Sublime

“Platonism,” he says, “is part of the vital structure of Christian theology, with which no other philosophy, I venture to say, can work without friction.” There is, he says, an “utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.” He points out that Saint Augustine speaks of Plato’s system as “the mos

Never did he allow the meannesses of human respect to degrade his Christian dignity.

And if this again passes from potentiality to actuality, it must be preceded by something else, whereby it can be brought from potentiality to actuality. But we cannot go on thus to infinity. Therefore we must come to something that is wholly actual and nowise potential. And this we call God.

Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently

John disagrees with the Aristotelians in refusing substantiality to particular things. He calls Plato the summit of philosophers. But the first three of his kinds of being are derived indirectly from Aristotle’s moving-not-moved, moving-and-moved, moved-but-not-moving. The fourth kind of being in John’s system, that which neither creates nor is cre

I love this sentence by the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: “It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.”

William of Occam, who held that ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with less’.

modern terminology, the word “cause” would be confined to the efficient cause. The unmoved mover may be regarded as a final cause: it supplies a purpose for change, which is essentially an evolution towards likeness with God.