Saturday, May 30, 2020

Kenosis Thomistica (i.e. Patristica, Calvinistica, etc.), that Extra Thomisticum (Patristicum, Calvinisticum, etc.)

"the Lord, i.e., God the Father, 'will execute his brief word' [Rom 9:28:  verbum breviatum faciet Dominus], i.e., [his] incarnate [Word], because the Son of God emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.  He is called 'emptied' (exinanitum) or 'brief' (breviatum), not because anything was subtracted from the fullness or greatness of his divinity, but because he assumed our thinness and smallness [nostrum exilitatem et parvitatem suscepit]."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Rom. 9, lec. 5 (no. 805), as trans. Gilles Emery, "Kenosis, Christ, and the Trinity in Thomas Aquinas," Nova et vetera 17, no. 3 (Summer 2019):  856 (839-869).


"He emptied himself.  But since he was filled with the divinity, did he empty himself of that?  No, because he remained what he was; and what he was not, he assumed.  But this must be understood in regard to the assumption of what he had not, and not according to the assumption of what he had.  For just as he descended from heaven, not that he ceased to exist in heaven, but because he began to exist in a new way on earth, so he also emptied himself, not by putting off his divine nature, but by assuming a human nature."

     Super Phil. 2, lec. 2 (no. 57), on p. 842.


"He is not said to have ‘emptied himself’ by diminishing his divine nature, but by assuming our deficient nature."

     In de div. nom. 2, lec. 5 (no. 207), on p. 853.


"the Word of God emptied himself, that is to say, was made small, not by the loss of his own greatness, but by the assumption of human smallness."

     SCG IV, ch. 34 (no. 3715), on p. 855.


"He is said to have emptied himself, not by losing his fullness, but because he took our littleness upon himself."

     ST III.57.2.ad 2, on pp. 855-856.


"'He emptied himself':  he made himself small not by putting off greatness, but by taking on smallness."

     Super Gal. 4, lec. 2 (no. 203), on p. 856.


"he emptied himself:  not that he abandoned his great dignity, but he hid it by taking on our smallness".

     Super Ioan. 13, lec. 2 (no. 1746), on p. 857.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

"the only prayers never denied are moderate ones."

     "And I believe that God will hear our prayers, since we make them with such firm faith, and will grant us our wish, it being so moderate [(mediocre)].  The wise men of old called moderation [(Mediocrité)] golden—that is precious, universally praised, welcome everywhere.  Look through the sacred Bible [(les sacres bibles)] and you'll find that the only prayers never denied are moderate ones [(que ont mediocrité requis, those characterized by the requisite moderation)]."

     Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel IV.Prologue (trans. Burton Raffel (New York & London:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 384).  According to the 1994 Pléiade edition annotated by Mireille Huchon, mediocrité (juste milieu, golden mean) acquired the pejorative sense it has today only in the 17th century (1487n7).  Trans. Urquhart & Motteux:  "the prayers of those who asked moderately were never unanswered."
     And that's how it is, that's what happens to those who, simply, innocently, wish only for moderate things, and make moderate choices [(en simplicité soubhaitent et optent choses mediocres)].  Learn from them, you other lowland humbugs [391].

Sunday, May 24, 2020

The Son united the substance of our fragility with himself and "collocated" it with the Father

"the most sacred day on which your Only Begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself"

"diem sacratissimum . . . quo Dominus noster, Unigenitus Filius tuus, unitam sibi fragilitatis nostrae substantiam in gloriae tuae dextera collocavit"

the most sacred day on which our Lord, your Only Begotten Son, has collocated the united-with-himself substance of our fragility at the right hand of your glory

     The Communicantes proper to the Ascension, Eucharistic Prayer I, Roman missal.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Raymond Saint-Jean on perseverance

"constancy is linked to space, to the obstacles that rear up [along the way]. Perseverance is linked to the point-of-accomplishment-in-time at which one aims, while endurance floods the interval in between. Patience . . . is [by contrast] meta-empirical. . . . It is . . . perseverence that makes it possible for all of the other virtues to endure. . . . [W]hat is the 'heaven' into which one enters without the sustained 'violence' of perseverance (Mt 11:12)? Perseverance, along with patience and constancy [and endurance], is indeed the virtue of 'the violent [who] take it by force.'"

     Raymond Saint-Jean, S.J. (the philosopher), "Persévérance," Dictionnaire de spiritualité 12.1 (1984), cols. 1183-1184.
"constancy is linked to space [(espace, possibly a given interval of time)], to the obstacles that rear up [(qui l'assailent) along the way].  Perseverance is linked to the point-of-accomplishment in time at which one aims [(au terme visé du temps)], while endurance floods the interval in between [(en remplit l'intervalle)].  Patience . . . is [by contrast] meta-empirical [(la vertu métempirique)]. . . . [That said,] It is the grace of perseverance that makes it possible for all of the other virtues to endure. . . . [W]hat is the 'heaven' into which one enters without the sustained 'violence' of perseverance (Mt 11:12)?  Perseverance, along with patience and constancy [and endurance], is indeed the virtue of 'the violent [who] take it by force' [(sont bien les vertus des forts)]."

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Probably St. Thomas Aquinas

O God, who in this wondrous sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion; grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of thy body and blood, that we may ever continue to feel within ourselves the blessed fruit of thy redemption. Who.

Deus qui nobis sub sacramento mirabili passionis tuae memoriam reliquisti, tribue, quaesumus, ita nos corporis et sanguinis tui sacra mysteria venerari, ut redemptionis tuae fructum in nobis iugiter sentiamus.

Or

ut tuae redemptionis fructum

or

ut tui redemptionis fructum

or

ut redemptionis tui fructum.

     Probably St. Thomas Aquinas (Corpus Thomisticum:  "authenticitate probabile").  Officium de festo Corporis Christi, ad mandatum Urbani Papae IV (Orvieto, July-August 1264).  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum, passim.  "Certainly the text as it now stands in the current Roman rite or Dominican rite did not come from Thomas.  The text in the current liturgical books of the Church is that of the fifteenth-century Roman liturgy, which was introduced in the collections of Thomas's writings by Antonio Pizzamano only in 1497.  The revised text of the fifteenth century was reformed by Pope Pius V in the sixteenth century, and again by Pius X in the twentieth" (James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas d'Aquino:  his life, thought, and work (New York:  Doubleday, 1974), 177-178 (176-185); prayer itself at 181-182).  "The original text of the Mass ('Cibavit eos') and the office ('Sacerdos in aeternum') have not yet [(i.e. by 1974)] been reconstructed" (400).  Starter bibliography at Corpus Thomisticum.
     Variant translations:

O God, who in this wonderful sacrament, hast left us a perpetual memorial of thy passion:  grant us, we beseech thee, so to reverence the sacred mysteries of thy body and blood, as in our souls to be always sensible of the redemption thou has purchased for us.

Friday, May 8, 2020

Pseudo-St. Teresa of Ávila

"Govern everything by your wisdom, O Lord, so that my soul may always be serving you in the way you will and not as I choose. Let me die to myself so that I may serve you; let me live to you who are life itself."

     Attributed to St. Teresa of Ávila but never, so far as I've been able to tell, with a proper citation.
     Also, having first tested these scans of the Complete works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers, against the copy on my shelf, and found them to be functioning perfectly no matter what I pulled out of the three volumes of the latter at random, I searched for relevant occurrences of Govern, "your wisdom", "my soul" serving, "you will and not", "not as I choose", "die to myself", "live to you", and "life itself", but always came up empty.  Though this could have come from the hand of a translator other than Peers, it seems pretty unlikely that none of these short phrases would have been used by both.  For a searchable version of the critical edition of the Spanish, go here.

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Fake newsies

"But let me ask you this.  A guy shoots 1 for 23 from the field."

"McDeere?"

"Yeah.  But he goes 8 for 8 from the foul line.  My question is, Why are you fouling this guy at all?  I’d just get out of the way and point him toward the basket."

     Toby Ziegler to Sam Seaborn, The West Wing, Season 3, Episode 11.