last night. I have a sudden urge to watch
again.
I finished scanning all my notes from college today. Time flies. I feel very content.
"part of friendship is to assist one another in spiritual as well as worldly duties; indeed the former is more necessary for attaining our main end--beatitude in heaven" (15).
"After several great journeys in his life, and worn out by almost continuous teaching and writing, he who had been a traveler now entered the life of plain vision and comprehension of all that he had labored to put into words" (16).
"Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) . . . thought that God cannot be simple if he possesses attributes . . . St. Thomas, however, thought that we are not confined to negative names but can speak about God affirmatively because, as he points out elsewhere, every negation rests on an affirmation" (22).
"One reason why we do not know what God is, is that he divine light is hidden from us by its simplicity . . . we can know that God exists but now what he is . . . By faith, however, we are joined to the unknown imperfectly, because we are joined to what is above the power of natural reason" (27, 28, 29).
"the gap between something and nothing is an infinite one, which only an inifinite being has the power to cross" (35).
"St. Thomas holds that God does not act by necessity of nature but by knowledge and understanding" (36).
St. Thomas "thought that the true explanation of diversity in the world was neither necessity nor chance but the ordering of God's wisdom, which he saw manifested in the order of the world" (38).
"nothing is more intimate to a thing than its existence" (39).
"things come from God's knowledge in the first place" (40).
"Existence is prior to the good because existence is the first good that is sought by everything; the first thing everything seeks is to preserve its existence" (45).
"Nothing recedes wholly from the good; otherwise it would cease to exist altogether" (50).
"evil is only found in things that are good by nature" (50).
"The beauty of the mind itself lies in its concord, or agreement, with truth" (55).
"Nothing is loved unless it is first known, St. Thomas repeats, following St. Augustine. We naturally love to know and love our knowledge. In the same way, the Word that comes forth in God as he thinks of himself is 'a word breathing forth love' (verbum spirans amorem)" (63).
"God dwells in us, St. Thomas says, as what is known exists in the mind and what is loved exists in the lover" (67).
"St. Thomas starts from the principle that all creation is good; what makes a thing good is its likeness to God. In St. Thomas's view, the goodness of creation requires the existence of beings who are like God in having incorporeal nature" (72).
"it is form that gives existence to matter anyway, according to the philosophy of Aristotle . . . A form can exists on its own if it has some kind of activity. This will be an immaterial activity" (73, 75).
"Evil . . . does not lie in the mater but in the will" (75).
"In Christian tradition the angels have been divided into a hierarchy of nine orders, three sets of three. The first set comprises Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; the middle set, Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; the third set, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels . . . The three sets of orders can be divided by saying that the first reflects the attributes of God (who is love, knowledge, and justice); the second, his government; and the third, the execution of his providence . . . Archangels are the messengers of God, and angels are entrusted with watching over individual human beings . . . every angel is its own species . . . But the difference between one species of angel and another must be one of intellect, for they have a purely intellectual nature . . . God thinks of everything with one concept, and the nearer an angel is to God, the simpler it is . . . The higher the angel, the greater its power of seeing all the conclusions contained in an axiom. We have to argue from step to step to discover conclusions by discursive reasoning, but an angel, properly speaking, does not reason: it simply sees things by intuition. They do this by the light of their intellect" (76, 77, 78).
"As it was necessary for them to choose it freely, it was also possible for them to lose it by their own choice . . . There are two principle sins of the intellect: pride and envy . . . They sinned by wanting to be like God by their own strength, not by God's power. Nothing can be equal with God, because everything else receives its existence from another, and so shares in existence . . . The angels remained fixed in their first choice for several reasons . . . an angel reaches its perfection straight away with one movement of its will, since it is simple" (83).
"'psychology,' which literally means 'the study of the soul'" (99).
"'Since the soul naturally moves the body, a spiritual movement of the soul is naturally the cause of an alteration of the body'" (100).
"hope turns into joy and fear into sorrow or pain" (102).
"timid persons are frustrated by their lack of power and se themselves driven into a corner; they then turn around and attack what oppresses them with unexpected force" (104).
"when things become warm they fuse together . . . cold things do not easily mix" (106).
"We would rather be without sight than understanding, St. Thomas remarks . . . we receive joy from the two activities of inquiry (inquisitio) and contemplation" (108).
"the brain and imagination get tired . . . The remedy for the sorrow that comes from overwork is games and rest, St. Thomas recommends" (109).
"The greatest pleasure of the senses comes from the sense of touch" (109).
"Great pleasure or pain prevents us from thinking, St. Thomas observes, becaues thought involves the use of the imagination, which is absorbed by pleasure or pain, as all the powers of the soul are rooted in its essence" (110).
"one of the effects of anxiety is to restrict the movement of the body" (111).
"The memory of evil brings joy when we see ourselves now free from it" (112).
"As Aristotle says, a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved" (113).
"The contemplation of truth softens sadness and pain . . . As rest is the remedy for the body, so pleasure is for the soul" (114).
"'A gentle answer breaks anger' (Prv 15:1) . . . 'vengeance is sweet'" (117).
"For Aristotle good actions flow from the virtuous character, but for St. Thomas a person is good because he or she does good actions" (120).
"We should have solicitude about the needs of others rather than our own" (127).
"Prudence especially demands the mean in acting . . . The mean between the two, of being neither too fearful nor too daring, is the virtue of fortitude" (127).
"The Old Law restrains by fear of punishment, the New inclines use by the promise of eternal things" (143).
. . .
"the intellect's knowledge is only completed by love" (189).
"Aristotle counts friendship as a virtue (it is the only virtue to which he devotes not just one but two books of the Nicomachean Ethics), because being friends with others involves the practice of all the virtues . . . For Aristotle, friendship is part of happiness (eudomonia, or human flourishing and well-being)" (190).
"Aristotle says that there are three kinds of frienship: the useful, the pleasant, and the honorable . . . Aristotle thought that only friends of this third kind are truly friends, and Aquinas that only this kind can be perfect friendship" (191).
"no one can bear sorrow alone for a long time . . . The mere presence of the other makes one happy; friends find one another's company delightful . . . goodwill, generosity, companionship and conversation, concord and sympathy . . . For Aristotle, we love ourselves when we love the good of the higher part of our nature, which is reason. This most of al seems to be ourselves, he says, because it controls the emotions . . . for good reasons, their own existence is desirable: they like their own company, have entertaining memories, and have minds furnished with topics for contemplation" (192, 193, 194).
"Aristotle thought that our highest happiness lies in contemplation, for this is most like God's activity, but he does not associate this with the love of God. For the Christian, however, ethics is not just about the noble life, as it was for Aristotle, but about friendship with God" (195).
"St. Bonaventure . . . says that in things beneath us knowledge is more important than love, but in things above us, where our knowledge must remain imperfect, love counts for more than knowledge" (201).
"The more we are friends to ourselves, the more we can be friends to others" (202).
"we can only have contemplation imperfectly in this life, because we do not yet see clearly but only as in a mirror, with faith" (203).
