Links R & C 8

Recent

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. on Church and State, Lumen Scholasticum. «It would be absurd to contend that princes, in making laws, are able to act as if no revelation exists, when in fact it does exist, and are able to enjoin those things which perhaps are prohibited by it. This would be to say: the human legislator is greater than the divine legislator.»

Michael Gilleland, A Homeric Phrase, Laudator Temporis Acti. «[In] Babylonian poetry […] the future is determined by the so-called Tablet of Destinies, the ṭupšīmātu. Whoever possesses it controls the world. Its place is on its owner’s knees…»

Andrew Cusack, Russian Demographic Turnaround.

A Nāhuatl hymn for All Saints’ Day, Nāhuatl Texts.

Thumb War, XKCD.

Classic

2015: The Order of the World, Entirely Useless. «Thus a successful world is one in which the order of time basically corresponds with the order of causality and the order of goodness. This is what St. Thomas means when he says that the good of the world consists in its order, and that its order consists principally in the fact that one thing is the cause of another, and that one thing is better than another.» Not the whole of what St. Thomas meant, but an important part of it.

1950: Charles De Koninck, Sedeo Ergo Sum, Laval théologique et philosophique. «Our opinion is of course very much down to earth, and yet there is ample proof of the fact that a philosophy which pretends to seek its first principles in the realm of pure thought soon degenerates into a philosophy of the spirit and winds up in the most terrestrial crudeness and a nihilism that is only too tangible.»

 

Sancrucensia

2011: Against C.S. Lewis’s Idea of Hell.