"let us never speak of 'divine kenosis' on the cross."

"Christ Jesus performs in his passion precisely the same performance of agapè as in the Trinity, because the Son that he is from all eternity never 'steps out' of/'leaves' [(«sort» de)] the Trinity, never alienates himself from or externalizes himself in relation to it, in accordance with the absurd (in order to go where?) and blasphemous (the Son, would he set aside [(se déferait-il de)] his [own] filiation?) doctrine of the philosophers.  The opposite is true:  Christ Jesus re-integrates the world—despite its finitude and sin—into the Trinitarian play [(jeu)]; he 'recapitulates all things' (Eph 1:10) in himself, 'to the end that God may be all in all' (1 Cor 15:28).  The Trinitarian paradox [that] the Son possesses nothing that he has not received and for this very [reason] is in principle absolutely—this [Trinitarian paradox] Christ Jesus articulates and accomplishes in the economy, from the depths of finitude and human [(notre)] sin. . . .  The 'kenosis' does not introduce the negation [(negatif)], the alienation, namely the 'death of God' into (or rather outside of) the Trinity; it renders manifest, to men trapped in the obscurity of sin and rotting in hatred of self and of all of all, the eternal play of the gift and of the abandonment in which the three [Persons] of the Trinity triumphantly rejoice [(triomphent et jubilant)].  The masterwork accomplished by Christ does not consist in the heroism of his virtues or the enormity of his suffering (for in itself neither the exemplarity of a model nor the pain of an expiation saves [(sauve qui que ce soit)]); it consists in this, that, like an inspired musician, he performs the melody and the orchestration to perfection [(la mélodie et l’orchestration les plus parfaits)] on an instrument that has now but a single remaining string (free choice), a single string rendered (by the perversity of evil) completely discordant.  With this instrument—our nature which plays always false—he plays perfectly true [(parfaitement juste)] in accordance with its true nature [(suivant sa propre nature)].  [On the] strength of this performance, he can promise us that we, too, we will come to play true (or almost), provided that we allow ourselves to be inspired by the same Spirit who unites him eternally with his Father."

     Jean-Luc Marion, "À partir de la Trinité," Revue internationale catholique Communio 40, no. 6 (novembre-décembre 2015):  33 (23-37).  And, on p. 36:

At the very least, let us never speak [(ne parlons jamais)] of 'divine kenosis' on the cross.  The Trinitarian glory is manifest in the kenosis, but the kenosis is not equivalent to it.  The kenosis must be contemplated from and in view of the Trinity.  The kenosis brings the Trinity to light [(expose)], but does not explicate [(explique)] it.  On the contrary, [the kenosis] is a question of a revelation, through the obscurity of sin, of the Trinitarian play—in which agapè goes beyond, in its gravity [(sérieux)], its travail, its patience, and its suffering, all that our poor understanding and profound resentment imagines to be the gravity of the concept.  There is infinitely more gravity in the Trinitarian joy than is found in the futility—grim to be sure, but finite—of our sin.  The Trinity is at work even in the kenosis, because the distance within [the Trinity] includes and surpasses even those [distances]—still finite—of evil, of sin, of death.  'Power (dunamis) is made perfect in weakness' (2 Cor 12:9) precisely because 'with God all things are possible (para tô theo panta dunata)' (Mk 10:27 & Lk 18:27).

"Christian, look hard at them . . . in silence, and then ask for the print of the nails."

     "'While Martin was praying in his cell, the evil spirit stood before him, environed in a glittering radiance, by such pretence more easily to deceive him, clad also in royal robes, crowned with a golden and jeweled diadem, with shoes covered with gold, with serene face, and bright looks, so as to seem nothing so little as what he was.  Martin at first was dazzled at the sight; and for a long while both parties kept silence.  At length the evil one began:—"Acknowledge," he says, "O Martin, whom thou seest.  I am Christ; I am now descending upon earth, and I wished first to manifest myself to thee."  Martin still kept silent, and returned no answer.  The devil ventured to repeat his bold pretence.  "Martin, why hesitate in believing, when thou seest I am Christ?"  Then he, understanding by revelation of the Spirit, that it was the evil one and not God, answered, "Jesus, the Lord, announced not that He should come in glittering clothing, and radiant with a diadem.  I will not believe that Christ is come, save in that state and form in which He suffered, save with the show of the wounds of the Cross [(nisi in eo habitu formaque, qua passus est, nisi crucis stigmata)]."  At these words, the other vanished forthwith as smoke, and filled the cell with so horrible an odour as to leave indubitable proofs who he was.  That this so took place, I know from the mouth of Martin himself, lest any one should think it fabulous.’ —[Sulpicius Severus, ]Vit. B. M. 2[4, CSEL 1, ed. Halm (1866), 134]
     "The application of this vision to Martin’s age, is obvious; I suppose it means in this day, that Christ comes not in pride of intellect, or reputation for ability.  These are the glittering robes in which Satan is now arraying.  Many spirits are abroad, more are issuing from the pit:  the credentials which they display, are the precious gifts of mind, beauty, richness, depth, originality.  Christian, look hard at them with Martin in silence, and then ask for the print of the nails."

     John Henry Newman, The Church of the Fathers, 2nd ed., (London:  J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1842), chap. 21, pp. 413-414.  On p. 206 of vol. 2 of the Historical sketches of 1876, that last paragraph was modified as follows:

     The application of this vision to Martin’s age, is obvious; I suppose it means in this day, that Christ comes not in pride of intellect, or reputation for philosophy.  These are the glittering robes in which Satan is now arraying.  Many spirits are abroad, more are issuing from the pit;  the credentials which they display are the precious gifts of mind, beauty, richness, depth, originality.  Christian, look hard at them with Martin in silence, and ask them for the print of the nails.

 I was put onto this by First things.

"a sword will pierce through your own soul also"

"God wills that Mary be in time the Mother of his Son; [and] this on the condition that the extremely exalted bond of affinity by which Jesus belongs to her will be the foundation of a grace that will separate her from him all the more.  She will be his Mother not in order that she might revel ecstatically in the sweets of his presence while he is afflicted with exhaustion [(ennui)] and consumed by sorrows; it is rather in order that he might be in her womb a bouquet of extremely bitter myrrh, and that she might be for him, in the flesh that she supplies and the nourishment that she provides him with, a living source of displeasures [(dèplaisirs)]. . . . Her motherhood [(qualité de mère)] detaches her from her Son, and her extremely exalted affinity with the incarnate Word is a cross that crucifies [both] God and Mary."

     Louis Chardon, La croix de Jésus (Paris:  Cerf, 2004 [1647]) 1.28.369, as quoted by Aaron Riches, Ecco homo:  on the divine unity of Christ, Interventions (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2016), 242n28 (translation mine, though I see that a translation by Murphy & Thornton was published in 1957-1959).  Apparently Chardon goes on to sketch out the "pilgrimage of faith" by which Mary is led to embrace ever more concretely this ever more wrenching separation (242-246):

The whole 'weight' of Jesus' life leading to the Cross is the weight of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness (cf. Mark 1:12) now drives him to the Cross where he offers himself without blemish 'through the Spirit' (cf. Heb 9:14).  The Spirit is the 'crucifier,' the unio that joins Son to Father in his being and in his abandonment.  The vinculum amoris pours forth in the moment of total sui exinanitio [(self-emptying)] in order to realize the living death and dying life that is the Christian vocation perfectly revealed and lived by Mary in the moment of the Sacrifice of Calvary [(245-246, underscoring mine)].

Small on the "fruits of modernity"

     "So yes, liberalism didn't happen, peace and prosperity didn't materialize.  But because Bellaigue's value system is backwards binary—modernity equals good, bad equals not modernity—he's ultimately unable to make coherent sense of the history he's telling.  Secret police, genocides, one-party states, revolutionary utopianism, consumerism, radical terrorism, rentier economies, huge sovereign debts:  all these dispiriting twentieth-century phenomena are fruits of modernity.  Indeed, they happened because of, not despite, the Enlightenment, reaching their modern forms, so repugnant to any truly enlightened sensibility, thanks not to religious 'bigots' and 'stick-in-the-muds', but to the modern cast of mind Bellaigue champions so uncritically:  literate and ideological, obsessed with science and technology, and fixated on the future, never on the past, on new and final solutions, never on traditional wisdom."

    Thomas Small, "Truly modern Muslims:  the thorny question of what it means to be Islamic," a review of, among others, Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic enlightenment:  the modern struggle between faith and reason:  1798 to modern times, Times literary supplement no. 5958 (June 9, 2017):  8-9 (7-9).  I have not read the book.
     Commenting on Tariq Ramadan's Islam:  the essentials, Small says

Ramadan does not ignore jihad—but I almost wish he had.  Again, it's all smoke and mirrors, beginning with his claim that it is only in an echo of 'the Christian crusades' that Westerners present jihad as 'holy war', which is getting it precisely backwards.  By the time of the Crusades, Christendom in both East and West had endured centuries of aggression at the hands of the Caliphate, and Christian knighthood took on a sacralized dimension only in emulation of the ghazis of Islam.

Etc.

Luther on the Divine office

"in the wake of the Leipzig Debate, Luther's attitude to his monastic vocation began to alter.  From his early years as a monk, he had been obliged to attend services and perform the 'hours,' the repetition of prayers that took such a prominent place in a monk's daily routine and consumed much of his time.  Even after the Augsburg discussions, when Staupitz had released Luther from his vows, he still found it hard to give up this duty, as if it were a burden he could not put down.  At some point in 1520, however, he stopped altogether.  He recalled in 1531, 'Our Lord God pulled me by force away from the canonical hours in 1520, when I was already writing a great deal, and I often saved up my hours for a whole week, and then on Saturday I would do them one after another so that I neither ate nor drank anything for the whole day, and I was so weakened that I couldn't sleep, so that I had to be given Dr. Esch's sleeping draught, the effects of which I still feel in my head.'  In the end, a 'whole quarter-year' of hours had mounted up:  'This was too much for me, and I dropped it altogether.'  The resulting liberation—and the amount of time it freed up—may have played a part in the burst of creativity he experienced in 1520:  Now he could devote himself to writing and thinking without interruption or guilt."

     Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther:  renegade and prophet (New York:  Random House, 2017), 134 and 446nn1-3, citing WA Tischreden 2, p. 11 (no. 1253), and 5, p. 137 (133 ff., no. 5428).  See also (says Roper) 3, no. 3651; 4, nos. 4082, 4919, and 5094; 5, no. 6077; and WA 17.1, 112ff. (a sermon of 1525).

"as before death Christ's flesh was united personally and hypostatically with the Word of God, it remained so after His death, so that the hypostasis of the Word of God was not different from that of Christ's flesh after death".

"sicut ante mortem caro Christi unita fuit secundum personam et hypostasim verbo Dei, ita et remansit unita post mortem, ut scilicet non esset alia hypostasis verbi Dei et carnis Christi post mortem".

     St. Thomas Aquinas, ST III.50.2.Resp., trans. FEDP.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.  I was put on to this by Aaron Riches, Ecce homo:  on the divine unity of Christ, Interventions (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2016):  204-208 ("The body of Christ in the tomb"), a wonderful discussion:

"'what belongs to the body of Christ after death is predicated of the Son of God [(ST III.50.2.sed contra)].'  The entombed cadaver—maximally different from God's apatheia—is nevertheless predicable only by virtue of the hypostatic union" (205). 

"There is no autonomous particularity, no 'thingness' or 'thisness' that can be granted to any aspect of the incarnate Christ, not even to the corpse in the tomb, apart from the Son.  The whole incarnate reality of Christ exists and is real only insofar as it subsists in union with the divine hypostasis of the Son" (207) 

"'The divinity was so indissoluably united to the humanity of Christ that, although body and soul were separated from each other, nonetheless the very divinity was always perfectly present both to the soul and the body.  Therefore, the Son of God was both in the tomb with the body and descended into hell with the soul [(et ideo in sepulcro cum corpore fuit filius Dei, et ad Inferos cum anima descendit)]'" (207; St. Thomas Aquinas, Sermon conferences on the Apostles' Creed, trans. Ayo (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 79 =Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum 5).

And from the concluding paragraph of the book by Riches (249):

     The indissoluble union of the Incarnate Logos is 'stretched out' from the height of the Son's eternal being with the Father to the cold stone on which his cadaver is laid, from the human breast of the Mother to the region of hell in which the crucified soul of Jesus is abandoned.  This mystery at the core of all being is not a tidy fact about divinity or humanity; it is the scandal of the Incarnate Son of God.  And 'none of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory' (1 Cor 2:8). 

"a war fought without a good stock of money is only a wispy shadow of what a war should be."

     The fearsome monk, in chap. 46 of François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, as trans. Burton Raffel.  The original French doesn't seem as interesting to me:

guerre faicte sans bonne provision d’argent, n’a q’un souspirail de vigueur.

souspirail = souffle (ed. Huchon & Moreau) or maybe soupirail (air-hole, vent, ventilator).  "a dissipation of vigor"?  "Trans." Urquhart & Motteaux:

war, begun without a good provision of money before-hand for going through with it, is but as a breathing of strength, and blasts that will quickly pass away.