Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delayed.

Among the most distinctive and destructive features of modernity is its structural hostility to traditional village life. By “structural hostility” I mean that modern society opposes the village as an inevitable result of its political and economic systems. The hostility, in other words, is not psychological. I have found no evidence to suggest that human beings in general ever lost their affection and desire for small, stable, integrated communities in which people are close (literally and figuratively) to one another and to nature. In fact, many personal experiences in the United States and abroad convince me that longing for the village is only intensifying, as is disillusionment with the alternatives—cities, suburbs, isolated farms—offered by postmodernity. The trend is no doubt influenced by the fact that these alternatives are gradually devolving into dystopic experiments in a technologized, dehumanized existence that is inimical to the health of body, mind, and soul. We want the village—and of course, what we want is also one of the few things you can’t buy on Amazon or anywhere else in the colossal, civilizational marketplace that was once called Christendom.

How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill.

A desire so foundational to human nature cannot be filtered out of our lives as though it is the flecks of dust and dirt that always—no matter how careful you are!—end up in the milk pail. Village life is the milk, and it’s the various modern simulacra that could be strained out and cast aside without fundamentally altering anything about the human condition as a quest for happiness and reunion with God. Men, women, and children lived and thrived for thousands of years without all the gadgets and machines and factories and highways that made traditional village life a superfluity, and then a rarity, and finally an impossibility. I am sorry to say that it took far less than thousands of years for the absence of villages to show how easily human societies will replace living and thriving with existing and buying.

How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree.

I say again—a yearning for the village is woven thoroughly into human psychology, and rooted deeply in human history; nothing that modernity does can change that. We have a dilemma, then: on the one hand indelible desire, and on the other a pervasive structural hostility that leaves the desire chronically unfulfilled. That the desire is a wholesome and rational one, conducive to goods both temporal and eternal, makes the dilemma all the more acute. That the desire is almost a need makes the dilemma all the more ominous: just as we can in theory survive on bread and water, we can in theory endure the artificial, mechanized, isolating, culturally fragmented communities of the modern world; just as a diet of bread and water will likely cause us to waste away both emotionally and physically, the deserted village will wound us with a wound of the heart, which heals slowly, if at all.

These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,
With sweet succession, taught even toil to please;
These round thy bowers their cheerful influence shed,
These were thy charms—But all these charms are fled.

Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.

That’s the name of the poem: “The Deserted Village,” by Oliver Goldsmith, who died in 1774 and therefore reminds us that villages have been under siege for a very long time. Modernity is structurally incompatible with Europe’s traditional agrarian communities, and modernity begins not with Microsoft or Henry Ford or the electric light bulb. Modernity begins where the Middle Ages end.

Some of you are aware that I have been very serious about rediscovering premodern agrarian life. I graduated with my bachelor’s degree at age twenty, and only after long years of homesteading, farming, and in-the-trenches cultural research did I go back to academia for a Master’s and PhD. I love scholarship, love literature, love teaching. But it’s hard for me to think of university life as my “career.” Maybe I just don’t have time for a typical academic career, because what I’m really about is the village, and all that it represents: family, friendship, faith; tradition, folklore, local culture; labor, leisure, feasting, dancing; poetry, prayer, beauty, birdsong; the little stone church “that topped the neighbouring hill”; and on the other side of that hill, a Benedictine monastery, which is simply the village in its most pure and perfected state.

Very few Westerners of my generation have experienced the village as viscerally as I have, and that in part is why I can speak so strongly of the village, and how it affects you, changes you, remakes you. I’ve lived and homesteaded in radically non-technological ways; I’ve researched and pondered the practical realities of premodern or preindustrial life more than anyone else of my acquaintance; I’ve sought to learn and teach the poetic mode of knowing, which is the mode proper to cottage and garden and footpath, to meadow and field and forest.

But all of this was prelude or postlude to “the Village,” as it is known in my family: the small town in northern Romania where for six months I was as close as I’ll ever be to the agrarian communities of medieval Europe. If you ever meet me in person (and I hope in October you will, see below), you might notice that I cherish a good conversation, and will talk for a long time about all sorts of things. But I still don’t talk much about my time in the Village. It might even be one of the very few topics that I actively avoid. The memories just go so deep, are so intimately and painfully stitched into my soul, that words are like a dull sickle, hacking awkwardly at stalks of wheat that cannot be harvested and shared in the usual way. The photographs in this post will have to serve as a glimpse into the place of which I speak little, and write less.

I chose this topic for today’s post because I want to encourage you all to register for the Idea of a Village conference, to be held in October near Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma. I will be one of the speakers at this conference, which I see as a communal attempt to fulfill our need for village life, in a world where village life in the strict sense is unattainable. The event itself promises to be a wonderful opportunity for old-fashioned fellowship and good cheer—in addition to talks the schedule includes “Bonfire and Singing,” “Dinner and Dance,” and breakout sessions involving ale, home-sawn lumber, and monastic architecture. (Sounds too good to be true, I know. And yes, I will bring my guitar, so be ready to sing…) Furthermore, I hope every attendee will leave with inspiring ideas and practical recommendations for enriching our homes, parishes, workshops, and classrooms with the spirit of traditional village life. You can register for the conference and find all necessary information here:

www.theideaofavillage.com

I’m so excited about this event, which has not been held for several years, that I’m offering a major discount for new subscribers who also register for the conference. After you register, forward an email confirmation or some such to viamediaevalis@substack.com (or contact me through the Substack chat interface), and I will send you a link where you can purchase an annual subscription at 50% of the normal price. This subscription gives you full access to my primary newsletter, Poetic Knowledge, and also to Via Mediaevalis (which has an extensive paywalled archive and occasional new posts).

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

“The Deserted Village” is a somber and sobering poem. Likewise, I prefer to be realistic about the tragic loss of village culture in Western civilization. But make no mistake: I believe in joy, and I love my modern life, despite all that I know about the extraordinary beauty, order, and wholeness of premodern life. Come to the conference if you can, and whether you can or not, find ways to enrich every day of the year with the blessings of simplicity, tradition, and friendship. Let us all remember that though the village is gone, it still has much to teach us about the art of living well—an art that can be practiced by any person, in any place, until the end of time.

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This post includes Part 1, first published two weeks ago, and Part 2. If you have already read Part 1, scroll down or click here to skip to Part 2.

Part 1

Though modern secular society is conspicuous for how much it does not know about the history of the Middle Ages, popular culture has managed to keep the memory of the Crusades alive. Even among those with little interest in the events, beliefs, and ideals of the medieval world, the Crusades are still well known and widely understood—or rather, grossly misunderstood—as a

deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history.1

The theme was taken up even by a prominent American politician, himself not exactly famous for moral integrity, in a 2001 speech delivered at Georgetown University. “When the Christian soldiers [of the First Crusade] took Jerusalem,” Mr. Clinton explained, they indiscriminately slaughtered local inhabitants until the knights were obliged, according to “contemporaneous descriptions,” to walk around “with blood running up to their knees.” The former president is actually being somewhat moderate here, as other versions of the massacre indicate that the blood reached the knees of their horses—or even the bridles of their horses! The more restrained commentators affirm that the river of blood was merely ankle-deep. We perhaps can discern here an educational lapse in not only the historical domain but also the mathematical: as one scholar reluctantly demonstrated by means of grotesque calculations, the sensationalized versions of this event are spectacularly impossible, and the accounts on which these versions are based “were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval people knew such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately, often do not.”2

We will never know what exactly happened on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in the year 1099, and modernity would do well to redress current atrocities instead of declaiming sanctimoniously against an event that is, sadly, but one example of the countless wartime excesses that fill the pages of world history. There is, however, something crucial to be learned here, and it is found not in modern-day polemics but in the actual medieval words written by Raymond d’Aguilers, a cleric who accompanied the Count of Toulouse on the First Crusade. His account of the Temple Mount massacre includes the following sentence:

Sed tantum sufficiat, quod in templo et porticu Salomonis equitabatur in sanguine ad genua, et usque ad frenos equorum.

(But let it suffice [to relate] that in the temple and the portico of Solomon they rode in blood to the knees, and even to the bridles, of the horses.)

As the editors of a 1969 edition of this text pointed out in a footnote, Raymond’s phrase is identical to a phrase found in the Vulgate rendering of Revelation chapter 14. This chapter begins with a vision of the divine Lamb on Mount Sion, and it concludes with a vision of the harvest and vintage of the earth:

And another angel came out from the temple, crying with a great voice to him that sat on the cloud, Send forth thy sickle, and reap: for the hour to reap is come; for the harvest of the earth is over-ripe. And he that sat on the cloud cast his sickle upon the earth; and the earth was reaped.3

An angel also gathered the “clusters of the vine of the earth” and cast them into “the great winepress of God’s wrath,... and there came out blood from the winepress, even unto the bridles of the horses [usque ad frenos equorum].”4 Raymond was not attempting to describe the scene with scientific objectivity; he was, in characteristically medieval fashion, interweaving the literal and the mystical, the historical and the biblical, the visible and the invisible. He was, in other words, blending the truths of heaven into the ongoing story of earth.

To read Raymond’s words as precise facts, or even as exaggerated facts, is to err as we moderns so easily do when pondering the events and customs and writings of the Middle Ages. Historical scholarship in the modern sense hardly existed in the Age of Faith; medieval historiography was above all an exercise in allowing human actions to reveal the providential designs of Almighty God. Furthermore, as the historian Deborah Deliyannis has observed, “there was no such thing as a professional historian at any time during the Middle Ages”; chronicles and the like were composed by scholars or clerics who wrote “exegesis, poems, panegyrics, scientific or computational texts, and legal documents in addition to works that memorialized the past.”5 When Raymond invokes the biblical image of blood usque ad frenos equorum, he is doing what medieval Christians continually and instinctively did: spiritualize that which they observed and experienced, by drawing from the Church’s vast treasury of theology, sacramentality, and sacred literature. How exactly Raymond sought to spiritualize the massacre on Temple Mount is hard to say; perhaps he interpreted the violence as a ghastly purification, or perhaps he saw it in an apocalyptic light. In any case, such details are not our concern at the moment; what’s important for the present discussion is that his allusion to the mystical violence of the Book of Revelation gives us insight into the entirety of the grand project that we now call the Crusades—which were not fundamentally about the bare “facts” of war, conquest, adventure, or wealth. At the heart of the Crusades, emerging as they did from the deep logic of medieval life, was an earthly journey whose benefit was spiritual, and whose destination was God.

It is somewhat ironic that the term “crusade” is so widely recognized in modern society, because if someone asked Raymond d’Aguilers to share his thoughts on the nature and significance of a Crusade, the response might be a blank stare. The word “crusade”—cruciata in Latin, crociata in Italian, crozada in Old Occitan—was rarely used and didn’t even exist until the thirteenth century. And though “crusade” is derived from the word for “cross,” it refers primarily to the symbol that the travelers sewed into their clothing. I say this because it would perhaps be easy for us to exaggerate associations between the term “crusade” and triumphalistic notions of marching forth with the Cross of Christ into heathen and hostile lands. The original phrases for these expeditions described them simply as a journey to Jerusalem or to the Holy Sepulchre, and a participant in the journey was called a peregrinus, a word that in the classical era denoted a foreigner or stranger (then by extension, a traveler). All this leads us to the essential principle of the Crusades as they were first envisioned: a Crusade is most properly understood not as a military campaign but as an “armed pilgrimage.” The historian Thomas Madden conveys this with memorable emphasis:

No one at the time considered the First Crusade to be a “first” anything.... Crusaders took vows akin to pilgrims’ vows, marked themselves as pilgrims, and enjoyed the ecclesiastical protection often afforded to pilgrims. They referred to themselves as pilgrims and their expedition as a pilgrimage.6

And pilgrimage to Jerusalem was by no means a new idea.

The Christian tradition of pilgrimage, meaning a journey to a sacred place undertaken for spiritual purposes, began very early. Already in the second century, the faithful celebrated local martyrs by going to their tombs, and these journeys increased in distance as people began traveling to the tombs of illustrious martyrs such as St. Peter. As martyr shrines increased in number, so did pilgrimage destinations. The Holy Land, being that favored portion of material Creation that felt the very footsteps of the Incarnate God, must ever be the pilgrimage destination par excellence, though its appeal for ordinary Christians increased after Constantine built a basilica over the sites of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. One of Latin Christianity’s most remarkable pilgrimage-related documents was written by a devout woman named Egeria, perhaps as a way to share her journey with a community of religious sisters back in Europe. She visited the Holy Land in the late fourth or early fifth century, about a hundred years before the beginning of the medieval period, and she recorded her experiences in a diary. Egeria’s detailed account of liturgical life in Jerusalem is inspiring, but it’s also a bitter reminder of the apathy and liturgical desolation that afflict postmodern Christianity. In the introduction to a 1970 edition of the diary, the translator included the following highlights:

A multitude, including many children, attended daily vespers. On Sundays, the crowds were as large as at Easter. On the great feasts, particularly Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday evening, and Pentecost, vast throngs moved from the Mount of Olives in procession to the city. Egeria states that on Pentecost not a single Christian remained at home.7

Egeria’s description of Epiphany shows how solemn and cherished that feast was in former times, and how early in Christian history the Church employed the finest and most expensive materials for divine worship:

You see nothing there but gold and gems and silk. If you look at the hangings, they are made of silk with gold stripes; if you look at the curtains, they are also made of silk with gold stripes. Every kind of sacred vessel brought out on that day is of gold inlaid with precious stones.... What can I say about the decoration of this building which Constantine, with his mother on hand, had embellished with as much gold, mosaics, and marble as the resources of his empire permitted?8

Is it not something like a dream, this vision of vibrant, fervent, magnificently communal and public Christianity in the land where Christ Himself walked the earth and healed the sick and preached the Gospel? Is there not a unique sorrow, an incurable wound of loss and yearning, in the knowledge that it came so soon to an end and remains to this day a place of strife and unbelief?

O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,
And careful hours with time’s deformèd hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face.
But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?9

Part 2

In the year 628, Islamic armies began conquering cities and territories in Syria and Palestine, and by 638, the Muslim Caliph Umar ibn al-Κhattab had entered the Holy City:

He was riding upon a white camel, his clothes were dirty and dusty, and worn out, and his thin figure reflected the hardships of years of war in the desert. Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, watched him at the site of the Temple of Solomon, and turning to one of his clergymen, he murmured in Greek: “Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.”10

One could doubt whether Sophronios actually said this. The comment may more accurately reflect the assessment of the chronicler, a man named Theophanes, for Sophronios was careful to treat the Caliph with great respect. Hostility would have accomplished little, in any case, since Jerusalem had surrendered without a fight.

The conquest could have been much worse. The city was not sacked, and its inhabitants were not slaughtered or enslaved. Sophronios negotiated with Umar, and the resulting pact gave official recognition to the Church and legal protection to Christians, including pilgrims. Thus, the tradition of Holy Land pilgrimage continued through Christianity’s first millennium, but the surrounding environment was changing in ominous and convulsive ways. Not only was Jerusalem now an Islamic city, but invading armies were on the move all over the Christian world. Egypt, Spain, North Africa, Syria, southern France, Italy, Mediterranean islands—all were threatened, and some definitively conquered, by the warriors of Islam.

By the eleventh century, the geopolitical situation was swiftly deteriorating. A Caliph named Abu Ali al-Mansur came to power in 996; he was not favorably disposed to Christianity and in 1009 went on an unprecedented rampage: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was destroyed, its treasure was confiscated, Christians were massacred, and survivors were “heavily penalized: they were not only under legal disabilities, but had to wear a copper cross ten pounds in weight.”11 These were traumatic moments for Christendom; many a Frankish knight back in Europe must have listened to this news with a wrathful hand gripped tight around the hilt of his sword, and with the sort of facial expression that Shakespeare’s King Henry V recommended to his English warriors:

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,
Then lend the eye a terrible aspèct,
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon, let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.12

Al-Mansur was a deranged and unpredictable ruler who also persecuted Jews and Sunni Muslims (and dogs, which annoyed him with their barking and which he therefore sought to exterminate). However, the fact that his actions were due in part to mental illness did nothing to bring back one of the most cherished and sacred sites on earth—medieval maps placed Jerusalem in the center of the world, and the Holy Sepulchre was the spiritual center of Jerusalem. To make matters even worse, Seljuk Turks were replacing Arab rulers in the Middle East, and the Turks were not part of the agreements that gave Christian pilgrims some degree of toleration and protection. Thus, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was becoming more dangerous, and in response, pilgrims began traveling in groups and carrying weapons. This is what is meant by the term “armed pilgrimage”; as we saw above, “no one at the time considered the First Crusade to be a ‘first’ anything,” and the word “crusade” was not in use during the eleventh century. For those taking part in it, the First Crusade was primarily an armed pilgrimage—or as the British historian Joan Evans expresses this idea, “pilgrim and crusader were one and the same; the one defended himself, the other attacked his enemies in order to reach his goal.”13

One of our primary sources for the First Crusade is a text by Ekkehard of Aurach, a German historian writing in the twelfth century. According to Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook, “his work is regarded by historical scholars as remarkably painstaking and temperate.” (That’s high praise considering the tension between medieval and modern historiography.) Though Ekkehard admits that the Germans (in contrast to the Franks) initially regarded the crusaders as madmen, he speaks highly of the endeavor:

Here I am very anxious to add certain details concerning these military undertakings, which are due to divine rather than human inspiration. This I do for the especial purpose of refuting those imprudent—or, better, impudent—critics, who, bound by prejudice, take it upon themselves with insolent lips to blame this novel enterprise, so necessary to a world that is growing old and nearing its end. They, like the Epicureans, prefer the broad way of pleasure to the narrow way of God’s service.

He is convinced that the expeditions were preceded, and aided, by supernatural occurrences:

The signs in the sun and the wonders which appeared, both in the air and on the earth, aroused many who had previously been indifferent. It seems to us useful to interweave an account of a few of these signs…. For example we beheld a comet on the 7th of October to the south, its brilliancy slanting down seemed like a sword...

This next passage shows us how the spirit of penance and pilgrimage was woven into the First Crusade:

Many displayed, either on their clothing or upon their forehead, or elsewhere on their body, the sign of the cross, which had been divinely imprinted, and they believed themselves on this account to have been destined to the service of God. Others likewise were induced, through some sudden change of spirit or some nocturnal vision, to sell all their property and possessions and to sew the sign of mortification on their mantles. Among all these people who pressed into the churches in incredible numbers, swords were distributed with the priestly benediction,… along with the pilgrim’s staff and wallet.

Modern man still struggles to accept that medieval Christians actually believed what they supposedly believed, and were sincerely motivated by the needs of the soul, and were truly willing to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of a heavenly and immaterial God. This limitation helped to produce, among other historical distortions, the notion that Crusaders went on Crusade for economic reasons. It is a testament to the value of honest historical research that this theory is no longer tenable: scholars now recognize that

crusading was an extraordinarily expensive activity. Many families risked bankruptcy by engaging in it.... Booty was notoriously scarce, and even when available it rarely exceeded the costs of the expedition. Scholars now focus more attention on the pious motivations of crusaders, integrating participation in the expeditions into the larger economy of salvation important to medieval Europeans.14

It was the economy of penance and forgiveness and grace and salvation, not of worldly wealth, that informed the actions of the Crusaders. And it was the spirit of pilgrimage, not of wanton conquest, that animated these uniquely medieval journeys into foreign and perilous lands.

Let us conclude with the example of the French nobleman and chronicler Jean de Joinville, who joined King St. Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade in the year 1248. He began his journey thus:

I set out on foot, barefoot and in penitent’s garb, and visited Blechicourt and St. Urbans and other holy relics there; and all the while ... I dared not cast my eyes back to Joinville, lest my heart should fail me for the fair castle and the two children that I was leaving behind.15

In 1450, Jack Cade led a major rebellion against the English government. He was a skillful mischief-maker who had some success as a violent revolutionary, but before long he lost popular support, was captured, and died a lonely death. In Shakespeare’s rendition of the events, Cade takes refuge in the forest after his rebellion fails, hiding there without food for the better part of a week before sallying forth and making the best of his wretched lot. He comes across a Kentish gentleman named Alexander Iden and then threatens him; Iden isn’t about to be abused by some vulgar nobody that just crawled out of the woods: “Why, rude companion, whatsoe’er thou be, / I know thee not…. / But thou wilt brave me with these saucy terms?” Cade, perhaps somewhat maddened by hunger, defies him: “Brave thee? Ay, … I have eat no meat these five days.” A swordfight ensues, and Cade’s mischief-making comes to an abrupt end. Before he breathes his last, he is able to declare (with fine Shakespearean diction) that “famine, and no other, hath slain me.”

Much could be said about this scene; our concern here is Cade’s fast. Modern readers might look askance at Shakespeare’s suggestion that a man who has eaten nothing for five days could walk through the woods, and climb the wall of a gentleman’s garden, and even draw his sword against a well-fed man and then fight him to the death. Is this just another case of Shakespearean fancy? Is it yet another moment when the Bard seems decidedly uninterested in plausibility?

Not at all—though Cade likely would have felt an overpowering urge to find sustenance, his actual energy levels would probably have been normal. In fact, if he had a bit of extra flesh on his body when he first wandered off into the woods, he might have been in excellent physical condition at the end of those five days.

I’ll go even further. I have personally observed someone voluntarily eat nothing—nothing—for much longer than five days, leading a normal active life the entire time, and with physiological benefit rather than harm. Oh, the marvels of the human body! It was designed, with perfection and complexity beyond all comprehension, by a good and loving God, who knew that “to all things there is a season”: a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to eat, and a time to fast.

Disclaimers:

1. My intention here is to give knowledge, not medical advice (or any other type of advice). Bodies are different and sometimes react to things, especially new things, in unpredictable ways. I am of the opinion that we modern folks could be a bit bolder in our pursuit of (physical or spiritual) health, but prudence and caution, combined with carefully listening to the body, are nonetheless essential.

2. This is emphatically not a “five reasons why you should be fasting” type of article (perish the thought!). I’m not a physician, and I’m not a priest; ascetic practices, for the body or the soul, involve personal decisions that are none of my business. I am, however, an educator, and my objective here is simply to educate. More specifically, I want to share valuable information and thought-provoking perspectives that are grievously underrepresented in current discussions of health and spirituality, and which have the potential for truly life-changing, even life-saving, effects.

Part of my interest in this topic derives (as you may have guessed) from medieval culture, in which fasting—practiced on a staggering scale, year after year after year, by peasants and kings and everyone in between—was an issue of great religious and social importance; Tuesday’s post will continue this discussion by exploring the history and significance of fasting in the Middle Ages. And let me state clearly that I mean fasting in the strict and basic sense: I refer not to temporary renunciation of chocolate, or abstinence from meat, or the consumption of bland food, or meals of reduced size, or any such thing. I refer to eliminating meals and snacks, such that nothing whatsoever is eaten for a significant portion of the day (or in extreme cases, for multiple days).

As you may already know, the Via Mediaevalis newsletter is not fundamentally about how people lived in the medieval world; it is fundamentally about how we live in the modern world. However, we seek inspiration and guidance from medieval Christendom because it is an era that utterly surpassed our own in many important ways, and that supplies a perpetual and incomparable feast for the eyes, the intellect, and the imagination.

What medieval Christendom did not do is supply a perpetual feast for the stomach. Lent and vigils and Ember fasts came around with (perhaps disconcerting) regularity, and members of monastic communities seriously restricted food intake for large portions of the year. I am perfectly willing to accept that we, for various reasons, should not or cannot fast as our medieval brethren did. But we should nonetheless seek to learn from their fasts, and we can do that more easily if we understand fasting not only as an ascetic practice but also as a physiological and psychological phenomenon.

In 1965, a “grossly obese young man” living in Scotland sought medical assistance for weight loss. He began a short fast and felt fine; since he wanted to reach a desirable weight more quickly, he decided to extend the fast. When all was said and done, he had lost 276 pounds. He ate nothing for 382 consecutive days. I didn’t get this story from the rumor mill; my source is a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal. The patient freely drank non-caloric fluids, used daily vitamin supplementation but not much mineral supplementation, and was under medical supervision. The authors of the paper concluded that “prolonged fasting in this patient had no ill-effects.”

For a long time, fasting scared me. I vaguely imagined that missing a meal or two would do something bad to me. I’m not even sure what exactly—maybe I would faint? or have crippling stomach cramps? or get scurvy and die? Who knows. It hardly mattered, though, because food was always available and I have never been overweight, or anything close to overweight. Mine is the opposite problem: poor appetite, poor digestion, poor muscular development. I’m currently 6'1'' and 155 pounds; the photo below gives you an idea of how very thin I am. From a psychological standpoint, extended fasting is still a struggle for me, because I have so little fat to burn and dearly want to retain the small amount of muscle that I manage to build through weight training. I nonetheless have done a great deal of fasting in an attempt to overcome chronic illness, and my body adapted to it extremely well.

A big fasting breakthrough for me was just understanding the math. One pound of human body fat contains about 3500 calories of energy. Compare that number to the energy required by the human body each day: for most adults, the number is somewhere between 1600 and 3000 calories. Those figures are somewhat misleading, because when food intake is restricted, the body (quite reasonably) goes into energy-conservation mode and thus needs fewer calories. However, let’s ignore that for now and just use 2500 calories as a representative daily energy requirement. We see immediately that eating absolutely nothing for an entire day will burn not even one pound of fat—only about 0.7 pounds (2500 ÷ 3500 = 0.71) is needed to get through the day with normal energy levels. This number has been verified experimentally. The young man mentioned above, for example, lost weight at an average rate of 0.72 pounds per day, and other long-term fasts that had been studied at the time achieved weight-loss rates of 0.41 and 0.67 pounds per day. The 0.41 number indicates that the patient’s body used only about 1400 calories per day. (Note that dramatic weight loss at the beginning of a fast occurs because fasting stimulates natural diuresis; someone who abruptly stops eating might lose five pounds of water weight before burning one pound of fat.)

A healthy, well-fed adult will typically have at least 15% body fat; in a modern affluent society the number will often be much higher. But let’s say a 180-pound man has 15% body fat: that’s 27 pounds of total fat reserves, and 27 pounds ÷ 0.7 pounds per day ≈ 38 days. In other words, this person would have to eat absolutely nothing for 38 days in order to burn all the fat on his body. I realize that zero percent body fat is a very bad place to be, but the point is, the human body stores a lot more energy than we sometimes think.

Another example: let’s say a 200-pound Christian with 20% body fat (= 40 pounds total fat) wants to eat only one meal per day every day during Lent. This is a prolonged fast, and we’ll assume that the body gets a little worried and decides to conserve energy by lowering the metabolic rate. The average daily energy requirement is thus reduced to about 2000 calories, and if the (understandably hungry) penitent brings in 1000 calories at the one daily meal, that’s a deficit of 1000 calories per day, or about 0.3 pounds of body fat. Thus, total fat loss after forty days of Lent will be only 12 pounds, out of the original 40 pounds! I think that many people would be delighted to lose 12 pounds, and if the one meal is wholesome and nutrient-dense, it should provide adequate vitamins and minerals for most non-pregnant, non-lactating adults. If the penitent added an evening collation to the regimen and ate heartily on Sundays, he or she might look and weigh much the same on Easter Sunday as on Shrove Tuesday.

I apologize if this section has been somewhat dull and technical, but there is a crucial message here: the traditional Lenten fast is remarkably feasible from a physiological standpoint. Medieval folks in general ate quite well during most of the year, and there was no reason for them to worry about losing five or ten or even fifteen pounds during Lent—especially considering that Lent was preceded by the Christmas-Epiphany feasting season and followed by the Easter feasting season.

None of this information, I hasten to add, suggests that fasting is easy. Though the body may endure calorie restriction (and even temporary starvation) with relative ease, the mind wants food. Our desire to eat—a strong and sometimes overpowering primal urge—is rooted not only in metabolic needs but also in the emotional, social, and spiritual facets of our being. Fasting is, and always has been, hard. It is, and always will be, a penance. There’s no way around it.

Faith was almost universal in the Middle Ages; heroic sanctity was not. It is unwise to sever ourselves from the pious or penitential practices of the noble past by assuming, perhaps subconsciously, that modern bodies and souls just can’t do what medieval Christians did. Today I have attempted to briefly demonstrate that, generally speaking, the strict and extended fasts of the Middle Ages pose no threat to bodily health and will not lead to catastrophic weight loss or severe fatigue. Indeed, many people nowadays are fasting in a rather Lenten way simply because they want to improve their health, and we should be thankful that modern science is confirming ancient wisdom—namely, that fasting is one of the safest, most efficacious, and most widely applicable therapies in existence.

The information I’ve shared today is, in my life, neither a burden nor a guilt-trip. It is simply freedom: the freedom to skip a meal or two when eating is inconvenient; the freedom to help my body detoxify without spending any money; and yes, the freedom to fast as my medieval forebears did. In the eleventh century, the progenitor of the Keim family fled the world and lived as a goat-herding hermit in the Alps, and his son fought in the First Crusade. These sound like people who made fasting an important part of their life, and I’m glad that it can, in some small way, be a part of my life as well.

This is just a quick note to remind you that I am now publishing my essays through a new Substack newsletter entitled Poetic Knowledge. If you did not receive the two most recent posts, it’s possible that I was unable to add you to the subscriber list for Poetic Knowledge, in which case you can easily subscribe using the link below. (Remember that if you have a paid subscription to Via Mediaevalis, you will have access to paid posts on Poetic Knowledge as well.) I also included links to the first two Poetic Knowledge essays, in case you missed them.

Sincerely,
Robert

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Poetic Knowledge

Finding “True Love” in Friendship

Previous essays in this series…

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7 months ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · Robert Keim

Poetic Knowledge

Of Poetry and Reality

All subscribers are receiving today’s post, which explores fundamental principles of my new newsletter. Paid-subscriber-only posts will resume next Tuesday…

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7 months ago · 7 likes · Robert Keim

As many of you know, the purpose of Via Mediaevalis was not to simply supply information about life in the Middle Ages. That world is gone forever, and our duty is to live well and do good now, despite the many difficulties that postmodern society imposes on us. Thus, the newsletter’s purpose was to enrich our lives and our communities; exploring and appreciating medieval culture was a means to that end. And the principal lens through which we have explored and appreciated medieval culture is poetry, in the broad sense of the word: poetic literature, poetic visual art, poetic religious practices, poetic lifestyles, poetic modes of thought. In other words, the newsletter’s name will now reflect the more essential purpose of my writing: to help us joyfully rediscover reality through the beauty of fine art and the poetic mode of knowing.

The name “Poetic Knowledge” is a reference to the book Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, by James Taylor. I have mentioned before that I knew Dr. Taylor personally, and his book made a deep impression on me during a crucial and formative stage of my life as a young adult. My new newsletter is named partially in honor of him and his scholarship, and partially in honor of John Senior, that monumental man whose audacious genius powerfully influenced both Taylor’s life and my own. Senior and Taylor have completed their earthly pilgrimage; I hope to continue their legacy and build upon their work, however unworthily and inadequately, as long as my strength allows.

You might be wondering: What exactly is poetic knowledge? It’s not the sort of question that can be answered in one sentence, or even one paragraph, but the following quote from Taylor’s book is a starting point:

Poetic knowledge is a kind of natural, everyman’s metaphysics of common experience. It is a way of restoring the definition of reality to mean knowledge of the seen and unseen.

This not only summarizes poetic knowledge but captures its paradoxical qualities: it is simple and almost unavoidable, insofar as it is “natural” and rooted in “common experience.” And yet, acquiring and internalizing authentic “knowledge of the seen and unseen” is no easy task—and modernity has rendered it vastly less easy than in the pre-industrial era. The new publication’s logo is intended to reinforce the essential elements of poetic knowledge:

Via Mediaevalis, as the inaugural post explained, emerged from my vocation as an educator devoted to the classical-medieval traditions of moral and intellectual formation. The Latin language is at the heart of those traditions, and at the heart of education is the Latin verb scire, translated as “to know” but more fully defined as follows: “to know, in the widest significance of the word; to understand; to perceive; to have knowledge of or skill in any thing.” This is a word that extends beyond knowing in a mechanistic, abstract, or superficial sense. Rather, scire evokes that fullness of knowing which results from seeking and reflecting on real experiences, interacting in meaningful ways with real people, using our hands to create real things, and studying every subject as somehow revealing Him who is the ultimate source of all reality.

Taylor explains also that poetic knowledge is

the appropriate means of reawakening the intuitive nature of human beings who are able to know reality in a profound and intimate way that is prior to and, in a certain sense, superior to scientific knowledge.

As I mentioned in a previous post, even mainstream scholars have acknowledged that we live in an “age of unreality.” Consider Oxford’s definition of “psychosis”: “a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.” Thus, what used to suggest “a severe mental disorder” is now a standard and increasingly pervasive feature of human life. We need remedies for this profoundly ominous condition; poetic knowledge is one of them.

Scientific knowledge has its place. But nowadays it is not only in its place; it is everywhere. Like a river that peacefully powers a gristmill when properly contained yet wreaks destruction when overflowing its banks, scientific and technological thought has flooded the human experience in ways that I and many others find deeply distressing. We need to restore balance. We need to rediscover the wholeness of our humanity as material and immaterial beings who not only think and do and calculate and buy but also feel and create, dream and contemplate, wonder and love. Poetic knowledge helps us to do this:

Poetic knowledge … is not strictly speaking a knowledge of poems, but a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning. It is, according to a tradition from Homer to Robert Frost, from Socrates to Maritain, a natural human act, synthetic and penetrating, that gets us inside the thing experienced. It is, we might say, knowledge from the inside out, radically different in this regard from a knowledge about things. In other words, it is the opposite of scientific knowledge.

The tag line for the new newsletter is “rediscovering the world, one another, and oneself through literature.” This conveys the fact that Poetic Knowledge will focus more on literature (in the broad sense) and how it enriches, illuminates, deepens, beautifies, and even sublimates the experience of living as a human being in the material and spiritual world. Again, there really is no fundamental shift here. Via Mediaevalis was always a highly literary journey through medieval civilization. But now the landscape will be more expansive and more diverse, with the potential, I hope, to reach new readers and give us all an even greater range of ideas to ponder and wonders to contemplate.

If you are subscribed to Via Mediaevalis, it seems fair to assume that you are interested in the culture and spirituality of the Middle Ages. I want to reassure you that these topics will be present in the essays I write for Poetic Knowledge—in part because medieval societies were the most poetic of any in Western history, and in part because it is impossible to discuss the great works of Western literature without regularly discussing medieval culture. This is true even for works composed in other eras, and the image I chose for the new newsletter’s welcome page is a perfect example:

That would be Prince Hamlet, the unforgettable protagonist of a text that is almost certainly the world’s most famous work of literature (other than the Bible). Hamlet the play was written by a man who lived shortly after the medieval period and was heir to its extraordinary artistic and philosophical achievements. And Hamlet the character was a medieval Christian whose captivating tragedy unfolds in the royal court of medieval Denmark. He was also someone who yearned, with an intensity that seems to have exhausted his very life, to rediscover the world, and others, and himself.

One of the quotations above reminds us that poetic knowledge “is not strictly speaking a knowledge of poems.” Elsewhere Dr. Taylor says that “poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-­emotional) experience of reality.” One might wonder, then, if Poetic Knowledge is an appropriate title for a newsletter devoted to works of literature.

My response is twofold: First, my approach to reading and teaching literature emphasizes precisely its role as “a poetic experience of reality.” Indeed, there are persons and moments in the great works of fiction and poetry that are, so to speak, more real than (material, factual) reality itself.

Second, it must be acknowledged that traditional forms and features of reality are scarce in our increasingly commercialized, mechanized, technologized, digitized world. For example, it is impossible for most of us to have a full and visceral encounter with the rhythm of the seasons and the enchanting cycle of agricultural labors. Urban and suburban life, even rural life in this age of tractors and central heating, do not allow for it. Premodern warfare, as the primal yet artistic man-to-man bloodbath of the Iliad or the Song of Roland, no longer exists. The feasting of a Germanic mead-hall—the aroma of woodsmoke mingling with the song of the storyteller—can hardly be imagined without help from Beowulf. The mysterious, ancient narratives of the Old Testament bring us face to face with the deep roots of our humanity in a way that twenty-first-century life simply cannot. And the list goes on. To experience these things poetically, we must often rely on actual poetry, along with the labors of our own imagination.

I will conclude with another quotation from Dr. Taylor. This one’s so good I really ought to have it memorized.

Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is nonanalytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious. It is true that poetic experience has that same surprise of metaphor found in poetry, but also found in common experience, when the mind, through the senses and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.

Exaggerated accounts of peasant life as poverty-stricken and brutally laborious might give the impression that medieval folks were so busy dodging starvation that they had no time for growing herbs and vegetables. Actual records of the period give a different impression. We see cultivated plants everywhere—in food, clothing, construction materials, medicine, and various forms of cultural expression. The Welsh even made leeks an emblem of their national identity. (The Welsh soldier Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V punishes the knavish character Pistol by forcing him to eat a raw leek; the scene is comical but also shows respect to decorative leeks as an “ancient tradition” of Wales.) The historian Deirdre Larkin provides an apt and memorable summary: “There is no aspect of medieval life—artistic, literary, social historic, economical, religious or scientific—that cannot be approached through plants and gardens.”

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A few physicians at the controversial, cutting edge of alternative medicine now make bold statements about disease as a fundamentally spiritual phenomenon. Natasha Campbell-McBride, for example, has been a doctor for forty years, with experience as a nutritionist, a neurologist, and a brain surgeon. She recently wrote this:

Love is a universal energy that creates perfection and harmony.... Without love, there is no healing.... After watching thousands of people heal, I have no doubt that chronic disease comes to us when we need to learn something important on a spiritual level—when we need to evolve spiritually. Disease is a spiritual lesson.

Whether you find these ideas intriguing or outlandish, they are an astonishing departure from the biochemical, mechanistic model of human health that has informed Western medicine for a long time. They are also a fascinating rebirth of attitudes that dominated medical theory and practice during the Middle Ages.

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The full title of John’s poem is “song of the soul that delights in knowing God by faith.” At its heart, ringing steadily from stanza to stanza like a church bell, is one word, one syllable, one sound: sé (“I know”). We must not forget how immense the privilege, how profound the pleasure, of knowing God. Here on earth we cannot know Him as the saints and angels do, but because of the Incarnation, our knowledge nonetheless may attain a remarkable degree of perfection. May the grace of this Christmas season help to make us a little less unworthy of this magnificent gift.

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I read it again, and I really liked it ;-)

Year after year after year of reading books and articles and news reports on so many different aspects of the Christian religion, and yet I’ve never seen the problem articulated in quite the way I have in mind. Maybe that’s a sign that I’m just wrong. Or maybe this is common knowledge that I’ve somehow never come across, and that is too obvious to merit discussion.

I’m going to discuss it anyway.

The Christian religion, despite vicious persecutions and a variety of logistical impediments, took the ancient world by storm. The culmination of this momentous, civilizational rebirth was the youthful period that we call the Middle Ages—one thousand years during which virtually everyone in western Europe believed in and practiced Christianity. To “believe in and practice Christianity” is not to be a saint. There was no shortage of sinners and scoundrels in medieval society. But the sinners, at least in their better moments, were mindful of the God who abhorred their iniquity and hoped for their conversion. And the scoundrels, probably even in their worst moments, wanted to have faith and to be a part of the vast Christian family that surrounded them. Those who didn’t were few in number and belonged to one of two general categories: Muslims and Jews who had no interest in renouncing their ancestral religion, and residual pagans, whose descendants would eventually embrace the Gospel and entrust their lives to a world so overflowing with Christ that it was not a kingdom but rather a Christendom.

The sixteenth century was the long and complex transition from medieval to modern society. The early modern period, however, was still intensely religious. Despite the gradual ascent of secular values—commercialism, humanism, nationalism—it was still shocking and scandalous when, for example, a public figure like Christopher Marlowe dabbled (allegedly) in atheism. The Scientific Revolution came along and made Christianity look rather unscientific, but belief remained crucial to personal and social life. The Enlightenment brought skepticism to new levels and painted historical Christianity as hopelessly unenlightened, and yet, the Christian experience mysteriously endured—even Voltaire, that monumental crusader against the “infamy” of non-Voltairean Christianity, “built a Catholic chapel on his property and attended Mass. He sent his workers to Mass and had their children taught the Catholic catechism. He accompanied his solitary meals with sermon readings. He was an active member of a Catholic lay order. He put in writing that he wanted a Catholic burial.”1

But then, after a revival of sorts in the nineteenth century, a process of unprecedented—I say again, unprecedented—dissolution began. Soon there were immense segments of the Western population who regarded anything resembling historical Christianity as simply impossible. The cultural descendants of Christendom somehow developed an overpowering blind spot where the Christian religion once was: they could not believe it, could not practice it, could scarcely even fathom its existence.

We are in the late stages of this process, the results of which I need not describe. You see them all around you.

The religious and spiritual state of postmodern society is a complex reality that has emerged from an equally complex interplay of historical forces. I have no intention of denying or downplaying any of that complexity.

At the same time, though, the fundamental message of Christianity is simple, and perhaps it’s worth our while to think in simple ways about the fundamental problems of Christianity in modern culture. My proposal—which is built from many years of formal education and personal experience, and which, as I mentioned above, seems to be largely absent from discussions of this nature—is as follows:

Christianity is, quite simply, too good to be true.

Now let me make that more specific:

For a world without joy—a world that has largely forgotten how to be deeply, vibrantly, communally joyful—Christianity is too good to be true.

A providential, fatherly Creator who made us out of nothing and breathed His life into us and loves us with an infinite love? A God who became a Man so that He could teach us and heal us and enamor us and die for us? Forgiveness of sins, even the worst sins, even seventy times seven of the worst sins? The deep, psychologically transformative pleasure of knowing with certainty that some things are true and some things are false? A bare minimum of non-negotiable religious duties, all of which are perfectly consonant with basic human happiness, and one of which involves a single day of the week when we are “obligated” to practice leisure and attend a liturgical service that is—that should be—a delightful experience appealing powerfully to the intellect, the memory, the poetic sense, and all five physical senses?

Divine compassion for illness, pain, poverty, sorrow? The sublimation of suffering, which imparts transcendent value to afflictions that we all must endure anyway? The destruction of death, which need no longer be feared? The possibility of reuniting with deceased friends and family?

The hope of perfect, unalterable, everlasting joy and celebration in a celestial paradise?

How many people nowadays look out from their world—at its worst, a nihilistic, agnostic, consumeristic, relativistic, dehumanized, roboticized, skeptical, pragmatical, isolated, fragmented, increasingly substance-enhanced and tragically despair-ridden world—and simply say “No.” Christianity is implausible, improbable, inconceivable. It’s a fairly tale, a myth, a dream. Nothing that hopeful could be real. Nothing that good could be true.

Sometime in the fourteenth century, a curious event occurred in the history of the English language. The Old English word wuldor, which was the standard equivalent to Latin gloria (or Greek doxa) had gradually faded away, and English writers of the late Middle Ages found themselves without a word for “glory.” What to do?

Modern Englishmen would have filled the gap by importing a word from the Continent. But medieval Englishmen came up with a different solution: they took a related word and enriched its meaning. Which word did they choose? “Joy.”

We see examples of this in a fourteenth-century translation of the Latin Psalter into Middle English:

minuisti eum paulominus ab angelis: gloria et honore coronasti eum
thou lessid hym a litel fra aungels: with ioy and honour thou coround him

caeli enarrant gloriam dei
heuens tillis the ioy of God

et gloriabuntur in te omnes qui diligunt nomen tuum
and ioy sall all in thee that lufis thi name

We see it in the mystical text Scale of Perfection, by the Augustinian Canon Walter Hilton (d. 1396), when he comments on a Latin text and expresses the idea of the gloria of the Lord:

We … bihalden, as in a miror, heuenly ioye ful schapin and onyd [united] to þe ymage of Oure Lord.

We find it even in a translation of a very familiar prayer:

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, þat is, Ioye to þe Fadir, Sone, and Holy Goost.

This word was not chosen by accident. It was chosen because joy is not just an idea, and is much more than a feeling, and is not incompatible with the travails and misfortunes of our earthly pilgrimage. Joy is a social experience, an act of the will, a religious practice, a heavenly reality. It is, or at least it used to be, a way of life.

In the High and Late Middle Ages, the practice of Christianity was universal; the birth of the Incarnate God was a historical fact that informed and spiritualized the entirety of human civilization; Christmas began on Christmas; and the season of Christmas continued into January, with joy-filled revelry and feasting on a scale that is, for us, unimaginable.

In my corner of the modern world, the practice of Christianity is a withered, distorted shadow of its former self; the commercial Christmas emerges sometime in October; the season of Christmas, which in spiritual terms never really began, ends on December 26th; and the post-Christmas period is notorious for widespread loneliness, disappointment, and depression.

Authentic Christianity brings joy. But let’s not forget the converse of that statement: authentic joy brings Christianity. We need more of both.

How to recover them? Well, that’s the hard part. Returning to a more medieval Christmas would be an excellent way to start. And when it comes to stirring up some deeply human joy in a weary human heart, dancing works wonders—so I guess I’ll conclude with some advice borrowed from Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act 5, scene 2:

In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.

Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same people, by the way, had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt.

On Sunday I expressed my dismay at the neglect of—or even the fear of?—liturgical darkness in the churches of the twenty-first century. Why do we so diligently illuminate our sacred spaces as though they are living rooms or lecture halls? A double row of multi-bulb lamps, running the entire length of the nave, far exceeds what is necessary for reading a hymnal or a missal. In many cases, a total absence of electric lighting would not impede this; natural illumination from windows is surprisingly effective when one allows the eyes to adjust and then reads slowly and thoughtfully—as befits a book that is merely a supplement to, not a replacement for, the all-encompassing sensorial experience of divine worship. And this is to say nothing of the spotlights, perhaps a formidable array of them, directed at the sanctuary. How much light does the priest need to read from the Missale Romanum? And is it not somehow unsatisfying to see the flames of the altar candles reduced to flickering ornaments, useless for illumination amidst the flood of electrical whiteness?

Are we afraid? Do we fear dimness, so conducive to reflection and recollection, in this age of light-bearing screens and merciless notifications and brightly colored pixels dancing on command like maniacal jesters in the royal court of the unreal? “We piped unto you,” say the children of the Gospel parable, “and ye did not dance.” The children of today have no need for such complaints.

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But this essay is different. This essay is about something that can be done, and done easily, and done today. No nostalgia, no radical commitment to tradition, no papal dispensation is required. In the worst case, some electrical work might be needed. In the best case, all it takes is someone with the authority, and the willingness, to flip a few switches from on to off.

The Dark Ages—that’s the outmoded name for the Middle Ages, or for the first half of the Middle Ages. It’s not taken too seriously anymore. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

The term Dark Ages was commonly used by 19th-century historians. However, as knowledge of the history and culture of the period increased, the negative connotations of the term began to be questioned; it is now more commonly used in popular rather than technical discourse. The term is now also frequently reconceptualized, as referring to a period for which historical evidence is relatively scant.

It was a judgmental, derogatory label for an era that produced the sort of darkness you see here:

And here:

And here:

But as some of you know, I like the term, because I like darkness, if we have it when and where it ought to be. I like darkness at night, when I want to see the stars, not the wall-sized television glowing in my neighbor’s “living” room. I like darkness in the evening, when I’m reading to my children, and hoping that for a little while they will see less, and imagine more. And I like darkness in church, when my principal objective is prayer, and when the person I most want to see is illuminated by candles, and when the God whom I am there to seek is already perfect Light unto my soul.

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Lesson 17: propers and readings for the feast of the Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior: introit | epistle | gradual | Gospel

Lesson 18: uses of Latin noun cases | the dative of possession | the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 19: thoughts on vocabulary acquisition | past and future of esse (“to be”) | imperfect tense of esse | future tense of esse | the last Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 20: the first stanza of Rorate Caeli

Lesson 21: compounding of verbs (preposition + verb) | Rorate Caeli: second stanza

Lesson 22: passive-voice verb endings | an overview of the passive voice in general | Latin’s passive personal endings

Click here for a list of all the previous lessons.

The O Antiphons seem to be fairly well known these days, but in case you’re not familiar, they are prayers that the Church sings as part of Vespers during the final days of Advent. There are seven of them, with one being assigned to each day from December 17th to December 23rd. Since we’re now in the midst of the O Antiphon stage of Advent, I’ll dedicate this post to the first three of these seven prayers. I’ll give the Latin version, a literally translated English version, and a few explanatory comments to help you use these texts for language study.

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Medieval mysticism was a diverse collection of intense spiritual experiences, but the prototype for these experiences is found above all in one occurrence that comes, fittingly, from Sacred Scripture.

Medieval Christians were serious about understanding their lives through an all-encompassing biblical lens. I don’t want to say that they read and interpreted the Bible with the sort of ruthless literalism that gained popularity in the early modern period; they focused less on each individual Bible verse being true in the literal sense, and more on the entire Bible being true in every sense. The Bible for them was a coherent world of thoughts and stories, of persons and events, of laws and precepts, of prophecies and mysteries. And like the material world, to which they related much more holistically than we do, the biblical world possessed multiple interrelated dimensions of truth and reality.

I might attempt to summarize this with a hypothetical scenario: I sit down with a medieval monk and we read a confusing or difficult passage of Scripture. He offers me varied reflections on the passage, touching on allegorical and moral aspects of the text and maybe commenting on the historical context and writing style. I ponder his words for a time but, being a modern man accustomed to a more dissection-like exegesis, I ask him to expound upon the literal meaning. He says a few things, mostly of a meditative nature, then stops and looks at me, pensively. I’m not satisfied: “But is this literally true?” It’s hard to tell, but it seems that he’s not sure what to say. Eventually he speaks: “My poor modern friend, the truth is One.”

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