By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Fried, Johannes. The Middle Ages, trans. from the German by Peter Lewis. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. Xi + 580.
The Middle Ages are generally considered to be the period between 500 and 1500 AD. That thousand-year period in Johannes Fried’s narrative begins with Boethius under the reign of the Emperor Justinian and effectively ends with Petrarch in the reign of Charles IV, who tried to woo him to the imperial court.
The book is too much to read in one sitting and obviously too great a work for a brief review. Nevertheless, it deserves notice, not merely for its account of the making of Europe but for the many lessons it holds for the present.
In lieu of an extensive review, a few paragraphs may convey the character of Fried’s study.
Fried’s admiration of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is undisguised. “Gregory must be counted among the outstanding successors of St. Peter,” he writes.
A member of a distinguished Roman aristocratic family and a former Roman prefect, Gregory came to the papacy with an extraordinary command of ancient learning. As Pope he called Christians to embrace a life of contemplation and monastic simplicity. Consistently applying these principles to his private life, the wealthy Gregory vested all his family fortune in the Church and urban monastic orders.
Gregory’s extensive writings included theological works, biblical exegesis, sermons, and letters. He is cited by Fried for the lasting influence of his Commentary on the Book of Job and for his Book of Pastoral Rule. The latter, we are told, proved to be a seminal text for the governance of the Church insofar as it helped to define the role of bishops and other Church leaders.
As an interpreter of Sacred Scripture, Gregory followed the lead of St. Jerome by distinguishing different layers of textual meaning in the Bible. “The written word, he held, is not simply to be understood literally, but may also be understood in various metaphorical senses.” Fried calls Gregory’s Commentary on the Book of Job “one of the greatest educational texts of the Middle Ages.”
Two centuries later, it was under the rule of Charlemagne (747-814) that the Church was to become firmly integrated into the empire’s ruling system. Charlemagne regarded the prosperity of a religious culture to be in the interest of the empire, and he acted accordingly. His religious initiative aimed first and foremost at promoting the worship of God and the liturgical reform it entailed.
In Fried’s account, he believed that “in order not to offend the Lord, religious service called for correct liturgical language, error-free Latin, proper liturgical plainsong, and reliable scholarship.” In order to achieve his ecclesiastical reform, Charlemagne requested from Pope Adrian I the Roman Missal and a definitive collection of canon law.
Given that the organization of the Church was seen as important to the empire, bishops were charged with the education of their clergy. The fulfillment of that charge became the origin of the cathedral schools, which in the late Middle Ages became the embryos from which the great universities of Europe grew.
From the tenth century on, dialectics and the sciences flourished in the cathedral schools that initially vied with exceptional monastery schools, but eventually the urban cathedral schools of Chartres, Reims, Leon, and Paris outstripped them.
Fried devotes a lengthy chapter to what he calls the Papal Schisms of the 11th and 12th centuries. The intellectual culture of that period was in a state of upheaval, and Church reform and contentious papal elections were, in Fried’s judgment, simply manifestations of contemporary trends. Given the historic intertwining of the papacy and empire, the person who was the true Successor of Peter had implications for kings and princes. It was not simply a matter of doctrine.
In the closing chapter of his narrative, Fried angrily addresses the origin of the “dark age myth.” He has few good words to say about the Renaissance humanists whom he takes to have originated the myth. Dismissing the logic, science, and art upon which they drew, the humanists denigrated the accomplishment that stood between them and an imaginary Rome and an idealized Antiquity.
Petrarch and his fellow humanists, Fried tells us, inveighed against Aristotelian Scholasticism and philosophers of the time for their insatiable curiosity, and warned “against investigations that knew no bounds.” And Fried adds that the humanists preferred to talk more about themselves than about anything else. He cites Petrarch’s extensive correspondence as an example.
In Fried’s “Epilogue” to The Middle Ages, one finds the most devastating critique of Immanuel Kant as a representative of the Enlightenment that one is likely to encounter. Fried claims that Kant, who had little experience of the world, condemned the Middle Ages out of hand.
“However exalted Kant’s contribution to critical philosophy may have been, in matters of anthropology, art appreciation, and historical understanding, Kant, like his comrades in arms, was simply a child of his age, and these men knew nothing about the Middle Ages, but also did not want to learn anything about it.”
In Fried’s judgment, Kant and his contemporaries were heirs to the age they denigrated, not its conquerors. They stood on the shoulders of others, but were not aware of doing do. They despised what was in fact supporting them.
Given its solidly based scholarship and its depth of analysis, the book belongs in the library of anyone who values knowledge for its own sake.
+ + +
(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress