Bouyer on double agency

"A good act, while fully our own, is good only because it comes entirely from God, being the act of God before being ours.  An evil act, on the other hand, is such to the extent in which our action is no longer fully the action of God."

Louis Bouyer, Woman and man with God:  an essay on the place of the Virgin Mary in Christian theology and its significance for humanity, trans. Fr. A. V. Littledale (London:  Darton, Longman & Todd, 1960 [1957]), 110.

The CCC on scandal

"Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.  The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter.  He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death.  Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense."

"Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion.
"Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to 'social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practially impossible.'"

Catechism of the Catholic Church ##2284, 2286 (http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism_lt/p3s2c2a5_lt.htm#II).  The quote is from a discourse delivered by Pius XII on 1 June 1941.

Moreover,

"The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of the civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel.  Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community.  'Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.'  'We must obey God rather than men'. . . ."

Catechism of the Catholic Church #2242 (http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism_lt/p3s2c2a4_lt.htm#V).

"Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God's commandments."

"Oratio condicio est pernecessaria ut quis praeceptis Dei oboedire possit."

Catechism of the Catholic Church #2098.

"Self-mastery is ordered to the gift of self"

"Charity is the form of all the virtues.  Under its influence, chastity appears as a school of the gift of self.  Self-mastery is ordered to the gift of self."

"Caritas est omnium virtutum forma. Sub eius influxu, castitas tamquam schola apparet doni personae. Dominium sui ad sui ordinatur donum."

Catechism of the Catholic Church #2346.

Conversely, then, no chastity (theologally informed), no gift of self.

On how to foster a positive public image

"PZ Myers, an outspoken atheist and associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. . . . last year angered Catholics when he [1] publicly tried to desecrate consecrated communion wafers".  Myers "has a blog and often speaks at SSA-affiliate group meetings, where he [2] urges students to go public about their unbelief and to foster a positive image."

RNS, as quoted in the Christian century 126, no. 21 (October 20, 2009):  18, italics mine.  SSA stands for the Secular Student Alliance, and RNS, probably, for Religion News Service.

John Chrysostom, not Clement of Alexandria

The first part of the following fragment, reproduced at ANF 2, p. 581 (=PG 9, col. 755/756), is John Chrysostom, not Clement of Alexandria (Clemens Alexandrinus, ed. Stählin (Leipzig:  J. C. Hinrich'sche Buchhandlung, 1905-1936), vol. 3 (1909), pp. LXXIII-LXXIV ("Unechte Fragmente" no. 29); 2nd ed., ed. Stählin, Früchtel, & Treu (Berlin:  Akademie-Verlag, 1960-1980), vol. 3 (1970), p. XXXII ("Unechte Fragmente" no. 29)).  See Chrysostom's On the priesthood 2.3 (=NPNF, 1st ser. vol. 9, p. 41).

The second part (which is longer in Dindorf III (http://spu.worldcat.org/title/clementis-alexandrini-opera/oclc/446346084), p. 503, ll. 16-20 than in PG 9, col. 755/756, and, so, does end with τήν ἑκάστου διάθεσιν) is "Ps. Clemens Hom. XI 8", not Clement of Alexandria ("Unechte Fragmente" no. 30).

Maximus, Sermon 55, p. 661.

[John Chrysostom:]  Above all, Christians are not allowed to correct with violence the delinquencies of sins. For it is not those that abstain from wickedness from compulsion, but those that abstain from choice, that God crowns. [Pseudo-Clement:]  It is impossible for a man to be steadily good except by his own choice. For he that is made good by compulsion of another is not good; for he is not what he is by his own choice. For it is the freedom of each one that makes true goodness and reveals real wickedness. Whence through these dispositions God contrived to make His own disposition manifest.

The former, i.e. superceded, edition of the Works ed. Stählin is online here: http://tinyurl.com/yazpsgy (Register here: http://tinyurl.com/ydccr2w). Stählin reproduces these out of Dindorff III (http://spu.worldcat.org/title/clementis-alexandrini-opera/oclc/446346084), p. 503, ll. 13-15 and ll. 16-20 respectively.

I reproduce this information here only because it wasn't readily available on the Internet.

Hart on the tears of Peter

"To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving we may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us--Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's imminent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal--is obvious in very large part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's tears. To us this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that enobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, all of us--even unbelievers--are 'Christians' in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous complaints of an indolent slave, the self-pitying expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accompaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers--as the great literary critic Eric Auerbach noted half a century ago--that it is only in Peter that one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaean peasant. This is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion.
"This is not, obviously, a claim regarding the explicit intent of any of the evangelists. But even Christianity's most implacable modern critics should be willing to acknowledge that, in these texts and others like them, we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into full visibility, arguably for the first time in our history: the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of an infinite value."

David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 166-167. I was reminded that I had meant to put this passage up by Hart's defense of it against the passing critique of Anthony Kenny in the Times literary supplement, March 5, 2010, p. 6 (Kenny had reviewed Atheist delusions in the issue of the TLS dated 19 February):

to call attention to the novelty, for its time, of the gospels' treatment of Peter's grief--elevating a rustic, with a particular name and face, to a position of tragic centrality in the narrative--is not to ignore antique depictions of the joys and sorrows of anonymous peasants; it is merely to observe the considerable difference in moral sensibility separating the former from the latter

(italics mine).

Having completed Beyond good and evil recently, I can't help but think by contrast of Nietzsche (though Nietzsche is a sophisticated thinker, and therefore still beyond me).