QUOTATION: Mystery

Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful what we know, but by far the most beautiful is what we do not know.

--Blessed Niels Stensen, 17th century scientist and priest.

QUOTATION: The Faithful Servant

He who relies on theoretical knowledge alone is not yet a faithful servant: a faithful servant is one who expresses his faith in Christ through obedience to His commandments.

--St. Mark the Ascetic

QUOTATION: Angels are Why You Know

Human intellectual knowledge is ordered by God through the mediation of angels.

--St Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Knowledge

There are some who desire knowledge merely for its own sake; and that is shameful curiosity. And there are others who desire to know, in order that they may themselves be known; and that is vanity, disgraceful too. Others again desire knowledge in order to acquire money or preferment by it; that too is a discreditable quest. But there are also some who desire knowledge, that they may build up the souls of others with it; and that is charity. Others, again, desire it that they may themselves be built up thereby; and that is prudence. Of all these types, only the last two put knowledge to the right use.

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon on the Canticle of Canticles

QUOTATION: Wasting Time

What are we doing? Unlearned people are taking heaven by force. Yet we, with all our knowledge, are so cowardly that we keep rolling around in the mud of our sins.

--St. Augustine to his friends before his conversion.

QUOTATION: Knowledge

Knowledge is very well in its place, but it is like flowers without fruit. We cannot feed on knowledge, we cannot thrive on knowledge. Just as the leaves of the grove are very beautiful but would make a bad meal, so we shall ever be hungry and never be satisfied if we think to take knowledge for our food. Knowledge is no food. Religion is our only food. Here then is another mortification. Mortify your desire of knowledge. Do not go into excess in seeking after truths which are not religious.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, Sermon 5, “Surrender to God” in Faith and Prejudices and Other Sermons, 1848

QUOTATION: Academic Ignorance and Bad Exegesis

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Knowledge and Belief

We can’t have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led.

-- St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Knowledge and Reason

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true.

--C.S. Lewis, Miracles

QUOTATION: Knowledge

You need to know your faith. You cannot give what you do not have.

-- Fr. John Corapi

QUOTATION: Authority

The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with “I think I heard somewhere, or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said such-and-such”, and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.

-- G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Authority

Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: Knowledge of the Faith is a Necessity

We therefore grossly deceive ourselves in not allotting more time to the study of divine truths. It is not enough barely to believe them, and let our thoughts now and then glance upon them: that knowledge which shows us heaven, will not bring us to the possession of it, and will deserve punishments, not rewards, if it remain slight, weak, and superficial. By serious and frequent meditation it must be concocted, digested, and turned into the nourishment of our affections, before it can be powerful and operative enough to change them, and produce the necessary fruit in our lives. For this all the saints affected solitude and retreats from the noise and hurry of the world, as much as their circumstances allowed them.

-- Saint Apollinaris of Hierapolis

QUOTATION: Knowledge of Scripture

A man who is well grounded in the testimonies of the Scripture is the bulwark of the Church.

--St. Jerome: In Isaiam, 54:12

QUOTATION: Knowledge and Charity

Let knowledge be applied to a kind of scaffolding, making it possible for the edifice of charity to rise, to endure for ever, even when knowledge is done away with.

--St. Augustine