Another Newman Quote of the Day

Another classic worth posting here.

Aquinas, Etc.

My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of my nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself. (Grammar of Assent, p. 347)

It’s hard to know where to begin in commenting upon this brief passage. It is just packed.

What is resignation to the laws of my nature? I think a good illustration would be to think of the madman who is convinced he has wings and tosses himself off a ledge with a false certainty that his powers of flight will deliver him from an inevitable sudden stop at the bottom of the cliff. So resignation to the laws of my nature would be…

View original post 459 more words

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: