The Catholic Book Club discussion

5. Share any quotes, or scenes that you thought were meaningful or significant. Feel free to add a thought or two explaining why.

“The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed, this is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means the same element in every age.”

"As the eighteenth century thought itself the age of reason, the nineteenth century thought itself the age of common sense, the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think itself anything but the age of uncommon nonsense." (Chapter 1)

This is applicable too to the twenty-first century, where things are even worse.

"St. Thomas did not reconcile Christ to Aristotle; he reconciled Aristotle to Christ." (Chapter 1)

"Private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion." (Chapter 3)

The best definition of the quarrel of Science and Religion I've ever read.

"This vividly illuminates the provincial stupidity of those who object to what they call “creeds and dogmas.” It was precisely the creed and dogma that saved the sanity of the world. These people generally propose an alternative religion of intuition and feeling." (Chapter 4)

Chesterton is such a skilled writer, endlessly quotable. It almost interferes with understanding the content of what he writes!

I love his contrasts between Francis and Thomas (scampering vs. stolid), and how fundamentally they draw from the same well. "The great fact of medieval history is that these two great men were doing the same great work; one in the study and the other in the street."

"Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most."

"Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out."

"He passionately loved the Catholic worship long before he found he had to fight for it." (the best starting point of all; the Church has already poured so much thought and passion into her liturgy)

"The Renaissance might be called the Relapse [rediscovery of the classics]. Whatever may be said of the Gothic and the Gospel according to St. Thomas, they were not a Relapse. It was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God who makes all things new."

Discussion of Francis, Dominic and Thomas makes me wish I knew St. Dominic better.

"The Dumb Ox is bellowing now: the whole work of his life was being betrayed behind his back. And yet, even in this isolated apocalypse of anger, there is one phrase that may be commended for all time to men who are angry with much less cause. If there is one phrase that stands in history as typical of Thomas Aquinas, it is that phrase about his own argument: “It is not based in documents of faith, but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.” We must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours. We may do other things instead of arguing, according to our views of what actions are morally permissible; but if we argue we must argue ‘on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.’ " (Chapter 3)

Mariangel wrote: ""The Dumb Ox is bellowing now: the whole work of his life was being betrayed behind his back. And yet, even in this isolated apocalypse of anger, there is one phrase that may be commended for all t..."
I remind the anecdote all scholars scorn Saint Thomas Aquinas, because he did not speak, and they compared with a Ox, and Then other great man Saint Albert Magnus the patron of the chemist in Spain said that he would mooa mooed that he amazed to the world. The prediction of Saint Albert Magnus was autentic.

A quote from chapter 7:

"But Aquinas says he sees no particular reason, in reason, why this world should not be a world without end; or even without beginning. And he is quite certain that, if it were entirely without end or beginning, there would still be exactly the same logical need of a Creator. Anybody who does not see that, he gently implies, does not really understand what is meant by a Creator."

Some quotes from chapter 8:

"The object is an object; it can and does exist outside the mind, or in the absence of the mind. And therefore it enlarges the mind of which it becomes a part. The mind conquers a new province like an emperor; but only because the mind has answered the bell like a servant."

"The essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage. Indeed it is very truly a marriage, because it is fruitful; the only philosophy now in the world that really is fruitful. It produces practical results, precisely because it is the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact."

"To [St.Thomas Aquinas] even what was momentary was momentous. "

"While, like all his contemporaries and coreligionists, he has no doubt that true authority may be authoritative, he is rather averse to the whole savour of its being arbitrary."

"He even mentioned the truth, ignored during the long idolatry of trade, that things which men produce only to sell are likely to be worse in quality than the things they produce in order to consume."

"It is still expressed in the amazing fact that (in the North) modern men can still write histories of philosophy, in which philosophy stops with the last little sophists of Greece and Rome; and is never heard of again until the appearance of such a third-rate philosopher as Francis Bacon."

The last quote is now sad-fully true, not just in the North, but in the south. Here in Spain, a friend told me that he had assisted to an introductory course on philosophy where they went directly from the Greek philosophers to Descartes, not even deigning to mention St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

"He practically said that if they could really prove their practical discoveries, the traditional interpretation of Scripture must give way before those discoveries." (no quarrel between Science & Religion)
"Both [work and play] were for him found in the unusual hobby of thinking, which is for some men a thing much more intoxicating than mere drinking."
"No men are more different than saints." (e.g. Thomas and King Louis)
"There is but one purpose in this life, and it is one that is beyond this life."
"He was one of those large things who take up little room."
I love Chesterton's list of things Thomas might have requested, at God's invitation: "the solution of an old difficulty; or the secret of a new science; or a flash of the inconceivable intuitive mind of the angels; or any one of a thousand things that would really have satisfied his broad and virile appetite for the very vastness and variety of the universe."
"All sorts of things were Unknowable, which were exactly the things that a man has got to know."

Manuel wrote: ""As the eighteenth century thought itself the age of reason, the nineteenth century thought itself the age of common sense, the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think itself anything ..."

I agree with you, Manuel, and thought the same thing when I read it.

Manuel wrote: ""This vividly illuminates the provincial stupidity of those who object to what they call “creeds and dogmas.” It was precisely the creed and dogma that saved the sanity of the world. These people g..."

Another problem that is even more serious in our time than in Chesterton's.

I have been delaying putting up my quotes because I noted so many. But the month is almost over, so here they are, by Chapter, excluding the ones you all have already identified, many of which I also noted.

From Chapter One:
"It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, 'I have understood every page I ever read.'"

"Christ did not tell his apostles that they were only the excellent people, or the only excellent people, but that they were the exceptional people; the permanently incongruous and incompatible people; and the text about the salt of the earth is really as sharp and shrewd and tart as the taste of salt. It is because they were the exceptional people, that they must not lose their exceptional quality. 'If salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?'" This is simply the best exegesis of this passage I've ever seen.

"If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world."

"Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out; and the point here is that the enlargement of medieval theology was simply the full comprehension of that theology."

"They were not bringing something new into Christianity, in the sense of something heathen or heretical into Christianity; on the contrary, they were bringing Christianity into Christendom. But they were bringing it back against the pressure of certain historic tendencies, which had hardened into habits in many great schools and authorities in the Christian Church; and they were using tools and weapons which seemed to many people to be associated with heresy or heathenry."

"Simply as one of the facts that bulk big in history, it is true to say that Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies."

"St. Thomas takes the view that the souls of all the ordinary hard-working and simple-minded people are quite as important as the souls of thinkers and truth-seekers; and he asks how all these people are possibly to find time for the amount of reasoning that is needed to find truth. The whole tone of the passage shows both a respect for scientific enquiry and a strong sympathy with the average man. His argument for Revelation is not an argument against Reason; but it is an argument for Revelation."

"The conclusion he draws from it is that men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all."

"St. Francis is called humane because he tried to convert Saracens and failed; St. Dominic is called bigoted and besotted because he tried to convert Albigensians and succeeded."

"In short, St. Dominic and St. Francis created a Revolution"

From Chapter Two:

"This medieval period was rather specially the period of communal or corporate thinking, and in some matters it was really rather larger than the individualistic modern thinking."

"The international soldier is always very much disliked by internationalists. They dislike Charlemagne and Charles V and Napoleon; and everybody who tried to create the World State for which they cry aloud day and night."

"Thomas of Aquino wanted to be a Friar. It was a staggering fact to his contemporaries; and it is rather an intriguing fact even to us; for this desire, limited literally and strictly to this statement, was the one practical thing to which his will was clamped with adamantine obstinacy till his death. He would not be an Abbot; he would not be a Monk; he would not even be a Prior or ruler in his own fraternity; he would not be a prominent or important Friar; he would be a Friar. It is as if Napoleon had insisted on remaining a private soldier all his life."

"Something in the courage and consistency of Dominic and Francis had challenged his deep sense of justice; and while remaining a very reasonable person, and even a diplomatic one, he never let anything shake the iron immobility of this one decision of his youth; nor was he to be turned from his tall and towering ambition to take the lowest place."

"There is a sort of Christian cross-purposes in the contrast between the feverish illusion of the importance of things, always marking men who are called practical; and the much more practical pertinacity of the man who is called theoretical."

John wrote: "From Chapter Two:

"The international soldier is always very much disliked by internationalists. They dislike Charlemagne and Charles V and Napoleon; and everybody who tried to create the World State for which they cry aloud day and night..."

Of course, Chesterton did not include Hitler in his list, as this book was written in 1933, but it is obvious after the fact that he can be included among those who tried to create a World State.

Internationalists would answer that they exclude those creators of the World State precisely because they tried to do it by force of arms. They would say that they want to do it peacefully, democratically, even though their concept of democracy implies crushing down all those who think differently, in the style of "1984" (which had not been written at the time) or "Brave new world" (which had been published a few years before).

Present internationalists are trying to impose their dominant ideology to everybody, not through the force of arms, but by taking control of governments and by promulgating laws that put an end to freedom of expression and even of thought.