Sublime

Unlike Gildas, he was not classically educated – his Latin was, by his own testimony, uncultured. The backdrop to his life is a landscape in which arbitrary violence, extreme wealth and poverty, kindness and cruelty are shadowed by a functioning, literate institutional church capable of conducting business with daughter churches across the Irish Se

In addition to providing us with a complete set of names, Ssu-ma Ch’ien also tells us that Lao-tzu, or Li Erh, served as keeper of the Chou dynasty’s Royal Archives.

That heresy seems to have died down almost completely in the second half of the eleventh century is possibly related to the fact that the Church was starting a programme of reform that had been initiated by Pope Leo IX (1049–54). The greatest of the reforming pontiffs of this period – and indeed one of the most significant of all mediaeval popes –

daily encounters large and small, we are challenged to remember that our animating commitment is to love others, and that our personal mandate is to grow in love.

Above all, there appears notably that universal mark of the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves.

invective

Any number of European princes channeled Jewish economic activity toward lending at interest to Christians, so that they could then expropriate a considerable share of the proceeds from the Jews in the form of loans, taxes, and extraordinary seizures called captiones, “takings.” We can think of this as a novel form of indirect taxation. At a time w

Speaking broadly, Saint Ambrose determined the ecclesiastical conception of the relation of Church and State; Saint Jerome gave the Western Church its Latin Bible and a great part of the impetus to monasticism; while Saint Augustine fixed the theology of the Church until the Reformation, and, later, a great part of the doctrines of Luther and Calvi