HUMANITAS • 113The Medieval Mind: A Meditation

The Medieval Mind: A Meditation

Anthony Harrigan

Entering into the mind of the medi-eval world is very difficult formoderns. There is a vast mental andpsychological distance between thetwenty-first century and the middleages. The latter were drenched inmysticism, whereas the contempo-rary world has been shaped by ra-tionalism so that mystical conceptsand experiences have been strippedaway except among a small numberof people steeped in the religiousthought of our Western ancestors. Iwas reminded of this in reading abr ie f h is tory of the Abbey ofConques in the Auvergene region ofFrance, a church that serves pilgrimswho are walking on the ancient routefrom Le Puy to Santiago de Campos-tella—one of the historic pilgrimageroutes of Christians.

The original church, constructedat the end of the ninth century,housed the relics of St. Foy, whichinspired great devotion. ThoughChristianity remained a very strongforce more than a thousand years

later, today the cult of relics and thepilgrimages associated with them nolonger play a significant role in thelives of Christians. It can be arguedthat the decline of pilgrimages is aloss to Christian spiritual life in anage of unbelief and immorality whenpeople have a profound need forspiritual examples.

Awareness of the Christian mar-tyrs also has diminished consider-ably even for those whose faith is inthe Catholic tradition. It is not clearwhether this is because of the wide-spread de-Christianization in West-ern Europe or whether it is itself acontributing cause of the de-Chris-tianization. This diminishing aware-ness is all the more disturbing sincethere may have been more martyrsin the twentieth century than in anyprevious century of the Christian ep-och. To appreciate this, one has onlyto bear in mind the vast number ofChristians murdered by the Nazisand the Russian, Eastern Bloc, andChinese Communists. Many years

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ago I gained insight into this subjectwhen I came to know a Belgian Jesuitwho had been a missionary in Chi-na when the country was overrun byMao Tse-tung’s Communists. Hesaid that his Chinese assistants wereseized by the Communists and thathe, Father de Jaeger, was forced towatch while they were buried alive.Countless Christians also were mas-sacred in Uganda, the Congo, Sudan,Rwanda, and other African coun-tries. These are only the recent vic-tims of religious persecution. Manypriests and nuns were martyred inthe Spanish Civil War, the MexicanRevolution, and other oppressiveconflicts of the twentieth century.

The blood of martyrs was spilledin many parts of the world in the lastcentury. Despite this sad history, thefaith of people in most parts of Eu-rope was not reinforced as it was inPoland and certain other Easterncountries brutalized by persecutionof Christians.

St. Foy in France was martyred in303 in Emperor Diocletion’s perse-cution of Christians. Four centurieslater, Christians were besieged bythe conquering Muslims who hadspilled into Spain and made a deeppenetration of France until halted byCharles Martel at Poitiers in 731. Agrille in the church at Conques re-portedly was made of the chainsplaced on Christians who had beenprisoners of the Moors.

Another loss in our time is thepractice of monasticism on a largescale. Commencing during the ear-ly centuries when Christians werepersecuted, monasticism continued

to flourish in succeeding centurieswhen the traditional Roman socialorder had broken down and citiescollapsed under barbarian pressure.The monasteries served as spiritualenclaves in a disordered world andalso made possible the safeguardingof relics.

Dr. Peter Brown of Princeton Uni-versity observes that monasticismarose in the fourth century and“brought a new element into themoral and social attitudes of the lateantique Christian world.” The Greekword for monks means the “lonelyones.” Dr. Brown notes that themonk personified the ancient idealof singleness of heart.

What Dr. Brown calls “the monas-tic paradigm” was developed in theoverwhelmingly rural environment ofthe Middle Ages when few peoplewere exposed to the “bright lights”of cities. Christian monasticismsought to create a world without thestructures and enticements of urbanexistence. It was a parallel world tothe other Christian world that devel-oped in the Hellenistic cities of theRoman empire, where St. Paul andother apostles had established thefirst Christian congregations.

Modern Christians, living in ahighly urbanized world, adhere tothe early model of urban Christianlife. The order established for monksliving in the abbeys required adher-ence to a very rigorous daily regime,quite apart from the limitations im-posed by a celibate existence. Themonks were committed to a routineof prayer that was very demanding—matins, prime, tierce, sext, nones, ves-

HUMANITAS • 115The Medieval Mind: A Meditation

pers, and compline. Then there werethe arduous tasks required to feedthe monastic community.

The life of praise, worship, work,and scholarship was designed tomagnify God. That this monastic lifecontinues to exist at all amidst theundemanding secular life of the con-temporary world is truly remark-able. But one can understand whythe number of people who committhemselves to monasticism is verysmall in a world given over to en-tertainment and other enticements,plus an extraordinary degree of sex-ual liberty.

The loss of an ever-present monas-tic world deprives the secular world,including those who adhere to a lessarduous Christian existence, of avery strong model of singleness ofspirit. It may be, of course, that thefuture will experience conditionsthat will lead people to return to mo-nasticism on a large scale. This is notan illusory notion since millions ofpeople in the former European com-munist world have returned toChristianity after seventy-five yearsof militant atheistic indoctrinationand persecution of Christians.

There is almost no end to the dif-ferences between the world of todayand the world of the Middle Ages,indeed between the modern worldand the world in which mankindhad lived since the dawn of con-sciousness. A fundamental differenceis the existence of artificial lightavailable at all hours in almost allplaces. The world in which the me-dieval mind was shaped was aworld of darkness after the sun went

down. This meant that journeyscould not begin until daylight andhad to cease after daylight faded.Farmers had to return from the fieldsat this time and markets had to shutdown. Worship in the churches wasconducted in darkness by torchlightor by a few candles. The worshipers,of course, were largely illiterate.They would not be reading from aprayer book or hymnal. Most of themonks sang the offices from memo-ry. When there was light in the skies,it made possible the marvel of thegreat stained glass windows. Wor-ship conducted in darkness un-doubtedly made the liturgical ritesall the more mysterious. And thegolden chalices and church paintingswere all the more necessary for wor-ship in the hours of bright light. Ac-customed as moderns are to abun-dant light, the conditions of life inthe medieval era are for them diffi-cult to imagine. What is done indarkness is inherently full of mys-tery. We need to make a great men-tal and psychological effort, there-fore, to put ourselves in the place ofthe people who lived in Conques inthe ninth or eleventh centuries.

The Middle Ages also were a timeof harshness and deprivation, a timeof sickness without remedies. Lifewas brutally short. Yet we may besure that life meant as much to peo-ple in that time as it does to peoplein our time. It was hard to scratch aliving from the land. And most peo-ple were bound to the land in serf-dom. Even if they were free to leavethe land where they worked, therewere few and difficult roads. Only

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the monasteries offered a measure offood and shelter. They were indis-pensable establishments. Such asthey were, they were the hotels andhospitals of their time. Within thelimits of charity and rudimentarymedical knowledge, they providedgreatly needed help.

Fortunately many of the monastichouses were very beautiful placesthat provided spiritual sustenance.They were beacons of light for me-dieval people. Ironically, they offeredfar more in the way of genuine carethan modern Western societies pro-vide to the indigent traveler or ur-ban homeless. What the monasteriesprovided was not conditioned bymarket forces.

Another difficulty in comparingmost modern Western societies withthe Middle Ages is that equality isthe paramount value today. Under-standing the medieval mind lies ingrasping the centrality of hierarchyand obedience. Equality is interpret-ed to mean that no group can giveorders to another. The medievalworld was completely hierarchical,starting with God the Father andgoing down to the secular and cler-ical authorities who could and didrequire strict obedience. Of course,it was a different kind of obediencefrom that known in modern times.It was based on love and trust anddivine authority, not raw power.

Resistance to the concepts of hi-erarchy and obedience mushroomedin Western Europe and North Amer-ica in the twentieth century. In theMiddle Ages, every aspect of lifewas hierarchical. The feudal system

established on the wreck of the oldRoman order was a system of de-tailed obligations which extendedfrom king to serf. The idea and right-ness of hierarchy was ingrained inthe minds of the people. That con-cept and feeling is completely absentfrom the modern world. Largelygone from the modern mindset is thenotion of obligations of one personto another. Moderns are imbuedwith the idea of individualism, ofone person being a completely inde-pendent unit.

The medieval world also was aworld of corporate life and action.The Protestant approach to religion,an individualistic approach to Godand Christian duty, was unknown.People worshiped corporately and inplaces such as abbeys that were cor-porate institutions. Only in the mod-ern Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Rus-sian Orthodox, and traditional An-glican communities does the ideaand practice of corporate religiousactivity still survive.

This does not mean that in suchcommunities the self is submergedin collectivity (as the Communistssought in their establishments).Rather, there is a richer appreciationof the individual. As Dr. GraceGoodell has noted, “Mysticism is anindividual experience, and the Me-dieval idea of soul emphasizes indi-vidual responsibilities.”

Largely vanished from the mod-ern world is the concept of the uni-ty of the faithful. In the ancientchurches of Western Europe we seethe structures and symbols of themost admirable unity of faith, which

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produce the strongest personalbonds in communities and families,indeed nations. In short, much thatwas central to Western civilizationhas been destroyed by the disruptiveprocesses of time. In the modernworld, therefore, Christ’s injunctionto a Christian to love thy neighboris hard to maintain as an operativeforce in the life of a person, family,or community.

The abbey of Conques and all theancient churches are full of the sym-bolism of the unity of the humanfamily under God. Men and wom-en in the Middle Ages were far morealive to symbolism than the mostsensitive moderns. For one thing, allthe major physical structures,churches and monasteries, were con-ceived and built in symbolic terms.Every structural detail, from the archto the spire, had a role in conveyinga symbolic message.

Churches often were erected onsites that had been important to ear-lier pagan people. The church wasintended to erase or supplant anyremaining pagan significance.

Moderns, at least the religiousamong them, undoubtedly value andlove their churches. Many of theirassociations are rooted in theirchurches. But given the varied na-ture of contemporary life, it is notalways the case that a church is theabsolute center of parishioners’ lives,the source of community meaning.

The secular world is full of struc-tures designed to focus attention onsecular institutions, causes, and be-liefs. Certainly, this was not the casein the medieval period. There were

castles and palaces, but these werenot present in every locality. But thechurch was everywhere, and monas-teries were numerous. At the time ofthe Reformation, when London had30,000 residents, there were 100churches in the city. A parish churchmight have had room to worship fora family, its household, and a smallnumber of friends.

The extent of monastic life can beguessed by the fact that when Hen-ry VIII struck out at monasticism, heabolished 800 monastic institutionsin his kingdom. Or consider thatCluniacs had perhaps 600 houseswhen the order was at its height.

The church and its symbolismwere similar throughout the Westand so impressed the same messageon worshipers, who constituted theentire population in every commu-nity, big or small. The unity of ob-servance and faith was total. Today,the mind is pulled in many direc-tions and shaped by an enormousvariety of diverse forces. These forc-es didn’t exist in the Middle Ageswhen life moved in a single streamand everything had sacramental sig-nificance.

Georges Dubuy, a member of theFrench Academy, wrote in 1994, ina paper published by the abbey, that“medieval man could not imagine abarrier between the visible universeand the next world.” He noted thatthe abbey—and other churches—was conceived as a place where Godand man could meet. This under-standing has disappeared from theminds of most moderns; even peo-ple who are religious may have lost

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this medieval conception, whichshows the extent to which people inmodern times have had a sense ofsacramentalism removed from theirconsciousness.To bring back the fer-vor of Christians in the Middle Agesit would be necessary to regain thesacramental sense and understand-ing of the medieval mind. An aspectof the sculptured decoration of theabbey of Conques and other medi-eval churches is the depiction of thetortures of the damned. Modernsfind it difficult to accept the impo-sition of everlasting punishments, in-cluding physical torture, on thosewho have committed terrible sins. Tothe medieval man or woman, it wasperfectly conceivable that eviltongues would be torn out or thesluggish be forced to sit in flames foreternity. Moderns find such notionsincompatible with a just and lovingGod. To be sure, there is no lack ofunspeakable human activity such asthe torture and other atrocities asso-ciated with the Communist and Naziregimes of the twentieth century,cruelties imposed on millions of in-nocent people. Exactly what punish-ments perpetrators of such crimeswill receive is not clear. But the mod-ern imagination certainly is a worldaway from what our ancestors inWestern Europe conceived a thou-sand years ago.

The people of the eleventh centu-ry lived in an age when cruel pun-ishment was a part of daily life, notsimply a feature of a terrible periodof persecution. These punishmentshad come down from the old Romanorder when the elites of Roman so-

ciety were familiar with philosophybut also accepted a terrible brutali-ty. We cannot understand how aMarcus Aurelius could have writtenof the most civilized behavior and atthe same time permitted people tobe crushed by red hot iron plates.The people of the Middle Ages alsolived with such incompatible ele-ments in human life, incompatiblewith the loving kindness of JesusChrist.

The spirituality represented by theAbbey of Conques and all the otherchurches and monasteries in theWest was an extraordinary phase inhuman history. This phase came toan end with the fragmentation ofChristian unity and the breakup ofthe order built on it. When we studya structure such as the abbey atConques and gain an understandingof its organization and the larger or-ganization of which it was a part, wesurely also come to understand whathas been subtracted from our civili-zation and its spiritual life as a re-sult of the fragmentation and break-up. To a very large extent, we havelost the sacramental view of lifewhich was the heart and soul of themedieval world. The cost is beyondany reckoning. The medieval sacra-mental character was a priceless pos-session.

It would be too much to expectthat the mindset of Westerners in thetwenty-first century could be recon-stituted in the mold of the MiddleAges. History has moved on, provid-ing a vast range of new experiencesand establishing new thought pro-cesses, both good and bad. And as

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history unfolds in this and later cen-turies, new and unexpected chang-es will take place. This is the waythat it has always been. But this doesnot mean that all the ways and les-sons of the past have to be discarded.

The Western world today incorpo-rates institutions and insights root-ed in biblical times and in the cen-turies we regard as the ClassicalWorld, the world of Greece andRome. To a very large extent, whatwe regard as civilized is inheritedfrom the past.

The current decline of Westerncivilization results in large part fromthe discounting of our inheritance.The same is true of our religious life.The discounting of our religious in-heritance, beliefs and rites, is thehallmark of the emergence of an

anti-civilization. Fortunately, wehave the capacity to recover a goodmeasure of the qualities of the me-dieval mind. We can’t live life as itwas lived in the eleventh century—and we wouldn’t want to do so—butwe can seek to recover the best of themindset that existed at that time andendeavor to make it operative withinthe new conditions of the twenty-first century, thereby strengtheningthe faith and religious observancesof today. Indeed, for Christians thisshould be the challenge of our times:recovery of the sacramentalism thatflourished in the medieval periodand gave Christianity a shining qual-ity. Without that ancient sense of thesacramental, we are fated to lead adebilitated and religiously much di-minished existence.