Ontological Musings

"Love, in so far as distinct from desire or as opposed to desire, love treated as the subordination of the self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level more truly me than I am myself -- love as the breaking of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the essential ontological datum. -- The science of ontology will not get out of the scholastic rut until it takes full cognizance of the fact that love comes first." - Gabriel Marcel

"Our alienation from God also includes our alienation from ourselves and explains it. Without him, the internal dialogue we can have with ourselves would lack all mystery and lose most of its metaphysical interest." - Maurice Nedeoncelle

"Just as the we tend to adopt from the reigning political paradigm of the surrounding culture our sense of how the Church should structure itself -- monarchial in the age of monarchies, democratic in the age of democracy -- so, too, do we adopt the prevailing notions of what personal life consists of. But in both cases, we do injustice to the radical specificity of Christianity." - Gil Bailie

"The revolution of the person," writes Paul Evdokimov, "is the event of Christianity," and human desire is simply "the inborn nostalgia to become a 'person.'"

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - William Shakespeare

[h/t: Cornerstone Forum]