the birth of Spain as a nation-state, and as an incipient empire, gave shape to a new ideology of religious and racial unity – an ideal ultimately known by the name of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre), despite the absurdity of such a concept after centuries of intermarriage among Christians, Jews and Muslims.

The tears of Peter were therefore indicative of a profound shift in moral imagination and sensibility. Something had become visible that had formerly been hidden from sight. For Christian thought, God had chosen to reveal himself among the least of men and women, and to exalt them to the dignity of his own sons and daughters. And, as a consequence,

The great Jewish scholar Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, had already argued that, intermediate between God and this world, was the divine Logos, the ‘Son of God,’ through whom the world was created and governed; for God himself, in his transcendent majesty, could not come into contact with lower reality.

It was the message of submission (which is what ‘Islam’ means) to the will of God: obedience to divine law, prayer, reverence, good works and faithfulness.

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

his body has somehow already entered into the transfigured reality of the Kingdom of God; and thus, by his resurrection, the Kingdom has already ‘invaded’ historical time.

Christians were characterized in great part by their sobriety, their gentleness, their fidelity to their spouses, their care for the poor, their willingness to nurse the gravely ill even in times of plague and for their ability to exhibit virtues (like courage and self-restraint) that were generally thought impossible for persons of low estate,

Most importantly, the council rejected Luther’s teachings on justification, asserting the reality of human freedom in the work of redemption, the indispensability of good works and the need for the co-operation of the will set free by grace. Moreover, it did this with so thorough and plenteous an exposition from scripture that no Protestant

The first true university in Western Europe, though, was probably that of Bologna in northern Italy, founded late in the 11th century. And the first major universities in the West were the late 12th-century universities of Paris and Oxford.