WINGNUTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WITH US

Well, maybe not always but certainly for hundreds and hundreds of years. I have been reading volume 1 of Peter Gay's 2-volume study of The Enlightenment and it occurred to me that the totalitarian desires of the Intelligent design crowd and religious right pastors are an echo of the Christian Middle Ages.

Gay gives two examples from the Middle Ages which clearly foreshadow the modern wingnut positions on the role of religion in society, one from a now little known writer:

Vincent of Beauvais, an erudite and ambitious encyclopedist of the thirteenth
century, wrote in his De eruditione filiorum regalum: "Every art and all
knowledge must serve divine science, which exists for edification, that is, for
the sake of belief and right action. They must be related and directed toward it as its purpose and goal." (page 233, hardcover edition)

and one from Thomas Aquinas:

"This science [theology] can draw upon the philosophical sciences; not as though it stood in need of them, but only in order to make its teaching clearer. For it accepts its principles, not from the other sciences, but immediately from God, by revelation. Therefore it does not draw upon the other sciences as upon its superiors, but uses them as its inferiors and handmaidens." (page 234, hardcover edition)