How Stephen Greenblatt talked ABSOLUTE NONSENSE about the Middle Ages in his book The Swerve

Something very, very good just came out of L.A.–to be specific, out of the L.A. Review of Books.

EVERYONE needs to read Jim Hinch’s reflection on Stephen Greenblatt‘s award-winning screed against medieval culture’s supposed religiously motivated destruction of the human pursuit of knowledge.

I haven’t read Greenblatt’s book, but Hinch’s account, and the quotations he provides, convinces me that its portrayal of the Middle Ages is just as nonsensical and intellectually corrosive (yes, readers will be stupider about things medieval after they read it) as William Manchester‘s steaming pile of dog crap, A World Lit Only By Fire. [Yes, this is the "worst book on the medieval period I hope you'll never read."]

Here’s how Hinch begins. PLEASE click the link below and finish reading this excellent dismantling of an unfortunate, and unfortunately prize-winning, book:

Jim Hinch on The Swerve

Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong — and Why It Matters

December 1st, 2012

ONE YEAR AGO THIS MONTH, Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt stepped to the podium at the Cipriani Club in New York City to accept the National Book Award for non-fiction. Greenblatt won for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a 356-page study of the transformative cultural power wielded by an ancient Latin poem called De Rerum Natura by a first-century BC Epicurean philosopher named Titus Lucretius Caro. Holding back tears, Greenblatt thanked, among other people, his publishers at W.W. Norton for committing to “the insane idea that they could sell a book about the discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist to more than a handful of people.” In fact, by the time Greenblatt addressed the Cipriani Club’s gold-domed ballroom, The Swerve already had spent more than a month on the New York Times bestseller list, just as had Greenblatt’s previous book, Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that came close to winning its own National Book Award (it was a finalist). Five months later, The Swerve won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. The book remains a strong seller on Amazon.

Read the new Christian History Guide to Worship from Constantine to the Reformation

Well, my love affair with the Middle Ages (warts and all) continues with the new issue of Christian History. This one is another mini-guide, like our Guide to Christian Thought on Hell.

This one surveys worship from the time of Constantine to the eve of the Reformation.

Master writer and liturgiologist (and friend) Dr. Jennifer Woodruff Tait wrote the whole thing, and it’s wonderful.

The design by Doug Johnson and images found by image researcher Jennifer Trafton help create a marvelous sense of time travel: the thematic articles on art & architecture, Scripture and sermons, music, leadership, and sacraments survey the landscape of medieval worship, and the three “snapshots” of what it would have been like to experience a worship service in 400, 800, and 1400 AD put you in the midst of the action.

Go ahead and check it out, in its full, image-rich glory, at http://www.christianhistorymagazine.org. I would love to hear your feedback here.

A new translation of “The Death of King Arthur”

Arthur and Mordred, The Boys' King Arthur

Here’s a ringing review and tasty samples of a new translation of “The Death of King Arthur,” done by Simon Armitage, from The Guardian [UK].

Hat tip to Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College for bringing this to my attention on his tumblr blog.

The review is here.

And here is a sample of this newly translated epic:

The startled glutton glared gruesomely,
grinned like a greyhound with grisly fangs
then groaned and glowered with a menacing grimace,
growling at the good King who greeted him angrily.
His mane and his fringe were filthily matted
and his face was framed in half a foot of foam.
His face and forehead were flecked all over
like the features of a frog, so freckled he seemed.
He was hook-beaked like a hawk, with a hoary beard,
and his eyes were overhung with hairy brows.
To whomever looked hard, as harsh as a hound-fish
was the hide of that hulk, from head to heel.
His ears were huge and a hideous sight,
His eyes were horrid, abhorrent and aflame,
His smile was all sneer, like a flat-mouthed flounder,
and like a bear his fore-teeth were fouled with rank flesh,
and his black, bushy beard grew down to his breast.
He was bulky as a sea-pig with a brawny body,
and each quivering lump of those loathsome lips
writhed and rolled with the wrath of a wolf’s head.
He was broad across the back, with the neck of a bull,
badger-breasted with the bristles of a boar,
had arms like oak boughs, wrinkled by age,
and the ugliest loins and limbs, believe me.
He shuffled his shanks, being shovel-footed,
and his knock-kneed legs were abnormally knuckled.
He was thick in the thigh and like an ogre at the hips,
and as gross as a grease-fed pig, a gruesome sight.
He who mindfully measured that monster’s dimension
from face to foot would have found it five fathoms.

Related articles

• The Death of King Arthur, By Simon Armitage (independent.co.uk)
• Alfred Tennyson – Morte d’Arthur (englishvillage.wordpress.com)

Behold: an evangelical theologian who wishes to medievalize evangelicalism–as I do!

A fascinating evangelical proposal to return to a medieval "sacramental ontology"

A week or so ago, I stumbled fortuitously on a book review in the pages of Books and Culture. Or to be more precise, on the glowing screen of B&C‘s website. This was a review by a Wheaton art historian of a book by the J. I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, BC. This is an exciting book for me, as it handles with great historical and theological sophistication the themes of earthiness and embodiment, Creation and Incarnation, that have floated to the surface of my own attempt to write about a “usable medieval past.”

The book is Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (2011). I find it rich enough that I would like to blog on it here in the coming weeks. What did Wheaton art prof Matthew Milliner say about it? Here’s a sample:

Embodiment, emotion, death, asceticism . . . an attempt to describe the legacy of medieval faith

A page from the Book of Kells

The book Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, or as I think of it these days, Getting Medieval: A faithful tour of the Middle Ages with a little help from C S Lewis, is trying to be born, and I’m trying not to get in the way. I’m struggling to express an argument which will set up the medieval centrality of the Incarnation and Creation as that period’s most important legacy to us today.

What follows is just rough-draft wording of a short passage for the book’s introduction. Arguments and details still seem to pull in opposite directions, but I’m convinced of the truth, at least in outline, of what I’m struggling to express here.

Readers, I’d value your thoughts on this brief, rough, passage. Where can I go from here? How can I refine and add power to this argument? What am I missing? Where am I too negative about the modern church? Too positive about the medieval? Does this argument resonate at all with your experience or does it just seem to you to miss the mark? 

Getting medieval on the doctrine of hell

I’ve posted several times on the new resource from the publishers Christian History, a compact little survey and resource guide on the history of Christian thought about hell. The project was ably managed by Jennifer Trafton and written by Jennifer, myself, and that redoubtable pair Edwin and Jennifer Woodruff Tait. Jennifer Trafton wrote a splendid annotated bibliography containing brief summaries of over 50 books contributing to the modern debates on hell. For the main, “timeline” section of the publication, the four of us divvied things up chronologically.

Hortus Deliciarum - Hell (Hölle) Herrad von Landsberg (about 1180)

My section was the medieval one, the substance of this post (previously posted in draft form, here). If you would like to read the whole guide in all its fully designed glory, simply go here and you can flip through it, starting with the harrowing Gustav Dore illustration for Milton’s Paradise Lost that appears on the cover (folks with old eyes, like mine, can click to zoom in):

The medieval period saw a shift in em­phasis from the early church’s focus on the biblical “Last Things”—the Second Coming of Christ, general resurrection, and final judgment—to a new concentra­tion on the afterlives of individuals. Until the 400s and even beyond, Jesus’ return was still expected imminently; thus those who died in the intervening generations could be thought of as simply sleeping or awaiting the resurrection. There was not much written during this early period about the immediate fate of those who died before Jesus returned.

As the Second Coming came to seem more remote, however, Chris­tians increasingly focused on the doc­trine of the immediate judgment of each soul at death. The Book of Rev­elation in particular began to guide Christian imagination on people’s fate after death. This emphasis on the af­terlife resulted in a lavishly visual and grotesque new genre of literature: the vision of the otherworldly journey, of which Dante’s Divine Comedy repre­sented the pinnacle.

Medieval images and doctrines of hell

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca 1225 - 1274, Mosaic, Baptistry, Florence)

Folks, here’s a sneak preview of some work I did for the forthcoming Christian History magazine Handbook to Christian Thought on Hell. It’s not edited yet, but the guide, which will survey Christian thought on hell from the earliest church to the 21st century, will include something like what follows. If you are interested in getting the entire guide, which will be in a half-size  (roughly 5 x 8.5) magazine format complete with timeline and illustrations, go to www.christianhistorymagazine.org and get on the mailing list.

The Middle Ages

The medieval period (roughly 500 – 1500 AD) saw a shift in emphasis from the early church’s focus on the biblical “Last Things”—the Second Coming of Christ, general resurrection, and final judgment—to a new concentration on the afterlives of individuals. Until the 400s AD and even beyond (as in the thought of Gregory the Great (540 – 604)), the “Parousia” (second coming and all its associated events) was still expected imminently, and so those who died in the intervening generations could be thought of as simply sleeping or awaiting the resurrection. There simply wasn’t much written during this early period about the immediate fate of those who died before Jesus returned.

However as the Second Coming came to seem, potentially, more remote, the question of the reward of the saved and the punishment of the damned heated up, and the doctrine of the immediate judgment of each soul at death came into more prominence. The Book of Revelation in particular, which tremendously influenced medieval culture, began to be pressed into service to imagine the shape of people’s fate after death. As we will see, this emphasis on the afterlife and its support from the Book of Revelation resulted in a lavishly visual and grotesque new genre of imaginative literature: the vision of the otherworldly journey, of which Dante’s Divine Comedy was the pinnacle.

CS Lewis’s medieval “world-sacramentalism”

Brendan in the birchwood, from the wonderful animated film The Secret of Kells (note the cross shape of the path!)

Like the medievals, C S Lewis loved created things in a way that amounted to sacramentalism. That is, he saw the created world as a channel of God’s grace–a special means of communications from God to us. Excised from the reading draft of my paper “The Intuitive Medievalism of C S Lewis” (International Medieval Congress 2011) were the following notes on this aspect of Lewis’s “world-sacramentalism”–a topic I did treat in the paper, but only briefly:

From Peter Kreeft, “How to Save Western Civilization: C. S. Lewis as Prophet,” in A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honour of C. S. Lewis, ed. Andrew Walker and James Patrick (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990):

“Lewis describes what a medieval boy learnt in school: ‘farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy. This concrete knowledge, mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. High abstractions and rarified artifices jostled the earthiest particulars . . . They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots, and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it seems to us, both the naivety and the energy of their writing . . . They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys; never like civil servants or writers of leading articles.’”[1] (200; N. 29: Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 62.)

“We moderns have lost the solid objectivity both of the high universals (especially truth and goodness) and of the low particulars, the concrete world. Both have been dissolved into a vague, abstract, ideological-political-sociological-psychological mid-range. We are the ‘middle’ ages.” (200; N. 29: Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 62.)

Lewis’s love of the concrete was sacramentalist: “Every created thing is, in its degree, an image of God, and the ordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing a clue which, truly followed, will lead back to Him.” (Lewis, Commentary on Arthurian Torso by Charles Williams [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948], p. 116.) In this, too, he was medieval to the core.

Glimpses of what Creation meant to medieval Christians, from Emile Male’s The Gothic Image

The First day of Creation: ivory panel from the cathedral of Salerno, ca. 1084

Oh, how the medievals loved Creation. C S Lewis once observed, “Marcus Aurelius wished that men would love the universe as a man can love his own city. I believe that something like this was really possible in the [Middle Ages].”

No one saw more clearly the medieval love affair with Creation than the early twentieth-century French medievalist Emile Male.

Way back in the mid-90s, when I was at Gordon-Conwell (and a library rat), I was browsing through a stack of books given to the community by the widow of a professor who had passed away, and I came across Emile Male’s The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, tr. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958; orig. pub. 1913). Flipping through it on that day, I gathered that it promised a key to the rich symbolic system standing behind every piece of medieval art.

Yesterday, while working on my course Medieval Wisdom for Modern Ministry (and the related book), I found myself wanting some secondary source that would explain some of the medievals’ high regard for, indeed love for and even veneration of, Creation. So out came Male–finally I’d get to read it!

What follows are a few notes from Male’s book that deal with Creation and related themes–themes readers of C S Lewis’s The Discarded Image will be familiar with: the medieval passion for sorting and ordering information; the absolute subjection to the authority of tradition, especially written tradition; the importance of scripture in forming the medieval imagination. All of these, say Male, deeply influenced medieval artists.

On the theme of what I think can fairly be called medievals’ “Creation spirituality,” Male portrays medieval artists and art as saturated in that sense of the sacramentality of all created things that Gregory the Great bequeathed to the Middle Ages—the understanding that God is continually communicating to us in everything he makes. Male takes this to be an extension of the principle of allegorical interpretation: that under the literal sense of scripture hide deeper spiritual meanings. So: “The artist, as the doctors might have put it, must imitate God who under the letter of Scripture hid profound meaning, and who willed that nature too should hold lessons for man.”

Finally, taking a tip from Michael Ward, we may find in Male’s delightful exploration of the “symbolic code” that operates in medieval art something like the sort of “secret code” that Ward believes C S Lewis used when he implanted into each book of the Narnia Chronicles the atmosphere and values of one of the mythical/Ptolemaic planets. See Ward’s Planet Narnia for that—especially the early chapter on “secrecy” as both a Lewisian and a medieval quality. However, we should remember that for medieval artists and likely the majority of their audience, the symbol system wasn’t secret. It was really sort of matter-of-fact.

So here is Male:

The Intuitive Medievalism of C S Lewis (Kalamazoo 2011 paper)

Finally this year, I earned my keep at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, MI by presenting a paper. For as long as some folks remember, there have been slews of sessions on J R R Tolkien, and a resounding silence on C S Lewis. This seems passing odd, given that Lewis contributed more to the field of medieval studies than did Tolkien. My theory for the many Tolkien sessions is that so many medievalists first got into their field under the influence of the grand master of fantasy.

In any case, two sessions of three papers each were presented at Kalamazoo 2011 on the subject of Lewis’s and the “Discarded Image” (the medievals’ worldview as he presented it to his Cambridge students, published posthumously in the the book of the same name). Here is my contribution to the second of those sessions. As always, reproduction of all or any part of the following without prior written consent by me is strictly prohibited.

The Intuitive Medievalism of C. S. Lewis

Paper given May 15, 2011, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI

Two words in my title require some explanation. “Medievalism” is the easier of the two, I take it to denote the ways people since the Middle Ages have appropriated, reframed, and selectively highlighted medieval culture, to fit their own questions and agendas. Lewis was, professionally, a professor of literature, and he spent much time reading, teaching, and producing scholarly works on the Middle Ages, both its literature and its culture. And of course we needn’t go far in the work of Lewis, or of such of his modern friends as Tolkien, Williams, and Sayers, to find that the varied versions of “the medieval” plied by these authors were full of distinctly modern, or more accurately, anti-modern, concerns.