Beauty will save the world

Catholicism and Neoplatonism. Philosophy major. American; Italian student with emigration dreams.

[ave-caele-pater]

'Oh God,' you will say, 'why do I not always look upon you as you always look upon me? Why do you think of me so often, my Lord, and why do I think so seldom of you? Where are we, O my soul? Our true place is God, and where do we stand?'

St. Francis de Sales, "Introduction to the Devout Life"

[postmortemdecay666-deactivated2]

Individual things come into being and pass away according as the soul gives them life or departs from them. But the world as a whole does not cease, because the spirit and the world-soul shine forever.

Karl Jaspers, from The Great Philosophers, Volume II, Plotinus. (via postmortemdecay666)

[templeofapelles]

Jupiter and Juno, 1597 Annibale Carracci

[ave-caele-pater]

You are fair in entirety, my love, and there is no fault within you!

Song of Songs 4:7

[philosophybits]

To philosophize is to learn how to die or to rise to divinity — to know being as Being.

Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom (via philosophybits)

[onancientpaths]

For it was on the highest attributes accessible by man concerning God, namely His goodness and love, that [the saints] rightly concentrated their vision, and it was from these that they learned that God was moved to give being to all the things that exist, and to grant them the grace of well-being…And it was with a view to these that the saints wisely modeled themselves, and owing to their expert imitation they now bear the distinguishing characteristic— manifest through the virtues — of the hidden and invisible beauty of the divine magnificence. Thus they themselves became good, and lovers of both God and their fellow men, full of compassion and mercy, and were proved to possess one single disposition of love for the whole of mankind…

St Maximus the Confessor (via onancientpaths)

[ave-caele-pater]

Trinitarianism is not a compromise between tritheism and unitarianism; it is superior to both. What I mean is that it is not as if God, as conceived by Catholics, would be “more one” if only we could sacrifice his threeness; on the contrary, God the Trinity is more one than any other God could be that were not trine - therefore, it is the unitarians, not the trinitarians, who attribute insufficient unity to the Deity, for “among all things called one, the unity of the divine Trinity holds first place.”

It is easy to see how. If God is not essentially self-diffusive, then how is he the Good? And if he is not the Good, then how is he the One? The unitarian would either have to respond 1) by asserting that God is essentially self diffusive, but externally, and thus fall into a criminal necessitarianism about creation that divinizes the universe by making it an essential part of God’s being God, and at any rate compromises his absolute simplicity by attributing a real external relation to him, or 2) by asserting that the Good is not necessarily self-diffusive - at which point we may dismiss him as a babbling madman, and invite him to look for a cure in the Scriptures, which declare that God is love.

[catholicthinker]

‪"I heard the voice of a boy or a girl… - coming from the neighboring house, chanting over & over again, ‘Take up and read; take up and read.’“ - St.Augustine‬

[tradcatmaria]

The goal is to share the gospel with the unbeliever, and then step back and say, ‘God, I’ve shared your truth, but you’re the one who changes hearts.’

Ken Ham (via tradcatmaria)

[ave-caele-pater]

Not even Christ, as man, but only as God, bestows the Holy Ghost.

St. Augustine, "On the Trinity"

[papalwords]

Indeed, his Commedia, which deservedly earned the title of Divina, while it uses various symbolic images and records the lives of mortals on earth, has for its true aim the glorification of the justice and providence of God who rules the world through time and all eternity and punishes and rewards the actions of individuals and human society. It is thus that, according to the Divine Revelation, in this poem shines out the majesty of God One and Three, the Redemption of the human race operated by the Word of God made Man, the supreme loving-kindness and charity of Mary, Virgin and Mother, Queen of Heaven, and lastly the glory on high of Angels, Saints and men; then the terrible contrast to this, the pains of the impious in Hell; then the middle world, so to speak, between Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, the Ladder of souls destined after expiation to supreme beatitude. It is indeed marvellous how he was able to weave into all three poems these three dogmas with truly wrought design.   If the progress of science showed later that that conception of the world rested on no sure foundation, that the spheres imagined by our ancestors did not exist, that nature, the number and course of the planets and stars, are not indeed as they were then thought to be, still the fundamental principle remained that the universe, whatever be the order that sustains it in its parts, is the work of the creating and preserving sign of Omnipotent God, who moves and governs all, and whose glory risplende in una parte piu e meno altrove; and though this earth on which we live may not be the centre of the universe as at one time was thought, it was the scene of the original happiness of our first ancestors, witness of their unhappy fall, as too of the Redemption of mankind through the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. Therefore the divine poet depicted the triple life of souls as he imagined it in a such way as to illuminate with the light of the true doctrine of the faith the condemnation of the impious, the purgation of the good spirits and the eternal happiness of the blessed before the final judgment.

Pope Benedict XV, In Praeclara Summorum (Encyclical, On Dante, 1921)

[c0ssette]

William-Adolphe Bouguereau “Art and Literature” 1867.

[ave-caele-pater]

Now the soul, to which spiritual birth and perfect spiritual age belong, is immortal; and just as it can in old age attain to spiritual birth, so can it attain to perfect age in youth or childhood; because the various ages of the body do not affect the soul. And although youth and old age cannot be together in a body, yet they can be together in a soul, the former on account of quickness, the latter on account of gravity.

St. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica”

[koredzas]

Raphael - Philosophy. 1509 - 1511

[armoramore-deactivated20170729]

Socrates and Plato agree with Pythagoras that the telos is assimilation to God. Plato defined this more clearly by adding: ‘according as is possible’, and it is only possible by wisdom, that is to say, as a result of Virtue.

Eudorus (via armoramore)

[ave-caele-pater]

It is possible to imagine order without an intelligent efficient cause, but not an without an exemplary cause. The arguments of the atomists, who allege that even vastly complex order can come about by chance, cause dismay to deists and naïve Christians alike - but to Thomists and Platonists they have no effect.

When we see a watch, only with probability do we infer a watchmaker, but with certitude, we infer watchness. We can imagine its parts coming together by chance, but that it is intelligible as a watch at all is not only inexplicable, but nonsensical, without an exemplar.

The materialist knows nothing of this. All the same, the God of Plato and St. Thomas, the prime exemplar of all things, remains unassailable by the Democritean cavils of the New Atheism, against which the paltry “proofs” of contemporary Christians, the sons of Paley, crumble into so much dust.

[purplebuddhaproject]

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one’s head.

Mark Twain  (via purplebuddhaproject)