"the deceitful dream of a golden age"

"Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape? Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?"

     Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist no. 6, The [New York] independent journal; or, the General advertiser, 14 November 1787.

"a Christology without a full Marian account fails to be incarnational in any meaningful way"

"the Jesus-Mary relation is so integral to the incarnational fact, and therefore to a coherent Christocentrism, that a Christology without a full Marian account fails to be incarnational in any meaningful way and is reduced to mere abstraction."

     Aaron Riches, Ecce homo:  on the divine unity of Christ (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2016), 17.  This "full Marian account" would have to begin with the claim that she is Theotokos and presumably extend (though I haven't yet got that far) to an orthodox form of the doctrine of "co-redemption" (the "Coda" on Chardon (17)).

The more of God, the more of me

"if Jesus is the true human, the irreducible difference of the human being in relation to God is perfected in direct (as opposed to inverse) relation to the perfection of the unio of his humanity with the divine Logos.  In Christ, the relation of divinity and humanity must be, in the first place, and basically, non-contrastive and non-competitive. . . .

". . . only the confession of the 'one Lord Jesus Christ' maximally preserves the integrity and difference of verus homo before verus Deus. . . . [B]eginning from an abstract idea of what his humanity might be apart from that unio, Christian theology fails before it even begins."

     Aaron Riches, Ecce homo:  on the divine unity of Christ (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2016), 7-8.  7n12:  "the deeper and more perfect the union, the more each is realized in its distinct integrity.  Union [with true God!] differentiates."