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"So that I alone am the End of the World. Angels and Men being all mine. And if others are so, they are made to Enjoy it for my further Advancement. God only being the Giver, and I the Receiver. So that Seneca Philosophized rightly, when he said . . . God gave me alone to all the World, and all the World to me alone." - 1st C. 15 [2/2]

"Such Endless Depths lie in the Divinity, and the Wisdom of God, that as He maketh one, so He maketh every one the End of the World: the Supernumerary Persons being Enrichers of his Inheritance. Adam and the World are both mine. And the Posterity of Adam enrich it Infinitely. Souls are God's Jewels. Every one of which is worth many Worlds. They are his Riches because his Image; and mine for that reason." [1/2]

"Alas the WORLD is but a little Centre in comparison of you...Your Understanding comprehends the World like the Dust of a Ballance, measures Heaven with a Span and esteems a thousand years but as one Day. So that Great Endless Eternal Delights are only fit to be its Enjoyments"-First Century 19

"[God] formed man as a second cosmos, a great universe within a little one."Gregory Nazianzus, Orations 38.11

"Funny," said Lancelot, "how the people who can't pray say that prayers are not answered, however much the people who can pray say they are."

"[Lancelot] loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo's, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace."

"'If I were to be made a knight,' said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, 'I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.'

'That would be extremely presumptuous of you,' said Merlyn..."

Tyrants and other violent men stand immersed in a river of boiling blood, shallower or deeper according to the extremity of their wrath. Centaurs armed with bows shoot any who emerge further from the river than their eternal sentence allows.

metal af

"Mary is precisely that human nature that was worthy of being united with the divine nature of the Logos through the reception of His hypostasis. In this sense, She is truly the Theotokos. Christ could receive the human nature only through birth. But the human nature does not exist extrahypostatically. Therefore, the New Adam could come into the world only through the New Eve."

Mary is the humanity of Christ.

"In the person of Christ all people who come to Him will see themselves as they should be, as God desires them to be; and there is no one who will be nearer to us than He if only in our life we meet Christ, who is the Neighbor for every man."

These are literally just random quotes from the book; they don't stand out from the rest of the text on account of their profundity.

"...He was equally close and accessible to anyone who scrutinized Him closely. In Jesus Christ there is truly neither Greek nor Scythian, neither slave nor free man, even neither man nor woman, since for each and for all He is the image that speaks directly to mind and heart, that penetrates into the hidden places. This is the basis of the universality of the Gospel, of its supreme all-humanity."

"In reality, Christ's individuality does not know any ontological limits. He was not a mere man, as one of a multitude of people. He was Man in the sense of Universal Man, and His personality contained all human forms; it was the All-Personality. There was nothing local, limited, or particular in Him. His empirical envelope was perfectly transparent and imperceptible..."

"This is a life in which the divine hypostasis, emptying itself to the level of the human hypostasis while ... remaining rooted in the Holy Trinity and the divine nature, inspires His perfect sinless human being. In its uniqueness, this life is inaccessible to the human understanding, even though it is a human life. Every man is given the power to approach this life, to seek and find it in his own life..."

"The Incarnation is accomplished from the very beginning, but the divine-humanity is realized and matures during the course of Jesus' earthly life... Not one step of human development is realized in Him without a corresponding step in the growth of the divine self-consciousness..."

"...Thus, the divine nature of the God-Man is not an external fact or given but a ceaselessly continuing process of the attainment of the divine in the human and of the human in the light of the divine."

"[T]he incommensurability...between the...human essence and the divine essence are such that the latter restrained its manifestation in Christ by kenotic means of voluntary self-limitation until these limits were inwardly overcome by the glorification of Christ..."

Inside the walls of Dis, heretics - conceived not only as those with unorthodox religious beliefs but also as sowers of political and familial division - lie entombed in burning sepulchers. Dante meets Farinata, a Ghibelline leader who was exiled and declared a heretic by Dante's Guelphs, and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a fellow Guelph whose son Guido was Dante's best friend. Epicurus, Frederick II among the damned.

"The world is created for the fullness of its being; there is no other being, and all its elements are given from the beginning. But this general predeterminedness, which comprises the given and the task to be accomplished, does not extend to becoming, in which creaturely freedom participates...Creaturely freedom is as real as the world, for this freedom is the image of the world's becoming..."

"The pagans are guilty only of the fact that, having gained knowledge of God, they did not glorify Him as God but complicated this knowledge and 'became vain in their imaginations' (Rom. 1:21)...they 'changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image' (1:23) resembling man and animals. That is, they did not distinguish the Glory of God, the Divine Sophia, from the creaturely Sophia, fallen in man."

"But the inorganic world, the vegetal world (in paradise), and the animal world are led to man at this initial hour of the world's being in order to become humanized from and in him and thus to realize their destiny."

"Man's relation to nature essentially reproduces the relation of the Logos to Sophia, but it does so in a creaturely fashion, in the sense that the All, existing in Sophia in Integrity, appears here in multiplicity, creaturely hierarchy, and becoming..."

"Man is a 'microcosm,' and his imprint therefore lies upon the entire world, the macrocosm. The world has its fullness and pinnacle in man, who is the logos of the world...there is and can be nothing in the world in which humanity does not participate, nothing to which man's knowledge, feeling, and will cannot extend...[T]he whole world is man's potential and peripheral body."

Canto 7 - Fourth and fifth circles, with a set of dualities in each: the avaricious (greedy) and the prodigal (extravagant) in the fourth circle; the wrathful (above the mud) and sullen (below it, gurgling) in the fifth. Virgil makes a positive characterization of Fortuna as a "general minister" appointed by God to disperse "empty" worldly goods just as God's Wisdom distributes evenly the light of heaven.

Canto V

Second circle, for people led to ruin by love. Minos designates a circle for sinners by coiling his tail a certain number of times. Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra carried by a perpetual hurricane. Most prominent is Francesca, who quotes Dante's earlier poetry back to him in describing how she and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere and fell prey to lust just as they did. Dante swoons with pity.

"Regardless of Mullah Omar's willingness to talk, the [US] can be faulted for shutting down talks..Bush's overall attitude [was] that the Taliban and al-Qa'eda were inseparable...this narrow and inflexible approach contravened diplomatic wisdom to bring adversaries into a post-war political settlement. The US decision to reject any negotiations...must be regarded as one of the greatest mistakes of the Afghan War."

"'This miserable way is taken by the sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise. They now commingle with the coward angels [...] The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened, have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them - even the wicked cannot glory in them.'"

"At once I understood with certainty: this company contained the cowardly, hateful to God and to His enemies."

"The Taliban exemplified something that inspired, something that made them powerful in battle, something closely tied to what it meant to be Afghan. In simple terms, they fought for Islam and resistance to occupation, values enshrined in Afghan identity."

"[T]he Taliban’s tie to what it meant to be Afghan was necessary to America’s defeat in Afghanistan."

"Later [Paul] traveled there, to bring us back assurance of that faith with which the way to our salvation starts. But why should I go there? Who sanctions it? For I am not Aeneas, am not Paul; nor I nor others think myself so worthy."

"You say that [Aeneas], while he was still corruptible, had journeyed into the deathless world with his live body [...] in the empyrean heaven he was chosen to father honored Rome and her empire; and if the truth be told, Rome and her realm were destined to become the sacred place, the seat of the successor of great Peter [...]"

...by a "Greyhound", who will "never feed on land or pewter, but find his fare in wisdom, love, and virtue". The Greyhound is probably Dante's patron Cangrande della Scala, nobleman and future ruler of Verona, whose name literally means "Big Dog". Already we understand that the Comedy will be a thoroughly political work, in both the Aristotelian and partisan senses.