"In Heaven There Is No Beer," as sung by Aquinas and Pesch

"The Bavarian has in heaven no beer to expect, the Briton no Guinness, the Frenchman and the Italian and the Rhenish Hessian as well as the Franconian no wine, the Swiss no kirsch, the Pole and the Russian no vodka, the North German no corn schnapps, the Greek no ouzo."

Otto Hermann Pesch, "Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005):  441.

Pseudo-Melito on the Assumption

"Then the Saviour spake unto them, saying: . . . this woman did I choose out of the tribes of Israel by the commandment of my Father, to dwell in her.  What then will ye that I do with her?  Then said Peter and the other apostles: . . . it hath appeared right to us thy servants that, as thou having overcome death dost reign in glory, so thou shouldest raise up the body of thy mother and take her with thee rejoicing into heaven.
"Then said the Savior:  Be it done according to your will."

 Pseudo-Melito, Latin narrative of the Assumption XVI.2-XVII.1, trans. Montague Rhodes James (The apocryphal New Testament, corr. ed. (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966 [1953]; cf. http://www.archive.org/download/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp.pdf), 215-216).  I'm not endorsing this (not endorsing this fifth-century document either), just intrigued by the idea of a development of fact and dogma left up to the apostles.  I was put onto this by Fr. Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P., Initiation à la théologie mariale:  «tous les âges me diront bienheureuse», Bibliothèque de la Revue thomiste (Paris:  Parole et Silence, 2007), 175.

Colón-Emeric on the Methodist house and the Thomist cathedral

"The Methodist house of religion is no English manor but a simple dwelling with a porch, a door, and an interior.  The porch of this house is repentance; the door to this house is faith; the inside of the house is holiness itself.  When we turned to Aquinas the scene shifted tremendously.  We found ourselves not before a humble if hospitable house, but before a Gothic cathedral that threatened to overwhelm us by its sheer scale.  The interior of this cathedral is cavernous; there are such treasures in this place that centuries of Thomist commentators have not surveyed them all.  Our study amounted to little more than a cursory walk through.

     "Looking at Wesley and Aquinas side by side it is easy to feel dizzied by the differences.  Methodist house and Thomist cathedral, what can these two possibly have in common?  Even when focused on a central doctrine, like perfection, the differences seem to be so great as to render any comparison as fruitless as that of the proverbial apples and oranges.  Yet in the same way that both house and cathedral have generic common features (walls, roofs, doors, etc.) that allow for comparison, so do Aquinas' and Wesley's respective teachings on perfection.  The chief commonality that their teachings share is that they are grounded  in the Scriptural Witness [(the Sermon on the Mount)] as interpreted by the Christian tradition."

     Edgardo A. Colón-Emeric, Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian perfection:  an ecumenical dialogue (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2009), 125.  I haven't yet read this book, but, in skimming through it, stumbled upon this, which, understandably, caught my eye.  Cf. p. 149 and elsewhere.

Aquinas on the Angst of the philosophers

"Alexander and Averroes laid it down that the final happiness of man is not in such knowledge as is possible to man through the speculative sciences, but in a knowledge gained by conjunction with a separately subsistent intelligence, which conjunction they conceived to be possible to man in this life. But because Aristotle saw that there was no other knowledge for man in this life than that which is through the speculative sciences, he supposed man not to gain perfect happiness, but a limited measure of happiness suited to his state. In which it sufficiently appears how hard pressed on this side and on that these fine geniuses were [(quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia)]. From [which] stress of difficulty [(angustiis)] we shall find escape in positing, according to the proofs already given, that man can arrive at true happiness after this life, the soul of man being immortal. In this . . . state the soul [(in quo statu anima (no 'disembodied'!))] will understand in the way in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] understand. The final happiness of man then will be in the knowledge of God, which the human soul has after this life according to the manner in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] know Him."

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.48.[16], trans. Rickaby (http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc3_48.htm), modifications and underscoring mine.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum here:  http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/scg3001.html#25987.  angustia Pesch translates as Angst ("Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 431), but "difficulty, distress, [and] perplexity" (Andrews, A copious and critical Latin-English lexicon (1868)) would be a consequence of finding oneself, no matter how brilliant, between a rock and a hard place (angustiam . . . hinc inde) philosophically.  There is no entry for angustia in Schütz's Thomas-Lexikon as reproduced here (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/tl.html), but "difficulty, distress" are the equivalents given in the Lexicon of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Deferrari and Barry (for what little that may be worth).

Pesch on the only satisfactory answer to "the question of meaning"

“this God does not want ‘to enjoy’ (frui!) his own beatitude [(beatitudo)] without us”.

Otto Hermann Pesch, “Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 452 (427-453).

Arnold on intimations of antiquity

"These are no medieval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history,or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;--stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical."

Matthew Arnold, The study of Celtic literature (London:  Smith, Elder, & Co., 1891 [1867]), 51.

White on the Incarnation

"only because of the uniqueness of the form of causality that is proper to God as Creator is he alone free to 'become' human, to assume a created nature hypostatically, without being in any way alienated from what he is eternally.  The substrate of the hypostatic union is the existent person of God the Son.  Therefore, if there is a hypostatic union, the causality entailed cannot transpire in a pre-existent material subject in which change is effectuated.  Rather, this union is the new presence of God in creation existing as man, with a human soul and body.  The subject is the Son.  Just as creation does not effectuate a change in the creature, but gives existence to it, so too the Incarnation is not an intra-worldly change, but the gift of God existing in human flesh.  Precisely because God alone can act at the level of existence in a causal fashion, therefore he alone can become incarnate in the being of man (at the deepest level of created reality) without ceasing to exist as God.  It is truly God the Son (the author of life, in whom we live and move and have our being) who is present in history, yet without any loss of his deity. . . .
"This is a non-trivial matter, for if by contrast we remove the appeal to the analogy of creative causality from our understanding of the divine and human natures of Christ that are united in his person, then we must conceive of the union of God's divine and human natures not in a trans-historical fashion (aided by recourse to an analogical doctrine of creative causality), but rather by appeal to a likeness from causal becoming in a pre-existent subject.  The hypostatic union of the natures will then have to be 'narrated' by a movement of the Son from being God alone into being human, understood after the fashion of the change from one specific state or contrary to another within a common genus, whether this be the genus of 'nature,' 'relation,' or 'operation.'  The non-relativity (and non-mutual reciprocity) of the divine and human natures will be lost.  Instead, God will be understood in a narrative fashion, through historical becoming, as one who is eternally relative in his deity to the human nature of Christ.  Therefore, the Incarnation will not be conceivable without ascribing history to the very life of God in se, and the very notion of the 'immanent Trinity' will be threatened. . . . [And] if God is only intelligible in himself as the triune God in relation to the historical economy (which includes moral evil, suffering, and death), then these latter attributes of history are also in some real sense intrinsically necessary to the developing identity of the historical God.  In this case, the results of the abandonment of a classical metaphysics of divine causality are in fact disastrous, not only for the speculative contemplation of the Trinitarian mystery itself, but also for our ethical and soteriological understanding of the agency of God."

Thomas Joseph White, O.P., "How Barth got Aquinas wrong: a reply to Archie J. Spencer on causality and Christocentrism," Nova et vetera: the English edition of the international theological journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 2009):  264-266 (241-269).