From: Elizaphanian (Elizaphanian@members.v21.co.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 29 2002 - 22:29:14 GMT
One addition to this - for Wim, really, with friendly greetings ;-)
~~~~~~
Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation.
Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared
with this, everything he had read and argued about and written-Aristotle and
the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas-was no
better than chaff or straw, For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike
would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done
more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already
ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his
mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of
actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better
prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who
comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the
man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less
self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped
to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning
to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
~~~~~~~~~~
It was December 6, 1273, and it happened when Aquinas was celebrating the
Eucharist. His precise words: "I cannot do any more. Everything I have
written seems to me as straw in comparison with what I have seen."
I was thinking of Wim's comment:
"Seriously, I simply don't understand how such a ritual can provide anything
dynamic. It can only latch past DQ experiences and communicate those (now
static) patterns of values to followers. Are you sure those 'Quality
moments' are DQ moments? Couldn't they just be sq moments? Also valuable, of
course, but not what I seek in religion."
Sam
www.elizaphanian.v-2-1.net/home.html
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