Seven Principles of the Spiritual Life

 Reading Feser on the Politics of Chastity came by way of checking his main website.    One of his footnotes cited a book called On Love and Charity, which is Aquinas translated by P Kwasniewski and also Thomas Bolin OSB and Fr Joseph Bolin.  

This attracted my attention because Liam went to school with two Bolins (Louis and Dominic) and also, when he went to Clear Creek for the Easter vigil in his junior year at TAC, I believe their group visited the Bolins who have something like 10+ children.    Apparently at least a couple of them are now priests.   Maybe more.  

Also the book is a commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, so I was interested in that after reading about Lombard as an early scholastic in Jean Leclercq's book.  

I found their vocations website Paths of Love and through that an article called Seven Principles of the Spiritual Life.  I haven't finished reading it yet but it is really good.    Here are the seven principles:

1. To keep God in mind at all times.
2. To trust in God as much as possible.
3. To do all things for the love of God.
4. Not to trust in oneself.
5. Not to seek oneself.
6. To do all things with joy.
7. To be as energetic as possible.1

The 7th is the most unfamiliar, of course.   I suppose it adds up to "zeal for your house".   

St Therese is quoted extensively.  

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Other things of note -- I started reading Thomas Pink on Magisterium, authority and so on.  I don't exactly remember what I read that reminded me of him.    Feser has a post that discusses Pink's distinction between official and magisterial theology.  

This is sort of my running series of reading notes.   The advantage is that I can link to things and see the connections between thought streams.   

I occasionally put down a few notes in my handwritten notebook, too, when a reading makes me question or hypothesize something.   These are often very ambiguous later on but perhaps I will type them out at some point and try to remember what I was thinking when I wrote them.   

One thing that I believe I mentioned yesterday was that most scholarly type people have written a LOT.    When I read about Josef Seifert last week sometime, he mentioned that in addition to his significant body of publications, he also has lots of unpublished papers.   My theory on that is that just as with me, with these more advanced thinkers, writing helps them think.    And their work can be quite wide-ranging -- Seifert has thought out things in areas like logic, ethics, politics and I think science and perhaps aesthetics as well.   It makes me think I should start developing some puny body of Thought in different areas that really are of prime importance in life.    The down side is that I wouldn't want to divert focus from the unum necessarium.  This is a concern.  But on the other hand, all these areas lead directly to Him, as well.    And having unexamined, half-pagan ideas about them, through lack of serious reflection, is also a way of "being troubled about many things".