"we must never avert our eyes from those elements in [Christianity] which seem puzzling or repellent"

"If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself.  If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than 'my own stuff'. . . . If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know."

     C. S. Lewis, "The weight of glory," in The weight of glory and other addresses (New York:  Macmillan, 1949) =Transposition and other addresses (London:  G. Bles, 1949), 7.

"God is said not to be in the same genus as other . . . things, not because he is in another genus, but because he is outside any genus".

"God is said not to be in the same genus as other . . . things, not because he is in another genus, but because he is outside any genus but the principle of every genus.  Thus he is compared to others by way of excess. . . ."

     Thomas Aquinas, ST I.6.2.ad 3, trans. Ralph McInerny.

"catch[ing] up, by the laborious path of learning and argument acquired by study, to the wisdom the unlettered charwoman already possesses as a free gift of God."

"The theological master simply strives to make explicit, to recapture in modo cognitionis, what the faithful heart of any old woman already knows."

     Bruce D. Marshall, "Quid scit una uetula:  Aquinas on the nature of theology," in The theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2005):  26 (1-26), with reference to the Collationes Credo in Deum:  "Despite all of their effort, none of the philosophers before the coming of Christ was able to know as much about God, and about what is necessary for life, as one old woman [uetula] knows by faith after Christ's coming.  Hence it is said:  'The earth is full of the knowledge of God' [Isaiah 11:9]" (1).  The title is from p. 25.