The Exodus also = salvation; Egypt = sin; Pharoah = Satan; Moses = Christ; the Jews = the Church; the Red Sea = death; the wilderness = Purgatory; the Old Law = the New Law; the gospel; the old Mount...
Socrates says we must be either fools because we think we are wise, or wise because we know we are fools. Christ says we must be either sinners who think we are saints, or saints who know we are sinne...
Since (1) charity is supernatural, and comes only from the real presence of God in the soul (St. Thomas’ paragraph 3), and since (2) all men, and not only Christians, are capable of charity (as has be...
Pride is really very simple. It is the attitude of the spoiled brat: I want what I want when I want it, and if you say No to me, I hate you. Thy will be done is the essential prayer of the saint; my w...
Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.
Our faith here can only be in God, not in our faith (that’s presumption). He will never abandon us, but we can abandon Him. That’s why we must be vigilant.
Other possible means were not lacking on God’s part. One drop of blood—from Christ’s circumcision at the age of eight days—would have been sufficient to purchase all mankind’s salvation. Why then did...
No one can be saved, and attain eternal joy, without all of the following: (1) a morally honest acceptance of the demands of virtue, (2) a serious effort to practice it, (3) an intellectually honest c...
More accurately stated, man is not both angel and animal because he is neither angel nor animal; he is between angels and animals, a unique rung on the cosmic ladder.
Modernism and Fundamentalism are popular—they are two quick and easy answers to a complex question.
Man's soul has three powers, and God left him prophets for all three: Jewish moralists for his will, Greek philosophers for his mind, and pagan mythmakers for his heart and imagination and feelings. O...
Love is supposed to bring us out of the dark prison of the my will be done ego into the joys of thy will be done, both horizontally and vertically, toward both the human and the divine Other.
It is an a fortiori argument: if even the veneration of a beloved father’s relics after he dies is a good thing, how much more the veneration of a saint’s?
In fact, educated people can justify sins more easily than uneducated people can, because they are clever enough to rationalize their sins away.
In a sense all the way to Heaven is Heaven (St. Catherine).
If human life becomes cheapened, it becomes cheapened at both ends. Parents are killed, by euthanasia, when they become a burden to their children; and children are killed, by abortion, when they beco...
I often thought of comparing life to a dream, because death always seemed to be an awakening.
Heidegger says that the fundamental question of metaphysics is why is there anything at all rather than nothing? The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, what a thing is (every Platonic dial...
Heart here refers especially to deep feeling or emotion. Heart means not only (1) intuitive reason (the heart has its reasons) and (2) will
Haven’t you forgotten the first and most important lesson in all of philosophy, the lesson taught to all of us by Socrates, the father of philosophy? That you are wise only when you are humble, that t...