A Medievalist in the Modern Church
"From childhood’s hour, I have not been; As others were, I have not seen; As others saw, I could not bring; My passions from a common spring" -Edgar Allen Poe, Alone
Being a medievalist in the modern Church is a hard knock life. On one side there are the Traditionalists. This side would love nothing more than to coopt the title for themselves as it would place them further back into that elusive “tradition” they seek in order to validate their position. In reality though, they should more correctly be called baroque Tridentines than medieval; much more inclined to humanist and Reformation influences than medieval. On the other side are the Progressives, who are just… wrong- about nearly everything. They wouldn’t qualify in any real sense as anything one finds in the perennial Church. Their influences derive more from Post-Enlightenment and classical liberalism ideals.
Admittedly my love of medievalism stems from something of a mental escapism. Modernity is just so awful, so numbingly dull and soulless that I would rather spend my leisure time contemplating the era of the Black Death than the Covid lockdown, or on the fields of Hastings or Agincourt than the hills of Afghanistan. The Plague after all was as swift as it was deadly, Agincourt was at least fought by two armies who believed in their causes. In modernity, even the diseases are apathetic.
My particular interests are in Medieval England, especially after the societal revolutions of the 11th and 12th centuries. Changes in agriculture allowed for larger populations, which in turn freed up some sectors of labor to allow for the growth of the medieval cities and then the universities. This was followed by an influx of the newly formed and revolutionary mendicant blackfriars and greyfriars who came and filled up the new universities of Oxford and Cambridge, bringing in a flowering of learning. As well as these subjects of interest, I have a real affinity for the medieval mystics of this era: St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bonaventure, St. Catherine of Siena. Endless pages of fascinating visions and accounts fill the writings and hagiographies of these men and women.
All of this flowering was ultimately undone by the Humanist movement, and then butchered and scattered to the four corners by the Reformation and subsequent French Revolution. Add to this loss the rise of the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the Nation/State, and now the beginnings of a Technological Revolution, we see how far removed that world is from us. Those people seem at times alien to generations weened on secular nihilism.
How does this trajectory play out in Catholicism? One could fill bookshelves assessing this. There was of course the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, which directly affected faith experience all over Europe. Monasteries were dissolved, saints relics were ground into dust and scattered to the wind, churches were ransacked and gutted. Wherever the humanist influenced Reformers took over, they took control of universities, and they suppressed any would-be mystics before they even got started. Even the areas that stayed Catholic were not immune. A humanist influenced Counter-Reformation was arguably underway even before Luther got his start. One of their principle targets: mystics.
Even if I were to grant that by the Late Middle Ages there was a glut of counterfeit mystics who were pulling the flock in the direction of a charismatic extremism, the cure that followed ended up almost killing the patient. Every new popular devotion that arose became subject to these humanist investigators, every mystic was suspect. St. Bernardino of Sienna was attacked by the humanists for his devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, Ss. Theresa of Jesus and John of the Cross were attacked for their mystical writings, as was Bl Mary of Agreda. This trajectory follows the Church up into the modern age with the modernist attacks on the mystics Ss. Faustina and Padre Pio.
If by the Late Middle Ages it could be said the patients ran the insane asylum, it could now be said in modernity that Dr. Mengele has tried to run it.
I believe the rise of this skepticism, coming on the heels of the Protestant Reformation, was the death knell for the Medieval world. Many folk are under the impression that the Catholic Inquisitions of Spain and Italy had their targets on the Protestants, when in fact they were just as often on Catholics whom they suspected of harboring erroneous beliefs. These beliefs were often ones that had been held by Catholics for centuries. It was the undue pressures of some of these Inquisitors by which we almost lost some truly great medieval devotions. To quote Wellington at Waterloo, “It was a damned near thing.”
The universities as well underwent this gradual shift. While they were, embarrassingly for any post-Reformation narrative, purely the product of the medieval monastic tradition, the secular takeover of all sectors of society has too come for these last bastions of our distant past. The scholastic dialectic, probing truth as its ends, synthesizing the massive corpus of Christian and pagan texts into a unified system could not withstand. As everyone now admits, even the most optimistic of ivory tower academicians, the university has become houses of agitprop and state indoctrination. Gone are the rigorous, scholarly disputations by the most learned men of the city. Today one learns to memorize the accepted party slogans. (But not too in depth, we wouldn’t want any students becoming too critical of thinkers. Just enough they can march in step when called upon.)
Yes, it’s a bad way to be in.
In the Middle Ages, there was a mock festival called the Feast of Fools. On this day all of society was inverted. The kings became jesters, and the jesters kings. A boy was selected and “consecrated” bishop, and priests had dead fish tied around their waists. In a civilization that so valued normalcy and order, this was a day to subvert all that. It was one day out of the year where insanity reigned. Today, it’s as if the entire calendar year has become one long Feast of Fools that never ends. That a society could know the difference between a feast of and a perpetual state of; how it makes we medievalists long for a time gone, a time never to return again.
