Yes, but are those later generations ever the more superficial?

"it is one of the ironies of history that those issues which once seemed so important as to justify their defence with the sacrifice of life itself should in time come to seem to later generations irrelevant."

Maurice Lindsay, History of Scottish literature (London:  Robert Hale, 1977), 128, as quoted by Barton Swaim, "Reasons for Latin," Times literary supplement, 15 January 2010, 24, but verified.  The sentence preceding, the one that opens the chapter, runs as follows:  "The seventeenth century, with its long and bitter periods of religious struggle--family divided against family, maintaining attitudes of bigotry and intolerance--is not an age upon which Scots can reasonably look back with much pride."
Yet in this same issue of the TLS is a review by Jonathan Clark entitled, "Did Butterfield write in vain?"  (Peter Burke, in the new and revised (1988) edition of the Harper dictionary of modern thought, defines the "Whig interpretation of history" identified by Butterfield as "the tendency of historians to see the past as the story of the conflict between progressives and reactionaries, in which the progressives, or Whigs, win and so bring about the modern world.")

"In Heaven There Is No Beer," as sung by Aquinas and Pesch

"The Bavarian has in heaven no beer to expect, the Briton no Guinness, the Frenchman and the Italian and the Rhenish Hessian as well as the Franconian no wine, the Swiss no kirsch, the Pole and the Russian no vodka, the North German no corn schnapps, the Greek no ouzo."

Otto Hermann Pesch, "Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005):  441.

Pseudo-Melito on the Assumption

"Then the Saviour spake unto them, saying: . . . this woman did I choose out of the tribes of Israel by the commandment of my Father, to dwell in her.  What then will ye that I do with her?  Then said Peter and the other apostles: . . . it hath appeared right to us thy servants that, as thou having overcome death dost reign in glory, so thou shouldest raise up the body of thy mother and take her with thee rejoicing into heaven.
"Then said the Savior:  Be it done according to your will."

 Pseudo-Melito, Latin narrative of the Assumption XVI.2-XVII.1, trans. Montague Rhodes James (The apocryphal New Testament, corr. ed. (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966 [1953]; cf. http://www.archive.org/download/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp.pdf), 215-216).  I'm not endorsing this (not endorsing this fifth-century document either), just intrigued by the idea of a development of fact and dogma left up to the apostles.  I was put onto this by Fr. Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P., Initiation à la théologie mariale:  «tous les âges me diront bienheureuse», Bibliothèque de la Revue thomiste (Paris:  Parole et Silence, 2007), 175.

Colón-Emeric on the Methodist house and the Thomist cathedral

"The Methodist house of religion is no English manor but a simple dwelling with a porch, a door, and an interior.  The porch of this house is repentance; the door to this house is faith; the inside of the house is holiness itself.  When we turned to Aquinas the scene shifted tremendously.  We found ourselves not before a humble if hospitable house, but before a Gothic cathedral that threatened to overwhelm us by its sheer scale.  The interior of this cathedral is cavernous; there are such treasures in this place that centuries of Thomist commentators have not surveyed them all.  Our study amounted to little more than a cursory walk through.

     "Looking at Wesley and Aquinas side by side it is easy to feel dizzied by the differences.  Methodist house and Thomist cathedral, what can these two possibly have in common?  Even when focused on a central doctrine, like perfection, the differences seem to be so great as to render any comparison as fruitless as that of the proverbial apples and oranges.  Yet in the same way that both house and cathedral have generic common features (walls, roofs, doors, etc.) that allow for comparison, so do Aquinas' and Wesley's respective teachings on perfection.  The chief commonality that their teachings share is that they are grounded  in the Scriptural Witness [(the Sermon on the Mount)] as interpreted by the Christian tradition."

     Edgardo A. Colón-Emeric, Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian perfection:  an ecumenical dialogue (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2009), 125.  I haven't yet read this book, but, in skimming through it, stumbled upon this, which, understandably, caught my eye.  Cf. p. 149 and elsewhere.

Aquinas on the Angst of the philosophers

"Alexander and Averroes laid it down that the final happiness of man is not in such knowledge as is possible to man through the speculative sciences, but in a knowledge gained by conjunction with a separately subsistent intelligence, which conjunction they conceived to be possible to man in this life. But because Aristotle saw that there was no other knowledge for man in this life than that which is through the speculative sciences, he supposed man not to gain perfect happiness, but a limited measure of happiness suited to his state. In which it sufficiently appears how hard pressed on this side and on that these fine geniuses were [(quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia)]. From [which] stress of difficulty [(angustiis)] we shall find escape in positing, according to the proofs already given, that man can arrive at true happiness after this life, the soul of man being immortal. In this . . . state the soul [(in quo statu anima (no 'disembodied'!))] will understand in the way in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] understand. The final happiness of man then will be in the knowledge of God, which the human soul has after this life according to the manner in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] know Him."

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.48.[16], trans. Rickaby (http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc3_48.htm), modifications and underscoring mine.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum here:  http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/scg3001.html#25987.  angustia Pesch translates as Angst ("Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 431), but "difficulty, distress, [and] perplexity" (Andrews, A copious and critical Latin-English lexicon (1868)) would be a consequence of finding oneself, no matter how brilliant, between a rock and a hard place (angustiam . . . hinc inde) philosophically.  There is no entry for angustia in Schütz's Thomas-Lexikon as reproduced here (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/tl.html), but "difficulty, distress" are the equivalents given in the Lexicon of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Deferrari and Barry (for what little that may be worth).

Pesch on the only satisfactory answer to "the question of meaning"

“this God does not want ‘to enjoy’ (frui!) his own beatitude [(beatitudo)] without us”.

Otto Hermann Pesch, “Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 452 (427-453).

Arnold on intimations of antiquity

"These are no medieval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history,or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;--stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical."

Matthew Arnold, The study of Celtic literature (London:  Smith, Elder, & Co., 1891 [1867]), 51.