"no angel attains to the perfection of God, but all are infinitely distant from Him"

"nullus Angelus pertingit ad perfectionem Dei, sed in infinitum distat"

no angel attains to the perfection of God, but is forever infinitely distant from [it]

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II.50.6.Resp., trans. FEDP (i.e. Shapcote).  "in infinitum" can have a temporal as well as a "spatial" sense.

"energivorous and lifeless repositories of the creative products of our true[ly] intellectual activity"

Source

"The machines dubbed ‘artificial[ly] intelligent’ are the energivorous and lifeless repositories of the creative products [(résultats formulés)] of our true[ly] intellectual activity, which they [do no more than simply] recombine ad infinitum.  They lack only the essential thing:  [admiration.]  'Admiration issues in the quest, and the quest attains to understanding,' writes Isaac of Stella in his Letter on the soul.  Abiding at the edge of the world, [human] intelligence is the sentinel that mounts a watch and keeps vigil in the presence of all the mysteries.  Let admiration and wonder in the face of [such] escape [(désertent)] our regard, and the source of all knowledge will be dried up.  Let them, on the contrary, continue to shimmer [before us ((à y briller))], and our fascination with machines [like these], however advanced, will melt away like snow in the sunshine."

     Laure Soignac, "Irréductible intelligence:  les leçons du Moyen Âge," Communio:  revue internationale catholique 50, no. 5 =301 (septembre-octobre 2025):  111 (97-111).

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.