eloquence

"Catholic theology followed a fairly well defined direction. Its path was not from the outset as broad and straight, like an arterial road, as it afterwards became. At the beginning it branched and wandered like a country lane, and pursuing the first tracks that men made round and across their own intellectual holdings, served to link together the scattered habitations of thought. But steadily the lane grew straighter, as the various more important settlements came to be more clearly established and the extent and requirements of the whole area were more thoroughly surveyed. Great awkward corners were then found to exist, at which a number of top-heavy, badly loaded heresies met with disastrous road accidents. It was necessary to improve the highway, and so at last the ordered simplicity of the conciliar definitions was brought into arterial working. The progress made was never arbitrary, nor was its general tendency irregular. It represents simply the first stages in the formation of that "steadfast and consistent Christian philosophy", the philosophia perennis, which has grown and continues to grow through reverent and rational reflection on the Gospel, and presents, as Mr. Alfred Noyes has written, a central point of view enabling men, from the height of a great historic religion, to see life steadily and see it whole (The Unknown God, pp. II, 370). A road like that is not to be regarded as an illegitimate accretion on the jungle, but as a main trunk, if not the one main trunk, of the communications of civilizing thought."

-- G.L. Prestige, Bampton Lecture I, TRADITION: OR, THE SCRIPTURAL BASIS OF THEOLOGY: A PROLOGUE

Emperor Julian

A man after my own heart... too bad he was an apostate.

"One of his most intimate friends, who had often shared the frugal simplicity of his table, has remarked, that his light and sparing diet (which was usually of the vegetable kind) left his mind and body always free and active, for the various and important business of an author, a pontiff, a magistrate, a general, and a prince... The predecessors of Julian, his uncle, his brother, and his cousin, indulged their puerile taste for the games of the Circus, under the specious pretence of complying with the inclinations of the people; and they frequently remained the greatest part of the day as idle spectators, and as a part of the splendid spectacle, till the ordinary round of twenty-four races was completely finished. On solemn festivals, Julian, who felt and professed an unfashionable dislike to these frivolous amusements, condescended to appear in the Circus; and after bestowing a careless glance at five or six of the races, he hastily withdrew with the impatience of a philosopher, who considered every moment as lost that was not devoted to the advantage of the public or the improvement of his own mind."

-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall vol. 2