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Philip thought all monks should be thin. Fat monks provoked poor men to envy and hatred of God’s servants.
God does not take that much trouble over the formation of a man who is going to spend his life in a small monastery on a bleak hilltop in a remote mountain principality.
When people came here they were supposed to be awestruck by the majesty of Almighty God. But peasants were simple people who judged by appearances, and coming here they would think that God was a careless, indifferent deity unlikely to appreciate their worship or take note of their sins.
“When you’re thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.”
Having faith in God did not mean sitting back and doing nothing. It meant believing that you would find success if you did your best honestly and energetically.
The first casualty of a civil war was justice, Philip had realized.
“Pray for miracles, but plant cabbages.”
Progressive thinkers nowadays no longer saw the congregation as mute observers of a mystical ceremony. The Church was supposed to be an integral part of their everyday existence. It marked the milestones in their lives, from christening, through marriage and the birth of children, to extreme unction and burial in consecrated ground. It might be their landlord, judge, employer or customer. Increasingly, people were expected to be Christians every day, not just on Sundays. They needed more than just rituals, according to the modern view: they wanted explanations, rulings, encouragement,
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a quarrel so bitter and fierce that the archbishop had been forced to flee the country, and had taken refuge in France. They were in conflict over a whole list of legal issues, but the heart of the dispute was simple: Could the king do as he pleased, or was he constrained?
He was the worst kind of Christian, Philip realized: he embraced all of the negatives, enforced every proscription, insisted on all forms of denial, and demanded strict punishment for every offense; yet he ignored all the compassion of Christianity, denied its mercy, flagrantly disobeyed its ethic of love, and openly flouted the gentle laws of Jesus.
Philip smiled. “Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems, to me.” “Why?” “Because they will all be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can safely be shelved.”
