You can’t be modern without being medieval
Someone on Twitter asked me, after I had tweeted some image from an illuminated manuscript, if I didn’t think a problem with the Church was that it was so medieval. The question surprised me. The Church doesn’t seem to me the least bit medieval, though I myself have a taste for medieval things.
The Church can’t help being completely of now. That is because it is the People of God, visible on earth. True, it makes up the Body of Christ, but there isn’t anything very medieval about that; Christians believe Christ is alive. Count the Christians who have died and gone to heaven (one hopes) and only a minority come from the medieval era.
Men and women, mostly married, make up the bulk of the Church. Certainly it possesses a hierarchy, which supplies the principle sacrament of the Eucharist, and spiritual governance through the bishops. But it is a gross error to equate the Church with the clergy. Clerics often do bad things, but they bring no more blame upon the Church than lay people do when they commit faults and crimes, as they do all the time.
As a child of seven I was told about bad popes, so I regard it as a bonus that we have had a succession of good popes.
Why, then, am I always enthusing about medieval things? It is like travelling abroad. There we see things that are different from those back in Blighty. The flowers, the birds, the chimneys, the bread, the very lavatory brushes are different from those at home, which we hardly see at all because they are so familiar.
To travel to a country like France, Italy or Spain that has much in common with the culture of Britain, and then to return home, brings a strikingly new perspective to one’s own country. To go back in history, and try to understand the art, buildings and thought of a past time, has a similar effect on one’s appreciation of the present.
In any case, things from the past are worth seeing for their own sake. Luckily, new technology has made it infinitely easier to study the pictorial art of medieval manuscripts.
The British Library has, for example, a manuscript with astonishingly bright illuminations in an unfamiliar idiom, finished on June 30 1109. The book is a commentary on the book of Revelation by an 8thcentury monk called Beatus of Liébana. The British Museum bought it in 1840 from Joseph Bonaparte, who was put on the throne of Spain in 1808 and fell off it in 1813.
Anyone who was a member of the Reading Room of the British Museum (later the British Library) could look at the book. And then what? They’d need a sharp memory to compare it with similar surviving manuscripts around Europe. But since the British Museum has digitised hundreds of books, we can all look at the pictures and read the text.
What goes for manuscript art goes for architecture, philosophy and theology. It’s easy and cheap to travel to see medieval buildings. The cathedrals of the era are notoriously inspiring. Medieval philosophy from the 13th century has much to say to the analytic and Wittgensteinian schools popular in Britain. The theology of Thomas Aquinas has never been so readily available and discussed seriously. Even medieval music can be heard in our own homes.
The medieval mind, as a complement to antiquity and to the modern, astonishes, challenges and sharpens our contemporary outlook. Without its input, we’d find it impossible to be properly up to date.