Charles Freeman > Quotes

“It was a mark of Constantine's political genius and flexibility that he realized it was better to utilize a religion(Christianity) that already had a well-established structure of authority as a prop to the imperial regime rather than exclude it as a hindrance.”
― Charles Freeman

“In his play Antigone, Sophocles summed it up: Wonders are many and none more wonderful than man . . . In the meshes of his woven nets, cunning of mind, ingenious man . . . He snares the lighthearted birds and the tribes of savage beasts, and the creatures of the deep seas . . . He puts the halter round the horse’s neck And rings the nostrils of the angry bull. He has devised himself a shelter against the rigours of frost and the pelting rains. Speech and science he has taught himself, and artfully formed laws for harmonious civic life . . . Only against death he fights in vain. But clear intelligence—a force beyond measure— moves to work both good and ill . . . When he obeys the laws and honors justice, the city stands proud . . . But man swerves from side to side, and when the laws are broken, and set at naught, he is like a person without a city, beyond human boundary, a horror, a pollution to be avoided.29 The”
― Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason

“Why did God create Eve if he knew that she would thwart his plans for creation?”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“Theological contemplation contemplates through a light infused by God, but the philosopher contemplates through an acquired disposition of wisdom.’ The two philosophies were linked, however, in that Albert believed that when God acted he did not do so through sudden unnatural interventions but through the observable causation of natural events.”
― Charles Freeman, The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of theEnlightenment

“Sepphoris.”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“Serapis,”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“bishops recorded in Persia in AD 235 who themselves led missions that took Christianity as far as Basra (in southern Iraq), Qatar and the modern Oman and Yemen. The royal family of Kerala in southern India”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“150 years later, Constantinople suffers an even worse fate. The emperor Justinian, faced with similar violence, the Nika revolt of 532, was encouraged by his wife, Theodora, to send in troops. Between 30,000 and 50,000 citizens are believed to have been massacred. It was the arbitrary exercise of this absolute power that was most unsettling. The fact that Justinian supposed himself to be a quintessentially Christian monarch made no difference. It was, after all, fully accepted that God might act punitively, and there were dozens of Old Testament texts to back the point. So why should his representative on earth be different? In any case, as the contemporary historian proposes, the king did not see it as murder, as the victims did not share his beliefs.”
― Charles Freeman, The Closing Of The Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

“belief, since anyone who believes without testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived.”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“Faith” is a complex concept, but whether it is trust in what cannot be seen, belief in promises made by God, essentially a declaration of loyalty or a virtue, it involves some kind of acquiescence in what cannot be proved by rational thought.”
― Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason

“he had no erotic urges and did not need to excrete.”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“basilica”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of “mystery, magic and authority”, a substitution which drew heavily on irrational elements of Pagan society that had never been extinguished. Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers.”
― Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

“Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers.”
― Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason

“Henry Chadwick's excellent The Early Church, first published in the 1960s.”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity

“The god of Genesis is certainly not transcendent. He shows jealousy, vindictiveness and an apparent inability to foresee the results of a situation that he has created.”
― Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity