The Middle Ages are the foundational myth of modernity. This is why they have proven so hard to kill, or even to re-imagine. We moderns need the Middle Ages to be what they have been since they were invented by the Italian humanists: the trough of darkness between the pinnacle of antiquity and the ever-ascending slope of progress in the age of civilization. Admittedly the promoters of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment sometimes took a dimmer view of antiquity than did the early humanists, but they still needed the Middle Ages, as that time when science was mere parroting of Aristotle and reason was bound in the chains of authority.
To be sure, the past two hundred years have seen a vast effort to rehabilitate the Middle Ages. The Romantics grew weary of being hectored about Reason and Science and looked to the Middle Ages for other paths to truth and beauty, and also for a foundation to the new political architecture of nationalism. The scientific project itself, as it spread into every domain of intellectual life, also began a historical and aesthetic re-assessment of the Middle Ages, which aimed to free itself from shamelessly propagandistic readings of the past. Meanwhile faith in progress was badly shaken by the horrors of the machine age, and this too led to questioning whether we had been to quick to consign the Middle Ages to the outer darkness.
The past two hundred years have seen a vast effort to rehabilitate the Middle Ages.
All this work by artists, scholars, critics has certainly not entirely failed. Today it no longer needs arguing that Chartres is an architectural masterpiece, that the Lindisfarne Gospels or Beatus manuscripts are wonders, that St Thomas Aquinas was one of the great thinkers of the West. Yet, however contradictorily, none of this has seriously attenuated the conviction that to be “medieval”—then or now—is to be a bigoted, unreasoning brute. When a practice or culture is referred to as “medieval” in common parlance, the significance is almost always pejorative in just this sense.
Now a myth cannot persist merely because it is useful—it must contain elements of truth. After all, the Renaissance humanists were part of the medieval world which they were seeking to put behind them, and that world was far closer even to Francis Bacon and Voltaire than it is to us. The mythographers of the Middle Ages were not working in ignorance of their subject. The time after the fall of the Western Roman Empire really was substantially different from what came before it. It is true enough that there was less literacy; that Latin was no longer much written according to classical norms; that figurative art abandoned realism; that sovereignty was seen to be ultimately in God’s hands; that human authority was openly embraced in many contexts; that there was little thought that politics or philosophy could offer man some final escape from his fallen nature. And while none of this is to be judged rashly, if we are to exercise historical judgment at all, we may at least declare that the Crusades and the Inquisition were ugly models for how to join together power, piety and violence.
The time after the fall of the Western Roman Empire really was substantially different from what came before it.
So there is no need, in a Ruskinian vein, to reverse the humanist coin, and declare the Middle Ages the pinnacle of history. But we will understand neither the Middle Ages nor what has come since if we persist (as we surely will) in seeing that epoch primarily as a dragon to be slain. Behind that lies the belief that our own time is, or ought to be, or will be soon, one without religion, one where science can explain all that is worth explaining, where authority always yields to freedom, where suffering and wickedness must not be just tempered or understood, but eradicated. That is to condemn ourselves to frantic disappointment, and to remain forever baffled by how the Middle Ages emanate so much light.
