History
Early Christian apologists include Justin Martyr, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus. Augustine of Hippo was a significant apologist of the Patristic era. Thomas Aquinas, an influential Catholic philosopher, presented five arguments for God's existence in the Summa Theologica, while his Summa contra Gentiles was a major apologetic work. Blaise Pascal outlined an approach to apologetics in his Pensées: "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true."
Read more about this topic: Christian Apologetics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)