The Church of Cathedral and Crusade

By Henri Daniel-Rops

(NB: Product contains two individual volumes.)

The Church of Cathedral and Crusade is the third installment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ monumental History of the Church of Christ.

Volume 1 includes the first seven chapters of that work, surveying the salient characteristics of the period 1050 to 1350; the religious foundation of the age and its expressions in prayer and pilgrimage, liturgy and sacrament; the archetype of medieval manhood, St. Bernard of Clairvaux; the leavening labors of reform and renewal by Popes Gregory VII and Paschal II and Sts. Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzman; the relationship between Church and State, popes and monarchs, and ecclesial and secular hierarchies; the governmental model of the medieval Church and its effects on the moral and material economies; and the tension between such Christian ideals as fidelity, humility, and charity (symbolized by St. Louis IX) and those all-too-human realities of impetuosity, vanity, and violence.

Volume 2 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 culture; it radiates joy and a spirit of bold originality.… “I hold God made all for the best.…” There you have that tranquillity and sublime confidence which alone could have produced the cathedrals and crusades. (Henri Daniel-Rops)

Spectacular in scope and detail, The Church of Cathedral and Crusade presents Christ­endom in “the springtime of its youth” in which it “built the cathedrals, compiled the summae, embarked on the crusades, spread and intensified the Gospel message; while the Church’s power reached heights hitherto unexplored, and she herself became the guide of human thought.” The cause of this incomparable creativity? Simply, on Daniel-Rops’ studied assessment, that “from the lowest to the highest, society believed.”

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Henri Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), the nom de plume of Henri Petiot, was a French Catholic historian. His bibliography comprises seventy books—written over a span of just thirty years—and includes Sacred History, Jesus and His Times, and the monumental, ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. He also served as editor for the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which consisted of one hundred and fifty volumes. Phenomenally successful in his own time, Daniel-Rops made religious history accessible and popular; in 1955, he was elected to the Académie française and in 1956 he received the Order of St. Gregory from Pope Pius XII.

Paperback: 394pp. (Vol. 1) and 404pp. (Vol. 2)

ISBN: 978-1685952129 (Vol. 1) and 978-1685952136 (Vol. 2)

Buy the volumes individually: Volume 1 and Volume 2 

 Hardcover editions available for purchase on Amazon.com: Volume 1 and Volume 2