Balance

Three estates, four humors, monastic schedules ... and Icarus: finding the via media in the via mediaevalis.

The title of this newsletter, Via Mediaevalis, is Latin for “the medieval way,” where Latin via, like English “way,” evokes the physical tracks and trails on which we travel and, more importantly, their figurative extensions: “method (of action),” “mode (of thought),” “path (to personal wholeness),” “journey (to fullness of life).”

However, the title is also a play on words: embedded within via mediaevalis is the term via media, a Latin phrase that has been naturalized and now appears in English dictionaries: “a middle way; an intermediate state; a compromise between extremes.” And it turns out that the via media—the way of balance—is essential to the via mediaevalis.

A pilgrim chooses his path. France, fourteenth century.

There is actually some linguistic and historical irony here. The word “medieval” is simply an English rendition of Latin medium aevum, which literally means “middle era.” That’s why the phrase “via media” (middle way) forms part of “via mediaevalis” (middle era). Dating only to the early nineteenth century, “medieval” was an inherently disparaging term—it’s as if the medieval world is best understood as all that stuff between the noble Greco-Roman world and the enlightened modern world.

The irony is that the medieval period was “middle,” but in the best—and for modern folks, most desperately needed—sense of the word: the “via media” sense. Much more than a one-thousand-year bridge between Antiquity and Modernity, medieval civilization had a special affinity for and dedication to balance—in the mind, in the body, in the community, and in the cosmos.

I touched on the theme of balance in previous essays on cosmology, music, and religious politics. Honestly, the theme is difficult to avoid, because it arises naturally from careful reflection on many medieval topics. Balance was integral to labor, thought, art, and belief in the Middle Ages, which inherited this grand aspiration for balance—suggesting stability, cyclicality, equilibrium, moderation, symmetry—from the classical world. It grew into something new and wondrous, nourished by the Christian ideals and rich spirituality of medieval culture.

The classical attitude is summarized by the phrase in medio stat virtus: “virtue is in the middle,” which is a way of saying, in the characteristically dense style of Latin maxims, that you’ll find the good thing or the right path somewhere between two extremes. The idea is found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Horace, and in memorable passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Ride too high, you will scorch the heavens,
too low, and you scorch the earth:
the middle way is safest.¹

I warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way:
the dampness will weigh down your wings, if you dip too low;
the sun with fire and flame will burn them, if you soar too high.
Fly between the extremes.²

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This is the image that I chose for the frontispiece of the Via Mediaevalis website:

It depicts the “three estates,” that is, medieval society’s self-understanding as a hierarchical yet interdependent community of nobles who govern and fight, clerics who pray and teach, and peasants who work the land. The threefold structure embraces basic physical and spiritual realities: A triangular frame, with three sides, is stable and strong, as a kingdom should be. The Deity, as three Persons in One, has both distinction and unity, just as the members of a commonwealth must be both distinct and united. The tripartite universe, divided into Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso like Dante’s Commedia, is complete, just as the body politic, if it is to flourish, must be complete.

Notice how the figures in the illustration are turned toward one another: the knight in the center looks directly at the cleric, who looks simultaneously back at him and over to the peasant, who in turn completes the circle by looking at the knight. Order and balance: each has his estate—his own purpose and position in the grand edifice of civilization—and none of the three can survive without the others.

The Trinity and a triangle; France, early sixteenth century.

Real life tends to stray from idealistic models like this, but even as an ideal, it’s a compelling vision of sociopolitical life: humanity’s fundamental needs are divided among the three estates with the elegance and symmetry of fine artwork. Peasants have authority over the natural realm, meaning the minerals, plants, and animals that supply man’s food, medicine, clothing, and shelter; nobles have authority over the temporal realm of war, law, and governance; and priests have authority over the spiritual realm, which weaves humankind into the unseen world of angels, demons, divine truths, and eternal destinies.

Balance in medieval culture is like meter in an epic poem: sometimes prominent, sometimes forgotten amidst the tragedies and triumphs, but always present. It was the keynote of Romanesque architecture, the leitmotif of agricultural cycles, and the underlying beauty of the cardinal virtue called temperance, which as Thomas Aquinas says, “consists in a certain moderate and fitting proportion, and this is what we understand by beauty.”³

A personification of temperance; Italy, fifteenth century.

The key to health in the Middle Ages was achieving and maintaining balance among the four bodily fluids known as “humors”—phlegm, blood, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The humors regulated physiological and mental states, and they blended with the material elements, the seasons, the times of day, the signs of the zodiac, and the phases of the moon in a mysterious, cosmological mosaic of human well-being.

In this fifteenth-century diagram, the four humors emerge from man (who is encircled by the earth) and are directly connected to the four seasons, indirectly associated with the planets (including the sun and the moon), and surrounded by the four classical elements.

A final example: Monasticism, by which medieval society expressed its deepest yearnings for a rhythmical and harmonious life, divided the day into an equilibrium of labor (which included study) and prayer:

The ideal was ... to so live in unceasing labor and prayer that the whole of life was one, never ceasing to work while one prayed, never ceasing to pray while one worked.⁴

Labor, study, prayer: the medieval response to the needs of the body, the mind, and the soul, which thrive when thus balanced and lead the unified self to wholeness and perhaps even to holiness. “Whole” and “holy” sound alike because they are alike—trace them back far enough and they converge in Old English hal: whole, undivided, complete.

1. “Altius egressus caelestia tecta cremabis, / inferius terras: medio tutissimus ibis” (Book 2, lines 136–7).

2. “Instruit et natum ‘medio’ que ‘ut limite curras, / Icare,’ ait ‘moneo, ne, si demissior ibis, / unda gravet pennas, si celsior, ignis adurat. / Inter utrumque vola’” (Book 8, lines 203–6).

3. Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q141, A2.

4. Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West. Liturgical Press, 1986, p. 69.