Education Quote by John Jewel

“Dark” lands like a verdict, repeated until it stops being a mood and becomes a worldview: even the disciplines that promise clarity can’t escape the fog. John Jewel is writing as a Reformation-era clergyman, and that context matters. This is an age when the medieval synthesis is cracking, religious authority is being renegotiated in public, and competing claims to truth (Rome, Reformers, humanists, folk belief) are fighting for the same psychological territory. Jewel’s line reads less like despair than like a tactical narrowing of the field.

The intent is polemical. By lumping philosophy, astrology, and geometry together, Jewel collapses the prestige hierarchy. “Philosophy” signals inherited scholastic reasoning; “astrology” points to the era’s appetite for cosmic certainty dressed up as science; “geometry” is the interesting twist, the supposedly clean, Euclidean refuge. If even geometry is “dark,” then no human method gets to swagger in as the final court of appeal. That exaggeration is doing work: it’s not that Jewel literally thinks triangles are unknowable, but that even the brightest human tools are limited when pressed into answering ultimate questions.

Subtext: stop outsourcing spiritual certainty to fashionable expertise. The line pressures the reader toward a different epistemic anchor - revelation, scripture, grace - and away from the idea that salvation can be argued, predicted, or proven. The rhythm of repetition is almost sermonic, a drumbeat meant to deflate intellectual confidence just enough to make room for faith’s authority.