No man. But God

Truly no man can ransom himself, or give to God the price of his life [(אָ֗ח לֹא־פָדֹ֣ה יִפְדֶּ֣ה אִ֑ישׁ לֹא־יִתֵּ֖ן לֵאלֹהִ֣ים כָּפְרֹֽו)], for the ransom of his life is costly, and can never suffice [(וְ֭יֵקַר פִּדְיֹ֥ון נַפְשָׁ֗ם וְחָדַ֥ל לְעֹולָֽם)], that he should continue to live on for ever, and never see the Pit. . . . But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me [(אַךְ־אֱלֹהִ֗ים יִפְדֶּ֣ה נַ֭פְשִׁי מִֽיַּד־שְׁאֹ֑ול כִּ֖י יִקָּחֵ֣נִי)].

     Ps 49:7-9, 15, RSV.  לָקַח > יִקָּחֵ֣נִי.  For he, rather than the Pit/Sheol, will take me in.  BDB 4f is "receive, accept, esp. a bribe, gift, ransom, etc.", but then v. 15 would contradict v. 7 (which, if אָ֗ח is (as in the note) "brother," may not be reflexive in nature).

"'Grant that I may find mercy and may grow old together with her.' And [Sarah] said with him, 'Amen.'"

ἐπίταξον ἐλεῆσαί με καὶ ταύτῃ συγκαταγηρᾶσαι. καὶ εἶπεν μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ Αμην.

     Tobit 8:7-8 RSV. Nicholas J. Healy Jr., in "The merciful gift of indissolubility and the question of pastoral care for civilly divorced and remarried Catholics" (Communio:  international Catholic review 41, no. 2 (Summer 2014):  330 (306-330)), treats this as a prayer for the grace to remain faithful for life, though what they're asking for is of course most immediately that, unlike Sarah's seven previous bridegrooms, Tobias be allowed to live through their first night (6:13-17; 7:10-11, 17-18; 8:9-18).

A totalizing mentalité from within which réalité becomes quite literally incomprehensible

The "reconfiguration of marriage [to this essentially androgynous anthropology] represents a very fundamental shift, the shift toward the conception of a humanity composed of alternative but essentially equivalent 'orientations.'  And this has enormous implications for the philosophical (and theological) understanding of the human person driving culture. . . .  [I]t implies grounding society and culture on an essentially gay anthropology"; on a mentalité from within which what it is replacing becomes, not something similar or even complementary (an older form of the one thing we call "marriage"), but quite simply inconceivable.  Under this conceptual regime, "the anthropologically fundamental starting point of the sexual otherness of man and woman is in fact no longer available", no longer accessible to thought, incomprehensible.  "If [not the liberals but the] radicals [of 2006] criticize current society as institutionalizing a 'compulsory heterosexuality,' the vision of society proposed as its replacement may therefore be characterized just as accurately as a form of [not the proverbial bigger tent but] 'compulsory homosexuality.'"

     David S.Crawford, "Liberal androgyny:  gay marriage and the meaning of sexuality in our time," Communio:  international Catholic review 33, no. 2(Summer 2006):  246, 264-265 (239-265), italics mine.  "a . . . compulsory homosexuality" in the sense that the androgynous anthropology of "orientations" renders it impossible to understand why the difference between male and female was ever considered constitutive of "sex" (from secare, to cut or divide, some think), now conceived of in terms of pleasure (the manipulation of a sub-personal body) alone, rather than also procreation, considered as its fundamental and distinctive telos (drawing a bit also on "Public reason and the anthropology of orientation:  how the debate over 'gay marriage' has been shaped by some ubiquitous but unexamined presuppositions," Communio:  international Catholic review 43, no. 2 (Summer 2016):  247-273).

The greater the equality, the greater the complementarity

The "'liberation' [of women in Jesus and Paul] happens against the backdrop of an equally unique and permanent revaluation of the gender difference.  In fact, the difference is maintained throughout:  from the special designation of Mary as the mother of the Lord and, later, of John (hence of the Church) to the (no longer merely symbolic, but) 'incarnatory' relation between Christ as Bridegroom and the Church as Bride and the new valuation of marriage that follows from it (Eph 5).  This goes far beyond the relation between Yahweh and Israel in the Old Testament, which had not yet found an echo in the human-sexual sphere, and which also has nothing in common with pagan and Gnostic 'syzygies.' . . .  The New Testament’s 'revaluation' of the woman to equality of dignity is inseparable from the simultaneous accentuation of the difference between the sexes."

     Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Thoughts on the priesthood of women," trans. Adrian Walker, Communio:  international Catholic review 23, no. 4 (Winter 1996):  702-703 (701-709).

"the more diverse the characteristics of man and woman in the identity of human nature, the more perfect and fruitful their union in love can be."

That "the 'persons' [of the Godhead] are so different that they cannot be subsumed under any generic concept of person and precisely thus constitute the one and only essence of God. . . .  suggests the following anthropological principle:  the more diverse the characteristics of man and woman in the identity of human nature, the more perfect and fruitful their union in love can be."

     Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Thoughts on the priesthood of women," trans. Adrian Walker, Communio:  international Catholic review 23, no. 4 (Winter 1996):  703 (701-709).

Martin Luther (on St. Thomas Aquinas), ignoramus

In the whole of Thomas [there] is not one word capable of facilitating trust in Christ.

"Im gantzen Thoma ist nicht ein wort, das einem mocht ein zuuersicht zu Christo machen."

     Martin Luther, Tischrede 1721, 12 (?) July 1532, WA-TR 2, 193, ll. 5 ff.  I'm not seeing it in the American edition ed. Pelikan.  Paul M. Bretscher ("Neothomism," Concordia theological monthly 21, no. 4 (April 1950):  258n11) translates this more professionally than I as follows:

In all of Thomas there is not one word which might arouse in one confidence in Christ.

     I was put onto this by the Lutheran (?) theologian Stefan Gradl.  See his "Inspektor Columbo irrt:  kriminalistische Überlegungen zur Frage 'Kannte Luther Thomas?,'" Luther 77, no. 2 (2006):  91 (83-99).  "Inspector Columbo" is, following Otto Pesch, Denis R. Janz, whose Luther on Thomas Aquinas:  the Angelic Doctor in the thought of the reformer (1989) is said to have converted even Pesch himself to the view that Luther knew Thomas well.  Having traced the history of the debate, Gradl goes on to argue 1) that Janz was quite mistaken (that, barring the discovery of sources hitherto unsuspected, Luther very likely did not know Thomas well), and 2) that, anyway, the question is not only unanswerable (???), but entirely beside the point, dogmatically speaking.

"a cybernetic destiny requiring the devaluation and revaluation of all values"

"When we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments, invented by human beings and under human control, we are expressing a kind of common sense, but it is a common sense from within the very technology we are attempting to represent.  The novelness of our novelties is being minimized.  We are led to forget that the modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves.  The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness.

     ". . . To put the matter crudely:  when we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal.  We have bought a package deal of far more substantial novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control.  It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness. . . . Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny:  we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny.

     "The result of this is that when we are deliberating in any practical situation our judgment acts rather like a mirror, which throws back the very metaphysic of the technology which we are supposed to be deliberating about in detail.  The outcome is almost inevitably a decision for further technological development."

     George Grant, "Thinking about technology," in Technology and justice (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 32-33.  I was put onto this by Brent Waters, Christian moral theology in the emerging technoculture, Ashgate science and religion series (Burlington, VT:  Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 43-44.  The heading is from Waters himself, at the top of p. 44.  For "Grant . . . at his bleakest", according to Waters, "The fate of late modernity may, after all, prove to be an inevitable, inescapable, and recurring nihilism."