Diarmaid MacCulloch > Quotes

“Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again. This is the impulse which makes King Arthur’s knights sleep under certain mountains, ready to bring deliverance, or creates the fascination with the Knights Templar and occult conspiracy which propelled The Da Vinci Code into best-seller lists.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch

“The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“In Italy, the Index’s ban was enforced. Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics; even literary versions of scriptural stories in drama or poetry were frowned on. As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian-language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“One should nevertheless not fall into the old stereotype of an organization that kept its place in Spanish society by sheer terror. Certainly the Inquisition used torture and executed some of its victims, but so did nearly all legal systems in Europe at the time, and it is possible to argue that the Spanish Inquisition was less bloodthirsty than most – as we will see, it showed a healthy scepticism about witches and put a stop to witch-persecution where it could”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Calvin had a talent for inventing abusive nicknames and he styled this amorphous opposition ‘Libertines’, which had a conveniently scandalous resonance, while also reflecting the undoubted fact that his opponents sought a freedom for which he saw no need.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Yet so much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the children of the Jewish Diaspora turned on the religions which had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light. ( p698)”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History

“The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“There is now general agreement among historians that between 1400 and 1800, between forty and fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial north America on charges of witchcraft”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The city of Granada, so gloriously provided with architectural reminders of its Islamic heritage, was particularly anxious to show that it was a more ancient and distinguished Christian centre than Toledo or Santiago de Compostela, and it also wanted to outface the upstart royal capital Madrid. These aims were much assisted by the ‘discovery’ from 1588 onwards of a series of forged early Christian relics (plomos, or lead books) hidden in the minaret of the former main Granadan mosque and in various nearby caves.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“After a period of undoubted severity in the crisis decades around 1500, soon after its foundation, the Inquisition’s execution rate between 1540 and 1700 was around 2 or 3 per cent per year for those brought before its various tribunals. That was lower than virtually any contemporary secular court of justice in Iberia or elsewhere (admittedly, that might not have been much consolation to those burned at the stake).”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Sometimes the Church patently tried to profit from such incidents: the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral in England, encouraged by their bishop, were pioneers in the blood-libel business when in the 1140s they tried to foster in their own church a cult of an alleged young victim of the Jews called William. Unfortunately for the monks, the good folk of Norwich loathed their cathedral more than they did the Jews, and the pilgrimage to little St William never amounted to much. Other cults were more successful (see chapter 2, p. 59), and the blood-libel has remained a recurring motif in the worst atrocities against the Jews.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Alongside this was the king who remained a conservative to his dying day. He never accepted the central Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, despite all Cranmer’s efforts to persuade him, especially in the revision of the Bishops’ Book; so he had lost his hold on purgatory while not finding his way to a coherent replacement doctrine on salvation.49 To see this is to make some sense at last of the apparently baffling twists of policy and inconsistencies in the king: he was caught between his lack of full belief in two mutually opposed ways of seeing the road to salvation. What did he have instead? A ragbag of emotional preferences. He cherished his beautiful personal rosary, which still exists; he maintained the mass in all its ancient Latin splendour and he left instructions in his will for a generous supply of requiems, in line with his new rationale for them in the King’s Book.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Lucas de Heere’s painting from the 1570s, now at Sudeley Castle, its subject precisely Henry VIII’s family (see Plate 4). It is a portrait with no sense of chronology. The old king sits in full vigour on his throne, handing over his sword to an Edward who is well into his teens. On the king’s right hand is his elder daughter Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and in body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth I, who upstages everyone else. The only figure as big as her is the lady whom she appears to be introducing to the gratified company, the personification of Peace. The message is clear: after all the upsets caused by her jovial but terrifying parent and her unsatisfactory siblings, Elizabeth is complacently pointing (literally) to her own achievement, a nation united in harmony.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“when John Locke published his celebrated Letters concerning toleration in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, he still excluded Roman Catholics and atheists from his proposals, on the grounds that they were enemies to the English state.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“There is in all these connections a prehistory of the Enlightenment. What were the intentions of those who were proud to give themselves the ‘Enlightenment’ label? In one form, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did indeed set itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this started as being anti-Catholic rather than anti-Christian: a powerful consideration was the memory of the arch-Catholic Louis XIV of France’s great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes. Often doubt, scepticism or hatred of the Church then moved on to become what we would define as atheism. So an anti-Christian Enlightenment encompassed the anger of Voltaire against clerical stupidity, David Hume’s serene indifference to any hope of life after death that so shocked the diarist James Boswell, Maximilien Robespierre’s cold hatred of Catholicism and the French Revolution’s replacement of the Catholic Church with the goddess of reason. The authors of The treatise of the three impostors would have been delighted by all that, and they should also have been humbled by the quality of some of the minds which they had recruited by their clumsy diatribe.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“English was a complex hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Norse, with a strong overlay of Norman-French, and was difficult for outsiders to learn fluently because of its consequent lack of linguistic logic.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life

“Everyone confronting the unfamiliar, inside or outside a religious system, has a duty of enquiry and exploration, as a means of combating fear. Fear is generally fear of the unknown. Knowledge is like a medicine to soothe a fever; in particular, proper knowledge of the past is a medicine for intellectual fevers contracted from prejudiced views of history.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

“the same metaphors and themes sound again and again in mystic discourse, like a muffled peal of bells in English change-ringing.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“That search for wisdom they entrusted to people whom they defined as lovers of wisdom: philosophers.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

“Aurispa”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years