A garland of quotations XVI

Culled from the finest theurges in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

For God’s sake…Remember Rehoboam! Remember Philip the Second! Remember King Charles the First!
•John Wesley, letter to Lord Dartmouth (6/14/1775).

One day Apollonius asked one of the priests, ‘Are the Gods righteous?’ “Doubtless,’ was the response. ‘Reasonable also?’ ‘Why, what could be more reasonable than Divinity!’ ‘And do they know the circumstances of men?’ ‘That is the very root of their Divinity, that they know all things,’ was the answer. ‘If this be so,’ said Apollonius, ‘it seems to me that the only prayer which a well-meaning person can pray is, O ye Gods, give to me what is suitable to me.’
•Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 220).

Hugh has just pronounced a principle of sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. If God fills the universe, how can God create anything? There’s no space. So God has to withdraw to create space for the world to exist.
•Burton L. Visotsky, in Bill Moyers’s Genesis: A Living Conversation (1996).

God will not do everything and rob man of his glory.
•Dante, citation lost.

The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create more perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension.
•Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946).

Providence cannot exist in such a way as to make us nothing. If everything was Providence and nothing but Providence, then Providence would not exist; for what would It have to provide for? There would be nothing but the Divine.
•Plotinus, Enneads (ca. 270).

The Origin of Evil, in particular, held no perplexities for Miss Nightingale. “We cannot conceive,” she remarks, “that Omnipotent Righteousness would find satisfaction in solitary existence.” This being, so, the only question remaining to be asked is: “What beings should we then conceive that God would create?” Now, He cannot create perfect beings, “since, essentially, perfection is one”; if He did so, He would only be adding to Himself. Thus the conclusion is obvious: He must create imperfect ones. Omnipotent Righteousness, faced by the intolerable impasse of a solitary existence, finds itself bound by the very nature of the cause, to create the hospitals at Scutari.
•Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918).

Search well another world: who studies this,
Travels in clouds, seeks manna where none is.
•Henry Vaughan, “Leave, Leave Thy Gadding Thoughts” (1650).

Row no more, or floor becomes roof for us, and we shall seem to walk backwards with our feet in the air. Row no more, for there must be order in all things; every man has his station as ordained by the gods, and yours is not the oarsman’s stretcher.
•Mika Waltari, The Egyptian (1945).

References: Wesley: quoted in Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984); Philostratus: trans. Kenneth S. Guthrie, The Gospel of Apollonius of Tyana (Kessinger, nd); Plotinus: trans. A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus (Collier, 1962); Waltari: trans. Naomi Walford (Putnam’s, 1949); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.