"Ever since I've practiced not seeing, I've seen many wonderful things. . . . How much have you been seeing? Are your eyes satisfied?"

     "If a director is to restrain himself on film, though, he must restrain himself in life—that is, he must 'practice' restraint. He must fast. A man who refuses meat on Friday (and a man who refuses his smartphone on Sunday) is better suited to be a director (all things being equal) than a man who doesn't. Because the man who fasts is the man who can best grasp the measure of a thing, because he recognizes its power over him and knows its limitation in bringing him happiness. From that vantage point, he can see; thus, he knows what kind of a shot a thing deserves, if any at all. Such a man is free to look long, and he is free to look away, because such a man is free."

     Michael Toscano, "The call of the nightingale," Books and culture 22, no. 2 (March/April 2016):  17 (15-17).  The entire essay (which is devoted to the films of Majid Majidi) is simply transcendent.
     According to Toscano, the words at the top are those of Morteza, a character in The willow tree who went blind late in life, to Yousef, the blind man who, having regained his sight, "is undone by the lust of the eyes" (16).
     In The color of paradise (according to Toscano, Rang-e Khoda, The color of God), the blind boy Mohammed says this:

Our teacher says that God loves the blind more because they can't see, but I told him if it was so, He would not make us blind, so that we can't see Him.  He answered, 'God is not visible.  He is everywhere.  You can feel Him.  You see Him through your fingertips.'  Now I reach out everywhere for God till the day my hands touch Him, and tell Him everything, even all the secrets in my heart.

     Later, after quoting Confessions X.vi(.9), Toscano continues,

I can think of no passage that better encapsulates the incredible power of the virtuous eye, which can perceive the beauty of the created world and therein—in the textured braille of nature—the writing of God's hand and nature's joyful reply. This is the dignity of the eye (when rightly ordered), the dignity of the camera (when used to see in love), and the dignity of Mohammad, searching the fibers and composition of sound and touch for the One who composed them. You are both seen and unseen; only thee I want; only thy name I call. 'Now I reach everywhere for God till the day my hands touch him' [(17, underscoring mine)].

"as you know our weakness, so we may know your power to save"

"For the Tempted", William Bright, Ancient collects and other prayers: selected for devotional use from various rituals, with an appendix, on the collects in the prayer-book (1862 [1857]), 237-238 (i.e. among the "few Collects constructed in imitation of the ancient model" (233)):

Merciful and faithful High Priest, Who didst deign for us to be tempted of Satan; make speed to aid Thy servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations; and as Thou knowest their several infirmities, let each one find Thee mighty to save, Who livest, &c.

First Sunday in Lent, Book of common prayer (1979), Traditional:
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted of Satan:  Make speed to help thy servants who are assaulted by manifold temptations; and, as thou knowest their several infirmities, let each one find thee mighty to save; through. . . .

First Sunday in Lent, Book of common prayer (1979), Contemporary:
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan:  Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the  weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through. . . .

Prayers and Collects for Lent and Holy Week, United Methodist book of worship (1992):
Almighty God, your blessed Son was led by the Spirit
      to be tempted by Satan.
Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations.
And, as you know the weaknesses of each of us,
      let each one find you mighty to save;
through. . . .

First Sunday in Lent, Book of common worship (1993), PCUSA:
Almighty God,
your Son fasted forty days in the wilderness,
and was tempted as we are but did not sin.
Give us grace to direct our lives
in obedience to your Spirit,
that as you know our weakness,
so we may know your power to save;
through. . . .

First Sunday of Lent, Common worship: services and prayers for the Church of England (2000):
Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ fasted forty days in the wilderness,
and was tempted as we are, yet without sin:
give us grace to discipline ourselves in obedience to your Spirit;
and, as you know our weakness,
so may we know your power to save;
through. . . .

"'These are your gods, O Israel!'"

E. Béricourt, "[Procession de la déesse Raison]" (1793).
Bibliothèque nationale de France.

"the proof that the unbelievers have neither gods nor [any] access to divinity consists in this pretention precisely, repeated incessantly as a great privilege, a great right—that of deciding [for] themselves who is god [(decider eux-mêmes de qui est dieu)]:  the Senate (or National Assembly, or Congress) votes on the divinity of each idol:  '. . . among you, divinity is weighed in the judgment of men.  There is no god except the one you will have decided upon; from now on the man will have to bestow his favor on the god' (Tertullian, Apologeticum 5.1; cf. 13.3).  But by definition ‘There is no one to make gods, Nemo est qui deos faceret (11.3)."

     Jean-Luc Marion on the second-century apologists (who would have had little or nothing to do with modern "apologetics"), "Apologétique et apologie," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 39, no. 1-2 (janvier-avril 2014):  15 (9-17).
     The "accusation [of atheism] remains . . . perfectly current:  not only because Christians find themselves persecuted by other religions and marginalized by widespread unbelief, but because they contest the quasi gods of contemporaneity ('values', 'pluralism', 'tolerance', the 'mastery of the end of life', the 'freedom of choice', [economic] 'growth', the 'market, etc.)" (14).
     "God, the true [God], is not nominated, but only de-nominated [(Dieu, le vrai, ne se nomme pas, au mieux il se dé-nomme)]" (16).
     All of this in the context of the claim that "Christians make their apology [(not apologetics)] by assuming not only atheism, but a double atheism":  1) the objective atheism that consists in finding oneself an orphan of the "moral god", the only one that (modern) metaphysics allows for, and therefore "without God [(atheoi)] in the world" (Eph 2:12), and indeed in finding oneself in such a situation "with the serious terror of the apologue of Nietzsche"; and 2) the active, iconoclastic atheism that "with hammer blows" "shatters the idols and their thousand reappearing heads", the idols of those unbelievers who "cut a good figure and play the hero without God" because they "imagine that they have still other gods in reserve or at hand, still to come, perhaps, unavowed, but in every case more conformable and above all more manageable than He who, even missing (or, precisely, because missing) always maddens [(affole) them]."  The first atheism the early apologists noticed (constater).  The second the contemporary Christian apologist must in addition insist upon (revendiquer) (14-15).  As Christians we must abandon apologetics "in order to return to or rather attain to" a properly Christ- and therefore kerygma-centered apologia of the theologal virtues of faith, hope, and love.  A superb article that someone should translate in its entirety.

     On the other hand, surely this was an urban legend:  "Tiberius accordingly, in whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world, having himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ’s divinity, brought the matter before the senate, with his own decision in favour of Christ.  The senate, because it had not given the approval itself, rejected his proposal. Cæsar held to his opinion, threatening wrath against all accusers of the Christians" (Tertullian, Apologeticum 5.1).

"This surplus of rationality"

Le Point

"Faith thinks, and if it does not think like the world, this is not because it thinks less, but on the contrary because it thinks more than the world."

"La foi pense, et si elle ne pense pas comme le monde, ce n’est point parce qu’elle pense moins, mais au contraire parce qu’elle pense plus que le monde."

     Jean-Luc Marion, "Apologétique et apologie," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 39, no. 1-2 (janvier-avril 2014):  12 (9-17).  "ce surcroît de rationalité".

Wisdom's power and temperance's might

Nought feard their force, that fortilage to win,
But wisdomes powre, and temperaunces might,
By which the mightiest things efforced bin:

John Melhuish Strudwick,
Acrasia (c. 1888),
Wikimedia Commons

     Edmund Spencer, The faerie queene II.xii.43, ll. 5-7.  No Bower-of-Bliss defender feared anything but the power of wisdom and the might of temperance, by which two virtues the mightiest strongholds of vice are reduced.

"My very hairs do mutiny"

My very hairs do mutiny, for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and then they them
For fear and doting.

     William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 3, sc. 11, ll. 14-16.  Cf. act 4, sc. 8, ll. 24-29.

Pseudo-Bonhoeffer:"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

"We are not simply to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. . . . Silence in the face of evil is itself evil:  God will not hold us guiltless.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act."

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as quoted by Laura Joyce Davis, channeling Shannon Sedgwick Davis, in "The quiet fighter:  how Shannon Sedgwick Davis helped dismantle Joseph Kony's reign of terror," Christianity today 59, no. 1 (January/February 2015):  42 (38-42).

     I cite Davis because she conflates the two quotations, only the first of which appears to be indubitably authentic.
     The first comes from "The church and the Jewish question" (1933), which has been often reprinted in different translations.  I give here the rendition at Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12 (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2009), p. 365 (361-370):

The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. 

Die dritte Möglichkeit besteht darin, nicht nur die Opfer unter dem Rad zu verbinden, sondern dem Rad selbst in die Speichen zu fallen.

“Die Kirche vor der Judenfrage,” as reproduced in Niederdeutsche Kirchenzeitung: evangelisch-lutherisches Halbmonatsblatt für Kirche und Volkstum in Niederdeutschland 3, no. 13 (1 Juli 1933):  236 (234-238), not Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 12 (where the various versions of the essay are—as in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12—spelled out).  Other translations:

The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself [(The Bonhoeffer reader, ed. Green and DeJonge (Fortress Press, 2013), 374)]. 

The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself [(Testament to freedom:  the essential writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Kelly & Nelson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 139)]. 

The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself [(Dietrich Bonhoeffer:  witness to Jesus Christ, ed. De Gruchy (Collins, 1988), 127; No rusty swords:  letters, lectures and notes 1928-1936, from the collected works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, volume 1, ed. Robertson, trans. Robertson & Bowden (New York:  Harper & Row, 1965), 225)].

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12, 365n12:  "This is the famous phrase 'dem Rad selbst in die Speichen zu fallen,' often translated as 'to fall within the spokes of the wheel.'  As German editor Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth notes, however, Bonhoeffer and his readers would have understood this as the act of detaching a cart or wagon from the horse pulling it.  In any case, the meaning clearly is to bring the apparatus of the unjust and illegitimate state to a halt.  'To seize the wheel itself' is the English phrase; for this reason we use that translation here."  (It should be noted, however, that the essay should be read in its entirety, and Bonhoeffer's position on role of the Church in speaking truth to the State carefully noted, as the latter is not—was not yet at that point in time, at least—what those who bandy these words about in a sub-Lutheran American context tend to make of it.)

     The second appears to me to have been back-translated (?) into German as

Schweigen im Angesicht des Bösen ist selbst böse: Gott wird uns nicht als schuldlos betrachten. Nicht zu sprechen ist sprechen. Nicht zu handeln ist handeln 

Schweigen in das Gesicht des Boesens ist an sich schlect.  Gott wird uns nicht schuldlos halten.  Nicht zu sprechen ist sprechen. Nicht zu handeln ist handeln

and so forth (a potential indication of inauthenticity), but has (so far as I know) yet to be located in the works of Bonhoeffer, and did not—as of 1 March 2016—occur here.  See the "Master index of subjects" at p. 601 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 16 (Indexes and supplementary materials), where the two German terms for "silence" in Bonhoeffer are given as Rühe and Schweigen; and where vol. 14* (for Rühe) and vols. 3*, 4*, 14*, and 16* (for Schweigen) bear an asterisk "indicat[ing] that the term in question was a significantly indexed entry in the German index volume (DBW 17), but was either not indexed at all in the respective DBWE[nglish] volume or was indexed under a different entry."  (I have checked the references in vols. 3 (whose index actually lacks an entry labelled "silence"), 7, and 8 (for Rühe) and vols. 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 (for Schweigen) of the English edition.  I have also run a varied series of Google and full-text databases searches, but without any success so far.  Though he was by no means the first to have thus "quoted" Bonhoeffer without referencing a source (James Cone and others were doing so long before him), Eric Metaxas seems to have been the one greatly to popularize the "quotation".  Though Google Books offers a searchable "Preview" version of the Metaxas biography here, I have not been able to get it to return an occurrence of the "quotation" anywhere other than on the dust jacket, where, of course, the source is not given.)
     I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can prove my suspicions unfounded, but on 24 July 2016 Dr. Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer Chair Scholar, Union Theological Seminary and Executive Director, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, graciously responded to an inquiry of mine by confirming that he and his colleagues had (by that point at least) never been able to trace "Silence in the face of evil" back to Bonhoeffer himself.

     See now Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on resistance:  The word against the wheel (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2018), which, though it contains several references to the first, genuine half of the quote on "jam[ming] a spoke into the wheel [of injustice] itself," contains none of the following English words and phrases:  silence (!), guiltless, "not to speak," "not to act" (not schuldlos or Handeln either).  (I haven't read this, though; only searched it.)

     Update, 19 March 2019:  I have now searched for this in the Alexander Street Press database Twentieth Century Religious Thought:  Volume 1, Christianity, which contains the critical edition of the German works (DBW) as well as the Fortress English (DBWE), but to no avail.  The first part of the quotation at the head of this entry comes up readily in both English and German, but the second, not at all.  The best I could do was get three irrelevant hits on nicht zu sprechen.  But I got none on nicht zu handeln, and none on either back-translation into German (?) of Silence in the face of evil.

     Update, 27 July 2019:  Over five months after I posted the above on 1 March 2016, Dr. William Throckmorton, a psychologist at Grove City College, posted this, which has been more influential.  That he has updated at least twice.  On 2 November 2016 he came pretty close to accusing Metaxas of unethical behavior in the light of repeated attempts to get him to come clean.  And on 11 November 2016 he located a key portion of it in a book published in 1971 (and other portions of it even earlier than that).