The "It's a drama/entertainment, not a documentary" defense

"Do these fantastical entertainments matter?  And what do they say about Churchill—or about us?  There is a standard defense that such movies are dramas, not documentaries, but that's disingenuous.  For every person who has read serious, detached books about Churchill and his times, there will be thousands whose knowledge of him comes from cinema and television.  And by now the encrustations of mythologizing and hero worship have gone beyond a point where they can be easily corrected.  The line at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence—'When legend becomes fact, print the legend'—is the guiding principle for depictions of Churchill in popular culture."

     Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "A star is born," The New York review of books 65, no. 1 (January 18, 2018):  23 (22-23).

"My grace is sufficient for you"

"where one is heading—somewhere else—cannot exhaust the divine truth of the present.  'Here' cannot only be a pneumatic moment in its futurist or eschatological orientation.  Yet if that is so, then 'here' must allow for a complete divine presence whose shape is itself sufficient without appeal to some yet-to-be-grasped divine form.  It is always enough that 'we see Jesus.'  The pneumatic corollary of this is that the Spirit is just this 'enough.'

     "We might wish to explain why 'seeing Jesus' is enough—that is, explain what is the nature of 'enough-ness.'  This is, in part, the burden of 'theodicies of intimacy':  to the extent that they are theodicies at all, they must show in what way knowing God or seeing God [in the 'here' and 'now'] makes the suffering somehow worth it.  One might, in this light, simply assert the equivalence between the encounter with God and 'worth':  'Whom have I in heaven [but thee]?  and [there is] none upon earth [that] I desire beside thee' (Ps 73:25); 'As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness:  I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness' (Ps 17:15).  But in fact theodicies of intimacy often shift, despite themselves, into the kind of [pneumatico-]instrumentalist claims that most theodicies share.  With or without the apparatus of some kind of therapy of the soul, the vision of God that theodicies of intimacy propose—as encounter, union, or relation—is valuable because this vision is itself a 'defeat' of evil.  To say that evil is defeated in Christ, which is clearly a central Christian claim, is not however to say that suffering itself is redemptive.  One must say more.  Suffering is redemptive, more foundationally, only because Jesus suffers.  We do not know exactly what it means that Jesus suffers, however, unless we follow with him, a matter that simply kneads the surds of life into the rising dough of our obedience.  Divine intimacy is certainly present here; yet it is present in a way that is sufficient to the moment itself."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 241-242, underscoring mine.  Needless to say, "pneumatic" is almost a dirty word here, as throughout the book (11 par. 3), a cipher for the Incarnation- and Cross-avoiding temptations of the (admittedly legitimate) theodicy of intimacy.  The Spirit just is this "enough" (Introduction, too, for example at p. 11), nor should we be looking for something more.  That there is "something better 'waiting' beyond this life" is a "necessary conviction if we are to ward off despair or angry cynicism against God" (239).  But it must not become the focus of a kind of pneumatic escapism, for it is the Spirit's job to drive us deeper into an opaque but authentically Christoform life of cruciform suffering in the here and now.  However:  "Jesus suffers."  Note the present tense.  Is that orthodox?

Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit. . . .

Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself and flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it is. . . . Life is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you.

And variants galore.

This has in recent times been widely attributed to Pope Francis, though I have yet to trace a use of it (or any version thereof) back to him.

Meanwhile its opening clauses antedate him by centuries, being unmistakably those of a Sanskrit subhāṣita present in the 14th-century Sūktiratnahāra (Sūkti ratna hāra). They ran in the Sūktiratnahāra as follows:

"Rivers do not drink their water; the trees do not eat [their own] fruits, the cloud never eats crops, [indeed] the lives of the virtuous are for the welfare of others."

This came into the 14th/18th-century Pali Lokanīti as follows:

"Rivers do not drink up their water, nor trees eat up their fruit; rain does not fall in some places only: the wealth of the virtuous is for others."

Source: Ujjwal Kumar, "Lokanīti: method of adaption and new vocabulary," Buddhist studies review 34, no. 1 (2017): 99 and elsewhere.

The Pali proverb in particular, at least, had made its way into the consciousness of English speakers by 1892 at the latest ("Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; neither are clouds stationary anywhere. So also with wealth: it is for the benefit of others"). Indeed, by 1878. For the Burmese Lokanīti was first translated into English by Richard Carnac Temple in that year (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 47, no. 3 (1878)), and here it is: no. 23 on p. 247 ("The rivers drink not of their own water, neither eat the trees of their own fruit, nor fall the rains in every place: likewise are the riche of the jut man only for an help unto others"). And then again by James Gray in 1886 (no. 64 (Lokanīti) and no. 139 (Dhammanīti)):

"Rivers do not drink up their water, nor trees eat up their fruit; rain does not fall in some places only: the wealth of the virtuous is for others."

"Rivers do not drink up their water, nor trees eat up their own fruit; rain never eats up corn: the wealth of the righteous is for others."

Undoubtedly the variants on this have been legion. But IF Pope Francis "quoted" and adapted it (filling it out in the manner noted above, perhaps in imitation of someone else), I would be interested in knowing where, for, as I've just said, I have yet to identify a use of it by him. (He has, by the way, been notoriously sloppy on many occasions, and about matters far more serious than quotations.)

"raw choice, autonomous choice, choice for its own sake and for private ends, uncoupled from any command."

     "Our 'secular' saeculum has its own gospel. In it we announce choice itself, not choice about something. We announce raw choice, autonomous choice, choice for its own sake and for private ends, uncoupled from any command. We have taken up the idea of the self as the repository of all goodness; but this repository is not, like Mary, full of grace and gratitude. It is, like Eve, full of desires and demands. It is possessed, like Adam, of many rights; but it does not do what is right and just, or even acknowledge what is right and just. It seeks power and authority, not from and for justice, but in order to decide what “­justice” will be. It advocates progress in everything but virtue. It is not interested in virtue because it is not interested in God, the goal to which virtue leads. Thus, the mystery of lawlessness advances under ­cover of an ever-expanding positive law that no longer acknowledges any foundation for law. In the name of liberty, we are making progress in law at the expense of liberty. And so far from being grateful for the gifts of providence, we no longer know how even to make sense of the idea of “the gift,” an idea our philosophers tell us is incoherent. The economy of grace and gratitude is a currency we no longer recognize.

     "In our putative secularity, the rough draft of our response to the heavenly court has begun to take shape. Is there silence in heaven? Very well. Then let there be silence on earth also. That court shall not be named, not in public; neither shall the Christ, whose authority it has confirmed. Our secular silence is not a repentant silence. It is not a mournful silence in sackcloth and ashes like that of the Ninevites, to whom God brought Jonah that he might deliver his reluctant rebuke. It is not a prayer, but a refusal to pray. It is not a contemplation of our sins, but a refusal to allow that there is any such thing as sin—save the sin of honoring God and admonishing one another to heed the commands of God, which is now both a sin and a crime."

     Douglas Farrow, "The secret of the saeculum," First things no. 303 (May 2020):  35 (27-35).

"One must belong to an ecumenical organization in order to fail to understand that Luther was a miserable confessionalist."

"Es bedarf der Zugehörigkeit zu einer ökumenischen Organization, um nicht zu verstehen daß Luther ein elender Konfessionalist war."

     Tom [G. A.] Hardt, of the missiologist Hans-Werner Gensichen (1915-1999), who, at Damnamus:  die Verwerfung von Irrlehre bei Luther und im Luthertum des 16. Jahrhunderts (1955) 45, was apparently scandalized to discover that the doctrine (i.e. principle) of justification by faith alone had never (“nie”) been more important to Luther than the hoc est corpus meum; had never been allowed to turn communion into the merely "spiritual eating and drinking" of the Schwärmer, and thus Luther into a principled "Konfessionalist."  "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  67 (62-83).  See also p. 66.

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by another article."

     Martin Luther at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, according to Hermann Sasse, This is my body:  Luther's contention for the real presence in the sacrament of the altar (Minneapolis:  Augsburg, 1959), 261 (Hed[io], Coll[in], An[onymous]).  =WA 30.3, 141 (An[onymous], Coll[in]):

An.] Lutherus respondit:  Quemque articulum fidei sui ipsius principium esse, nec opus esse exemplo simili probari.

Coll.] Lutherus.  Non petimus principium, nam articulus fidei non probatur per articulum.

Anonymous]  Luther responded [that] every article of faith is its own [first] principle [(lit. a principle of itself)], and [that] it is not required [(nec opus esse) that it] be demonstrated by a comparable such [(exemplo simili)].  |  LW 38, 51:  Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by a similar example.

Collin]  Luther:  We are not begging the question [(Non petimus principium, We are not in search—i.e. need—of a principle)], for [one] article of faith is not demonstrated by [another] article.  |  LW 38, 61:  We are not begging the question, for one article of faith is not proved by another.

=Walter Koehler, Das Marburger Religionsgeschpräch 1529:  Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (1929), __.  I was put onto this by Tom [G. A.] Hardt, "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  66 (62-83):  "Jeder Glaubensartikel ist sich selbst Prinzip und bedarf nicht des Beweises durch einen anderen."

     With this Luther was able to affirm the spiritual eating (manducatio spiritualis) so stressed by Zwingli and Oecolampadius without being compelled thereby—as if by an Oecolampadian "norm for the whole of [Christian] doctrine" rooted in the principle of justification by faith alone—to dispense with the doctrine of the Real Presence:  "Your argument implies this:  [that] because we affirm [(haben)] a spiritual eating, there is no need of a bodily.  I answer:  The spiritual eating we in no way deny.  Indeed, we everywhere teach and believe that it is necessary.  But by this can it not be established that the bodily is useless or unnecessary" (cf. the translation on p. 236 in Sasse).

     What he is arguing for here would seem to be an interpretation of the "This is my body" controlled by the mandatum (revelation) rather than a kind of rationalistic consistency.  And to that extent he may be right.  The consistency is surely to be sought in convenientia post factum alone (?).

'"The [ancient] catholic church was a confessional church whose harshness had nothing in common with the contemporary church of tolerance."

"The 'Great Church' invented by [Bishop Bo] Giertz and A history of the ecumenical movement 1517-1948 [(London:  S.P.C.K., 1954)] never existed.  The [ancient] catholic church was a confessional church [(Konfessionskirche)] whose harshness [(Schroffheit)] had nothing in common with a modern church of tolerance [(Toleranzkirche)].  The anathema [pronounced] against heretics and apostates was for it [(die alte Kirche)] a matter of real consequence [(eine Realität)].  Though small and inconsequential, it raised [high] the claim to be the sancta ecclesia catholica."

     Tom [G. A.] Hardt, "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  64 (62-83).  I know nothing about Prof. Hardt, who undoubtedly followed Luther in anathematizing the Roman Catholic Church.  But if so, then the anathema that he would reserve to confessional Lutheranism was, of course, also pronounced against it in the manner of that same "ancient church."