Reno on the prospects for the university as we've known it

"the vanguard institution of this new therapeutic culture [of self-realization]—the university—is in crisis, not churches and synagogues.  I have confidence that religious institutions, however constrained or impaired in the future, will be living, vital institutions for my grandchildren.  I don't believe the university will survive."

     R. R. Reno, "Benedict option," First things no. 273 (May 2017):  64 (63-65).  On. p. 67, under "The lordless powers" (66-67):  "Were someone innocent of political correctness to witness the desperate machinations of university administrators as they try to respond to the proliferating and often invisible 'identities' that demand accommodation, he might well conclude that our society is possessed by demons, and not unreasonably so."

Proletarier aller Lander vereinigt Euch!

"Charles Marx, Squire of London"

     The words with which Karl Marx "checked in" whenever he "took the cure at Carlsbad".  R. J. W. Evans, quoting David Clay Lodge, The grand spas of Central Europe:  a history of intrigue, politics, art, and healing (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), in "A liberal empire?  Ruled from the spas?," The New York review of books 64, no. 5 (March 23, 2017):  36 (36-38).  In the header are, of course, the closing words of the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848.  My assumption is that a "Squire" (whatever the original; perhaps Landjunker?) would not have been considered a member of the proletariat, but then surely Marx never considered himself a member of the proletariat anyway.  Lodge says only "checked in quaintly as", so perhaps the incongruity was relative to Marx's financial circumstances (or landlessness) alone?  The whole comment may be of some relevance:  "The first of these [rivals of liberal imperialism] was socialism.  Yet socialism, on this reading, did not seriously jeopardize the imperial enterprise in Hapsburg Central Europe.  Karl Marx, after all, repeatedly took the cure at Carlsbad (were--Large tells us--he checked in quaintly as 'Charles Marx, Squire of London')."

"every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy."

"One cannot fail more seriously in the second of the two essential commandments.  And as to the first, I fail to observe that in a still more horrible manner, for every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy."

     Simone Weil, Letter IV to Fr. Perrin (Spiritual autobiography), Marseilles, c. 15 May 1942.  Waiting on God (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1951), 33.  French:

On ne peut manquer plus gravement au second des deux commandements essentiels.  Et quant au premier, j’y manqué d’une manière encore bien plus horrible, car toutes les fois que je pense à le crucifixion du Christ, je commets le péché d’envie.

     Georges Charot, "Simone Weil:  la croix et le péché d'envie," Cahiers Simone Weil 14, no. 2 (1991):  97-106, beginning with Weil's own words:

     'It is necessary [for] a just man to engage in imitation in order that the imitation of God be not a simple word, but it is necessary, in order that we be borne beyond the will, that we be not able to will to imitate him.  One cannot will [for oneself] the Cross.
     'One could will it matters not what degree of asceticism or heroism, but not the Cross, which is penal suffering.
     'The mystery of the Cross of Christ resides in a contradiction, for it is at once an offering consented to and a chastisement that he suffered quite in spite of himself.  If one saw in it only the offering, one could will it all the more for oneself.  But one cannot will a chastisement suffered in spite of oneself.
     'Those who conceive of the crucifixion only under the aspect of the offering obscure its saving mystery and saving bitterness.  To desire martyrdom is to desire far too little.  The Cross is infinitely more than martyrdom' [(Cahiers, nouvelle ed., III, 28-29, only partially quoted at Charot, 106)].

     Do you not think that this is the response [to the question, Why would it be a sin against the First [Great] Commandment for her to prefer her vocation to that of most others (102; not to mention the sin against the Second, which would consist in her denying a similar vocation to qualified others)]?  And it is she who gives it [(this response)] to us.

     If the mystery of the Cross resides in a contradiction, the person who lives it, as Simone Weil did, can only be torn asunder, [1] knowing that it is forbidden to will the Cross and [yet] [2] finding that she cannot keep herself from desiring it for herself[, considered as an intensely particular vocation authenticated solely by the fact that it proceeds from neither feeling [(sensibilité)] nor reason].  Would not the tearing asunder of Simone Weil reside in the fact that she could not live [out] her desire except as a sin of envy?

     This is the explanation that I propose.  [I'll leave it] to you to find another if you can. 

     That said, it would be a grave misunderstanding to believe that, to have uttered this sentence, Simone Weil must have been guilty of [(est suspecte de)] masochism, and that she must have been struck by [(était atteinte d')] a neurotic psychosis.  The Cross [was] not, for her, a good in itself.  It [was] only the privileged way that seems to [have] be[en] reserved for her [(qui semble lui être réservé)] to enter into the kingdom of the Truth.

     Her desire can be only a mystical desire and in one sense a folly, a folly of love, but [a folly] that certainly did not betray a perverse taste for suffering and unhappiness.  Her life (as if this [really] needed to be said) ought to remove all ambiguity on this subject.  Simone Weil loved to live in joy (106).

More from Charot on the larger context:

• We should keep in mind (and respect the fact) that this was originally an intensely private confession to a trusted confessor, made on what Weil saw as the eve of her imminent death in the service of the Free French (who, as it turned out, were to reject her offers), and that there was also much wry humor in it (99), a kind of "malice" directed at herself, knowing, as she did, that Fr. Perrin would recognize in it "something like an aptitude for laughing at herself and at her extravagant need to engage in impossible combats" (105).
• That said, it is "in any case impossible not to take seriously this declaration that the cross is a good that one ought to be capable of wishing on one's neighbor and even one's friends, and that to reserve to oneself the privilege of [suffering] it constitutes a breach of the Second [Great] Commandment" (99).
• For Weil, the Cross involved the Son of God in complete and utter abandonment by both man and his Father.  "For there was, at that instant, an infinite distance between God and God."  With this no martyrdom for the sake of Christ can even hope to compare (99-100).
• The cross would appear to be, as we've already said, "a good" of which a few (i.e. not Weil alone) are indeed capable (whereas for the rest there is the way of "uninterrupted joy, purity and sweetness" (Letter IV to Fr. Perrin, Waiting on God, 33)).  And this is why Weil's refusal to wish it on anyone else is a sin against the Second [Great] Commandment (100-101).  Her failure with respect to the Second [Great] Commandment was "to believe herself alone capable of being called ([i.e. having a] vocation) to suffer the Cross of Christ."  "To judge one's neighbor too mediocre or too precious to merit [this] misery [(malheur, misfortune)], and to judge oneself alone capable of receiving the supreme good [of crucifixion], is this not to sin through pride, is it not to love oneself more than one's neighbor in every case?" (101).
• The supreme good of the way of crucifixion (i.e. that complete and utter abandonment to the silence of not just man but God himself available to the religious genius) is "th[at] instant when, for an infinitesimal fraction of time, pure truth, naked, certain and eternal enters the soul", and by comparison with which the eternal happiness of the beatific vision (the "future state" of the Christian tradition) would seem to be as nothing (Letter IV to Fr. Perrin, Waiting on God, 16).  This vision of "pure truth" would facilitate a "'thinking together in the truth [of] the misery [(malheur, misfortune)] of men, the perfection of God and the bond between the two'" (103, citing a letter to M. Schumann).
• As for the sin against the First [Great] Commandment, "To wish to take her desires for crucifixion [(même crucifiants)] for a [personal] vocation and to risk thus disobeying God in order to obey an impulsion, for the sole reason that it [(the said impulsion)] procedes from neither feeling [(sensibilité)] nor reason, would this not be to wish to be God?  Would it not be, in any case, to wish to enter by force into the forbidden mystery of the perfection of God, the sin par excellence in her eyes?  For it is God who seeks us and not the reverse.  If such was the case, her legitimate desire [(envie)] to follow Christ to the Cross would betray in the end only a sin of envy [(envie)].  Humility and her commitment to the truth, would they not have obliged her to confess this with a [wry] smile?  It can be only a sin to desire what must not be desired" (105).

"When one believes something to be true [simply] because God is Truth itself[,] . . . one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows."

"When one believes something to be true because God is Truth itself, one begins to know all the rest in virtue of one’s knowing God.  Thereby one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows.  For God characteristically knows all that is true by knowing—or rather by being—his own Truth.  His knowing of all truth is not, and cannot be, a second act of knowledge resulting from the act by which he knows himself.  It is rather because the act by which he knows himself is immediately his knowing of all that is, and of all that can be, that God’s knowledge is Life itself.  When it is unrestricted, Life itself is indeed sovereign being, whose nature is intellection and is not determinable by anything else.
     "There is a second, significant aspect to this fourth and last reference to divine faith, which, according to its place in the order of the poem, lies just beyond the threshold that separates bare Truth from Truth that is Life.  As stated, something in divine faith is already eternal life in us.  Faith, however is only its beginning, not its perfection.  God’s eternal life becomes definitively and integrally ours only when vision replaces faith, and only when the resurrection allows us to share corporally in blessedness.  Only then do we re-join Christ, who, as the incarnate and sacramental God, first joined with us, especially by means of the fullness of sacramental grace that is the Eucharist."

     Robert Wielockx, "Poetry and theology in the Adore te deuote: Thomas Aquinas on the Eucharist and Christ's uniqueness," in Christ among the medieval Dominicans: representations of Christ in the texts and images of the Order of Preachers, Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies 7, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 166-167 (157-174), underscoring mine.

"we do not merit it by our own works"

"Through the Passion of your Only Begotten Son, O Lord, may our reconciliation with you be near at hand, so that, though we do not merit it by our own deeds, yet by this sacrifice made once for all, we may feel already the effects of your mercy.  Through Christ our Lord."

"Per Unigeniti tui passionem placatio tua nobis, Domine, sit propinqua, quam, etsi nostris operibus non meremur, interveniente sacrificio singulari, tua percipiamus miseratione praeventi.  Per Christum Dominum nostrum."

     Prayer over the Offerings, Palm Sunday, Roman missal.  All except for the incipit "Per Unigeniti tui passionem" comes word for word from the 7th-century Leonine (i.e. Veronese) sacramentary (no. 628 in the critical edition of 1956 ed. Mohlberg), which drew upon 5th and 6th century Roman material.

Creation straining

"the reality infinitely outstrips the figure:  the lengthy germination of wheat and vine [(including, I would add, the fermentation and 'work of human hands' so indispensable to the transformation of grape and kernel into wine and (at least leavened) bread)] comes, through transubstantiation, to a head 'in the mystery of all this bread and all this wine that, across the immensity of space and time, comes to subsist only [(ne subsistent plus qu')] in the existence of the holy humanity of Jesus' (H.-M. Feret, "La messe rassembleent de la communauté," in La messe et sa catéchese, p. 275)....
     "The bread and the wine, utilized as figures of the Christian economy, signify the integration of the [whole] cosmos into the work of restoration.  The universe, solidary with [(solidaire de)] man, had lost its quality of sign; the sin of man had rendered it opaque, caught up as it was in the Fall.  The consecration of the bread and wine signifies the consecration of all things [in and] through the humanity of Christ; this consecration [(elle)] extends to the [entire] universe and founds the sacramental economy:  the progressive integration of all things into the unity of Christ....
"The death of Christ is a victory that catches up not only humanity, but the universal resurrection.  The dogma of the resurrection of the body gives expression to this integral recapture of matter and the universe up into a glorious life".

     Dictionnaire de spiritualité, sv "Eucharistie. I. Mystère eucharistique" (1961), cols. 1579-1581 (1553-1586), by Adalbert Hamman, italics mine.

"Whither, also, all we mortals wend our way, making of our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia."

"Thou only art immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and unto earth shall we return.  For so thou didst ordain when thou createdst me, saying, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'  All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."

     The Oikos or Ikos (Ὁ Οἶκος) to the Kontakion for the Orthodox funeral service in the church (Νεκρώσιμος, ἤτοι εἰς Κεκοιμημένους . . . ἐν τῳ ναῳ), as translated on p. 482 (Burial I) of the 1979 Book of common prayer.  For the Greek, see p. 411 of this 1869 printing of the Euchologion to mega (Ευχολόγιον το μέγα):

Αὐτὸς μόνος ὑπάρχεις ἀθάνατος, ὁ ποιήσας καὶ πλάσας τὸν ἄνθρωπον·  οἱ βροτοὶ οὖν ἐκ γῆς διεπλάσθημεν, καὶ εἰς γῆν τὴν αὐτὴν πορευσόμεθα, καθὼς ἐκέλευσας ὁ πλάσας με, καὶ εἰπών μοι·  Ὅτι γῆ εἶ, καὶ εἰς γῆν ἀπελεύσῃ·  ὅπου πάντες βροτοὶ πορευσόμεθα, ἐπιτάφιον θρῆνον ποιοῦντες ᾠδὴν τὸ, Ἀλληλούϊα.

Other translations exist, e.g.

You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return.  For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, 'You are dust, and to dust you shall return.'  All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia [(p. 499 (Burial II) of the 1979 Book of common prayer)].

Thou only art immortal, who has created and fashioned man.  For out of the earth were we mortals made, and unto the earth shall we return again, as thou didst command when thou madest me, saying unto me:  For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.  Wither, also, all we mortals wend our way, making of our funeral dirge the song:  Alleluia [(The service book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church (Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1906), as reproduced on p. 215 (pp. 185-234) of Alexander Schmemann, The liturgy of death:  four previously unpublished texts (Yonkers, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2016))].

You alone are immortal, who made and fashioned mankind; we mortals then were formed from earth and to that same earth we shall go, as You who formed me commanded saying: You are earth, and you will go back to earth; to which all we mortals will go making our funeral lament a song: Alleluia [(Fr. Ephrem Lash)].

Thou alone art immortal, who hast created and fashioned man. For out of the earth were we mortals made, and unto the same earth shall we return again, as Thou didst command when Thou didst fashion me, saying unto me: Earth thou art, and unto the earth shalt thou return. Whither, also, all we mortals wend our way, making of our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia [(http://www.kiilehua.com/services/The_Funeral_Service.pdf)].

Cf. the post Cantemus Alleluia.