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Patristics Quotes

Browse 11 quotes about Patristics.

Patristics Quotes

“To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus’s hand: “he wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch.” The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “proceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ’s human nature as the instrumental cause.” Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an “infinite value” that “derives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates”. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.”

“Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot, the passersby sneer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage because of the King who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Saviour on the cross. It is bound hand and foot; all who are in Christ trample it as they pass, and as witnesses to Him (King Jesus) deride it, scoffing and saying, “O Death where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

“We will begin then with the creation of the world with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: The renewal of Creation has been wrought by the Self-Same Word who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works affecting the salvation of the world through the same Word who made it in the beginning.”

“Being (in the sense of "God is Being, from whom all creation takes its being") is an auto-kenetic crystalline active power unfolding within itself unceasingly. The key concept is that of intrinsic cyclic motion, power to act. Existence is a verb, an action, a doing. "Action springs forth" (from "to be") as the "Word leapt.”

“The Kingdom of God is not a Talmud, nor is it a mechanical collection of scriptural or patristic quotations outside our being and our lives. The Kingdom of God is within us, like a dynamic leaven which fundamentally changes man's whole life, his spirit and his body. What is required in patristic study, in order to remain faithful to the Fathers' spirit of freedom and worthy of their spiritual nobility and freshness, is to approach their holy texts with the fear in which we approach and venerate their holy relics and holy icons. This liturgical reverence will soon reveal to us that here is another inexpressible grace. The whole atmosphere is different. There are certain vital passages in the patristic texts which, we feel, demand of us, and work within us, an unaccustomed change. These we must make part of our being and our lives, as truths and as standpoints, to leaven the whole. And at the same time we must put our whole self into studying the Fathers, waiting and marking time. This marriage, this baptism into patristic study brings what we need, which is not an additional load of patristic references and the memorizing of other people's opinions, but the acquisition of a new clear-sighted sense which enables man to see things differently and rightly. If we limit ourselves to learning passages by heart and classifying them mechanically — and teach men likewise — then we fall into a basic error which simply makes us fail to teach and make known the patristic way of life and philosophy.”