The Church Quotes

“Whoever expresses truth expresses God, the Word, and utters therefore a word of God.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“The more a man departs from lawful authority, that is, authority normally constituted, whether by God or by the nature of things, the more he is obliged to fall back into arbitrary claims to authority.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“She [the Church] proclaims that we owe love, honour and service to God in the first place, and after God not to humanity immediately, but to our father and mother, to our families, to our countries. After these, to humanity.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“Variety is precious when it expresses nature more richly by developing various aspects of it; but the variety that consists in producing cripples and abortions instead of normal human beings has nothing to commend it to the lover of mankind.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“There are antecedent passion and consequent passion, that is, passion which precedes the use of reason or faith, and so hinders it; and passion which follows the exercise of reason or faith, and is of service to them.
A man is in a state of anger at the moment when he ought to make a decision on an action; he decides badly, for anger blinds him. But when the decision is taken, and the man is wholly engaged in the performance, it may happen that a generous anger, kept within its proper limits, is a strength. What would we do without anger, without passion generally, on the battlefields either of war or of life?”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“To upset the order of nature, and even more the order of God, who, for us, is more natural than nature itself, is to destroy the harmony of forces; and violence, unbending against the rebellion of things, against the more terrible rebellion of souls, is the only refuge of him who wishes to maintain unity at all costs.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“Is it not strange that it should be precisely our century—a century of social science and of solidarity if ever there was one, and consequently of authority, apart from wandering into the most inconsistent Utopias—which rejects the Church because she refuses to be individualist!
Thinking that they had destroyed the religious life by killing it in themselves, we saw its politicians attempt but yesterday to replace it by enunciating theories of moral unity, of monopoly and spiritual collectivism, theories which cannot express anything except on condition of inviting men to erect once more, and this time arbitrarily, the authority they claimed they had destroyed.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“Could error arise from a true demonstration, and falsehood proceed from duly verified authority? In no domain could this easily happen, and when dealing with religious faith it could not happen at all.
To say that religious faith is legitimate as a means of knowledge is to say that it is divine; for it has no value for those who proclaim it except what it derives from this transcendent origin.
To say, on the other hand, that the use of the reason is legitimate and necessary, is to take the same thing as understood; for reason has no authority except as far as it represents the eternal order, that is to say, God once more. How could God be divided against Himself, teaching by revelation what He contradicts by the intelligence, and setting up in opposition to each other as two manifestly hostile things on the one side the Gospel, on the other the book of nature and of humanity, when these volumes, which we want to distinguish, are really the three volumes of one work?
If the Gospel be properly understood—the living Gospel, I mean, such as the Church offers it—it cannot contradict nature, nor man, nor, consequently, that science which expresses them both.
If science is in its own domain and operates according to its law, it cannot contradict the Gospel.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church

“We hear our legislators proclaim unceasingly their respect for the individual conscience, though it be a religious conscience, and themselves anticlericals.
All the same, all their efforts tend to, dissociate us, and to reduce us to the state of amorphous dust. They can bear no organised society other than what they call a lay society no government other than their government and no social finality other than their temporal aspirations.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Church