Quotes by Theologians - Page 94

When I say "The good man gave his good dog a good meal," I use "good" analogically, for there is at the same time a similarity and a difference between a good man, a good dog, and a good meal. All three are desirable, but a good man is wise and moral, a good dog is tame and affectionate, and a good meal is tasty and nourishing. But a good man is not tasty and nourishing, except to a cannibal; a good dog is not wise and moral, except in cartoons, and a good meal is not tame and affectionate, unless it's alive as you eat it.
Peter Kreeft
The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed
John Milbank
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
Søren Kierkegaard
Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.
Peter Kreeft
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
Peter Kreeft
Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.
Peter Kreeft
God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.
David Bentley Hart
Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.
Peter Kreeft
It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.
Peter Kreeft
It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.
Albert Schweitzer
...much theological discussion is wasted, not because the words used have no possible meaning, but because the people who use them don't mean anything by them.
Rosemary Haughton
Etre dans le vent, c'est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes.
Jean Guitton
Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
Paul Tillich
Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.
Augustine of Hippo
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
Peter Kreeft
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.
Peter Kreeft
By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.
Peter Kreeft
Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.
Søren Kierkegaard
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
G.K. Chesterton
The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.
Peter Kreeft
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Søren Kierkegaard
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
Peter Kreeft
We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.
Scott Hahn
We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.
John Chrysostom
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Thomas Aquinas
The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.
Peter Kreeft
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
Peter Kreeft
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
G.K. Chesterton
If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.
Jalaluddin Rumi
All actual life is encounter.
Martin Buber
True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: 'I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live
Albert Schweitzer
The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
Søren Kierkegaard
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
G.K. Chesterton
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
C.S. Lewis
The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.
Thomas Aquinas
This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.
Peter Kreeft
Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Søren Kierkegaard
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
G.K. Chesterton
His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
C.S. Lewis
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesterton
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
Søren Kierkegaard
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
Søren Kierkegaard
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
G.K. Chesterton
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
G.K. Chesterton
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
G.K. Chesterton
Adventures are never fun while you're having them.
C.S. Lewis
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chesterton
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
C.S. Lewis
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
C.S. Lewis
You soak up my soul and mingle me. Each drop of my blood cries out to the earth. We are partners, blended as one.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
Peter Kreeft
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely
C.S. Lewis
You're water. We're the millstone.You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes.You're spirit. We're the opening and closing of our hands. You're the clarity.We're the language that tries to say it.You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing.
Jalaluddin Rumi
All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.
C.S. Lewis
Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.
Desmond Tutu
I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.
C.S. Lewis
Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all.
Augustine of Hippo
Better to illuminate than merely to shine to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
Thomas Aquinas