Medieval Literature Quotes

Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende. Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona, Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..." "Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart, Seized him with my beautiful form That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me. Love, which pardons no beloved from loving, took me so strongly with delight in him That, as you see, it still abandons me not...

The foolish rush to end their lives. Only the steadfast soul survives.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

I have a master’s degree in medieval literature. Wyverns—or firedrakes, if you prefer—were once common in European mythology and legends.” “But you . . . you’re my accountant,” Sarah sputtered. “Do you have any idea how many English majors are accountants?” Vivian asked with raised eyebrows.

...for most men are unaware that what is in the power of magicians to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery.

If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews.

Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems.

whatever flows immediately from God, senza mezzo distilla (67), will never end.

Literature is a means to delight the mind and embolden the spirit.

There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.

Every night, I slip into the empty winter land of memory.

Little son, I have longed a while to see you, and now I see you the fairest thing ever a woman bore. In sadness came I hither, in sadness did I bring forth, and in sadness has your first feast day gone. And as by sadness you came into the world, your name shall be called Tristan; that is the child of sadness.” After she had said these words she kissed him, and immediately when she had kissed him she died.

The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt.

Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself. (from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter")

It is said that people pointed out Dante in the street not as the man who made the Comedy but as the man who had been in Hell. Even today there are those (some of them critics) who believe every novel and even every lyric to be autobiographical. A man who lacks invention himself does not easily attribute it to others.

I used to be in school, like a good boy. Medieval Literature. Von Eschenbach, Chaucer, Milton... Yes, sir, no, sir. Then I had that... Crisis. You know it? Wake up one morning and everything's all wrong? Wake up one morning and it occurs to you the milk's spoiled and the bread is getting moldy. Wake up and it just hits you. Someday you're gonna die. Maybe like that girl last night died. Face down in an alley with a caved in head. Such a terrible thing and what for? Why life? Why This life? Why This soap? Why these hands? What's it all mean? Deep down you fear nothing. But you still hope something. Either way, you're not really sure. That's my crisis. I don't wanna die. But if I'm gonna die, first I'm gonna live. I'm gonna peel life like fruit, and use it up. I'm gonna light up an' burn. I'll burn and burn until I'm snuffed out. Then I'll just fade away. But until then I'm gonna live! I'm ready. I'm gonna do it. Come what may, one hundred percent.

Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain”. *Gulistan ("The Rose Garden") is a landmark literary work in Persian literature. Written in 1259 A.D, it is one of two magna opera of the Persian poet Saadi, considered one of the best medieval Persian poets. The Gulistan is a collection of poems and stories, just as a rose-garden is a collection of roses. It is widely quoted as a source of wisdom. **The entrance to the United Nations' Hall of Nations’ carries the above inscription culled from Gulistan.” Muslih Al-Din Mushrif Ibn Abd Allah Al Saadi 1184 1283

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts; Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void

Qui Deus a duné esciënce e de parler bone eloquence, ne s’en deit taisir ne celer, ainz se deit voluntiers mustrer". Prologue des Lais.

Listen as the fox slowly and deftly unbinds his whole pack of tricks—his flattery and fine words, his warm and sugary russet charm, his bold-faced blandishments. He has brought forth a spool of raw lies and spun them into a glittering web of truth to trap them all. Every last one of them.

Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus,

The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a commonplace to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it (xix), to mortify human ambition.

Ancient Greek had no verb meaning “to read” as such: the verb they used, anagignsk, means “to know again,” “to recollect.” It refers to a memory procedure. Similarly, the Latin verb used for “to read” is lego, which means literally “to collect” or “to cull, pluck,” referring also to a memory procedure (the re-collection or gathering up of material).

Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.

To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

The reader will no doubt understand that this was no arbitrary fancy, but just such another ‘tool’ as the hypothesis of Copernicus; an intellectual construction devised to accommodate the phenomena observed. We have recently been reminded13 how much mathematics, and how good, went to the building of the Model.

To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the ‘wise passiveness’ in which landscape ought to be enjoyed. But to consult a map before we set out has no such ill effect. Indeed it will lead us to many prospects; including some we might never have found by following our noses.

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature.

My point in setting these two descriptions up in this way is simply this: the nature of creative activity itself – what the brain does, and the social and psychic conditions needed for its nurture – has remained essentially the same between Thomas’s time and our own. Human beings did not suddenly acquire imagination and intuition with Coleridge, having previously been poor clods. The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery.

Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.

His spirit chaunged house and wente ther, As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher.

It is obvious to all who are wise that the foundation of speech will not be demolished by tempestuous events. (translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould)

medieval English literature reached its height after the plague in the writings of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer

Asceticism is far more characteristic of Catholicism than of the Puritans. Celibacy and the praise of virginity are Catholic: the honor of the marriage bed is Puritan.

(Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.)

Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture.

think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages. Boethius,

scraps of Plato—often scraps which were very marginal and unimportant in Plato’s own work—trickled down to the Middle Ages.

Writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it, for it is the mental representation that gives birth to the written form, not vice versa.

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

Africanus Major carries Africanus Minor up to a height whence he looks down on Carthage ‘from an exalted place, bright and shining, filled with stars’ (xi). They are in fact in the highest celestial sphere, the stellatum. This is the prototype of many ascents to Heaven in later literature: those of Dante, of Chaucer (in the Hous of Fame), of Troilus’ ghost, of the Lover in the King’s Quair.

Hence what we might take to be the difference between a clearly Christian and a possibly Pagan work may really be the difference between a thesis offered, so to speak, to the Faculty of Philosophy and one offered to that of Divinity. This seems to me to be the best explanation of the gulf that separates Boethius’ De Consolatione from the doctrinal pieces which are (I presume, rightly) attributed to him.

Though Christians were logically bound to admit the goodness of matter that doctrine was not heartily relished; then, and for centuries, the language of some spiritual writers was hardly to be reconciled with it.

There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C.

Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.

Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.112 Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That

The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.

Good music excellently played beautifies the world, calling people out of the prison of themselves to something greater and grander. Literature, both writing and reading it, is strategic. How many people have been primed to receive the gospel because they read The Chronicles of Narnia as children? And how much medieval philosophy and classical poetry and fantastic fiction did C. S. Lewis have to read before he was equipped to write those precious books?

During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.

The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained. Not all Christians at all times have detected them or admitted their existence: and among those who have done so there have always been two attitudes. There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3

It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape. And neither poets nor artists were much interested in the strict illusionism of later periods. The relative size of objects in the visible arts is determined more by the emphasis the artist wishes to lay upon them than by their sizes in the real world or by their distance. Whatever details we are meant to see will be shown whether they would really be visible or not.

Så tenkte jeg, og derfor sa jeg det. Men sørg ikke over dette; ti jeg selv har voldt at slik måtte det ende. Og Gud bedre det for deg, sønn, så du ikke arver vår lykke. Gjør nu som din mor vil; lenge har jeg lengtet etter at mitt hode skulle ligge i hennes fang.

Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.

this only helps dispute the belief that the Black Death was caused by rats. A plague outbreak is always preceded by the presence of a great many dead rats, since they are also susceptible to the disease. Now, unlike in Asia, in Europe there are no plague-resistant rodents that could act as a breeding ground for the disease and a distinct lack of accounts mentioning dead rats in any medieval literature. Also, despite two outbreaks of plague in Iceland in the fifteenth century rats did not settle on the island until much later.

His writings are usually regarded as the main channel by which a certain kind of Theology entered the Western tradition. It is the ‘negative Theology’ of those who take in a more rigid sense, and emphasise more persistently than others, the incomprehensibility of God.

George is a goblin who looks like a young boy. He is explaining to his friend Lout, an ogre, that he’s really older than he seems - - - “My people grow slowly and I’ve been around longer than you think. I’m very mature for my age. I have a doctorate degree from Oxford in Medieval Literature,” said George. “Is Oxford really in this story?” asked Lout. “I should have said Oxxphord.” “That sounds better. I’m really impressed, George. With an education like that, you could get a great job.” “Yeah, that’s how I ended up as a stable boy.

Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons.

The concept of modernity in literary history was also related to the relation each Indian language and literature developed with English. Sanskrit and Persian literary models were labelled as traditional and medieval, and those found in English, irrespective of any period, as modern (page 22)

It looks as if the Romances and such Ballads were in the Middle Ages, as they have remained ever since, truancies, refreshments, things that can live only on the margin of the mind, things whose very charm depends on their not being ‘of the centre’ (a locality which Matthew Arnold possibly overvalued).

If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.

Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain”. *Gulistan ("The Rose Garden") is a landmark literary work in Persian literature. Written in 1259 A.D, it is one of two magna opera of the Persian poet Saadi, considered one of the best medieval Persian poets. The Gulistan is a collection of poems and stories, just as a rose-garden is a collection of roses. It is widely quoted as a source of wisdom. **The entrance to the United Nations' Hall of Nations’ carries the above inscription culled from Gulistan.

Werewolves had been so rationalized and medicalized by the year 1000 that they became subject to a medieval type of “heroin chic” romanticism in literature, in which they were frequently portrayed as attractive, lonely, suffering, victimized, self-sacrificing, chivalrous heroes in fictional and mythological tales emerging during the Grail romance era. The “chivalrous werewolf” narratives often feature a noble knight or prince who transforms into a werewolf to protect the subject of his romantic love, but while he is a werewolf she betrays him by stealing his transformative device—either a potion, a ring, a belt or his clothes—trapping him forever in his lovelorn werewolf state.25

There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3 A. CHALCIDIUS

Sempre, ao longo dos séculos, item a item é transferido do lado do objeto para o lado do sujeito. E, agora, em algumas formas extremas do behaviorismo, o próprio sujeito é descartado como sendo meramente subjetivo; só o que fazemos é pensar que pensamos. Depois de ter tragado tudo, ele devora a si mesmo. E "para onde nós vamos" surge como uma questão mergulhada nas trevas.

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law', but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable.

I thought that in an age when books were few and the intellectual appetite sharp-set, any knowledge might be welcome in any context. But this does not explain why the authors so gladly present knowledge which most of their audience must have possessed. One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew.

En la forest de Longue Attente chevauchant par divers sentiers m'en voys, ceste année présente où voyage de Desiriers. Devant sont aller mes fourriers pour appareiller mon logis en la Cité de Destinée. Et pout mon cœur et moy ont pris l'ostellerie de Pensée. Dedans mon livre de pensée j'ay trouvé escripvant mon cœur la vraie histoire de douleur de larmes toute enluminée. In het Woud van Lang Verwachten te paard op pad, dolenderwijs, zie ik mijzelf dit jaar bij machte tot Verlangens' verre reis. Mijn knechtstoet is vooruitgegaan om 't nachtverblijf vast te bereiden, vond in Bestemming's Stad gereed voor dit mijn hart, en mij ons beiden, de herberg, die Gedachte heet. In 't boek van mijn gepeinzen al vond ik dan, schrijvende, mijn hart; het waar verhaal van bitt're smart verlucht met tranen zonder tal. Charles d'Orléans

Tristan contrefit sa voix et répondit : « Aux noces de l'abbé du Mont, qui est de mes amis. Il a épousé une abbesse, une grosse dame voilée. De Besançon jusqu'au Mont tous les prêtres, abbés, moines et clercs ordonnés ont été mandés à ces épousailles : et tous sur la lande, portant bâtons et crosses, jouent et dansent à l'ombre des grands arbres. Mais je les ai quittés pour venir ici : car je dois aujourd'hui servir à la table du roi. »

My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian1 outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.

they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilisation.

The writing, in huge insular majuscule script, is flawless in its regularity and utter control. One can only marvel at the penmanship. It is calligraphic and as exact as printing, and yet it flows and shapes itself into the space available. It sometimes swells and seems to take breath at the ends of lines. The decoration is more extensive and more overwhelming than one could possibly imagine. Virtually every line is embellished with color or ornament.

Will they not for their part have monkeys and marmosets to make them fine coats and doublets of leather and iron? Hands would not be a problem, for the monkeys could work with their hands, and so they would in no way be inferior to man; they could even be writers. They would never be so feeble as not to put their heads together to find ways of resisting these arms, and they would construct machines of their own with which they would inflict great harm on men.

In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, ‘My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye’. And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour—a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists.

Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.

The castle is situated at the terminus of a long and upward-winding mountain road. It presents a somewhat forbidding aspect to the world, for there is little about it to suggest gaiety or warmth or any of those qualities that might assure a wayfarer of welcome. Rather, this vast edifice of stone exudes an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay. At night, and most particularly on nights when the moon is slim or cloud-enshrouded, it is a heavy blot upon the horizon, a shadow only, without feature save for its many-turreted outline; and should the moon be temporarily released from her cloudy confinement, her fugitive rays lend scant comfort, for they but serve to throw the castle into sudden, startling chiaroscuro, its windows fleetingly assuming the appearance of sightless though all-seeing orbs, its portcullis becoming for an instant a gaping mouth, its entire form striking the physical and the mental eye as would the sight of a giant skull.

Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century?

Hence we may, with proper precautions, regard a certain humility as the overall characteristic of medieval art. Of the art; not always of the artists. Self-esteem may arise within any occupation at any period. A chef, a surgeon, or a scholar, may be proud, even to arrogance, of his skill; but his skill is confessedly the means to an end beyond itself, and the status of the skill depends wholly on the dignity or necessity of that end. I think it was then like that with all the arts. Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense the art is humble even when the artists are proud; proud of their proficiency in the art, but not making for the art itself the high Renaissance or Romantic claims. Perhaps they might not all have fully agreed with the statement that poetry is infima inter omnes doctrinas.17 But it awoke no such hurricane of protest as it would awake today. In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.

The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I

O homem é um animal racional e, por isso, é um ser composto, em parte, à semelhança das feras, que são animais, mas não são racionais; e parcialmente à semelhança dos anjos, que são racionais, mas - na visão medieval tardia - ele não é animal. Eis aí um dos sentidos pelo qual o homem é um "pequeno mundo" ou microcosmo. Toda modalidade de ser, em todo o Universo, contribui para ele; ele é uma secção transversal da existência. Como disse Gregório, o Grande (540-604),35 "porque o ser humano tem uma existência (esse) em comum com as pedras; a vida, com as árvores; e o discernimento (discernere), com os anjos, ele é corretamente chamado segundo o nome do mundo".

Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain”. ***Gulistan ("The Rose Garden") is a landmark literary work in Persian literature. Written in 1259 A.D, it is one of two magna opera of the Persian poet Saadi, considered one of the best medieval Persian poets. The Gulistan is a collection of poems and stories, just as a rose-garden is a collection of roses. It is widely quoted as a source of wisdom. The entrance to the United Nations' Hall of Nations’ carries the following inscription culled from Gulistan.

The 'most precious object of the Western world' is now a national monument of Ireland at the very highest level. It is probably the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind. It is the iconic symbol of Irish culture. It is included in the Memory of the World Register compiled by UNESCO. A design echoing the Book of Kells was used on the former penny coin of Ireland (1971 to 2000) and on a commemorative twenty-euro piece in 2012. One of its initials was shown on the reverse of the old Irish five-pound banknote. It has been illustrated on the country's postage stamps. Probably every Irish bar in the world has some reflexion of its script or decoration.

The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead. It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted; full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. This is sentimentally regretted, but tragically unalterable. Tennyson was retelling a genuine medieval tale, but he transformed it utterly. In the original story the lady was not weak and helpless at all, and she was not under any curse. Nor was she passive and pathetic. She was a wilful, stubborn woman who boldly declared her passionate love for Lancelot. Her tragedy was that it was not returned. The story was retold in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, and there too the Lady of Shalott was portrayed as a real, flesh and blood woman whose declaration of love was unashamed (‘Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman?’) and who wrote to Lancelot as an equal. In fact, pretty well every time we find an apparently helpless woman in medieval literature she turns out to be not quite what we were looking for.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

The supposedly eyewitness authority of the Pseudo-Turpin finds a parallel in another genre in which vernacular prose was pioneered: that of the historical memoir. There were twelfth-century verse histories narrated by authors who had personally participated in the events they describe, such as the Third Crusade. But the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4 saw a switch to prose. This shameful fiasco, in which the crusaders were induced to turn aside from the Holy Land and attack instead the Christian city of Constantinople, inspired two contrasting accounts. Robert de Clari--ignorant of higher-level strategy, but all agog at the splendours of Constantinople--gives a worm's eye view. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, by contrast, has a top diplomat's suave authority and a leader's eye for the aesthetics of war--the splendid sight of a fleet, or the noble heroism of a ruler. For both authors the medium of prose seems to convey the purported authenticity and transparency of lived experience.

Duvido de que eles teriam entendido nossa demanda por originalidade ou valorizado mais aquelas obras de sua própria época que fossem originais, só por conta disso. Se você tivesse perguntado a La3amon ou Chaucer: "Por que é que vocês mesmos não inventaram uma história inédita?" Penso que eles poderiam ter respondido: "Com certeza ainda não estamos reduzidos a isso, estamos?" Que sentido teria tecer uma nova trama da própria cabeça, quando o mundo está repleto de tantas obras excelentes: exemplos proveitosos; tragédias deploráveis; aventuras estranhas e chistes divertidos que ainda nunca foram levados a efeito como mereciam? A originalidade que nós temos como sinal de prosperidade poderia parecer a eles uma confissão de pobreza. Por que fazer coisas sozinho, feito o solitário Robinson Crusoé, se há riquezas por toda a parte, para você se apropriar? O artista moderno muitas vezes não se dá conta dessas riquezas. Ele é o alquimista, que deve transformar metal básico em ouro. Isso faz uma diferença radical.

The daemons are ‘between’ us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ‘witness and guardian’ through life (xvi). It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

Se eu estiver certo, o homem de gênio de então se encontrava em uma situação muito diferente daquela do seu sucessor moderno. Hoje, um homem assim, muitas vezes, ou até usualmente, sente-se confrontado com uma realidade, cuja significância ele não pode conhecer; ou com uma realidade que não tenha significância alguma; ou até com uma realidade tal que a própria questão, se tiver um sentido, é, em si, uma questão sem sentido. O objetivo para ele é, por sua própria sensibilidade, descobrir o sentido; ou com base em sua própria subjetividade, atribuir sentido ou ao menos uma forma para aquilo que, por si mesmo, não possui alguma dessas características. Mas o Modelo de universo de nossos ancestrais tinha uma significância embutida. E isso em dois sentidos: como tendo uma "forma significativa" (trata-se de um projeto admirável) e como manifestação da sabedoria e bondade de quem o criou. Não havia necessidade de despertá-lo para a beleza ou a vida. Para sermos mais enfáticos, o nosso problema não era o vestido de noiva, nem a mortalha. A perfeição alcançada já estava lá. A única dificuldade era de lhe dar uma resposta adequada.

Put in terms of autonomy, Islam bore similarities to medieval Christianity, seeing life on this earth as important primarily as a preparation for eternal life, and harboring deep suspicions about the piety of inquiring too closely into the nature of God’s creation. But Islam, more than Christianity at any point in its history, also saw God as sustaining the universe on a continuing basis, and as a deity who is not bound by immutable laws. To proclaim scientific truths that applied throughout the universe and throughout time could easily become blasphemy, implying limits to what God could and could not do.20 Islamic piety consisted in obedience to God’s rules and submission to his will, not presuming to analyze his works or glorify him with flights of one’s personal fancies and curiosities. Indeed, expressing one’s fancies through representational art or most fictional literature ran directly against Islamic teaching. Islam was (and is) not a religion that encourages autonomy. Seen in the framework I have been using, it is no surprise that the burst of accomplishment in the golden age was aberrational, not characteristic, of Islamic culture.

A eternidade é bem distinta da perpetuidade, da mera continuidade infinita no tempo. A perpetuidade é nada mais do que a realização de uma série infinita de momentos, cada um dos quais se perde assim que se realizam. A eternidade é a fruição real e perene de vida ilimitada. O tempo, mesmo o tempo infinito, não passa de uma imagem, quase uma paródia, daquela plenitude; uma tentativa desesperada de compensar a transitoriedade de seus "presentes", multiplicando-os infinitamente. Esse é o motivo por que a Lucrécia de Shakespeare o chama de "seu criado incessante por toda a eternidade" (Rapto, 967). E Deus é eterno, não perpétuo. Estritamente falando, Ele nunca prevê; Ele simplesmente vê. Seu "futuro" é apenas uma área, e apenas para nós uma área especial, do Seu Agora infinito. Ele vê ( em vez de lembrar) seus atos de ontem porque o ontem ainda "está aí" para Ele; Ele vê (em vez de prever) os seus atos futuros porque Ele já está no amanhã. Como um espectador humano, ao assistir aos meus atos presentes, não infringe sua liberdade, assim tampouco sou menos livre para agir como bem entendo no futuro, porque Deus, no futuro (o Seu presente) me vê agir.

As sete artes liberais Atribuir a um currículo educacional um lugar no modelo do Universo pode parecer um absurdo à primeira vista; e seria um absurdo se os medievais tivessem tido o mesmo sentimento, a esse respeito, que temos quanto às matérias dos programas de ensino de hoje. Acontece que esse programa era tido como imutável; o número sete é numinoso; as Artes Liberais, por uma prescrição longa, haviam alcançado um status semelhante ao da própria natureza. As Artes, e também as Virtudes e os Vícios, eram personificados. A Gramática, com sua palmatória, está assentada com olhar altivo nos claustros de Magdalen. Dante no Convivia faz um entalhe cuidadoso das artes na estrutura do cosmo. A Retórica, por exemplo, corresponde a Vênus, pelo único motivo de que ela é "a mais amável de todas as disciplinas", soavissima di tutte le altre scienze. A Aritmética é como o Sol, pois, na medida em que este fornece luz para todas as demais estrelas, ela também fornece luz a todas as outras ciências, e como nossa visão fica turvada pela ação de sua luz intensa, da mesma forma nossa inteligência fica perplexa com a infinidade de números. E assim ocorre com as outras [matérias] (li, xiii),

O espírito desse esquema, ainda que não em todos os detalhes, está bem presente no Modelo Medieval. E se o leitor suspender sua descrença e exercitar sua imaginação neste assunto, mesmo que só por alguns minutos, acho que tomará consciência do amplo reajuste envolvido na leitura atenta dos poetas antigos. Encontrará toda a sua atitude perante o Universo invertida. No pensamento moderno, isto é, no pensamento evolucionário, o homem está no topo de uma escada cuja base se perde na escuridão; nesse Modelo, ele está na base de uma escada cujo topo é invisível por causa da luz ofuscante. Também compreenderá que algo, além do gênio individual, ajudou a dar aos anjos de Dante aquela majestade inigualável. Milton, ao perseguir esse objetivo, errou o alvo. O classicismo entrou no meio. Seus anjos têm anatomia demais, armaduras demais, e são por demais parecidos com os deuses de Homero e Virgílio, e (por essa mesma razão) são muito pouco parecidos com os deuses do paganismo em seus desenvolvimentos religiosos mais elevados. Depois de Milton, instaurou-se a degradação completa e, por fim, chegamos aos anjos puramente consoladores - portanto, femininos e aguados - da arte do século XIX.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown. Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist. This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history. As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely.

As dimensões do universo medieval não são tão facilmente percebidas, ainda hoje, quanto a sua estrutura; em meu próprio tempo de vida, um cientista distinto ajudou a disseminar um erro. 14 O leitor deste livro já deve estar sabendo que a Terra era, a julgar por padrões cósmicos, um pontinho - de nenhuma magnitude significativa. E como o Somnium Scipionis nos ensinou, as estrelas eram maiores do que ela. Isidoro já sabia no século VI que o Sol é maior, e a Lua, menor do que a Terra. (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xl- viii); Maimônides,15 no século XII, sustenta que cada estrela é noventa vezes maior; Roger Bacon, no século XIII, declara que a menor estrela é "maior" do que ela. 16 Quanto às estimativas da distância, contamos com a sorte de ter o testemunho de uma obra completamente popular, Lendas do Sul da Inglaterra, uma prova melhor do que qualquer produção pesquisada, em favor do Modelo, como ele existia no imaginário de pessoas comuns. Diz-se ali que se um homem fosse capaz de viajar para o alto, numa velocidade de quarenta milhas17 e um pouco mais por dia, ele ainda assim não conseguiria alcançar o Stellatum ("o mais alto céu que jamais se viu") em oito mil anos. 18 Esses fatos são em si curiosidades de interesse medíocre. Eles se tornam acessíveis, apenas à medida que nos permitem penetrar mais fundo na consciência dos nossos ancestrais, dando-nos conta de como um universo assim deve ter afetado aqueles que acreditavam nele. A receita para tal compreensão não é o estudo de livros. Você terá de sair numa noite estrelada e caminhar por aproximadamente meia hora, tentando examinar o céu em termos da velha cosmologia. Lembre-se de que agora você tem um "para cima" e um "para baixo" absolutos. A Terra é, de fato, o centro, o lugar mais baixo; o movimento para chegar a ela, de qualquer direção que seja, é um movimento para baixo. Como homem moderno, você localizava as estrelas a uma grande distância. Agora terá de substituir essa distância por um tipo de distância muito especial e muito menos abstrata chamada altura; Os Céus 1 103 que fala imediatamente aos nossos músculos e nervos. O Modelo Medieval é vertiginoso. E o fato de que a altura das estrelas na astronomia medieval é muito pequena comparada às distâncias modernas acabará se manifestando como não tendo o tipo de importância que você supunha. Para o pensamento e a imaginação, dez milhões de milhas e um bilhão são a mesma coisa. Ambas podem ser concebidas (isto é, podemos fazer contas com ambas) e nenhuma delas pode ser imaginada; e quanto mais imaginação tivermos, melhor deveríamos saber disso. A diferença realmente importante é que o universo medieval, ao mesmo tempo que era inimaginavelmente grande, também era indubitavelmente finito. E um resultado inesperado disso foi o de fazer com que a pequenez da Terra fosse sentida com mais vivacidade. Em nosso Universo ela é pequena, sem dúvida; mas as galáxias e tudo o mais também são - e daí? Mas para eles havia um padrão finito de comparação. A esfera celeste mais alta, o maggior corpo de Dante, era tão simples e finalmente o maior objeto existente. A palavra "pequeno" aplicada à Terra assume, então, uma significância bem mais absoluta. Repito, pelo fato de o universo medieval ser finito, ele adquire uma forma, a forma perfeitamente esférica, que contém em si uma diversidade ordenada. Consequentemente, olhar para fora numa noite escura com olhos modernos é como olhar para o mar, que vai minguando num dia de nevoeiro; ou olhar para uma floresta virgem - infindáveis árvores sem nenhum horizonte. Vislumbrar o universo medieval altaneiro é mais como visualizar um prédio bem alto. O "espaço" da astronomia moderna pode infligir terror, espanto ou um vago devaneio; as esferas celestes dos medievais nos apresentam um objeto no qual a mente pode repousar, impressionando por sua grandeza, mas satisfazendo por sua harmonia. Esse é o sentido pelo qual o nosso universo é romântico, e o deles era clássico.