Book Review: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
“O highest Wisdom, how much art you show
in Heaven, on earth, and in the evil world!
How justly does your power apportion all!”
– Inferno XIX. 10-12.
Tag: Christendom
Book Review: Piers Plowman by William Langland
Why Langland’s allegorical poem about the spiritual life ought to inspire us today.
Book Review: The Lusíads by Luís Vaz de Camões
“There will be no lack of Christian daring / In this little house of Portugal.”
– The Lusíads VII. 14.
Trobadourism: The Idolization of Romance and Its Decadent Consequences, Past and Present
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
– William Shakespeare
Book Review: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
“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
Book Review: The Making of Europe by 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”
Book Review: The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order by Otto Von Simson
“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
Book Review: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God by Jean Leclercq, O.S.B.
“The love of God is honourable wisdom.”
– Ecclesiasticus 1:14
Book Review of A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy, from Augustine to Duns Scotus by Fr. Fredrick Copleston, S.J.
“Christians believed first of all, and only afterwards, in the desire to defend, to explain and to understand what they believed, did they develop theology, and in a subordination to philosophy, theology.”
– Fr. Copleston, S.J
Book Review: The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans
“I will worship towards thy holy temple, and I will give glory to thy name. For thy mercy, and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy holy name above all.”
– Psalm 137:2