The Church of Cathedral and Crusade, Volume 2

By Henri Daniel-Rops The Church of Cathedral and Crusade is the third installment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ monumental History of the Church of Christ. This volume includes the last seven chapters of that work, surveying the rise of the universities and triumph of scholasticism in Sts. Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas; the emergence of that “perfect expression of a faith,” the cathedral; the callings, conflicts, and controversies of the Crusades; the ascent to glory and decline into schism in the Christian East; the adventures and agonies of missionary efforts to expand the Christian sheepfold; the heretical rendings in the fabric of Christianity by Manicheanism and Albigensianism; and the tumultuous, at times outrageous, closing of the age, at which the Church yet speaks the last word—above the indignity of antipopes and the putrefying horror of the Black Death rises another glorious witness to the living Word: Dante Aligheri and the Divine Comedy. There is nothing gloomy about medieval c