A wordy "omnia Deus", God in All things. This the first work of the redoubtable PTC. He lived his religion and passion and combined the two. Not really discovered by the greater world until after his death his deep thinking on his Jesuit Catholicism tied to explain modern cosmic science within Catholic themes. A lot of words trying to describe the indescribable but still an interesting read with some Jesuit gems within. ( )

essay on the interior life

If it were mine to say, I would have called it ‘The Holy Environment’; I may not speak French, but I can speak English, and ‘The Divine Milieu’ is just hiding behind translationese. It’s want of courage; it’s blending in, the actual content of Pierre’s working is strikingly different from classic Hellenistic theology, but with a word without an obvious meaning to most people, you hide that behind this vague idea of class, basically…. Pierre wasn’t hiding from the new world, though, even if he was a Christian, and he didn’t lack courage.

For me it’s religion—interfaith—Christianity and secularism.

…. On the one hand I wouldn’t want to be a recentist—I suppose that technical science is a sort of recentism, but the /meaning/ of it isn’t…. “I’ve never believed a single word you say, goosecap”~ That’s right; I know you don’t, hahaha—but on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to imagine that this is better somehow than, say, Polkinghorne…. I don’t know; of course there will always be that macho scientist who goes, Me And My Big Balls Will Blast Away The Past; (NOBODY listens to fun. anymore; Aim and Ignite is fucking Nostalgic, you know what I think of that! You’re going down, Millennial! You’re. Going. Down!), but it is still right to say, you know, Dust You Are, and to dust your books will return….

Although I guess sometimes it takes a long time, longer than a single human life—it’s like a tree’s life, you know. Pierre was like a tree. He didn’t take much interest, did he, in the newspapers and newsmakers….

…. He’s quite a pretty girl; he writes pretty—although he’s bashful as Beth March. “I will only play the piano softly, Mother….” But plenty of religious people talked about him as though he were some sort of whore, you know….

…. I don’t suppose I’ll read Pierre himself again, although perhaps (in addition to Polkinghorne etc), I will read a contemporary book About him—augmenting and commenting, and even more importantly, by doing so, cutting away the merely historical and the encrustations of mannerisms; many of these mannerisms seem to be rather augmented than ameliorated by the translator, as though la palabra mas grande, mas francesa, were what absolved it of sin, or at least were what was desirable about it, you know.

I suppose perhaps Pierre escapes out of the past into the future, but if so certainly he escapes with marks on his body—the claw-marks of some great dragon.

It makes me think about myself; perhaps those intellectually fallow years of youth, so obviously apparently disastrous, were of some use, you know.

…. Pierre was literally a scientist, and it’s good for scientists to try to not be exclusively in their exclusivist-naturalist orthodoxy and recentism, BUT, I also TOTALLY would get a scientist of today not liking this book. 👌

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