Welcome to Via Mediaevalis
Modern society has reached a turning point, and the “medieval way” can be a path toward beauty, harmony, and wholeness.
I’ve devoted my adult life to education. I’ve written textbooks and instructional articles and academic essays, worked as a consultant and a private tutor, and taught a variety of subjects to children, teens, college students, and older adults from all over the world. There are times when it feels like we’re facing an educational crisis of epic proportions. Maybe we are. But when I reflect on my long years of experience with the thoughts and questions and struggles of so many people from so many different backgrounds and stages of life, I sense that the issue goes deeper than that. I think what we’re really seeing is a crisis of spirituality.
And when I say “spirituality,” perhaps I simply mean “humanity”—because only human beings build their lives around the belief that existence is much more than the material realm. This conviction clashes with sensory observations; it contradicts the apparent behavior of all other animals; it sometimes produces more confusion than clarity; and yet it is common to all cultures, from all eras. The vast majority of humans throughout history have lived and died insisting that they are both body and spirit, and that the world they inhabit is both physical and spiritual.
A crisis of spirituality, then, is really a crisis of self-understanding. It is a chronic, pervasive disruption in our collective understanding of what it means to be human, and why happiness is so elusive, and how we should answer the unrelenting urge to spiritualize our own nature and the nature of the world around us. And it is not merely an issue of one religion versus another, because all religions are implicated in it, and because no religion teaches that humans should be as spiritless as the beasts of the field.
The word “crisis” is loaded down with negativity these days. Originally it was neutral, denoting an intense turning point that might lead to decline or improvement. The seventeenth-century physician James Hart wrote that patients could, “by the virtue and power of a happy crisis, sail forth into the haven of health.” That’s the sort of crisis I’m talking about. We are, once again, at a turning point in the journey of human history. It’s time to find a new way through the bright meadows, dark forests, and sharp thorns of life.
I grew up with the typical clichés, defamatory legends, and fairy-tale oversimplifications about the Middle Ages. Like many other modern boys, I would have placed knights, castles, magical swords, and Robin Hood in the “good” column; contaminated water, torture chambers, menial labor, and bubonic plague in the “bad” column; and religion somewhere in the middle, since it was a mixture of exotic miracles, jolly monks, bloodthirsty crusaders, and the Inquisition.
As a scholar, however, I had to learn a great deal about the real Middle Ages, and that’s when I began to see that there was something truly extraordinary in this misunderstood and disparaged millennium of European history. I specialize in the literature and culture of early modern England; “early modern” in academic terminology means the transitional period between the Middle Ages and the secular, scientific, industrial societies that we now call “modern.” To better understand early modern culture, I need to study the culture that it emerged from, built upon, and reacted against.
This brought me into a world of medieval art, poetry, drama, festivity, and spirituality that utterly transcended the sarcasm and the stereotypes. What I found in authentic texts and conscientious research was nuanced, and enchanting, and passionate, and sensitive—and profoundly, boldly, beautifully human. My long journey on the medieval way, the via mediaevalis, has been a time of intellectual pleasure and deep thought. It led me to timeless wisdom about the joys, sorrows, fears, and enduring mysteries of the human experience. It taught me to reimagine reality, and to reimagine myself. The via mediaevalis has given to my life a richness and a wholeness that I want to share with others.
I summarize this newsletter as “medieval spirituality for the postmodern world—sharing authentic texts, serious scholarship, and sincere commentary to help us rediscover reality.” This is not a newsletter about “everything medieval.” We’re going to stay focused on the spirituality of real people who lived in western Europe between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. However, this theme is broader and more diverse than it may initially appear, because in the Middle Ages, spirituality was interwoven with just about everything.
Other things this newsletter is not about: defending medieval culture against all of modernity’s accusations, excusing the vileness of its many villains, or pretending that it was a golden age populated primarily by saintly churchmen, chivalrous horsemen, and princesses. No civilization has ever attained anything resembling perfection. The Middle Ages, like Antiquity before them and Modernity after them, were thoroughly afflicted by the selfish and destructive tendencies that have haunted humankind since the beginning of recorded history.
However, in medieval Europe we do see an especially vibrant and harmonious understanding of body and spirit as a united self, of the self as an integral member of the community, and of the community as an integral component of the cosmos. This was a time when societies had their feet firmly planted on the good earth, their hands busy with the task of building a well-ordered commonwealth, and their eyes turned often toward the heavens. And it was a time when people from all walks of life were insightfully seeking—and, in my view, often finding—a path toward human “perfection” in the old sense of the word: fulfillment, completion, wholeness.
Burton Raffel, a well-known professor and poet of the twentieth century, translated some of the greatest works of medieval literature into modern English. Along the way, he seems to have glimpsed the essence of medieval spirituality:
Medieval man did not think he had to invoke God at every step.... Medieval man felt God, saw God everywhere, and had no doubt that He was always and inevitably and justly in the world, seeing and caring for His creatures.