Reconciling This World and the Next

Just as the church in the early thirteenth century wanted to regulate worldly life in accordance with God’s plan for salvation, so thinkers, writers, musicians, and artists sought to harmonize the secular and the sacred realms. Scholars wrote treatises that reconciled faith with reason, poets and musicians sang of the links between heaven and human life on earth, and artists expressed the same ideas in stone and sculpture and on parchment. In the face of many contradictions, all of these groups were largely successful in communicating an orderly image of this world and the next.