We have all learnt at school the three great historical periods of history: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern times. Antiquity, finishing in 476 with the fall of the Roman Empire, gave way to the religious Middle Ages, which themselves ushered in the Renaissance and modern world in 1492 when Columbus discovered America and started the age of reason. We particularly understand the modern world as a “rediscovery” of the science and knowledge of Antiquity, and therefore as a continuation of Antiquity, with an intermediate period–hence Middle Ages, because they are ‘in-between’–of about a thousand years. This intermediate period can be understood as either an important moment of our history, or, which is a legacy of the Enlightenment, as “a thousand years of decline.” The problems with those statements is that they tell more about whay we think of ourselves than about the past.<\/p>\n
While the division of history into periods is not wrong in itself, we must keep in mind that history is first and foremost a human event, and that therefore it does not obey such artificial divisions and oversweeping generalizations. The problem becomes particularly evident when we find ourselves at a loss trying to fit entire portions of history into one of these categories and realize that they do not entirely fit in anywhere.<\/p>\n
The first example that comes to mind is the Byzantine Empire. Ignored by Classicists and medievists alike because not entirely fitting in either categories, this period remains to the general public one generally ignored and misunderstood. Is the Empire part of Antiquity? Is it medieval? Rather, the answer is that it is both and neither. The difficulty arises from the fact that the distinction that we make between Antiquity and Middle Ages goes well beyond the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire; it also carries the more profound understanding, in the Western mind, of the end of a certain rationality of the mind and the beginning of an age of religion and emotions.<\/p>\n
While there is some truth in this statement, we should not take it at face value either. The period we call the Middle Ages is indeed a very religious one, not however because their predecessors had no faith in any god, but because the influence of the new faith went deeper and reached wider than before. The Christian Church reinvigorated the life of the whole Empire and the successor kingdoms, it reached to all social classes, and all had now the same understanding of the Just and Good. Yet, we are mistaken if we believe both that the people of Antiquity had less faith and more reason, while the people of the Middle Ages had less reason.<\/p>\n
We are wrong because we fail to understand that ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are two concepts that operate at two completely different levels of thought. If, as we usually believe, Ancient philosophy is the axiom of reason, we fail to understand what the object of the philosophical quest was. Socrates, Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics, all had as their aim the search for God and the good life, which was precisely what the Christians believed had found.<\/p>\n
Those who want to see in Christianity a triumph of obscure blindedness over reason should notice that in the arguments between Christians and ‘pagans’, no mention is made of “reason.” After Christ, the reasonable mind, which had hereto been given to the philosophical search, was simply redirected toward a more profound understanding of the revealed God–this is the nature of the Patristic texts.<\/p>\n
The same holds true with the Renaissance. The Renaissance did not spring up suddenly from the ashes of the old monuments of Rome to usher a return to “reason.” Dante and Aquinas in their writings, Giotto in his paintings, were already in the 13th century–the century “par excellance” of the medieval era–developing certain features that would mark Western art and literature until our own days. Conversely, some of the greatest artworks of the Renaissance have biblical and other religious themes–unless we deny that the Sistine Chapel ceiling or the Annunciation of Da Vinci are work of the Renaissance. In the 16th century, some were considering a crusade against the menacing Turks.<\/p>\n
The division of history based upon such concepts as the dominance of faith or reason betrays rather our own concerns and understanding of it than an “objective” or “scientific” inquiry.<\/p>\n
The second problem comes with the fact that by doing so, we see must see Antiquity as a somehow uniform entity, the Middle Ages as the same throughout, and so with the modern world. But when does Antiquity start then? In the chaos that followed the Trojan war and ushered in the Iron Age? When the first states arose in Sumer? Can 4000 years be the same throughout?<\/p>\n
To come back to the question asked above: where do periods and cultures like the Byzantine stand? Can there be such a sharp break between Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance? The Byzantine Empire underwent a development very different from that of the West. If the Middle Ages started in the West through the loss of much of ancient literature and concepts, then the Byzantine era does not belong in the Middle Ages. If the Middle Ages are defined by Christianity, then it is medieval. But rather than trying to fit it in some category or other, we should rather consider it for what it was, not for what we should want it to be in comparison with something else.<\/p>\n
Similarly, the Renaissance was a product of certain developments in the western lands, a product that itself was transformed in later centuries. But it developped within the Western cultural context, a Christian one, and the loss of its faith certainly did not come about overnight, but was itself the result of a centuries-long development. Cultures, which belong to history, are a continuum, and rarely, if ever, break completely. And they–save perhaps our own–are certainly not built by an opposition between ‘faith’ and ‘reason.’ They are made up of a mosaic of elements, society, politics, religion, economy, all existing separately but interdependent. It is those elements that we must study, and not subjective concepts such as ‘faith’ and ‘reason.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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