“She looking thro’ and thro’ me/Thoroughly to undo me,/Smiling, never speaks:/So innocent-arch, so cunning-simple…”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Lilian”
“Tota ecclesia instar tonitrui reboat Amen.”—Jerome, 2nd Prologue to his Commentary on Galatians, in Whitaker, Disputations on Holy Scripture
“We must exactly distinguish between man’s duty and God’s purpose, there being no connection between them. The purpose and decree of God is not the rule of our duty; neither is the performance of our duty in doing what we are commanded any declaration of what is God’s purpose to do, or his decree that it should be done. Especially is this to be seen and considered in the duty of the ministers of the gospel, in the dispensing of the word, and exhortations, invitations, precepts, and threatenings, committed unto them; all which are perpetual declaratives of our duty, and do manifest the approbation of the thing exhorted and invited to, with the truth of the connection between one thing and another, but not of the counsel and purpose of God, in respect of individual persons, and the ministry of the word. A minister is not to make inquiry after, nor to trouble himself about, those secrets of the eternal mind of God, namely—whom he purposes to save, and whom he hath sent Christ to die for in particular. It is enough for them to search his revealed will, and thence take their directions, from whence they have their commissions…and when they make proffers and tenders in the name of God to all, they do not say to all, “it is the purpose and intention of God that ye should believe,” (who gave them any such power?) but, that it is his command, which makes it their duty to do what is required of them; and they do not declare his mind, what himself in particular will do.”—John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ
“…that it is a great undertaking, I easily grant; but for the performance of it, hic labor, hoc opus.”—Owen
“For such reasoning as this have ever had very great weight and influence with all, even the worst of men: the church hath ever judged these books canonical; therefore you ought not to reject, or doubt concerning them. A man must be shameless indeed, who will not be moved by this argument. But it is one thing to force men to acknowledge the scriptures, and quite another to convince them of their truth.”—William Whitaker, Disputation Concerning Holy Scripture
“Assuredly, this is the difference between theology and philosophy: since it is only the external light of nature that is required to learn thoroughly the art of philosophy; but to understand theology aright, there is need of the internal light of the Holy Spirit, because the things of faith are not subject to the teaching of mere human reason."
“In Psalms xix and cxix the prophet David passes high encomiums upon the scriptures; from which praises and eulogies men’s necessity may be gathered. He he calls them the law; and what is more necessary than law? Now, if the law be necessary in a state, then much rather in the church. For if in civil affairs men cannot be left to themselves, but must be governed and retained in their duty by certain laws; much less should we be independent in divine things, and not rather bound by the closest ties to a prescribed and certain rule, lest we fall into a will worship hateful to God.”
“Christus veritatem se, non conseutudinem cognominavit” (Christ named himself truth, not custom.)—Tertullian, trans. Whitaker
“The fourth [opinion concerning Scripture the papists hold] is, their complaining of the incredible obscurity of the scriptures, not for the purpose of rousing men to diligence in studying and perusing them, but to bring the scriptures into hatred and subject them to wicked suspicions: as if God had published his scriptures as Aristotle did his books of physics: for no one to understand.”—Whitaker
“...not that I mean to depreciate [the poets]; but everyone can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language.”—Plato, Timaeus (Jowett)
“We must acknowledge disease of the mind to be a want of intelligence; and of this there are two kinds; to wit, madness and ignorance. In whatever state a man experiences either of them, that state may be called disease; and excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable.”—Timaeus
“Envy, jealousy, and hate render alike those they possess, but in our world people tend to misunderstand or ignore the resemblances and identities that these passions generate. They have ears only for the deceptive celebration of differences, which rages more than ever in our societies, not because real differences are increasing but because they are disappearing.”—Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
“What is the basis of imitating Jesus? It cannot be his ways of being or his personal habits: imitation is never about that in the Gospels. Neither does Jesus propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of Thomas a Kempis and his celebrated Imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be. What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.”
“Our unending discords are the ransom for our freedom.”
“The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them.”
“If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likable educator, we may feel initially that we are ‘liberated,’ but this impression does not last…”
“His Kingdom is a caricature of the Kingdom of God. Satan is the ape of God.”
“Throughout history religion is the constant element in diverse and changing institutions. Therefore we cannot discount it in favor of the pseudo-solution that takes it as a mere nothing, the fifth wheel of all the coaches, without coming to grips with the opposite possibility, disagreeable as it is for modern antireligion. This possibility is that religion is the heart of every social system, the true origin and original form of all institutions, the universal basis for human culture.”
“Those who discuss religions give the impression of taking them very seriously, but in reality they don’t attach the least importance to them. They view religions, all the religions, as completely mythical, but each in its own fashion. They praised them all in the same spirit we all praise kindergarteners ‘paintings,’ which are all masterpieces. The upshot of this attitude is that we are all free to buy what pleases us in the supermarket of religions, or (better still) to abstain from buying anything.”
“As for the real physical violence of the executioners themselves, our puritans of violence don’t seem to see it, taking it for null and void of meaning. Some other puritans of violence taught them that only texts are violent.”
“For everything pertaining to their false glory, the powers don’t hesitate to take charge of their own publicity.”
“The proof that all this is absurd is the superb indifference, the regal contempt, that mythology shows toward any suggestion of possible violence of the strong against the weak, of those in the majority against the minority, of the healthy against the ill, of the normal against the abnormal, of the native against the foreigners, and so on. Modern confidence in the myths is even stranger in our day when our contemporaries are terribly suspicious regarding their own society. They see hidden victims everywhere except where they really are, in the myths that they never look at with a critical eye.”
“Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporary attitude, but everyday new records are broken. We are all actors as well as witnesses and a great anthropological first.”
“The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible.”
“In our days the deconstructionists reverse the positivist error. For them, only interpretation exists. They want to be more Nietzchean than Nietzsche. Instead of getting rid of problems of interpretation, they get rid of facts.”
“To bury the modern concern for victims under millions and millions of corpses—there you have the National Socialist way of being Nietzschean. But some will say, “This interpretation would have horrified poor Nietzsche.” Probably, yes. Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time (and our own) a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents. But philosophers, to their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.”
“We are always prepared to translate all our conflicts, even those that don’t blend themselves at all to it, into the language of innocent victims.”
“We ‘moderns’ believe we possess intuitive knowledge solely because we are completely immersed in our ‘modernity.’ Let us not confuse true enlightenment with the idolatry of the here and now.”—Girard
“…for mythology and the inquiry into antiquity are first introduced into cities when they begin to have leisure, and when they see that the necessaries of life have already been provided, but not before.”— Plato, Critias
