The despots of Italy were, in fact, in the Greek sense, tyrants, and Machiavelli did little more than say so. What gives him his importance is that w… - Neville Figgis

War! That is the enduring condition of the Church on this earth. That is what the word means when we call her militant. And war means an enemy, an opposing spirit.

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.

The medieval struggles between Popes and Emperors are wrongly regarded as a conflict between Church and State, if by that is meant the relations between two societies. The medieval mind, whether clerical or anticlerical, envisaged the struggle as one between different officers of the same society, never between two separate bodies; this is as true of Dante and Marsilius, as it is of Boniface and Augustinus.