Theologians

"I have seen unlearned men who were truly humble, and they became wiser than the wise."

"Do not say: 'I do not know what is right, therefore I am not to blame when I fail to do it.' For if you did all the good about which you do know, what you should do next would then become clear to you."

"Evils reinforce each other; so do virtues, thus encouraging us to still greater efforts."

"The devil belittles small sins; otherwise he cannot lead us into greater ones."

"When you first become involved in something evil, don't say: 'It will not overpower me.' For to the extent that you are involved you have already been overpowered by it."

"He who does not choose to suffer for the sake of truth will be chastened more painfully by suffering he has not chosen."

"The intellect cannot be still unless the body is still also: and the wall between them cannot be demolished without stillness and prayer."

"Prayer is called a virtue, but in reality it is the mother of the virtues: for it gives birth to them through union with Christ."

"Love is the last of the virtues to be born in the heart, but it is the first in value."

"However great our virtuous actions of today, they do not requite but condemn our past negligence."

"One man received a thought and accepted it without examination. Another received a thought and tested its truth. Which of them acted with greater reverence?"

"Many of us feel remorse for our sins, yet we gladly accept their causes."

"A passion which we allow to grow active within us through our own choice afterwards forces itself upon us against our will."

"Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos."

"Ibn Taymiyya digested the “poison of philosophy” – yet, his brilliant mind turned the poison into honey. This very honey, extracted from the hive of his writings, can accordingly nourish a new era of modern Islamic philosophy. That Ibn Taymiyya himself, no doubt, would have taken umbrage at this sort of labeling of his work demonstrates how rich in irony the history of ideas can actually be!"

"Ibn Abdelwahhab had taken Ibn Taymiyya’s pronouncements stripping Islam down to absolute monotheism and began to enforce them in Najd. He went further still by declaring war against anyone who didn’t follow his teachings—non-Muslims but also Muslims. The Najdi preacher had taken theology and turned it into a political and military mission. Ibn Abdelwahhab was so extreme that his own father and brother denounced him. He sent missives around the Arabian Peninsula and beyond to scholars and notables of the Muslim world, appealing to them to follow him and what he claimed was the true version of Islam. He was rejected and mocked in scathing responses coming from as far away as Tunisia, where the scholars of Al-Zaytuna, one of the oldest, most important centers of Islamic learning, undid his arguments one by one. The locals in his desert settlement accused him of heresy and tried to kill him."

"The power of the Al-Sauds still rested on their alliance with clerics upholding the legacy of the holier-than-thou preacher Ibn Abdelwahhab. Born in 1703, Ibn Abdelwahhab had been inspired by the dogmatic teachings of a literalist, medieval theologian, Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, who belonged to the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, the strictest of the four Islamic schools. A complex character with a rich legacy who had lived at the time of the Crusades and sanctified war against the Christian invaders, Ibn Taymiyya would be quoted mostly for his edicts allowing war against a Muslim ruler in certain cases. He would inspire generations of activist and jihadist Salafists who ignored the nuances of his teachings."

"A man married a maid-slave who bore him a child. Would that child be free or would he be an owned slave?" "Her child whom she bore from him would be the property of her master according to all the Imams (heads of the four Islamic schools of law) because the child follows the (status) of his mother in freedom or slavery. If the child is not of the race of Arabs, then he is definitely an owned slave according to the scholars, but the scholars disputed (his status) among themselves if he was from the Arabs - whether he must be enslaved or not because when A'isha (Muhammad's wife) had a maid-slave who was an Arab, Muhammad said to A'isha, `Set this maid free because she is from the children of Ishmael.'"

"What can my enemies do to me? I have in my breast both my heaven and my garden. If I travel they are with me, never leaving me. Imprisonment for me is a chance to be alone with my Lord. To be killed is martyrdom and to be exiled from my land is a spiritual journey."

"Sins are like chains and locks preventing their perpetrator from roaming the vast garden of tawhid and reaping the fruits of righteous actions."

"The objective of asceticism is to leave all that harms the servants Hereafter and the objective of worship is to do all that will benefit his Hereafter."

"The jihad against the soul is the foundation for the Jihad against the disbelievers and hypocrites."

"The more the servant loves his Master, the less will he love other objects and they will decrease in number The less the servant loves his Master, the more will he love other objects and they will increase in number."

"This whole religion (of Islam) revolves around knowing the truth and acting by it, and action must be accompanied by patience."

"Guidance is not attained except with knowledge and correct direction is not attained except with patience."

"If God—exalted is He—is Creator of everything, He creates good and evil on account of the wise purpose that He has in that by virtue of which His action is good and perfect."

"God does not create pure evil. Rather, in everything that He creates is a wise purpose by virtue of what is good. However, there may be some evil in it for some people, and this is partial, relative evil. As for total evil or absolute evil, the Lord is exonerated of that."

"When the Lamb opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?”"

"Patmos, that infamous island, place of banishment, place of punishment, place of lonely wanderings, became a place of revelation, of discovery, of empowerment. Instead of teetering on the brink of mad isolation, John finds himself drawn to the heart of God and miraculously, wondrously, into the heartbeat of the church, not only of Asia Minor but of the world, not only of that time but of all times to come."

"The twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying:"

"I testify that it is possible for believers to be so filled with the Holy Ghost that they can live many years on the earth conscious every day of a meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light, and of no shrinking back, because of a felt need of further inward cleansing, from an instant translation into the society of the holy angels and into the presence of the holy God."

"And with animals, if we approach them in a rational way we shall find a trace of the intelligible in them which is a not unworthy imitation of what is above reason. For if we look at those beings that naturally care for their offspring, we are encouraged to define for ourselves reverently and with godly boldness that God exercises providence in his sovereign uniqueness over all beings."

"[For Maximus], through accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with God."

"In Maximus all the streams of the Greek patristic tradition flow together in synthesis. At the same time, with real originality, there is much from within that tradition that he takes to a higher level. But the course of this saint's life impressed me even more than his teaching. Once again, like Athanasius, one man was able to defend orthodox Christology against a whole empire. A Byzantine joins forces with Pope St. Martin I in Rome and finally suffers martyrdom for the true faith. This is the summit of that unity of doctrine and life which marks the whole patristic age; speculation and mysticism of the greatest subtlety are wedded to a soberly and consciously grasped martyrdom. In St. Maximus we can see in the Catholica what Kierkegaard found within the individual."

"Intolerant believers embrace what we may call Calvin's contradiction, after the theologian who, perhaps, most brazenly weds the notions of religious certainty and textual interpretive 'inerrancy' with the directly contradictory notion of humanity's moral and epistemic 'fallenness.' John Calvin's steadfast refusal to consider the implications of his view of human 'depravity' for his own claims regarding the nature and meaning of scripture has conditioned Protestant belief ever since, setting the stage for the flight from anxiety that has helped to push the self-satisfied certainty of many Christians in tragically (and sinfully) aggressive and intolerant directions."

"Nothing impossible has been commanded by the God of justice and majesty. ... Why do we indulge in pointless evasions, advancing the frailty of our own nature as an objection to the one who commands us? No one knows better the true measure of our strength than he who has given it to us nor does anyone understand better how much we are able to do than he who has given us this very capacity of ours to be able; nor has he who is just wished to command anything impossible or he who is good intended to condemn a man for doing what he could not avoid doing."

"Under the plea that it is impossible not to sin, they are given a false sense of security in sinning ... Anyone who hears that it is not possible for him to be without sin will not even try to be what he judges to be impossible, and the man who does not try to be without sin must perforce sin all the time, and all the more boldly because he enjoys the false security of believing that it is impossible for him not to sin ... But if he were to hear that he is able not to sin, then he would have exerted himself to fulfil what he now knows to be possible when he is striving to fulfil it, to achieve his purpose for the most part, even if not entirely."

"When will a man guilty of any crime or sin accept with a tranquil mind that his wickedness is a product of his own will, not of necessity, and allow what he now strives to attribute to nature to be ascribed to his own free choice? It affords endless comfort to transgressors of the divine law if they are able to believe that their failure to do something is due to inability rather than disinclination, since they understand from their natural wisdom that no one can be judged for failing to do the impossible and that what is justifiable on grounds of impossibility is either a small sin or none at all."

"If you depart from evil but fail to do good, you transgress the law, which is fulfilled not simply by abominating evil deeds but also by performing good works."

"Love of wealth is insatiable, desire for honour knows no fulfilment; possessions destined to meet with a speedy end are sought endlessly. But divine wisdom, heavenly riches, immortal honours we neglect in our indifference and sloth, and, as for spiritual riches, either we do not touch them at all or, if we get a slight taste of them, we at once suppose that we have had enough. The divine Wisdom invites us to its feasts in quite different terms: Those who eat me, she says, will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more (Sir.24.21). No one can have enough of such feasts or ever suffers from squeamishness because he has had too much: the more he drinks from that source the greater will be each man's capacity and eagerness for more."

"We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. ... If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man's status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived."

"The best incentive for the mind consists in teaching it that it is possible to do anything which one really wants to do."

"We can never enter upon the path to virtue unless we have hope as our guide and companion."

"Whenever I have to speak on the subject of moral instruction and the conduct of a holy life, it is my practice first to demonstrate the power and quality of human nature."

"Yet we do not defend the good of nature to such an extent that we claim that it cannot do evil, since we undoubtedly declare also that it is capable of good and evil; we merely try to protect it from an unjust charge, so that we may not seem to be forced to do evil through a fault of our nature, when, in fact, we do neither good nor evil without the exercise of our will and always have the freedom to do one of the two, being always able to do either."

"It was because God wished to bestow on the rational creature the gift of doing good of his own free will and the capacity to exercise free choice, by implanting in man the possibility of choosing either alternative. ... He could not claim to possess the good of his own volition, unless he was the kind of creature that could also have possessed evil. Our most excellent creator wished us to be able to do either but actually to do only one, that is, good, which he also commanded, giving us the capacity to do evil only so that we might do His will by exercising our own. That being so, this very capacity to do evil is also good – good, I say, because it makes the good part better by making it voluntary and independent, not bound by necessity but free to decide for itself."

"Whenever I have to speak on the subject of moral instruction and conduct of a holy life, it is my practice first to demonstrate the power and quality of human nature and to show what it is capable of achieving, and then to go on to encourage the mind of my listener to consider the idea of different kinds of virtues, in case it may be of little or no profit to him to be summoned to pursue ends which he has perhaps assumed hitherto to be beyond his reach; for we can never end upon the path of virtue unless we have hope as our guide and compassion."

"He is a Christian"

"Do you consider a man to be a Christian by whose bread no hungry man is ever filled?"

"Let no man judge himself to be a Christian, unless he is one who both follows the teaching of Christ and imitates his example."