"A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."

     "Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture.  Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism.  If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture.  A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."

     Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Revelation and homosexual experience:  What Wolfhart Pannenberg says about this debate in the church," trans. Markus Bockmuehl, Christianity today 40, no. 13 (November 11, 1996):  35, 37.  ="Amor vincit omnia—or does it?  Outlook:  Homosexuality and scripture," trans. Markus Bockmuehl, Church times (June 21, 1996), modified by the above:

     Here lies the boundary of a Christian Church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of scripture.  Those who urge the Church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism.  If a Church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognised homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a Church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of scripture. 

     A Church which took such a step would thereby have ceased to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

="Maßstäbe zur kirchlichen Urteilsbildung über Homosexualität," in Beiträge zur Ethik (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 99-102.  ="'Einem männlichen Wesen darfst du nicht beiwohnen': Maßstäbe zur kirchlichen Urteilsbildung über Homosexualität," Zeitwende 65, no. 1 (1994): 1-4.  From the latter (the original, identical to the 2004 reprint), in which this does not begin a new paragraph, and which appeals to Luther rather than the four marks:

An dieser Stelle liegt die Grenze für eine christliche Kirche, die sich an die Autorität der Schrift gebunden weiß.  Wer die Kirche dazu drängt, die Norm ihrer Lehre in dieser Frage zu ändern, muß wissen, daß er die Spaltung der Kirche betreibt.  Denn eine Kirche, die sich dazu drängen ließe, homosexuelle Betätigung nicht mehr als Abweichung von der biblischen Norm zu behandeln und homosexuelle Lebensgemeinschaften als eine Form persönlicher Liebesgemeinschaft als eine Form persönlicher Liebesgemeinschaft neben der Ehe anzuerkennen, eine solche Kirche stünde nicht mehr auf dem Boden der Schrift, sondern im Gegensatz zu deren einmütigem Zeugnis.  Eine Kirche, die einen solchen Schritt tut, hätte darum aufgehört, evangelische Kirche in der Nachfolge der lutherischen Reformation zu sein.

. . . A church that takes such a step would have ceased to be [an] evangelical/Protestant church in the succession of the Lutheran Reformation.

 There is also at least one version of this up in German here.
     Cf. Yeago, Abraham, and others on this blog.  Abraham in another place:  "If the United Methodist Church were to abandon its current teaching on homosexual behavior, it would cease to be a body of congregations among which the pure Word of God is preached; and thus it would undermine its own most important ecclesiological insight" (William J. Abraham, "Chapter 1:  The Church’s teaching on sexuality:  a defense of the United Methodist Church’s Discipline on homosexuality," in Staying the course:  supporting the Church’s position on homosexuality, ed. Maxie D. Dunnam and H. Newton Malony (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2003), 30 (15-31)).

"she could do more [than her brother], she who loved more."

". . . illa plus potuit, quae amplius amauit."

". . . πλεῖον ἠδυνήθη ἐκείνη, ἥτις πλεῖον ἠγάπασεν."

     Gregory the Great on St. Scholastica, the sister of St.Benedict, Dialogues II.xxxiii.5.  SC 260, ed. Vogüé (1979), 234 =PL 66, cols. 196A and 195A respectively.  The Latin or the Greek should take priority.

'Lo, I asked you[, Benedict,] and you would not listen; so I asked my Lord and he did listen.' 

'Ecce te rogaui, et audiri me noluisti.  Rogaui Dominum meum, et audiuit me.' 

Ἰδοὺ παρεκάλεσά σε, καὶ ὑπακοῦσαί μου οὐκ ἠθέλησας.  Παρεκάλεσα τὸν κύριόν μου, καὶ εἰσήκουσέ μου·

For the context, go here.

Descartes on the stupefied admiration

"But more often we wonder too much rather than too little, as when we are astonished in looking at things which merit little or no consideration.  This may entirely prevent or pervert the use of reason.  Therefore, although it is good to be born with some inclination to wonder, since it makes us disposed to acquire scientific knowledge, yet after acquiring such knowledge we must attempt to free ourselves from this inclination as much as possible.  For we may easily make good its absence through that special state of reflection and attention which our will can always impose upon our understanding when we judge the matter before us to be worth serious consideration.  But there is no remedy for excessive wonder [(d’admirer avec exces)] except to acquire the knowledge of many things and to practice examining all those which may seem most unusual and strange."

     Descartes, The passions of the soul 76, trans. Robert Stoothoff (The philosophical writings of Descartes 1 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1985), 355) =the standard Œuvres de Descartes ed. Adam & Tannery, vol. 11, p. 385.  I have not read The passions, but was put onto this by Thibault Barrier, "La capture de l'esprit:  attention et admiration chez Descartes et Spinoza," L’attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  48-49 (43-58):  "voluntary attention is not opposed to simple impassibility, but to an admiration become hebetude" (49), i.e. stupor.

Aquinas on the unicity of truth

"there are indeed different and distinct domains of enquiry, each with its own standards for distinguishing the true from the false.  Mathematics is one such domain, physics another, history a third, theology a fourth.  But these domains are not self-enclosed, so that the truths in any one domain have no implications for what is true or false in any of the others.  Some truths in physics exclude certain historical possibilities.  Some truths in mathematics exclude certain physical possibilities.  Some truths in theology exclude certain physical and certain philosophical possibilities."

     Alisdair MacIntyre, channeling Aquinas contra the 13th-century Averroists on the doctrine of the two truths, in God, philosophy, universities:  a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., A Sheed & Ward Book, 2009), 68.

"the disagreement between theistic and non-theistic cultures is not only a disagreement about God, it is also and perhaps as fundamentally a disagreement about intelligibility."

     Alisdair MacIntyre, God, philosophy, universities:  a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., A Sheed & Ward Book, 2009), 61.

Ask, seek, knock

     "If, as H. Gouhier once remarked, the philosophy of Malebranche is one long systematic meditation on the various attributes of God, [then] one is entitled to suppose that attention constitutes one of these, and that, as N. Depraz indicates, the love of God is [(comprend)] a form of attention, as much cognitive as affective, in this [respect], that he is at once attentive and indistractably so [(attentif et attentionné)] in his divine providence.  Thus, the sometimes hard work that attention demands of us [(que réclame l’attention aux humains)] corresponds to the gracious movement of the divine attention.  As the third of the Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques indicates explicitly, that attention is nothing other than [the attention] of love:  'if you ask without attention, this is [for] lack of love', just as an attention without perseverance is only a ‘love too weak’[, a love] that will obtain from God only an inaudible reply."

     Michel Dupuis, "L'attention et l'amour de l’Ordre dans la morale de Malebranche," L'attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  69-70 (59-71).  On attentionner, see, for example, the CNRTL.

"the [idolatrous] thrill of the shadow of nothingness"

Department of Theology,
University of Notre Dame

"the great attraction of Heidegger's path" isn't just the attraction of what is "irrational, absurd, and superstitious."  It is "precisely the attraction of idolatry.  Indeed, Heidegger provides us with a bold statement of the very quintessence of idolatry in its purest and most distinctively postmodern form. . . . From the vantage point of Heidegger's enthrallment with finitude, we can see that people make idols and glorify the creature instead of the Creator, not because they just made a mistake and thought that the creature or the idol is the absolute being.  Rather, people make idols and glorify the creature instead of the Creator because they have made the judgment, at a deep level that is not altogether transparent to logical reasoning, that finite being is just more thrilling than absolute being.  And what is more indicative of the mood of our times than a mesmerization with finitude as such and a distaste, even repulsion, at the very notion of a perfection of being, a repulsion that even drives theologians to disparage the preoccupation of  'classical theism' with the attributes of divine being[?]  It is this mesmerization with finitude that is the existential wonder to which our epoch spontaneously gravitates!  Heidegger reveals to us that just as philosophy itself begins with wonder, so does idolatry.  But unlike the wonder invoked by both classical philosophy and theology, Heidegger's wonder is idolatrous because it is, despite all his elaborate protestations to the contrary, an arrested wonder.  It prostrates itself before the very combination of the eruption of being and the decline from being that characterizes finite beings, refusing to move on to the recognition of a perfect being that would lack the thrill of the shadow of nothingness falling over it.  Does not this 'mood' of idolatry utterly pervade our current existence?
     "If we compare the apologetic strategies of Athanasius and David Hart, we can see that they both make significant use of the argument from creaturely contingency to a perfect being, God.  But what is distinctive to Athanasius's approach is the insight that what prevents us from accepting this logical correlation is not just stupidity, the inability to appreciate the cogency of the logic which must posit necessary being as the ground of contingent being, but the deeper and more complex problem of idolatry, our intractable attachment to the finite things around us that makes us absolutize those finite things, both because they are sources of immediate pleasure and because they provide temporary evasions from the specter of death.  Heidegger, unwillingly, gives us an even bolder presentation of the distinctly postmodern form of idolatry, which is the glorification of finitude as such and the distaste for perfect being unadumbrated by the seductive shadow of nothingness."

     Khaled Anatolios, "The witness of Athanasius at the (hoped-for) Nicene Council of 2025," Pro ecclesia 25, no. 2 (Spring 2016):  234-235 (220-236).
     Have Hart and Milbank then, the two writers upon whom Anatolios relies, succeeded in reversing the French reversal of c. 1960 on Heidegger?

From the Neothomist point of view, Neoplatonism seemed an ally of modernity, a movement that preceded it and sustained its idealisms.  But the positive character of the current interest in Neoplatonism adheres to a reversal of that judgment.  In the last third of the 20th century, it is Neoscholasticism rather than Neoplatonism that dreams of an objectivizing rationalism and an ontotheology.  Towards 1960, the French discovered, despite the judgment of Étienne Gilson, that Heidegger would not object to [(ne ferait pas une exception à)] the identification by Thomas of God with ipsum esse subsistens.  Thus, Neoplatonism, above all in its Proclean and Dionysian branches, and medieval thought in the measure in which it is Neoplatonic, becomes more interesting for every attempt to respond to the questions raised by modernity.

Wayne J. Hankey, "Le role du néoplatonisme dans les tentatives postmodernes d’échapper à  l’onto-théologie," La métaphysique:  son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux, Actes du XXVIIe Congrès de l’Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française (A.S.P.L.F.), Québec, 18-22 août 1998) (Paris:  Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin; Québec:  Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000):  38-39 (36-43), citing Heidegger's 1959 "Le Retour au fondement de la métaphysique" and G. Prouvost, "La question des noms divins," Revue thomiste 98, no. 3 (1997):  485-511.