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3b73c7b
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Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.
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medival
middle-ages
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Thomas Cahill |
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98f2b6c
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They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions.
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Thomas Cahill |
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b886e1d
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In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life...Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination - making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)"
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Thomas Cahill |
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eb29e03
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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 t..
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Thomas Cahill |
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a83b152
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The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.)
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Thomas Cahill |
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acfe618
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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..
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Thomas Cahill |
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d58fa6b
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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."
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Thomas Cahill |
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a6528ce
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I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there.
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Thomas Cahill |
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b42bd6b
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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721d1ac
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Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value.
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Thomas Cahill |
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b6a141b
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What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other -- a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single..
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Thomas Cahill |
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e55de4a
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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."
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Thomas Cahill |
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c28aec4
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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1573c72
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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 ..
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Thomas Cahill |
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3c0b129
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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72b7ac9
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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..
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Thomas Cahill |
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02897bf
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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bc91ad3
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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, ungai..
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Thomas Cahill |
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be83ec0
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Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.
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religious-act
literacy
irish
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Thomas Cahill |
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91407dc
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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..
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Thomas Cahill |
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917b0d6
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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a727444
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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cbbffd1
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After the Age of Pericles, as Athenian confidence dimmed, that famous confidence was all too often replaced by cynicism, modesty by cockiness, sincerity by manipulation, strength by bluster. Though the gods were more and more loudly invoked, the prayers rang hollow, the appeal to conscience turned mute, and any reference to social justice tended to be met with a knowing smirk.
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Thomas Cahill |
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97d7603
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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649eecb
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The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture's stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts.
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Thomas Cahill |
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26ae5fc
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If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool.
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Thomas Cahill |
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2035e07
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There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers.
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Thomas Cahill |
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4a4befc
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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c876c93
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The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men--senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds--performing meaningless duties.
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Thomas Cahill |
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0c35b5b
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Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.
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irish-history
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Thomas Cahill |
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c97289b
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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."
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Thomas Cahill |
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6e79372
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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ab37f27
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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 o..
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Thomas Cahill |
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192e0e6
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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 ..
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Thomas Cahill |
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fe6a065
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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 th..
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Thomas Cahill |
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1b20344
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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 t..
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Thomas Cahill |
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1ddff24
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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 d..
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Thomas Cahill |
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ccc1e9a
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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..
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Thomas Cahill |
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1d33976
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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..
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Thomas Cahill |
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3eeda2b
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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61adf23
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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,..
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Thomas Cahill |
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031167c
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By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.
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seventeenth-century
visible
invisible
thought
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Thomas Cahill |
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2aaab14
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |
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6f8a1fa
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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.
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Thomas Cahill |