Commemorating Fides et Ratio

“In the self-giving of truth, truth retains a transcendence in relation to reason, not because it remains irrational but because truth here has the character of personhood, that is, it presents itself in its own light and makes itself known in a personal relationship.”

“Can we not indeed say that ‘we can truly know’ God because Mary has contingently brought him forth through her own body, within the order of creation, in a way that is epistemically vastly superior to (though perfectly compatible and ultimately identical with) the god of the philosophers as enabled by the old metaphysics?”

“Denying nature denies the portals of one’s own flesh, leaving one’s understanding without a hold on reality; it severs the relation of things and affectivity, and thereby it severs the bond that invests our words with the weight of meaning.”

“The embodied act of thinking together in the differentiated communion that is the dialogical exchange allows, then, for the complete exposition of what things are, and, in that sense, it is here that the truth belongs.”

“[T]he ultimate outcome of the project of mastering nature is not simply to humanize the world but more deeply to remove any reference to transcendence from the horizon of history.”

“God is no undifferentiated, self-satisfied unity, but rather an event, an eternal celebration of emergence from another and of loving unification of nonidenticals, a wedding.”

“[T]rue doctrines are never embalmed, like mummies, in the past, and, wherever there is a plenitude of Christian spirit, oppositions are only so many stimulations to a more perfect knowledge of the one truth, ever ancient and ever new.”