Monday, October 25, 2010

Notes: Saturday-Monday, October 16-25, 2010 (part 2 of 2)

7. Interesting books reviewed in the weekend papers

Just one from last weekend, but I've been meaning to blog on a number of them from earlier weekends, though it seems I won't get round to it. This review, apparently not available on-line so my transcript follows, is from the Herald's Spectrum supplement:

THE COURIER'S TALE
Peter Walker
Bloomsbury, 352 pp,
$32.99

There's a lot of dreadful historical fiction about but this is an intelligent, literate historical novel whose emphasis is on character and whose narrative voice is that of a quirky, bemused minor player in the drama. Michael Throckmorton was a real historical persaonage, as was the other main character in this story, the virtuous but indecisive Cardinal Pole.
Throckmorton finds himself travelling backwards and forwards between England and Italy for most of his adult life, the uneasy servant of two warring masters.
He belongs to that turbulent period of English history that starts with the marriage of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn and ends with the succession of their daughter, Elizabeth I, to the throne in 1558. In sticking to historical events and characters, Walker becomes enmeshed in detail at the expense of the narrative; after its promising start, the novel loses its way.
[Review by Kerryn Goldsworthy]

8. Two recent blog comments by me:

At Mr. Schütz's blog:

8.1

Cardinal Pole
October 20, 2010 at 5:20 pm

“[You] might misleading suggest that the bread and wine are physically Jesus.”

They are. A man’s metaphysical parts are his animality and rationality, his physical parts are his body and soul, and his integral parts are his faculties and members. ‘Physis‘ means ‘nature’, and human nature is the conjunction of animal body and rational soul. By virtue of the Sacrament, the bread is converted into the Body of Christ, and by virtue of concomitance, His Blood, Soul, and Divinity are present there too, and the same goes mutatis mutandis for the wine.

These days people tend to mean something else by ‘physical’, though, and that’s presumably what you have in mind. Paul VI. dealt with this in an allocution, though I don’t have time to find the reference.

[http://scecclesia.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/no-knowledge-without-education/#comment-17721]

8.2

Cardinal Pole
October 21, 2010 at 5:34 pm

“… not in the way bodies normally are”

Quite right–He is present ‘as in a Sacrament’. (Unfortunately there are some, even in the Priesthood, who would like to speak only of ‘Sacramental Presence’ while remaining silent on the question of Substantial Presence. See this old Coo-ees post, and also my comment there of January 16, 2009 6:02 PM (which also contains an interesting example of a Magisterial usage of the term ‘natural’):

http://coo-eesfromthecloister.blogspot.com/2009/01/move-of-zwingli-luther-and-calvin-its.html

“… although not in the manner in which bodies are in a place.”

Good to see His late Holiness re-stating the doctrine of the Catechism of the Council of Trent. After publishing that earlier comment it occured to me that it might have been Mysterium Fidei of which I was thinking when I wrote of Paul VI. dealing with ‘physical’ presence.
[http://scecclesia.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/no-knowledge-without-education/#comment-17737]

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of Sts. Chrysanthus and Daria, Martyrs, A.D. 2010

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