"a metaphysics of conjoined attention"

"the man who strives to attend [(s’efforce à l’attention)] rejoins the harmonious whole of th[ose] other created minds for whom attention is less difficult, indeed spontaneous, and God himself, in the grasp of the one theoretical and practical reality, of the true and the good.  One finds oneself here at the heart of very contemporary questions about attention conjoined or shared [(l'attention conjointe ou partagée)], [a heart] that radically modifies the conceptual terrain of the question of attention, dislodge[s it] from a posture purely egological, or purely dyadic, in order to situate it within the [whole] system of encounters with others and with the world.  In the ethics of Malebranche, . . . attention serves less to grasp the divine will that man must discern in particular situations than to see the general order-of-perfection of things [(l’ordre general de perfection des choses)].  And, in the realm [(temps)] of thought and of reason in every case (outside of faith in a religious revelation), it is from this correct grasp of the ordination of things in accordance with their perfection that the human will is called to rejoin the movements of preference, choice, attachment, and regard as executed by all minds and once again God himself infallibly and uniformly.  One has here then a metaphysics of conjoined attention [(une métaphysique de l'attention conjointe)].  The moral life would be [then] nothing other than the life oriented, like that of God, towards God himself.  Philosophical by consequence on this way of reason, the ethics of Malebranche is, like the whole of his thought, [nevertheless] radically religious, in the precise, trans-Jansenist sense of a rational confidence in the love of a God who guarantees the solidity ([solidité,] a term very frequent in Malebranche), that is to say the maintenance in being, of entities fragile and inconstant, but whose capacity for attention is a finite thread that, by grace, holds them in union with the Infinite."

     Michel Dupuis, "L'attention et l'amour de l'Ordre dans la morale de Malebranche," L'attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  70-71 (59-71).

The most precious goods must not be sought, but awaited

     "We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.  Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity."

     Simone Weil, "Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1951), 56-57.

     "Les biens les plus précieux ne doivent pas être cherchés, mais attendus.  Car l'homme ne peut pas les trouver par ses propres forces, et s'il se met à leur recherche, il trouvera à la place des faux biens dont il ne saura pas discerner la fausseté."

     The most precious goods must not be sought, but awaited.  For man cannot find them by his own powers, and if he puts himself onto the search for them, he will find instead only false goods, the falsity of which he will be unable to discern.

"And Thou hast freely given | what earth could never buy, | The bread of life from heaven, | That now I shall not die"

     Johann Rist, "Wie wohl hast du gelabet," stanza 2, as trans. Catherine Winkworth, in "O Living Bread from Heaven, in Lyra Germanica (London:  George Newnes Limited; New York:  Charles Scribener's Sons, 1855), 283-286.  The original:  Neuer himmlischer Lieder (1651), 76-81.  See also Hymnary.org.

"no unmediated divine actions, no unmediated divine gifts, no unmediated sources of sanctification"

"The sacraments are little Christs.  Just as the Incarnation of the Eternal Word establishes the framework of the Christian religion, so the sacraments define the parameters of sanctified life in the Church.  Once the Eternal Word becomes Incarnate, no unmediated divine actions, no unmediated divine gifts, no unmediated sources of sanctification are recognized by the Church.  Otherwise put, the sacraments have become the indispensable instruments for the communication of God’s love."

     Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., “The sacraments, grace and ethics,” Thomistic Institute lecture, Harvard University, 15 November 2018, from 5:07.

"Marriage" in heaven

"It’s hard for me to think that I could be me and have a relation to everybody else that’s the same as the relation to my wife.  I just don’t see how I’m me.  Not the me that [is] the life I’ve led.  So even if there’s no marriage or giving in marriage in heaven, . . . nevertheless I can’t imagine how I cease to be my . . . [how] that history goes.  I mean, that history seems to be a part of who I am.  There will be a radical openness to all things, but I think I’m still me, and I don’t see how that disappears. . . . I can’t imagine me being me without my history. . . .  So I would think Yes, we will remain who we are, and I think who we are—who we’ve come to be—involves a set of relations.  They may be expanded, but I can’t see them being erased, and we still are particular individuals."

     Michael Root, "What do the saints do for eternity?  The activity of heaven," Thomistic Institute lecture, New York University, 10 November 2018, from 56:51.

"As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe"

Communist Party of Ireland

"The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.  The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one.  As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed.  In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more nor less than art."

     J[ohn] D[esmond] Bernal, The world, the flesh and the devil:  an enquiry into the future of the three enemies of the rational soul (London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929), 78-79 (chap. 5).
     I was put onto this by Rémi Brague, whose The kingdom of man:  genesis and failure of the modern project (trans. Paul Seaton, Catholic ideas for a secular world (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 111) sets this powerfully in the context of the whole of the modern "project" (5 and therefore passim).  Bernal was a communist of some sort.  On p. 119, Brague connects "The dream of the indefinite malleability of nature" up with "the Soviet Union, poor in real inventions, armaments excepted," but "the country of regimens of longevity, youth serums, even 'resurrections' (anabiosis) of animals drained of their blood" (most notably, presumably, Lenin himself (on which see, for example, Yuri Slezkin, The house of government:  a saga of the Russian revolution (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2017)).
     Needless to say, by "art" Bernal means not the fine arts but, in the words of Brague, the "domination of external nature, perceived as an object to conquer" (6).  And then, of course, internal nature, too.  For "Where action (praxis) is reduced to making (poiēsis), man loses what he alone was able to do, since he alone 'acts' in the strict meaning of the term", such that "There is therefore no longer any reason for which he could exempt himself from production, and he must himself become its object" (165).  Thus, "A self-destructive dialectic is . . . unleashed.  The project of a radical immanence ends by reversing the project of a domination of nature by man into a domination by nature over man" (197), [à la C. S. Lewis' The abolition of man.]  "A dialectic is put in place by which the ambition of man to total dominance leads to his own effacement" (201).

John Wesley on the British Museum

Wikimedia Commons

"At the desire of some of my friends, I accompanied them to the British Museum.  What an immense field is here for curiosity to range in!  One large room was filled from top to bottom with things brought from Tahiti; two or three more with things dug out of the ruins of Herculaneum!  Seven huge apartments are filled with curious books, five with manuscripts, two with fossils of all sorts, and the rest with various animals!  But what account will a man give to the Judge of quick and dead for a life spent in collecting all these?"

     John Wesley, Journal, Friday, 22 December 1781; BEWJW 23 =Journals and diaries 6 (1776-1786), ed. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), 190.  Ward's comment:  "JW's almost automatic recurrence to the theme of the transience of this world's goods, is singularly inappropriate both to the permanent intellectual significance of the collections, and to the instinctive engagement with them of his own intellectual curiosity" (n47), not to mention not only his positive or at least neutral references to the collections of the likes of the British Museum and the Bodleian Library elsewhere, but his own lifelong engagement with books and collections (his own, his Christian library, the Kingswood library, etc.).  Perhaps the operative term here is "curiosity."  But what is a mere "curiosity" to one can be (or become) a source of inestimable value from another point of view.  I was put onto this comment (I trust it was this comment) by Michael Paulus.