Theology is only thought applied to religion.
Interpretation
Theology interprets and rationalizes religious beliefs.
In this quote, Chesterton suggests that theology is essentially the intellectual exercise of applying thought and reason to the principles and ideas embedded in religious beliefs. It implies that theology is not merely an abstract concept but a practical way of engaging with faith, pushing the boundaries of understanding by examining and questioning the foundations of religious doctrine.
In practice
This quote could be used in a lecture on the relationship between philosophy and religion.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
Silence is ever speaking; it is the perennial flow of language.
I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.
You know all the money we spend on nuclear weapons and defence every year? Trillions of dollars? Correct? Trillions. Instead, if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world,which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, not one, we could, as one race, explore outer space together in peace forever
Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.