Medieval Mind

Understanding the Medieval mind is more than an exercise in antiquarian curiosity. We cannot fully understand where we are without knowing where we came from, and how we got here. Above all, it was the mind of medieval man that served as the launching pad for modern discovery, evey bit as much as the Spanish port of Palos did for Christopher Columbus, or Cape Kennedy for 20th Century astronauts.

The ancients had dabbled in empirical and mathematical method, but those issues not yet become critically important. The mind of the middle centuries was not terribly concerned with what we would view today as empirically accurate data. It would take centuries for that to become a serious consideration.

The medievalist’s view of the world was moral much more than it was factual. It stood on what seemed to be two very stout legs: an underlying metaphysical conviction that the world had been created by an infinite God, and, secondly, that this same God had intervened directly throughout the ages in the history of the human race, first through the Jewish people, and subsequently, in and through the life and salvific significance of Jesus Christ. The Bible, the holy book of the Israelites, was accepted as truth revealed by God. This was balanced by vigorously active practicalities of architecture, warfare, trade and art.

The fideistic perspectives of the age determined the way the universe was envisoned. The world was created “in the beginning,” with no foggiest idea of the actual age of man’s home. It didn’t matter. Earth was at the center of things, as befit the home of the drama of creation, sin and salvation. The crystal spheres of the heavens carried the planets, the Sun, the Moon, and the fixed stars. There was no concept of interstellar space. Things were “out there,” at a convenient but undefined distance from Earth. Most important, man himself (herself) had come into existence some measurable number of generations ago, according to the Genesis story. The cosmic drama of Original Sin and Salvation was what was important. The Christian Church was the repository of ultimate authority and truth. Unfortunately, the Church canonized the imagined universe into its system of dogma, as Galileo and others learned to their disappointment.

More positively, and to our way of thinking paradoxically, there was profound respect for scholarship and for theoretical speculation within the pale of accepted ideas. The middle centuries saw the preservation of classical Roman and Greek literature in the scriptoria of the monestaries and the creation of the first great European universities: Paris, Salamanca, Bologna and Oxford.

The medieval matrix contained the seeds of its own destruction. Curiosity and achievement had their own reward. Discovery and travel encouraged thinkers, merchants, and princes to wonder about the world beyond. The Crusaders, steeped in an odd amalgam of idealism and savagery, punched windows through the ideological walls of fortress Europe. Marco Polo brought back tales of distant Cathay. Ultimately, the itch for power, wealth and discovery caused an increasing breakout from dogmatism and institutional stagnation.

We owe an inestimable debt to our medieval forebears. As we are cultural Greeks, so are we cultural Medievalists.

We have not known what to do with the essential theories of metaphysical religion. The issues of ultimate intelligence in the universe, of causality, and of existence itself have not been laid to rest, although the incidental trappings of historical Christianity have been resoundingly revised. It is not at all clear where we go from here.