The submission of a man of great courage

"In the post-Tridentine [(postèrieurs)] writings of [Cardinal] Seripando one finds no further mention of double justice.  This submission showed the high degree to which he was [a] true Catholic.  His filial attachment to the Church was [much] more profoundly rooted in him than his conviction [on the subject] of double justice, as tenaciously [as he argued for the latter throughout the discussions of 1546 (si ferme pourtant)]."

     P. Pas, "La doctrine de la double justice au Concile de Trent,"  Ephemerides theologicae Lovanienses 30 no 2/3 (April/September 1954):  51 (5-53).  Pas gives a good sense of the penultimate tenacity of this man, e.g. on p. 17:  "Given this context and the manifest intention of the author to give expression to the opinion of the majority, one is astonished to find yet again in the fourth canon [of Seripando's draft of 19 August (CT V, 828-833)], in the most explicit fashion, the doctrine of double justice.  In the midst of a placid exposé, which is far from requiring the idea, this canon affirms that the Christian possesses, besides grace, 'the very pure justice of the Christ' of whom he is a member.  Seripando had to have been profoundly convinced of the truth of this doctrine in order to reintroduce [(maintenir)] it even after having renounced the personal views that were its native habitat [(qui en formaient le contexte normal)]."  (This, by the way, is said to be "the first time that we find, in Seripando, the technical term" De duplici iustitia (duplex iustitia).)  And on p. 24:  "That he had, despite everything, the courage of his opinion his very profound conviction places beyond all doubt.  In any case he could not consent to the explicit rejection of double justice as he understood it to be enunciated in the new decree.  That transmogrification [(métamorphose)] of his own work he could only accept after a reprobation of his doctrine, not by certain unknown editors, but by the entire council."  Moreover he was virtually alone in this.  "This option for double justice was not driven by fidelity to a long [Augustinian] tradition", for there was none (30; cf. 27 ff.).  Indeed, of all of the five (!) defenders of double justice at the Council of Trent, we know of only one whose commitment to it was independent of Seripando's:  Cardinal Pole (30).

"Dei, quia a Deo, nostra, quia in nobis, Christi, quia per Christum"

Source

"Una est iustitia Dei et nostra per Christum Iesum, qua iustificaur:  Dei, quia a Deo, nostra, quia in nobis, Christi, quia per Christum."

One is [1] the justice of God and [2] ours through Jesus Christ, by which we are justified:  'of God' [(or 'God's')] because from God; 'ours,' because in us; 'of Christ' [(or 'Christ's')] because through Christ.

     Last chapter of the fourth draft of the Tridentine decree on justification dated 11 December 1546 (CT V, -700-), as reproduced in P. Pas, "La doctrine de la double justice au Concile de Trent," Ephemerides theologicae Lovanienses, 30 no 2/3 (April/September 1954):  48 (5-53).  "This will become in the definitive text [of 13 January 1547]:  'iustitia nostra . . . a Deo nobis infunditur per Christi meritum'" ("what is called our justice, because we are justified by its abiding in us, is that same justice of God, in that it is imparted to us by God through the merit of Christ" (Tanner, vol. 2, p. 678)).  Fill this out with the analysis on pp. 37 ff.

"Whoever loves someone whom he believes good loves goodness, whether that person is what he is esteemed to be or something quite different."

Emeth, by Pauline Baynes.
C. S. Lewis,The last battle, chaps. 14-15.

". . . qui eum diligit, quem credit bonum, siue ille se ita siue aliter, quam creditur, habeat."

     St. Augustine, Letter 20 to Antonius (390/391), FC 12, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons, 46.  CSEL 34.1, 47-49, ll. 24-25.

A figural interpretation of Genesis 1

"Mother was by no means lacking in acumen.  I have a copy of her Bible in which, on January 1, 1886, she had entered a comment on the opening lines of Genesis.  She wrote:  'This is a symbol of the new creation in Jesus Christ.  Man without salvation is without form and void until the light of the world breaks in.'  How far this goes beyond all the conflicts over Genesis based on geology and evolution!"

     Roland H. Bainton, Roly:  chronicle of a stubborn non-conformist (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Divinity School, 1988), 5.  Bainton's mother (who died in 1910, when he was 13) was Charlotte Blackham Bainton.

Presumption

The Pharisee and the Publican (5th/6th century),
Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.

     "As a matter of fact, several of the participants at Trent seem to have been willing to serve as the minor for Gregory's syllogism. . . ."  "Bernard Costacciario ([Concilium Tridentium] V 552, 30-48), Nicholas Taborel ([CT V] 630, 19-40), and Ludovicus Vitriarius ([CT V] 569-470) all expressed a willingness to be judged on the basis of their works."

     James F. McCue, "Double justification at the Council of Trent:  piety and theology in sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism," in Piety, politics, and ethics: Reformation studies in honor of George Wolfgang Forell, Sixteenth century essays and studies, ed. Carter Lindberg (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1984), 52 and 52n21 (39-53), on the speech of Gregory of Padua at Trent:  "As a matter of fact, several of the participants at Trent seem to have been willing to serve as the minor for Gregory's syllogism, but most of the opposition ignored the reference to practice and to liturgy and focused instead on the theoretical ramifications and inadequacies of the doctrine of double justification" (52-53).  "the minor for Gregory's syllogism"?  Here's Gregory of Padua, speaking at Trent in 1546:

One who has been justified by God's mercy through Jesus Christ, if he or she does good works relying on these same helps, fulfills the law, and perseveres—such a one is indeed just and merits heaven itself, blessedness, and God.  But there is a problem in finding a minor for our syllogism:  how shall we find someone who will say 'I am that one; ergo by right heaven is owed me.'  Who, speaking about himself, will provide the minor and say 'I am the very one?'  Who knows that he or she has done all that God has commanded, even down to circumstantial detail (cum debitis circumstantiis)[?]  Who is sure of his or her own works when everyone agrees that the justified do not know (regularly; there may be exceptions) that they are in grace[?]  Who will say, 'All that you have commanded Lord I have done from my youth, what more is wanting to me?'  This judgment, esteemed Fathers, is difficult and is not to be sought from us, who fall daily.  It is to be sought from the saints.  But I do not think that any of them, if they came back to us, would say:  'I'll provide the minor; I am that just one!'  And I accept all the testimonies of the saints adduced to this effect (and I do not think that they were deceived, Fathers—nec decepi credo Patres) in which they accused themselves and said that they were unclean and unjust [(CT V, 580, 1-15)].

"I live in a hole here, but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere."

The Blake Archive

     "It has to be remembered that Blake was almost completely forgotten at the time of his death in a tiny two-room apartment in Fountain Court, a narrow alley off the Strand in London, in 1827.  He had sold less than thirty copies of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794).  Of the great illuminated Prophetic Books, The French Revolution (1791) had never been published for fear of prosecution, only four copies of Milton (1804/1810) were printed in his lifetime, and only five of his tortured, apocalyptic masterwork Jerusalem (1810/1810), of which just two fully colored originals now remain.
     "Blake had been mocked in a notorious obituary in Leigh Hunt's liberal newspaper the Examiner as 'an unfortunate lunatic.'  Both Wordsworth and Southey thought Blake was 'perfectly mad,' and even Coleridge—who was exceptional in having read the Songs in a rare copy, thought Blake was gifted but deeply eccentric.  The author of 'Kubla Khan' wrote:  'You perhaps smile at my calling another poet a mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic poet and painter.' . . .
". . . [Damrosch] remarks that Blake could lean out of the window of his last tiny lodgings in Fountain Court and just glimpse the river Thames, sometimes 'like a bar of gold.'  He adds Blake's comment:  'I live in a hole here, but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere.'"

     Richard Holmes, "The greatness of William Blake," reviewing Eternity's sunrise:  the imaginative world of William Blake, by Leo Damrosch (and other books), The New York review of books 62, no. 19 (December 3, 2015):  72, 73 (71-73).

Extra Calvinisticum, Extra Patristicum, Extra Catholicum

St. Gallen,Stiftsbibliothek
(Cod. Sang.) 390, fol. 54 (detail).

"Helpless, he lay in a manger; glorious, he shone in the heavens.  Humbled, he lived among men; eternal, he dwelt with the Father."

"In praesepio jacebat et in cælis fulgebat; ad nos veniebat, et apud Patrem manebat."

In a manger he was lying and in the heavens he was shining; to us he was coming, and with the Father he was remaining.

     Antiphon to the Benedictus, Morning Prayer, Weekday no. 1 (Monday) between 2 January and Epiphany.  According to CANTUS, this antiphon dates back to the late 10th century at least.  (But I haven't yet checked any sources beyond Hesbert's Antiphonale missarum sextuplex, in which it does not appear.)
     "shining" is too tame for "fulgebat" (flashing, burning, gleaming, shimmering).  Unfortunately, nothing better comes to mind.  "Fulgurating" doesn't really speak today.
     In any case, there is a clear if passing echo here of Sermo 200 by St. Augustine, his second on the Epiphany (PL 38, col. 1029 (1028-1031)), preached on 6 January between 393 and 405 inclusive, and read in the old Roman Breviary "in the second nocturn of the second and third days within the octave of Epiphany" (ACW 15, trans. Thomas Comerford Lawler, 159n1 on 226):

Here we have a great mystery.  He was at that time lying in a manger, and yet was leading the Magi from the East.  He lay hidden in a stable, yet He was acknowledged in the heavens, so that He, acknowledged in the heavens, might be made manifest in the stable, and this day might be called 'Epiphany,' which may be expressed in Latin as 'Manifestatio.' 

[WSA translation here.] 

Magnum sacramentum.  In præsepi tunc jacebat, et Magos ab Oriente ducebat.  Abscondebatur in stabulo, et agnoscebatur in cœlo; ut agnitus in cœlo manifestaretur in stabulo, et appellaretur Epiphania dies iste, quod latine manifestation dici potest.

Thus, "in the heavens he was shining" is probably a reference to the star that led "the Magi from the East", though there are no occurrences of fulg* in Mt 1 (but cf. Mt 24:27 (with Lk 17:24), 28:3; Lk 11:36, 24:4; 2 Cor 4:4; etc.).