Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, 1978, Random House Paperback, 2014.
This book is one historians picture of the 14th century. gg
"The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and everyday life is a great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is the problem that runs through Gibbon’s history, which he dealt with by a delicately malicious levity, pricking at every turn what seemed to him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal as opposed to natural human functioning. I do not think, however great my appreciation of the master otherwise, that Gibbon’s method meets the problem. Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon’s 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of. While I recognize its presence, it requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it." (Forward, xxv and xxvi)
Is the need religious or spiritual? Could the need be spiritual and religion the resulting natural ever failing substitute or distraction? When and if religion and spirituality intersect, the result is, indeed, special but this specialness is rare and seems to be always so short lived. The specialness of Martin Luther lost it's specialness with in a decade or less. For all of human history, there seems to have been a series of religious God thinking fades. This is just my opinion, which isn't worth much. gg
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
