Quotes About Religio

For to make holes in the earth was to rape it! The Romans had scruples about violating or disfiguring the landscape: their religio had aspects that today we would call 'ecological'. That did not prevent their undertaking large-scale works, but always with the approval of the gods.

The concept of the 'secular', first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, 'for the first time and permanently'.16 A decisive moment.