The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (27 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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The Religion of Peace
 
At Medina, Mohammed and his fellow refugees found it difficult to earn a living and soon resorted to plundering caravans for a livelihood, a practice which they justified upon the ground that the merchants were idolaters and unbelievers. . . . Mohammed strengthened his authority and provided funds for his followers by exiling the hostile Jewish clans and confiscating their property. Other obnoxious individuals were assassinated, and once some six hundred Jews who would not accept Islam were executed in cold blood and their women and children were sold into slavery. Thus the new religion began early to take on the ruthless and sordid features of conquest and tribute, and the persecuted prophet rapidly transformed himself into a religious despot and national legislator.
Lynn Thorndike
,
The History of Medieval Europe
 
 
Did the Church usurp that energy? It was the faith that brought that energy into being.
 
Drama’s rebirth: Another fruit of Christianity
 
Let’s take one example of this vibrant life. For civic creativity and whole-hearted bustle, let alone the transcendent
meaning
of it, I know of nothing we Americans enjoy, with our mass entertainment, mass government, and withered neighborhoods, that can compare.
 
Imagine that for several weeks every spring, the guildsmen in your town are in high gear. The carpenters are nailing together floats, to roll them in a pageant from church to church. The weavers are mending colorful costumes, some a suspiciously fiery red, with horns and spiky tail. The ironmongers are hammering a special gate with a hair-trigger that will spring it open at the right touch. The priests and clerks are rummaging up old scripts and trying them out on the “actors,” one of whom is that fat blustery neighbor of yours, playing Herod.
 
Everyone is waiting for the great three-day feast of Corpus Christi, beginning on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. On those three days, amid sacred processions and boisterous children and women hawking fruit, you and your townsmen will put on a cycle of plays spanning all of time, from the Creation of Man through the Redemption to the Final Judgment. These plays will be composed with homespun rhyming and tags of Latin scripture, yet with an imaginative power which you will find quite natural, seeing the end of man even in the beginning, and the revelation of Christ even in the curse that God pronounced upon the snake in the garden.
6
 
Imagine that these cycles of plays show up not here and there, but from Portugal to Germany, from England to Italy. Then you will understand why in the Middle Ages, after a thousand years of dormancy, drama was reborn. This was no accident. The people intuited that the Christian faith is intensely dramatic, with all kinds of wondrous surprises. So in the famous
Second Shepherds’ Play
at Wakefield, the lowly shepherds (after a lot of medieval shenanigans, including tossing the villain in a blanket, and forgiving him at last) find the Christ Child, the creator of the world, in a manger. There they give him three humble gifts: a bob of cherries, a bird, and something else you will find in no manger scene now:
 
Hail, hold forth thy hand small;
 
I bring thee but a ball:
 
Have thou and play withal,
 
And go to the tennis.
 
 
Cherries, a bird, and a tennis ball? Don’t dismiss it as earthy clowning, for even earthy clowning, in medieval art and culture, is touched by the clowning of God. These gifts are the hayseed way of symbolizing the red blood Christ will shed (blood that is as fruitful as spring), his rising again, and his ruling the globe. In that same village—for generations!—the people will behold one of their neighbors playing Jesus, standing before Hell’s gates, defying a buffoonishly impotent “Sir Satan,” bursting the bars open with a command that recalls Moses when he delivered the Jews from their bondage in Egypt: “Open up, and let my people pass!”
7
 
 
 
Was This a Good Thing?
 
The standard account holds that the Middle Ages were a period of technological stagnation. Real historians of the era shred that notion. For one thing, modern industry was launched:
 
The great expansion of the use of water-mills and windmills that took place during the later Middle Ages, in association with the growth of manufacturing, brought in an essentially new stage in mechanical technique. From this period must be dated that increasing mechanization of life and industry, based on the ever-increasing exploitation of new forms of mechanical power, which characterizes modern civilisation.
 
 
A. J. Crombie
,
Medieval
and Early Modern Science,
Vol. 1
 
It was rollicking stuff, comic and solemn and colorful and reverent all at once, simple enough for any child to understand, yet steeped in rich and subtle theology. Do not judge it by our standards of mass entertainment. The people produced it, the people enjoyed it, the people remembered it, and handed it on, for centuries. Shakespeare saw such plays when he was a boy,
350 years after the tradition began.
It is quite true, and accepted (though often ignored) by Renaissance scholars, that without this dramatic revival, there would have been no Shakespeare.
8
 
PC myth: The Middle Ages were the Dark Ages
 
Whence, then, comes the nonsensical charge that in the Middle Ages, the commoners lived lives of unutterable dreariness, while churchmen and warriors (often illiterate warriors) lorded it over them? In a typical medieval town—I am not talking about serfs in the backcountry of eastern Europe—there was more real equality of life, less of a gap between rich and poor, less of a division between one man’s life and another, than there would be in the West until the American pioneers were made equal by a forbidding land, no money, and hard work.
 
It wasn’t that life was easy. Life for most people has never been easy, until fairly recently. Nor should we think that the warrior aristocracies throughout Europe were all enjoying fine poetry and intellectual discourse. In many places they were simply marauders. But the leaven of Christian teaching, that all men are precious in the sight of God, was working its way up to the kings. So we have the pious king, Saint Louis IX of France, stationing himself under an oak tree in Paris to adjudicate cases brought by artisans and shopkeepers and plowmen. Louis was an able politician, but more than that, he was a true Christian king. Our heads of state would do well to heed the advice he left to his son and heir. Note, for instance, his preference for the poor, but also his politically incorrect acknowledgment that sometimes the rich too are in the right:
 
Dear son, if you come to the throne, strive to have that which befits a king, that is to say, that in justice and rectitude you hold yourself steadfast and loyal toward your subjects and your vassals, without turning either to the right or to the left, but always straight, whatever may happen. And if a poor man has a quarrel with a rich man, sustain the poor rather than the rich, until the truth is made clear, and when you know the truth, do justice to them.
9
 
 
Indeed, commoners frequently allied themselves with their king, against their common rivals, the noblemen. On this too Saint Louis gives his son advice:
 
Preserve [your towns and cities] in the estate and the liberty in which your predecessors kept them, redress it, and if there be anything to amend, amend and preserve their favor and their love. For it is by the strength and the riches of your good cities and your good towns that the native and the foreigner, especially your peers and your barons, are deterred from doing ill to you. I well remember that Paris and the good towns of my kingdom aided me against the barons, when I was newly crowned.
 
 
Kings granted charters to individual towns or guilds, guaranteeing them wide freedom in business affairs, in return for a modest tax revenue. On the whole it worked quite well. English wool traders sent raw fleece to the free towns in Flanders, where the fullers and weavers wove it into cloth and sent it along to the town-republics in northern Italy and Tuscany.
 
There, for instance in Florence, the cloth would be dyed, and sent further east, to Venice and her trading ships, or overland to Constantinople and beyond. Cloth and other goods would be traded for spices, gold, herbal drugs, and so forth, with the encouragement of local rulers, but managed through private banking houses. A merchant might need “factors” or agents in several far-flung cities, Antwerp, Genoa, Hamburg, Constantinople, to whom he would write letters asking for credit. Thus we see in medieval Europe the beginnings of capitalism and home rule: of local independence and productive (in Italy often bloodily productive) economic rivalry.
 
Finally, there’s the favorite slur against the Middle Ages, which has the added virtues of being a handy metaphor for anti-communism and persecution of women: witch-hunts and witch-burning. Witches were a real preoccupation of the Middle Ages, right? Not really. Probably more people have been shot in American shopping malls and high schools than were executed for witchcraft in all of Europe from 1000–1300. The real hunts for witches began only after the bouts of mass hysteria in the wake of the Black Plague, which struck Europe in 1348 and flared up every twenty years or so until the nineteenth century.
10
 
The most famous witch trials, of course, were conducted in 1700 by post-Reformation, post-Renaissance Puritans in Massachusetts, after demonology had become a “science.” Racialism would soon follow in the wake of the Enlightenment. The Middle Ages were ignorant of
these
sciences, I admit. Still, the Middle Ages serve as the politically correct hitching post for any unsavory episodes in Western history.
 
When love and nature were richer
 
By now the reader should see that to call the people of the Middle Ages “otherworldly” is as accurate as to say that their lives were drab and ignorant and miserable. We need to draw distinctions here.
 
In the darker corners of ancient Greek religion, which was about as sunny as paganism can be, there still lurked a fear of the tremendous forces of nature, and an urge, with sacrificial blood or ritual orgies, to placate them or to try to wrest them to one’s will. Hence would you see young maidens, at a feast for the wine-god Dionysus, carrying a huge wooden phallus in ritual procession.
11
But Christianity drove out those gods and, as Chesterton puts it, made it possible for people once again to revel in nature with a free conscience.
12
Long before the Renaissance, we witness a flourishing of art and literature that pays loving attention to the beauty of the natural world,
even when it is God and not that earthly beauty
that is the object of the artist’s ultimate desire.

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