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The Noonday Devil
Noonday Devil - May 2022
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1. Along the way
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Manuel
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Apr 30, 2022 11:42PM
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We often have an erroneous concept of freedom. We think that freedom is the ability to choose between contraries and, therefore, the possibility of choosing evil. We think that a transgression is a manifestation of our freedom. But that is not true at all. Let us take a musical comparison: the violinist who practices his exercises for hours acquires little by little a greater mastery of his instrument. Will he be less free as a result? Would freedom be, for him, the ability to play wrong notes? Is it not instead such mastery of his instrument that if, unfortunately, a string were to slacken during a concert, he could continue to play without anyone noticing the problem? Virtue is precisely what enables us to perform excellent actions easily and joyfully, in a stable manner, with profound interior freedom, the freedom of the children of God.
What a brilliant explanation of that troublesome Psalm about children being dashed against stones (Psalm 137:9). He says we should take our temptations or evil thoughts while they're still small and dash them against Christ the Rock!
Isn't that a wonderful reading of that verse? St. Benedict says it in his Rule.
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Whereas an angel acts by means of a single act, man needs multiple acts, because he is subject to time.
I wonder how he knows. Perhaps we should consult Jane Lebak, who is an expert in angels :-)
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This was precisely the point of departure for the Cartesian method: the first precept of science was not to accept anything as true unless one knew from evidence that it was. Faith is thus excluded, on methodical principle; from then on, the chasm between science and faith got deeper and deeper.
I disagree with this assertion. There is no chasm between science and faith. There is a chasm between atheism and faith, and atheism tries to imply that science is the same as atheism, which is false. If we accept this, we have already lost the war.
I have developed this discussion in a recent post in my blog: https://populscience.blogspot.com/202....
I think that Nault is describing the Cartesian method and not saying that science and faith are in any way necessarily at odds to each other. I liked this book a lot. As a married person, I found his discussion of acedia in marriage to be the weakest part, but it's not hard to apply what he says to and about monks & priests to my own life.
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Right, but he asserts that "the chasm between science and faith got deeper and deeper" and this is not true. As I said, there has never been a chasm between science and faith after Descartes. The chasm has been between faith and atheistic philosophy, also called materialism, naturalism, and by many other names.
I was curious about the relation between items in each lists of 7: 7 capital sins, 7 petitions of Our Father, 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit, 7 Beatitudes, 7 virtues, .
Our book just states there was a relation but does not explain it.
I searched online and found this page (in Spanish) that includes the relation between the first 3 lists. I could not find an equivalent page in English.
https://es.aleteia.org/2017/09/29/la-...
I just finished Chapter 3, and I liked it very much.Chapter 1 left me wanting more, concretely the author mentions the writings of Evagrius and others without giving a lot of detail, so I am left wanting to read them directly:
"This is about confronting the temptation of acedia by using the method that Christ utilized in the desert against Satan, in other words, the use of a verse of Scripture to confound the devil. Evagrius wrote a work dedicated to this subject [...] with regard to the eight principal vices, specifying all the verses of Scripture that can be used to resist the tempter."
This is just one example, but there were more.
I love his interpretation of the shepherd leaving the flock to seek the lost sheep as referring to the Incarnation, putting the sheep on his shoulder as taking on our flesh.I also like his discussion of merit and receptivity, the image of the child's mother lifting him up to reach the remedy. Good response to the tiresome Protestant-Catholic works-righteousness debates.
I don't understand the assertion (by Brague referencing Plato) that we can only love what's absent.
Jill, I also liked the first two ideas you mention.
