Are We Still Medieval? Epochal Overlaps in Contemporary Life
A design for the rebuilding of the Notre Dame spire by MA Architects
I work as a custos (a medieval job) in a Catholic parish with an architecturally neo-Byzantine church (Patristic or late Antique). I put out ciboria (from the Greek for cups) and chalices (modern anglicization of the Latin for cup) and lay out Gothic vestments made of polyester. One Wednesday, I opened the church and a nun came up to me in a habit (early modern design), to ask me to help with our speaker system (late twentieth century). Apparently, she was unable to plug in her iPhone (twenty-first century) to help lead the students while they sang at the school Mass (a 1970s inspired liturgy based on second-century liturgical practices). I figured out the speaker system and the iPhone. I then rushed to the sacristy to tell Father Ben (a Nigerian priest here in the United States because there are so few priests here and so many there) that we had a ciborium in the tabernacle with only consecrated crumbs left. They were too small to distribute but too holy to throw away. Fr. Ben took the ciborium and went to the sacrarium (a sink that goes directly into the ground). He filled the ciborium with water and massaged the hosts until they dissolved. He did so because of an (ancient) Aristotelian principle that is ensconced in Catholic doctrines and practices from the Middle Ages, all while using PVC pipes.
I have told the following story a few times in different contexts related to the Genealogies of Modernity project. I want to return to it because I think it captures some aspects of the challenge of thinking through “modernity.” When we think of historical epochs we place dividing lines between them. This is the historical work of periodization. Genealogists do this too, even if in general they seek to resist periodization. For instance, Michel Foucault, no advocate for periodization, reads Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment” and finds that Kant ushers in the modern episteme in part through his invention of “man.” Often, genealogists show ways in which these dividing lines are arbitrary, too neat, or need to be moved. For instance, the fall of Rome in 476 certainly seems like a sharp shift, but a hundred years later Boethius was defending the Senate, arguing about consuls, and getting executed by an emperor.
What I think my story reveals is the ways in which epochs in fact overlap within a community. In that one Wednesday morning, I encountered a range of practices that could fall in multiple epochs (Ancient, Patristic, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern). Are we modern? It may be that most of us live somewhere within these different epochs. Or maybe we move back and forth between them. The secular atheist professor, committed to modern ideals, dons medieval robes once a year at graduation. Think these are only surface differences? Stop into the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D.C. sometime and tell me that the Middle Ages are over. Dozens of Friars are hard at work studying Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in between chanting patristic hymns. Most of them help with a blog or have a Twitter account but they think now what Dominicans thought then.
Henri-Dominique Lacordaire by Théodore Chassériau
The intellectual fault lines of our times can be seen in the tense overlapping in practices that emerge from different epochs. Epochs that we assume are long past can rise up in unexpected ways. In The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson argues that modernity came into form between 1815-1830. Johnson overlooks that while the Modern was being born, the Medieval was being re-born. In the arts, we find movements seeking to restore medieval forms such as with the Pre-Raphaelites in England and the Lukasbund in Bavaria. English intellectual and religious life came to be dominated by the Oxford Movement, a theological return to Patristic sources. Henri Lacordaire re-founded the Dominicans in Paris in 1843 and captivated Parisians with his preaching from the restored pulpit of Notre Dame. All over Europe, neo-Gothic buildings went up. By the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII helped to re-establish Thomism as a great philosophical system again. The nineteenth century was as medieval as it was modern.
Such restorative movements aren’t merely retrograde. They were dynamic forces that created rich cultural worlds that ran counter to modernity but within the contemporary. We shouldn’t fall into the facile trap that the modern is always better than the ancient. It was dusty old Thomists in the 1600s who argued for the humanity of indigenous peoples against the classicizing Renaissance thinkers. Neo-classicism suffused the founding of the United States. It was Thomists once again in the 1920s who argued against progressive thinkers of the time that the very modern idea of eugenics was immoral. When Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. critiqued American laws, he didn’t turn to Kant, he appealed to Augustine and natural law. My examples here are all of medieval restorations but these are not the only ones. We need only consider the Renaissance or Neo-classicism to see other restorations of the Greco-Roman world.
What may mark modernity is that we have more epochs jostling each other at the same time. This is particularly the case because of our deepened historical consciousness. (We shouldn’t make too much of this. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales features quite the jostling between medieval, antique, and early modern epochs within the Knight’s Tale, for instance.) Consider the Catholic Church today. Many of the fault lines within the Church lie between those who feel more closely bound to the patristic era, the Medieval, the early modern, or the Contemporary. The question is often, which epoch is the one we most need to guide us today and tomorrow? Similar debates are talking place outside the Church. Steven Pinker is hard at work defending the modernity of the 1700s while critical race theorists are working to deconstruct the racial systemization introduced by the Enlightenment. Have we ever been modern? Well, which modernity? To answer that, we may need to recognize that we are modern sometimes, that being modern isn’t always such a great thing, and that other epochs continue to live alongside the modern.
There are many paths that lead to the present but perhaps there are also many “presents” within this present. There may also be paths to the present that weren’t taken and should be reconsidered today. We need to be clear which “presents” we are advocating for. When we are doing genealogies of modernity, we may find that what we are doing is arguing for which epoch we think is best for the future. For the Church and for the modern world the real question for the present may be this: which past will be our future?
Terence Sweeney is an adjunct philosopher at Villanova, theologian-in-residence at the Collegium Institute, and editor-at-large at the Genealogies of Modernity project.
[This article was originally published in GenMod in 2020]
