What Eberhard Arnold would have said to Hitler

"'My dear Adolf Hitler, this can’t go on much longer; you yourself can’t possibly take any more pleasure in all this killing, that you murder evil men instead of making them better.'"

     Eberhard Arnold (1883-1935) on what he would have said to Hitler (having dreamt of the encounter) had the latter ever actually agreed to meet with him.  Emmy Barth, An embassy besieged:  the story of a Christian community in Nazi Germany (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books/Plough Publishing, 2010), 233, as quoted by Kevin P. Spicer, CSC, in a review of the book published in Central European history 44, no. 4 (December 2011):  755 (754-756).

     Granted, I need to read the book itself.  But the quotation can be seen in context via Google Books.

"Before 428, theotokos is not in fact encountered in the literary œuvre of Cyril, though it is found in at least one homily of Nestorius".

Hagia Sophia

"The appellation θεοτόκος was not at all universal.  After the Council of Ephesus, it still had to be explained to the occidentals. . . . Before 428, it is not in fact encountered [(ne se rencontre pratiquement pas)] in the literary œuvre of Cyril, though it is found in at least one homily of Nestorius; . . . the Alexandrian archbishop will continue, at the height of the controversy, to call [(conservera, en pleine controverse, l’usage d’appeler)] Mary 'the Holy Virgin'."

     Joseph Famerée, "Éphèse et Nestorius:  un malentendu christologique:  l’apport du P. A. de Halleux," Revue théologique de Louvain 39, no. 1 (2008):  16-17 (3-25).

“It is necessary to pass through the Church, not necessarily to enter it.”

"Il faut passer par l’Église, pas nécessairement y entrer."

     Yves Labbé, "Théologie ecclésiale, théologie universitaire," Revue théologique de Louvain 40, no.1 (2009):  19 (14-40), on baptism considered as "une réponse institutionelle apportée à une demande de ritualité, c’est-à-dire d’identité."  But "'one cannot exclude from the religious phenomenon [(du fait religieux)] the discourse that founds the religious [(le religieux)] from the interior, which accepts the hypothesis of revelation or that of the presence of God in history, in short discourse [properly] theological, Christian as it happens'" (29-30, quoting F. X. Cuche, the President of what was then called l'Université Strasbourg II, in "Quelle place pour une faculté de théologie dans une université de service public française?," Revue des sciences religieuses 78(2004):  78 (67-79).

N. P. Williams in 1937 or 1938

"If, on the other hand, it is permissible for the Church of England to disregard the authority of St Paul and the universal custom of the Church Catholic—and if there is nothing in the grounds which we have suggested as underlying the teaching of Scripture and the practice of the Church—then there can be no particular reason why women ministers should be restricted to the functions specified in Resolution 7.  Indeed, the question must arise:  Why should there be a diaconissate, as a fourth Order definitely distinguished from the three traditional Orders, at all?  Why should not women be frankly admitted to the ordinary diaconate?  If the sex of ordinands is as irrelevant to the question of their fitness for the ministry as the colour of their eyes or hair, why should women not be admitted to the priesthood and to the episcopate?  We have above stated our reason for believing that it is profoundly relevant; but, if this be dismissed as mere morbidity, there seems no reason why the Church should not use the gifts and powers of women in any hierarchical rank whatsoever. . . .  if female sex be not inherently a bar to Holy Order, there would seem to be no reason why a matriarch or 'mother in Israel' should not one day arise, endowed with character or abilities so commanding as to render her capable of occupying the Chair of St Augustine himself."

     N. P. Williams, "Deaconesses and Holy Orders" (1937 or 1938), N. P. Williams, ed. Eric Waldram Kemp (London:  S.P.C.K., 1954), 200 (185-201).  Cf. "these considerations, if valid at all, would permit, and even necessitate far more sweeping changes than those proposed by the Resolutions under discussion; for they would equally justify the admission of women to the priesthood and the episcopate" (193-194).  Cf. also Williams on the sense of call (194):

no argument for the repudiation, in regard to this matter, of the authorities just quoted has been produced, apart from the fact that some educated and high-minded women believe themselves to have a 'vocation', not merely to the service of Christ and his Church in ways open to a laic or to a cleric in minor Orders, but to the specific status of 'Holy Orders'.  But to use this supposed consciousness of 'vocation' as an argument for the change is surely to beg the question; for, if it is the case, as the Church has hitherto believed, that it is not the will of God that women should be admitted to Holy Orders, any such feelings of 'vocation' must be illusory.

"the grounds which we have suggested as underlying the teaching of Scripture and the practice of the Church" are not those given today, e.g. by Gerhard Ludwig Müller, in Priesthood and diaconate (2002 [2000]).  But then Müller is explicit about the fact that, unlike the teaching and practice itself, they have changed over time, and says that we needn't be threatened by the fact that the "underlying" "grounds" floated in earlier periods aren't as convincing in a given present.

Repletion with the everlasting enjoyment of Christ's Divinity, as foreshadowed for the time being by the sacramental reception of his glorified Humanity

Sassetta, Thomas Aquinas in Prayer (1423/5),
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

"Grant, O Lord, we pray,

that we may delight for all
     eternity

in that share in your divine life,

which is foreshadowed in the
     present age

by our reception of your
     precious Body and Blood.

Who live and reign
     for ever and ever."

"Fac nos, quaesumus, Domine,

Divinitatis tuae sempiterna fruitione repleri,

Quam pretiosi Corporis et Sanguinis tui

Temporalis perceptio praefigurat.

Qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum."

Cause us, we pray, O Lord, to be replete with the eternal enjoyment of your Divinity, which [eternal enjoyment] the temporal reception of your precious Body and Blood prefigures, [You] who live and reign for all eternity.

     Post Communion for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Roman missal.  =the 12th-century Corpus orationum no. 2597 =Bruylants no. 552.  Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas.  A subsequent (?) prayer for the Feast of St. Laurence on 7 July (Bruylants no. 483) begins with the second line:  "Divinitatis tuae, Domine, sempiterna fruitione satiemur: . . ."

"the Watchfulness of blessed Q"

Ronald Knox Society
of North America

Twelve Prophets our unlearn’d
     forefathers knew,

We are scarce satisfy’d with twenty-two:

A single Psalmist was enough for them,

Our List of Authors rivals A. & M.:

They were content Mark, Matthew,
     Luke and John

Should bless the’old-fashion’d Beds they
     lay upon:

But we, for ev’ry one of theirs, have
     two,

And trust the Watchfulness of blessed Q.

Fr. Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

     Ronald Knox, “Absolute and Abitofhell; [or Noah’s Art put into Commission, and Set Adrift (with no Walls or Roof to Catch the Force of these Dangerous Seas) on a New Voyage of Discovery;] Being a Satire in the Manner of Mr. John Dryden upon a newly-issued Work Entitl'd Foundations,” Essays in Satire (London:  Sheed and Ward, 1928), 87 (but "first in the Oxford Magazine, then in a collection of Oxford poetry, then as a tract" (x)).  In the book the allusions are footnoted:  J. M. Thompson, Hastings Rashdall, William Temple, etc. (none though in this section, albeit Richard Brook for "Jabbok" two lines above.  I was sent looking for this by Fr. John Hunwicke, "The gender and number of bishops," in Consecrated women? (2004), in Fathers in God?  Resources for reflection on women in the episcopate, ed. Colin Podmore (Norwich, England:  Canterbury Press for Forward in Faith, 2015), 193 (192-197):

. . . we are mistaken to grub around in speculative might-have-beens.  What is authoritative is not the speculative proto-history of the New Testament documents.  Mgr Ronald Knox reminded us that I do not ask Blessed Q to bless the bed that I lie on, but the canon of Scripture that Holy Mother Church sets before us.  Urmarkus and Protoluke are not our Scriptures; we owe no obsequium to the magisterium of the Jesus Seminar.  Mark's longer ending, and the Pericope de Adultera are canonical even if they were not written by the authors of Mark and John.  Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles, are canonical even if they are pseudonymous.  And just as the apostolic kerygma coalesced authoritatively into the New Testament, so the apostolic ministry coalesced authoritatively into the form of ministry we have received from the same age.  Speculations about the proto-history of that Threefold Ministry which is centered upon the monoepiscopacy do no harm; indeed Dom Gregory Dix demonstrated that Catholics can play these games with at least as great a show of erudition . . . and with distinctly more verve and wit . . . than Protestants and liberals.  But, wherever they come from, such speculations are not the authoritative basis upon which the tradition may be messed around with.  Those adaptations which each age calls for must develop organically from the normative tradition which Scripture, Fathers and the classical liberal traditions witness.

Knox was also a founder of "the so-called 'Sherlockian Game,' a parody of the higher criticism", and "once argued that Queen Victoria rather than Tennyson must have been the true author of In Memoriam" (Matthew Walther, "The last great homilist," First things no. 274 (June/July 2017):  58 (57-59)).  The latter would be "The authorship of 'In memoriam'," in Essays in satire.

God "can be so much in earnest against sinful man that He is for him."

"God would not be God if there could be any altering the universality and logic and completeness of what is necessarily done here, if there could be any escaping this sequence of sin and destruction.  It means eternal perdition to have God against us.  But if we will what God does not will, we do have God against us, and therefore we hurry and run and stumble and fall [(läuft, rennt, stürzt und fällt)] into eternal perdition.
     "But again God would not be God if His reaction to wrong-doers could be compared to a mechanism which functions, as it were, independently of His free ruling and disposing. . . .  How God will fulfil the sentence to which man has fallen inescapably victim is a matter for Him to decide.  He can fulfil it—in all its strictness—in such a way that in fulfilling it there is attained that which man in his perversity tried and never could secure for himself—his pardon.  Without relaxing or mitigating the sentence, let alone as a judge who is unjust by reason of his laxity, He can exercise grace even with His judgment and in execution of it.  He can be so much in earnest against sinful man that He is for him [(Er kann allen Ernstes so gegen den sündigen Menschen sein, daß er eben damit für ihn ist)].  He can bring on him all that must come on him as a wrong-doer at the left hand of God and under his No, in order to set him at His right hand, in order finally to say Yes to him, in order to address and treat him as one who does right and not wrong."

     Karl Barth, CD IV/1 (1956), 221 =KD IV/1 (1953), 242-243 (§59.2, "The Judge Judged in Our Place").