We need more projects that are positively Medieval. If that shocks you, stop being a bigot. Those who lived before you do not deserve condemnation merely for envy that they are already in Paradise and you are not.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to chronological snobbery: thinking the calendar determines the worth of an idea, person, or artifact. The chronological snob tosses about words like “primitive” and “native.” This is the sort that cannot value science, as we should, without denigrating every other type of knowledge, which we must not.
If a man cannot learn from Shakespeare and Newton, then some part of his mind has gone dormant.
So if one lives in a country heavily influenced by Western Europe, and that is a good bit of the global culture, then a debt is owed to the people of the Middle Ages, the much maligned Medievals. If the Christians of Eastern Rome, Aksum, and the rest of the thriving Church never were positively Medieval, Western European Christians and allied groups created culture in unique ways.
If you think these were just the Dark Ages, go read Discarded Image and return when disabused on lies told by Protestant Victorians (often a good lot) to score points on Catholic Victorians (often just as excellent). Add the rise of trolls like Andrew White, determined to see a war between science and religion where one did not exist, and a lie grew: being positively Medieval was bad.
It is true that the people of Medieval times did not have science, as we know it, international law, as we understand it, and university education as we get it, but this is because they invented all these or made it possible for the next few generations to do so. When someone is stupid enough to criticize an idea by slandering the people who got him here, ask if by Medieval they mean:
- creating international law recognizing human rights
- vanity projects that become world heritage sites.
- producing poetry so powerful, like that of Dante, that it creates a language
- developing the scientific methods
- saving a prior civilization, because it had beauty, truth, and goodness, even though that society had persecuted their forerunners
- refusing narrow nationalism for patriotism and a common culture of educated persons.
The retort of the fool will be that nobody would wish to live as the Medieval did and we surely do not. The answer of the sensible person is that they made sure we would not do so! Every culture has times of failure and if the Medieval is one thousand years of history of many nations, tribes, and regions, then the Middle Ages has a share of dark ages.
Yet if they had not won out, then many nations would not exist. Like your republic? Thank a Medieval.
So the next time you here a person call something Medieval, know hope! Maybe something wonderful is being born. Be warned, however, some historically ignorant chronological snobs confuse “Medieval” with “dark age.” The great cathedrals are, evidently, not great enough to these bourgeois Babbitts.
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