Notes 137

Temptations are intermittent, consequences permanent.

Temptations cluster. What is dessert without coffee?

Suffer in this life, or suffer in the next.

If God had written the Bible, he would have taken more care with his copyists.

Catholics who love the Church more than God.

We who say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets, who of us would not have joined in crucifying Christ and burning Joan of Arc?

Eternal Recurrence is Nietzsche’s attempt to give significance to life. But something signficant could occur once, or not at all.

The purpose of ritual is to go through the motions. That is why good liturgy is so important.

In an oral culture, there is no distinction between theory and application, properly speaking: there are only particular reenactments of the cosmic. In Mircea Eliade’s elegant terms, “An object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype” (Myth of the Eternal Return 34). To conform to the ritual is to be practical, for the surest way to get things done is to do them in the pre-established pattern.
—John R. Harris, “How Never to Write a ‘Scholarly Article’: On Falling Afoul of Academic Bigotry”, Praesidum: A Journal of Literary and Literate Analysis 5.3 (Summer 2005)

It is well that the Summa Theologica is not Scripture.

Metaphor for original sin: the internal-combustion engine.

English: the principal language of posturing in the early 21^st century.

Theologians resemble eunuchs writing about sex.