A Day, a Year, a Life...

Inside the Middle Ages, and outside of time

Consider the following illumination from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript:

The people depicted here are the Maccabees, a group of Jewish insurgents who gained control of Judea at a time when it was ruled by foreigners. In the Middle Ages, the Maccabees were seen as symbolic forerunners of the Crusaders, who also fought to gain control of Judea, which had become a sacred place for Christians as well. The problem is that the Maccabees, despite being Middle Eastern warriors who lived in the second century BC, look very much like European knights of the fourteenth century AD.

And then we have this, painted about a hundred years later:

The artist is showing us Alexander the Great fighting against Darius III. That happened in the fourth century BC. Once again, the battle looks strangely medieval.

While we’re talking about Alexander the Great, let’s have a look at his teacher, Aristotle:

He is sitting on a medieval throne wearing medieval attire, and those books on the shelves look much more like medieval codices than Hellenic scrolls.

Let’s try a female historical figure, to see if we can find a representation that’s a bit more realistic:

No luck. That delightfully medieval queen is actually Queen Hecuba, wife of King Priam, the man who ruled Troy during the Trojan War.

Let’s look at one more example, my favorite thus far:

The scene in question is the dedication of the Temple built by King Solomon, circa 950 BC. The Jewish high priest is a Christian bishop, his Jewish assistants are tonsured Christian clerics, and the Jewish Temple is a Romanesque church.

It would be easy to make light of the way that medieval artists transpose all the people and events of the past into the culture of their own era. We could dismiss it as ignorance, or self-importance, or even cultural appropriation, and perhaps those things did play a part. But I propose that there’s something far more significant going on here. What we really see in these images is the “eternalization” of human history. In other words, what we see is the absence of time.

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve discussed poetic time, linear time, cyclical time, and medieval time, which combines all three. The phenomenon we’re studying today is still medieval, but we can’t call it medieval time, because the whole point is that in medieval culture, time had a strange tendency to dissolve into something resembling eternity. The topic today is non-time.

The distinguished literary scholar Phyllis Rackin made a remarkable statement in one of her books:

[A] major innovation in English Renaissance historiography, also introduced from Italy, was awareness of anachronism…. This new conception of temporality was implicated … in the movement from a vision centered on the timeless province of God to the humanistic consciousness that assigned new importance to the transitory material life of this world…. The Renaissance experience of secularization was, quite literally, a movement into time.¹

If society was moving into time as Renaissance culture developed, we must conclude that the culture of the preceding epoch—that is, of the Middle Ages—was somehow outside of time. And that is precisely what Dr. Rackin goes on to discuss, giving examples similar to the illustrations above.

She mentions how medieval tapestries depicted various stages of the same event, thus “collapsing time into space,” and how medieval chroniclers and translators wrote about the past as though “all history is present history”: Alexander the Great—as we saw above, in visual form—was a knight; Virgil was a “clerke,” i.e., a medieval scholar; the female followers of the Greek god Dionysus were the “nuns of Bacchus”; and so forth.

She also points out that medieval paintings paired biblical figures with medieval patrons, as if they lived in the same era. This practice continued into the Renaissance, but Renaissance artists started using light in a way that reduced the sense of timelessness. The timeless illumination in medieval style contributes to the deep sense of peace that people feel, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, when looking at the calendrical artwork that I include in The Medieval Year; for example:

We also find wonderful examples of this in works that I recently encountered in an article by Hilary White. The artist was Pinturicchio, an Italian included in the “Renaissance” category but whose style shines with the artistic wisdom of the Middle Ages. Hilary explains that

the use of light in Pinturicchio’s paintings reflects an older, more symbolic understanding of illumination, which aligns with the Byzantine concept of a sacred world bathed in divine light, where shadows hold less significance. Pinturicchio’s approach to light is less about the play of light and shadow and more about creating a sense of clarity, purity, and spiritual radiance.

Again, we could ascribe this to mere ignorance or inability or indifference, but why? Many medieval writers and artists were men of prodigious intelligence and skill who cared deeply about the events of the Old Testament, the culture of ancient Rome, the great saints of earlier centuries, the beauties of nature and of the human form, the history of their own people, and anything else that the past and the material world can teach mankind about living a good life and dying a happy death.

Rackin offers a better and more nuanced explanation. Medieval communities tended to view the world through the everlasting and unchanging lens of divine love: the “changing pageant of earthly human life” appeared somewhat illusory, because it was “seen from a perspective that transcends time.” The question is no longer one of cyclical time vs. linear time. The question is time itself, and how much it really mattered in a culture that sought the eternal God in the heavens, and felt His eternal power on earth, and welcomed Him into their homes, and wrote of Him in their books, and worshipped Him in their villages, and gazed upon Him—now truly, physically, fully present—in the outward form of wheaten bread, which became divine Flesh but began as the fruit of their own fields, and the work of their own hands.

This discussion of time began in a medieval monastery, and that’s also where it will end.

Those who entered a monastery in the Middle Ages were expected to relinquere saeculum. We still speak this way when someone responds to a monastic vocation, but the expression I hear in English contexts is “forsake the world.” The primary meaning of saeculum is temporal, not spatial—it referred originally to a lifetime, a generation, an “age” of man or of the world, rather than the world itself. The meaning of relinquere saeculum in medieval cultural was, at least in part, something more mysterious and profound than leaving the world behind: monks and nuns left time itself behind. The endless series of slowly chanted prayers, the soft and steady rhythm of daily labors and rituals, the blurred distinction between night and day, the renunciation of the body with its fleeting pleasures and surges of desire, the pursuit of silence instead of speech, the meditative immersion in spiritual and heavenly realities, the serene acceptance of aging and death—these things imparted a profoundly timeless quality to monastic life.

And perhaps most remarkably, this timelessness is itself almost timeless, so long as the authentic traditions of Western monasticism are respected and practiced. For it was still present in the twentieth century, when medieval Europe was a distant memory, and when a secular British writer named Patrick Leigh Fermor visited three of France’s most venerable medieval monasteries and lived for a while among the monks. In so doing he discovered, perhaps against his will, the spiritual power of monastic peace, and the enduring mystery of monastic time:

I found that days, and soon weeks, were passing almost unperceived. The speed of this temporal lapse is a phenomenon that every monk notices: six months, a year, fifteen years, a lifetime, are soon over; and … the only regret I heard was that they had delayed so long in the world before coming to the Abbey.

1. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Cornell University Press (1990), pp. 8–9.