"one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope, which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities."

     Raymond Tallis, "The shrink from hell," a review of Jacques Lacan (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1997), by Elizabeth Roudinesco.  Times higher education supplement no. 1304 (October 31, 1997), p. 20.

"Marriages are contracted for always, not for ever."

"Ehen werden für immer geschlossen, nicht für ewig."

     Bernd Wannenwetsch, Die Freiheit der Ehe, 299, as quoted by Christoph Raedel on p. 190 and 193n55 of his "Christliche Identität und neue Schöpfung:  Das Evangelium von der Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen als Zentrum der kirchlichen Homosexualitätdiskussion," European journal of theology 24, no. 2 (2015):  190 and 193n55.  Nicely put, if not at all nicely done.
     Raedel, same page, underscoring mine:

The—by Paul no more than sketched—distinction between the heavenly and the earthly bodies (1 Cor 15:39-49) refers also to the earthly restriction [(Begrenzung)] of marriage.  In this way monogamous heterosexual marriage experiences its theological relativization.  Yet [(jedoch)] it is relativized not in relation to other human forms of life, but by this, that it is placed in relation to the promise of the new creation.  Characteristic of the kingdom of God in its final consummation will be the sublimation of the marriage between man and woman [(Mann und Frau)] into [(die 'Auf-Hebung' . . . in . . . hinein)] the 'marriage' between Christ and the glorified community (Rev 19:7).

"error concerning creatures . . . spills over into false opinion about God".

"the opinion is false of those who asserted that it made no difference to the truth of the faith what anyone holds about creatures, so long as one thinks rightly about God. . . .  For error concerning creatures ... spills over into false opinion about God...."

"falsam esse quorundam sententiam qui dicebant nihil interesse ad fidei veritatem quid de creaturis quisque sentiret, dummodo circa Deum recte sentiatur, ... nam error circa creaturas redundat in falsam de Deo sententiam...."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II.iii.6, citing Augustine, On the origin of the soul IV.4, as trans. James F. Anderson.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.  Cited, tellingly, by Emmanuel Perrier O.P., in his lecture "Thomas Aquinas on creation and nature" (which opens with a reference to four de-natur-ations of secularism), Thomistic Institute Angelicum, 5 October 2019, at 25:10 and following:

To hold on[to] natural law ethics is not only legitimate on philosophical grounds; it is also a theological necessity for Christians....  Many Catholics today, influenced by the general movement of de-natur-ation, share the opinion that we should spare ourselves the burden of defending natural law ethics, and ... focus instead on preaching the Gospel.  Faith in Jesus Christ seems enough.  But besides the fact that it would lead, it would be a direct path to a religious kind of de-natur-ation like Qur'an, what would be our faith in Christ if it were no more the faith in Jesus Christ our Lord?  To have faith in Jesus Christ our Lord we need natural law ethics because Jesus Christ is our Lord in governing the universe, that is, every nature towards its end.

"a sober person does not take less pleasure in food taken in moderation than the glutton, but his concupiscence reposes less in such pleasures."

"Beasts are without reason. In this way man becomes, as it were, like them in coition, because he cannot moderate concupiscence. In the state of innocence nothing of this kind would have happened that was not regulated by reason, not because delight of sense was less, as some say (rather indeed would sensible delight have been the greater in proportion to [(fuisset enim tanto maior delectatio sensibilis, quanto)] the greater purity of nature and the greater sensibility of the body), but because the force of concupiscence would not have so inordinately thrown itself into [(non ita inordinate se effudisset super)] such pleasure, being curbed by reason, whose place it is not to lessen sensual pleasure, but to prevent the force of concupiscence from cleaving to it immoderately [(ad quam non pertinet ut sit minor delectatio in sensu, sed ut vis concupiscibilis non immoderate delectationi inhaereat)]. By 'immoderately' I mean going beyond the bounds of reason, as a sober person does not take less pleasure in food taken in moderation than the glutton, but his concupiscence lingers less in such pleasures [(sobrius in cibo moderate assumpto non minorem habet delectationem quam gulosus; sed minus eius concupiscibilis super huiusmodi delectatione requiescit)]. This is what Augustine means by the words quoted, which do not exclude intensity of pleasure [(magnitudinem delectationis)] from the state of innocence, but ardor of desire and restlessness of the mind [(ardorem libidinis et inquietudinem animi)]."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I.98.2.ad 3, trans. FEDP.  As trans. more freely by Edmund Hill on pp. 157 and 159 of vol. 13 of the Blackfriars edition published in 1964:

Animals lack reason.  So what makes man like the animals in copulation is the inability of reason to temper the pleasure of copulation and the heat of desire.  But in the state of innocence there would have been nothing of this sort that was not tempered by reason.  Not that the pleasurable sensation would have been any the less intense, as some [(Bonaventure, Alexander of Hales)] say, for the pleasure of sense would have been all the greater, given the purity of man's nature and sensibility of his body.  But the pleasure urge would not have squandered itself in so disorderly a fashion on this sort of pleasure when it was ruled by reason.  It is not demanded by this empire of reason that the pleasurable sensation should be any the less, but that the pleasure urge should not clutch at the pleasure in an immoderate fashion; and by 'immoderate' I mean going beyond the measure of reason.  Thus a sober man has no less pleasure in food taken moderately than a greedy man; but his pleasure urge does not wallow so much in this sort of pleasure.  And this is the bearing of Augustine's words, which do not exclude intensity of pleasure from the state of innocence, but impetuous lust and disturbance of mind.

Newspeak

     "I may come down from my garret with a plan in view, intending the first move towards the 'liquidation of the bourgeoisie' about which I had read in my Marxist textbook.  But this plan will not survive the first exchange of words with my chosen victim, and the attempt to impose it or to speak the language that announces it will have the same effect as the wind in Aesop's fable, competing with the sun to remove the coat of a traveller.  Ordinary language warms and softens; Newspeak freezes and hardens."

     Roger Scruton, Fools, frauds and firebrands:  thinkers of the New Left (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), 11.  The quotation marks around "liquidation of the bourgeoisie" appear with the first occurrence of the phrase in the previous paragraph, not here.

In praise of a theological mediocrity

It was "the developed neo-Nicene theology of the Trinity and its concept of the hypostases that could for the first time provide the necessary conceptual and intellectual instrumentarium for a tension-free interpretation of the co-enthronment of Christ.  Only when the unity of God is thought together with [(in)] his simultaneous differentiation into three hypostases can the enthronement of Christ be expressed on the far side of [1] a naïve conception of the bisellium (and its tendency towards ditheism) [on the one hand] and [2] an allegorical solution to [the difficulties posed by] this passage [on the other]. . . .

     "And yet—and this is the surprising discovery—the requisite linkage of Cappadocian terminology to the interpretation of Ps 110:1 is first found not in the leading theological minds of the epoch, but in a [single] work of a rather (and I say this advisedly) 'average thinker' above all, in [the Ancoratus of] the already oft-mentioned Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, . . . where passages on the enthronement of Father and Son are cited and then for the very first time interpreted in a sense consistent with the [new] doctrine of the three hypostases:

The Father sits in heaven, but '[the] Son sits at the right hand of the Father'. . . .  With this it should be obvious [that the Son] is an hypostasis and [the Spirit] is an hypostasis.

Only against the background of this conceptual solution can the Bishop of Cyprus speak in one breath of the 'one Godhead', the εἰς Θεός, without turning the 'co-enthronement of Christ' into an episode in salvation history.  By means of this complicated conceptual apparatus he can place the statement εἰς Θεός beside Ps 110:1 for the first time [in history] without tension.  Unoriginal [(wenig origineller theologischer Denker)] though he was, Epiphanius obviously realized that only a sessio ad dexteram interpreted against the background of the neo-Nicene formula could point the way between the Scylla of monarchianism and the Charybdis of ditheism, and he did so when he interpreted the text as [a] confutation of Sabellian phantasies of unity [on the one hand] and [the] Arian Christology of subordination [on the other]."

     Christoph Markschies, "»Sessio ad dexteram«:  Bemerkungen zu einem altchristlichen Bekenntnismotiv in der christologischen Diskussion der altkirchlichen Theologen," in Le Trône de Dieu, ed. Marc Philonenko, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament 69 (Tübingen:  J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), 296-297 (252-317).

"There it is that Paul, there it is that Peter, will rise, and be caught up to meet the Lord in the air."

     St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 32.  Greek from In divi Pauli epistolam ad Romanos homiliae XXXIII, ed. F. Field (Oxford:  J. H. Parker; London:  F. and J. Rivington, 1849), 490.

"This is why I love Rome, although if I would, there are many other things for which I might praise her her greatness, her antiquity, her beauty, her population, her empire, her wealth, or her victories. But all these I pass by, and I call Rome blessed for this cause, that Paul in his lifetime loved her children so well, was so kindly toward them, taught openly there, and at length laid down his life among them. They have there his holy body, and this alone maketh that city illustrious more than doth aught else. And just as a great and strong body hath two bright eyes, so are the bodies of these two Holy Apostles in the city of Rome. Not brighter is the sky when the sun doth make it all light with his beams, than is the city of Rome darting forth these twin rays of light to the uttermost bounds of the earth. There it is that Paul, there it is that Peter, will rise [(Ἐκεῖθεν ἁρπαγήσεται Παῦλος, ἐκεῖθεν Πέτρος)], and be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. Think, and thrill at the thought, of what Rome will see then, when she beholdeth Paul and Peter rising suddenly out of that coffin, to be caught up to meet the Lord."

     Trans. at Divinum Officium.  Matins, Saturday in the Octave of  the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. Roman breviary (1910).

"I love Rome even for this, although indeed one has other grounds for praising it, both for its greatness, and its antiquity, and its beauty, and its populousness, and for its power, and its wealth, and for its successes in war. But I let all this pass, and esteem it blessed on this account, that both in his lifetime he wrote to them, and loved them so, and talked with them whiles he was with us, and brought his life to a close there. Wherefore the city is more notable upon this ground, than upon all others together. And as a body great and strong, it hath as two glistening eyes the bodies of these Saints. Not so bright is the heaven, when the sun sends forth his rays, as is the city of Rome, sending out these two lights into all parts of the world. From thence will Paul be caught up, from thence Peter [(Ἐκεῖθεν ἁρπαγήσεται Παῦλος, ἐκεῖθεν Πέτρος)]. Just bethink you, and shudder at the thought of what a sight Rome will see, when Paul ariseth suddenly from that deposit, together with Peter, and is lifted up to meet the Lord."

     Trans. J. B. Morris, LFC 7 (1841) =NPNF 11 (1889).