"This surplus of rationality"

Le Point

"Faith thinks, and if it does not think like the world, this is not because it thinks less, but on the contrary because it thinks more than the world."

"La foi pense, et si elle ne pense pas comme le monde, ce n’est point parce qu’elle pense moins, mais au contraire parce qu’elle pense plus que le monde."

     Jean-Luc Marion, "Apologétique et apologie," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 39, no. 1-2 (janvier-avril 2014):  12 (9-17).  "ce surcroît de rationalité".

Wisdom's power and temperance's might

Nought feard their force, that fortilage to win,
But wisdomes powre, and temperaunces might,
By which the mightiest things efforced bin:

John Melhuish Strudwick,
Acrasia (c. 1888),
Wikimedia Commons

     Edmund Spencer, The faerie queene II.xii.43, ll. 5-7.  No Bower-of-Bliss defender feared anything but the power of wisdom and the might of temperance, by which two virtues the mightiest strongholds of vice are reduced.

"My very hairs do mutiny"

My very hairs do mutiny, for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and then they them
For fear and doting.

     William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 3, sc. 11, ll. 14-16.  Cf. act 4, sc. 8, ll. 24-29.

Pseudo-Bonhoeffer:"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

"We are not simply to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. . . . Silence in the face of evil is itself evil:  God will not hold us guiltless.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act."

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as quoted by Laura Joyce Davis, channeling Shannon Sedgwick Davis, in "The quiet fighter:  how Shannon Sedgwick Davis helped dismantle Joseph Kony's reign of terror," Christianity today 59, no. 1 (January/February 2015):  42 (38-42).

     I cite Davis because she conflates the two quotations, only the first of which appears to be indubitably authentic.
     The first comes from "The church and the Jewish question" (1933), which has been often reprinted in different translations.  I give here the rendition at Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12 (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2009), p. 365 (361-370):

The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. 

Die dritte Möglichkeit besteht darin, nicht nur die Opfer unter dem Rad zu verbinden, sondern dem Rad selbst in die Speichen zu fallen.

“Die Kirche vor der Judenfrage,” as reproduced in Niederdeutsche Kirchenzeitung: evangelisch-lutherisches Halbmonatsblatt für Kirche und Volkstum in Niederdeutschland 3, no. 13 (1 Juli 1933):  236 (234-238), not Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 12 (where the various versions of the essay are—as in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12—spelled out).  Other translations:

The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself [(The Bonhoeffer reader, ed. Green and DeJonge (Fortress Press, 2013), 374)]. 

The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself [(Testament to freedom:  the essential writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Kelly & Nelson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 139)]. 

The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself [(Dietrich Bonhoeffer:  witness to Jesus Christ, ed. De Gruchy (Collins, 1988), 127; No rusty swords:  letters, lectures and notes 1928-1936, from the collected works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, volume 1, ed. Robertson, trans. Robertson & Bowden (New York:  Harper & Row, 1965), 225)].

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12, 365n12:  "This is the famous phrase 'dem Rad selbst in die Speichen zu fallen,' often translated as 'to fall within the spokes of the wheel.'  As German editor Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth notes, however, Bonhoeffer and his readers would have understood this as the act of detaching a cart or wagon from the horse pulling it.  In any case, the meaning clearly is to bring the apparatus of the unjust and illegitimate state to a halt.  'To seize the wheel itself' is the English phrase; for this reason we use that translation here."  (It should be noted, however, that the essay should be read in its entirety, and Bonhoeffer's position on role of the Church in speaking truth to the State carefully noted, as the latter is not—was not yet at that point in time, at least—what those who bandy these words about in a sub-Lutheran American context tend to make of it.)

     The second appears to me to have been back-translated (?) into German as

Schweigen im Angesicht des Bösen ist selbst böse: Gott wird uns nicht als schuldlos betrachten. Nicht zu sprechen ist sprechen. Nicht zu handeln ist handeln 

Schweigen in das Gesicht des Boesens ist an sich schlect.  Gott wird uns nicht schuldlos halten.  Nicht zu sprechen ist sprechen. Nicht zu handeln ist handeln

and so forth (a potential indication of inauthenticity), but has (so far as I know) yet to be located in the works of Bonhoeffer, and did not—as of 1 March 2016—occur here.  See the "Master index of subjects" at p. 601 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 16 (Indexes and supplementary materials), where the two German terms for "silence" in Bonhoeffer are given as Rühe and Schweigen; and where vol. 14* (for Rühe) and vols. 3*, 4*, 14*, and 16* (for Schweigen) bear an asterisk "indicat[ing] that the term in question was a significantly indexed entry in the German index volume (DBW 17), but was either not indexed at all in the respective DBWE[nglish] volume or was indexed under a different entry."  (I have checked the references in vols. 3 (whose index actually lacks an entry labelled "silence"), 7, and 8 (for Rühe) and vols. 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 (for Schweigen) of the English edition.  I have also run a varied series of Google and full-text databases searches, but without any success so far.  Though he was by no means the first to have thus "quoted" Bonhoeffer without referencing a source (James Cone and others were doing so long before him), Eric Metaxas seems to have been the one greatly to popularize the "quotation".  Though Google Books offers a searchable "Preview" version of the Metaxas biography here, I have not been able to get it to return an occurrence of the "quotation" anywhere other than on the dust jacket, where, of course, the source is not given.)
     I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can prove my suspicions unfounded, but on 24 July 2016 Dr. Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer Chair Scholar, Union Theological Seminary and Executive Director, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, graciously responded to an inquiry of mine by confirming that he and his colleagues had (by that point at least) never been able to trace "Silence in the face of evil" back to Bonhoeffer himself.

     See now Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on resistance:  The word against the wheel (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2018), which, though it contains several references to the first, genuine half of the quote on "jam[ming] a spoke into the wheel [of injustice] itself," contains none of the following English words and phrases:  silence (!), guiltless, "not to speak," "not to act" (not schuldlos or Handeln either).  (I haven't read this, though; only searched it.)

     Update, 19 March 2019:  I have now searched for this in the Alexander Street Press database Twentieth Century Religious Thought:  Volume 1, Christianity, which contains the critical edition of the German works (DBW) as well as the Fortress English (DBWE), but to no avail.  The first part of the quotation at the head of this entry comes up readily in both English and German, but the second, not at all.  The best I could do was get three irrelevant hits on nicht zu sprechen.  But I got none on nicht zu handeln, and none on either back-translation into German (?) of Silence in the face of evil.

     Update, 27 July 2019:  Over five months after I posted the above on 1 March 2016, Dr. William Throckmorton, a psychologist at Grove City College, posted this, which has been more influential.  That he has updated at least twice.  On 2 November 2016 he came pretty close to accusing Metaxas of unethical behavior in the light of repeated attempts to get him to come clean.  And on 11 November 2016 he located a key portion of it in a book published in 1971 (and other portions of it even earlier than that).

Give us an opportunity of repentence

"Lord, all powerful King, free us for the sake of your name.  Give us time to turn from our sins."

"Domine, rex omnipotens, libera nos propter nomen tuum et da nobis locum pænitentiæ."

O Lord, king omnipotent, free us for the sake of your name, and give us [sufficient] space to repent.

     Antiphon 1, Evening prayer, Third Sunday of Lent, Liturgia horarum.  "locus" can mean "extent sufficient for some purpose, room", "room to exist or operate", "room for action, scope, opportunity, opening", "the proper occasion, the right time", etc.; and "locum dare", "to give place, make way", etc. (Oxford Latin dictionary; see also the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British sources, nos. 14, 24, 28, etc.).  "pænitentiæ" must be either genitive or dative.  Biblical sources, the first two of which are pretty pessimistic about the use we are likely to make of the said "locus":

• Job 24:23:  "God hath given him place for penance [(dedit ei Deus locum paenitentiae)], and he abuseth it unto pride: but his eyes are upon his ways" (Douay-Rheims 1899 American).
• Wisdom 12:10:  "But executing thy judgments by degrees thou gavest them place of repentance, not being ignorant that they were a wicked generation, and their malice natural, and that their thought could never be changed [(sed partibus iudicans dabas locum paenitentiae non ignorans quoniam nequa est natio illorum et naturalis malitia ipsorum et quoniam non poterat mutari cogitatio illorum in perpetuum)]" (Douay-Rheims 1899 American).
• Wisdom 12:19:  "But thou hast taught thy people by such works, that they must be just and humane, and hast made thy children to be of a good hope: because in judging thou givest place for repentance for sins [(docuisti autem populum tuum per talia opera quoniam oportet iustum esse et humanum et bonae spei fecisti filios tuos quoniam das locum in peccatis paenitentiae)]" (Douay-Rheims 1899 American, which appears to insert without warrant the phrase "in judging").

According to CANTUS, the antiphon goes back to the late 9th-century (e.g. Albi, Bibliothèque municipale Rochegude 44, 101v (De Esther)), if not before.

"'Warning! Man-eating Tiger!'"

G. P. Sanderson, Thirteen years among
the wild beasts of India, 7th ed. (1912).

"It makes no sense to suppose that someone might awake one morning and be struck silent by the realization, 'We’ve lost the word for generic human being.' When speakers behave as if a word were lost, when in reality it is still current, linguistic stress results, and this stress manifests itself in their speech as clearly as a man trying to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk displays his neurosis in his gait. . . .  [T]he circumlocutions catalogued above point to an ideologically potent taboo, in its operation no different from parlor games in which the players handicap each other by, for example, forbidding words beginning with the letter 'b.'"

     Paul Mankowski, S.J., "The necessary failure of inclusive-language translations:  a linguistic elucidation," The Thomist 62 (1998):  449-450 (445-468).  A reprint of this article can be found at Touchstone.