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"God is to be so understood, and the world or creatures are to be so understood, that nothing greater, maius, is achieved if the world or creatures are added to God. To bring out this implication, and to state the [unstated] premise in terms more akin to Anselm's own expression, we must say:
(God plus the world) cannot be conceived as greater than God alone; or:
(God plus any creature) cannot be conceived as greater than God alone.
. . . if the world or any creature were to contribute greatness to God, then God would not be that than which nothing greater can be thought. God plus the creature or God plus the world would be thinkable as greater than God alone. Anselm's definition of how God is to be understood is usually taken to mean that no other being, or no other combination of beings, could be conceived as greater than God; but it must also be true that any being or any beings taken together with God cannot be conceived as amounting to something greater than God alone. . . .
Furthermore, in chapters three and five [of the Proslogion] Anselm introduces the theme of being better, melius, as parallel to the theme of being greater, so another formulation of his unstated premise would be:
(God plus the world) cannot be conceived as better than God alone; or:
(God plus any creature) cannot be conceived as better than God alone.
That is, no perfection would be lost if God had not created the world. The world and God must be so understood that nothing but God could be all that there is, and there would be no diminution of greatness or goodness or perfection. God is not better or greater because of creation, nor is 'there' more goodness or greatness because God did create. This does not imply that God does not care about his creation, or that what is created is not worth anything. On the contrary, God's benevolence is so great that even though he does not need creation in any sense at all--he does not need it to be himself, nor does he need it for 'there' to be greater excellence; nullo alio indigens--still he has created and, beyond that, has entered into his creation in the person of Jesus."
Robert Sokolowski, The God of faith and reason: foundations of Christian theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995 (1982)), 8-9.
"The error of most modern biblical exegetes is a subliminal assumption that the church in and for which Matthew or Paul wrote, or in which Irenaeus shaped the canon, and the church in which we now read what they put together, are historically distant from one another. That is, the error is the assumption that there is no one diachronically identical universal church. And that is, the initiating error of standard modern exegesis is that it presumes a sectarian ecclesiology. But while Athens may perhaps have disappeared into the past and been replaced by Paris or London or New York, Paul's church still lives as the very one to which believing exegetes now belong. . . .
"When academic exegetes, continuing our examples, say that Paul's opinions about sexuality are too historically conditioned now to be helpful, or that the parable of the vineyard-keepers cannot itself control what we make shift to draw from it, they are simply interpreting Scripture as it now will inevitably be interpreted outside the church."
Robert Jenson, "The religious power of Scripture," Scottish journal of theology 52, no. 1 (1999): 98-101 (89-105). The relevant
historical distances. . . . are [only] differences of times and places within the life of one community.
The historical distances with which the interpretation must indeed reckon and of which historical-critical labors must maintain the awareness, are the distances between Moses and the later prophets, or between the prophets and Jesus, or between Jesus and Paul and Paul and us, but never between the story as a whole and us, never between the biblical community as a whole and the present church. . . .
. . . [There is only] the one story of God with his people, who are we
(100-101). After "they are simply interpreting Scripture as it now will inevitably be interpreted outside the church", this follows immediately:
Current academic, political, and publicistic elite communities are indeed alienated historically from the community in which the Bible emerged, and this is the reason and indeed excuse of their helplessness before this body of text. But when the church reads Scripture in course of her own worship and catechetics and preaching, her interpreters cannot give up so easily, because they are themselves at stake.
Those who interpret Scripture in and for the church are compelled to keep trying to say what it says, and by the mere act claim that Scripture does say something to us; the struggle itself is the hermeneutical principle. Pastors and other scholars in their service are the ones who labor to read the text honestly and faithfully, and whose assumption of the labor this means in their office, will maintain the authority of Scripture, or whose failure to do so will undercut it. The old-Protestant doctrine of Scripture gave it a second essential predicate: it is 'perspicuous', by which they did not mean it contains no obscurities or can be understood without effort, but that the effort need not be finally defeated
What the most percipient of the previous generation's 'hermeneutical' theory said must therefore hold in the church and of her Scripture, though perhaps nowhere else: our present effort to understand a handed-down text cannot be hopeless, since it is merely the further appropriation of a continuing communal tradition within which we antecedently live. Past and present do not need to be bridged before understanding can begin, since they are always already mediated by the continuity of the community's language and discourse: the questions and concepts and turns of phrase and dominating metaphors and ready-to-hand warrants with which I now try to say what the text says, cannot be wholly unsuitable since they were inculcated in me by the very tradition of which the text is a part. 'Understanding is not so much an undertaking by the subject as it is further entry into a continuing tradition-event in which past and present anyway mediate themselves'.
Citation for the direct quote is Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965), 275.
"with respect to things that are most knowable, our mind is as the eye of a nightbird towards the light of the sun [(ut oculus noctuae ad solem)]. . . ."
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, lib. 1 cap. 11 n. 1 (Thomas Aquinas: selected writings, ed. & trans. Ralph McInerny (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 246). A noctua is a night-owl, but Thomas cites here Metaphysics 2.1 (993b, ll. 8-11): "Perhaps, too, as difficulties are of two kinds, the cause of the present difficulty is not in the facts but in us. For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all" (trans. W. D. Ross).
"While the Jewish tradition affirms that Israel is the son of God, the divine filiation of Jesus does not contradict this first filiation. Jesus is not the Son of God without being, at the same time, the 'son of David, son of Abraham' (Mt 1:1). In him, the two filiations are as indissociable as his two natures. Or, better: the second is taken up into the first without confusion or separation, just as his humanity is not abolished but brought to fulfillment when the Person of the Word appropriates it forever.
"Consequently, when Jesus prays, it is the prayer of Israel throughout the centuries that is brought to fulfillment. He takes up again the prayer of his people, through the cycle of feasts and the rhythm of goings-up to Jerusalem. He prays the psalms, and his last prayer in the gospel of Luke is a citation of a psalm, with the addition of the word, 'Father': 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit' (Lk 23:26; cf. Ps 31:6). Thus we can say truly that it is precisely as the Son of the Father that Jesus is capable of bringing to fulfillment the entire prayer of Israel, in some sense revealing it to itself as the expression of the filial destiny of the people of God."
Jean-Pierre Batut, "Praying to the Father through the Son in the Spirit: reflections on the specificity of Christian prayer," trans. Michelle K. Borras, Communio: the international Catholic review 36, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 629 (623-642).
"all discourse about [God] that places him in the third person is, properly speaking, contradictory: to speak of him as a 'that'--which I am doing at present--, is always in some way to speak of something that is not he. . . . what attention is required of man, not only not to take the divine name in vain (cf. Ex 20:7; Dt 5:11), but never to forget that it is a contradiction to speak of God without invoking God."
Jean-Pierre Batut, "Praying to the Father through the Son in the Spirit: reflections on the specificity of Christian prayer," trans. Michelle K. Borras, Communio: the international Catholic review 36, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 625 (623-642).
"if someone acts contrary to the law of God because of an erroneous [but of course binding] conscience he is not excused from sin. . . ."
"an erroneous conscience [though sufficient to bind] is insufficient to absolve when it sins from its own error, as when it errs about things it is held to know [(circa ea quae scire tenetur)]."
Thomas Aquinas, De veritate q. 17 a. 4 arg. 8; q. 17 a. 3 ad 4 (Thomas Aquinas: selected writings, ed. & trans. Ralph McInerny (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 231), italics mine. "That conscience binds means that when one does not follow it he incurs sin, not that one following it does the right thing" (q. 17 a. 4 Resp.) or is free to persist in error.
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [(1 Tim 1:7)]."
"Plerumque enim accidit ut aliquid de terra, de coelo, de caeteris mundi huius elementis, de motu et conversione vel etiam magnitudine et intervallis siderum, de certis defectibus solis ac lunae, de circuitibus annorum et temporum, de naturis animalium, fruticum, lapidum, atque huiusmodi caeteris, etiam non christianus ita noverit, ut certissima ratione vel experientia teneat. Turpe est autem nimis et perniciosum ac maxime cavendum, ut christianum de his rebus quasi secundum christianas Litteras loquentem, ita delirare audiat, ut, quemadmodum dicitur, toto coelo errare conspiciens, risum tenere vix possit. Et non tam molestum est, quod errans homo deridetur, sed quod auctores nostri ab eis qui foris sunt, talia sensisse creduntur, et cum magno eorum exitio de quorum salute satagimus, tamquam indocti reprehenduntur atque respuuntur. Cum enim quemquam de numero Christianorum in ea re quam optime norunt, errare comprehenderint, et vanam sententiam suam de nostris Libris asserere; quo pacto illis Libris credituri sunt, de resurrectione mortuorum, et de spe vitae aeternae, regnoque coelorum, quando de his rebus quas iam experiri, vel indubitatis numeris percipere potuerunt, fallaciter putaverint esse conscriptos? Quid enim molestiae tristitiaeque ingerant prudentibus fratribus temerarii praesumptores, satis dici non potest, cum si quando de prava et falsa opinatione sua reprehendi, et convinci coeperint ab eis qui nostrorum Librorum auctoritate non tenentur, ad defendendum id quod levissima temeritate et apertissima falsitate dixerunt, eosdem Libros sanctos, unde id probent, proferre conantur, vel etiam memoriter, quae ad testimonium valere arbitrantur, multa inde verba pronuntiant, non intellegentes neque quae loquuntur, neque de quibus affirmant."
St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim 1.19.39 (PL 34, col. 201), trans. John Hammond Taylor (ACW 41, pp. 42-43). Latin from this transcription of PL 34, not the critical edition.
"When I hear this or that brother Christian, who is ignorant of these matters and thinks one thing the case when another is correct, with patience I contemplate the man expressing his opinion. I do not see it is any obstacle to him if perhaps he is ignorant of the position and nature of a physical creature, provided that he does not believe something unworthy of you, Lord, the Creator of all things (1 Macc. 1:24). But it becomes an obstacle if he thinks his view of nature belongs to the very form of orthodox doctrine, and dares obstinately to affirm something he does not understand."
"cum enim audio christianum aliquem fratrem illum aut illum ista nescientem et aliud pro alio sentientem, patienter intueor opinantem hominem nec illi obesse video, cum de te, domine creator omnium, non credat indigna, si forte situs et habitus creaturae corporalis ignoret. obest autem, si hoc ad ipsam doctrinae pietatis formam pertinere arbitretur et pertinacius affirmare audeat quod ignorat."
St. Augustine, Confessions V.v/9, trans. Henry Chadwick. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Reponsio de 43 articulis, prol.
Cf. Aquinas.
