#theology

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#philosophy #theology #wonder #worship #attitude

My body kills me, so I kill it. ↗

— Dorotheus the Theban

#death #desert-father #dying #holy-father #monastic

Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#beauty

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#beauty #catholicism #christianity #god #goodness

Our theology is still in a time of crisis, and I think this will last for some years more. ↗

— Godfried Danneels

#i #i think #last #more #our

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt. ↗

— Leslie Stephen

#atheism #collection #doubt #express #few

There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. ↗

— Walpola Rahula

#cogito-ergo-sum #existence #existentialism #god #humanity

For the progressive left, social activism grounded in faith and theology crested in the 1960s. ↗

— Mike McCurry

#faith #grounded #left #progressive #social

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. ↗

— H. L. Mencken

#explain #knowing #terms #theology #unknowable

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#doctrine #theology #wisdom #experience