Dorie Catlett

"'Oh, my boy, how far away will you be sometime, remembering this?'"

     Dorie Wheeler Catlett to her grandson Andy, who is remembering it many years later in San Francisco (where "Nobody in thousands of miles . . . knows him" (51)), confused and on the verge of a great abandonment. It is the latest in a series of "rememberings" that reminds him that

He is held, though he does not hold. He is caught up again in the old pattern of entrances: of minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds. The pattern limits and complicates him, singling him out in his own flesh. Out of the multitude of possible lives that have surrounded him and beckoned to him like a crowd around a star [(cf. p. 45)], he returns now to himself, a mere meteorite, scorched, small, and fallen. He has met again his one life and one death, and he takes them back. It is as though, leaving, he has met himself already returning, pushing in front of him a barn seventy-five feet by forty, and a hundred acres of land, six generations of his own history, partly failed, and a few dead and living whose love has claimed him forever. He will be partial, and he will die; he will live out the truth of that. Though he does not hold, he is held. He is grieving, and he is full of joy. What is that Egypt but his Promised Land?

     Wendell Berry, Remembering (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 51, 57-58.

Berry on how little we understand

"Within limits we can know. Within somewhat wider limits we can imagine. We can extend compassion to the limit of imagination. We can love, it seems, beyond imagining. But how little we understand!"

     Wendell Berry, A world lost (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996), 149.

For Aquinas the eye is not a source of light

"the illumination of the material sun does not bring about in the bodily eye some light connatural to it, through which it can make things actually visible [(lumen aliquod sibi connaturale, per quod possit facere visibilia in actu)], as does happen in our mind by the illustration of the uncreated sun. Therefore the eye always needs an exterior light, but mind does not."

Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate, pars 1 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3, as translated by Ralph McInerny (Thomas Aquinas: selected writings, ed. and trans. with an introduction and notes by Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 114). The Latin is taken from the Leiden (i.e. Brill) edition of 1959, ed. Bruno Decker, as reproduced in Corpus Thomisticum here: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cbt.html#84303. At the beginning of the Responsio Aquinas stresses "the difference between active and passive powers", and calls even some lower powers (the vegetative) active, but not the sensitive: because "the passive powers cannot actually perform their proper operations unless moved by the active", "sense cannot sense unless it is moved by the sensible", and "the bodily eye can see bodies only by means of the supervenient illumination of the material sun" (arg. 3, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cbt.html#84287, which isn't contradicted by ad 3). Clearly, then, the eye is not for Aquinas illuminative; it is not a source of light. I don't know that anyone has ever claimed this for Aquinas specifically, and I haven't read any of the specialized histories of ancient or medieval optics, but I have, I think, heard this claim made for the pre-moderns generally. Cf. this: Although "Archytas of Tarentum . . . held that vision arises as the effect of an invisible 'fire' emitted from the eyes so that on encountering objects it may reveal their shapes and colors", "the possible solutions of the problem of vision were [in antiquity] very limited; either something from the object arrives at the eye, or something from the eye goes out to the object, or else the intervening medium serves as the connection between the object and the eye" (Vasco Ronchi, "Optics and vision," Dictionary of the history of ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), vol. 3, p. 407; cf. http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv3-51).

Anyone seeking to reform the Church must share the Church's faith

"Anyone seeking to reform the Church must share the Church's faith and accept the essentials of her mission. The Church cannot take seriously the reform advocated by those who deny that Christ was Son of God and Redeemer, who assert that the Scriptures teach error, or who hold that the Church should not require orthodoxy on the part of her members. Proposals coming from a perspective alien to the Christian faith should be treated with the utmost suspicion if not dismissed as unworthy of consideration."

Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Church and society: the Laurence J. McGinley Lectures: 1988-2007 (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 404-405, as quoted by James F. Keating in his review, The Thomist 72, no. 4 (October 2008): 663-664.

Franks on the natural law

"one must be in the right sort of community in order to learn what nature has to teach. . . . Natural law . . . is only promulgated by being learned, through the growth of prudence, and our success in developing knowledge of the natural law is very much subect to our community's success in fostering such knowledge."
". . . actually learning what nature has to teach depends on communally mediated practical wisdom."

Christopher A. Franks, "The usury prohibition and natural law: a reappraisal," The Thomist 72, no. 4 (October 2008): 651. Franks is summarizing Pamela M. Hall's Narrative and the natural law: an interpretation of Thomistic ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), and is, like Hall, opposed to the idea that, for Aquinas, the "natural law . . . function[s] autonomously as some sort of moral anchor amid peculiarly modern forms of moral uncertainty" (631) "for an allegedly . . . universal audience" (649). No, "for Aquinas God's answer to the obscurity of the natural law is revelation" (650) and the virtues of the Christian community.

Martin on Catholic reserve

"over the two millennia of the Catholic Church's existence, she has defined the meaning of some ten or twelve texts."

Francis Martin, "Mary in sacred scripture: an ecumenical reflection," The Thomist 72, no. 4 (October 2008): 554n61. Cited is Maurice Gilbert, "Textes bibliques dont l'Église a défini le sens," in L'autorité de l'Écriture, ed. Jean-Michel Poffet (Paris: Cerf, 2002).

Sterne on the Shandean mode of argument

"many an undertaking critick would have built two stories higher upon worse foundations."

     Laurence Sterne, The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., V.3 (Penguin ed. ed. Melvin & Joan New (2003), 320; GBWW, 1st ed., 1952, vol. 36, p. 390).