Calvin on the "deitatis sensus"

"I do not say with Cicero, that errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day.  For the world . . . labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God, and corrupts his worship in innumerable ways.  I only say, that, when the stupid hardness of heart, which the wicked eagerly court as a means of despising God, becomes enfeebled, the sense of Deity, which of all things they wished most to be extinguished, is still in vigour, and now and then breaks forth."

"quum stupida quam impii ad Deum spernendum cupide accersunt, durities in eorum animis tabescat, vigere tamen, ac subinde emergere quem maxime extinctum cuperent, deitatis sensum."

     John Calvin, Institutes III.3, trans. Henry Beveridge.  This I would translate somewhat as follows:  "when the stupid hardness in their minds, which the impious, in order to spurn God, eagerly cultivate, subsides, there then flourishes, and immediately [re-]emerges, what they were especially hoping [they had] extinguished, [namely,] the sense of deity."

God is not a "communion" of persons, but "one"

"As with all human language applied to God, the use of the term communion [(κοινονία)] theologically has carried with it the dangers of shaping our conceptions of God in a way that comes to mirror our social assumptions and hopes:  God ends up looking like a multiethnic society, a congress, a church council, a congregation, and on and on.  What we require for our understanding of 'communion,' which is a human and social construct, is that its meaning be informed by God's reality, not the other way around.  If God is never called a 'communion' in Scripture, God is clearly called 'one.'  And hence, God's 'oneness' is what needs to inform the Church's 'communion':  'that they may be one even as we are one' (John 17:22 RSV; cf. vv. 21, 13).  The 'oneness' that is God's, however, is, in this prayer, identified as something peculiar:  'as we are one,' in Jesus' words.  How is God one?  Do we know what this means?  Here some eristological nuance will be helpful. . . ."

     Ephraim Radner, A brutal unity:  the spiritual politics of the Christian church (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2012), 8.  "Eristology . . . is the study of hostility in its disordering forms and forces" (4-5).  This critique of social trinitarianism begins on p. 7, with an appreciative reference to Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the divine:  toward an (im)political theology (Farnham, UK:  Ashgate, 2009).

"Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery"

"O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were being cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen" (1976 Book of common prayer, pp. 280 (Good Friday), 291 (Easter Vigil), 515 (Ordination of a Bishop), 528 (Ordination of a Priest), 540 (Ordination of a Deacon)).

     This, according to Hatchett (Commentary on the American prayer book (The Seabury Press, 1980), p. 248), is no. 432 in the 8th-century Gelasian sacramentary.  Cf. p. 82 in the 1894 Clarendon Press edition of that by H. A. Wilson.  In the current Roman missal, it occurs after the seventh reading in the Easter Vigil at least:

"O God of unchanging power and eternal light, look with favour on the wondrous mystery of the whole Church and serenely accomplish the work of human salvation, which you planned from all eternity; may the whole world know and see that what was cast down is raised up, what had become old is made new, and all things are restored to integrity through Christ, just as by him they came into being. Who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen."

"one hour of purgation here is more profitable than are many there."

     St. John of the Cross, The dark night of the soul II.6, ed. & trans. E. Allison Peers.

"which are they that, when they were awake and alive, consented not to this."

"it is not to be supposed that, because in this night and darkness [the soul] has passed through so many tempests of afflictions, doubts, fears and horrors, as has been said, it has for that reason run any risk of being lost. On the contrary, it says, in the darkness of this night it has gained itself. For in the night it has freed itself and escaped subtly from its enemies, who were continually hindering its progress. For in the darkness of the night it changed its garments and disguised itself with three liveries and colours which we shall describe hereafter; and went forth by a very secret ladder, which none in the house knew, the which ladder, as we shall observe likewise in the proper place, is living faith. By this ladder the soul went forth in such complete hiding and concealment, in order the better to execute its purpose, that it could not fail to be in great security; above all since in this purgative night the desires, affections and passions of the soul are put to sleep, mortified and quenched, which are they that, when they were awake and alive, consented not to this."

     St. John of the Cross, The dark night of the soul II.15, ed. & trans. E. Allison Peters.  "the spiritual and the sensual desires are put to sleep and mortified, so that they can experience nothing, either Divine or human; the affections of the soul are oppressed and constrained, so that they can neither move nor find support in anything; the imagination is bound and can make no useful reflection; the memory is gone; the understanding is in darkness, unable to understand anything; and hence the will likewise is arid and constrained and all the faculties are void and useless; and in addition to all this a thick and heavy cloud is upon the soul, keeping it in affliction, and, as it were, far away from God.  It is in this kind of ‘darkness’ that the soul says here it travelled 'securely'" (II.16).

St. John of the Cross on the reception of the Eucharist

"the sensory benefits are the least among those that this Most Blessed Sacrament bestows, for the invisible grace it gives is a greater blessing.  God often withdraws sensory delight and pleasure so that souls might set the eyes of faith upon this invisible grace.  Not only in receiving communion, but in other spiritual exercises as well, beginners desire to feel God and taste of Him as if He were comprehensible and accessible.  This desire is a serious imperfection and, because it involves impurity of faith, opposed to God's way."

     St. John of the Cross, The dark night I.6 ("The imperfections of spiritual gluttony").5, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.; The collected works of St. John of the Cross (Washington, D.C.:  ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973), 308.

Personal knowledge

     "inference simply cannot substitute for experience [as I have defined it].  One will not long believe in a personal God with whom there is no personal communication, and the most compelling evidence of a personal God must itself be personal.  To attempt something else as foundation or substitute, as has been done so often in an effort to shore up the assertion of God, is to move into a process of internal contradictions of which the ultimate resolution must be atheism."

     Michael J. Buckley, S.J., Denying and disclosing God:  the ambiguous progress of modern atheism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004), 138 (the conclusion).
     Experience is "'an affair primarily of doing.  The organism does not stand about, Micawberlike, waiting for something to turn up.  It does not wait passive and inert for something to impress itself upon it from without.  The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings.  As a consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. . . . This close connection between doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience'" (quoting John Dewey, Reconstruction in philosophy, enlarged edition with a new introduction by the author (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1966), p. 86, italics mine, at Denying and disclosing God, p. 128).
     All of which reminds me so much of Austin Farrer and his emphasis on the activity system (as in Finite and infinite), as well as the sterility of any "thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think":  "Nothing can give substance to our thought of God but an experience which employs our activity in relation to God, where that activity is something other than thought itself" (Faith and speculation, pp. 22 and 28 (in chap. 2 on "The empirical demand"), italics mine).  Or, more to the point, "to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them.  No physical science without physical interference, no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think. . . . We can know nothing of God, unless we can do something about him.  So what, we must ask, can we do?" (22)  "God would not be recognized as worshipful, save in relation to our worshipping.  If he is so recognized, there is something we can do about God:  we can worship him" (26).
     Thus, "the interaction that constitutes experience . . . in the actual history of religious commitments and faith" has two dimensions:  1) the categorical or concrete (but most effectively of all an encounter with the saints), and 2) the transcendental, as encountered by those who love the truth (or any of the other transcendentals) above everything else, even God himself" (or, more accurately, God as wish-fulfillment).  For "'Christ likes us to prefer truth to him'", since "'If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms'" (Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Cranfurd (New York:  Harper and Row, 1951), 69, at Denying and disclosing God, p. 132).
     All of this—except, of course, the Farrer—from chap. 6 of Denying and disclosing God, which is Buckley's own antidote to the misguided apologetics of modernity, an apologetics with a distressingly persistent tendency to treat the question of the existence of God in abstraction from the concrete practices of personal interaction so essential to the Christian faith ("those very events that in the actual history of religious commitments and faith have proved most cogent", it being only "in such an interaction that the manifestation of the holiness of God [in fact] occurs" (p. 128, italics mine)).