Quotes

"At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer or a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted “a place for everything and everything in the right place”. Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight . . . Highly original and soaring philosophical speculation squeezes itself into a rigid dialectical pattern copied from Aristotle. Studies like Law and Moral Theology, which demand the ordering of very diverse particulars, especially flourish . . . There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up . . . The perfect examples are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante’s Divine Comedy; as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday."

C. S. Lewis