Last Things Quotes

“And this mercy remained consistently overwhelming. The most optimistic estimates of Augustine's interlocutors in the City of God as to what the power of God's mercy might achieve for their fellow Christians became a central feature of the imaginative world of early medieval Muslims. Whatever men or angels might think, God kept for himself 'ninety-nine parts of mercy'. At the very end of the Last Day, he would not be content until the last Muslim crawled out of hellfire, blackened all over like a coal, except for the unburned patches on his forehead and two knees--signs that even this frailest of sinners had prayed the appropriate prayers of a Muslim. And God would joke with him, with the bonhomie of a great king, imperturbably certain of his power, and in a mood, after a long day, to show mercy.”
― Peter R.L. Brown, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages