Doctor Subtilis

"It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the portrait of Aquinas, you know. . . . But Aquinas, now - he was a little too subtle, wasn't he?  Does anybody read Aquinas?"

     Mr. Brooke of Edward Casaubon, in George Eliot's Middlemarch, chap. 28.  The "subtle doctor" was, of course, Duns Scotus.

"Young Mr Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings."

George Eliot, Middlemarch, chap. 21.

"in a media-addled age, mere scrupulous scholarship is rarely a match for shameless intellectual dishonesty or emotional derangement."

David Bentley Hart, "Mediocrity's tribute," in On the square: daily columns from First things' top writers, 25 November 2011.

"the 'no God's land' of a human liberty improperly raised to the rank of a secondary divinity"

"The human being and God are not in competition, simply because the first and the second cause are not on the same plane.  Furthermore, it is God himself who gives the free choice of the creature all of its (determined) reality.  Confronted with the immense mystery of predestination and the unequal distribution of grace, one ought not to propose a 'solution,' but to situate the mystery in its proper place:  in the fathomless liberty, goodness, and wisdom of God, and not in the 'no God's land' of a human liberty improperly raised to the rank of a secondary divinity.  Henceforth, Bañezianism—and the thesis of physical premotion—became the official doctrine of the Dominican Order."

     Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., "The Thomist tradition" (2003), trans. Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., Nova et vetera:  the English edition of the international theological journal 8, no. 4 (Fall 2010):  881 (869-881).

Kennan on the importance of "a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions"

"There is more resepect to be won . . . by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives."

George Kennan, as quoted by Frank Costigliola, in his "Is this George Kennan?," The New York review of books 58, no. 19 (December 8, 2011), 6 (4-8).

The happiness of me

"at the age of twenty, [Mill] suffered one of the most famous nervous breakdowns in history; having embraced utilitarianism with a religious passion, he asked himself a fatal question:  If all his plans for the happiness of others were realized, would he himself be happy?  'An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!"'  Only after eighteen months of depression did he regain his poise."

     Alan Ryan on John Stuart Mill, in "The passionate hero, then and now," The New York review of books 58, no. 19 (December 8, 2011), 60 (59-63).  The quotation is from chap. 5 of the Autobiography.

"in the thick of foes"

     "It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.  Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies.  At the end all his disciples deserted him.  On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers.  For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God.  So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes [(mitten under die Feinde)].  There is his commission, his work.  'The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies.  And he also who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people.  O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ!  If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared?' (Luther).
     "'I will sow them among the people:  and they shall remember me in far countries' (Zech. 10:9).  According to God's will Christendom [(Christenheit)] is a scattered people, scattered like seed 'into all the kingdoms of the earth' (Deut. 28:25).  That is its curse and its promise.  God's people must dwell in far countries among the unbelievers, but it will be the seed of the Kingdom of God in all the world.'"

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York:  Harper One, HarperCollins Publishers, [1954]), 17-18.