without knowing what it was she yearned after, and she desired without knowing what she desired! The third was the sweet consolation and bliss she derived from the eternal words that came from Christ’s mouth. Three things also caused Martha to run about and serve her dear Christ. The first was a maturity of age and a depth of her being, which was thoroughly trained to the most external matters. For this reason, she believed that no one was so well suited for activity as herself. The second was a wise prudence that knew how to achieve external acts to the highest degree that love demands. The third was the high dignity of her dear guest. The masters of the spiritual life say that God is ready for every person’s spiritual and physical satisfaction to the utmost degree that the person desires. We can clearly distinguish with respect to God’s dear friends how God satisfies our spiritual nature while, on the other hand, he also provides satisfaction for our physical nature.”
48. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, 85.
49. Cf. Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study of Sorcery,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985.
50. Strauss, On Tyranny, 22–132.
51. ST I, 2, 1, obj. 1.
52. Cf. Cornford, “Youth,” in Poems, 15.
53. Dostoyevsky, Idiot, 4.
54. Dostoyevsky, Idiot, 4.
55. Cf. See Jocasta’s foreshadowing remarks. Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” in Three Theban Plays, §1070–72: “What should a man fear? It’s all chance, chance rules our lives. Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark. Better to live at random, best we can.” See also Milton, Paradise Lost, 658–61: “The reason’d high of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, fixt fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, and found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.” Cf. Hegel, Natural Law, 105: “Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become entangled in it), as a fate, and places it outside itself: and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both. To continue this metaphor, Comedy, on the other hand, will generally come down on the side of absence of fate. Either it falls within absolute vitality, and thus presents only shadows of clashes (or mock battles with a fabricated fate and fictitious enemies) or else it falls within non-life and therefore presents only shadows of self-determination and absoluteness; the former is the old, or Divine, comedy, the latter the modern comedy.”
56. Aeschylus, “Agamemnon,” Oresteia, §67–71.
57. Young, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, 149.
58. ST I, 2, 1, ad. 1.
59. Cf. Laws 644d; 803b–c: “I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete blessed seriousness, but that what is human, as we said earlier, has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the most beautiful games.” Cf. Rahner, Man at Play, 40: “Surely only a man whose foundation is in the reality of God can thus call life on earth a game and a shadow-play? For only such a man as this, only to a man who truly believes that this world has proceeded out of the fullness of God’s creative being, is it given to say ‘Nay’ along with his ‘Yea’, and to say it without demur or hesitation. In other words, only such a man can accept and lovingly embrace the world—which includes himself—as God’s handiwork, and, at the same time, toss it aside as a child would toss a toy of which it had wearied, in order then to soar upward into the ‘blessed seriousness’ which is God alone. Only thus does gay melancholy become possible and justified, the mood which must always govern the Christian, the true Homo Ludens, as he follows his middle road. Love for the world and rejection of the world—both of these must draw him and he must at one and the same moment be ready to fold that world in his embrace and to turn his back upon it.”
60. Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” in Three Theban Plays, §1077-86.
61. See “Monologium,” XIV, in Anselm, Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo.
62. Pegis, “Aquinas and the Natural Law,” 5.
63. Ps 119.
64. Cf. ST I-II, 94, 6, ad. 2. On whether the natural law can be abolished from the heart of man. “Although grace is more efficacious than nature, yet nature is more essential to man, and therefore more enduring.”
65. Cf. Balthasar, Christian Witness, 18; see also Berry, “Tested in Fire,” 145–70.
66. ST I, 8, 1, resp.
67. This is why Plato places such a unique and privileged status on the nature of wonder. See Theaet. 155d: “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder).”
68. Cf. É. Gilson, “Medieval Experiment,” Part 1 of The Unity of Philosophical Experience.
69. ST I, 2, 1, resp.
70. Cf. ST I, 3, 4, resp: “If the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing’s existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore, it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.”
71. Cf. ST I, 3, pr.: “Having recognized that something exists, we still have to investigate the way in which it exists,
