“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…”
– The Cathedral, J.K. Huysmans
“The love of God is honourable wisdom.”
– Ecclesiasticus 1:14
“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
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.
“No day will pass that I feel no pain for you.”
– Charlemagne
(Laisse 207. 2901)
The wonderful development of spiritual and intellectual life that characterized this period was only possible in view of the fact that all minds were still influenced by the Church doctrine of ‘salvation by good works.’ This teaching resulted, on one hand, in innumerable charitable bequests, in the founding of hospitals, asylums, and orphanages, as well as in the building of churches and cathedrals adorned with all that was most beautiful in art; while it also prompted the establishment of higher and lower education institutions, and the liberal endowment of them.
“It is an oft-repeated tale,
A century old and more,
Who ne’er in sorrow hath wept,
Never in love hath smiled.”
– A Medieval German poem
“For We admire in him not only supreme height of genius but also the immensity of the subject which holy religion put to his hand. If his genius was refined by meditation and long study of the great classics it was tempered even more gloriously, as We have said, by the writings of the Doctors and the Fathers which gave him the wings on which to rise to a higher atmosphere than that of restricted nature. And thus it comes that, though he is separated from us by centuries, he has still the freshness of a poet of our times: certainly more modern than some of those of recent days who have exhumed the Paganism banished forever by Christ’s triumph on the Cross.” – Pope Benedict XV