'Sweet dreams burn me'

"The thief who hung on the cross managed to recover the joy of life and a bold, realizable hope, though he probably had no more than an hour left to live. You still have long years ahead of you, and most likely I will not die as soon as it seems. What if, by a miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a terrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong, proud of our truth? ... Sweet dreams burn me, and I can hardly breathe from excitement. I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault. Let us live! The sun does not rise twice a day, and life is not given us twice—hold fast to the remains of your life and save them ..."

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Story of an Unknown Man" (1892) (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 2004)

'you armed yourself with an ironic attitude toward life'

"And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Living, free, spirited thought is inquisitive and imperious; for a lazy, idle mind, it is unbearable. To keep it from disturbing your peace, you, like thousands of your peers, hastened while still young to set limits to it; you armed yourself with an ironic attitude toward life, or whatever you want to call it, and your restricted, intimidated thought does not dare jump over the little palisade you have set around it, and when you jeer at the ideas that are supposedly all known to you, you are like a deserter who shamefully runs away from the field of battle but, to stifle his shame, mocks at war and courage. Cynicism stifles pain."

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Story of an Unknown Man" (1892) (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 2004)

'that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see'

Today, anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus' Nativity in Bethlehem will find that the doorway five and a half meters high, through which emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled up. Only a low opening of one and a half meters has remained. The intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from attack, but above all to prevent people from entering God's house on horseback. Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus' birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our "enlightened" reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God's closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis, the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions, the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby.

—Pope Benedict XVI, homily on Christmas Eve 2011 (official Vatican translation, 2011)

'the improbable roads and cities of fidelity'

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)

This uniting link...

This uniting link between the divine and the natural worlds is man. Man combines in himself all possible opposites which can all be reduced to one great polarity between the unconditional and the conditional, between the absolute and the eternal essence and the transitory phenomenon or appearance. Man is at once divinity and nothingness. There is no need to dwell on the assertion of this undoubted contrast in man, because it has of long represented the common theme of poets as well as of psychologists and moralists.

—Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood (1876)

dark fanaticism, abstract rationalism

To the true conception of religion are equally repugnant the dark fanaticism which holds on to a single partial revelation, a single positive form, and denies all others; and the abstract rationalism which resolves the whole essence of religion into the fog of indefinite concepts and merges all religious forms into one empty, impotent, and colorless generality.

—Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood (1876)

a theology of writing

...we have to go on speaking/writing about God, allowing the language of faith to encounter fresh trials every day, and also fresh distortions and refusals. In writing fiction in which no formula is allowed unchallengeable victory, Dostoevsky has implicitly developed what might be called a theology of writing, specifically of narrative writing. Every fiction is at its most fictional in its endings, those pretenses of closure and settlement. Even morally and religiously serious fiction has to project something beyond that ending or otherwise signal a level of incompletion, even in the most minimal and formal mode, indicating an as yet untold story.

—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (2008)

The Five Kingdoms

The sheer cosmic scope of this vision of ethics finds its loveliest expression in Solovyov's...doctrine of the five Kingdoms; each of these Kingdoms — the mineral, vegetal, animal, human, and divine — says Solovyov, is "translated" and exalted in the next. Each, in order, comprises one moment in the development of creation toward its union with the divine: to be, to live, to be conscious, to be rational, to be perfect. Plants absorb the nutrients of the earth and transform them into vitality; animals absorb the world not only as food but in varying degrees of consciousness; humanity raises the world up into rational reflection; and finally the God-man (as reason, Logos, incarnate) actively realizes the perfect moral order of all things in himself. The great chain of being has, in a sense, been given eschatological depth; the world-process gathers the universe into a living and diverse unity, and humanity gathers it again into rational and ordering thought, and the God-man gathers it together into its ultimate reality — the infinite moral order: universal resurrection. Thus, when the Kingdom comes, it does not abolish any of the lower orders of existence, but rather puts them in their proper places within the unity of the Logos.

—David Bentley Hart, Preface to Vladimir Solovyov's The Justification of the Good (2005)

Humanity knows much more...

Just a few days earlier, he had attended the defense by Vladimir Solovyev of his doctoral dissertation, and he now cites a thought uttered during that learned disputation. "Humanity, according to my profound conviction," Solovyev had declared, "knows much more than it has succeeded in uttering in its science and its art thus far." Applying this idea to himself, Dostoevsky continues: "I sense that there is much more concealed in me than however much I have been able to express thus far."

—Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (2003)

A Chaste Marriage

Thus this wonderful union of the divine nature with human nature in the communication of grace or supernature is brought about by God’s merciful, infinite love. It is a chaste marriage. For grace, on its side, unites with nature and fructifies it without violating it; nature, as an image of God, is the undefiled, receptive soil to which grace brings the dew of heavenly energy down from heaven to revive and fructify it, and sheds on it heavenly light to adorn and warm it.

—Matthias Scheeben, Nature and Grace (1861)

The tragic curve.

I was considering a little earlier a rather fascinating curve whose connotations are quite various. The asymmetrical parabola, the one which looks like this—

Re: Spengler's plant form for all cultures (youth, growth, maturity, old age, or bud, bloom, wilt, decay). But the above curve is the form line of all cultures. An epoch always seems to reach its zenith at a point past the middle of its orbit in time. The fall is always more rapid than the rise. And isn't that the curve of tragedy; I should think it a sound aesthetic principle that the growth of a character should take longer to accomplish than his disaster.

[ ... ]

What is this curve? It is the fundamental path of any projectile, of a ball, a stone, an arrow (Nietzsche's arrow of longing) or of an artillery shell.

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

'its superlatives do not match ours'

All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the carbolic and retch of the el, the frightened passion for movement of an ant nest suddenly jarred, the vast hurried grabbing plans of thousands of men whose importance is confined to a street, a café, and there is no other sense than one of the present. History is remembered with a shrug; its superlatives do not match ours.

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

'a naked quivering heart'

The war, or rather, war, was odd, he told himself a little inanely. But he knew what it meant. It was all covered with tedium and routine, regulations and procedure, and yet there was a naked quivering heart to it which involved you deeply when you were thrust into it. All the deep dark urges of man, the sacrifices on the hilltop, and the churning lusts of the night and sleep, weren't all of them contained in the shattering screaming burst of a shell, the man-made thunder and light?

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Reverence

It is that fundamental attitude toward being in which one gives all being the opportunity to unfold itself in its specific nature, in which one neither behaves as its master nor acts toward it in a spirit of familiar conviviality. In its most primitive form reverence is a response to the general value of being as such, to the dignity which all being (as opposed to nothingness or mere fictitiousness) possesses, to the value of its own consistency, of standing on its own, of the ultimate positiveness of being. In this right and appropriate attitude toward being as such, this affirmation free from obtrusiveness, this silent, contemplative disposition toward being as being, the world begins to disclose itself in its entire depth, differentiation, and plenitude of value.

—Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality (1943)

Now my years are spent in lamentation...

Now my years are spent in lamentation, and you, Lord, my eternal Father, are my only solace. I have broken up into times, whose order I know not, and in tumultuous changes my recollections, the innermost sinews of my soul, are being torn apart, until I should flow together again in you, purified and melted in the fire of your love.

—St. Augustine, Confessions (398)

Animated Expressions of Divine Wisdom

In Augustine’s Platonic theism, beings made in God’s image have the capacity to see themselves as God sees them — not as insignificant assemblages of particulars in space and time, whose value must be arbitrarily assigned, but as animated expressions of divine wisdom…[Augustine] sees himself disfigured over time because he lacks the unified view God has of him in eternity. When God sees Augustine, God represents him as perfected, and if Augustine could see himself through God’s eyes, he would have no difficulty making his life out to be significant and intelligible.

—James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (1992)

'Jeez, it's beautiful, really beautiful'

He sits on the bench for over an hour, calms at last. The river languishes by, stippled and quivering like the play of light on a metallic cloth. Across from him, the dormitories of the business school lance their reflections into the water, and the automobiles in the distance seem tiny and alive. He feels the earth under him germinating in the spring night, the sweet assuasive air. In the sky the stars are studded in the warm intimate velvet of the night.

Jeez, it’s beautiful out. A play of yearnings, lost and never articulate. Makes ya think. He sighs. Real beautiful, makes ya think. The woman with whom he could share this. I’m gonna be something.

Awe. Night like this makes you know there’s a God, dumb atheists. Jeez, it’s beautiful, really beautiful, it makes ya think things are gonna be okay.

He sits there, absorbed in the night. I ain’t like the other guys, theah’s somethin’ special in me. He sighs again. Boy, to … to … He fumbles for his thought as though his hand were groping for a fish in the water. Jeez to …

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)