Book Review: The Lusíads by Luís Vaz de Camões Translated by Landeg White
“There will be no lack of Christian daring / In this little house of Portugal.”
– The Lusíads VII. 14.
“There will be no lack of Christian daring / In this little house of Portugal.”
– The Lusíads VII. 14.
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
– William Shakespeare
“The importance of these centuries…is not to be found in the external order they attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man—a change which can never be entirely undone expect by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
– Christopher Dawson
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
– Pericles, “Funeral Oration”
“Against the darkness of the interior, the windows are in effect grey or black, and one must go inside the church and turn round in order to see the fire of the glass catch alight; the outside is here sacrificed to the inside. Why?
Perhaps, Durtal answered himself, it’s a symbol of the soul illuminated in its innermost places, an allegory of the spiritual life…”
– J.K. Huysmans, The Cathedral
“The love of God is honourable wisdom.”
– Ecclesiasticus 1:14
“But it was fit that we should make merry and be glad, for this thy brother was dead and is come to life again; he was lost, and is found.” – Luke 15:32
“Let not the discourse of the ancients escape thee, for they have learned of their fathers: For of them thou shalt learn understanding, and to give an answer in time of need.”
– Ecclesiasticus 8:11-12
“With his spirit at once humble and swift, his memory ready and tenacious, his life spotless throughout, a lover of truth for its own sake, richly endowed with human and divine science, like the sun he heated the world with the warmth of his virtues and filled it with the splendor of his teaching.”
– Leo XIII on St. Thomas Aquinas
What they defended was the Catholic faith that we profess. We, who are the heirs of so great a tradition, ought to know at least something about the story of the long chain that joins us back to the first Whitsunday.