Middle Ages

"The existence of God may be proved in five ways. The first and most manifest way is the argument from motion. ...Whatever is in motion is moved by another, for nothing can be in motion except it have a potentiality for that toward which it is being moved. ...It is ...impossible that from the same point of view and in the same way anything should be both moved and mover, or that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. This cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover; as the staff only moves because it is put into motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a First Mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God."

"Thou sayest, Well discern I what I hear; But it is hidden from me why God willed For our redemption only this one mode. Buried remaineth, brother, this decree Unto the eyes of every one whose nature Is in the flame of love not yet adult. Verily, inasmuch as at this mark One gazes long and little is discerned, Wherefore this mode was worthiest will I say. Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn All envy, burning in itself so sparkles That the eternal beauties it unfolds. Whateer from this immediately distils Has afterwards no end, for neer removed Is its impression when it sets its seal. Whateer from this immediately rains down Is wholly free, because it is not subject Unto the influences of novel things."

"We know Chaucer in the only way in which the greater authors generally have cared to be known. ...All we need further in the way of fact is some knowledge of the literary conditions of his time. Publication in our modern sense there was none. So long as copies were still made laboriously by hand, circulation was very slow and very limited. Authors wrote for few readers; they had to depend largely for the spread of their works on patrons in positions of influence; and they were never certain that any two copies would be exactly alike. Many books were written in the middle age; but only the most popular of them were circulated in many copies, and sometimes the more copies, the more variations there were from the original. ...authors were at the mercy of the scriveners, or copyists... If the books that a medieval author wrote were thus scarce, dear and inaccurate, so often were the books that he read. The change wrought in this respect by the printing press is too great for us to realize without a strong effort of imagination. ...in Chaucers time twenty books were a considerable collection, such as would not often be seen outside of the monastic and cathedral libraries ...Nor were even the libraries of cathedrals and monasteries either large or accessible according to our modern habits. ... Adding to the situation the slowness and difficulty of travel, one begins to realize that in the middle age wide reading was easy in only a few centers, and that even in these a man must sometimes have studied not so much what he wanted as what he could get."

"During the Middle Ages, human life was generally held in small respect; various judicial institutions—if not altogether secret, at least more or less enveloped in mystery—were remarkable for being founded on the monstrous right of issuing the most severe sentences with closed doors, and of executing these sentences with inflexible rigour on individuals who had not been allowed the slightest chance of defending themselves. While passing judgment in secret, they often openly dealt blows as unexpected and terrible as they were fatal. Therefore, the most innocent and the most daring trembled... terrible as these mysterious institutions were, the general credulity, the gross ignorance of the masses, and the love of the marvellous, helped not a little to render them even more outrageous and alarming than they really were."

"In reality, the so called science of the middle ages is scarcely worthy of the name. Infinitely inferior as compared with modern science, it was still more crude, more distorted, more fantastic and illusory than that of ancient times. Medieval man had no clear-eyed perception of the visible world, actuality possessed for him little value, that which really is and happens was without special significance in his eyes. What the medieval man saw he interpreted as a symbol, what he heard he understood as an allegory. Dante himself is our best witness that cultivated men of his age esteemed the speculative life vastly superior to the practical."

"In the warrior societies of the Middle Ages, the killing of enemies in combat and genocidal campaigns are frequently very hard to separate. In the West, notions of chivalry on the battlefield mixed with the barbarous readiness to eliminate whole groups of enemies, often with religious (“Christian”) justification as the backdrop. In the east, Mongol warriors also slaughtered enemies, sometimes as whole groups, because of perceived slights or resistance to the inevitability of Mongol overlordship. The twenty-first-century observer has to be careful not to make the particularities of a distant world, in this case that of the Crusaders or the Mongol warriors, blend too easily with those of their modern counterparts. But the wholesale massacres of civilians that the warrior societies of the past engaged in also should not be separated from the genocides of the modern world in any hard- and- fast way."

"The alchemical conception of different substances as forms of the one thing, that is, portions of the same entity concealed in different wrappings, prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and did not wholly disappear until towards the end of the eighteenth century."

"Music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric."

"Many of the greatest accomplishments of the Middle Ages were either anonymous or the work of countless laborers."

"Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind."

"There is almost never a sharp break nor a total dissimilarity between periods which adjoin in time. Thus the Middle Ages inherited much from ancient times, and many features of our present civilization may be traced back several centuries into medieval history. This illustrates how one age dovetails into its successor, no sharp line being drawn between them, but some features of the old life continuing for some time after innovations have been made in other respects."

"There were no intellectuals as such in the Middle Ages; for the medieval man... society and its structures were once and for all given, namely as a reflection of the divine order, analogous in heaven and on earth. It was the individual who, through his participation in the mystical body of Christ and through his membership in the Church, was important in the eyes of God, not the community; it was the individual whose fate, sins, repentance, and salvation were the important matter; his submission to or defiance of the social order were not weighed in terms of benefit or loss to the latter, but in terms of whether he did or did not follow the divine decrée. ...the community was considered an instrument helping or hindering the individuals earthly course, not a goal in itself, but a testing ground for individual virtue or weakness."