The Dark Ages Were Not Dark
November 30, 2015
JOHN C. Wright describes the Middle Ages:
Maturity in a soul means the reason, the appetites and the passions act in harmony, and the more harmony is achieved, the more the maturity. It is the child who cannot control his appetites and passions, and lets a fierce mood or sudden disappointment throw him into childish rage or erupt into childish tears. Maturity in a community means that the spiritual and temporal powers are balanced, the elite and the commoners agree with mutual recrimination or mutual hatred, that the cities and the country cooperate, men and women are settled into roles fit for human life, and so on.
In the modern day, the elite hates the commons and seeks forever to destroy and enslave them, in the name, ironically enough, of freeing them. The elite and intellectuals in the Middle Ages were clerks in the Church, not vicious and deceptive pundits, newspapermen, and empty headed actors burning with a zeal to subvert and suborn middle class values, and destroy their hated enemies, the Bourgeoisie.
The elite were not a different religion from the commons then, but agreed on the basics of the basic vision of a just life. Not every king was a good king, but there was a basic agreement on what a good king should be. Sneer me no sneers about the divine right of kings placing some men above others: that doctrine dates from the Reformation. The legal theory of the Middle Ages was Roman and hence, in the technical sense of the term, republican.
This legal theory, best explicated by Thomas Aquinas, does not promise civic equality to all men, and so is anathema to the modern age. But then again, the legal theory of the Modern Age started with Machiavelli: both sides of the great conflicts of the Twentieth Century, Democrats or Socialists, justified their politics on the basis of it being a necessary evil, an evil that is done that good might come of it.
The idea of a state whose mission is to encourage the virtue of its citizens comes from the days when the clothing and architecture and music likewise was meant to be both useful and beautiful. Nowadays we dress in drab denim, and live in steel boxes. The society that lives for its own pleasures and powers produces ugliness; the society that lives for God, for something greater than itself, produces pleasure and power.
In the Middle Ages, sacred things were actually set aside from the rough and tumble of common life. Any man or woman could retire from the world and join a nunnery or monetary, and be immune from the class requirements of the surrounding society.
