Stone's Fence

A favorite indoor sport of the intellectual elite seems to be characterizing "this generation" or "this era," normally as a maneuver to undergird a cultural agenda. The recent drop-dead favorite seems to be "post-modern." The term carries a cachet of advanced thought, the bemused detachment of one observing great crises from outside, never committing to a "meta-narrative" lest one become ideologically co-opted.
Recently I realized what bothers me about the post-modernity thing. Tremors came as I savored Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages but the eruption came as I finished the stellar new translation of Huizinga's classic The Autumn of the Middle Ages. What I don't like about the "post modern" is that "post" implies movement beyond, or forward, even bravely, when it increasingly appears we have gone back. Rather than "post-modern," our age seems one of medieval recrudescence. Huizinga tellingly branded the medieval era with "the passionate intensity of life." For medievals,

Every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness have in the mind of a child...Honor and wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty...all things in life had about them something glitteringly and cruelly public. (Autumn, p. 1)

This remark comports an adumbration, dark but real, of our time. We de-emphasize the rational, the logical, in favor of the immediate. Rather than simply live life, we engulf it and gorge. Alpine skiing bores, so we snowboard Mt. Everest. "Xtreme" sports embody the hunger of atrophied sensibility for the vivid perception wrought by the proximity of death. And it is all "glitteringly and cruelly public."
The medieval hunger for vivid experience, for "a beautiful life," (again, Huizinga) flowed from the unrelenting sameness and uniform deprivations of ordinary life. This hunger rapidly descended into a lust for the sensational. We simply have "no idea of the unrestrained extravagance and inflammability of the medieval heart" (Autumn, p. 15). Perhaps we do. Moderns worked hard to birth the suburban middle-class lifestyle but then recoiled from the inevitably resulting uniformity of mass culture. Missing the magic in ordinary life, work, and relationships, we crave the strange, the unusual, the spectacular. Medievals sought any stimulation that promised, even for a moment, to lift life out of the dreariness of the ordinary. Susceptible to collective emotional outbursts, they thrilled as much to mass hysteria as to the mystery of the Mass. The simplest occasions could detonate into explosive riots leaving almost as many dead bodies behind as the post-game festivities of a World-Cup soccer match. In such an environment, leaders morph into celebrities of irresistible influence. The 11th and 12th centuries saw a series of preachers who had the same mesmerizing power over their audiences as the stars on MTV exercise over their acolytes. These preachers like Bernard of Clairvaux worked up the frenzies driving the crusades, at one point even convincing parents to send their young children into the war against Islam. Imagine: knowingly sending ones children to certain, suicidal death at the behest of a charismatic celebrity religious leader, in the name of God!
But then death was an intimate acquaintance to the medievals, who inhabited its shadow. Starvation, squalor, and plagues that killed a third of Europe made death a fact of daily life. You could be perfectly healthy at breakfast on Monday and be dead by sunup on Tuesday. Architects adorned churches with gruesome scenes of decomposing corpses, the agonies of hell, and the pedagogic chastisements of purgatory. "Goth" was not a fad. At least the medievals did not quail before the violent sufferings of Christ, which seems to be the lone exception to our post-modern medieval...tolerance...for barbarism. [To Be Continued]

(continued) Most telling are the similarities tying today's church to medieval Christianity. Take the Bible. Despite the stereotypical "cartoon history of the church" taught in most schools, it remains true that medieval lay persons knew the Bible less from reading than from stained-glass windows, crude dramatic sketches, and the pronouncements of celebrity clergy authorities. Fanciful legends about saints and biblical characters filled in the gaps. Medieval theologians augmented the biblical text with a growing jungle of notes reconciling a top-heavy church tradition with the text's stark witness. Glosses bred like cats and so engulfed the biblical text that the very pages appear a labyrinth of marginalia. Worse, the benefits of a universally accepted translation, the Latin Vulgate, dissolved in the deep corruption and error that crept into copies of the Bible in common use. The text itself became unstable and uncertain. An authoritative Bible loses its coercive force if nobody knows just what it says.
Theoretically, the protestant reformation fixed all that. Now lay persons read the Bible for themselves. Protestants, we are told, interpret the Bible in its plain sense, freed from the labyrinth of annotation. Much of this is easy stereotype but much is fair. How much of the medieval experience parallels the contemporary church? More and more, we do not experience scripture in its unfolding, developing context, but on the gigantic illuminated screens, where the selected and edited passages, in just the right translation, freed from the burdens of contexts flash before our eyes, all thanks to the wizardry of PowerPoint--the stained-glass window of neo-medieval Christendom.
And we have our celebrities who establish the meaning of the Bible for the masses and proclaim the next crusade. How many Bible study groups end up studying, not the Bible, but the latest book by the current anointed celebrity expositor? And merely studying the Bible falls short! We require event-oriented programming that delivers not just God's word, but sensational experiences, God's word on steroids...Xtreme ministry. I have met people in great churches whose grasp of biblical truth stems as much from popular fiction as from the Bible itself. Again, our designer study-Bibles--has the Repeat Sex Offender Study Bible come out yet?--increasingly resemble medieval Bibles with their labrynths of glosses. And with so many translations of the Bible into English, I can quote the scriptures directly in class or from the pulpit and have the majority of the audience not realize it. They've got The Message and I quoted the New Living Translation. Have we have weighed sufficiently the impact of the babel of translations visited on a single tongue while other tongues still await their first? The value of the Bible derives precisely from its ability to shape and mold our thinking and discourse about grace. But how does that happen when Christians do not even share a common text? While we celebrate the Bible, our access to it becomes disquietingly oblique.
Which brings me to mystery. While medieval scholars wrestled over the relationship between the literal and spiritual senses of scripture, many just gave up and dove directly into mystery. "Spiritual" reading attempted an end-run, hoping that God would speak through the Bible without actually using its plain words. The Bible becomes more of an antenna than a message. When I read the reformers, I am struck by how unspiritual they sound to our ears. Luther's garrulous impiety shocks. Calvin's acidity would strip the paint off the fellowship hall of most churches. The faith of the reformation, in part, involved a liberation from "spirituality." The emotional works-righteousness of religious affectations yielded to faith, hope, and charity. But today spirituality is the Xtreme sport of jaded neo-medieval Christians for whom faith, hope and charity seem too confining. Eventually the medieval hunger for the exotic, combined with biblical and historical ignorance spawned a host of occult philosophies claiming custodianship over a truth concealed by a church protecting its power. Whether it be masonry, alchemy, Rosicrucianism or the Cult of Mary Magdalene (you know, the Disciple Whom Jesus Bedded?) you could not throw a rock into a medieval mob without hitting a self-styled practitioner of some forbidden art. Gnosticism is the cruelest tyranny exercised by the elite over the ignorant. In an occult/gnostic culture, the line between fiction and fact dissolves before micro-waved medieval fantasy like The DaVinci Code.
The medieval church confronted two defining crises. First, imperial Islam challenged the very existence of the church, and the church in response acquired the disquieting habit of answering challenges by "taking the cross" of crusading. But are we any better prepared to confront our own encounter with a re-energized Islam? Second, the seismic intellectual shift of the 13th century from a Platonic, "spiritual" worldview to one informed by the stark realism of Aristotle constitutes a paradigm shift dwarfing our current case of nerves over modernity. Fortunately for the medieval church, a thinker like Thomas Aquinas met the challenge, not by transforming the faith into something more palatable, but by translating its timeless truths afresh in terms comprehensible to the new worldview. Aquinas and his colleagues bequeathed a theological heritage that even the reformers grudgingly admired and shamelessly emulated, unleashing 800 years of philosophical, theological, and scientific advancement.
I am not sure neo-medievals are going to be so lucky.