"The attention of other men is the most irresistable of drugs"

P2P Foundation

"Die Aufmerksamkeit anderer Menschen ist die unwiderstehlichste aller Drogen".

     Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit:  ein Entwurf (München:  C. Hanser, 1998), 10, as quoted by Nina Heinsohn, Simone Weils Konzept der attention:  religionsphilosophische und systematisch-theologische Studien, Religion in philosophy and theology 97 (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 10.

Reductio ad absurdum

"Chris Boesel describes the God who becomes involved in the messiness of human creation in the following way:  'The sphere in which God chooses to be God is not the "properly divine" sphere of the eternal darkness of unknowing, but the creaturely sphere of materiality and temporality wherein creatures see, hear, know, and live in a radically material and temporal way, within the finitude of particularity, for example, one by one, moment by moment, place by place' (Boesel 2010: 321).  No particular expression of that materiality can ever be ruled 'out of bounds' by this kind of God."

     John Blevins, "When sodomy leads to martyrdom:  sex, religion, and politics in historical and contemporary contexts in Uganda and East Africa," Theology and sexuality 17, no. 1 (2011):  69 (51-74), on the Feast of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs (3 June), italics mine.  Please note that I have not authenticated this photograph, taken from here.
     Although the second half of this article is impressive in the justice of its (even) self-awareness, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is, I suspect, being misappropriated here in the service of a very different "kind of God."

"and it does not know them as they are"

"Existing beings do not know [the supreme Cause] as it actually is and it does not know them as they are."

οὐδὲ τὰ ὄντα αὐτὴν γινώσκει ᾗ αὐτή ἐστιν· οὐδὲ αὐτὴ γινώσκει τὰ ὄντα ᾗ ὄντα ἐστίν·

     Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical theology 5, trans. Colm Luibheid (Classics of Western spirituality, 141) =PG 3, col. 1048A.

A martyrdom visible only to God

First Things

"It seems obscene, I know, to invoke the specter of martyrdom from within the relative safety and prosperity of the liberal West and all of our privileges and advantages and comforts, especially at a time when so many of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world are dying for the faith. . . .  And yet it seems to me that there’s a peculiar challenge to Christian faith and witness in the fact that technocratic order diffuses its power quietly, almost imperceptibly, without spectacle or responsibility, bleeding its victims slowly through ten thousand bureaucratic paper cuts rather than spectacularly with swords and lions in the Colliseum.  Not the least of these challenges is the very real possibility that one’s sufferings may be visible, in a media dominated world, only to God.  If a tree falls in the forest and The New York Times does hear it, does it make a sound?"

     Michael Hanby, "Technocracy and the future of Christian freedom," 4 May 2016, from 45:57.

The Ascension of "our body"

Giotto, c. 1305

Agamus ergo gratias
nostrae salutis vindici,
nostrum quod corpus vexerit
sublime ad caeli regiam.

Sit nobis cum caelestibus
commune manens gaudium:
illis, quod semet obtulit,
nobis, quod se non abstulit.

Let us therefore give thanks
to the claimant [(vindex)]
     of our salvation,
because he has borne our body
on high to the royal palace.

Let it be for us with those in heaven [(caelestibus)]
an abiding joy-in-common:
for them, because he bore himself to [(obtulit) them],
for us, because he did not bear himself away from [(abstulit) us].

     From Optatus votis omnium, a hymn for Ascension Day attested as early as the late 10th-century, if not before, albeit in the late 10th-century Winchester hymnal without the stanza Sit nobis cum caelestibus (The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, sv Winchester Hymnal, by Inge Milfull).  Translation mine.  I have not yet investigated this hymn in any depth.  One hundred Latin hymns:  Ambrose to Aquinas, ed. and trans. Peter G. Walsh with Christopher Husch, Dumbarton Oaks medieval library (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2012), 185 (182-185, 450-451):

So let us now express our thanks
to our salvation's rescuer,
for he has borne our bodily form
to heaven's palace up on high.

May we with denizens of heaven
abiding joy in common share,
since he joined those who dwell above,
yet did not separate from us.