St. John of the Cross on the reception of the Eucharist

"the sensory benefits are the least among those that this Most Blessed Sacrament bestows, for the invisible grace it gives is a greater blessing.  God often withdraws sensory delight and pleasure so that souls might set the eyes of faith upon this invisible grace.  Not only in receiving communion, but in other spiritual exercises as well, beginners desire to feel God and taste of Him as if He were comprehensible and accessible.  This desire is a serious imperfection and, because it involves impurity of faith, opposed to God's way."

     St. John of the Cross, The dark night I.6 ("The imperfections of spiritual gluttony").5, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.; The collected works of St. John of the Cross (Washington, D.C.:  ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 308.

Personal knowledge

     "inference simply cannot substitute for experience [as I have defined it].  One will not long believe in a personal God with whom there is no personal communication, and the most compelling evidence of a personal God must itself be personal.  To attempt something else as foundation or substitute, as has been done so often in an effort to shore up the assertion of God, is to move into a process of internal contradictions of which the ultimate resolution must be atheism."

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God:  the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004), 138 (the conclusion).
     Experience is "'an affair primarily of doing.  The organism does not stand about, Micawberlike, waiting for something to turn up.  It does not wait passive and inert for something to impress itself upon it from without.  The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings.  As a consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. . . . This close connection between doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience'" (quoting John Dewey, Reconstruction in philosophy, enlarged edition with a new introduction by the author (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1966), p. 86, italics mine, at Denying and disclosing God, p. 128).
     All of which reminds me so much of Austin Farrer and his emphasis on the activity system (as in Finite and infinite), as well as the sterility of any "thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think":  "Nothing can give substance to our thought of God but an experience which employs our activity in relation to God, where that activity is something other than thought itself" (Faith and speculation, pp. 22 and 28 (in chap. 2 on "The empirical demand"), italics mine).  Or, more to the point, "to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them.  No physical science without physical interference, no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think. . . . We can know nothing of God, unless we can do something about him.  So what, we must ask, can we do?" (22)  "God would not be recognized as worshipful, save in relation to our worshipping.  If he is so recognized, there is something we can do about God:  we can worship him" (26).
     Thus, "the interaction that constitutes experience . . . in the actual history of religious commitments and faith" has two dimensions:  1) the categorical or concrete (but most effectively of all an encounter with the saints), and 2) the transcendental, as encountered by those who love the truth (or any of the other transcendentals) above everything else, even God himself" (or, more accurately, God as wish-fulfillment).  For "'Christ likes us to prefer truth to him'", since "'If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms'" (Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Cranfurd (New York:  Harper and Row, 1951), 69, at Denying and disclosing God, p. 132).
     All of this—except, of course, the Farrer—from chap. 6 of Denying and disclosing God, which is Buckley's own antidote to the misguided apologetics of modernity, an apologetics with a distressingly persistent tendency to treat the question of the existence of God in abstraction from the concrete practices of personal interaction so essential to the Christian faith ("those very events that in the actual history of religious commitments and faith have proved most cogent", it being only "in such an interaction that the manifestation of the holiness of God [in fact] occurs" (p. 128, italics mine)).

"What appears at first sight as a rare or highly specialized experience of mystical development 'writes large' the outline by which the surrender that is faith evolves into its own fullness in many lives."

     "It is in this deeply mysterious assimilation to Christ, this gradual movement from the initial stages of purification from expectations and conceptual clarity until the final moments of union, that John [of the Cross] throws into bold relief what is the experience, in various degrees and infinite varities, of many deeply good people.  What appears at first sight as a rare or highly specialized experience of mystical development 'writes large' the outline by which the surrender that is faith evolves into its own fullness in many lives.  Any serious following of Christ leads by way of the reversals of concepts or the disappointments of expectations, the sacrifice or the suffering—by way of the deconstruction of an initial understanding of God—into the loving awareness that God is beyond concept, beyond management, and beyond form.  There is in Christian living an abiding purification from expectations and projections that social workers or mothers of families or dedicated teachers undergo—must undergo if they are to continue faithful to the God who dwells in light inaccessible, whose incalculable reality is embodied in Jesus, and whose draw they feel within their own spirits. . . .
     "René Voillaume makes a similar point as he introduces the Journal of one of the major disciples of John of the Cross in the twentieth century, Raïssa Maritain:

The contemplative prayer of Raïssa, whose life was above all dedicated to intellectual work, and who was called on to testify mainly in the world of thought and of art, is but one with the experience of a factory girl or a woman wholly occupied in domestic tasks in a poor neighborhood.  I have known some such, who by these paths in appearance very different have found the same simplicity of gaze on God and endured the same acute ordeals of purification, to achieve a more complete union with the supreme object of their love.

This contemplative purification, which in one way or another catches up the lives of those who move within this grace, is delineated in its progressive moments and in its fullest completion by the mystical theology of John of the Cross.
     "Not all atheism comes out of Feuerbach and Freud; not all contemplatives are influenced by John of the Cross.  But there is an intersection here of religious criticism that seems to me highly significant.  If it is correct, then the concern of a theology that sees development somewhat dialectically should be less to refute Feuerbachian and Freudian analysis than to learn from them what they have to teach about the relentless remolding of the image of God by religious consciousness and to suggest alternative stages to the processes they elaborate of anthropological recognition and reduction."

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God:  the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004), 118-119.

"Apart from a rather dense and elaborate nexus of liturgical and congregational gestures, words, practices, and so on, how do Christian people show that they believe in [something like the] real presence?"

     "The observable differences in Catholic and Lutheran practice raise the question whether the Lutheran lex orandi, their liturgical instantiation of the presumed reality of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in his body and blood, adequately reflects what Lutherans say they believe about 'real presence.'  Apart from a rather dense and elaborate nexus of liturgical and congregational gestures, words, practices, and so on, how do Christian people show that they believe in real presence?  As Martin Luther himself once remarked, 'it is good that the Sacrament of the Altar is honored with bended knees; for the true body and blood of the Lord are there, likewise the presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of the Word of God, which should be heard reverently.  For God works there, and the Lord shows Himself.'  It has become increasingly rare today to find Lutherans whose practices vigorously enact real presence, which suggests at a minimum a disconnect between 'official theology' and church practice, and, at worse, a de facto eucharistic memorialism—creeping Zwinglianism, if you will—that contradicts official theological statements to the contrary.  Granted that Lutherans reject, as do Orthodox, tabernacling or processing the consecrated host.  Still, one wonders, where is the piety that reflects the Lutheran teaching?  And granted even further that that all our churches struggle with aspects of ecclesial practice that seem to betray the faith we confess, still one must ask:  Why does the Lutheran liturgical lex orandi so often seem to contradict their lex credendi?  At the risk of being accused of uncharitably airing out the Lutheran family's dirty laundry, which I do not at all intend to do, I would note that in my own experience as a representative of the Lutheran churches I once looked on in horror as our Orthodox ecumenical partners observed a Lutheran pastor throwing out the 'leftovers' (i.e. consecrated wine) after a Lutheran Eucharist.  Again, all of us have experiences within our churches that seem to contradict our churches' most deeply held, and ecumenically trumpeted, convictions.  But this one, which is in my experience common, is a particularly egregious example. . . . [I]t stands as a warning to all of us, reminding us that we must be ever vigilant to guard the integrity of our traditions, lex orandi et lex credendi."

     Mickey L. Mattox, "Catholic 'Church,' Lutheran 'Community'?," in Mickey L. Mattox, A. G. Roeber, and Paul R. Hinlicky, Changing churches:  an Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran theological conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 146-146 (112-153).  The words of Luther occur at Lectures on Genesis 47:31 (LW 8, 145; WA 44, 685).
     I am ignorant of the niceties of the Lutheran doctrine of persistence.  Presumably "The usus or actio (that is, the practice or administration)" (Formula of concord, Solid declaration VII, 86) is not already over by this point of "disposal"?
     For Luther's own convictions, see Lyndal Roper's startling account of how he handled a case of spillage here.
     Cf. Taft:  "In the far more modern and sophisticated twentieth-century United States I have heard tales (but not myself witnessed) abuses in Roman Catholic parishes that would turn one's hair gray:  poorly trained communion ministers and even priests who dump what is left of the consecrated hosts not used for Holy Communion at Mass back into the container of unconsecrated hosts in the sacristy, or worse, fill up the ciborium from that container of unconsecrated hosts if they run out of consecrated hosts for Holy Communion at Mass!" (Robert F. Taft, SJ, FBA, "'Communion' from the Tabernacle—a liturgico-theological oxymoron," Worship 88, no. 1 (January 2014):  19n63 (2-22)).
     Sitting right up front during an extremely crowded and busy Midnight Mass at St. Mary Catholic Church in Eugene one Christmas Eve a few years ago, my wife was startled to hear the celebrant stop a man who had started to walk away with the host in his hand, and demand in no uncertain terms that it be consumed right then and there, on the spot.
     Cf. the successful lawsuit filed by Archbishop Coakley of Oklahoma City.

The 17th-century Jesuit Leonard "Lessius argued as if Christianity had not significantly affected the grammar of 'God.'"

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God: the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 30.

Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy on the enduring value of his pre-Conciliar Irish-Catholic upbringing

Faculty of History, Cambridge University

"But if we believe in the reality of revelation, and if we believe that the Church is entrusted with it, then we have to give a concrete meaning and form to that confidence. We cannot infinitely postpone our obedience and response to the truth, as it seems to me many forms of liberal Protestantism tend to do. If the Church has the gospel of truth, someone, somewhere, has to be trusted to say what it is, and to call on us to receive it. That process seems to me now more complex and less simplistically hierarchical than we imagined in 1950, but the essence of what we believed in 1950 seems to me both true, and precious. A Church without real authority is not the Church at all. We receive and proclaim the Catholic faith which come to us from the apostles, we do not invent it: the Brothers, and my grandmother, knew that too."

     Eamon Duffy, "Confessions of a cradle Catholic," The pastoral review (January 2000).

Flowers for Algernon

"[von Neumann] spent the last year of his life in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he surprised and dismayed friends and family by seeking out a priest for counsel.  His brother explains this away as merely an effort to find intellectual companionship; his daughter Marina affirms, to the contrary, that von Neumann was taking up Pascal's Wager—betting on the existence of God, since he couldn't lose by being wrong:  'My father told me, in so many words, once, that Catholicism was a very tough religion to live in but it was the only one to die in.'
     "Whatever his spiritual state may have been, we know that he was distressed by the disease's effect on his mind.  An old joke among mathematicians says, 'Other mathematicians prove what they can; von Neumann proves what he wants,' but in the last weeks of his life he felt his mind rapidly deteriorating.  What had always come so easily to him—almost supernaturally easy—became difficult and then impossible.  Marina von Neumann told George Dyson that near the end her father asked her 'to test him on really simple arithmetic problems, like seven plus four, and I did this for a few minutes, and then I couldn't take it anymore.'  Even as von Neumann stumbled over the most elementary sums, he never lost his awareness that mathematics was important and that he had been marked from childhood by the astonishing fluency with which he could do it.  Marina von Neumann fled the hospital room:  in George Dyson's words, she could not bear to watch her father, one of the greatest minds of the 20th or any other century, 'recognizing that that by which he defined himself had slipped away.'"

     Alan Jacobs, "The man who delivered the computer," Books and culture (September/October 2012):  38.