Forty-Seven Years Ago Today

President John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley died on the same day, the assassination of the former overshadowing the other two.

On Creation and the Music of the Spheres

God created the heavens and the earth, but not only half-He created all the heavens and all the earth, creating the essence with the form. For he is not an inventor of figures, but the creator even of the essence of beings.-St. Basil of Caesarea, The Hexameron


But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is twofold. One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make a marvellous harmony. In both of these our soul took part before it was imprisoned in our bodies. But it uses the ears as messengers, as though they were chinks in this darkness. By the ears, as I have already said, the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony which it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to (Fruatur, ad sedes) its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again.-Marsilio Ficino, De divino furore (On Divine Frenzy)

St. Martin of Tours

 
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On this Armistice Day, we honour a saint who had been a soldier of the Roman Army, and whose life gained greater fame as Christ's soldier, as a missionary bishop in a hostile Gallic land.


O man of worth past telling, whom labour could not conquer, nor death discomfit; who neither feared to die, nor refused to live. -Third Antiphon for Lauds for the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, from the Monastic Diurnal

Here's his vita from The Golden Legend

Attack Ads Ca. 1800

Hat tip: John Beeler