Letter #65: Medieval Renaissance

What comes after the Enlightenment?

Maester Klavan,

Let me run something by you. We know we’re watching an exhausted era reach its end. Whatever’s dying right now, I think it was born about 500 years ago, when philosophers and politicians were poking at the weak spots of the Catholic establishment that had built Christendom in Europe. From that searching endeavor came modern science, the Protestant reformation, a riotous boom time for the humane arts and letters—basically, the Renaissance. A rebirth.

It had a pretty good run. Even the Enlightenment, despite the honestly quite indecent number of French people involved, did help cast off some complacent assumptions that had outlived their prime and grown brittle. But there were also blind spots and missteps from the beginning. Last week I wrote about how unwarranted inferences drawn from Newton’s discoveries left us all thinking of ourselves as primitive meat machines. There was also this genuinely unfair and over-broad contempt for “the Dark Ages,” without whose tradition of rational learning and pious wonder there would have been no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. But suddenly everything Medieval was parodied as repressive, superstitious, and violent. We tried to close ourselves off to it altogether.

It looks like that was a bad idea. Maybe it was necessary to cut the mind of man loose from restraints it had outgrown, I don’t know. But at this point our culture of smug ignorance, casual infanticide, and primitive tribalism looks pretty dark to me. We are just as played out as the Medievals were on the brink of the modern era. We need new breath in our lungs. 

The pioneers of the Renaissance reached back for inspiration to the noble pagan cultures of Greece and Rome. When the church first got its start, it had to distance itself from pagan ritual, which often really was repressive, superstitious, and violent. But after centuries of Christian dominance, people were ready to consider whether there weren’t some good and true things they had cast out along with the evils of paganism. The premiere art historian of the period, Giorgio Vasari, wrote that the church had gone about indiscriminately "driving out and extirpating root and branch every least occasion whence error could arise."

Our ancestors cut themselves off from the Medieval era in exactly the same way the Medievals cut themselves off from the pagans, and for the same reasons: to clear away every trace of the day’s most pervasive errors and start fresh. But now, just as Renaissance masters reached back to reclaim what was best in paganism, is it possible we moderns have to revive what was best in the Middle Ages? That was when literature was at its most allegorical, when spirit and flesh were most exactly united in the mind of man—everything we’re missing. Is it possible to infuse the modern world with a Medieval spirit?

Love,
Spencer

Image: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Dülmen, Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Rosette -- 2022 -- 0669 (crop, kreativ)” / CC BY-SA 4.0