Transsubstantiation

The language of Antoine Arnauld and the Abbé de St. Cyran "is as Catholic as yours; but their conduct confirms their faith, and your conduct belies it.  For if you believe, as well as they do, that the bread is really changed into the body of Jesus Christ, why do you not require, as they do, from those whom you advise to approach the altar, that the heart of stone and ice should be sincerely changed into a heart of flesh and of love?  If you believe that Jesus Christ is in that sacrament in a state of death, teaching those that approach it to die to the world, to sin, and to themselves, why do you suffer those to profane it in whose breasts evil passions continue to reign in all their life and vigour?"

"Car si vous croyez aussi bien qu’eux que ce pain est réellement changé au corps de Jésus-Christ, pourquoi ne demandez-vous pas comme eux que le cœur de pierre et de glace de ceux à qui vous conseillez d’en approcher soit sincèrement changé en un cœur de chair et d’amour?  Si vous croyez que Jésus-Christ y est dans un état de mort, pour apprendre à ceux qui s’en approchent à mourir au monde, au péché et à eux-mêmes, pourquoi portez-vous à en approcher ceux en qui les vices et les passions criminelles sont encore toutes vivantes?"

     Blaise Pascal, Provincial letters no. 16, trans. M’Crie (GBBW, 1st ed. (1952), vol. 33, pp. 136-137), underscoring mine =pp. 281-282 of tom. 6 of the 1904-1914 critical edition of the Œuvres edited by Brunschvicg =p. 774 of the 1998 Pléiade edited by Le Guern.

Body, soul, and divinity

"'the dead ashes of the bodies of the saints derive their principal dignity from that seed of life which they retain from the touch of the immortal and vivifying flesh of Jesus Christ'".

"'les cendres mortes des corps des saints tirent leur principale dignité de cette semence de vie qui leur reste de l’attouchement de la chair immortelle et vivifiante de Jésus-Christ'".

     Antoine Arnauld, De la fréquente communion (Paris:  Antoine Vitré, 1643), 1.40.  I was put onto this by Blaise Pascal, Provincial letters no. 16, trans. M’Crie (GBWW, 1st ed. (1952), vol. 33, p. 150).

"'What I am really asking is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man.'"

     George Orwell, proposing by letter (dated 18 April 1946) to Anne Popham, who "was not swept off her feet."  As quoted in Dorian Lynskey, Ministry of truth:  the biography of George Orwell's 1984 (New York:  Doubleday, 2019), 147, citing CW XVIII, p. 153.