The Meaning of Life, and the Closing of Doors

“There were no other eyes like those in all the world.”

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There were no other eyes like those in all the world. There was only one creature on the earth that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she.
—Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Quarosis, that dread disease of modernity which we discussed in the preceding post, leads us to the question that since time immemorial has perplexed, distressed, even tormented the human race: what is the meaning of life? The Church’s traditional answer—“to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next”—is, given its purpose and context, perfect. But that answer, like even the mightiest and most elegant structures, requires a foundation. And the insatiate flood tide of modernity—humanism, secularism, empiricism, materialism, nihilism—has washed the foundation away.

I mentioned on Sunday that though “no society, no age of the world, is fully immune” to the burden that this question places upon the human psyche, “there is one age that seems to me much more immune than others.” This age (of course) is that Middle and Christian Age which rests, singularly balanced, between the ancient world and the modern world. I cannot offer conclusive documentary proof of this. I cannot produce testimonies from medieval peasants and knights and clerics attesting to their abiding sense of tranquility in the face of visceral doubts about the why and wherefore of human existence. But when you spend as much time studying and pondering medieval culture as I do, you get feelings about things. You have thoughts that seem to well up not from your own mind, but from the deep aquifers of forgotten Christendom. You sense relations and presences and absences that perhaps left no trace in the historical record, because they circulated in the lives of ordinary folk who talked and sang and danced and loved but did not write.

So in lieu of persuasive citations I say simply that I have seen, imaginatively, the rarity of quarosis in medieval life; that I have sensed the irrelevance of the midlife crisis; that I have felt the contentment, or at least the peaceful disinterest, with which medieval Christians—the laboring class especially—regarded the question of life’s ultimate meaning.

However, the source of this contentment is not, perhaps, what one might expect. I do not believe, for example, that it derives primarily from possessing a flawless and convincing answer to the question what is the meaning of life. In fact, I think that it derives in large part from the fact that this question was not commonly asked. And it was not commonly asked because it is, in one important respect, the wrong question.