medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Christopher,
You wrote:
"i'd submit that even the "heretical" (broadly
defined) conflicts all took place within a context of
Shared Belief which it is difficult for us Modrens
--even us Believing Modrens-- to comprehend.
Middlevil Belief --Muslim/Christian, Jewish/Christian,
Cathar/Christian--was on a scale which 20th c.
Westerners simply cannot fully appreciate"
Maybe so. But who was suggesting otherwise? As I
said – our medieval ancestors differ fundamentally
from us in terms of the worldviews, conceptual
frameworks, religious and secular narratives within
which they experienced and understood themselves.
This does not mean that they did not have conflicts
and even crises of identity. What you describe as
‘modest’ would not have been modest to contemporaries.
I’m sure, for example, that the protagonists involved
in the conflict over the Franciscan rule of poverty
(sticking to "domestic" examples) did not regard the
conflict as a 'modest' affair! Conflicts which
emerge over common sources (as was so often the case
in the Middle Ages) are hardly less life threatening,
serious or disturbing even if (as in the case of the
Cluniacs and Cistercians) they are not always so!
What was fundamentally at stake in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries was the apostolic model - the
model of salvation itself which, in this period, meant
everything. In that sense such twelfth and
thirteenth-century conflicts have a narrative unity
which is perhaps lacking from contemporary western
conflicts of identity - but I think even here you
would find a surprisingly greater degree of
homogeneity than expressions like "thoroughly
disintegrated" suggest. Take for example the
discourse of human rights -- something which has been
taken up by ethnic and sexual minorities as much as by
the supposedly "mainstream" political culture. Values
like 'authenticity' - about which Charles Taylor has
written so eloquently - and 'equality' have become
central to contemporary debates about self hood.
Perhaps it is not as ridiculous as it seems to suggest
that our own debates about authenticity are analogous
to (albeit radically different from) medieval
questions about the apostolic life.
For all our differences in conceptual schemes and
meanings, and for all our apparent "disintegration" we
still possess common discourses for negotiating our
conflicts: much as medieval scholastics, Christians,
Jews and Muslims shared a discourse with Aristotle!
Best,
Scott
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