"we must never avert our eyes from those elements in [Christianity] which seem puzzling or repellent"

"If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself.  If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than 'my own stuff'. . . . If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know."

     C. S. Lewis, "The weight of glory," in The weight of glory and other addresses (New York:  Macmillan, 1949) =Transposition and other addresses (London:  G. Bles, 1949), 7.

"God is said not to be in the same genus as other . . . things, not because he is in another genus, but because he is outside any genus".

"God is said not to be in the same genus as other . . . things, not because he is in another genus, but because he is outside any genus but the principle of every genus.  Thus he is compared to others by way of excess. . . ."

     Thomas Aquinas, ST I.6.2.ad 3, trans. Ralph McInerny.

"catch[ing] up, by the laborious path of learning and argument acquired by study, to the wisdom the unlettered charwoman already possesses as a free gift of God."

"The theological master simply strives to make explicit, to recapture in modo cognitionis, what the faithful heart of any old woman already knows."

     Bruce D. Marshall, "Quid scit una uetula:  Aquinas on the nature of theology," in The theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2005):  26 (1-26), with reference to the Collationes Credo in Deum:  "Despite all of their effort, none of the philosophers before the coming of Christ was able to know as much about God, and about what is necessary for life, as one old woman [uetula] knows by faith after Christ's coming.  Hence it is said:  'The earth is full of the knowledge of God' [Isaiah 11:9]" (1).  The title is from p. 25.

The good is diffusive of itself in the way in which an end moves

"the good is said to be diffusive of its being [(lit. of itself)] in the way in which the end is said to move [(bonum dicitur diffusivum sui esse, eo modo quo finis dicitur movere)]."

     Thomas Aquinas, ST I.5.4.ad 2, trans. Ralph McInerny.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.

Galileo, loyal Catholic?

“To the Protestants he was yet another image of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, which was not a role that he liked to play; he felt he was a victim not of the Church but of corruption within the Church, as he tried to make clear if he got the chance." 

     Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's dream, chap. 20.4 ((New York:  Ballantine Books, 2009), 511).

     Presumably this is accurate?  The historical portions of the novel do seem remarkably fair.
     "The italicized passages in this novel are mostly from Galileo's writing or that of his contemporaries, with a few visitors from other times.  I made some changes in these texts, and many elisions that I did not mark, but I was always relying on the translators" (531).

     Robinson continues as follows:  "I do not hope for any relief, [Galileo] wrote to a supporter named Peiresc, and that is because I have committed no crime.  I might hope for a pardon if I had erred.  With the guilty a prince can show forbearance, but against one wrongly sentenced when he is innocent, it is expedient to uphold rigor, so as to put up a show of strict lawfulness.  This was like something out of Machiavelli, a writer Galileo knew well.  Galileo had met his prince, too, and suffered the consequent tortures, just as Machiavelli had."
     Galileo's conversation with the young John Milton continues in the same vein, which is to say that he refuses to take the Protestant bait (512-514).

A birthday prayer (8th century)

O God, life of the faithful, savior and guardian of those who fear you, who have deigned to lead your servant N. to this day of his natural birth, one year further on [(exemto, taken away)], increase in him the grace of the protector of life [(gratiam in eo vitae protectoris augmenta)], and multiply his days by a great number [(numerositate)] of years, that, by acknowledging [(annuente)] you, he, having been carried forward [(provectus)] through a fruitful lifetime, may merit to attain to the beginning [(principatum, beginning, origin, first rank)] of celestial joys.

Deus, vita fidelium, timentium te salvator et custos, qui famulum tuum Illum ad hanc diem natalis sui genuini, exemto anno, perducere dignatus es, gratiam in eo vitae protectoris augmenta, et dies eius annorum numerositate multiplica, ut te annuente, per felicem provectus aetatem, ad principatum caelestium gaudiorum pervenire mereatur.

     Postcommunion prayer, Missa (Oration[es]) "in natale genuinum", Gelasian sacramentary (8th century), my translation.

"the proper attitude with respect to death"

"The tristitia theme belongs . . . to the most beautiful [of] expositions in the [treatise on] Christology of Thomas. . . . Christ wants to experience sadness [(die Traurigkeit)] in the face of death, first, because it belongs to the proper attitude with respect to [(Einstellung gegenüber)] death; second, in order to suffer and thus to redeem us; and, finally, in order to provide us with an example (cf. how [in the commentary] In Joh. Thomas turns even the natural sense of the injunction 'Non turbetur cor vestrum [(Let not your heart be troubled)]' completely into its opposite)."

     Leo Scheffczyk on ST III.14-15, in "Die Stellung des Thomas von Aquin in der Entwicklung der Lehre von den mysteria vitae Christi," in Renovatio et reformatio:  wider das Bild vom "finsteren" Mittelalter:  Festschrift für Ludwig Hödl zum 60. Geburtstag überreicht von Freunden sowie Kollegen und Schülern, ed. Manfred Gerwing und Godehard Ruppert (Münster:  Aschendorff, 1985), 60 (44-70).
     The passage in the commentary In Joh. to which Scheffczyk refers is this one:  "Here he is not forbidding them to be troubled in spirit, but he is forbidding that their hearts, that is, their spirits, be troubled. For there is a troubled state which arises from reason; this is to be praised and is not forbidden" (trans. Joseph Kenny).