When a new topic overwhelms — as with coronavirus — it’s easy to take in a lot of noisy information. Information that isn’t helpful, accurate, or clear. With that in mind, and especially for those of you physically isolated in response to COVID-19, I present this (long) quote about the Dark Ages of Europe.
“Whatever reproach may, at a later period, have been justly thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures find an asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the Aeneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle, in which who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural philosophy might make experiments on properties of plants and minerals. Had not such retreats been scattered here and there, among the huts of a miserable peasantry, and the castles of a ferocious aristocracy, European society would have consisted merely of beasts of burden and beasts of prey. The Church has many times been compared by divines to the ark of which we read in the Book of Genesis: but never was the resemblance more perfect than during that evil when she alone rode, amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great works of power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within that feeble germ from which a second and more glorious civilization was to spring.”
Continue reading “A Religion of Isolation (Pandemics Past and Present)”