60 Thomas Cahill Quotes on Books, Geneaology and Culture - Quotes.pub

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Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion).

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

Alexander was, therefore, “the Great,” the greatest man who had ever lived. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

In the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the most learned and nimble interpreter of antiquity in our age: “All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central government and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

which had previously provided the translator safe haven. Pretending

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

assemblies. “Speaking

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased. In reforming Irish sexual mores, he was rather less successful, though he established indigenous monasteries and convents, whose inmates by their way of life reminded the Irish that the virtues of lifelong faithfulness, courage, and generosity were actually attainable by ordinary human beings and that the sword was not the only instrument for structuring a society.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

funny. And, of course,

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God—the Real God, the One God—was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him. “YHWH, YHWH,” he thunders at Moshe, the man alone on the Mountain: “God, showing-mercy, showing-favor, long-suffering in anger, abundant in loyalty and faithfulness, keeping loyalty to the thousandth (generation), bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin, yet not clearing, clearing (the guilty), calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon sons’ sons, to the third and fourth (generation)!

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

This is God’s self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to the end, patient with all our failings however dismaying, but reminding us that a household—a familial environment, holding three (or sometimes four) generations—cannot escape the sins of the oldest generation; they necessarily infect the atmosphere.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least (venial) to the most serious (mortal), to those so grave as to entail formal excommunication from the Communion of Saints and, therefore, requiring special dispensation, such as a writ of forgiveness issued by a bishop or pope.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

This was why sudden death was so feared: it did not give you time to put your spiritual house in order. You might have meant to repent but hadn’t quite got round to it. Too bad. Down you go. All the way.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

the Jews were the first people to develop an integrated view of life and its obligations. Rather than imagining the demands of law and the demands of wisdom as discrete realms (as did the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks), they imagined that all of life, having come from the Author of life, was to be governed by a single outlook. The material and the spiritual, the intellectual and the moral were one: Hearken O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH (is) One! The great formula is not that there is one God but that “God is One.” From this insight will flow not only the integrating and universalist propensities of Western philosophy but even the possibility of modern science. For life is not a series of discrete experiences, influenced by diverse forces. We do not live in a fragmented universe, controlled by fickle and warring gods. As Bob Dylan sings: Ring them bells, sweet Martha, for the poor man’s son. Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one. God and “the poor man’s son” belong together. Because God is One, life is a moral continuum—and reality makes sense.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescribed a hand not for a hand but for the theft of a loaf of bread or for the striking of one’s better and which gave much favor to the rights of the nobility and virtually none to the lower classes. The casual cruelty of other ancient law codes—the cutting off of nose, ears, tongue, lower lip (for kissing another man’s wife), breasts, and testicles—is seldom matched in the Torah. Rather, in the prescriptions of Jewish law we cannot but note a presumption that all people, even slaves, are human and that all human lives are sacred. The constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty; and there is even a frequent enjoinder to sympathy: “A sojourner you are not to oppress: you yourselves know (well) the feelings of the sojourner, for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.” This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

As we shall see, these depictions of divine wrath will eventually give way to a purer understanding of God, but at this moment we have a snapshot of monotheism in its tadpole stage.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Quotes

Translating Plato’s philosophy to the context of Christian belief, Augustine finds that “out of a certain compassion for the masses God Most High bent down and subjected the authority of the divine intellect even to the human body itself”—in the incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man—so that God might recall “to the intelligible world souls blinded by the darkness of error and befouled by the slime of the body.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

This is a game that has been played over and over—in fact, for twenty-four centuries—before audiences of almost infinite variety. At some point long ago, the game became a doubles match, for the two Greek philosophers were joined by two medieval Christian theologians: Plato by Augustine of Hippo, who could nearly equal him in style and seriousness; Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, nearly as styleless as Aristotle but, though overweight, ungainly, and blinking in the sun, extremely thoughtful and genial—the sort of athlete who is always undervalued.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he is poor, they are ambitious; East and West have glutted them; alone of mankind they behold with the same passion of concupiscence waste alike and want. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire; they make a desolation and call it peace. Children and kin are by the law of nature each man’s dearest possessions: they are swept away from us by conscription to be slaves in other lands; our wives and sisters, even when they escape a soldier’s lust, are debauched by self-styled friends and guests: our goods and chattels go for tribute, our lands and harvests in requisitions of grain; life and limb themselves are used up in leveling marsh and forest to the accompaniment of gibes and blows.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

though some times are better and some worse, there can be no permanent safety. Peace will be followed by war, prosperity by poverty, happiness by suffering, life by death. This was indeed the constant message of all ancient literature and its principal insight into human existence.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasing concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life—these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we often act as if they were. At least, the emperor could not heap his economic burdens on posterity by creating long-term public debt, for floating capital had not yet been conceptualized. The only kinds of wealth worth speaking of were the fruits of the earth.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the “cheap grace” of the majority of German Christians in favor of the “costly grace” that linked Christian belief to social courage.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God's fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for 'the bush was not consumed.

Fear Quotes / God Quotes Suffering Quotes

appreciated. In any case, Satan, the Archdevil and ruler of Hell, looms

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who “make a desolation and call it peace”) at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn’t Philip of Macedon’s first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn’t Alexander’s last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters—which were not all that important, anyway—was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

The real purpose of religion—at the popular level—was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let’s all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same steps, and wander through the same colonnades. Let the Jews have their god, by all means—who’s stopping them?—and let us all have ours. And no provincial exclusiveness, please.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

Next panel [Plate 9]: Adam and Eve—painted by Masaccio—as they are thrown out of Eden. (Masaccio seems to have been, too.) The figures are less standard, even less accurate, than Masolino’s: Adam’s arms are far too short, his right calf is impossibly bowlegged; Eve’s arms are of unequal length and she is dumpier than in Masolino’s version, with a fat back and hefty haunches and an awfully thick right ankle. But they are alive, believable, fleshy!—and being pushed forward into all the horror of real life. Adam’s stomach, sucked in and emphasizing his vulnerable ribs, displays the tension of inconsolable grief; Eve’s hands, placed to shield her belles choses (and copied by Masaccio from the teasing poses of ancient Venuses), have been transformed into demonstrations of irremediable shame. Her breast, peeking out above her wrist, is a real breast; and Adam’s genitals are downright funky—not smoothly attractive, not ready for the style section of the Sunday newspaper, just their grotty selves. Never before had such nudes been seen or even thought of. How far they are from the ideal figures of the ancients, as well as from the self-censoring expressions of so many Christian centuries.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

This commentary is so important within Matthew’s framework that it is worth quoting in its entirety: Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets: I have come not to abolish but to complete. I tell you solemnly: till heaven and earth disappear, not one jot or tittle will disappear from the Torah—not till everything has come to be. So whoever breaks even one of the least of these commandments and teaches other human beings to do likewise will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whoever keeps them and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. (For I tell you: unless you do more justice than the scribes and Pharisees, you will never make it into the Kingdom of Heaven.) You have heard that it was said to our People long ago: Thou shalt not kill;8 and whoever does must face judgment. But I say to you: Whoever is angry with a brother must face judgment; whoever calls a brother “raqa” [Aramaic for “moron”] must answer to the Sanhedrin [the Jewish high court]; whoever calls him “traitor” is in danger of the fire of Gehenna.9 Let’s say that you are bringing your offering to the altar and remember that your brother holds something against you: leave your offering before the altar and go first to reconcile yourself with your brother; then return and make your offering. [Similarly,] come to terms with your accuser before you reach the court, lest he hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the warden, and you be thrown into prison. Solemnly I tell you: you will not get out till you have paid the last penny. You have heard that it was said: Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say to you: Whoever looks on a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye is your downfall, tear it out and throw it away; better you should lose one of your members than that your whole body perish in Gehenna. And if your right hand is your downfall, cut it off and throw it away; better to lose one of your members than that your whole body go down to Gehenna. And it has been said: Whoever divorces his wife must give her a writ of dismissal. But I say to you: Whoever divorces his wife, unless the marriage is already spoiled,10 makes her an adulterer; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Again, you have heard that it was said to our People long ago: Thou shalt not swear falsely, but keep the oaths that you have made to the Lord. But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, since that is God’s throne, or by earth, since that is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, since that is the City of the Great King. Do not swear by your own head either, since you cannot turn a single hair white or black. Say “yes” when you mean “yes,” and “no” when you mean “no.” Anything more than this comes from the Evil One. You have heard that it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say to you: Do not resist the evildoer. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him; if someone sues you for your shirt, give him your coat as well; if someone makes you go one mile, go with him an extra mile. Give to everyone who asks; and from anyone who wants to borrow from you do not turn away. You have heard that it was said: Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven—for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends his rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward can you expect? Don’t even the tax collectors do as much? And if you save your greeting for your brother, what are you doing that’s so wonderful? Don’t even the gentiles do as much? You must, therefore, include everyone, just as your heavenly Father includes everyone.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero’s speeches are language as practical tool.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

do not mean to make Jesus the first stand-up Jewish comedian; but to get the tone here, one must hear the irony (and something close to self-mockery) in Jesus’s voice—he knows perfectly well that he’s asking the impossible—and one must see the great crowd, buzzing with confusion, and observe the light dawning in some faces as they come to realize what he is really talking about. It is precisely the entitlement of the powerful and the disfranchisement of the powerless that make life so unlivable. And whether this enshrined and permanent injustice, taken for granted by all, issues in war, torture, and all the grand oppressions to which the Beatitudes allude or just in the petty tortures that we visit on one another—the casual oppression of women by men, the interior wounds caused by quotidian mean-spiritedness, exclusiveness, and theatrical mendacity—spirit is crushed and ordinary life is made a torment. Whereas Mark’s Jesus speaks in blunt staccato phrases (“The Time has come”)—not unlike a certain inspired fisherman—Matthew’s subtle, balanced Jesus exhibits mastery of intellectual discourse, an attention to detail that verges on the legalistic, and a profound reverence for the godliness of Jewish tradition, all of which are likely to have been heightened by the mind and memories of Matthew, the well-schooled Jewish tax collector and Roman employee. However that may be, each portrait of Jesus has been given its peculiar style by the hand, personality, and life experiences of the artist who stands behind the portrait. And yet, both portraits are patently of the same Jesus, who preaches prophetic justice—that unique, inflexible ethic of Jewish religious tradition which insists that the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized be taken care of—but graciously encloses his words in a gentleness that was hardly the hallmark of the old Hebrew prophets. This is Jewish justice, all right, but justice tempered by an affectionate mercy.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

However much he, as a reflective adult, modified her attitudes and diluted her prejudices, much of his instinctive outlook was formed by this fierce, unbending woman, so that in many ways Jesus’s worldview is already spelled out in the Magnificat, the

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are Christ-like. Only if we put Christ before all practical considerations—only if we clear a place for him in our hearts (rather than clear the table)—will we be able to behave as the Samaritan does. For us who (like Luke and his gentile readers) live in the time after Jesus, without the comfort of his physical presence, clearing a place for Jesus means praying. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus, despite the constant outpouring of his energy in preaching and healing, always finds time to “withdraw to some lonely place to pray.” So, immediately after the story of Martha and Mary, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray:

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

since a Samaritan as the model of Christ-like behavior would rub so many Jewish Christians the wrong way? But Luke’s gentile Christians needed to be reassured that there was more than one way to be Christ-like, more than one path that could be taken if you would follow in the footsteps of the Master. You needn’t be a born Jew, raised in the traditions of the ancestors. There was no background that was unthinkable: it was even possible to be something as freaky as a Samaritan. As we stand now at the entrance to the third millennium since Jesus, we can look back over the horrors of Christian history, never doubting for an instant that if Christians had put kindness ahead of devotion to good order, theological correctness, and our own justifications—if we had followed in the humble footsteps of a heretical Samaritan who was willing to wash someone else’s wounds, rather than in the self-regarding steps of the priest and the immaculate steps of the levite—the world we inhabit would be a very different one.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

The Jews, in their emphasis on justice and its lack, were familiar with guilt. They had no trouble portraying their greatest king, David, as a murderer beset by lust, a man who must come to feel the sharp, inner pangs of guilt for his abysmally unjust actions. Greco-Roman literary and imaginative traditions enshrined no such scenes. For the Greeks and Romans, sin—hamartia—was not personal, the result of an evil choice, made against the Law of God written in their hearts. Rather, it was an unavoidable flaw, such as Oedipus’s hamartia, his tragic mistake in murdering his father and marrying his mother, while believing he had done everything to avoid these very actions. For gentiles, what we may think of as a more “Oriental” orientation prevailed: rather than guilt, they were much more likely to feel shame, a far less socially constructive emotion.2 The great figures of the Christian tradition must not, therefore, be shown by their admiring biographer in shameful, slovenly, or compromising situations. Luke’s alterations are occasional; and it is tempting to make more of them than is warranted by his text. In the controversy over Jesus’s notorious dinner companions, for instance, Luke gives us the same answer as Mark, when Jesus, addressing the objections of the Pharisees and their scribes, says: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the upright but sinners”—Luke adding only eis metanoian (“to a change of heart”), which hardly constitutes a change of meaning. We discover in Luke’s Gospel a subtle development of the kerygma for presentation to a gentile audience, but a development without substantial discontinuity.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition must not be shown as muddled, contentious, or craven; and the central figure, Jesus, must be allowed as much dignity and distance from criticism as possible. Thus, in Luke’s treatment of the call of Matthew Levi, the Pharisees and their scribes direct their ire at Jesus’s disciples, not at Jesus himself (as they do in Mark), for eating and drinking with “tax collectors and prostitutes.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

In the words of Paul Johnson: The Temple, now, in Herod’s1 version, rising triumphantly over Jerusalem, was an ocular reminder that Judaism was about Jews and their history—not about anyone else. Other gods flew across the deserts from the East without much difficulty, jettisoning the inconvenient and embarrassing accretions from their past, changing, as it were, their accents and manners as well as their names. But the God of the Jews was still alive and roaring in his Temple, demanding blood, making no attempt to conceal his racial and primitive origins. Herod’s fabric was elegant, modern, sophisticated—he had, indeed, added some Hellenic decorative effects much resented by fundamentalist Jews who constantly sought to destroy them—but nothing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption, and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale. The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple-soldiers, and minions. To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish disapora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale. Sophisticated Romans who knew the Judaism of the diaspora found it hard to understand the hostility towards Jews shown by colonial officials who, behind a heavily-armed escort, had witnessed Jerusalem at festival time. Diaspora Judaism, liberal and outward-minded, contained the matrix of a universal religion, but only if it could be cut off from its barbarous origins; and how could so thick and sinewy an umbilical cord be severed? This description of “Herod’s” Temple (actually the Second Temple, built in the sixth century B.C. and rebuilt by Herod) is more than a bit overwrought. The God of the Jews did not roar in his Temple: the insoluble problem was that, since the destruction of the First Temple and, with it, the Ark of the Covenant, God had ceased to be present in his Temple. Nor would animal sacrifice have disgusted the gentiles, since Greeks, Romans, and all ancient peoples offered such sacrifices (though one cannot help wondering whether, had the Second Temple not been destroyed, it would today be ringed from morn to night by indignant animal-rights activists). But Johnson is right to emphasize that Judaism, in its mother city, could display a sweaty tribalism that gentiles would only find unattractive. The partisan, argumentative ambience of first-century Jerusalem, not unlike the atmosphere of the ultra-Orthodox pockets of the contemporary city, could repel any outsider, whether gentile or diaspora Jew. Perhaps most important is Johnson’s shrewd observation that Judaism “contained the matrix of a universal religion.” By this time, the more percipient inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world had come to the conclusion that polytheism, whatever manifestation it might assume, was seriously flawed. The Jews alone, by offering monotheism, offered a unitive vision, not the contradictory and flickering epiphanies of a fanciful pantheon of gods and goddesses. But could Judaism adapt to gentile needs, could it lose its foreign accent and outlandish manners? No one saw the opportunity more clearly than Luke; his gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, present a Jesus and a Jesus Movement specifically tailored to gentile sensibility.

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In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before & After Jesus Quotes

Oscar Wilde’s immortal comment: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World Quotes

Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers.… Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates. He might as well have been the king of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or any other of the inconsequential outlanders that civilized people have looked down their noses at throughout history. It was preposterous. They dispatched a pair of envoys to conduct the tiresome negotiation and send him away. The envoys began with empty threats: any attack on Rome was doomed, for it would be met by invincible strength and innumerable ranks of warriors. Alaric was a sharp man, and in his rough fashion a just one. He also had a sense of humor. “The thicker the grass, the more easily scythed,” he replied evenly. The envoys quickly recognized that their man was no fool. All right, then, what was the price of his departure? Alaric told them: his men would sweep through the city, taking all gold, all silver, and everything of value that could be moved. They would also round up and cart off every barbarian slave. But, protested the hysterical envoys, what will that leave us? Alaric paused. “Your lives.” In that pause, Roman security died and a new world was conceived.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure—the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

We will never make it under our own stem. Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the "Confessions" is a full-scale emotional breakdown.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as “glamour.” In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

How the Irish Saved Civilization Quotes

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