From Paris, Cahill takes us to Oxford and Sir Roger Bacon, stopping to sum up the previous portraits: “We know that Thomas was a fat friar and Francis a bone-thin ascetic, that Hildegard was a sickly nun and Eleanor a radiant queen. Of Roger we have no description at all, and he seems at times in his surviving writings so much a sprite, a will-o’-the wisp, that he would be too quick for anyone’s pen to capture on a page.”
Summing Bacon up, the author notes that he was an alchemist trying to spin gold from lead, while in the process propelling science ahead. Bacon believed in the “essential unity of human knowledge,” an idea not unlike that of Einstein’s grand unification theory.
Bonaventure takes on Giotto in the visual arts and Dante reigns supreme ahead of Milton and Shakespeare in literature. This is Cahill’s finest writing since “Drunk in the Morning Light” from Desire of the Everlasting Hills. He wraps up this excursion through Medieval Europe rebuking Dante’s inclusion of Justinian to Heaven in the Divine Comedy.
Mysteries differs from the previous volumes in being more fully integrated with references to the previous volumes. It also contains heat in Cahill’s defense of Catholic thought where there once was almost fatherly apology.
In his chapter, “How the Romans Became Italians,” Cahill addresses the recent spate of Catholic intrigue thrillers by closing a discussion on Constantine thusly,
- The depiction of Christianity in the popular thriller The Da Vinci Code as a fraud perpetrated by Constantine not only is preposterous to any reader with a modicum of historical knowledge but rests on melodramatically anti-Christian Assumptions. The book’s further premise that the Catholic Church sends out Opus Dei hit men to murder anyone who has stumbled on the truth is straight anti-Catholic libel...
To be sure, this is not Cahill singing the praises of a misunderstood epistle writer in the face of similar assessment. Cahill is certainly passionate enough to take up the sword to slay anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment, real and unreal. In doing so, he runs the risk of overstating his position. However, it may be time to do just that.
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