The Hope of Austin Farrer

 I would no longer attempt, with the psalmist, ‘to set God before my face’.  I would see him as the underlying cause of my thinking, especially of those thoughts in which I tried to think of him.  I would dare to hope that sometimes my thought would become diaphanous, so that there should be some perception of the divine cause shining through the created effect, as a deep pool, settling into a clear tranquility, permits us to see the spring in the bottom of it from which its waters rise.

(from ‘The Glass of Vision’ by Austin Farrer)

Austin Farrer - Anglo-Catholic Thomist

As you read Wikipedia are you ever irritated by vexatious citation needed editor remarks? Here are examples of what I mean:

re Austin Farrer:

He went to St Paul's School in London where[citation needed] he gained a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.[2] Encouraged by his father to value scholarship,[citation needed] he nevertheless found the divisions within the Baptist church dispiriting,[15] and while at Oxford he became an Anglican.[16] Finding his spiritual home at St Barnabas Church in Oxford, his theology and his spirituality became profoundly Anglo-Catholic, although centred on the Book of Common Prayer. After gaining a first in greats,[citation needed] he went up to Cuddesdon Theological College where he trained alongside the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.[17]

Austin Farrer is an interesting and somewhat anomalous thinker. He was a Protestant, sorry Anglo-Catholic, Thomist. Eric Mascall was another and he refers frequently in his book Existence and Analogy to Farrer’s Finite and Infinite. The latter is an attempt to justify the rational proofs of the existence of God. Depending on my personal metaphysical weather I am in and out on that. Beginning it last night I was struck by its briskness combined with a flurry of sidebars.

Later.