic elements and then combined the four basic elements into various individuals according to the exemplars in his mind …. Only God has this power to assemble parts into a single discrete individual substance. Only God can impose form on matter … It makes perfect sense for Abelard to talk about forms, but the form is not a part of the individual. This is the hallmark of Abelard's reductivism; "form" is a name for an objectively discernable feature of the individual, not for an ontologically distinct item. Individuals thus created are discreet from all others; they share no matter or form, yet they are similar. Abelard will explain this in terms of natures or substantial forms, but again prefers a reductive account. Individuals have a certain nature because they have a certain substantial form, but this substantial form is not a part of the individual or any item that could be shared by two individuals. In contemporary terms Abelard would be a resemblance nominalist. Individuals created by God according to the same exemplar will be naturally similar in the way that houses made according to the same blueprint are similar. This similarity is real, not conventional, but nothing in addition to the individuals is required to explain this fact. The individuals that populate the world fall into natural kinds. Natures themselves do not need to be posited to explain this fact about the world."

"Almost a thousand years ago, a teacher fell in love with his student. Almost a thousand years ago, they began a torrid affair. They made love in the kitchens of convents and in the boudoir of the girl's uncle. They wrote hundreds of love letters. When the girl bore a child, they were secretly married, but the teacher was castrated by henchmen of the enraged uncle. At her lover's bidding, the girl took religious orders. He took the habit of a monk. They retreated into separate monasteries and wrote to each other until parted by death. The story of Abelard and Heloise hardly resonates with the spirit of our age. Not least, its origins in the classroom offend: teachers, we know, are not supposed to fall in love with their students. Heloise, moreover, is no feminist heroine, despite having been one of the best educated women of her age and writing some of its most affecting prose. Nobody who takes the veil on the command of her husband and swears "complete obedience" to him can hope to sneak into the bastion of feminism. Today, even the high romance of the couple's liaison strikes us as foreign: all that sacrifice and intensity! … The notion that passion might comprise not only joy but pain, not only self-realization but self-abandonment, seems archaic. To admire, as an early-20th-century biographer of Abelard and Heloise does, the "beauty of souls large enough to be promoted to such sufferings" seems downright perverse. And yet there's a grandeur to high-stakes romance, to self-sacrifice, that's missing from our latex-love culture — and it's a grandeur we perhaps crave to recover. How else to account for the flurry of new writing on these two ill-fated 12th-century lovers? … Only recently — and miraculously — has a new cache of material turned up, fragments of 113 letters that many scholars believe Abelard and Heloise exchanged before Abelard's castration. Copied in the 15th century by a monk named Johannes de Vespria, discovered in 1980 by Constant J. Mews and finally published as The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, these short but eloquent missives present two people vying — with no coyness or gender typecasting whatever — to outdo each other in expressions of adoration. … The love stories that touch us most deeply are punctuated by human frailty. Look at them up close and you see the fault lines, compromises and anticlimaxes. At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, Romeo is just as intemperately in love with a girl called Rosaline as he is later with Juliet. Tristan and Isolde's passion could well be the fruit of substance abuse, of a love potion they drank unknowingly. And Abélard and Heloise? They weren't equally strong or passionate or generous. Still, they put their frailties together and begat a perfect myth, as well as something perhaps even more precious — a surprising, splendid, fractured reality. "There is a crack," the Leonard Cohen lyric goes, "a crack in everything: that's how the light gets in.""

"Officium officialium, quorum te numero aggregasti, hodie est, jura confundere, suscitare lites, transactiones rescindere, innectere dilationes, suprimere veritatem, fovere mendacium, quaestum sequi, aeqitatem vendere, inhiare exactionibus, versutias concinnare."

"Aqua turbida piscosior est."

"Male ulciscitur dedecus sibi illatum, qui amputat nasum suum."

"D'ordinaire, ceux qui gouvernent les enfants ne leur pardonnent rien, et se pardonnent tout à eux-mêmes."

"Remarquez un grand défaut des éducations ordinaires: on met tout le plaisir d'un côté , et tout l'ennui de l'autre; tout l'ennui dans l'étude, tout le plaisir dans les divertissements."

"Les traités de paix ne couvrent rien, lorsque vous êtes le plus fort, & que vous réduisez vos voisins à signer le traité pour éviter de plus grands maux: alors il signe comme un particulier donne sa bourse à un voleur qui lui tient le pistolet sur la gorge."

"Toutes les guerres sont civiles; car c'est toujours l'homme contre l'homme qui répand son propre sang, qui déchire ses propres entrailles."

"Je proteste que personne n'admire Cicéron plus que je fais: il embellit tout ce qu’il touche."

"Le bon historien n'est d'aucun temps ni d'aucun pays: quoiqu'il aime sa patrie, il ne la flatte jamais en rien."

"Nous verrons à sa lumière, dans l'éternité, que ce que nous désirions nous eût été funeste, et que ce que nous voulions éviter était essentiel à notre bonheur."

"Sur-tout ne vous laissez point ensorceler par les attraits diaboliques de la géométrie."

"L'humilité produit le support d'autrui. La vue seule de nos misères peut nous rendre compatissants et indulgents pour celles d'autrui"

"When you come to be sensibly touched, the scales will fall from your eyes; and by the penetrating eyes of love you will discern that which your other eyes will never see."

"The river of grace, it is true, is not dried up; but often, in order to water new lands, it diverts its course and leaves only dry sand in the old canal. Faith has not died out, I admit; but it is not bound to any of the places it illumines; it leaves behind it a frightful night for those who have scorned the day, and it carries rays of light to purer eyes."

"Quiconque est capable de mentir est indigne d'être compté au nombre des hommes; et quiconque ne sait pas se taire est indigne de gouverner."

"Tout le genre humain n’est qu’une famille dispersée sur la face de toute la terre. Tous les peuples sont frères, et doivent s’aimer comme tels."

"Les hommes sont fort à plaindre d'avoir à être gouvernés par un roi, qui n'est qu'homme semblable à eux; car il faudroit des dieux pour redresser les hommes. Mais les rois ne sont pas moins à plaindre, n'étant qu'hommes, c'est-à-dire foibles et imparfaits, d'avoir à gouverner cette multitude innombrable d'hommes corrompus et trompeurs."

"Jesus Christ was born in a stable; He was obliged to fly into Egypt; thirty years of His life were spent in a workshop; He suffered hunger, thirst, and weariness; He was poor, despised, and miserable; He taught the doctrines of heaven, and no one would listen. The great and the wise persecuted and took Him, subjected Him to frightful torments, treated Him as a slave, and put Him to death between two malefactors, having preferred to give liberty to a robber, rather than to suffer Him to escape. Such was the life which our Lord chose; while we are horrified at any kind of humiliation, and cannot bear the slightest appearance of contempt."

"Let us endeavor to commence every enterprise with a pure view to the glory of God, continue it without distraction, and finish it without impatience."

"A cross borne in simplicity, without the interference of self-love to augment it, is only half a cross. Suffering in this simplicity of love, we are not only happy in spile of the cross, but because of it; for love is pleased in suffering for the Well Beloved, and the cross which forms us into His image is a consoling bond of love."

"We must bear our crosses; self is the greatest of them all. If we die in part every day of our lives, we shall have but little to do on the last. O how utterly will these little daily deaths destroy the power of the final dying!"

"This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom, — the very fashion of which "passeth away.""

"If we had strength and faith enough to trust ourselves entirely to God, and follow Him simply wherever He should lead us, we should have no need of any great effort of mind to reach perfection."

"God's treasury where He keeps His children's gifts will be like many a mother's store of relics of her children, full of things of no value to others, but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that was in them."

"As a general rule, those truths which we highly relish, and which shed a degree of practical light upon the things which we are required to give up for God, are leadings of Divine grace, which we should follow without hesitation."

""My Father, it is dark!" "Child, take my hand, Cling close to me; I'll lead thee through the land, Trust my all-seeing care, so shalt thou stand 'Midst glory bright above." Can we be unsafe where God has placed us, and where He watches over us as a parent a child that he loves?"

"The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure."

"This is the love that does all things; that brings to pass even the evils we suffer; so shaping them that they are but instruments of preparing the good which, as yet, has not arrived."

"We may be sure that it is the love of God only that can make us come out of self. If His powerful hand did not sustain us, we should not know how to take the first step in that direction."

"Thou lovest like an infinite God when Thou lovest; Thou movest heaven and earth to save Thy loved ones. Thou becomest man, a babe, the vilest of men, covered with reproaches, dying with infamy and under the pangs of the cross; all this is not too much for an infinite love."

"The presence of God calms the soul, and gives it quiet and repose."

"God works in a mysterious way in grace as well as in nature, concealing His operations under an imperceptible succession of events, and thus keeps us always in the darkness of faith."

"We are never less alone than when we are in the society of a single, faithful friend; never less deserted than when we are carried in the arms of the All-Powerful."

"God never makes us sensible of our weakness except to give us of His strength."

"Carefully purify your conscience from daily faults; suffer no sin to dwell in your heart; small as it may seem, it obscures the light of grace, weighs down the soul, and hinders that constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate."

"True love goes ever straight forward, not in its own strength, but esteeming itself as nothing. Then indeed we are truly happy. The cross is no longer a cross when there is no self to suffer under it."

"Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing."

"If there is any thing that can render the soul calm, dissipate its scruples, and dispel its fears, sweeten its sufferings by the anointing of love, impart strength to it in all its actions, and spread abroad the joy of the Holy Spirit in its countenance and words, it is a simple, free, and child-like repose in the arms of God."

"O Lord! take my heart, for I cannot give it; and when Thou hast it, O! keep it, for I cannot keep it for Thee; and save me in spite of myself, for Jesus Christ's sake."

"If we love Him infinitely more than we do ourselves, we make an unconditional sacrifice of ourselves to His good pleasure, desiring only to love Him and to forget ourselves. He who thus loses his soul shall find it again with eternal life."

"There is but one way in which God should be loved, and that is to take no step except with Him and for Him, and to follow with a generous self-abandonment every thing which He requires."

"O God, the creature knows not to what end Thou hast made Him; teach him, and write in the depths of his soul that the clay must suffer itself to be shaped at the will of the potter."

"If we love Him infinitely more than we do ourselves, we make an unconditional sacr"

"Here it is that the Spirit teaches us all truth; for all truth is eminently contained in this sacrifice of love, where the soul strips itself of every thing to present it to God."

"As the reflections of our pride upon our defects are bitter, disheartening, and vexatious, so the return of the soul towards God is peaceful and sustained by confidence. You will find by experience how much more your progress will be aided by this simple, peaceful turning towards God, than by all your chagrin and spite at the faults that exist in you."

"We sleep in peace in the arms of God when we yield ourselves up to His providence, in a delightful consciousness of His tender mercies; no more restless uncertainties, no more anxious desires, no more impatience at the place we are in, for it is God who has put us there, and who holds us in His arms. Can we be unsafe where He has placed us, and where He watches over us as a parent watches a child? This confiding repose, in which earthly care sleeps, is the true vigilance of the heart; yielding itself up to God, with no other support than Him, it thus watches while we sleep. This is the love of Him that will not sleep even in death."

"Commit yourself then to God! He will be your guide. He Himself will travel with you, as we are told He did with the Israelites, to bring them step by step across the desert to the promised land. Ah! what will be your blessedness, if you will but surrender yourself into the hands of God, permitting Him to do whatever He will, not according to your desires, but according to His own good pleasure?"

"[Servetus] is a wise man who doubtless thought he was teaching the truth, but he fell into the hands of the Devil. . . . Be careful the same thing does not happen to you!"

"If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?"

"To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods."

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed."

"The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself."

"By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, naturalism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience."

"The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung."

"Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright."

"The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being."

"The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others."

"The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice."

"The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks."

"To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness — the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence."

"When ethics thus moves into the domain of politics and becomes morality, the possibility of violence appears because of the threat of the application of such absolutist forms of thought. Further, although the moral agent must remain free in order to avoid the totalizing domination of the state, morality must still be grounded in the ethical relation of the face-to-face."

"According to Levinas, we construct our world in our individual minds, and this constructed reality has boundaries or "horizons" as Levinas calls it. But when the Face of the Other intrudes into this boundaried construction, what Levinas terms our "same," the Other inevitably becomes part of our construction. The key phrase is "our construction," because our construction of the Other is not the Other; the Other can never become one with our "same": it continually transcends our poor attempt to know it."

"In 1923 Levinas went to France to continue his studies, where he had Charles Blondell and Halbwachs as teachers."

"For Levinas there is a radical opposition between politics and religion. The former enslaves liberty by encompassing it within the 'Great All'. Religion on the other hand, which for Levinas is the metaphysical relationship with the Other, is based in respect and mutual aid even beyond need, submission and generosity."

"He teaches us that we can redeem our humanity by not just caring about our own perspective but by seeing details of the other individual in the mass of humans."

"Levinas teaches us that to be entitled with the adjective of human, you must first acknowledge the humanity of the other, and particularize the other within multitude, the one, the specific."

"I beg everyone from the highest to the lowest to forgive me; I have given them all much very bad example."

"Make use of this very simple aspiration: you and I, my love, you and I, you and I, and never another nor more! To which you could add some burning words like: "since you are entirely good and all goodness itself; since you are entirely glorious and all glory itself; since you are entirely holy and all holiness itself!"

"This is what the Son of God desires of you: that he might be able to embellish, perfect and gain you lustre with the fullness of his gifts. Since he is so taken by your Beauty, which flows and gushes from him to you, as I have said, what he desires of you is that he might have the supreme pleasure of an eternity enjoying you and his gifts. Thus, everyone who proceeds to live in a way that is contrary to his own self, lives in God; his whole being is God-orientated; he sees nothing but God and himself."

"My exercise consists in a total elevation of the spite above all created and sense-objects. By this exercise I am securely concentrated within myself and gaze steadily at God who in a simple manner draws me to the state of simple unity and nakedness of spirit, which is called “simple idleness.” In this state of simplicity of rest I am passively possessed and held above every sense-image. This rest remains mine, whether I am by myself doing nothing or whether I am engaged in activity that is exterior or interior and mental. This is what I can tell you about my interior life: my condition is simple, naked, darkened and without knowledge even of God, in nakedness and darkness of spirit. I am lifted above every kind of illumination existing below this level; in this state I cannot bring into play my interior faculties. They are all without exception drawn and held under the influence of this unique and simple “image.” This image, in fact, holds them in a state of naked simplicity above vision and essence at the highest level of spirit, beyond spirit. It is there that I find myself in the nakedness and darkness of the all-incomprehensible depths, incomprehensible because of their darkness, where everything of the senses, everything specific and created melts down and blend into the unity of spirit, or rather into the simplicity of essence or spirit."

"Love does not always choose the same dwelling place, it makes many exploits in men here below; It has its night, its day, and its many levels: only the one who has overall happiness is content. It moves, it suffers in God, its first cause and the unique happiness of the celestial Spirits; It is there that it is always equally enraptured, by the Seraphic love which is above all things."

"I have three homes here below, each very appealing: The Cross, Love, and the Sepulchre; all of them are to me as One, and raise me above nature, and above its wearisome hold."

"Tell me, my Life and my Spouse, this whole ineffable mystery, is it not rather for the admiration of the Seraphim, than for the expression of one like me, your spouse, who doesn’t know what to do about this, except to babble."

"In a word, frankly, I am in love with the love in my Spouse."

"I don’t want anything more than to be one of your spouses employed by you to announce that they languish for your love."

"Sing boldly, O spouses of a Bridegroom such as mine! you, I say, whom are my companions in this fate and enjoyment so happy as ours! Sing at my happy insistence as I will sing by yours, a new song containing endless praises of the infinitely excessive grandeur and love of our Bridegroom, coming to so admirably espouse us, to deiformly deify us of him and in him, and to make us oneself of oneself."

"What is all this? Let him conceive it if he can, express it if he knows how, if he desires to; if one can it is licit, but it is better to shut up as one should; because it is here that our intuitive joy, respectively and mutually in us both, speaks, not of this nor anything like it, but something infinitely other than this, by its profundity, and perpetual and ineffable silence."

"Of what sort is this truth in its accomplishment in us both, your spouses cannot lay their eyes on me without seeing that I am your cherished and unique bride, by the evident and manifest signs of your radiant and exuberant love, which manifestly flow from me to you, whether I perceive them or not, yet all my desire is to be perpetually within, hidden and known only to you who are my Bridegroom, my Life and my All."

"Aspiring then is an expression of love: a love so purely and radically expressed that it transcends all loves that are comprehensible by the senses, the reason or the intellect. By the impetuosity and force of the Spirit of God, it arrives at union with God, not by chance but by a sudden transformation of the spirit in God."

"Aspiration, practiced as a familiar, respectful and loving conversation with God, is such an excellent method, that, by means of it, one soon arrives at the summit of all perfection, and falls in love with Love."

"The way to attain love is to love. A less excellent love leads to a greater love, and a greater love in turn leads to the highest love, as well as to the most excellent and ultimate fruits of active love. Each of these degrees has its own theory and practice. All of them, especially the last degrees, possess a simple, exalted, and singular contemplation of the divine Object, which constantly exerts a powerful influence on the soul and ravishes it with delight."

"This love is so overpowering that the will alone enters the amorous bosom of love, where it savors an unutterable love beyond all understanding and expression. All the while, the dumbfounded intellect remains paralyzed at the gate."

"Such is the effect of love's flood rushing into its lovers. It sweeps them away, ravishes them, and swamps them in its waves. These people become love itself — its spirit, its divinity — insofar as it is possible for any creature in this life."

"The sight of the intuitive and ravishing Beauty of God holds her as if asleep in its delectable bosom...This state surpasses all human definition and comparison."

"This path is so delightful and delectable that anyone who knows it will lovingly travel it at his own cost and expense. Such happiness is beyond words."

"The worst of all human miseries is not to know God, not to feel Him, not to desire Him, not to taste Him."

"Whoever refuses to follow Christ in His poverty will never possess Him in the abundance of His graces and virtues in this life, nor in His glory in the next. To possess nothing and to be nothing is to be full of God."

"We cannot imagine what a great love the angels have for those who are truly chaste. They take such special care of them that the devils can harm them only with difficulty and from a distance."

"The obedience of those, purified in soul and body in the furnace of humiliation, is of infinite worth to God."

"Every soul, touched by God, feels and believes in the depths of its being that it is more sinful than all men together."

"The corruption of the world and of the worldliness is a consequence of the fact that men have no eye whatever for the majesty of God in and around themselves; therefore has God delivered them to the natural and brutal motions of their heart."

"The forgetting of all things and of one's self, combined with contemplation, makes a man divine"

"Love which is not humble is a devil."

"Desire, abide, suffer and die unknown for all time; this is true sanctity!"

"The heavenly Bridegroom allows small failings and common weaknesses in order to deliver his loved ones from pride."

"True solitude is in the soul. The soul has as its desert and homeland God Himself, the father and teacher of all souls"

"The more a person strives after God, the more earnest he will become--the les he will converse with men."

"Modesty enables physical deformity."

"No one can be a true mystic who is not thoroughly versed in the ways of nature. The more nature is attracted by spiritual favors, the more it is inclined to make itself the master of them. Nature always mingles its own spirit with the spirit of God. unless we keep a close watch over it, it will always remain so. Natures most subtle snare is to lead us to confuse what is licit with what is expedient. When we doubt the inspiration of an impulse, whether from grace or nature, we should picture a similar object which is without doubt acceptable to nature. If this representation pleases us, it is a sign that the first inclination also comes from nature and is consequently to be rejected."

"Whether great attraction and strong interior occupations are of nature or of grace can be known by the fact that they are accompanied by perfect rest or subtle disquiet."

"It is much more trying to be continually tormented by evil men than by devils."

"God takes such great pleasure in the sanctity of His saints that in the interests of a few, He often allows the whole Church to suffer great loss."

"Perfect contemplatives hear without astonishment all that the learned propound since they excel in a science transcending all understanding."

"Simplicity is the loving inclination of the soul elevated by God, Who efficaciously drawn it into His own heart. There He reduces all its faculties to unity of spirit, that it may live there, in a n abstract, simple and essential condition, without sensible desire to reason or think of order or disorder. It is continually lost in the eternity of God."

"Nothing ever astonishes the really simple person."

"Those who apply themselves more ardently to the practice of love, by that very face bring more devils upon their heads."

"If the visitations the soul receives are from God, it first feels fear, then gladness accompanied by a hunger and thirst for virtue. If they are from the devil, the soul at first feels gladness and thereafter remains in confusion and darkness. Whether the visitations be from God or from the devil, we should always despise and humiliate ourselves; God is exceedingly glad to visit the humble, but the devil cannot stomach them."

"The soul’s pleasure is to enter and to go forth: to enter into the profound abyss of God where it is irretrievably lost in the sight of his infinite grandeur and beauty which it contemplates continually with the eye of its understanding; and to go forth from there to the ravishing sight of our Savior, the God-Man, whom it is inspired to follow by a lively imitation both interiorly and exteriorly. p. 59"

"When the soul has been deeply touched, it is by love alone that it desires to be intimately joined to God. This is why we advocate reducing ardent aspiration to a few words, even to the mere word ‘love’. This love sends forth ardent and fiery flames with all its strength. As a result. A blazing divine fire is enkindled in the soul. It is in this way that God stirs up the soul and draws it strongly inward. p. 86"

"When you have acquired this excellent habit of love you will feel completely absorbed by it as it penetrates deeply into the center of your being. There you will be conscious of enjoying a taste and a gaze of such height, breadth, length, depth and simplicity that you will attain this state quite easily, without any effort on your part. p. 120"

"We have been created in order to return to God through love, through his own love. In us it must be ardent, pure and unceasingly active, so that we expend all our energies and are consumed by it. Actually, we shall never be able to do or give anything that can sufficiently recompense him who is infinite Love. Before him every creature is deceitful, and in comparison with him, man is nothing. p. 140"

"The method for practicing this ardent love is short and easy. Its subject is constant and loving aspiration. But to be perfect, aspiration must be practice so eagerly and continually that it becomes as easy as breathing. It has a number of degrees, all of which can be reduced to four. The first consists in offering oneself and all created things to God. As far as possible, this should be done in an abstract manner. The second degree consists in making requests of the divine Spouse, asking him for his gifts in him and for his own sake. The third degree consists in being resigned and completely conformed to him. This conformity is very lofty and perfect, and is characterized by a great love. Moreover, the soul also desires it for creatures who are capable of such exalted love. The fourth degree is that of unitive love which unites the soul to God. Here the souls yearns for him and pursues him with acts of love until he opens his loving and super essential bosom to it. Here it feast upon his immense beauty in great abundance and intoxication, eating and drinking at the table of the Blessed. But since this does not last very long, the soul soon returns to itself to feed upon its former spiritual fare. From this it derives renewed strength, until God again receives it into his bosom with the same effect."

"You are within, my Love, and I too am there with you and will be there constantly. No, I will never look for you outside, for you are not there. Rather will I retire into the deepest center of my being, where I shall possess you in a singular repose and delight. IN this simple union, we shall take the greatest delight in each other. And I shall rejoice only in this: that you are my God. With this I am happy, completely satisfied that you are such, and that you will never be understood by any created being. p. 183"

"It is a wonder that any religious at all preserves a love for the true spirit of religious life in the midst of all these adversaries, and remains resolved to be really spiritual in spite of them and even of hell itself. Although their number is small, it does not matter. These few sparks will help to keep the religious state alive to God's honor and glory. p. 188"

"“God destined him to be the brightest flame in our little company as regards spiritual things. It is no exaggeration to say that in this respect he was the St. John of the Cross of the new reform.”"

"John of Saint Samson insists very strongly on the mystical vocation of Carmelites. The active life should not have first place. Recalling that the rule demands a life of prayer; he chooses this prayer — "to be lost in the object of contemplation, God and the things of God." No doubt it is necessary to preach, study and work, but because of the dangers which exterior activity brings, it is necessary for young scholastics to exercise themselves intensely in the principal object of their vocation and establish themselves solidly in the practice of meditation and contemplation. Contemplation is still a pure gift of God; but it is important that we for our part remove all the obstacles and practice the virtues so that we may be found disposed in the way which God demands before giving his mystical favors. In this doctrine, human activity enjoys a considerable part; in its higher degrees, contemplation remains an absolutely gratuitous gift. Thus equilibrium is maintained between the school of acquired contemplation and that of infused contemplation. John is careful to note that perfection does not consist in ecstatic phenomena but in union with God who lives in us. This fire, which burns in us, sets us aflame, and the flame of our love is united to Divine Love which en flames our heart. It is necessary that Carmelites understand this vocation and prepare for it. As a means of arriving at the dispositions required by God, John counsels a form of prayer which the Francis can Henry Herp especially honored, namely, aspiration. It has four degrees: inhaling God, exhaling God, living in God, living by God. Entirely filled with God, we must hunger and thirst for God without ceasing and open our mouth to breathe God. We should start by offering ourselves and every creature to God."

"For the Greeks who believed in the immortality of the soul it may have been harder to accept the Christian preaching of the resurrection than it was for others. . . . The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consonance [agreement] with that of the New Testament."

"Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. . . . Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies."

"Because Jesus came, died, and was resurrected, O[ld] T[estament] festivals have now been fulfilled, and to maintain them ‘means reverting back to the old covenant, as if Christ had never come."

"There is a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. . . . Although Christianity later established a link between these two beliefs, and today the average Christian confuses them completely, I see no reason to hide what I and the majority of scholars consider to be the truth. . . . The life and thought of the New Testament are entirely dominated by faith in the resurrection. . . . The whole man, who is really dead, is brought back to life by a new creative act of God."

"The complex notion of the ‘provisional’ character of the State is the reason why the attitude of the first Christians toward the State is not unitary, but rather appears to be contradictory. I emphasize, that it appears to be so. We need only mention Romans 13:1, ‘Let every man be subject to the powers that be . . . ,’ alongside Revelation 13: the State as the beast from the abyss. In both instances, the same Roman state is spoken of."

"To superficial consideration, it might appear that in its relationship to the State Christianity simply took over the heritage of Judaism, and that the problem poses itself in exactly the same way here as there. Actually, however, the Jewish theocratic ideal is expressly rejected by Christianity as satanic—we need only recall the temptation stories in the Gospel. Satan offers to Christ the kingdoms of the world."

"The Gospel knows nothing of that confusion of the Kingdom of God with the State which is characteristic of the theocratic ideal of Judaism. On the contrary, it opposed the theocratic ideal of Judaism with the same sharpness with which it resisted the totalitarian claims of the Roman State."

"The Zealots ... want to initiate a holy war and to establish within a human framework a Kingdom of God which is an earthly kingdom and which at the same time takes the place of the Roman Empire. Jesus sees that use of this method places one on exactly the same plane as every other totalitarian State. This is also an abandonment of the New Testament expectation of a kingdom which is really God's, and not a human kingdom. If the Zealots succeed in realising their ideal, it will be a totalitarian State of the most extreme form; one making divine claims."

"Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise."

"Being is - or should be - necessary."

"When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test."

"Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it."

"I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical."

"No doubt I shall be told: "In the immense majority of cases this is an illusion." But it is of the essence of hope to exlclude the consideration of cases; moreover, it can be shown that there exists an ascedning dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof - the plane of salvation as opposed to that of success in whatever form"

"the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope."

"The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation."

"speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride."

"And yet it is clear that the normal development of a human being implies an increasingly precise and, as it were, automatic division between what concerns him and what does not, between things for which he is responsible and those for which he is not. Each one of us becomes the centre of a sort of mental space arranged in concentric zones of decreasing interest and participat ion. It is as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him; and this sclerosis is bound up with the hardening of the categories in accordance with which we conceive and evaluate the world."

"The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction."

"No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis. But it is with this crisis in our moral awareness as a starting-point, that there becomes possible that cry from us towards the creative principle, and that demand by it on us, which each must answer in his own way."

"The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. ... I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time."

"No philosopher would be willing to accept the idea of philosophy as a way of escape, but might there not be a question of the philosopher being in duty bound to refuse to accept a world, like our real world here, of disorder and crime where the values of the mind and spirit can no longer find a home?"

"There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought."

"We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect."

"We ought to be able to see more clearly just for what reason the mass-man is so easily turned into a fanatic. What I seem to myself to have grasped is this, that such permeability is due to the fact that man, that the individual, in order to belong to the mass, to be a mass-man, has had, as a preliminary, though without having had the least awareness of it, to divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality or rather to the fact of his belonging to a small actual group. The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas and images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment."

"The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear."

"It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse."

"There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocalizing process. … The human creature under normal conditions finds his bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are not only close to him in space but also linked to him by a feeling of intimacy. Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constellation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions assembles itself around each human being. … This kind of constellation around the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of dissolution."

"Seen as a whole, the direction of theological thinking has been characterized by a transference away from attention to the being per se of supernatural realities, and toward attention to their relationship with man, with the world, and with the problems and the affirmations of all those who for us represent the others."

"People want to be Christians too cheaply, and consequently they are not Christians at all. Salvation has to cost, it has to cost everything, at least as far as the disposition of the heart is concerned."

"[While] there are worldly singularities, there are Christian and salutary ones, too; and this singularity by which one is differentiated from the crowd who tread the broad path is what constitutes the straight and narrow path of the Gospels. ... Holy things will never be established or reestablished so long as we have this fear of appearing singular."

"There are only two loves, whence originate all our wishes and all our actions: the love of God which does all for God and which God rewards and the love of ourselves and of the world, which does not refer to God what should be referred to him and which for that very reason becomes evil."

"Unhappily, a love of walls has seized you; unhappily, the Church of God which you venerate exists in houses and buildings; unhappily, under these you find the name of peace. Is it doubtful that in these Antichrist will have his seat? Safer to me are mountains, and woods, and lakes, and dungeons, and whirlpools; since in these prophets, dwelling or immersed, did prophesy."

"The Son of God is nailed to the cross; but on the cross God conquers human death. Christ, the Son of God, dies; but all flesh is made alive in Christ. The Son of God is in hell; but man is carried back to heaven."

"Many are kept within the pale of the church by the fear of God; yet they are tempted all the while to worldly faults by the allurements of the world. They pray, because they are afraid; they sin, because it is their will. The fair hope of future life makes them call themselves Christians; the allurements of present pleasure make them act like heathen. They do not abide in ungodliness, because they hold the name of God in honour; they are not godly because they follow after things contrary to godliness. ... These, then, are they whom the judgment awaits which unbelievers have already had passed upon them and believers do not need... and their judgment arises from the fact that, though they loved Christ, they yet loved darkness more. (John 3:18-19)"

"The divine Nature feels no pain. ... although He underwent the sufferings in all the fullness of their force, which necessarily causes pain to the sufferers, yet He never so abandoned the powers of His Nature as to feel pain."

"Saint Hilary was a Christian who bowed not to the power of the world, but to the Kingdom of God."

"If pastors and theologians are asked to reflect and follow the direction indicated by the Holy Father, they are certainly not obliged to think that the proposed approach, with the preambles supporting it, are exempt from danger, nor that the advice given is appropriate. They are even fully justified in drawing the attention of the Holy See of the bishops to the serious ambiguities of the underlying doctrine and on the dangers of the proposed pastoral care."

"We must continue evangelizing people’s beliefs with regard to angels, as the Church always did in the past. I think that our teaching about angels mustn’t occupy center stage but that it is important, since it reminds us of the spiritual dimension of existence. The simple fact to think of an angelic world, that is a purely spiritual world, would be a good way to fight the world’s underlying materialism and make people understand that there aren’t only material realities. The preaching about angels invites us to have a greater and more beautiful idea of God."

"If we must put up with what this impious man Sebastian Castellio] has vomited forth in his preface, what remains to us intact of the Christian religion? ... We must wait for another revelation."

"The main end of human society is that God be honoured as He should be. Now the Magistrate is set as guard and governor of this society... And though it be his duty, so far as in him lies, to take order that no discord arise among his subjects, yet, since the chief and ultimate end of human society is not that men should live together in peace, but that, living in peace, they should serve God, it is the function of the Magistrate to risk even this outward peace (if no otherwise may it be done) in order to secure and maintain in his land the true service of God in its purity... And it is impossible that he should so preserve and maintain religion unless he suppresses by the power of the sword those who obstinately contemn it and form sects. It remains then to say that those who would that the Magistrate should not concern himself with religion, either do not understand what is the true end of human society or else pretend that they do not."

"Now you, the whole world's ornament, the Queen On whose behalf both winds and oceans fight, Rule on with God, far from ambition seen, And succour still the pious with your might, That England you, you England long hold dear, Whom good men love as much as wicked fear."

"I have always impugned the Roman hierarchy, but I have never had the intention of opposing the ecclesiastical polity of your Anglican Church. I wish and hope that the sacred and holy society of your bishops may continue and maintain forever the right and title to the government of the Church with all Christian equity and moderation."

"It was in defence of Servetus' execution that Beza published his 1554 De Haereticis, the most important and influential sixteenth-century Protestant defence of hereticide... For Beza, as an "obstinate" heretic and blasphemer Servetus deserved to die with the most excruciating death that could be invented. In his Life and Death of Jean Calvin, Beza reflected on Servetus as "not a man, but rather, a horrible Monster, compounded of all the ancient and new heresies, and above all an execrable blasphemer against the Trinity" who had "by the just judgment of God and man" "ended by the punishment of fire". Calvin has, for Beza, done "the office of a faithful Pastor, putting the Magistrate in mind of his duty" that he might make sure that "such a pestilence should not infect his flock"."

"From him derives the terrible utterance which, in the history of thought, has given his name a sinister glory, "Libertas conscientiae diabolicum dogma"—freedom of conscience is a devilish doctrine. Away with freedom. Much better to destroy with fire and sword those who commit the abomination of independent thought; "better to have a tyrant, however cruel," exclaims de Bèze, "than permit everyone to do what he pleases... The contention that heretics should not be punished is as monstrous as the contention that parricides and matricides should not be put to death; for heretics are a thousandfold worse criminals than these.""

"[Per the Writings of Paul-Louis Couchoud] The controversy as to the historical existence of Jesus ..appeared [in France] under a new form, entirely distinct from the theories of Drews, J. M. Robertson, and W. B. Smith. It is of some interest to describe this new aspect of the thesis that the history of Jesus is a myth, and to try to explain the genesis of the contention."

"Negative as these [radical minimalist] conclusions appear, they must be strictly distinguished from the theories of the mythologists. According to the critics whom we may term [radical] minimalists, Jesus did live, but his biography is almost totally unknown to us. The mythologists, on the other hand, declare that he never existed, and that his history, or more exactly the legend about him, is due to the working of various tendencies and events, such as the prophetic interpretation of Old Testament texts, visions, ecstasy, or the projection of the conditions under which the first group of Christians lived —into the story of their reputed founder."

"God could cause a dead person to resurrect without possessing a single atom of the matter of which his earthly body was made."

"Journalist: According to you, the term "proof" does not apply to God. You prefer the term "sign". Why? God is not an entity of the same order as an atom or a galaxy. The existence of the atom is corroborated by theoretical schemes and experimental evidence. Almost the entire scientific community recognizes its existence. God, at least from my Christian point of view, is not a matter of demonstration. He is a personal God with whom we can establish a relationship. This is an act of faith and freedom. The word "proof" does not apply to the existence of God, because proof is a matter of logical reasoning, not of personal choice. When faced with a mathematical proof, we do not have the freedom to accept or reject the result. Even in physics, where there is no absolute certainty, scientists reach situations of consensus. The theory of general relativity, for example, is accepted by almost all scientists. But this is far from the case with the existence of God! A sign, however, requires interpretation. And interpretation refers to the freedom of the interpreter. If we have a pleasant encounter on the street, we can see it as a sign of God's benevolence or simply as a result of chance. It is a question of freedom of interpretation. No demonstration can conclude that we should have met that person on that day and at that time. The believer can be free to find signs of divine action in the structure of the universe. Isn't it a sign of something that the universe is so coherent? There is room for debate here. But this is not proof."

"The word "proof" is often understood in the strong sense of "rigorous demonstration that leaves no room for interpretation." Admitting the conclusion of a mathematical theorem does not commit freedom. It can be used in a weaker sense, but I prefer to speak of "signs", as in the Gospel according to John. They are, if you like, "clues". That an unexpected event spurs me to give thanks to God poses no difficulty to me, even if other people can see the result of chance in it. The sign presupposes the commitment of a freedom."

"From a Christian perspective, God is not a "thing", an object that exists like the desk I am sitting at exists, but a person with whom I am in a vital relationship. "Knowing" is not of the same order as knowing an electron, a chromosome or a galaxy: this presupposes a theoretical model and objective experimental verification. Proving the existence of the atom is one thing, but the same procedure cannot be used for the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. The relationship I form with him is about freedom."

"Journalist: What is the difference between a "great watchmaker" god and the God of Jesus Christ? The "great watchmaker" refers to the poetry of Voltaire: it is based on the idea that the world is a clock, that is, a mechanical construction. The model is the vision of Newton and the founders of modern science, such as Descartes. It is known that Pascal was critical of this God "of philosophers and wise men". The God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ presents another "profile", if we can put it that way. Its power manifests itself in its opposite, as Saint Paul of Tarsus vigorously underlined. This shows us the divine creative action in a very different way than according to the model of the manufacture of a machine."

"Contrary to Voltaire's sarcasm, the Creator does not resemble his creature."

"Knowledge of God without charity is lifeless; love is its centre."

"Theological research is carried out in the light of reason enlightened by faith."

"The notion of article of faith is closely linked to that of beatitude."

"(Nam) corporea pulchritudo in pelle solummodo constat. Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem est, sicut lynces in Boetia cernere interiora feruntur, mulieres videre nausearent. Iste decor in flegmate, et sanguine, et humore, ac felle, consistit. Si quis enim considerat quae intra nares, et quae intra fauces, et quae intra ventrem lateant, sordes utique reperiet. Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus?"

"Agassiz says the American Continent was the first created; it will be the last in the fulfillment of the designs of the Creator. A cosmopolitan land—cosmopolitan in the intentions of its founders, in the bloody struggle of its defenders—God has in store for you who peopled it the accomplishment of admirable results. Northward are the Esquimaux; southward is Africa. You summon from walled China the unmoving people to dwell amid the moving nation, the stationary to mingle with the progressive; all impelled by the breath of you, the great humanitarian people. The foundation of your people is the Bible, the book that speaks of God the living word of Jesus Christ. In an admirable manifesto from your President, there shines through his words the Christian faith. A belief in Jesus is at the root of this nation. ... And when I return, I shall tell Europe that I have found here liberty associated with Christianity, and have been among a people who do not think that to be free they must be parted from God."

"Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum."

"Thérèse of Lisieux was one of the sources of inspiration for the philosopher Henri Bergson during the final stage of his search, in which he found God thanks to the testimony of mystics."

"Christ does not even grant her [to Mary] the satisfactions of motherhood according to the flesh, however legitimate they may be."

"Mary shared the obscure condition of faith that is that of the other redeemed."

"It cannot be said that Mary's Redemption is of a different kind from ours, because it is the same redemption as Christ's, but in its supreme fulfillment and with its own modes of anticipation and perfection."

"If she is our queen, we too will reign with Christ; Mary is not superior to us except in being closer to us."

"Through the apparitions at Lourdes, Our Lady wanted to restore in us a love for the poor and for poverty, a love that is ingenious and liberating."

"Conversion: this is the word that most specifically expresses the meaning of pilgrimage."

"The events at Lourdes present an order, a harmony that becomes increasingly apparent as one delves deeper."

"Mass and the Body of Christ have become the very center of pilgrimage to Lourdes."

"The mid-19th century saw the triumph of the reign of money over the medieval reign of honor and traditions."

"The prayer of Bernadette is contagious."

"The Virgin [Mary] is the one in whom no sin has diminished love."

"Lourdes does not disappoint, even though miracles remain the exception there."

"We sinners oscillate dangerously between harshness and complicity towards others."

"There is no true love for the sinner without hatred for his sin."

"One cannot understand the sinner through sin, because sin is not a positive technique: in its essence it is deprivation, absence, nothingness; it is sin to the exact extent that it decapitates the good of the act performed. It is therefore not a factor of understanding but of obscurity."

"If heaven chooses what does not exist according to the world, it is not for the gratuitous pleasure of mocking the world."

"One is capable of mercy to the extent that one knows one is the object of mercy."

"In explaining the Sacred Text he made an excellent use of his great familiarity with Greek grammar and authors, availed himself chiefly of the commentaries of St. John Chrysostom and Theodoret, and always remained an enlightened and safe theologian."

"While the religious idea of a crusade inspired the secular policy of Père Joseph, intense sacerdotal and Apostolic zeal characterized him amid all his political preoccupations."

"In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est."

"(About the Assumption of Mary) She who was conceived without spot and borne without pain, who became mother without loss of virginity, who placed God in the world, who died without suffering, was also preserved from corruption; and we believe she lives in heaven with her body. It is piously believed."

"Of all the things to seek, the first is wisdom, in which lies the form of perfect goodness."

"Wisdom enlightens human beings so that they may recognise themselves."

"Tell me, I beg you, what – among all things – has become the one thing for you, the thing you want to embrace in a unique way and enjoy forever."

"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum. Coartata scientia iucunda non est."

"Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est; fortis autem iam, cui omne solum patria est; perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exsilium est."

"Love seems to be the satisfaction of a person's heart towards something, because of something: it presents itself as desire in the search, and happiness in the satisfaction of possession; it appears as a race, as far as desire is concerned, and as rest, as far as the joy of possession is concerned."

"You have given me perfection of sensitivity, quickness of intelligence, strength of memory; you have given me the ability to express myself fluently, to present my thoughts pleasantly, to teach convincingly, to carry out my intentions, to behave pleasantly, to progress in my studies, to achieve my projects; you have given me comfort in adversity, caution in happy circumstances."

"O my soul, what do you think that sweet and gentle thing is, which devout souls usually feel and taste when they remember their beloved, and which usually enamours them so sweetly that they seem to be alienated and out of themselves? They feel joyful and glad in their consciences and forget all their pain: their soul rejoices, their intellect becomes clear, their heart is illuminated, their will becomes joyful."

"This sensible world […] is almost like a book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine virtue, and individual creatures are like figures, not invented by human arbitrariness, but established by divine will to manifest the invisible wisdom of God. [...] It is therefore good to contemplate assiduously and admire divine works."

"When asked about the best conditions for learning, a scholar replied: “A humble spirit, commitment to research, a quiet life, silent inquiry, poverty, a foreign land; these circumstances make it easier to overcome the difficulties encountered during one's studies”. :*From Didascalicon."