Positively Medieval

Another Look at Modern Bigotry

An influential cultural commentator referred to the recent atrocities in the Middle East as “medieval.” Perhaps there is something about beheadings that justifiably evokes imagery of medieval weaponry or practice, but the implicit attribution of barbarity by a secular modern man to the Middle Ages is, at the least, dramatic historical hypocrisy. Deaths, often brutal deaths, have been inflicted in greater numbers by modern secular regimes over one century than by medieval regimes over the course of the many centuries of the Middle Ages combined (yes, that is partially due to population growth). So it should have made just as much sense for the commentator to say “how modern,” or even “how ancient,” but his meaning would have been lost if he had. 

The point is, the thoughtless and automatic singling out of the middle ages for unflattering comparisons signifies the persistence of modernity's most deep-seated bigotry: the fear and hatred of medieval culture. Of course, the use of “medieval” as a synonym for ignorance and barbarity is as old as the word itself, that is to say, it goes back to about the nineteenth century. As others have noted, “medieval” is a modern word for an age oppressed by unquestioned tradition and “modern” is a medieval word for the stupidity of ignoring learned authorities.¹ In our loving adoption of the word, we have apparently decided to take the criticism as a compliment.

This cross-era name calling perhaps points to the root of our contemporary bigotry: something about the middle ages is inherently antithetical to our own age in ways that ancient and earlier modern ages were not, even in their more base and atrocious moments. Ancient cultures are strange to us to be sure, but also mythical and tantalizing. Past centuries of the modern era may contain bloodshed and atrocity, but it is our bloodshed and atrocity, the kind we can understand and about which we can take sides. Medieval atrocities, in contrast, are utterly incomprehensible. Our feeble attempts to classify the Crusades, for example, in terms of the kind of political and territorial disputes that we can understand quickly fall apart, and even the words “political” and “territorial'' find their meanings radically altered in the proper context of the Crusades.

I will not attempt to describe here the exact nature of the anti-thesis found in medieval culture which draws our antagonism, but the bowing of a peasant to the Lord of the Manor and the singing of a Te Deum after victory are signs of it. However, we should be on our guard: when we classified an arbitrary set of centuries as the “middle ages,” we intended to label the vacuum of civilization that existed between the promising civilization of antiquity and the progressive civilization of our own age, but, if we are not careful, we may find instead that we labeled a brief bright spell between two dark ages.

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e.g. Robert Grosseteste c. 1235: “ Haec adduximus contra quosdam modernos, qui nituntur contra ipsum Aristotelem et suos expositores et sacros . . . “ Hexaemeron ed. Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1982), I.viii.4.

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