Sublime

Marsilio Ficino set out on an explicit mission to educate his city in the truths of Christian theology. He wished, with the help of the powerful and wealthy Medici family, to teach Florence about the Christly virtues of charity and compassion, courage and dignity of spirit. But he also understood that any such lessons would be largely ineffective

A biographer of the novelist E. M. Forster wrote, “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

For let me tell you, that the more the

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