What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the
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“Know then, that God no sooner finds us resolved to attain solid virtue than He sends us trials of the severest kind. Convinced of His immense love for us and His fatherly solicitude for our spiritual advancement, we ought with gratitude to drink to the dregs of the chalice that He is pleased to offer us, confident that its beneficial character will be in proportion to its bitterness.”
― The Spiritual Combat
― The Spiritual Combat
“What we find, then, is that Dante’s musical program embodies theological realities. Infernal sinners remain willfully rebellious. In life they broke away from the human community to pursue some good in vicious competition with the rest of the human race. Now, as a community, they fail to achieve concord. Like musical notes that remain independent, their retained individuality is ugly and broken. Repentant sinners in purgatory, on the other hand, now willfully submit their individuality to the community. They learn now what it is like to live as members of a body. And thus they erase their tendencies to erratic individualism, forcing their voices into the unison of the simple plainchant. But with the polyphonic hymns of Paradiso, we have not only concord but also a simultaneous expression of individuality: Dante gives us a vision of heaven as a million-part motet.”
― A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
― A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
“According to the majority of the Fathers, “what” and “he” who restrains the “lawless one” (unanimously identified by the Fathers as the Antichrist of whom John speaks in 1 John 2:18–22 and 4:3) is the Roman empire and the Roman emperor.220 St Thomas considers in his commentary on this epistle how it could be that the Antichrist has not come by his own time when it would seem that the Roman empire has perished. “The Roman Empire has not perished,” he explains, “but passed from the temporal to the spiritual order.” The revolt of which St Paul speaks will be against the faith and government of the Holy Roman Church.221”
― The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church
― The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church
“I think that men need to be astonished in order to adore, to praise, to thank this God who is so good and so great. Wisdom begins with wonder, Socrates said. The inability to wonder is the sign of a civilization that is dying.”
― The Day Is Now Far Spent
― The Day Is Now Far Spent
“When shall this soul of mine, entranced with love for God, look on herself as broken sherds, yearn after God, and lose herself in Him, for “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit”? When shall she cry out: “My flesh and my heart have fainted away; Thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion for ever”? Holy and happy is he who but once, for but one moment, has felt something like this in his mortal life; for this is no human happiness, it is life eternal so to lose oneself, as if one were empty of self, as if one were not.”
― Saint Bernard of Clairvaux Collection [8 Books]
― Saint Bernard of Clairvaux Collection [8 Books]
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