d'Holbach on Newton

"o man! so great and so powerful, when you were a geometrician; so little and so weak, when you became a theologian"!

Baron d'Holbach on Newton, The system of nature, or laws of the moral and physical world 2.3, trans. Robinson ((New York: G. W. & A. J. Matsell, 1836), 229 (http://books.google.com/books?id=VU4VAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR5&dq=d%27Holbach+%22system+of+nature%22#PPA229,M1)), as quoted by Michael J. Buckley, S.J., At the origins of modern atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 312. d'Holbach would have said this of any theologian, but this is also Buckley's thesis: that the theologians of the period (Lessius and Mersenne, but then also Malebranche following Descartes, and Clarke following Newton) gave away the store, thus setting natural theology up for the great and disastrous slide into "modern atheism". They abandoned theology for natural philosophy (either the universal mathematics of Descartes or the universal mechanics of Newton), and became "little and . . . weak" qua theologians.

Hart on The Da Vinci code

"the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate."

David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009): 4.

Léonard on pure nature

"If one avoids these two dangers of extrinsecism and dualism, the problematic of the supernatural [on the one hand] and pure nature [on the other] will connect back up with the great Christian idea of the reciprocal glorification of God and man: God reveals his glory all the more in the creation of a man free and substantial [(consistant) in his own right], and man is all the more fulfilled the more he opens himself up to the will of God for him. Divine grace, because it is grace, calls forth the substantiality proper to human nature [(la consistance propre de la nature humaine)]. Far from competing with it, it postulates it. In Thomistic terms, grace presupposes nature, and, far from suppressing it, elevates it. Or, in the language of Irenaeus, the glory of God is man [fully] alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. For this reason, the glory of God does not burst forth over the ruins of man, nor does his grace build on the foundation of human inconsequence [(inconsistance)]. On the contrary, man fully realizes his humanity only in openness to God, and, in closing himself off from the supernatural a priori, falls finally beneath it (his humanity)."

     André-Mutien Léonard, "La nécessité théologique du concept de nature pure," Revue thomiste 101, no. 1/2 (2001): 355, italics mine.

Mater synagoga

"a very beautiful expression that one can read as an index of [St. Thomas'] positive appreciation of Judaism".

     Jean-Pierre Torrell, "Saint Thomas et les non-chétiens," Revue thomiste 106, no. 1/2 (2006): 32 and 32n55. St. Thomas got this from St. Augustine (see the article by Lamirande), who got it from St. Paul.

Zangerle on the sole point of Christian culture

"The Christian may first quit the battlefield of the world when the Lord comes. Until then he must do everything [he can] to shape this world in a Christian fashion [(christlich)]. Activity like this is no end-in-itself. All Christian culture . . . has only th[is] single point: to facilitate the home-turning of as many souls as possible into the Father's house, into the Church"; to facilitate the assumption of "the whole of humankind into the river of love that is the triune God [(in den Liebesstrom des dreieinigen Gottes)]".

     Ignaz Zangerle, "Zur situation der Kirche," Der Brenner 14 (1933/34): 77. This shouldn't be given an escapist sense.

Wisdom on the doctrine of "analogy"

"from the greatness and beauty of created things is their Creator correspondingly [(analogôs)] discerned."

Wisdom 13:5, NETS (Michael A. Knibb), http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/29-wissal-nets.pdf. I was put onto this by Jean-Pierre Torrell, who says that the presence of analogôs (or "par analogie") here "would have delighted" Aquinas, who quoted this verse several times, but from the Vulgate, where cognoscibiliter appears (Jean-Pierre Torrell, "Philosophie et théologie d'après le Prologue de Thomas d'Aquin au Super Boetium de Trinitate: essai d'une lecture théologique," Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 10 (1999): 309). Would it have delighted Barth?

Gregory on the Christian distinction

Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study

"Every finding and every possible finding of natural science is compatible with a notion of God whose radical otherness is precisely the possibility condition of his presence throughout the physical world. If the biblical God of traditional Christianity is real, then the empirical findings of the natural sciences from astronomy and experimental physics to paleontology and evolutionary biology could not diminish God's presence in and through the world."

     Brad S. Gregory, "No room for God? History, science, metaphysics, and the study of religion," History and theory 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 509-510. But the key here is the notion. It must be the traditional notion of a God "who cannot in principle be conceived as part of, alongside, or in competition with the natural world"; who "is not a 'highest being' or a 'supernatural entity' that can in any sense be properly conceived within or as a component of a more comprehensive reality"; who is "radically distinct from the universe", i.e. "metaphysically transcendent" (502-503); and so forth. So away with the profoundly meta-scientific assumptions of modern scientism rooted ultimately in "late-medieval nominalism" (Duns Scotus on univocity). "A radically transcendent God would be neither outside nor inside his creation. . . . Rather, if real, such a God could be wholly present to everything in the natural world precisely and only because he would be altogether inconceivable in spatial categories. Divine transcendence would thus be not the opposite but the correlate of divine immanence. So, too, God in this sort of view would be neither temporally prior to nor a cosmic observer of sequential events as they unfold. . . . Rather, God could be fully present to all events and every moment precisely and only because he would be altogether inconceivable in temporal categories. Divine eternity would then be not the opposite but the correlate of divine providence" (503). "The intellectually unjustified misstep that provides the foundation for scientism and ideological secularism in the modern academy derives not from science, but from the transgression of science's own self-imposed limits" precisely (506). Nothing new here, but he sure brings his fellow historians up to speed. Outstanding! Great footnotes, too.