Jesuits

"Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent."

"Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear."

"I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow. And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea."

"Beauty … is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison."

"It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty."

"A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree."

"That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows."

"It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget."

"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest."

"By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind."

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession."

"I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds."

"Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion."

"For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light."

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants."

"Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right."

"The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one."

"No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped."

"Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be."

"All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose."

"I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again."

"I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism."

"I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation."

"Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson."

"For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great."

"It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither."

"I say more, the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces."

"What I do is me: for that I came."

"On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The faithful soul is always an open soul."

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

"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."

"[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"."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

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

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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