Valorizations of the Middles Ages - Mircea Eliade, 1936
Article about the different interpretations given to the Middle Ages in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century.
Think back at how people from the 18th and 19th century used to judge, and particularly, what they used to see in the Middle Ages: horror and darkness (18th century) and Gothic art (19th century). The entirety of the 18th century is dominated by the English roman noir (black novel) and by Voltairean polemics against monasticism and Christian values. The books that enjoyed the most overwhelming and enduring success in the 18th century were those which had as their main character a vile monk and the action of which was set in the Dark Ages. It is only recently that literary historians have started researching the influence that novels like The Monk (1795) by M.G.Lewis and The Italian (1797) or The Confessional of the Black Penitent (1797) by Anna Radcliffe had on the entirety of 19th century European literature. Hoffman, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, George Sand, etc – all of them wrote under the influence of these black novels, with their tenebrous monasteries, with their vile monks, with their innocent maidens fallen victim to monastic sadism, with their endless crimes and horrors. For a curious redear, I can recommend an admirably documented monography about these novels that were frenetically anti-Catholic and, in their spirit, profoundly anti-medieval: La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica [published in English as The Romantic Agony] (Milano-Roma, 1931) by Mario Praz. The passion with which these novels were read can only be matched by the frenzy of anti-medieval and anti-Catholic polemics carried out by Voltaire a generation earlier. The Middle Ages, for the spirit of the 18th century, came down to horror, turpitude, lugubrious landscapes, crime, and sadism. A true “Dark Age”…
The 19th century Romantics discovered the Gothic art of the Middle Ages. The Romantic sensibility valorised medieval ideals and life because they discovered Gothic art; they discovered the ruins of castles, the shadows of cathedrals, the paintings of monasteries. It is only after this visual spell that Romanticism started finding something of its own ideals in the Middle Ages: simplicity of life, erotic pathos, “authenticity”, “originary phenomenon”, etc. However, it is easy to see that even this sympathetic valorisation of the Middle Ages done by Romanticism carries negative and polemical attitudes left over from the 18th century. What is kept is first of all “the pathos”, “the weird”, “the lugubrious” that comes from the novels of Lewis and Radcliffe. In a latent fashion, the critical attitude of Voltaire towards Scholasticism remains unchanged in Romanticism. Medieval mysticism, “diabolism” and medieval “magic” is a discovery of Romanticism – but St. Thomas and scholasticism in general remained just as undigestible to the Romantics as they were for the Enlightened encyclopaedists. Thomism is a recent discovery. The “Summa Theologica” has been put back into circulation in Catholic seminaries only in the second half of the 19th century (until then, what was primarily studied were Thomistic commentaries and summaries). And the “relevance” of the Summa in European culture is owed mostly to Maritain and Grabmann; meaning, to the last two decades of European culture.
Giotto was discovered by the Romantics, and the same is true for the poetry of the Troubadours. But the Divine Comedy and Franciscanism – two great peaks of Medieval culture – have remained un-fructified, one could even say un-assimilated by the Romantics. Dante was too much of a theologian, too “symbolic”, and had a profundity that Romanticism disliked: dogmatic profundity. There is too much “fortitude” in Dante. Beatrice is too like theological virtues; she has almost no biography. The Romanticism that exalted Abelard and Heloisa (pathic existences) and Petrarch’s Laura (a river of tears) – has respectfully passed over Beatrice. Saint Francis was “discovered” by Protestantism (Reuss, Sabatier) and sentimental laity (Renan) in the second half of the 19th century. For the Romantics, St. Francis was too simple and his pathos too little biographical. There are no tragic happenings in the life of Saint Francisc. That’s why when the Romantics wanted to find thrilling emotions and frenetic “mystical lives”, they did so in other parts of Christianity. They discovered Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Nostradamus. The generations that preceded the Romantics during the Age of Enlightenment had even more impure tastes. Cagliostro, Martinism, “Magnetism”, Rosicrucianism and other degraded mysteries were the spiritual nutrients of the elites leading up to, and contemporary to the French revolution. The 18th century relished The Monk by Lewis because this novel described Catholic monasticism as a real fountain of horror – but at the same time, the “Age of Enlightenment” was deep-diving into an ocean of pseudo-mysteries and embarrassingly mediocre mystagogy. I’ve written a small article some time ago (“The Enlightenment” of the 18th century) trying to hurriedly commentate “Les sources occultes du romantisme” by Auguste Viatte (Paris, 1928), and there is no point in repeating what I said there. I’ve shown in endless paragraphs and with all kinds of examples that mystagogy and pseudo-occultism triumphed in an age that attacked mysticism and metaphysics ruthlessly. When you stop believing in mysteries, you start believing in Mesmerism and Freemasonry; one who stops believing in Paradise starts believing in spiritism…
How different is our century’s conception of the Middle Ages compared to the valorisation given to it by the 18th and 19th centuries! Here I am referring to thinkers that are still alive and who’ve published in the last 20 years. Our age sees something totally different in the Middle Ages. First of all, it’s starting to see and understand the symbol (Dante, sacred architecture, Fedeli d’Amore and their “secret” languages) and the primacy of the transcendental (metaphysics and mysticism). Second of all, it discovered something called traditional continuity in the Middle Ages: guilds, feudal states, Papacy. Neither the monastic landscape, nor the songs of the Troubadours, nor the chivalric ideals can fructify the spiritual life of a modern person. He sees something else in the Middle Ages than the man of the 18th century, who read Lewis, or the man of the 19th century, who read Victor Hugo. If we think of someone like Maritain, Rene Guenon, Evola, Ananda Coomaraswamy, etc – we can safely say that what the elites see in the Middle Ages nowadays is ideas. What surprises and interests us in the Middle Ages is first of all its immense rational and symbolic capacity. Today, when it is so difficult (and it was especially difficult not even ten years ago) to convince someone of the “autonomy” of ideas and of the spiritual efficiency of the symbol – we look with admiration at the Middle Ages that were athirst for dogmas, for allegories, for symbolism.
The modern age has managed to overcome the historical vision of the Middle Ages, and so it discovers at the same time the transhistorical values of this traditional and spiritual age.
We are managing to detach from medieval history after we managed to detach from the medieval landscape (after the death of Romanticism). We discover, with awe, that the specificity of the Middle Ages lies less in its “history”, in its “becoming” – and more in what is supra-historical, traditional, universal in it: in its symbolism and its metaphysics.