The Light & the Dark: Volume XXX - DISPRIVILIGED GROUPS
Chapter III - THE DESTRUCTION OF UNITY
Part 2 - THE MIDDLE AGES AND THEIR SURVIVAL
1. Medieval unity
The medieval world had a common leadership, a kind of
condominium, exercized by Pope and emperor, sometimes compared to the sun and
the moon. The emperor was the liege lord of all European rulers. I know very
well that this was largely theory, but it was an expression of a nominally
acknowledged political unity. It also true that the relationship of Pope and
emperor did not always work out as it should, but this too was an expression of
nominally acknowledged spiritual unity.
The thirteenth century was the apogee of the
Middle Ages. It was the age of the great Gothic cathedrals, the highrise
buildings of the time; they do not proclaim the triumph of technology and
capitalism, as their modern counterparts do, but the flight of the soul to God.
It was also the century of the foundation of two great and influential monastic
Orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans.
It was the age of High Scholasticism, of the
great philosophers and theologians, who built an harmonious and unified system
of thought in which Creator and creation, God and man, faith and reason,
theology and philosophy, met another. This found its most perfect expression in
the thought of St.Thomas Aquinas, especially in the concept of the analogia
entis, the analogy of being, the concept that says that creation, and above
all man, wears the seal of the Creator. Finally, shortly after 1300 Dante
composed his own summa, a summa poetica, in his Divina
Commedia. There was a short period, between 1250 and 1275, when all dualism
seemed to have disappeared from the intellectual scene. It was not to last.
2. An icon of the unity
Medieval society may be characterized as sacral,
hierarchical and rhytmical. These key elements guaranteed a society that was as
stable and harmonious as human societies can be. Earth is not heaven, where
all, as Thomas More said, is `sure and uniform'. No human society is integrally
sure and uniform.
What medieval society was like, especially
in its most prominent aspect, its sacrality, was graphically expressed by the
Flemish artists Jan and Hubert van Eyck in their incomparably beautiful
painting The Wedding of the Lamb, on show in a side chapel of St.Baafs
cathedral in Ghendt. "Happy are those who are invited to the wedding of
the Lamb" (Rev.19:9). The lamb is the symbol of the sacrificed Christ. The
painting depicts a large, slightly undulating plain; on a low hill stands an
altar and on this a lamb, tamquam occisus (Rev.5:6).
From far and near people come to adore it,
the whole medieval society, people of all ranks, young and old, men and women,
emperors amd kings, all the nobles from high to low and the knights, the Popes,
the cardinals, the bishops, the priests, monks and religious sisters of all
Orders, the guilds, the artisans, the farmers rich and poor, even the kings and
prophets of Israel, and yes, also Adam and Eve. This picture of harmony and
peace was painted in the first decades of the fifteenth century, when there
were already many signs of destabilization and dissolution, but the fabric was
still mainly intact.
3. The substream
Yet, speaking of medieval unity, we must not throw dust
in our eyes. There is a snake in the grass, and the name of this snake is the
Gnosis. If anything deserves a place in this series on dualism, it is the
Gnosis; I gave it an extensive treatment in the volumes VII, VIII and IX. The
Gnosis is characterized by a double dualism, one between the upper world, the
Pleroma, and the sublunar world, our world, the world of human history. Between
these two realms there is an abyss that can only be crossed by those - the
happy few - who possess the saving Knowledge. The other dualism is that between
those who `know' and the massa damnata, who does not.
The Gnosis flourished during the first
centuries AD. Confronted with the monolithic Catholic Church, it finally had
the worst of it, firstly, because it was not a unified movement, but a
conglomerate of some three hundred sects, some large, most small, and secondly
because of its pessimistic view of humanity, that appealed only to a minority.
The Gnosis did not die out, but went
underground. More than once I stressed that under the imposing fabric of the
medieval Church and medieval society a substream was running, the main element
of which was the Gnosis. It surfaced again during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries in the shape of Catharism, that displayed the same dualistic
characteristics. The Albigensian War (1208-1229) made an end of Catharism as a public
phenomenon, but it continued to exist as an element of the substream. Gnostic
elements are easily detectable in the doctrines of the Reformers.
People love to say that there are a great
many religions. Superficially this seems to be true. I pass over in astonished
silence the contention that all religions are really the same. Actually, there
are two main religions: on one side Judaism/Roman Catholicism, on the other the
Gnosis; they are utterly and fundamentally opposed. The first mentioned are the
only religions that are entirely free of Gnostic-dualistic elements. I remark
in passing that there is not such a thing as a `Christian Gnosis'. This is a
hybrid form that does not do justice to the Gnosis, a phenomenon in itself, not
tainted by Christian elements. In between the two main religions we find all
other religions; every one of them carries within itself some or many
Gnostic-dualistic elements.
4. The Church in rough weather
The dualism returned already soon after 1300 with the
advent of nominalism, the main thesis of which is that there is an unbridgeable
gap between name - nomen - and the thing the name is supposed to denote.
We may say `God', but we do not know what this means. For a long time this way
of thinking remained restricted to highbrow circles; it did not affect the
great mass of the faithful.
What did affect them indeed was the ever
growing criticism of the Church, of the monastic orders, of the clergy in
general, of their wealth and power, of their obscurantism and ignorance - a criticim
that sometimes led to the rejection of the institution as such. The Church
drifted evermore into rough weather, what with the Babylonian Captivity of the
Popes in Avignon, the Great Western Schism, and the Renaissance Popes. It lost
much of its prestige; anticlericalism rapidly gained ground; anti-Church
movements, like, for instance, the Hussites in Bohemia, originated. All this
made that the Church of ca. 1500 was not in the best condition to withstand the
shock to which it would soon be exposed.
5. A surviving past
Earlier in this work I wrote that during the early
modern age two revolutions occurred, two great upheavals: the Reformation and
the Enlightenment. Both had immense consequences, but were very different in
nature and affected different groups of people. It should, however, be stated
that, great as the changes might be, the Middle Ages, as some argued, for
instance Peter Lasslet in his The world we have lost (London, 1965),
lasted until the French Revolution, and let me add, perhaps even longer.
It is not only so that many medieval customs
and habits and ways of doing things did in 1800 not significantly differ from
what they had been in 1500. It is also true that the medieval core ethos
survived both revolutions. In 1983 the American author Robert K. Wallace
published a remarkable book about Jane Austen and Mozart; the subtitle
points to what his main thesis is: Classical Equilibrium in Fiction and
Music (The University of Georgia Press, Athens (Georgia) (1983)).
The title does not suggest that Jane Austen,
the novelist (1775-1817), and Mozart, the composer (1756-1791), had some sort
of relation with one another. We may be sure that Mozart had never heard of
Jane Austen. But was the novelist acquaintd with Mozartiana? She never mentions
his name (nor that of Beethoven). However, she played the piano; it is,
therefore, not impossible that Mozart came her way. But it is not very
probable, and it is also not important. It is not the author's intention to
prove that there was a kind of subconscious understanding between these two
people.
Wallace is by far not the only one to
compare Austen to Mozart. One author said that Austen's novels have a
`Mozartean perfection', another that she is `rather like Mozart, without the
Requiem', and still others compare her novels to Mozart's operas.[i] What in any case unites them is
their humanity. All their characters are a mixture of good and bad, very human
therefore - the one exception perhaps being Don Giovanni, who is an
archvillain. Think of the womanizer count Almaviva who, although living in a
glasshouse, suspects his wife of unfaithfulness. At the end he kneels down
before her and asks forgiveness from her: perdono contessa - contessa
perdono. It is perfectly Christian, just as Austen's novels are perfectly
Christian, without them being apologetic in any sense. "The works of
each", writes Wallace, "reveal an unexampled mastery of symmetry,
balance, clarity, and restraint - even within their own classical and
neoclassical traditions - ... Each is often held up as the purest exemplar of
the classical equilibrium that was soon to give way to Romantic subjectivity,
vehemence and fragmentation."[ii] It is true tht Austen, living in the small village of
Waxton near Winchester, hardly ever alludes to the gigantic events of the day,
to the Napoleonic wars; nor can we distil from Mozart's works that he realized
what was going on, the first stage of the French Revolution. Yet, they were not
blind to the signs of the times; both had an inkling of what was coming. In Austen's
Mansfield Park (1814) `Mansfield' is a stately mansion, situated in a
large park; a drive of a mile long, lined with trees, connects it with the
highway. When it comes up for sale, some contractors arrive who take stock of
it. They conclude that a much shorter drive from the back side has to be built,
and the trees must be felled. This is a mentality we have become acquainted
with only too well. In Mozart's Cosė fan tutte (1786) the servant girl
Despina, having made chocolate for her mistresses, tastes it, saying
mischievously: "All that is yours is also mine." This too is a
pointer to the future. Yet, what Austen's novels and Mozart's compositions
prove to us is that the heritage of the Middle Ages, the fundamental harmony
and cohesion, still existed at the end of the eighteenth century.
I am prepared to go even further and contend that the
Middle Ages continued to exist until far in the twentieth century. I had ample
opportunity to note this, when I was, during the German occupation of the
Netherlands, hiding from the Nazis with a peasant family in 1943/1944. Their
farm was situated in the middle of the province of North Brabant, at an half
hour's walk from a small village; it stood on a sandy road, at the edge of deep
woods. It had no electricity, no gas, no streaming water. Water came from the
pump in the kitchen; lighting was done with paraffin lamps, while the cooking
stove was stoked with wood. We lived mainly in the kitchen. There was no radio
or telephone; the family had no car. There were no facilities for bathing or
taking a shower. It was all very primitive and uncomfortable, but I was young
and made no problem of it.
We went to bed at nine o'clock and got up very early. We
lived without a clock, on the rythm of the seasons - ploughing, sowing,
harvesting - and on that of the ecclesiastical year. The family was solidly
Roman Catholic and had only the faintest idea of what Protestantism might be.
None of them had more than primary school; they could read and write, but there
were no books in the house, also not a Bible. Their knowledge of the world was
very restricted; their view did not reach farther than the nearest market town,
where they rarely came; going there made them nervous. We were in the middle of
World War II, but there were no maps; they had no idea at all of what happened
at the fronts.
The family was largely self-supporting, at least with
regard to food. They all spoke the local dialect; they were unable to express
themselves in Received Standard Dutch. Please, do not think that I am deriding
or belittling them. That is very far from me! They were very nice people, not
stupid at all, whom I loved very much. What I mean to say is that I was
overnight transferred to the Middle Ages.
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