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Thomas Kempis (1380–1471) was a German-Dutch cannon regular, a category of clerics in the Catholic Church who live together in a vow-based religious community. He is credited with authorship of the devotional manual The Imitation of Christ, which emphasizes the importance of focusing on one’s interior life and maintaining strict dedication to Christ. With his […]
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In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English mystic, describes a series of revelatory visions that she received from Christ after she fell deathly ill at the age of 30. After making a full recovery, Julian wrote down her recollection and interpretation of these “Showings,” which was her original title for the
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First published in 1400, The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by the famed English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. “The Pardoner’s Tale,” which appears halfway through the collection, is an exemplum, a medieval literary and oratorical form often used in sermons to demonstrate a moral principle. “The Pardoner’s Tale” illustrates the
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Any survey of literature on the problem of evil would be remiss if it neglected to take note of the importance of liturgical writings, many of which have profoundly affected both individual and collective responses to the experience of evil. Dies Irae (“The Day of Wrath”) is a medieval Latin poem typically attributed to Thomas
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Can good be the cause of evil? Can the supreme good, God, be the cause of evil? In the paragraphs below, Thomas Aquinas examines these two facets of the problem of evil, concluding that God is the cause of the just penalty for sin (the ‘evil’ of death), but God is not the cause of
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Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was a rabbi, theologian, and physician, considered by many to be the greatest medieval Jewish thinker. Guide for the Perplexed addresses the conflicts between Judaism and the scientific and philosophic thought of the day, seeking to find a concord between the Old Testament, Aristotelian philosophy, and observable physical reality. In the excerpt below,
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Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) is often referred to as the “Father of Scholasticism” for his use of dialectics in his theological works, a method that would later become standard practice for scholastic writers. His ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and develop arguments reconciling seemingly contradictory presuppositions is on display in On the Fall
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On the Consolation of Philosophy was written in AD 523 during a year-long imprisonment that the Roman statesman Boethius served while awaiting trial, and ultimately execution, for the alleged crime of treason under the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. Boethius was imprisoned due to treachery, and his experience of this injustice inspired him to question
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Considerable obscurity remains about the person of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, author of On the Divine Names. His writings, which are our only source of information about his life, suggest that he lived in the Early Middle Ages, perhaps around 500 AD. Though little is known about the life of Dionysius, his work was influential among
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