I am currently teaching a course entitled Medieval and Reformation Christianity, but before you hit the snooze button to catch just ten more minutes of sleep, hear me out.  I start the course by reminding  myself and the students that a good question to ask about any period of history is, what was it possible for the people of a particular time to believe?  Not what I wish they had believed, or what they should have believed, or if I had lived then I would have believed such and such; the only legitimate question is, what was it possible for them to believe?  I then make a valiant attempt to recreate the medieval world before filling it with people like popes, monks, nuns, priests, bishops, scholastics, reformers, kings, emperors, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers along with other assorted historical figures.

What I try to impress on the students is that what you are looking for in recreating any period of history are the sentiments and the symbols that formed the foundation upon which people built the institutions that represented their culture.  Rather than starting with famous people, events, ideas and institutions; start with sentiments and symbols.  By sentiments I mean the core values people held, the values they used to interpret and shape the world around them.  What were they driven by?  What were they passionate about?  By symbols I mean just that, what were the prevailing symbols that appeared over and over in their art, architecture and literature?  Why is this exercise valuable?  It’s valuable because the political, educational, religious, social, artistic, legal and literary institutions that uniquely define every culture in history emerge out of and are shaped by the sentiments/values of the people who created them, and the symbols that represented those sentiments can be found everywhere if you look for them. 

For example, the medieval world was shaped by people who believed in continuity, the ultimate unity and oneness of all reality.  They believed that spiritual things and temporal things were meant to be connected somehow; therefore, they believed that politics and religion could not be and should not be separated.  In various ways they understood that heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent, were different realities, but they would not and could not accept the idea that they were mutually exclusive or unrelated realities.  At the center of the medieval world was a strong, prevailing belief in the existence of God and the belief that all of life was somehow connected with this God and for the glory of this God.  So, the great medieval project was to actually create a world in which the sentiments and symbols regarding heaven were functionally realized in all of its earthly institutions and vice versa.  The crowing political achievement of this medieval project was the creation of the Holy Roman Empire where Popes and Emperors represented the uniting of heaven and earth, the immanent and the transcendent.

                                                

Bottom line, this  great medieval project failed in many respects.  So what’s my point?  If my premise regarding sentiments and symbols has any weight, when our world is carefully examined 75 or 100 years from now, what will these future researchers deduce were the prevailing sentiments that motivated and drove us?  What were our core values as a culture?  What were we passionate about?  When they look at all of our institutions, what sentiments and symbols will be evident?  If our institutions reveal our values, what do we value?  What are the most powerful symbols in our culture?

 

Just something to think about.

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