TAKE OFF!
Around the year 1200 some areas of the life of early-stage Europe really started to move ahead, whilst many others remained much as they had been – and would do for centuries. The Gothic cathedrals, for instance, mentioned at the end of the last chapter, represent not only technological advance but a radical shift in the artistic conception of such symbolic buildings by their architects. By contrast, though, a basic element of medieval life such as instinctively resorting to the use of magic or astrology continued largely unaltered and essentially unchallenged until the Reformation.
To the extent that new technology produced – above all – increasingly impressive church buildings, it reinforced rather than undermined people’s existing worldview. Cyril Mango, in a chapter on ‘The invisible World of Good and Evil’ in his Byzantium: The Empire of the New Rome, outlines that worldview:
… to all men of the Middle Ages the supernatural existed in a very real and familiar sense. Not only did that other world continually impinge upon everyday life; it also constituted that higher and timeless reality to which earthly existence was but a brief prelude.
Like me, you may feel pulled back into such an age, to some degree, and touched by its outlook and worldview, when you visit an old cathedral or monastery – if you ever have the opportunity to do such a thing. Our worldview today, and the spirit of our own sceptical scientific and consumerist age, are so barren that perhaps it isn’t surprising if we feel a little wistful not to have been – even to be? – part of that ‘age of faith’.