The spirit of the law

"And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances."

וְאֶת־רוּחִ֖י אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם

וְעָשִׂ֗יתִי אֵ֤ת אֲשֶׁר־בְּחֻקַּי֙ תֵּלֵ֔כוּ וּמִשְׁפָּטַ֥י תִּשְׁמְר֖וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶֽם

     Ez 36:27, RSV.  There is no disjunction here.  What the spirit does is ensure that we keep the law.

"every passion gathers strength in proportion as it is cultivated, and is increased by all the efforts to satiate it."

"toute passion se fortifie à mesure qu'on s'en occupe davantage, et s'accroit par tous les efforts qu'on tente pour l'assouvir."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America II (1840).II.xix ("What causes almost all Americans to follow industrial callings"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 155n1);  Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 668.

"God alone satisfies, and goes/passes on [beyond that] into infinity."

Deus enim solus satiat, et in infinitum excedit. . . .

     St. Thomas Aquinas, In symbolum apostolorum 12.
     Too bad that's not how the Leonine edition reads.  Corpus Thomisticum re“prints" the 1954 Marietti edition, whereas the new (and standard critical) Leonine edition that Nicholas Ayo relied upon in the form of a pre-publication typescript in 1988 (Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C., The sermon conferences of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostles’ Creed, translated from the Leonine edition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988; Wipf & Stock, 2005)) reads (or will read once published, if it hasn’t been already) somewhat differently:

Deus autem solus satiat, qui in infinitum excedit. . . .

Whereas God alone, who goes/passes on into infinity, satisfies.

Ayo:  "God alone, who surpasses infinity, satisfies [us]. . . ."

"moral claims on moral grounds"

     "The moral vocabulary that now prevails in the United States is less Marxist but no less vulgar, for it is just as adamant that all moral claims be translated into material terms.  The only difference is that material self-interest is now permitted to coexist with material altruism.  Bad behavior can be condemned only if it is shown to correlate with some quantifiable negative outcome like a greater likelihood of receiving a free or reduced-price lunch among gradeschoolers, a higher incidence of antidepressant use among adults, or a measurable decline in the national GDP.  Moral questions are treated as if they were, at the end of the day, merely empirical.  We are hesitant, almost to the point of paralysis, about making moral claims on moral grounds."

     Helen Rittelmeyer, "Bloodless moralism," First things no. 240 (February 2014), 34 (33-39).

Gregory on the failure to fish

"One might decide to suspend judgment about a given intellectual issue in dispute—and indeed prudence often dictated the advisability of such a course—for the sake of preserving concord in accordance with Christian caritas, for example, so that all that needed weighing could be weighed.  But neither prudence nor the suspension of judgment nor the yearning for civility could get round the principle of noncontradiction:  although two contrary claims might both be false, even the everlasting suspension of judgment could not make them both true."

     Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 326.
     The principle of noncontradiction figures largely in this book.
     Yet (since Gregory makes this appeal to the principle of noncontradiction in the context of a discussion of the (far from necessarily contradictory) tension between the humanist and the scholastic approaches to learning) surely the humanists were not better at a determination of the precise sense in which one was or was not faced with contradiction than scholastics like Aquinas!

Ben Jonson on abortion

Oh, you live at court,
And there's both loss of time and loss of sport
In a great belly.  Write then on thy womb
'Of the not born yet buried, here's the tomb.'

     Ben Jonson, "To Fine Lady Would-Be", "the court lady who's taken an abortion pill", as quoted by Brian Vickers in "At feud with sin," a review of the apparently magnificent Cambridge edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, & Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), in the Times literary supplement, January 24, 2014, p. 5 (pp. 3-5).

"Since friends have one mind and one heart, it does not seem that what one friend reveals to another is placed outside of his own heart".

     "Now he sets down the true sign of friendship on his own part, which is that all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.   For the true sign of friendship is that a friend reveals the secrets of his heart to his friend.  Since friends have one mind and one heart, it does not seem that what one friend reveals to another is placed outside of his own heart [(non videtur amicus extra cor suum ponere quod amico revelat)]:  'Argue your case with your neighbor [and do not reveal a secret to a stranger (causam tuam tracta cum amico tuo et secretum extraneo non reveles)]' (Pr 25:9).  Now God reveals his secrets to us by letting us share in his wisdom:  'In every generation she [Wisdom] passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets' (Wis 7:27)."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John 15:15 =no. 2016 =cap. 15 lectio 3 (trans. Fabian Larcher, O.P., and James A Weisheipl, O.P., with introduction and notes by Daniel Keating & Matthew Levering (Washington, DC:  The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), vol. 3 (Chapters 13-21), p. 111, interpolations and underscoring mine).
     I was put onto this by Serge-Thomas Bonino, "Le rôle des apôtres dans la communication de la révélation, selon la Lectura super Ioannem de saint Thomas d'Aquin," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 103, no. 4 (octobre-décembre 2002):  327-328 (317-350).