Whensoever any great light ceases to shine, be it a civilization, a time of grace, or some lesser force, there is experienced a deep darkness, but as our faculties of sight and insight adjust, we begin again to detect the tangible power of light. We look, we recognize shape if not colour, we see if but darkly. There comes perhaps a moment when our focus is not so much outward as upward, and we discover a heavens of infinite lights, or turn again, and become seduced by a world quietly shimmering in the lustre of a moon-glossed night. Not, thus, was everything in the so-called “dark ages” darkled or dormant. A great power had shed its brilliance, and much was disoriented therein. Nevertheless, the world, the luminous capacities of heart and mind remained, and much that had been overshadowed by that more potent presence became free to claim command.
The eastern Mediterranean stirred with traffic from the Byzantine Empire, in the western sector, the Muslim conquest of northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula made for a freshet bearing vibrant routes of exchange for goods and ideas. The lands of Islam nurtured the study of ancient masters and sciences. Within Europe, Iberian culture enclosed a trove of scholarship and artistry. Christian missionaries scoured Europe, baptizing pagans, and christening with them the bulk of their traditions and customs. Monasteries anchored counties and towns, collected and copied countless texts, and devoted great portions of the day to prayer—illuminative undertakings all. Innumerable little wars hoisted upon the lands by would-be potentates forced the eclosure of Christian inspired comity. Trade sprouted along old roadways. Guilds formed to regulate trade rules and develop skilled workers. Urban centres slowly came back to life. Ventures for the Christian re-conquest of Holy Land provided catalyst for the east-west spread of trade, learning, and near disastrously and most challengingly, death and disease. Great universities were born out of the wanderings of students in search of masters. Magnificent churches and cathedrals arose to proclaim the devotion, artistry, prestige, and competitiveness of local populations. Much was afoot, at first slowly, and by the eleventh century, with unstoppable tide. Europe was emerging autochthonous from the implosion of the Roman Empire.
In the academic world several issues held sway: the relation of faith to reason, the relation of intellect to will, the nature of universal ideas, the nature of truth, the nature of time—all intriguingly issues we are still debating.
First, there was discord on the question of the relationship twixt faith and reason. Could reason expound upon and explain the items of the Christian faith, or was a faith, based on divine revelation, a necessary supplement to and above reason? Anselm, eleventh century Archbishop of Canterbury, opined faith was the superior power which reason could serve to justify. He argued that the relative nature of things, the contingency of one thing upon another, evidenced the existence of God because contingency implies a beginning point. There cannot be an infinite chain of re-actions; there must somewhere be a first action. He reiterated the Platonic logical principle that a quality found in many things must be possessed by one thing in infinite or perfect degree. Anselm took this further. He claimed that the idea of a perfect being inherently substantiates the existence of the perfect being, for perfection would not be perfection were to lack reality. A perfect being would not be a perfect being were it not to possess true existence. Despite the fact that there immediately arose critics to point out that a logical equation or principle does not translate into the real world as a necessary existent, Anselm’s “ontological argument” continued and continues to be revisited. Averroes, the Iberian Muslim scholar whose commentaries on Aristotle reintroduced the philosopher to the West, held reason was superior to faith, and further, in concert with Aristotle, that only that aspect of the soul, the non-personal rational intellect, was immortal. His co-religionists were not amused.
Second, is the act of will (and love as the principle act of will) logically and necessarily prior to intellection? The epistemological priority of will to intellect had long been cemented in the Platonic/Augustinian orbit. Bonaventura, and most of the scholars of the Franciscan order, more interested in the theological implications of the idea, continued to follow Augustine, and argued that will is superior to intellect, that accordingly, one must love God to be able to understand God and his divine attributes, and that the ability to so love God needs be injected into the mind by God (illuminism). Thomas Aquinas re-introduced the contrary position as set out by Aristotle. Many found that shift in primacy both troubling and dangerous.
Third, the divaricating visions of Plato and Aristotle regarding universal ideas could not be reconciled. Do ideas reference perfect transcending realities, are they mental referents of particular individual things, or are they merely names or signs for abstracted aspects of particular individual things? What exactly are our mental images, our ideas, and how do they relate to reality, to the world? Such questions may seem obtuse items of academia, but insofar as ideas such as Good and Truth (divine and moral attributes) are universal ideas, the answers impinge on the understanding of god and soul.
Fourth, unable to find a theory to reconcile all the elements of philosophy and theology, some adventurous scholars were persuaded that truth is divisible, or at least a two-sided coin. The theory of “double truths” allowed one statement to be true according to reason, and its discordant statement to be true according to faith based upon divine revelation. It was not usually well received. The mediaeval zeitgeist had to it a certain sense of concinnity. It was not inclined to think of things as viewable from varied perspectives. It was not agitated by a contradiction between philosophy saying “God created the heavens and the earth” and meaning reality has a first principle, and religion saying “God created the heavens and the earth” and denoting a divine being, ex nihilo creator of all that is. The notion of truth being susceptible to a point of view, of meaning being contextual, or relative to the field of inquiry, or endeavour was not an item upon the horizon of the mediaeval mind, a mind not disposed to considering truth as anything other than the absolute correspondence of two terms, of idea of thing and thing. Relativity is an attitude of the modern mind.
Fifth, the nature of time and eternity kept occupying considerations because the questions regarding creation, immortality, and divine immutability all required some framework regarding temporal extension or its absence. How could an immutable, eternal unicity, create all, know all, care for all, provide for all, when the “all” was temporal, changeable? How does the infinite, self-contained, and non-temporal singularity of god interconnect with the flux of finite things? What reality or relationship is denoted by the terms time and eternity?
There was a subliminality manifesting through all this academic and social repositioning. The Europe that Rome had held under its sway for several centuries was a gallimaufry of peoples, sundry tribes of Vandals, Goths, Celts, Huns, and others, covering a swath of Europe from the Danube to the Atlantic, from the Alps to the Scottish lowlands. Rome had provided an overlay of legal practicality, its unique contribution to the modern mind, which enveloped the genius loci, the fundamental Euro-spirit, at the root of these diverse tribes. When Roman power faded, that same native spirit became free to assert itself, and its self-acclamation was the age, the world of art, architecture, literature, and language we call the Gothic. The gothic world was simply the indigenous Europe revelling in itself after the bondage of Rome was broken. It did not last. It rarely does. Like Wagner’s Erda it is a hypnogogic creature, rousing and retreating, never fully stirred nor deeply dormant. The 19th century revival and its contrail in the Aesthetic, Nouveau, Secessionist, Deco experiments speak of its endurance, permeability, its inherent verticality, its interiorizing–branching and intertwining–its contraindication of the classical and its extraverted presence in the cubic and horizontal.
The Renaissance, humanism, even certain reminiscences of primitive Christianity broke in upon the mediaeval gothic and transanimated it. But this resurgence, this renaissance, of an ancient overlord’s cultural allure was not a pure revival. It was a macedoine of things Greek, things Roman, things monastic and mystical, things native, and like that admixture of Roman ingenuity, cement, it oozed into every possible cavity and harden into a near indestructible bond and fundament. The primitive, superstitious and magic-oriented mentality of ancient tribes melded with the legalistic mentality of the Roman and the idealistic mentality of the Greek to create the mind of modern Western man gyrating about liberal, conservative and fantastical gimbals. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are coloured by this, for the liberal magic of grace and sacrament differs only in type from the conservative magic of words. The Roman insistence on the necessity of sacraments is no less wanting than Protestant insistence on the letter of scripture. Both yield to the fascination of magic controlled by a legality, to a vision of some institute or institution capable by cant or chant to bridge the here with the hereafter and the evermore. Thus, Western Christianity, in its two major forms, is contaminated by fatal phantasm of legalistic priest-craft or legalistic word-craft, and Western civilization is made to face the dawn of Globalism shrived of the authenticity and vitality of its ancient spirituality, gadding after everything from Wicca to Buddha to Yoga to Islam to unbridled self-absorption.
An Excursus: I find there is no defence for scriptural literalism. It is geomancy by another name, manifesting a fervid fear of living, an artificial, verbal respiration in the stead of an authentic, conational inspiration. There is, however, something to be said for ritualism, especially the ritualism so well kept for so long in the old Roman rites. Too many have failed to recognize in these a potent and supernal language, to appreciate that ritual is the sublimation of communication to a more delicate level. Too many today are unwilling to accede to any form of communication beyond the most minimal. But, we communicate with one another on a vast field of forms. Sex is one of them. I do not mean here to reference the seemingly all too pervasive practice of falling atop one another willy-nilly for a moment of relief. Perhaps I should reveal my antiquity, and speak of “making love” for therein there is touching and embracing and exploring in manners excluded from the world of public and quotidian contact. The old Roman Mass and its attendant devotions were a type of such intimacy ritually played out for the abreaction of spiritual integration. The congregants were made to stand and kneel, to cross and bow as they observed the great performance of worshipful, devoted exploration, submission, and release. Sunday solemn Mass was the spiritual equivalent of Saturday night’s marital rapture, a moment consecrated in intimacy, away from the everyday, renewing, relieving, refreshing, and reconnecting–the sacred mystery of spousal love and trust, and the sacred mystery of cosmic love and faith, both ritually, both really, both (ideally) well, played out for the making of a whole, or if you would differentiate, a holy, person.