In our day, we are unable to envisage comfort except as part of the technical order of things. Comfort for us means bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing  ma­ chines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and pro­ mote rest and physical euphoria. For us, comfort is closely asso­ciated with the material life; it manifests itself in the perfection of personal goods and machines. According to Giedion, the men of the Middle Ages also were concerned with comfort, but for them comfort had an entirely different form and content. It represented a feeling of moral and aesthetic order. Space was the primary ele­ment in comfort. Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possi­bility of moving about, of seeing beyond his nose, of not con­stantly colliding with other people. These preoccupations are alto­gether foreign to us.

Moreover, comfort consisted of a certain arrangement of space. In the Middle Ages, a room could be completely “finished,” even though it might contain no furniture. Everything depended on pro­ portions, material, form. The goal was not convenience, but rather a certain atmosphere. Comfort was the mark of the man’s personal­ity on the place where he lived. This, at least in part, explains the extreme diversity of architectural interiors in the houses of the period. Nor was this the result of mere whim; it represented an adaptation to character; and when it had been realized, the man of the Middle Ages did not care if his rooms were not well heated or his chairs hard.

From Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 67-68.

The items in a code stand to the moral law as bricks to a building. Wisdom must involve some comprehension of how the bricks are meant to be put together.

This has an immediate bearing on how we read the Bible. Not only is it insufficient to quote and requote the great commands of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it may lead to evasions of the ‘plain’ sense of the Bible’s teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible’s silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 200.