Thomas Cahill Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality...

Thomas Cahill
In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks.

Thomas Cahill
We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.

Thomas Cahill
More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine.

Thomas Cahill
Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.

Thomas Cahill
The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus.

Thomas Cahill
Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas.... they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on.... Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome... they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way.

Thomas Cahill
Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery.

Thomas Cahill
The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

Thomas Cahill
Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.

Thomas Cahill
Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan.

Thomas Cahill
Pericles' words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history... Lincoln at Gettysburg... Churchill's... repeated promise to the British people... of "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." And no wonder, for both orator's knew their Thucydides and knew this speech [Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War].... the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential address of John F. Kennedy.... When he told of the sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches.... In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgement that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven.

Thomas Cahill
Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming—and, of course, copying.... a little hut for each monk... a refectory and kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of barns; a modest church—and they were in business.

Thomas Cahill
Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.

Thomas Cahill
If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature.... that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life.

Thomas Cahill
For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland...

Thomas Cahill
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.

Thomas Cahill
The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen.... Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.

Thomas Cahill
Patrick... understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.

Thomas Cahill
A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.

Thomas Cahill
The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

Thomas Cahill
Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

Thomas Cahill
The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution... the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom of blood. The Green Martyrs... retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island... there to study the scriptures and commune with God.

Thomas Cahill
Latin literature would almost certainly have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of the Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down.

Thomas Cahill
Even the special appurtenances of Christian monasticism—silence, meditation, chanting, distinctive costumes, beads, incense, kneeling, hands raised in prayer—all too likely go back to the Pythagoreans and beyond them to their influences, the Indian Buddhists and their predecessors.

Thomas Cahill
Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.

Thomas Cahill
Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all.... basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.

Thomas Cahill
Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.

Thomas Cahill
This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness.

Thomas Cahill
Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God's children is facing starvation. Before such statistics, believers should never forget Dostoevsky's assertion that the suffering of children is the greatest proof against the existence of God; for without justice, there is no God.

Thomas Cahill