Not really a "blog", strictly speaking; more of an on-line notebook. A sort of commonplace book , where I can collect short excerpts, and related links, from books that I am reading (and the occasional on-line article). This is mostly for my benefit; things that I want to remember. Sounds dull? Yeah, maybe, but no one is twisting your arm, and besides, there's some good stuff down there...after all, there are certainly worse ways for you to waste fifteen or twenty minutes on the internet.
-Buy this book.
- About the Author
-Richard Purtill Page at Ignatius Insight.
"...a universe without God is a universe without reason, a universe without moral values, a universe without hope of lasting happiness. It is precisely that the modern atheist or agnostic inhabits, precisely this world that the modern theater of the absurd, novel of the absurd, art of the absurd, shout, whine, and snivel about. If reason left us no alternative to such a view, intellectual honesty might force us to accept it. But if this view is true, reason has no force. If morality impelled us to take such a view, integrity might make us choose it. But if the view is true, morality has no force. If the deepest needs of our nature were satisfied by this view, then our nature might compel us to accept it. But if this view is true, the deepest needs of our nature are illusory. In sum, there can be no reason for accepting the absurdist view of the universe, for that view destroys all reasons." p.119
- Buy this book.
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
"In order to know what God is, Moses turns to God. He asks His name and straightway comes the answer: Ego sum qui Ait ; sic dices filiis Isreal ; qui est misit me ad vos (Exod. iii. 14). No hint of metaphysics, but God speaks, causa finita est, and Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended. From this moment it is understood once and for all that the proper name of God is Being and that, according to the word of St. Ephrem, taken up later by St. Bonaventure, this name devotes His very essence. Now to say that the word being designates the very essence of God, and the essence of no other being but God, is to say that in God essence and existence are identical. That is why St. Thomas Aquinas, referring expressly to this text of Exodus, will declare that among all the divine names there is one that is eminently proper to God, namely Qui est, precisely because this Qui estnon significat forman aliquam sed ipsum esse. In this principle lies an inexhaustible metaphysical fecundity ; all the studies that here follow will be merely studies of its results. There is but one God and this God is Being, that is the corner-stone of all Christian philosophy, and it was not Plato, it was not even Aristotle, it was Moses who put it in position." p.51
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Newman (Wikipedia)
" The Grammar of Assent derives from Pope Paul's judgment an increased significance because in it Newman, rejecting the purely intellectualist approach to the problem of God, talks a language much more like that of Duns Scotus than that of St. Thomas. It is also much more like that of the modern analyst and existentialist and we can see that growth of tolerance reflected in the present language of the Church. Where the early nineteenth century Popes had been only concerned to denounce, the modern documents are concerned to explain and understand. Contrast for instance Pius IX's full blooded denunciation of all enemies of the Church with the careful and reasoned attempt to discover what had led atheists to become atheists of John XXIII in Mater et Magistra or in the Schema XIII of the Church in the World Today; contrast Gregory XVI's denunciation of freedom of opinion as 'insanity' with John XXIII's assertion of its rights in Pacem in Terris; compare the Syllabus Errorum's advocacy of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures with the assertion of a duty of hermeneutic exposition of them in Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu; or the earlier Pope's denunciation of liberalism, progress and democracy with the Council's assertion of the autonomous rights of science and it's endorsement of democracy in it's judgment that 'admirable is the practice of those nations in which the greater number of citizens take part with true liberty in political life.'
Posts
