Peter Damian Quotes on God
Peter Damian's Letter on Divine Omnipotence defended one of the most uncompromising eleventh-century articulations of the doctrine of God's absolute power. The framework presses the case that the dialectical reasoning of the philosophers cannot place limits on divine omnipotence — even, as the celebrated dispute with Saint Jerome's remarks on virginity raises the question, with respect to the past — and the corresponding subordination of dialectic to theology supplied the period's strongest formulation of the case for the cognitive priority of revelation over philosophical inquiry. Damian's wider reformist writings made him one of the principal intellectual architects of the eleventh-century papal reform.
Quotes
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Attributed to Peter Damian:
“What is past, even God cannot make not to have been.”
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Attributed to Peter Damian:
“Philosophy is the handmaid of theology.”
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Attributed to Peter Damian:
“The cell is the workshop of salvation.”
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Attributed to Peter Damian:
“He who lives in solitude is never alone, for God is his companion.”
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Attributed to Peter Damian:
“Reform begins in the cloister and ascends to the throne.”
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“But now, coming to your shameless assertion that ministers of the altar should be allowed to marry, I consider it superfluous to unsheathe the sword of my own words against you, since we see the armed forces of the whole Church and the massed array of all the holy Fathers ready to resist you. And where so great a host of heavenly troops opposes you, one can only wonder that your novel and rash attempt at doctrine does not submit when confronted by such authority.”
Letter 141:7, To the Chaplains of Duke Godfrey of Tuscany. A.D. 1066. | The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 2004, Letters 121- 150, Owen J. Blum, Irven Michael Resnick, trs., Catholic University Press; ISBN 081321372X , ISBN 9780813213729 , vol. 6, p. 115