Levavi oculos meos in montes

Substack is an interesting platform, and currently it is rather interesting to browse through the substacks of people who have ended up there -- sometimes, people whose writing I haven't seen for a long time.  Fr Fessio might be a good example of that.   But I am kind of stuck in the early 2000s, as far as social media goes, and I think I will have to stay here on Blogger with this site, and much as I admire focused blogs I don't think I can write one.   I think if I'm going to post with any kind of regularity, it will have to be a patchwork or a mosaic.   One of my earlier blogs I described as a commonplace book and some form of that is the most viable model, I think.     That actually brings to mind what I was reading this morning -- St Thomas Aquinas on Ideas -- this is from Msr Glenn's Tour of the Summa, which is available online.    He says: An idea or concept is the mind's grasp of an essence. It is the understanding o...

 I almost brought it up a few posts ago -- the question of how to read theology when one isn't a theologian.    The answer is that you read as a reader, and as a Christian, if you are one; at least, hopefully, you read as a truth-seeker.    Perhaps GK Chesterton's words apply here, as they so often do to so many situations in life: I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar.      There's a more general point here.   Theology, the endeavor to know the truth of divine things, is too important to leave solely to theologians.  ...

 “Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.”   Diary of a Country Priest  was not what I expected.  I thought I had read it once before, but none of it seemed familiar.   The above quote reminds me of this one from CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters : Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a di...