Sublime

The medievals well knew their own maxim that “the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments” (see S.T. I, i, 8, obj. 2). But they also believed in doing their homework and in learning from their ancestors—two habits we would do well to cultivate today.

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, who went so far as to proclaim that he would have counted it a cause for pride had he been of Jewish extraction.

She sits as a monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable world.

It is hard to see how anybody can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a Protestant;

What follows is an abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles.

Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes was reputed an atheist. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis;