Letter #184: Going Medieval

What've They Got That We Don't Got?

Spinks.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of medieval literature. Instructions on meditation by a 14^th century contemplative. A theology of art by a 13^th century bishop. Aquinas meditating on the transcendentals. And so on.

I generally find reading medieval literature is not as much fun as reading the Romantics or reading the Victorians or driving a railroad spike into my ear with a claw hammer. But I was searching for something. A railroad spike, yes. But also something else.

We’ve been talking about recovering our ability to see the miraculous in the everyday. “To see a world in a grain of sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” so to speak. And the general feeling I get is that this ability slipped away when the medieval mindset was more or less particlized by the ray gun of science.

A lot of times people refer to this as the “disenchantment of the world.” And while that does sound like a downer, I get nervous when Chesterton in Orthodoxy, or Lewis in The Discarded Image, or Barfield in Saving the Appearances suggests that what we have lost is our ability to see what isn’t actually there. Fairies or the dome of the sky or the flat earth. Whatever. If what we lost when we lost our collective faith is the ability to see things partially or wrongly, we are simply going to have to trade enchantment for antibiotics and video games and call it even.

But no. Medieval thinkers may discuss the behavior of angels a little more specifically than most moderns would. They may allow scripture and Aristotle to overrule observation. But they actually have a very sophisticated understanding of the central philosophical subjects. The problems of knowledge, free will, time and so on.

But they do have something we’ve lost. Something so basic, it took me a while to even see it was there. They understood the human experience as a primary phenomenon. They knew that we could be deceived in our perceptions, but they did not see those perceptions as a secondary product of physical (or “objective”) events.

Without science to deceive them, they did not think that an oxytocin high or an adrenalin rush or a spark in the left hemisphere of the brain were explanatory analogues for falling in love or feeling excited or practicing analytical thought. And to your point, a drug that made them feel enlightened would’ve struck them as witchcraft rather than wisdom. Which would have been correct.

I cannot tell you how strongly I believe that a central message of the incarnation is that we have what we need to see what we need. We are built to know the infinite in the everyday. Which is the whole point. And if we are not doing that, then we — not our bodies, but we ourselves — have work to do. Which is, I think, the subject of the Gospels.

In short, don’t do drugs.

Love, Dad