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Though modern secular society is conspicuous for how much it does not know about the history of the Middle Ages, popular culture has managed to keep the memory of the Crusades alive. Even among those with little interest in the events, beliefs, and ideals of the medieval world, the Crusades are still well known and widely understood—or rather, grossly misunderstood—as a

deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history.1

The theme was taken up even by a prominent American politician, himself not exactly famous for moral integrity, in a 2001 speech delivered at Georgetown University. “When the Christian soldiers [of the First Crusade] took Jerusalem,” Mr. Clinton explained, they indiscriminately slaughtered local inhabitants until the knights were obliged, according to “contemporaneous descriptions,” to walk around “with blood running up to their knees.” The former president is actually being somewhat moderate here, as other versions of the massacre indicate that the blood reached the knees of their horses—or even the bridles of their horses! The more restrained commentators affirm that the river of blood was merely ankle-deep. We perhaps can discern here an educational lapse in not only the historical domain but also the mathematical: as one scholar reluctantly demonstrated by means of grotesque calculations, the sensationalized versions of this event are spectacularly impossible, and the accounts on which these versions are based “were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval people knew such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately, often do not.”2

We will never know what exactly happened on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in the year 1099, and modernity would do well to redress current atrocities instead of declaiming sanctimoniously against an event that is, sadly, but one example of the countless wartime excesses that fill the pages of world history. There is, however, something crucial to be learned here, and it is found not in modern-day polemics but in the actual medieval words written by Raymond d’Aguilers, a cleric who accompanied the Count of Toulouse on the First Crusade. His account of the Temple Mount massacre includes the following sentence:

Sed tantum sufficiat, quod in templo et porticu Salomonis equitabatur in sanguine ad genua, et usque ad frenos equorum.

(But let it suffice [to relate] that in the temple and the portico of Solomon they rode in blood to the knees, and even to the bridles, of the horses.)

As the editors of a 1969 edition of this text pointed out in a footnote, Raymond’s phrase is identical to a phrase found in the Vulgate rendering of Revelation chapter 14. This chapter begins with a vision of the divine Lamb on Mount Sion, and it concludes with a vision of the harvest and vintage of the earth:

And another angel came out from the temple, crying with a great voice to him that sat on the cloud, Send forth thy sickle, and reap: for the hour to reap is come; for the harvest of the earth is over-ripe. And he that sat on the cloud cast his sickle upon the earth; and the earth was reaped.3

An angel also gathered the “clusters of the vine of the earth” and cast them into “the great winepress of God’s wrath,... and there came out blood from the winepress, even unto the bridles of the horses [usque ad frenos equorum].”4 Raymond was not attempting to describe the scene with scientific objectivity; he was, in characteristically medieval fashion, interweaving the literal and the mystical, the historical and the biblical, the visible and the invisible. He was, in other words, blending the truths of heaven into the ongoing story of earth.

To read Raymond’s words as precise facts, or even as exaggerated facts, is to err as we moderns so easily do when pondering the events and customs and writings of the Middle Ages. Historical scholarship in the modern sense hardly existed in the Age of Faith; medieval historiography was above all an exercise in allowing human actions to reveal the providential designs of Almighty God. Furthermore, as the historian Deborah Deliyannis has observed, “there was no such thing as a professional historian at any time during the Middle Ages”; chronicles and the like were composed by scholars or clerics who wrote “exegesis, poems, panegyrics, scientific or computational texts, and legal documents in addition to works that memorialized the past.”5 When Raymond invokes the biblical image of blood usque ad frenos equorum, he is doing what medieval Christians continually and instinctively did: spiritualize that which they observed and experienced, by drawing from the Church’s vast treasury of theology, sacramentality, and sacred literature. How exactly Raymond sought to spiritualize the massacre on Temple Mount is hard to say; perhaps he interpreted the violence as a ghastly purification, or perhaps he saw it in an apocalyptic light. In any case, such details are not our concern at the moment; what’s important for the present discussion is that his allusion to the mystical violence of the Book of Revelation gives us insight into the entirety of the grand project that we now call the Crusades—which were not fundamentally about the bare “facts” of war, conquest, adventure, or wealth. At the heart of the Crusades, emerging as they did from the deep logic of medieval life, was an earthly journey whose benefit was spiritual, and whose destination was God.

It is somewhat ironic that the term “crusade” is so widely recognized in modern society, because if someone asked Raymond d’Aguilers to share his thoughts on the nature and significance of a Crusade, the response might be a blank stare. The word “crusade”—cruciata in Latin, crociata in Italian, crozada in Old Occitan—was rarely used and didn’t even exist until the thirteenth century. And though “crusade” is derived from the word for “cross,” it refers primarily to the symbol that the travelers sewed into their clothing. I say this because it would perhaps be easy for us to exaggerate associations between the term “crusade” and triumphalistic notions of marching forth with the Cross of Christ into heathen and hostile lands. The original phrases for these expeditions described them simply as a journey to Jerusalem or to the Holy Sepulchre, and a participant in the journey was called a peregrinus, a word that in the classical era denoted a foreigner or stranger (then by extension, a traveler). All this leads us to the essential principle of the Crusades as they were first envisioned: a Crusade is most properly understood not as a military campaign but as an “armed pilgrimage.” The historian Thomas Madden conveys this with memorable emphasis:

No one at the time considered the First Crusade to be a “first” anything.... Crusaders took vows akin to pilgrims’ vows, marked themselves as pilgrims, and enjoyed the ecclesiastical protection often afforded to pilgrims. They referred to themselves as pilgrims and their expedition as a pilgrimage.6

And pilgrimage to Jerusalem was by no means a new idea.

The Christian tradition of pilgrimage, meaning a journey to a sacred place undertaken for spiritual purposes, began very early. Already in the second century, the faithful celebrated local martyrs by going to their tombs, and these journeys increased in distance as people began traveling to the tombs of illustrious martyrs such as St. Peter. As martyr shrines increased in number, so did pilgrimage destinations. The Holy Land, being that favored portion of material Creation that felt the very footsteps of the Incarnate God, must ever be the pilgrimage destination par excellence, though its appeal for ordinary Christians increased after Constantine built a basilica over the sites of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. One of Latin Christianity’s most remarkable pilgrimage-related documents was written by a devout woman named Egeria, perhaps as a way to share her journey with a community of religious sisters back in Europe. She visited the Holy Land in the late fourth or early fifth century, about a hundred years before the beginning of the medieval period, and she recorded her experiences in a diary. Egeria’s detailed account of liturgical life in Jerusalem is inspiring, but it’s also a bitter reminder of the apathy and liturgical desolation that afflict postmodern Christianity. In the introduction to a 1970 edition of the diary, the translator included the following highlights:

A multitude, including many children, attended daily vespers. On Sundays, the crowds were as large as at Easter. On the great feasts, particularly Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday evening, and Pentecost, vast throngs moved from the Mount of Olives in procession to the city. Egeria states that on Pentecost not a single Christian remained at home.7

Egeria’s description of Epiphany shows how solemn and cherished that feast was in former times, and how early in Christian history the Church employed the finest and most expensive materials for divine worship:

You see nothing there but gold and gems and silk. If you look at the hangings, they are made of silk with gold stripes; if you look at the curtains, they are also made of silk with gold stripes. Every kind of sacred vessel brought out on that day is of gold inlaid with precious stones.... What can I say about the decoration of this building which Constantine, with his mother on hand, had embellished with as much gold, mosaics, and marble as the resources of his empire permitted?8

Is it not something like a dream, this vision of vibrant, fervent, magnificently communal and public Christianity in the land where Christ Himself walked the earth and healed the sick and preached the Gospel? Is there not a unique sorrow, an incurable wound of loss and yearning, in the knowledge that it came so soon to an end and remains to this day a place of strife and unbelief?

O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,
And careful hours with time’s deformèd hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face.
But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?9

To be continued in Part 2…

In 1450, Jack Cade led a major rebellion against the English government. He was a skillful mischief-maker who had some success as a violent revolutionary, but before long he lost popular support, was captured, and died a lonely death. In Shakespeare’s rendition of the events, Cade takes refuge in the forest after his rebellion fails, hiding there without food for the better part of a week before sallying forth and making the best of his wretched lot. He comes across a Kentish gentleman named Alexander Iden and then threatens him; Iden isn’t about to be abused by some vulgar nobody that just crawled out of the woods: “Why, rude companion, whatsoe’er thou be, / I know thee not…. / But thou wilt brave me with these saucy terms?” Cade, perhaps somewhat maddened by hunger, defies him: “Brave thee? Ay, … I have eat no meat these five days.” A swordfight ensues, and Cade’s mischief-making comes to an abrupt end. Before he breathes his last, he is able to declare (with fine Shakespearean diction) that “famine, and no other, hath slain me.”

Much could be said about this scene; our concern here is Cade’s fast. Modern readers might look askance at Shakespeare’s suggestion that a man who has eaten nothing for five days could walk through the woods, and climb the wall of a gentleman’s garden, and even draw his sword against a well-fed man and then fight him to the death. Is this just another case of Shakespearean fancy? Is it yet another moment when the Bard seems decidedly uninterested in plausibility?

Not at all—though Cade likely would have felt an overpowering urge to find sustenance, his actual energy levels would probably have been normal. In fact, if he had a bit of extra flesh on his body when he first wandered off into the woods, he might have been in excellent physical condition at the end of those five days.

I’ll go even further. I have personally observed someone voluntarily eat nothing—nothing—for much longer than five days, leading a normal active life the entire time, and with physiological benefit rather than harm. Oh, the marvels of the human body! It was designed, with perfection and complexity beyond all comprehension, by a good and loving God, who knew that “to all things there is a season”: a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to eat, and a time to fast.

Disclaimers:

1. My intention here is to give knowledge, not medical advice (or any other type of advice). Bodies are different and sometimes react to things, especially new things, in unpredictable ways. I am of the opinion that we modern folks could be a bit bolder in our pursuit of (physical or spiritual) health, but prudence and caution, combined with carefully listening to the body, are nonetheless essential.

2. This is emphatically not a “five reasons why you should be fasting” type of article (perish the thought!). I’m not a physician, and I’m not a priest; ascetic practices, for the body or the soul, involve personal decisions that are none of my business. I am, however, an educator, and my objective here is simply to educate. More specifically, I want to share valuable information and thought-provoking perspectives that are grievously underrepresented in current discussions of health and spirituality, and which have the potential for truly life-changing, even life-saving, effects.

Part of my interest in this topic derives (as you may have guessed) from medieval culture, in which fasting—practiced on a staggering scale, year after year after year, by peasants and kings and everyone in between—was an issue of great religious and social importance; Tuesday’s post will continue this discussion by exploring the history and significance of fasting in the Middle Ages. And let me state clearly that I mean fasting in the strict and basic sense: I refer not to temporary renunciation of chocolate, or abstinence from meat, or the consumption of bland food, or meals of reduced size, or any such thing. I refer to eliminating meals and snacks, such that nothing whatsoever is eaten for a significant portion of the day (or in extreme cases, for multiple days).

As you may already know, the Via Mediaevalis newsletter is not fundamentally about how people lived in the medieval world; it is fundamentally about how we live in the modern world. However, we seek inspiration and guidance from medieval Christendom because it is an era that utterly surpassed our own in many important ways, and that supplies a perpetual and incomparable feast for the eyes, the intellect, and the imagination.

What medieval Christendom did not do is supply a perpetual feast for the stomach. Lent and vigils and Ember fasts came around with (perhaps disconcerting) regularity, and members of monastic communities seriously restricted food intake for large portions of the year. I am perfectly willing to accept that we, for various reasons, should not or cannot fast as our medieval brethren did. But we should nonetheless seek to learn from their fasts, and we can do that more easily if we understand fasting not only as an ascetic practice but also as a physiological and psychological phenomenon.

In 1965, a “grossly obese young man” living in Scotland sought medical assistance for weight loss. He began a short fast and felt fine; since he wanted to reach a desirable weight more quickly, he decided to extend the fast. When all was said and done, he had lost 276 pounds. He ate nothing for 382 consecutive days. I didn’t get this story from the rumor mill; my source is a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal. The patient freely drank non-caloric fluids, used daily vitamin supplementation but not much mineral supplementation, and was under medical supervision. The authors of the paper concluded that “prolonged fasting in this patient had no ill-effects.”

For a long time, fasting scared me. I vaguely imagined that missing a meal or two would do something bad to me. I’m not even sure what exactly—maybe I would faint? or have crippling stomach cramps? or get scurvy and die? Who knows. It hardly mattered, though, because food was always available and I have never been overweight, or anything close to overweight. Mine is the opposite problem: poor appetite, poor digestion, poor muscular development. I’m currently 6'1'' and 155 pounds; the photo below gives you an idea of how very thin I am. From a psychological standpoint, extended fasting is still a struggle for me, because I have so little fat to burn and dearly want to retain the small amount of muscle that I manage to build through weight training. I nonetheless have done a great deal of fasting in an attempt to overcome chronic illness, and my body adapted to it extremely well.

A big fasting breakthrough for me was just understanding the math. One pound of human body fat contains about 3500 calories of energy. Compare that number to the energy required by the human body each day: for most adults, the number is somewhere between 1600 and 3000 calories. Those figures are somewhat misleading, because when food intake is restricted, the body (quite reasonably) goes into energy-conservation mode and thus needs fewer calories. However, let’s ignore that for now and just use 2500 calories as a representative daily energy requirement. We see immediately that eating absolutely nothing for an entire day will burn not even one pound of fat—only about 0.7 pounds (2500 ÷ 3500 = 0.71) is needed to get through the day with normal energy levels. This number has been verified experimentally. The young man mentioned above, for example, lost weight at an average rate of 0.72 pounds per day, and other long-term fasts that had been studied at the time achieved weight-loss rates of 0.41 and 0.67 pounds per day. The 0.41 number indicates that the patient’s body used only about 1400 calories per day. (Note that dramatic weight loss at the beginning of a fast occurs because fasting stimulates natural diuresis; someone who abruptly stops eating might lose five pounds of water weight before burning one pound of fat.)

A healthy, well-fed adult will typically have at least 15% body fat; in a modern affluent society the number will often be much higher. But let’s say a 180-pound man has 15% body fat: that’s 27 pounds of total fat reserves, and 27 pounds ÷ 0.7 pounds per day ≈ 38 days. In other words, this person would have to eat absolutely nothing for 38 days in order to burn all the fat on his body. I realize that zero percent body fat is a very bad place to be, but the point is, the human body stores a lot more energy than we sometimes think.

Another example: let’s say a 200-pound Christian with 20% body fat (= 40 pounds total fat) wants to eat only one meal per day every day during Lent. This is a prolonged fast, and we’ll assume that the body gets a little worried and decides to conserve energy by lowering the metabolic rate. The average daily energy requirement is thus reduced to about 2000 calories, and if the (understandably hungry) penitent brings in 1000 calories at the one daily meal, that’s a deficit of 1000 calories per day, or about 0.3 pounds of body fat. Thus, total fat loss after forty days of Lent will be only 12 pounds, out of the original 40 pounds! I think that many people would be delighted to lose 12 pounds, and if the one meal is wholesome and nutrient-dense, it should provide adequate vitamins and minerals for most non-pregnant, non-lactating adults. If the penitent added an evening collation to the regimen and ate heartily on Sundays, he or she might look and weigh much the same on Easter Sunday as on Shrove Tuesday.

I apologize if this section has been somewhat dull and technical, but there is a crucial message here: the traditional Lenten fast is remarkably feasible from a physiological standpoint. Medieval folks in general ate quite well during most of the year, and there was no reason for them to worry about losing five or ten or even fifteen pounds during Lent—especially considering that Lent was preceded by the Christmas-Epiphany feasting season and followed by the Easter feasting season.

None of this information, I hasten to add, suggests that fasting is easy. Though the body may endure calorie restriction (and even temporary starvation) with relative ease, the mind wants food. Our desire to eat—a strong and sometimes overpowering primal urge—is rooted not only in metabolic needs but also in the emotional, social, and spiritual facets of our being. Fasting is, and always has been, hard. It is, and always will be, a penance. There’s no way around it.

Faith was almost universal in the Middle Ages; heroic sanctity was not. It is unwise to sever ourselves from the pious or penitential practices of the noble past by assuming, perhaps subconsciously, that modern bodies and souls just can’t do what medieval Christians did. Today I have attempted to briefly demonstrate that, generally speaking, the strict and extended fasts of the Middle Ages pose no threat to bodily health and will not lead to catastrophic weight loss or severe fatigue. Indeed, many people nowadays are fasting in a rather Lenten way simply because they want to improve their health, and we should be thankful that modern science is confirming ancient wisdom—namely, that fasting is one of the safest, most efficacious, and most widely applicable therapies in existence.

The information I’ve shared today is, in my life, neither a burden nor a guilt-trip. It is simply freedom: the freedom to skip a meal or two when eating is inconvenient; the freedom to help my body detoxify without spending any money; and yes, the freedom to fast as my medieval forebears did. In the eleventh century, the progenitor of the Keim family fled the world and lived as a goat-herding hermit in the Alps, and his son fought in the First Crusade. These sound like people who made fasting an important part of their life, and I’m glad that it can, in some small way, be a part of my life as well.

Exaggerated accounts of peasant life as poverty-stricken and brutally laborious might give the impression that medieval folks were so busy dodging starvation that they had no time for growing herbs and vegetables. Actual records of the period give a different impression. We see cultivated plants everywhere—in food, clothing, construction materials, medicine, and various forms of cultural expression. The Welsh even made leeks an emblem of their national identity. (The Welsh soldier Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V punishes the knavish character Pistol by forcing him to eat a raw leek; the scene is comical but also shows respect to decorative leeks as an “ancient tradition” of Wales.) The historian Deirdre Larkin provides an apt and memorable summary: “There is no aspect of medieval life—artistic, literary, social historic, economical, religious or scientific—that cannot be approached through plants and gardens.”

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A few physicians at the controversial, cutting edge of alternative medicine now make bold statements about disease as a fundamentally spiritual phenomenon. Natasha Campbell-McBride, for example, has been a doctor for forty years, with experience as a nutritionist, a neurologist, and a brain surgeon. She recently wrote this:

Love is a universal energy that creates perfection and harmony.... Without love, there is no healing.... After watching thousands of people heal, I have no doubt that chronic disease comes to us when we need to learn something important on a spiritual level—when we need to evolve spiritually. Disease is a spiritual lesson.

Whether you find these ideas intriguing or outlandish, they are an astonishing departure from the biochemical, mechanistic model of human health that has informed Western medicine for a long time. They are also a fascinating rebirth of attitudes that dominated medical theory and practice during the Middle Ages.

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The full title of John’s poem is “song of the soul that delights in knowing God by faith.” At its heart, ringing steadily from stanza to stanza like a church bell, is one word, one syllable, one sound: sé (“I know”). We must not forget how immense the privilege, how profound the pleasure, of knowing God. Here on earth we cannot know Him as the saints and angels do, but because of the Incarnation, our knowledge nonetheless may attain a remarkable degree of perfection. May the grace of this Christmas season help to make us a little less unworthy of this magnificent gift.

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I read it again, and I really liked it ;-)

Year after year after year of reading books and articles and news reports on so many different aspects of the Christian religion, and yet I’ve never seen the problem articulated in quite the way I have in mind. Maybe that’s a sign that I’m just wrong. Or maybe this is common knowledge that I’ve somehow never come across, and that is too obvious to merit discussion.

I’m going to discuss it anyway.

The Christian religion, despite vicious persecutions and a variety of logistical impediments, took the ancient world by storm. The culmination of this momentous, civilizational rebirth was the youthful period that we call the Middle Ages—one thousand years during which virtually everyone in western Europe believed in and practiced Christianity. To “believe in and practice Christianity” is not to be a saint. There was no shortage of sinners and scoundrels in medieval society. But the sinners, at least in their better moments, were mindful of the God who abhorred their iniquity and hoped for their conversion. And the scoundrels, probably even in their worst moments, wanted to have faith and to be a part of the vast Christian family that surrounded them. Those who didn’t were few in number and belonged to one of two general categories: Muslims and Jews who had no interest in renouncing their ancestral religion, and residual pagans, whose descendants would eventually embrace the Gospel and entrust their lives to a world so overflowing with Christ that it was not a kingdom but rather a Christendom.

The sixteenth century was the long and complex transition from medieval to modern society. The early modern period, however, was still intensely religious. Despite the gradual ascent of secular values—commercialism, humanism, nationalism—it was still shocking and scandalous when, for example, a public figure like Christopher Marlowe dabbled (allegedly) in atheism. The Scientific Revolution came along and made Christianity look rather unscientific, but belief remained crucial to personal and social life. The Enlightenment brought skepticism to new levels and painted historical Christianity as hopelessly unenlightened, and yet, the Christian experience mysteriously endured—even Voltaire, that monumental crusader against the “infamy” of non-Voltairean Christianity, “built a Catholic chapel on his property and attended Mass. He sent his workers to Mass and had their children taught the Catholic catechism. He accompanied his solitary meals with sermon readings. He was an active member of a Catholic lay order. He put in writing that he wanted a Catholic burial.”1

But then, after a revival of sorts in the nineteenth century, a process of unprecedented—I say again, unprecedented—dissolution began. Soon there were immense segments of the Western population who regarded anything resembling historical Christianity as simply impossible. The cultural descendants of Christendom somehow developed an overpowering blind spot where the Christian religion once was: they could not believe it, could not practice it, could scarcely even fathom its existence.

We are in the late stages of this process, the results of which I need not describe. You see them all around you.

The religious and spiritual state of postmodern society is a complex reality that has emerged from an equally complex interplay of historical forces. I have no intention of denying or downplaying any of that complexity.

At the same time, though, the fundamental message of Christianity is simple, and perhaps it’s worth our while to think in simple ways about the fundamental problems of Christianity in modern culture. My proposal—which is built from many years of formal education and personal experience, and which, as I mentioned above, seems to be largely absent from discussions of this nature—is as follows:

Christianity is, quite simply, too good to be true.

Now let me make that more specific:

For a world without joy—a world that has largely forgotten how to be deeply, vibrantly, communally joyful—Christianity is too good to be true.

A providential, fatherly Creator who made us out of nothing and breathed His life into us and loves us with an infinite love? A God who became a Man so that He could teach us and heal us and enamor us and die for us? Forgiveness of sins, even the worst sins, even seventy times seven of the worst sins? The deep, psychologically transformative pleasure of knowing with certainty that some things are true and some things are false? A bare minimum of non-negotiable religious duties, all of which are perfectly consonant with basic human happiness, and one of which involves a single day of the week when we are “obligated” to practice leisure and attend a liturgical service that is—that should be—a delightful experience appealing powerfully to the intellect, the memory, the poetic sense, and all five physical senses?

Divine compassion for illness, pain, poverty, sorrow? The sublimation of suffering, which imparts transcendent value to afflictions that we all must endure anyway? The destruction of death, which need no longer be feared? The possibility of reuniting with deceased friends and family?

The hope of perfect, unalterable, everlasting joy and celebration in a celestial paradise?

How many people nowadays look out from their world—at its worst, a nihilistic, agnostic, consumeristic, relativistic, dehumanized, roboticized, skeptical, pragmatical, isolated, fragmented, increasingly substance-enhanced and tragically despair-ridden world—and simply say “No.” Christianity is implausible, improbable, inconceivable. It’s a fairly tale, a myth, a dream. Nothing that hopeful could be real. Nothing that good could be true.

Sometime in the fourteenth century, a curious event occurred in the history of the English language. The Old English word wuldor, which was the standard equivalent to Latin gloria (or Greek doxa) had gradually faded away, and English writers of the late Middle Ages found themselves without a word for “glory.” What to do?

Modern Englishmen would have filled the gap by importing a word from the Continent. But medieval Englishmen came up with a different solution: they took a related word and enriched its meaning. Which word did they choose? “Joy.”

We see examples of this in a fourteenth-century translation of the Latin Psalter into Middle English:

minuisti eum paulominus ab angelis: gloria et honore coronasti eum
thou lessid hym a litel fra aungels: with ioy and honour thou coround him

caeli enarrant gloriam dei
heuens tillis the ioy of God

et gloriabuntur in te omnes qui diligunt nomen tuum
and ioy sall all in thee that lufis thi name

We see it in the mystical text Scale of Perfection, by the Augustinian Canon Walter Hilton (d. 1396), when he comments on a Latin text and expresses the idea of the gloria of the Lord:

We … bihalden, as in a miror, heuenly ioye ful schapin and onyd [united] to þe ymage of Oure Lord.

We find it even in a translation of a very familiar prayer:

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, þat is, Ioye to þe Fadir, Sone, and Holy Goost.

This word was not chosen by accident. It was chosen because joy is not just an idea, and is much more than a feeling, and is not incompatible with the travails and misfortunes of our earthly pilgrimage. Joy is a social experience, an act of the will, a religious practice, a heavenly reality. It is, or at least it used to be, a way of life.

In the High and Late Middle Ages, the practice of Christianity was universal; the birth of the Incarnate God was a historical fact that informed and spiritualized the entirety of human civilization; Christmas began on Christmas; and the season of Christmas continued into January, with joy-filled revelry and feasting on a scale that is, for us, unimaginable.

In my corner of the modern world, the practice of Christianity is a withered, distorted shadow of its former self; the commercial Christmas emerges sometime in October; the season of Christmas, which in spiritual terms never really began, ends on December 26th; and the post-Christmas period is notorious for widespread loneliness, disappointment, and depression.

Authentic Christianity brings joy. But let’s not forget the converse of that statement: authentic joy brings Christianity. We need more of both.

How to recover them? Well, that’s the hard part. Returning to a more medieval Christmas would be an excellent way to start. And when it comes to stirring up some deeply human joy in a weary human heart, dancing works wonders—so I guess I’ll conclude with some advice borrowed from Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act 5, scene 2:

In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.

Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same people, by the way, had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt.

On Sunday I expressed my dismay at the neglect of—or even the fear of?—liturgical darkness in the churches of the twenty-first century. Why do we so diligently illuminate our sacred spaces as though they are living rooms or lecture halls? A double row of multi-bulb lamps, running the entire length of the nave, far exceeds what is necessary for reading a hymnal or a missal. In many cases, a total absence of electric lighting would not impede this; natural illumination from windows is surprisingly effective when one allows the eyes to adjust and then reads slowly and thoughtfully—as befits a book that is merely a supplement to, not a replacement for, the all-encompassing sensorial experience of divine worship. And this is to say nothing of the spotlights, perhaps a formidable array of them, directed at the sanctuary. How much light does the priest need to read from the Missale Romanum? And is it not somehow unsatisfying to see the flames of the altar candles reduced to flickering ornaments, useless for illumination amidst the flood of electrical whiteness?

Are we afraid? Do we fear dimness, so conducive to reflection and recollection, in this age of light-bearing screens and merciless notifications and brightly colored pixels dancing on command like maniacal jesters in the royal court of the unreal? “We piped unto you,” say the children of the Gospel parable, “and ye did not dance.” The children of today have no need for such complaints.

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But this essay is different. This essay is about something that can be done, and done easily, and done today. No nostalgia, no radical commitment to tradition, no papal dispensation is required. In the worst case, some electrical work might be needed. In the best case, all it takes is someone with the authority, and the willingness, to flip a few switches from on to off.

The Dark Ages—that’s the outmoded name for the Middle Ages, or for the first half of the Middle Ages. It’s not taken too seriously anymore. The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

The term Dark Ages was commonly used by 19th-century historians. However, as knowledge of the history and culture of the period increased, the negative connotations of the term began to be questioned; it is now more commonly used in popular rather than technical discourse. The term is now also frequently reconceptualized, as referring to a period for which historical evidence is relatively scant.

It was a judgmental, derogatory label for an era that produced the sort of darkness you see here:

And here:

And here:

But as some of you know, I like the term, because I like darkness, if we have it when and where it ought to be. I like darkness at night, when I want to see the stars, not the wall-sized television glowing in my neighbor’s “living” room. I like darkness in the evening, when I’m reading to my children, and hoping that for a little while they will see less, and imagine more. And I like darkness in church, when my principal objective is prayer, and when the person I most want to see is illuminated by candles, and when the God whom I am there to seek is already perfect Light unto my soul.

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Lesson 17: propers and readings for the feast of the Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior: introit | epistle | gradual | Gospel

Lesson 18: uses of Latin noun cases | the dative of possession | the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 19: thoughts on vocabulary acquisition | past and future of esse (“to be”) | imperfect tense of esse | future tense of esse | the last Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 20: the first stanza of Rorate Caeli

Lesson 21: compounding of verbs (preposition + verb) | Rorate Caeli: second stanza

Lesson 22: passive-voice verb endings | an overview of the passive voice in general | Latin’s passive personal endings

Click here for a list of all the previous lessons.

The O Antiphons seem to be fairly well known these days, but in case you’re not familiar, they are prayers that the Church sings as part of Vespers during the final days of Advent. There are seven of them, with one being assigned to each day from December 17th to December 23rd. Since we’re now in the midst of the O Antiphon stage of Advent, I’ll dedicate this post to the first three of these seven prayers. I’ll give the Latin version, a literally translated English version, and a few explanatory comments to help you use these texts for language study.

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Medieval mysticism was a diverse collection of intense spiritual experiences, but the prototype for these experiences is found above all in one occurrence that comes, fittingly, from Sacred Scripture.

Medieval Christians were serious about understanding their lives through an all-encompassing biblical lens. I don’t want to say that they read and interpreted the Bible with the sort of ruthless literalism that gained popularity in the early modern period; they focused less on each individual Bible verse being true in the literal sense, and more on the entire Bible being true in every sense. The Bible for them was a coherent world of thoughts and stories, of persons and events, of laws and precepts, of prophecies and mysteries. And like the material world, to which they related much more holistically than we do, the biblical world possessed multiple interrelated dimensions of truth and reality.

I might attempt to summarize this with a hypothetical scenario: I sit down with a medieval monk and we read a confusing or difficult passage of Scripture. He offers me varied reflections on the passage, touching on allegorical and moral aspects of the text and maybe commenting on the historical context and writing style. I ponder his words for a time but, being a modern man accustomed to a more dissection-like exegesis, I ask him to expound upon the literal meaning. He says a few things, mostly of a meditative nature, then stops and looks at me, pensively. I’m not satisfied: “But is this literally true?” It’s hard to tell, but it seems that he’s not sure what to say. Eventually he speaks: “My poor modern friend, the truth is One.”

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Lesson 16: present tense conjugations | conjugation practice | vocab

Lesson 17: propers and readings for the feast of the Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior: introit | epistle | gradual | Gospel

Lesson 18: uses of Latin noun cases | the dative of possession | the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 19: thoughts on vocabulary acquisition | past and future of esse (“to be”) | imperfect tense of esse | future tense of esse | the last Sunday after Pentecost

Lesson 20: the first stanza of Rorate Caeli

Lesson 21: compounding of verbs (preposition + verb) | Rorate Caeli: second stanza

Click here for a list of all the previous lessons.

Passive-Voice Verb Endings

Back in Lesson 16, we studied present-tense conjugations for all four categories of Latin verbs. When I say “present tense” in a context like this one, it is shorthand for a more precise yet awkwardly long series of words: “present-tense conjugations” actually means “present-tense, indicative-mood, active-voice conjugations.” This level of precision is necessary because in Latin, it’s not just tense (past, present, future, etc.) that influences the form of the word; mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) and voice (active or passive) must also be considered. Today I want to introduce the verb endings for passive-voice verbs, and it’s about time anyway, because these verb forms are very common in liturgical Latin.

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