Medieval Christianity Quotes

It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.

Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books.