Quotes from Aidan Nichols

It is false to suppose that so long as Scripture and doctrine are preserved, disciplinary and liturgical tradition can safely be modernised at will.

Though the integration into a single whole of all legitimate theologies is an eschatological desideratum, it can only be approached asymptotically in time.

On contact with sensuous experience, the intellect is able to generate first principles, and, with their help, it gradually builds up what it knows. But it is thus able to construct truth only because it is itself a participation in Truth. The mind is the light of divine truth -- analogically speaking, by way of participation. It is a participated likeness of the uncreated light in which the ideas of all things dwell.

Participated divine light, existing as finite mind, intimately united with the body, precedes all the data of perception and makes apprehension of their inner order and meaning possible.

The Giver has communicated himself in the gift of being in such a way that the creative act reaches to the core of the creature's freedom.

The act whereby God consummates the gift of being in the new creation that flows from the Word Incarnate's Paschal Mystery is love in a higher and more intimate sense than with any generosity bestowed in creating. It is the introduction of human freedom into the everlasting love-exchange of the Trinity itself.

The Gospel is not only message; it is, more, the fullness of the self-communication of God to man.

The passing on of Tradition includes, therefore, the passing on of fitting language about its content, and it is this language -- not Tradition itself -- which "develops," in so doing not changing apostolic truth as consciously entertained by the mind of the Church but amplifying its expression.

Postapostolically, the Spirit's assistance is given to the Church not only that she may guard the apostolic deposit but also that she may make it bear fruit in minds and hearts.

As modes of being -- for all things are composites of a nature with an "act of being," actus essendi -- things add to being not by bringing to it something extrinsic but, on the contrary, by bringing out of it its intrinsic riches in some determinate way.

Self-expression through activity (not only inward but also, and especially, outward) is the natural perfection, the flowering of being.

Evolution does not contradict the reception of being from its Source since chance events can be subsumed under divine providence.

Man's self-destructiveness and failure to attain a telos that cures dissatisfaction suggest a disjunction in his origins to which, theologically, the name "original sin" is applied.

To know beings is implicitly to know God, since all things are in some manner likenesses of divine being, which, in its communicative outflow in creation, shows itself for what it is.