Scott

“Finally, I advise you to consider that day as lost, in which (though you may have transacted much business in it) you have neither gained a victory over some sinful inclination, or form of self-will, nor thanked the Lord for all His benefits, and above all for His Sorrowful Passion endured for you, and for His Fatherly and sweet chastisements, when He has made you worthy to receive from Him the inestimable treasure of some trial.”
― Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat: Classic Edition

“One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery. In that instant one is aware, even if the precise formulation eludes one, that everything one knows exists in an irreducibly gratuitous way: “what it is” has no logical connection with the reality “that it is”; nothing within experience has any “right” to be, any power to give itself existence, any apparent “why.” The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same. In that instant one recalls that one’s every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve. One cannot dwell indefinitely”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“It is only because a dreamer has temporarily lost the desire to turn his eyes toward more distant horizons that he believes he inhabits a reality perfectly complete in itself, in need of no further explanation. He does not see that this secondary world rests upon no foundations, has no larger story, and persists as an apparent unity only so long as he has forgotten how to question its curious omissions and contradictions.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“That we are rational agents—that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations—is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss