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by
Peter Kreeft
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October 24 - October 25, 2021
You don’t need faith to see the consequences of faithlessness.
To the ancients, happiness was to the soul what health was to the body.
The root of most atheism is not argument but attitude, not intellection but feeling, not the love of truth but the fear of truth.
Style is like body language. Often, you can fool adults, who listen to your mind and your words, but not children, who listen to your body and your tone of voice.
Christianity is not a hypothesis, it is a proposal of marriage.
In regard to nature, the highest stage of knowledge is knowledge. But in regard to God and his images, the highest stage of knowledge is love. We know God and man only by loving them.
Unless the apologist creates internal silence in his reader, unless he produces somehow that precious moment of sudden, standstill shock, his apologetics is only chatter or scholarship, not power.
Knowing how to create this silence through words is like knowing how to touch a wild animal to quiet it, knowing where the sensitive bodily organ is. It is also like knowing how to play a pipe organ: knowing where the right keys are. That is the secret of Pascal’s power: he knows where our keys are. He “pushes our buttons”.
For philosophy, unlike science, does not go forward to discover new empirical truths, but backward to illuminate where arguments come from. Science builds skyscrapers, philosophy inspects foundations.
Pride can never defeat pride; only humility can defeat pride.
It is no longer fashionable to be honest enough to call the thing we lust after “power”. So we substitute a more exalted and idealistic-sounding word: “freedom”. But what do we mean by “freedom” but power, control over our own lives?
Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be: if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.
This is the chief use of reasoning, questioning and genius: that we may have something to quiet. The chief use of philosophy is to have something to immolate on the altar. The ultimate purpose of speech is to frame the great mystical silence.
No one is a moral relativist, subjectivist or minimalist when it comes to others’ behavior to him, only his to others.
A man will forgive you for unjust criticism but not for just criticism.
No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth.
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
St. Bernard, asked to name the four cardinal virtues, replied: “humility, humility, humility and humility.”
We now no longer have slaves for two reasons: moral and religious principles, and the Industrial Revolution. The first made us feel guilty about slavery, and the second made slavery unnecessary.
That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment; that is why the pleasures of solitude are so incomprehensible.I
We want neither peace and leisure as such nor pain and danger as such, but the diversion of danger with the illusion that it is the road to a happy peace.
Surely it is a development of spectacular social significance that the very thing ancient saints and sages loved and longed for is the thing we impose on our most desperate criminals as the crudest torture our minds can devise—solitude.
The word “boredom” does not exist in any ancient language. It first appears in the seventeenth century. No one knows its origin. Since we always invent words for things we experience, it follows that this is a new experience. Until modern times, it seems, people simply were not bored—that is, bored in general, bored with life.
Contradiction is a poor indication of truth.A Many things that are certain are contradicted.B Many that are false pass without contradiction.C
There is one remaining bit of innate sanity in any age, however insane and decadent: the knowledge that we will die.
“Why must holy places be dark places?”
The great divide, the eternal divide, is not between theists and atheists, or between happiness and unhappiness, but between seekers (lovers) and nonseekers (nonlovers) of the Truth (for God is Truth). Thus it is the heart and not the head that determines our eternal destiny.
I dare you to try Pascal’s experiment, actually to do it, not just read about it. Live this week as if it were your last, so that when you die you have no regrets, no “if onlys”—if only I had done this or said that—no unfinished business. For instance, tell your mother how much you love her. Above all, decide how much you love God, tell him and live that out.
God must have deliberately designed nature as a clue, not a manifesto; a puzzle, not a solution. We would have preferred an easier set of signs, one which pointed only in one direction, not two. God must have wanted nature to lead us to puzzlement, not certainty, so that we could “seek with groans”.
It is a remarkable fact that no canonical [Biblical] author has ever used nature to prove God. They all try to make people believe in him. David, Solomon, etc., never said: ‘There is no such thing as a vacuum, therefore God exists.’ They must have been cleverer than the cleverest of their successors, all of whom have used proofs from nature. This is very noteworthy.
Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies [are] so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it. (864) [739]
The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.A
The Stoics say: ‘Withdraw into yourself, that is where you will find peace.’ And that is not true.A Others say: ‘Go outside: look for happiness in some diversion.’ And that is not true: we may fall sick.B Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us.C (465)
Philosophers: they surprise the ordinary run of men. Christians: they surprise the philosophers.
Pascal means by the “heart”: 1. The “intuitive” mind as vs. the “geometrical” (that is, calculating, reasoning) mind; right-brain as vs. left-brain. By this work of the heart, we know unprovable, self-evident “first principles” like the law of noncontradiction in logic and “do good and avoid evil” in ethics. (See no. no, p. 229, for an extended treatment of this aspect of the “heart”.) 2. The perception of God by faith, the awareness that God is real. (See no. 110, last paragraph, p. 229, and no. 424, p. 232.) 3. That which hopes in God, invests its goodness, end, purpose and fulfillment in
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Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, for example, all meant by “reason” intellectual intuition as well as calculation, and moral intuition as well—that is, intuitive knowledge of moral first principles.
We may mistake the dream for the reality, but we do not in fact mistake the reality for the dream.
It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason. (278)
Here is a test whether you really love God. Have you done or avoided or given up a single thing today solely because you believed that God wanted you to?
Like Augustine, Pascal knows that the heart is deeper than the head, but like Augustine he does not cut off his own head, or so soften it up with relativism and subjectivism and “open-mindedness” that his brains fall out. 170
Not all of Christianity can be proved, but some of it can, and none of it can be disproved.
Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.
Reason takes you to the beach via land transportation; faith jumps into the ocean. Reason takes you to the diving board and even tells you when to jump, but it does not jump. Reason is like dating, faith is like marrying. How blind and foolish to marry someone you never dated and don’t know! Scripture itself commands us to give, and therefore to have, reasons for our faith (1 Pet 3:16).
The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instil it into hearts and minds with force and threats is to instil not religion but terror.
‘Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, and walk therein.’ But they said: ‘We will not walk therein’ (Jer. VI. 16). ‘But we will walk after our own devices.’2 They said to the nations of the world: ‘Come unto us, follow the opinions of these new authors. Natural reason will be our guide. We also shall be like other nations, who all follow their natural light.’ Philosophers and all the religions and sects in the world have taken natural reason for their guide. Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from outside themselves and to acquaint themselves with those
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God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will. Humble their pride. (581)
The Resurrection of the Body He’s a terror, that one— Turns water into wine, Wine into blood— I wonder what He turns blood into? (Christopher Derrick) 378
As Chesterton says, Christianity is like a checkerboard, very red and very white; it has always had a healthy hatred of pink.
God our Father is “easy to please but hard to satisfy” (George Macdonald).
We are all playing the same game (life) for the same two prizes. We all have two things we absolutely demand to win and not to lose: truth and happiness. No one wants to be deceived and no one wants to be miserable.
