The Incarnation as triggered by world-historical clarity as to its necessity on the one hand, and its impossibility on the other

"From the beginning until now God spoke through His prophets.  The Word aroused the uncomprehending depths of their flesh to a witnessing fury, and their witness was this:  that the Word should be made Flesh.  Yet their witness could only be received as long as it was vaguely misunderstood, as long as it seemed either to be [1] neither impossible nor necessary, or [2] necessary but not impossible, or [3] impossible but not necessary; and the prophecy could not therefore be fulfilled.  For it could only be fulfilled when it was no longer possible to receive, because it was clearly understood as absurd.  The Word could not be made Flesh until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but either to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely, yet in their choice there should be no element of luck, for they would be fully conscious of what they were accepting or rejecting."

     W. H. Auden, For the time being:  a Christmas oratorio, sv "The meditation of Simeon," from Religious drama 1, ed. Halverson (1947), p. 53, i.e. not yet the critical Princeton University Press edition of 2013, as edited by Alan Jacobs.  My interpretation so far:  [1] flippancy, [2] indifference, and [3] resignation (but not yet "despair").  Note also the parallels between "could only be received" and "could only be fulfilled" on the one hand, and "vaguely misunderstood" and "clearly understood" on the other.  "absurd":  [4] clear necessity but despair-inducing impossibility/absurdity.  (But what does Jacobs say?)

An intelligence irreducible to artificiality

Source

From the point at which the medieval Christian distinction between reason (ratio) on the one hand and an intelligence (intelligentia or intellectus) irreducible to it on the other—widespread in 12th and 13th-century Cistercian and then Franciscan contexts that could conceive of a semblance of rationality for the beasts, but certainly not a semblance of the intelligence in which human beings participate—was at first marginalized and then forgotten (such that the two came to be confounded); from that point, i.e. the turning of the 13th and of the 14th century [(au tournant du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle)], the disincarnation and impoverishment of [both] intelligence and reason that was to issue ultimately in the rise of the [nonsensical] idea of an 'artificial' 'intelligence' was underway.

     A summative paraphrase of the second paragraph of Laure Soignac's "Irréductible intelligence:  les leçons du Moyen Âge," Communio:  revue internationale catholique 50, no. 5 =301 (septembre-octobre 2025): 97-98 (97-111).  For more detail, read on.  For Soignac, the reduction of intelligence to reason, to a "faculty of adaptation or the resolution of problems" (106), began in the 13th century with "the progressive disjunction, well documented, between [1] 'scientific' theology and the philosophy taught in the universities on the one hand and [2] spiritual theology on the other, gradually marginalized as 'mysticism'"; and "contributed to the occultation of an experience foundational for intellectual and rational activity, namely, its rootedness in an astonished and wonder-infused encounter with a superior principle and dispenser of light acknowledged to be literally in-comprehensible" (107).  Thus, Albert the Great is charged with having "projected onto the natural functioning of human reason" "the characteristics of the 'artificial logic' . . . taught in the schools" (108, on "the reduction of reason to logic", and of "logic itself to Aristotelian logic, and of the latter to syllogistic [logic]", to the exclusion or reduction of "other argumentative cultures", etc., with the result that "One gains in efficacy what one loses in substance, diversity, and intelligence", even "humanity and good sense").  Indeed, it is in the 13th century that "art (in the sense of technology)" comes "for the first time" to be considered superior to and, like grace, perfective of nature (109-110).

"The [mid-third-century] Frankfurt silver inscription [of 2018] glorifies the holy name of God" (i.e. "Jesus")

     "Scholarship labels the mid-third-century Frankfurt silver inscription [(Silberkapsel) of 2018] a phylactery.  This '[means of] salvation [(salus)]' was, from the bearer who 'surrenders himself to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son,' meant to [(soll)] fend off 'all attacks [(incursionibus)],' and procure for him 'good health [(valetudinibus salvis)].'  Via the presence of the name of God, which he bore in an amulet on [his] body, its bearer felt himself strengthened and watched over.  It is natural to suspect this of magic[al thinking] and to tie it back to the culture of the fetish and talisman common in antiquity [both within] and also outside of Christianity.  [But] a less objectionable [(harmlosere)] and [indeed] perfectly [(durchaus)] acceptable interpretation [would] proceed from biblical onomalatry [considered] as the most concentrated form of [Jewish] grapholatry, which had attained here in this [theologically legitimate] spiritual exercise a performa[tive status (die hier in einem frommen Exerzitium zur Performanz gelangt war)]."

     Eckhard Nordhofen, "'Onomalatrie':  Die Frankfurter Silberschrift:  mehr als nur eine historische Sensation," Internationale katholische Zeitschrift Communio website, December 23, 2024.  Cf. Eckhard Nordhofen, "Onomalatrie:  Die Frankfurter Silberschrift verherrlicht den heiligen Gottesnamen," Internationale katholische Zeitschrift Communio 54, no. 3 (2025): 309-318, which I haven’t yet procured.  Cf. also Santiago Guijarro Oporto, Santiago, "The amulet of Frankfurt: popular Christianity in the limes Germanicus," Isidorianum 34, no. 1 (2025): 25-48, which I have read.  Needless to say, "to the concept of grapholatry[, no more than to the concept of onomalatry,] should any pejorative connotation [(Klang)] be affixed, even if the common parallel 'idolatry,' which designates the worship of idols, is always [(durchaus)] meant disparagingly."

"'when God wills that one or many be saved, water is the medicine'"

"'It pleased the goodness of God to conduct them out of the same peril to safety and deliverance, for the [outgoing] fresh water prevailing over the [incoming] salt, imperceptibly carried the ships out, and thus they were placed in safety; because when God wills that one or many be saved, water is the medicine.'"

     Bartolomé de Las Casas (?) on Columbus’ third fleet in Boca Grande, “westernmost of the Bocas del Dragón” between northern Venezuela and Trinidad, this one between Venezuela and Chacachacare Island, as quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in Admiral of the Ocean Sea:  a life of Christopher Columbus, one-volume edition without notes (Boston:  Little, Brown and Company, 1942), p. 550 (chap. 40, Terrestrial paradise, August 11-31, 1498).  But, as is well-recognized in the theology of baptism, water can, as here, be death-dealing too.

"a kind of Ivy-fringed Jesus Seminar"

      The Harvard Divinity School as valued by Hollis Professor Karen King in the context of the fight to replace it with (or at least turn it into) a supposedly more respectable Faculty of Arts and Sciences department of religious studies, according to Ariel Sabar, in his Veritas:  A Harvard professor, a con man and the Gospel of Jesus’s wife (New York:  Doubleday, 2020), (Act five, Faustian bargain).  But does that mean that Sabar sides with the likes of Prof. Steven Pinker and his contempt for theology?

"'Enter into the joy of thy Lord'"

since no creature has the capacity for the infinite joy in his infinite goodness that the infinite God both [1] is alone suited for and [2] does in fact experience, "it follows that this perfectly full joy is not taken into man, but, on the contrary, [that] man enters into it, according to Matt. 25:21: Enter into the joy of thy Lord."

"Quia tamen nulla creatura est capax gaudii de Deo ei condigni, inde est quod illud gaudium omnino plenum non capitur in homine, sed potius homo intrat in ipsum, secundum illud Matth. XXV, intra in gaudium domini tui."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II.28.3.Resp., as trans. FEDP, i.e. Chapcote, opening paraphrase mine.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.

The way and the light

"Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. . . .  How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?  The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

     G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy:  the romance of faith (New York:  Image, Doubleday, 1990 [1908]), 147 ("IX.  Authority and the adventurer").

Jesus Circular

"a group that set out to tell the public what Jesus really said and did had decided that a vision in a book it called false could be the basis for the reality of Magdalene’s witness to a resurrection that never happened."

     Ariel Sabar, Veritas:  A Harvard professor, a con man and the Gospel of Jesus’s wife (New York:  Doubleday, 2020), 275.  "When I asked another [Jesus S]eminar scholar, Kathleen Corley, how the [affirmative] red vote on Mary’s witness to the resurrection came about, she said, ‘That’s all Karen King.'"

"On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry"

I had always assumed that this one is Anglican.  And, of course, it is—in the English translation by Chandler:

Jordanis oras praevia
Vox ecce Baptistae quatit:
Praeconis ad grandes sonos
Ignavus abscedat sopor.

Auctoris adventum sui
Tellus & aether & mare
Praegestiente sentiunt,
Et jam salutant gaudio.

Mundemus & nos pectora:
Deo propinquanti viam
Sternamus, & Dignam domum
Tanto paremus hospiti.

Tu nostra, tu, Jesu, salus;
Tu robur & solatium:
Arens ut herba, te fine
Mortale tabescit genus.

Aegris salutarem manum
Extende:  prostratos leva:
Ostende vultum, jam suus
Mundo reflorescet décor.

Qui liberator advenis,
Fili, tibi laus maxima
Cum Patre & almo Spiritu
In sempiterna secula.  Amen.

     Charles Coffin (1676-1749; also ODCC4), Hymni Sacri, Auctore Carolo Coffin, Ant. Universitatis Parisiensis Rectore, Collegii Dormano – Bellovaci Gymnasiarcha (Paris:  Sumptibus suis ediderunt Bibliopolae Usuum Parisiensium, 1736), 34 (32:  "In Adventu").

Weil on the banality of evil

     "Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continuously fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good.  No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil.  This is the truth about authentic good and evil.  With fictional good and evil it is the other way round.  Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm."

     "Rien n’est beau, merveilleux, perpétuellement nouveau, perpétuellement surprenant, chargé d’une douce et continuelle ivresse, comme le bien.  Rien n’est désertique, morne, monotone, ennuyeux comme le mal.  Il en est ainsi du bien et du mal authentiques.  Le bien et le mal fictifs ont le rapport contraire.  Le bien fictive est ennuyeux et plat.  Le mal fictive est varié, intéressant, attachant, profound, plein de séductions."

     Simone Weil (writing under the pseudonym Emile Novis), "Morale et littérature" ("Morality and literature"), Cahiers du sud:  revue mensuelle de littérature 31, no. 1 (janvier 1944):  40 (40-45), as translated in A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, "Touching the void:  Simone Weil’s ethical life class," Times literary supplement  no. 6392 (November 14, 2025):  20 (19-20).  "Morality and literature" is also present in several anthologies.

"Oh, [by] grace how great a debtor | Daily [God's] constrained to be"

"God is faithful and has put himself in our debt not because we have given him anything but because he has promised us so much. Yet even promising was not enough for him. He wanted to be bound in writing as well [(fidelis deus qui se nostrum debitorem fecit, non aliquid a nobis accipiendo, sed tanta nobis promittendo. parum erat promissio, etiam scripto se teneri uoluit)]. . . .  [Indeed, h]e was . . . not content to provide us with a written guarantee of his promises to help us believe in him. He even appointed a mediator to establish his good faith: not some nobleman, nor an angel, nor an archangel, but his only Son."  Etc.

     St. Augustine, Ennar. in Ps. 109.1-2, WSA III/19, trans. Boulding & Ramsey (2003), 261.  =CCL 40, p. 1601, ll. 11 ff.

Where no pleas of merit suffice

"Be pleased, O Lord, with our humble prayers and offerings, and, since we have no merits to plead our cause, come, we pray, to our rescue with the protection of your mercy. Through Christ our Lord".

"Placare, Domine, quæsumus, nostræ precibus humilitatis et hostiis, et, ubi nulla suppetunt suffragia meritorum, tuæ nobis indulgentiæ succurre præsidiis. Per Christum Dominum nostrum".

Be reconciled/appeased, O Lord, we pray, by the prayers and sacrifices of our humility, and, where no pleas/judgments/aids/supports of merits are at hand/in store/suffice, hasten to help us with the garrison/troops [(præsidiis, defenses/protections)] of your indulgence. Through Christ our Lord.

     Prayer over the offerings, Second Sunday of Advent.  That "since" may be too good to be true.  I see no indication that ubi functions in that way in even the medieval Latin covered by the Dictionary of mediaeval Latin from British sources, let alone the classical.  That phrase might therefore run not "since no votes or backings of merits—i.e. no judgments of merit—suffice," but rather "where no votes or backings of merits—i.e. no judgments as to merit—suffice."  Corpus orationum, in which this appears as no. 4246, citing the Gregorian, the Old Gelasian, and so forth, gives the original word order as follows:

"Placare, Domine, quæsumus, humilitatis nostræ precibus et hostiis, et, ubi nulla suppetunt suffragia meritorum, tuæ nobis indulgentiæ succurre præsidiis."

1973 (very loose):
Lord, we are nothing without you. As you sustain us with your mercy, receive our prayers and offerings.

Neiman and Rieff on the land acknowledgment

Deutschlandfunk Kultur

"there are many things short of giving back the continent that could be done to improve the lives of Native Americans.  Solemnly reciting a land acknowledgement is not one of them. . . .  'The performative guilt of today's professional managerial class bears the same relationship to real shame and real guilt as Astro Turf does to grass.'"

     The philosopher Susan Neiman quoting David Rieff's Desire and fate (2024), in her review of that book entitled "Where wokeness went wrong," The New York review of books 72, no. 19 (December 4, 2025), 26 (26-28), an article eminently quotable throughout.  Neiman is, of course, the author of Left is not woke (Polity Press, 2023).

"What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows"

Carlos "Eire’s [weird and wonderful] book [They Flew: A History of the Impossible] raises the question of a culture’s epistemic reality and whether that affects the kinds of events that can occur. . . . What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows. This has nothing to do with the truth of the events; it involves the specific form the miracles took. St. Joseph [of Cupertino] levitated because this was an act expected of the holiest friars and nuns—the physical expression of metaphysical experience, the raptured body suspended between gravity and grace."

     Christian Wiman, "The tune of things:  Is consciousness God?," Harper's magazine (December 2025).

"being deified does not make anything depart from what it is by nature"

μηδαμῶς τῷ θεωθῆναι, τοῦ κατὰ φύσιν ἐκστᾷν.

     St. Maximus the Confessor, Opusculum 7, trans. DelCogliano in Christ:  Chalcedon and beyond, Cambridge edition of early Christian writings 4 (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2022), 513.  Greek:  PG 91, col. 81D (42).

Chrysostom on merit and the sola gratia

      "The Lord, however, does want them to contribute something, lest everything seem to be a work of grace, and they seem to win their reward without deserving it [(Εἶτα, ἵνα τι καὶ παρ' ἑαυτῶν εἰσφέρωσι, καὶ μὴ πάντα τῆς χάριτος εἶναι δοκῇ, μηδὲ εἰκῆ καὶ μάτην στεφανοῦσθαι νομίζωνται)].  Therefore he adds:  You must be clever as snakes and innocent as doves."

     St. John Chrysostom, Homily 33.1-2 on Matthew, as trans. Office of readings, Thursday, Thirty-fourth week in ordinary time, Liturgy of the hours.  Ed. F. Field (1839), 461; PG 57, col. 389-390 (in Field misprinted as 379 (379-380)).  NPNF 10, trans. Prevost as rev. Riddle:

'After this, that they may contribute something on their own part also, and that all might not seem to be of His grace, nor they supposed to be crowned at random, and vainly, He saith, 'Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'

"rather to reform the faith in us Christians than to give it to the Indians"

"'Our people here are such that there is neither good man nor bad who hasn't two or three Indians to serve him and dogs to hunt for him and, though it perhaps were better not to mention it, women so pretty that one must wonder at it.  With the last of these practices I am extremely discontented, for it seems to me a disservice to God, but I can do nothing about it, nor the habit of eating meat on Saturday [sic, for Friday] and other wicked practices that are not for good Christians.  For these reasons it would be a great advantage to have some devout friars here, rather to reform the faith in us Christians than to give it to the Indians [(más para reformar la fe en los christianos que para darla a los indios)].  And I shall never be able to administer just punishments, unless fifty or sixty men are sent here from Castile with each fleet, and I send there the same number from among the lazy and the insubordinate, as I do with this present fleet—such would be the greatest and best punishment and least burdensome to the conscience that I can think of.'"

     Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella "Shortly after landing on Hispaniola in 1498," as trans. Felipe Fernández-Armesto on pp. 133-134 of his Columbus (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1991), and citing Crístobal Colón:  textos y documentos completos, ed. Varela (Madrid:  1984), 244.  Yet "Columbus's requests for friars to be sent to Hispaniola for the needs of the colonists rather than the natives were consciously ironic:  he was using the simple pagan in his traditional role as a commonplace of sententious literature, to point up the moral deficiencies of the Christians.  He was, beyond question, every bit as enthusiastic about converting the natives as his royal sponsors" (137).

The energy cost of AI

"In this domain, living organisms are unbeatable:  a human brain consumes about 25 watts.  By contrast, a computer possessing an equivalent power of information-processing consumes 25 megawatts, i.e. a million times more."

     Jean-David Fermanian & Isabelle Rak, "Démystifier l’Intelligence Artificielle," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 50, no. 5 =301 (septembre-octobre 2025):  27 (17-34).

Planck on the scientific virtue "akin to" faith

PLANCK:  ". . . The difficulty which organized religion finds in appealing to the people nowadays is that its appeal necessarily demands the believing spirit, or what is generally called Faith.  In an all-around state of scepticism this appeal receives only a poor response.  Hence you have a number of prophets offering substitute wares.

MURPHY:  "Do you think that science in this particular might be a substitute for religion?

PLANCK:  "Not to a sceptical state of mind; for science demands also the believing spirit.  Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrace to the gates of the temple of science are written the words:  Ye must have faith.  It is a quality which the scientists cannot dispense with. . . .
     ". . . As a matter of fact, Kepler is [on the contrary] a magnificent example of [this]. . . .  [W]hat rendered him so energetic and tireless and productive was the profound faith he had in his own science, not the belief that he could eventually arrive at an arithmetical synthesis of his astronomical observations, but rather the profound faith in the existence of a definite plan behind the whole of creation. . . .  Compare him with Tycho de Brahe.  Brahe had the same material under his hands as Kepler, and even better opportunities, but he remained only a researcher, because he did not have the same faith in the existence of the eternal laws of creation.  Brahe remained only a researcher; but Kepler was the creator of the new astronomy. . . .
     ". . . if we did not have faith but could solve every puzzle in life by an application of the human reason what an unbearable burden life would be.  We should have no art and no music and no wonderment.  And we should have no science; not only because science would thereby lose its chief attraction for its own followers—namely, the pursuit of the unknowable—but also because science would lose the cornerstone of its own structure, which is the direct perception by consciousness of the existence of external reality.  As Einstein has said, you could not be a scientist if you did not know that the external world existed in reality; but that knowledge is not gained by any process of reasoning.  It is a direct perception and therefore in its nature akin to what we call Faith.  It is a metaphysical belief.  Now that is something which the sceptic questions in regard to religion; but it is the same in regard to science.  However, there is this to be said in favour of theoretical physics, that it is a very active science and does make an appeal to the lay imagination.  In that way it may, to some extent, satisfy the metaphysical hunger which religion does not seem to be capable of satisfying nowadays.  But this would be entirely by stimulating the religious reaction indirectly.  Science as such can never really take the place of religion.  This is explained in the penultimate chapter of [Where is science going?]."

     Max Planck as interviewed by James Murphy in "Epilogue:  a socratic dialogue:  Interlocutors:  Einstein—Planck—Murphy," in Max Planck, Where is science going?, trans. & ed. James Murphy (London:  George Allen & Unwinn Ltd, 1933), 214-215, 218-219.

The rising sun as typus Christi

Iam noctis umbra linquitur,
polum caligo deserit,
typusque Christi, lucifer
diem sopitum suscitat.

     Stanza 2 of the anonymous 5th or 6th century hymn "Deus, qui caeli lumen es."  One hundred Latin hymns:  Ambrose to Aquinas, ed. Walsh & Husch, Dumbarton Oaks medieval library (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2012), 119 (118-121):

The shades of night are left behind,
the murk vanishes from the sky;
the light-bearer, symbol of Christ,
awakens now the slumbrous day. 

The Christian faith is "exceptionally rich"

"The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441-442.  But McGilchrist then moves on from the body and religion to art, or, more generally, beauty.

McGilchrist on theological liberalism

     "The Western Church has, in my view, been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values, but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems. At the same time the liturgical reform movement, as always convinced that religious truths can be literally stated, has largely eroded and in some cases completely destroyed the power of metaphoric language and ritual to convey the numinous. Meanwhile there has been, as expected, a parallel movement towards the possible rehabilitation of religious practices as utility. Thus 15 minutes Zen meditation a day may make you a more effective money broker, or improve your blood pressure, or lower your cholesterol."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441.  But see p. 316 for his comments on "the improbable doctrine of transubstantiation," which he treats as "the explicit analytical [(i.e. medieval scholastic)] left hemisphere attempt to untangle" the properly metaphorical "is" of the right, and thus does no more than mirror the parallel rejection of metaphor on the part of Protestant literalism (mere representationalism).

"Gotta serve somebody"

      "When we decide not to worship divinity, we do not stop worshipping:  we merely find something else less worthy to worship."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441.

"Hall of mirrors"

     "If the right hemisphere delivers 'the Other' – experience of whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves – this is not the same as the world of concrete entities 'out there' (it is certainly more than that), but it does encompass most of what we would think of as actually existing things, at least before we come to think of them at all, as opposed to the concepts of them, the abstractions and constructions we inevitably make from them, in conscious reflection, which forms the contribution of the left hemisphere. But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings – so that the realm of actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering – not 'the Other', but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that was truly 'Other' than, beyond, the human mind.
     "In essence this was the [culminating] achievement of the Industrial Revolution."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the Western world, new revised edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 386.

"Receive us . . . not troubled, not shrinking back on that day of death or uprooted by force"

Index of Medieval Art, below

"O Lord and Maker of all, and especially of this body of ours! O God and Father and Pilot of mankind! O Master of life and death! O Guardian and Benefactor of our souls! O You who make and change all seasonably by Your creative Word, . . . receive us, ready and not troubled by fear of You, not turning away in our last days, nor forcibly drawn from things of earth, as is the misfortune of souls loving the world and the flesh, but eagerly drawn to the heavenly life, everlasting and blessed, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen."

     St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Funeral oration On his brother, St. Caesarius 24, trans. McCauley, FC 22 (Funeral orations (Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 1953)), 25.  Trans. Liturgy of the hours for Friday in the 31st week of Ordinary time:

"Lord and Creator of all, and especially of your creature man, you are the God and Father and ruler of your children; you are the Lord of life and death, you are the guardian and benefactor of our souls. You fashion and transform all things in their due season through your creative Word, as you know to be best in your deep wisdom and providence. Receive. . . . us too at the proper time, when you have guided us in our bodily life as long as may be for our profit. Receive us prepared indeed by fear of you, but not troubled, not shrinking back on that day of death or uprooted by force like those who are lovers of the world and the flesh. Instead, may we set out eagerly for that everlasting and blessed life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen [(δέχοιο δὲ καὶ ἡμᾶς ὕστερον ἐν καιρῷ εὐθέτῳ, οἰκονομήσας ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ ἐφ' ὅσον ἂν ᾗ συμθέρον· καὶ δέχοιό γε διὰ τὸν σὸν φόβον ἑτοιμασθέντας, καὶ οὐ ταρασσομὲνους, οὐδὲ ὑποχωροῦντας ἐν ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τελευταίᾳ, καὶ βὶᾳ τῶν ἐντεῦθεν ἀποσπωμένους, ὃ τῶν φιλοκόσμων ψυχῶν πάθος καὶ φιλοσάρκων, αλλὰ προθύμος πρὸς τὴν αὐτόθεν ζωὴν τὴν μακραίωνά τε καὶ μακαρίαν, τὴν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν, ᾧ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. Ἀμήν.)]."

     Greek from SC 405 (1995), , and PG 35, col. 788B-C.  A lovely illustration of this (St. Caesarius interpreted by me as both returning home upon exile as mentioned in this funeral oration and welcoming his brother and mother to "that everlasting and blessed life which is in Jesus Christ our Lord") would be Index of Medieval Art no. 49875.

"being and being known as a Christian"

"Although he possessed many important honors, his own first claim to dignity consisted in being and being known as a Christian."

     St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Funeral oration On his brother, St. Caesarius 10, trans. McCauley, FC 22 (Funeral orations (Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 1953)), 12.  Cf. "Their sole enjoyment in their children was that they be known as Christ's and called His" (4, p. 7).  This is, if memory serves, a theme of St. Gregory's.

"Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ [of perception] in us"

"In his Anthropology, . . . Dr. Heinroth . . . calls my approach unique, for he says that my thinking works objectively.  Here he means that my thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it; that my perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception. . . .
     "I must admit that I have long been suspicious of the great and important-sounding task:  'know thyself.'  This has always seemed to me a deception practiced by a secret order of priests who wished to confuse humanity with impossible demands, to divert attention from activity in the outer world to some false, inner speculation.  The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world.  Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.
     "But the greatest help comes from our fellow men:  they have the advantage of being able to compare us with the world from their own standpoint, and thus they know us better than we ourselves can.
     "Since reaching the age of maturity, I have always paid strict attention to what others might know of me:  from them and in them, as in so many mirrors, I can gain a clearer idea of myself and what lies within me.
     "Here I exclude adversaries, for they find my existence odious, repudiate my goals, and condemn my means of reaching them as a mere waste of time.  Thus I pass them by and ignore them, for they offer me no help with the growth which is the point of my life.  But friends may call attention to my limitations or to the infinite in my being--in either case I listen to them and trust that they will truly instruct me."

"Hiebei bekenn' ich, daß mir von jeher die große und so bedeutend klingende Aufgabe: erkenne dich selbst, immer verdächtig vorkam, als eine List geheim verbündeter Priester, die den Menschen durch unerreichbare Forderungen verwirren und von der Thätigkeit gegen die Außenwelt zu einer innern falschen Beschaulichkeit verleiten wollten. Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, in sofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf."

     Johann Wolfang von Goethe, "Significant help given by an ingenious turn of phrase [(Bedeutende Förderniß durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort)]," in Scientific studies, ed. & trans. Douglas Miller, Works 12  (New York:  Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988, 39 (39-41).  German:  Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen: II. Abtheilung: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften: 11. Band: Zur Naturwissenschaft: Allgemeine Naturlehre: I. Theil,  58-64. Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1893, p. 59, ll. 10-20.  I was put onto this by Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary, new expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press), 359-360, who, however, quotes a slightly different translation.

AI singularity as fundamental bug, not ultimate feature

     "The singularity of each [and every] AI machine is to be contrasted with the universality of human reason.  Rational activity consists . . . in a knowledge of the universal forms to be equated with neither the abstract symbolism of traditional informatics nor any generalizations from the concrete [that] artificial intelligence [might be capable of confecting].  Because [(De sorte que)] rational logic is truly [(elle-même)] universal, it is found in every human individual who is thinking straight; is communicable from one human being to another; [and] can be understood and communicated, agreed with or refuted.  AI machines, by contrast, are not designed to communicate their logic; rather, their [quite alien] internal logic is what one does not wish to see in their responses inasmuch as it has meaning for that one machine and it alone.
     "Among the myths surrounding artificial intelligence is the notion that, by dint of [a supposed] perfectability, AI machines, [having] become superintelligent, will begin to develop a moral sense, a consciousness of themselves, and thus attain to a personal 'singularity.'  In reality, singularity is not a perfection of the AI machine, but the opposite.  [For an AI machine] is already singular by its very logic, and that singularity is the inevitable by-product [(rançon directe)] of its incapacity to accede to the universality of human reason.  The more an AI machine is perfected in the imitation of the products of human reason, the more its logic becomes incommunicable and [the more it] finds itself entrapped within its singularity."

     Fr. Emmanuel Perrier, O.P., "Que fait l’intelligence artificielle?," Revue thomiste website, October (?) 2025.

"the amplitude of the glory of [the Father's] inheritance in the saints"

ὁ πλοῦτος τῆς δόξης τῆς κληρονομίας αὐτοῦ ἐν τοῖς ἁγίοις 

     Eph 1:18 RSV:  "that you may know . . . what are the riches of his glorious inheritance [i.e. 'portion'] in the saints."  riches:  abundance, wealth, richness, plenitude, fulsomeness, plentifulness, plenteousness, sumptuosity, immensity, magnitude, clerete, lustre, dimensity, etc.
     "God seeks from our goods not profit, but glory, i.e., the manifestation of His goodness" ("Deus ex bonis nostris non quaerit utilitatem, sed gloriam, idest manifestationem suae bonitatis"; St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II.114.1 ("Whether a man may merit anything from God").ad 2).

Neither hero nor villain

"Thus Columbus-the-hero and Columbus-the-villain live on, mutually sustained by the passion which continuing controversy imparts to their supporters. No argument can dispel [either of] the[se two falsehoods], however convincing; no evidence, however compelling. They have eclipsed the real Columbus and, judged by their effects, have outstriped him in importance. For one of the sad lessons historians learn is that history is influenced less by the facts as they happen than by the falsehoods men believe."

     Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at the time Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford, and the author of an important Columbus biography published by Oxford University Press in 1991 ("arguably one of the best-written and most historically sensitive" available, according to Dr. Valerie I. J. Flint in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Britannica Library), but now William P. Reynolds Professor of History, University of Notre Dame.  "Columbus - Hero or Villain?," History today 42, no. 5 (May 1992):  9 (4-9).
     And yet it seems clear that there are, in Fernández-Armesto's mind, respects in which Columbus was and remains the former at least, not (of course) to mention respects in which he was clearly a man of his own time, indeed more Genoese than Spanish, given that he "never understood [already contemporary] Spanish[/Castilian] scruples about slavery" (6).  And yet "Las Casas revered him, and pitied, rather than censured, the imperfections of his attitude to the natives."  (Though I suppose the question might be, Right up until his death in 1566, 61 years after Columbus'?)