Why study the Middle Ages?

Once upon a time, this question was easy to answer.

The Middle Ages gave birth to Europe. Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the paganism of antiquity bent its knee to the civilizing influence of Christianity. Latin became the language of liturgy and the liberal arts, and Everyman—and woman—was recognized as having been created in the image and likeness of God. Cities blossomed as centers of education and self-governance and flourished as hubs of industry and commerce. The learning preserved from antiquity in the monasteries became available in the towns through the preaching of itinerant friars. Feudal warlords were transformed by the ideals of crusade and chivalry from bloodthirsty robber barons into noble knights, while women were lifted up to become mistresses of their own households and wives, but only by their own consent. The Middle Ages were a time filled with light and color and song and joy, when bishops held kings to account and a beggar might gain audience with the pope. Castles and cathedrals rose majestically across the land, and every knee bowed in veneration at the sound of the angel’s bell in honor of Our Lady and her Son.

And then came modernity, which ruined everything with its lies.

This course seeks to counter those lies with Truth. It is designed as an introduction to the study of the Middle Ages as the formative period in the history of Western civilization. It challenges both the Enlightenment dismissal of this period as “dark”—because it was Christian—and more recent efforts to minimize the role of Christianity in the self-definition of the West. Its purpose is to expose the myth-making of modernity through close study of the sources on which our knowledge about the Middle Ages is based. Art, architecture, literature, music, philosophy, theology: all reveal a period bursting with love for God and his creation. Whereas to the Enlightened philosophes of the eighteenth century, these were “Dark Ages” of superstition and decline, to Christians of the day they were ages of reason and reform, of faith seeking understanding through the experience of God’s love. What darkness there was came from the reality of human sin, the falling away from God through failure to cultivate virtue. It took modernity’s conviction that there was no such thing as sin to make the Middle Ages truly “dark”—a darkness which engulfs the West to this day and grows, the further Christians stray from the worship of God and understanding of the truth.

It all depends on how you tell the story, whether from within the history of Christianity or from without.

It should go without saying that the above is not the way most modern scholars, even scholars of faith, tend to tell the history of the West today. Modernity has made us all anxious about celebrating the past, particularly the Christian past, lest we prove ourselves unsophisticated, less worldly than our academic peers. To embrace any orthodoxy other than the one by which all religions are declared as one, whether for good or ill, is to commit the deadly sin of narrowness, refusing to subsume the local into the global, according to which latter doctrine all human beings are the same regardless of how much they might differ in custom and mores. And yet, medieval Christians were never so modern as in their conviction that all human beings, whether Christian or not, were capable of reason and, therefore, of persuasion to the right worship of God. How this conviction gave birth to the self-critique by which the West now judges itself is a central theme of this course.

Welcome, Everyman and Everywoman! Let the quest for light, truth, virtue, beauty, and goodness begin!