"when man's words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him"

"What we previously knew only in theory has become for us a practical experience:  the Church stands and falls with the Liturgy.  When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness in the Liturgy of the Church, when man's words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells.  For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, as quoted by Alcuin Reid in "Liturgy and laity," a review of Una voce:  the history of the Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce, by Leo Darroch, First things no. 285 (August/September 2018):  63 (59-63).  Apparently this appeared first in the Preface Ratzinger contributed to Die Heilige Liturgie:  Referate Der "internationalen Theologischen Sommerakademie 1997" des Linzer Priesterkreises in Aigen/M., ed. Franz Breid (Steyr: Ennsthaler Verlag, 1997).

"The difference between Christianity and the Gnostic spirit"

"A sign that belongs to a proper language, constituted by knowable semantic and syntactic rules, can be replaced in the language by some other sound or mark, following the same semantic rules by which the sign was specified in the first place.  But we are not in a position to do this with such signs as the bath of baptism.  We are not able to create a different ceremony of initiation—say, the giving of a particular lifelong haircut—and declare that this will now mean what baptism has meant.  The reason is that we possess no semantic rules to control the translation.
  "The Supper's loaf and baptism's bath cannot be replaced because we cannot know the rules by which they were 'instituted'—that is, given force as signs.  We can know that they are signs, and even take them as signs into our discourse, with its rules.  Indeed, we can even after the fact sometimes work out how these signs are apt to their purpose—why, for example, bread and cup are apt to mean the crucified Messiah.  But we do not know the rules of these signs' home language; we do not know why God says 'I am with you' by bread and cup instead of by some other signs.  For us, the givenness of the loaf and the bath can be nothing but historical contingencies to which we are bound as we are bound to the contingencies of God's choice of Israel from the nations or of Mary from the maidens of Israel or of Jesus from Mary's many possible children.  Accordingly, we are not able to translate cup and bath into true equivalents; the res themselves are inseparable from their meaning.
  "The language by whose rules bread and cup and bath are instituted can only be the language of God and his saints.  It is the language of a community to which we now belong only across the line of death and new creation; our possession now of some of its signs is mysterious in the strict sense.  For it is identical with the identity across death and resurrection of the sinner that I was with the saint that I will be. . . .
  "The saints in heaven may know God so well as to make new names for him to suit their love; perhaps they do it instant by instant.  But we have membership in their company only across death and resurrection.  How do we know any names for God?  Or that 'The Father begets the Son' is a meaningful and true sentence?  Only if he lets us overhear, across the border of our own non-being and new being, the conversations of heaven. . . . And why he and his saints let us overhear one name instead of another, one phrase instead of another, we do not know at all. . . .
". . . The difference between Christianity and the Gnostic spirit is then simple and straightforward:  for the latter, apophaticism means that we have continuously to make up language in which to speak of God, since all speech fails as soon as it is used; for Christianity, apophaticism means that we are given language that is immune to our manipulating, that is 'sacramental' in its destiny."

  Robert W. Jenson, "'The Father, He . . .'", in Speaking the Christian God: the Holy Trinity and the challenge of feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1992), 107-109.

Plerophory (Plerophoria)

     πληροφορία:  Col 2:2 NEB (as taken up by Diogenes Allen in his subtitle to Christian belief in a postmodern world), 1 Thess 1:5, and Heb 10:22.  Cf. Dictionnaire de spiritualité, sv Plèrophoria, by Pierre Miquel and Vincent Desprez (vol. 12.2 (1986), cols. 1813-1821).

A disorienting combination of nuance and error (historical, metaphysical, etc.)

For example

The former:

Science doesn't know how to answer such a question.  Only religions provide us with the necessary guidance [(189; but Harari's understanding of 'religion' is constructivistically non-cognitive (179 ff.)].

The latter:

Why, then, are not all humans Catholic?  Because when you read the fine print, you discover that Catholicism also demands blind obedience to a pope 'who never makes mistakes' even when he orders his followers to go on crusades and burn heretics at the stake [(191)]. 

Scientists have subjected Homo sapiens to tens of thousands of bizarre experiments, and looked into every nook in our hearts and every cranny in our brains.  But they have so far discovered no magical spark.  There is zero scientific evidence that, in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls [(102; but reread this in the light of his argument that 'the very idea of soul contradicts the most fundamental principles of evolution' (103)]. 

We can now use an entire arsenal of scientific methods to determine who composed the Bible, and when.  Scientists have been doing exactly that for more than a century, and if you are interested, you can read whole books about their findings.  To cut a long story short, most peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that the Bible is a collection of numerous different texts composed by different human authors, . . . that these texts were not assembled into a single holy book until long after biblical times[, and that therefore God did not write the Bible (194-195)].

     Yuval Noah Harari, Homo deus:  a brief history of tomorrow, trans. Yuval Noah Harari (New York:  Harper, 2017).  Statements like these could be multiplied in both "columns".

"Bohrer is in his anecdotage"

     Ben Hutchinson, "It's now-time:  a German conservative in a progressive world," The times literary supplement no. 6012 (June 22, 2018):  33 (32-33), of Karl Heinz Bohrer, in a review of Jetzt: Geschichte meines Abenteuers mit der Phantasie.  This has been, I see, a sense since 1835, according to the OED.  Brilliant.

Jacques Maritain on Saul Alinsky

"among those of my contemporaries still living as I write these lines, I see in the Western world no more than three revolutionaries worthy of the name—Eduardo Frei in Chile, Saul Alinsky in America, . . . and myself in France, who am not worth beans, since my call as a philosopher has obliterated my possibilities as an agitator. . . ."

     Jacques Maritain, The peasant of the Garonne:  an old layman questions himself about the present time (New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 23.  Footnote:  "Saul Alinsky, who is a great friend of mine, is a courageous and admirably staunch organizer of 'people's communities' and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as effective as they are unorthodox.  Cf. 'The Professional Radical, Conversations with Saul Alinksy,' Harper's Magazine, June, July, 1965" (23n16).

     But things look completely spoiled when, at certain moments of deep trouble, the political formations of left and right, instead of being each a more or less high-spirited team held in check by a more or less firm political reason, have become nothing more than exasperated affective complexes carried away by their myth-ideal; from that point on, political intelligence can do nothing but practice ruses in the service of passion.  Under those conditions, to be neither right nor left means simply that one intends to keep his sanity.     This is what I [(Maritain)] tried my best to do, at a time when things were already quite spoiled ('I am neither left nor right,' even though by temperament [(as distinguished from politics)] I am what people call a man of the left)" (22)

i.e. one who, if taken to an extreme, would detest "being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is" (21).

"such an exhausting work of hermeneutic evacuation"

Comte "was more honest than you, studious expurgators of revealed truths.  He at least fabricated the myths of his 'subjective synthesis' fairly and squarely out of whole cloth, not, like you, by reinterpreting a whole religious heritage to which you believe yourself more faithful than anyone, nor by trying to deceive the thirst, and the heart, of those whose faith you imagine you share."

     Jacques Maritain, The peasant of the Garonne:  an old layman questions himself about the present time (New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 7 =Le paysan de la Garonne:  un vieux laïc s'interroge à propos du temps présent (Paris:  Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 18.  The heading ("un si épuisant travail d'évacuation herméneutique") is from 9-10 =22.