Thomas Cahill - Christianity Quotes

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It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.

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

Thomas Cahill