204 Quotes About Orthodoxy

One might well conceive all of human history as the story of humankind's journey from beauty lost to beauty gradually sought and regained. Never, over the centuries, has the human need for beauty been extinguished...Art, somehow removed from the practical demands of everyday life, reveals that our kinship is not with the biological world only; it is also with the spiritual world.

[H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?"[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)]

What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?"[Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006]

People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.

It was given to Abba Anthony to see a doctor in Alexandria who was simply and humbly doing what God had given him to do. His inner being stood in the presence of the Lord as he worked and prayed. According to the literature of the desert, this is the goal of our life in this world as it is set out for all Christians, a goal that the solitary monk tried to attain through his special vocation.

No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.

Heresy would like to think of itself as 'invented Truth'. But of course, all Reason and Logic would agree that no man can ever create Truth; he can only discover it. If heresy were ever at all beneficial, God would use it really to bring one right back to Truth, as countless 'inventions' have brought men to discovery.

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a “too unitive Christology” on the one hand, and a “too differentiating Christology” on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God.

For what need would I have to say, 'I believe,' if I already knew? (from The Church is One)