"And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up." pp. 56
"And the end of redemption ... was to save us from death ... or from sin [only] in so far as sin implies death." pp.57
"[W]hich is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?" pp.57
"Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting things mutualy contradictory..." pp. 58
"In truth, [Catholic dogma] drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable -- they are anit-rational." pp.58
"Fundamentally [the Sacrament of the Eucharist] is concerned with ... the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him." pp.59 This passage comes off as hellishly metal to me.
Funny quote from St. Teresa (one of 'em; not ours): "for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle." pp.59-60
"It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism." pp. 60
"For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability after death." pp. 62
"[T]he highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible, and permanent ... in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may give us life." pp. 62-3 I love that last part.
"No modern religion can leave ethics on one side." pp. 63 How many contemporary ethical theories have left religion to the side?
A doubtlessly honest yet disturbing comment: "And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell." pp. 63, emphasis added
"The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason." pp. 64, yet who will save us from the Church if that is where our faith lies? No one. No some. Only natural destruction in such a case, and we are bound to experience that!
Wow: "The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man." pp. 64, is there any wonder why conceptual and technological advances were in such short supply during the Middle Ages and the reign of the Church? And this is a terribly intelligent theological perspective.
"Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection of body as well as soul?" pp. 65, I think Harry Frankfurt has some pertinent material concerning what is playing out in the background of this comment.
"Here you have the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul?" pp. 66
"[Religion] feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. Amd thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized." pp. 68
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