The Story of Christianity

St Bonaventure (c.1217–74), for instance, governor-general of the order from 1257 to 1274, was a university man and speculative theologian of enormous erudition who succeeded grandly in combining the mystical elations of Franciscan piety with the rational disciplines of academic philosophy.

Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism.

in the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics unchallenged since the days of Aristotle.

though many of the Catholic doctrinal pronouncements of the time were responses to Protestant theological claims, the movement for reform in the Church antedated the schisms of the 16th century, and the advocates of reform within the Church had not disappeared as a result of those schisms.

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.

when the revolt began, Luther nevertheless exhorted the peasants to desist from rebellion; and when they did not, he wrote a scorching tract – ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’ – in which he encouraged the legal authorities to slaughter the rebels without pity.

Meister Eckhart was both a brilliant speculative theologian and a majestically gifted writer. He was also given to expressing his more difficult ideas in almost willfully audacious language.

It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the most important events in the early modern history of the Eastern Orthodox Church was the publication in 1782 of a book called the Philokalia, which means ‘the love of beauty’.

Denis Diderot (1713–84), an equally fervent (and more brilliantly insightful) materialist, famously declared that ‘Never shall man be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest’.