"without water there is no mystery of regeneration"

"the three witnesses in baptism are one: the water, the blood, and the Spirit, for, if you take away one of these, the sacrament of baptism does not stand.  For what is water without the cross of Christ except a common element without any sacramental effect?  And again without water there is no mystery of regeneration [(sine aqua regenerationis mysterium est)].  For 'unless a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.'  Moreover, even a catechumen believes in the cross of the Lord Jesus, with which he, too, is signed, but, unless he be baptized 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,' he cannot receive remission of sins nor drink in the benefit of spiritual grace."

     St. Ambrose, De mysteriis 20, trans. Deferrari (Theological and dogmatic works, FC 44 (Catholic University Press, 1963), 12).  =SC 25, 113, ll. 26-27.  Liturgy of the hours (Universalis):

the three witnesses in baptism – the water, the blood and the Spirit – are one. This means that if you take away one of these the sacrament is not conferred. What is water without the cross of Christ? Only an ordinary element without sacramental effect. Again, without water there is no sacrament of rebirth: Unless a man is born again of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. The catechumen believes in the cross of the Lord with which he too is signed, but unless he is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit he cannot receive the forgiveness of sins or the gift of spiritual grace.

God is still incarnate. Not

      "When [the fisherman] had gone to heaven, the lord [Kṛṣṇa (?)], yoking himself to the Self which is Brahman, imperishable, beyond thought, identical with Vāsudeva, without imperfection, unborn, immortal, the measureless Viṣṇu, the Self of all, having gone beyond the three guṇas, abandoned his human body."

     Viṣṇu Purāṇa 5.37.1-76, as trans. Classical Hindu mythology:  a reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas, ed. & trans. Cornelia Dimmitt & J. A. B. van Buitenen (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1978), 146.

An arranged marriage

      "Thjostolf rowed away up the fjord, while Thorvald's men shouted curses at him.  He made no reply, but carried on rowing until he reached home.  There he beached the boat and walked up to the house with his blood-smeared axe on his shoulder.
     "Hallgerd was outside.  'There is blood on your axe,' she said.  'What have you done?'
     "'I have now arranged that you can be married a second time [(Nú hefi ek þat at gǫrt . . . at þú munt gefin verða í ǫðru sinni)],' replied Thjostolf."

     Njal's saga 12 (trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (London:  Penguin Books, 1960), 60).  Original (which I know nothing about) from the critical edition upon which the above translation is based:  Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Reykjavík : Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1954), 35.

"labor und error"

"nothing would be more absurd than to interpret every image of [the externally multifarious and internally complex pagan and especially 'Christian'] labyrinth . . . as the manifestation of but a single sense.  The intention behind every single [(jeder einzelne)] employment of the figure . . . must be groped after differentially [(differenzierend . . . ertastet)]. . . ."

     Wolfgang Haubrichs, "Error inextricabilis:  Form und Funktion der Labyrinthabbildung in mittelalterlichen Handschriften," in Text und Bild:  Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweier Künst in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, hrsg. Christel Meier und Uwe Ruberg (Wiesbaden:  Reichert, 1980), 158 (63-174), translation and underscoring mine.  Needless to say, I have yet to read (all 112 pages of) this impressive-looking article as a whole.

     "Little can be said with certainty about the function and significance of church labyrinths.  Most accounts, for example, of labyrinths having served as paths of repentance and as symbolic pilgrimages are only hearsay and must be very late, possibly from the 18th century.  Despite this, I shall endeavor to present several possible interpretations" [tied to some of the different historical exemplars]. . . .  And so, on "The path to Jerusalem" interpretation, "Several northern French pavement labyrinths were referred to as the 'Chemin du Jérusalem,' the path to Jerusalem.  We do not know how old this designation is; I do not know of any sources that date further back than the 18th century.  This relatively recent appellation is probably just as uncharacteristic of the labyrinth as is the speculation that surrounds it:  that such labyrinths are from the time of the Crusades and offered those who remained behind—those for whom a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not possible—a substitute pilgrimage of a penitential nature. . . .
     "We can take our cue as to how seriously to take such speculations about the labyrinth being a substitute pilgrimage to the actual city of Jerusalem from a map of Lille, where, also in the mid-19th century, a route for pilgrimages was planned."

     Hermann Kern, Through the labyrinth:  designs and meanings over 5,000 years (Munich:  Prestel, 2000), 146, 148.  Regarding that map of Lille included in the prize-winning but unused 1856 plan by Clutton and Burges for the design of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille in Lille, see p. 155:  "Representations of the cities pilgrims would have travelled through on the 'Path to Jerusalem' appear in the spandrels:  Lille as the starting point, Rome, Constantinople, and, lastly, Jerusalem.  The design was a Neo-Gothic version of an only slightly older idea, taken literally, and thus deprived of its spiritual character and given a practical, geographical slant as a manual for pilgrims" (with sources).

"Let grace come and this world pass away"

Hiersolymitanus | Panagios Taphos 54, fol. 79a-b

ἐλθέτω χάρις καὶ παρελθέτω ὁ κόσμος οὗτος.

     Didache 10.6.  The quote constitutes most of l. 10 on p. 79b, which I was able to determine once Dr. Owen Ewald had identified what I took to be ιβ' as chap. 12 rather than chap. 11.  Hiersolymitanus | Panagios Taphos 54 (AD 1056) is, I think, the only complete manuscript of the Didache in the original Greek that we still possess.

A long-established but too-little-known reappreciation of the Spanish crown and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490-1573) on the Amerindians of New Spain

      "It is a commonplace to blame the Spanish conquest for the ills of modern Latin America.  But this argument bows to the discredited mythology of nationalist historians, who interpreted three centuries of Spanish rule as a time of retrograde oppression.  In reality the conditions of . . . most of [contemporary] Latin America, stem from the liberal reforms implemented in the nineteenth century by republican governments that abolished a well-established set of Spanish legislative measures.  These measures succeeded in creating a moral climate in which the Spanish crown was constantly reminded of its obligations towards the indigenous peoples, so much so that the latter felt empowered to fight for their rights all the way to the pinnacle of the judicial system.  It was the abolition of this system in favor of the 'universal' rights of 'man', in the abstract, that left Latin American communities defenceless against speculators for whom money was the only criterion.
     "Historians have been aware of this for decades. . . .
     As for "the old nationalist mythologies, whose only hero was the Dominican friar and 'Defender of the Indians', . . . For some time now historians have been aware that Las Casas was not a lone voice writing in a cultural vacuum, but part of a broad and vibrant intellectual milieu, keenly supported by the crown and reaching a famous high-point at the junta of Valladolid in 1550-1.
     "Nationalist historians still have the upper hand in the interpretation of this event, almost invariably and misleadingly described as a 'debate' in which Las Casas merely refuted the feeble attempts of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda to justify the conquests with the help of Aristotle's idea that some human beings were 'slaves by nature'.  Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas:  Defending empire, debating Las Casas is a long-overdue and thoroughly welcome corrective to this widespread opinion.  It includes carefully annotated translations of several key works that have never appeared in English. . . .  Nowhere in these works does Sepúlveda endorse the enslavement of indigenous peoples.  Nor does he support their forced conversion to Christianity.  It is true that, in the dialogue [Democrates secundus] (written at the time when he was translating Aristotle's Politics), he applies the philosopher's notion of natural slavery to justify subjugation; but this is quite likely the reason why a license to publish the work was never granted, which also explains why Sepúlveda moderated this argument over time, and ultimately abandoned the controversial language of natural slavery altogether.
     "Readers of this erudite volume will witness the cartoonish villain depicted in the bulk of the literature crumbling to pieces.  As one should expect from a talented linguist and renowned collaborator of the Italian Aristotelian Pietro Poponazzi, Sepúlveda's arguments are nuanced and often brilliantly constructed. . . .  His finely grained arguments thus presented important challenges to Las Casas and other critics of Spain's invasion of the Americas, and they did so in a much more dynamic and constructive way than the simplifications still prevalent in the literature would have us believe."

     Fernando Cervantes, reviewing We, the King:  creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-centurty Spanish New World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas:  Defending empire, debating Las Casas (Oxford University Press, 2023), in "The right to be heard:  the Spanish crown's solicitude for its Amerindian subjects, Times literary supplement no. 6307 (February 16, 2024):  8.

The anti-antiracism of Frantz Fanon

 "The [Frantz] Fanon we encounter in [Schatz's] pages rejects every form of racialist essentialism and envisions a future in which 'savage self-interest is [not] the sovereign principle of human conduct.'  His target is neither the West nor the Global North but all attempts to divide us through counterfeit categories in order to convince us that politics amounts to tribal struggles for power.
     "Schatz's portrait of Fanon does what superb biographies always do:  send the reader back to the original texts.  They provide a startling challenge to that recent antiracist ideology that routinely dismisses appeals to universalism as intellectual imperialism, fraudulent attempts to impose European ideas on non-European peoples.  The versions promoted by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo may be simplistic, but their simplicity and success lay bare assumptions also held by more thoughtful writers.  The very expression 'identity politics' assumes what is never proven:  that our identities are most fundamentally determined by aspects of our selfhood over which we have no control.  The inherited victimhood, or perpetratorship, that much current antiracist literature presupposes is just what Fanon sought to renounce. . . .
     "Common as it is today, th[e] claim [that 'universalism [is] itself a construct designed to veil the imposition of European values and institutions on the rest of the world'] was never made by Fanon.  His fury at the ways in which the ideals of the French Revolution were unrealized in the successive republics that proclaimed them never led him to jettison the ideals themselves.  Rather, he saw universalism as a promise whose fulfillment must be demanded.
". . . Fanon's goal was, according to Sekyi-Otu, 'not the death of the colonizer, but the death of race as the principle of moral judgement'. . . ."

     Susan Neiman, "Fanon the universalist," a review of The rebel's clinic:  the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Schatz, and Fanon's dialectic of experience, by Ato Sekyi-Otu, in The New York review of books 71, no. 10 (June 6, 2024):  21 (19-21).  It should be added that Nieman goes on to apply this Revolutionary "never been tried-ism" to Fanon's communism as well.