[maryz]

Henninger also compares the Pope's approach to Scalia's approach to the Constitution.

[maryz]

The First Things review Henninger mentions: Joseph Ratzinger, Christ’s Donkey

[jboot]

Swarm ping!

[redgolum]

Lutheran ping!

I am currently plowing through City of God, and so have read more of Augustine than Thomas, but I do prefer Augustine.

Thomas has often been accused (and rightly so at times) of using circular logic. While I haven't read all of his stuff yet, what I have read is at times guilty of that.

[goldstategop]

Augustine was a Platonist while Aquinas was an Aristotelian. The influence of the Greek philosophers is clear to any one who reads the work of the two greatest Christian thinkers in Western Civilization.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Knitting A Conundrum]

The fifth century was one of those watershed times...brilliant men of faith who helped build what was needed to carry the church through the collapse of the empire in the west.

Interesting that Benedict would be drawn to those who would be key to that - St. Augustine, St. Benedict, when our own civilization seems to be teetering on its own dark age.

[rwfromkansas]

Certainly interesting, as is his declaration to pursue church unity.

But, that rings hollow when in 2000, he published a document as part of the Church's doctrine office saying Protestant churches are not "proper" churches and are "deficient."

[RightWhale]

Ach, du Lieber, Augustine.

[sionnsar]

Augustine is the more mystical personality, closer in some ways to the "new age" impulses of our times. In the writings of Augustine, arguably the most complex mind Christianity has produced, the exercise of deep faith carries with it the possibility of what I would call a "high" experience in one's pursuit of and relationship to God. That was the Church of the 5th century. In our time, religion has become freighted with correct politics (the Left) or correct morality (the Right), rather than the substance of one's relationship with God.

I get the impression that Joseph Ratzinger--who reveres the early, transcendent Church Fathers (its "founding fathers")--is at heart more a vibrant 5th-century Christian than a stale 19th-century dogmatist; as conceivably was John Paul II, who often let himself slip into an Upward-directed reverie in public. In short, Benedict XVI looks to be very different from the stolid, authoritarian German described this week in the public prints.

[mware]

Those who wish to see where they fall, check out this site.

selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/

My results are

St. Augustine 100%

Aquinas 86%

Kant 69%

[cornelis]

ping!

[Ciexyz]

"When you become Pope, other people do the packing." ABC News reporting on the Pope moving to his new papal apartment.