Patrick Wyman
Born
Yakima, Washington, The United States
Twitter
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“Deus enim et proficuum (For God and profit) —A common phrase written in the accounts of medieval merchants”
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
“The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent.
It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky.
The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.”
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky.
The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.”
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
“It is always tempting to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, or at least a pretty good one, but grounding these shifts in the lives of real people, great and small, makes it clear that they were not necessarily - or even mostly - beneficial, at least not for the moment.”
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
― The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
Topics Mentioning This Author
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Aussie Readers: Annual Challenge 2021 - POI - SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE | 151 | 247 | Jan 05, 2022 12:32AM | |
Audiobooks: Audible Plus | 195 | 636 | Dec 22, 2023 05:33PM |
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