I think you're on to something with the distinction between the timeless Middle Ages and the "secular" Renaissance. One of the more interesting things about Gregorian Chant is that it does not notate rhythm. The Notre Dame School (around 1200) first introduced rhythmic notation to Western music. In other words, these composers made a deliberate effort to quantify time. Is it a coincidence that almost immediately after this the Renaissance dawned?
As usual, Mr. Iron, your thought-provoking comments are a pleasure to read. The increasing "rhythmicity" of Western music, even within the plainchant tradition, is something I have noted, though my expertise in the early musicological development of Western chant is limited.
The drone in the Roman Chant is exactly what Notre Dame composers used to embellish the plain chant melodies! It's also just like the ison in Byzantine Chant. It's funny how everyone hits upon the same solutions.
Yes, the lack of rhythmic notation - having sung it a lot of Gregorian chant in a schola (not as a professional musician but as someone who loves it and the Mass of the Ages), the rhythm asserts itself naturally. In my experience, Gregorian chant does take you wonderfully and deeply out of time because it becomes prayer.
Agreed, Gregorian chant has a wonderfully timeless quality. I think of it as having a "soft rhythm"—the vocalization of notes follows a system of duration, but without the mechanical rigidity of a clock, and the rhythm emerges in part from the words themselves rather than from an external tempo that is imposed on the words.
Agreed. I think we see the intensity of that experience in the title that Fermor chose for the book he wrote about his monastic experiences: A Time to Keep Silence.
A question for you, Mr Keim: have you ever considered compiling all the Via Mediaevalis posts into a book at some point? There is so much wonderful information so far (I haven’t finished the posts I missed), and all are surprising, enriching, inspiring, and deeply thought~provoking. And also very helpful in sorting out the kinds of things we can learn from our ancestors and are urgently needed to apply in this chaotic, often demonic, modern world. And one more point: all this info you’ve been giving needs to be recorded and kept for the future, lest we forget our incredible patrimony. Just saying…. We will get old (well, I already am!) and die. Many souls will need this kind of information for the future, and electronic data often disappears or becomes hard to find. (I’m the family archivist, so I have a passion for saving information that could be useful in the future, which will be passed on some day.)
What a marvelous comment! It is very meaningful to me that you find this value in my writing, which is the fruit of many years of prayer, study, and labor, and which I see as an educational "ministry" in the service of Truth and Goodness.
Actually yes, I have considered compiling these posts into a book. Electronic data does indeed have a disconcerting tendency to disappear, and everything feels more real in book form. However, creating books like that is a significant amount of work, even when the content is already written, and the harsh reality—at least according to my experience—is that such books sell very few copies. So it's the sort of thing that should be done, but it can be difficult to find the time and motivation to do it.
I totally understand your reservations. You do have a unique take and understanding of the medieval world and it is very clear that you have put a lot of prayerful reflection and study into your posts. They are extremely helpful to my own spiritual life. (See, if you market it with a catchy title like “The Medieval Option”…. I digress.). What I found very easy to do is use a print on demand company to print my 2 family history volumes, as well as help my mother publish her memories of growing up in Central California during WWII. You have no initial outlay except for what personal copies you want, and you can give the URL to interested readers so they go to the site and buy a copy directly from the printer, setting a price that gives the printer a small cut and allowing you to profit according to your preference. (In my case, I didn’t care about profit ~ my readership would be vanishingly small. Just people interested in these family lines.). It’s another way to approach it, but it doesn’t save you time in preparing the book, of course. I know it’s daunting. It took me 10 years to gather, sort, and put all the into into a readable narrative for one of the books. Just wanted to be sure you know how much I appreciate what you’ve so lovingly put into these posts. God bless!
I appreciate the encouragement, and you make good points—there's a fair bit of labor involved, but other than that it's a pretty low-risk and low-initial-investment project. Maybe over the summer I could find some time ... and maybe you could help me find a catchy title!
PS. Once you get to that point, you could mark up the drafts and give direction, and I could get them copy ready for your final proofing, closer to the time of publication. I’m retired and have more time than you do. I’d be happy to do that.
"She mentions how medieval tapestries depicted various stages of the same event, thus “collapsing time into space,”
This goes back further than the medieval tapestries. It's a big feature of iconography to put a bunch of related events into a single picture frame, with the picture frame of an icon being understood to represent a "flash" - a captured moment or set of moments in time. So you'll see something like the Nativity, around the cave with the Virgin and the infant Christ, the dispute of Joseph (with an old man in a fur coat who is actually Satan) over Mary's pregnancy, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds off in the distance, and the impending arrival of the Magi, and even sometimes the Flight into Egypt, all in the same image. But this goes back even further to the Egyptian antecedents to Byzz iconography. It was common in classical Egyptian art to show a lot of different scenes in sequence, like a comic strip, with all sorts of things happening on the side panels. Time for the Egyptians wasn't really a thing either; the annual flooding of the Nile was the absolute rock bottom foundation of existence, so that was a lot more important than a society or an individual's passage through "history".
Interesting connection to the Egyptians (especially the role of the annual flood), that hadn't occurred to me. I learned the term "simultaneous narration" for the iconographic technique that you mentioned; I'm not sure if that's an official term, but it stayed in my head. I'm not an expert in Eastern iconography, but in my experience simultaneous narration is pretty much standard practice for depictions of scenes—is that right? I think that Dr. Rackin found the medieval technique particularly significant because, unlike Eastern iconography, it was part of a culture that immediately preceded Renaissance culture, which quickly became incompatible with or even hostile to cyclical time and historical/artistic timelessness.
Fascinating. I don’t think I had necessarily ever considered specifically this sense of medieval time as expressed in this distinctive element of its visual art, though I do seem to recall C.S. Lewis describing something similar in his introduction to what he called the “Medieval Model” in The Discarded Image.
It reminds me of the Eastern Orthodox distinction of chronos and kairos time, with the latter being the expression of time as experienced in eternity, of which worship (and especially the Divine Liturgy) participates. Given the common origins of both traditions, and the described experience of the monastic life (and while I have not spent much time in monasteries, I have had the experience of attending certain services in the course of the liturgical cycle—especially during Holy Week—and losing the sense of the year in which I am attending that same service) I suspect they are related.
Also, seems to have some similarities to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein, though his was likely only a negative reflection, grasping for a sense of timelessness lost in the dead philosophies of modernity.
Thank you for these reflections. The distinction between chronos and kairos is definitely pertinent here, even in the form that we use in rhetoric and narrative studies, where chronos is sequential time and kairos is episodic, or where chronos is duration and kairos is the mystery of the non-durational, opportune "moment" which can intersect with chronos and thereby bring resolution or fulfillment.
"the dead philosophies of modernity"—that's well said.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s little book! My sister recently introduced me to his A Time to Keep Silence, and now I’ll have to read it.
I haven't thought enough of the medieval / monastic view of time, but this mirrors my experience earlier this year where I spent a week, and then later two weeks at a Benedictine monastery. Time partially--and paradoxically-disappears, and also expands.
I think there is an interesting transformation from the Middle Ages and before to the present in our view of space as well. Compare an early 15th century painting of Florence to a later one as Samuel Edgerton does in The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective and the first, earlier painting is like a religious icon. They depict objects as they would be perceived by all the senses across all of one's experiences of them. The order between objects is hierarchical rather than spatial, and there is no attempt at visual perspective representation. Edgerton's thesis (Marshall McLuhan also argues something similar) is that this was not simply a lack of painting technique but reflected a very real difference in how the medievals perceived and processed reality from the way in which we do, where visual perspective as perceived by one person from one point in space and one point in time is not just a technique that has been perfected in painting and photography, but the way in which we perceive reality. We mostly ignore substance and focus on externals.
An easy experiment to demonstrate this is to walk onto the main street of a midsized city (or any place where you can look at a variety of buildings of different shapes and sizes. Look at them without effort. Then look again, and try to focus on the fact that they are three-dimensional buildings with depth, heft, and substance. The second view, perceiving objects as objects, is not very habitual to us anymore.
Thank you for this very thoughtful comment! Yes, the monastic experience does seem to affect the human perception of time in paradoxical ways, and I agree that the visual qualities of medieval art have a strong connection to their mode of perceiving reality, which may be almost unrecoverable for people like us, whose minds have been powerfully influenced by so many manifestations of modern thought and ideology. I spend a great deal of time looking at medieval art, some of which is quite strange to our eyes, and it is difficult for me to conclude that they represented things in this way simply because they were unable to produce a more "realistic" representation. "Realistic" was different for them because reality was different for them.
Thank you for the reflection on Medieval time and your entire site which I discovered from Dr. Kwasniewski’s recommendation. I’m going to be trying to think/write more about how we can enter different modes of temporality myself. I think these are modes that are habitual, and it is possible yet extremely difficult to change our habits of perception (e.g. engage in a more monastic lifestyle).
Do you have any idea on how to explain how this idea “subjective realism” between reality and experience is not the same as post-modernism? I’ve been seeing ideas floating around that approximate this (Jordan Peterson/Spencer Klavan/Rudyard Lynch/Curt Doolittle/McLuhan/Neil Postman) but I can’t find a clear dividing line between “subjective realism” and a postmodern skepticism or Kantian noumena vs. phenomena.
A full and satisfying answer to that question would require a full and satisfying definition of what "subjective realism" really is, but I think there are three key points to consider:
1. To some extent, the noumena vs. phenomena concept is unavoidable. There is clearly some degree of disjunction between what we perceive and the essential reality of a thing, which I would describe not so much as a Platonic Form/Idea or a Kantian noumenon but as "the thing as God knows it."
2. I would not describe the medieval/monastic experience as "subjective" realism because "subjectivity" (i.e., personal preferences or opinions) was not really involved. They were responding to the world according to how their lifestyle and cultural environment had shaped their minds and souls.
3. Monastic modes of temporality were not "subjective" because they were part of collective experience rather than personal or individual experience. The entire concept of the individual, de-socialized self was weak in the Middle Ages compared to what we see in the modern period. These modes were suggestive more of communal wholeness than of personal subjectivity.
Hello! Which dynamic are you referring to? Are you saying that hagiography (or iconographic depictions with their prototypes and, e.g., non-historical beards) might exhibit this same idea that "all history is present history"?
Well then, yes, I do indeed think that this dynamic plays a role. I wonder what the author of that YouTube video would think about it, since if I recall correctly he didn't really incorporate issues of temporality into his discussion.
When we deliver ourselves to God’s providence, surrendering to His holy will in our life, time ceases to be a threat for us. We no longer worry about the burden of the past, neither are we preoccupied or anxious about the uncertainty of the future, because we know that all things rest in God’s mighty power: past, present and future. Our task is to concentrate on living each present moment before God, leading it into the fullness of His truth, submitting each moment of our life unto His ‘good, acceptable and perfect will.’
-Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou
In Monasticism: The All-Embracing Gift of the Holy Spirit, p. 125.
I have read that book you mention by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Indeed, my late husband lent it to our parish priest (who had a somewhat monkish temperament.) It is rather different from Leigh Fermor's other books.
By the way, did anyone notice the pearls and the cross necklace around Pinturicchio's angel? I've never seen an angel with jewelry, unless I've missed such details in the past.
The necklaces in that painting are part of why I find that angel so uniquely captivating. I don't think I've ever seen an angel depicted with jewelry like that, and you're right, jewelry of that nature seems to be very unusual in late medieval/Renaissance depictions of angels.
Strange coincidence—you were writing this question precisely when I was answering it in the response to Stanton. A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books, 2007, p. 34).
I think you're on to something with the distinction between the timeless Middle Ages and the "secular" Renaissance. One of the more interesting things about Gregorian Chant is that it does not notate rhythm. The Notre Dame School (around 1200) first introduced rhythmic notation to Western music. In other words, these composers made a deliberate effort to quantify time. Is it a coincidence that almost immediately after this the Renaissance dawned?
As usual, Mr. Iron, your thought-provoking comments are a pleasure to read. The increasing "rhythmicity" of Western music, even within the plainchant tradition, is something I have noted, though my expertise in the early musicological development of Western chant is limited.
As an illustrative example, compare the more recent Easter Sunday Introit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS8USaGrwpk) to the Old Roman Chant version as interpreted by Marcel Pérès (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76IGrfTEOM).
The drone in the Roman Chant is exactly what Notre Dame composers used to embellish the plain chant melodies! It's also just like the ison in Byzantine Chant. It's funny how everyone hits upon the same solutions.
Yes, the lack of rhythmic notation - having sung it a lot of Gregorian chant in a schola (not as a professional musician but as someone who loves it and the Mass of the Ages), the rhythm asserts itself naturally. In my experience, Gregorian chant does take you wonderfully and deeply out of time because it becomes prayer.
Agreed, Gregorian chant has a wonderfully timeless quality. I think of it as having a "soft rhythm"—the vocalization of notes follows a system of duration, but without the mechanical rigidity of a clock, and the rhythm emerges in part from the words themselves rather than from an external tempo that is imposed on the words.
I said this in a restock but it’s worth commenting here: To leave time behind has a strong tug on the heart of contemporary man, I think.
Agreed. I think we see the intensity of that experience in the title that Fermor chose for the book he wrote about his monastic experiences: A Time to Keep Silence.
A question for you, Mr Keim: have you ever considered compiling all the Via Mediaevalis posts into a book at some point? There is so much wonderful information so far (I haven’t finished the posts I missed), and all are surprising, enriching, inspiring, and deeply thought~provoking. And also very helpful in sorting out the kinds of things we can learn from our ancestors and are urgently needed to apply in this chaotic, often demonic, modern world. And one more point: all this info you’ve been giving needs to be recorded and kept for the future, lest we forget our incredible patrimony. Just saying…. We will get old (well, I already am!) and die. Many souls will need this kind of information for the future, and electronic data often disappears or becomes hard to find. (I’m the family archivist, so I have a passion for saving information that could be useful in the future, which will be passed on some day.)
What a marvelous comment! It is very meaningful to me that you find this value in my writing, which is the fruit of many years of prayer, study, and labor, and which I see as an educational "ministry" in the service of Truth and Goodness.
Actually yes, I have considered compiling these posts into a book. Electronic data does indeed have a disconcerting tendency to disappear, and everything feels more real in book form. However, creating books like that is a significant amount of work, even when the content is already written, and the harsh reality—at least according to my experience—is that such books sell very few copies. So it's the sort of thing that should be done, but it can be difficult to find the time and motivation to do it.
I totally understand your reservations. You do have a unique take and understanding of the medieval world and it is very clear that you have put a lot of prayerful reflection and study into your posts. They are extremely helpful to my own spiritual life. (See, if you market it with a catchy title like “The Medieval Option”…. I digress.). What I found very easy to do is use a print on demand company to print my 2 family history volumes, as well as help my mother publish her memories of growing up in Central California during WWII. You have no initial outlay except for what personal copies you want, and you can give the URL to interested readers so they go to the site and buy a copy directly from the printer, setting a price that gives the printer a small cut and allowing you to profit according to your preference. (In my case, I didn’t care about profit ~ my readership would be vanishingly small. Just people interested in these family lines.). It’s another way to approach it, but it doesn’t save you time in preparing the book, of course. I know it’s daunting. It took me 10 years to gather, sort, and put all the into into a readable narrative for one of the books. Just wanted to be sure you know how much I appreciate what you’ve so lovingly put into these posts. God bless!
I appreciate the encouragement, and you make good points—there's a fair bit of labor involved, but other than that it's a pretty low-risk and low-initial-investment project. Maybe over the summer I could find some time ... and maybe you could help me find a catchy title!
Ok! I’ll put my thinking cap on and see what comes up…. Thank you for considering. I think your current readers would buy a copy.
PS. Once you get to that point, you could mark up the drafts and give direction, and I could get them copy ready for your final proofing, closer to the time of publication. I’m retired and have more time than you do. I’d be happy to do that.
That's a generous offer, thank you!
We exist in time in the world and outside time in the heart of God to whom everything is NOW. What an amazing mystery!
Well said, Father.
"She mentions how medieval tapestries depicted various stages of the same event, thus “collapsing time into space,”
This goes back further than the medieval tapestries. It's a big feature of iconography to put a bunch of related events into a single picture frame, with the picture frame of an icon being understood to represent a "flash" - a captured moment or set of moments in time. So you'll see something like the Nativity, around the cave with the Virgin and the infant Christ, the dispute of Joseph (with an old man in a fur coat who is actually Satan) over Mary's pregnancy, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds off in the distance, and the impending arrival of the Magi, and even sometimes the Flight into Egypt, all in the same image. But this goes back even further to the Egyptian antecedents to Byzz iconography. It was common in classical Egyptian art to show a lot of different scenes in sequence, like a comic strip, with all sorts of things happening on the side panels. Time for the Egyptians wasn't really a thing either; the annual flooding of the Nile was the absolute rock bottom foundation of existence, so that was a lot more important than a society or an individual's passage through "history".
Interesting connection to the Egyptians (especially the role of the annual flood), that hadn't occurred to me. I learned the term "simultaneous narration" for the iconographic technique that you mentioned; I'm not sure if that's an official term, but it stayed in my head. I'm not an expert in Eastern iconography, but in my experience simultaneous narration is pretty much standard practice for depictions of scenes—is that right? I think that Dr. Rackin found the medieval technique particularly significant because, unlike Eastern iconography, it was part of a culture that immediately preceded Renaissance culture, which quickly became incompatible with or even hostile to cyclical time and historical/artistic timelessness.
Fascinating. I don’t think I had necessarily ever considered specifically this sense of medieval time as expressed in this distinctive element of its visual art, though I do seem to recall C.S. Lewis describing something similar in his introduction to what he called the “Medieval Model” in The Discarded Image.
It reminds me of the Eastern Orthodox distinction of chronos and kairos time, with the latter being the expression of time as experienced in eternity, of which worship (and especially the Divine Liturgy) participates. Given the common origins of both traditions, and the described experience of the monastic life (and while I have not spent much time in monasteries, I have had the experience of attending certain services in the course of the liturgical cycle—especially during Holy Week—and losing the sense of the year in which I am attending that same service) I suspect they are related.
Also, seems to have some similarities to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein, though his was likely only a negative reflection, grasping for a sense of timelessness lost in the dead philosophies of modernity.
Thank you for these reflections. The distinction between chronos and kairos is definitely pertinent here, even in the form that we use in rhetoric and narrative studies, where chronos is sequential time and kairos is episodic, or where chronos is duration and kairos is the mystery of the non-durational, opportune "moment" which can intersect with chronos and thereby bring resolution or fulfillment.
"the dead philosophies of modernity"—that's well said.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s little book! My sister recently introduced me to his A Time to Keep Silence, and now I’ll have to read it.
I highly recommend it.
I haven't thought enough of the medieval / monastic view of time, but this mirrors my experience earlier this year where I spent a week, and then later two weeks at a Benedictine monastery. Time partially--and paradoxically-disappears, and also expands.
I think there is an interesting transformation from the Middle Ages and before to the present in our view of space as well. Compare an early 15th century painting of Florence to a later one as Samuel Edgerton does in The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective and the first, earlier painting is like a religious icon. They depict objects as they would be perceived by all the senses across all of one's experiences of them. The order between objects is hierarchical rather than spatial, and there is no attempt at visual perspective representation. Edgerton's thesis (Marshall McLuhan also argues something similar) is that this was not simply a lack of painting technique but reflected a very real difference in how the medievals perceived and processed reality from the way in which we do, where visual perspective as perceived by one person from one point in space and one point in time is not just a technique that has been perfected in painting and photography, but the way in which we perceive reality. We mostly ignore substance and focus on externals.
An easy experiment to demonstrate this is to walk onto the main street of a midsized city (or any place where you can look at a variety of buildings of different shapes and sizes. Look at them without effort. Then look again, and try to focus on the fact that they are three-dimensional buildings with depth, heft, and substance. The second view, perceiving objects as objects, is not very habitual to us anymore.
Thank you for this very thoughtful comment! Yes, the monastic experience does seem to affect the human perception of time in paradoxical ways, and I agree that the visual qualities of medieval art have a strong connection to their mode of perceiving reality, which may be almost unrecoverable for people like us, whose minds have been powerfully influenced by so many manifestations of modern thought and ideology. I spend a great deal of time looking at medieval art, some of which is quite strange to our eyes, and it is difficult for me to conclude that they represented things in this way simply because they were unable to produce a more "realistic" representation. "Realistic" was different for them because reality was different for them.
Thank you for the reflection on Medieval time and your entire site which I discovered from Dr. Kwasniewski’s recommendation. I’m going to be trying to think/write more about how we can enter different modes of temporality myself. I think these are modes that are habitual, and it is possible yet extremely difficult to change our habits of perception (e.g. engage in a more monastic lifestyle).
Do you have any idea on how to explain how this idea “subjective realism” between reality and experience is not the same as post-modernism? I’ve been seeing ideas floating around that approximate this (Jordan Peterson/Spencer Klavan/Rudyard Lynch/Curt Doolittle/McLuhan/Neil Postman) but I can’t find a clear dividing line between “subjective realism” and a postmodern skepticism or Kantian noumena vs. phenomena.
A full and satisfying answer to that question would require a full and satisfying definition of what "subjective realism" really is, but I think there are three key points to consider:
1. To some extent, the noumena vs. phenomena concept is unavoidable. There is clearly some degree of disjunction between what we perceive and the essential reality of a thing, which I would describe not so much as a Platonic Form/Idea or a Kantian noumenon but as "the thing as God knows it."
2. I would not describe the medieval/monastic experience as "subjective" realism because "subjectivity" (i.e., personal preferences or opinions) was not really involved. They were responding to the world according to how their lifestyle and cultural environment had shaped their minds and souls.
3. Monastic modes of temporality were not "subjective" because they were part of collective experience rather than personal or individual experience. The entire concept of the individual, de-socialized self was weak in the Middle Ages compared to what we see in the modern period. These modes were suggestive more of communal wholeness than of personal subjectivity.
I forgot to say: freely given. If you get to that point, just email me (I assume you have it my address).
This reminds a bit of this video here: https://youtu.be/zj7TmpF7aGw?si=6dG7gAdNmLqiFLVe
My curiosity is piqued a bit— do you think a similar dynamic could be at work in the writing of saints lives?
Hello! Which dynamic are you referring to? Are you saying that hagiography (or iconographic depictions with their prototypes and, e.g., non-historical beards) might exhibit this same idea that "all history is present history"?
Yes, exactly!
Well then, yes, I do indeed think that this dynamic plays a role. I wonder what the author of that YouTube video would think about it, since if I recall correctly he didn't really incorporate issues of temporality into his discussion.
When we deliver ourselves to God’s providence, surrendering to His holy will in our life, time ceases to be a threat for us. We no longer worry about the burden of the past, neither are we preoccupied or anxious about the uncertainty of the future, because we know that all things rest in God’s mighty power: past, present and future. Our task is to concentrate on living each present moment before God, leading it into the fullness of His truth, submitting each moment of our life unto His ‘good, acceptable and perfect will.’
-Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou
In Monasticism: The All-Embracing Gift of the Holy Spirit, p. 125.
Thank you for this lovely contribution, Esmée.
Fascinating! Wow.
I have read that book you mention by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Indeed, my late husband lent it to our parish priest (who had a somewhat monkish temperament.) It is rather different from Leigh Fermor's other books.
It's a wonderful book, and definitely different from his famous travelogue A Time of Gifts, which I am not inclined to recommend.
By the way, did anyone notice the pearls and the cross necklace around Pinturicchio's angel? I've never seen an angel with jewelry, unless I've missed such details in the past.
The necklaces in that painting are part of why I find that angel so uniquely captivating. I don't think I've ever seen an angel depicted with jewelry like that, and you're right, jewelry of that nature seems to be very unusual in late medieval/Renaissance depictions of angels.
Yes, it stopped me in my tracks. I bet there’s a story behind that that we will never know.
Very insightful and thought-provoking. Thank you!
Fascinating stuff, as always.
In which of his books did Patrick Leigh Fermor write about the French monasteries?
Strange coincidence—you were writing this question precisely when I was answering it in the response to Stanton. A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books, 2007, p. 34).
I mean that p. 34 is where the "I found that days..." quote can be found. The entire book is about his experiences in monasteries.