Happiness Love and Friendship

“Friendship and love are, . . . excluding union with God, the highest expressions of the harmony between the mind and being.”

“[T]he body possesses a radical alterity: it precedes us and does not permit itself to be molded by our projects.”

“The ascetic is the ultimate hedonist, as it were, because he believes in a form of intelligible pleasure and happiness that constitute true human fulfillment.”

“As Max Weber famously showed in the case of Protestantism, it is wrong to think that theological ideas have no impact on society due to their high level of abstraction. This is especially true of powerful and successful theological ideas.”

“[V]irtue is . . . the ligature uniting the hiddenness of the good and the revelation of the beautiful, which somehow finds the always-superabundant, always-more-other, never-enclosable essence of the Creator in the ontological depths of the human image.”

“God’s supreme goodness is unique because, as uniquely perfect, it cannot be enjoyed at all without companionship.”

“[T]he Son’s bearing away the sin of the world is in the first place the work of God in his Paternity.”