Modernity boost through the Middle Ages

The university was invented during this period and the idea of "education" as a life-long endeavour was born: The Middle Ages were nowhere near as medieval as many people think. Especially as there is no such thing as "the" Middle Ages.
BY PROF. DR. JOHANN KREUZER
In the debates triggered by the terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, the atrocities committed by IS or Boko Haram, the warning of a relapse into 'the Middle Ages' has become a standard metaphorical element. The adjective 'medieval' stands for terribly dark times that have fortunately been overcome. This is understandable in view of the current horrors that we do not want to fall victim to. But was the metaphorically invoked Middle Ages as medieval as the pejorative use of the adjective suggests? It was not. The singular alone is a crude distortion: 'The' Middle Ages do not exist in the epoch it is used to describe. It would also have seemed strange to contemporaries living in this period - at least 1000 years, if you count from the 5th to the 15th century - to think of themselves as living in a middle epoch that was to be overcome by a coming 'modern age'. The schematisation of antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times arose in Europe for legitimisation purposes: A good origin (antiquity) is followed by a deplorable period of decay, which it was or is necessary to overcome in a return to the origin - whereby one's own present appears justified as an exit from a 'dark' intermediate period (in the 'middle', the medium aevus).

"One could almost conclude that the Middle Ages began as the first self-aware modernity."
While this construct may be arbitrary in terms of the history of ideas, there is also a point of reference to substantiate it. It is rather unspectacular, but all the more profound for that. In the
4. In the fourth century, the ancient papyrus scroll was replaced by the parchment codex as a medium of cultural transmission - a revolution comparable to the printing with movable type that initiated the modern era and marked the end of 'the' Middle Ages. The epochal sequence 'antiquity-medieval-modern times' can thus be read as an exaggeration of the change in the storage media of cultural memory. The adjective "modernus", derived from the adverb "modo" ('now'), has been documented since the 5th century. The Latin word for 'old' is "antiquus": 'antiquity' thus arises at the same time as a consciousness that understands itself at a distance from it as now, i.e. modernus. One could almost conclude that the Middle Ages began as the first self-aware modernity - as a surge of modernity that was followed by countless others up to the respective 'newest' modern era.

The assessment or pejorative slander that the Middle Ages were a monolithic block of pre-rational gloom is inappropriate from its very beginning. This is because it begins as a highly contradictory process of appropriation and transformation of the most diverse preconceptions of meaning (various religious and philosophical ones) and continues accordingly in divergent lines of development and breaks in development. This can be illustrated by a few dates or names: Augustine versus Boethius at the beginning - Abelard versus Bernard of Clairvaux later - high scholasticism and its summation in Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century - shortly afterwards the imagination of a structure of order that attempts to integrate historical experience and the forms of dealing with it in Dante - finally, in the 14th century, the origin of the developments that lead from William of Ockham to the modern understanding of knowledge and science: All of this is that 'Middle Ages' without which Europe would not exist and the understanding of reason coupled with rationality and enlightenment certainly not.

"The Crusades and their atrocities are still etched in the cultural memory of the Arab world today."
No era or cultural area should be glossed over. There is no "document of culture" that is not "at the same time a document of barbarism" (Walter Benjamin). The period of the Middle Ages as an epoch demonstrates this in an exemplary manner, perhaps most incisively in the case of the Crusades. Their atrocities are still etched in the cultural memory of the Arab world today. Now there were not only crusades that reached outwards (as seen from Central Europe), but also crusades within Europe, combined with Jewish pogroms, which have been epidemically shaking Christian Europe since the 12th century. The wounds inflicted and left behind by these internal imperial declarations of enmity are part of the cultural memory of 'Europe' (or should be part of it).

As a specifically 'medieval' achievement, however, we should also realise what was to be learned in dealing with the violence caused by power-political and religious fundamentalisms. The fact that subsequent European history itself fell massively short of the standard it achieved is not an argument against it, on the contrary. This also includes the point that the darkness and atrocities evoked by the use of the adjective 'medieval' - the horrors of the Inquisition from 1500 onwards, the excesses of the witch hunts that began shortly afterwards, the misuse of the adjective 'divine' to mask oppression and despotism: that all of this, such as the Thirty Years' War, for example, refers to post-medieval dates if we take a closer look at the dating. Obviously, the resulting fear of a relapse into anti-civilisational violence is so deeply rooted in cultural memory that the disasters of reason experienced in the process, as well as the associated rendering of religious layers of experience and expectation useless, are projected back to a time 'before'.

"The spirit of the epoch is most evident in the institution of the university."

When asked what can be done to prevent a relapse into anti-civilisational violence, the best answer from this time before - the pre-modern era of the Middle Ages - is the institution in which the 'spirit' of this epoch is perhaps most evident. That is the institution of the university. If modernity is the word that accompanies the beginning of the Middle Ages, then the university is the 'invention' in which its spirit is expressed: 1088 Bologna, circa 1150 Oxford, 1209 Cambridge, circa 1215 Paris (Sorbonne), 1222 Padua, 1240 Siena, 1303 Rome (La sapienza), 1348 Prague, 1365 Vienna, etc. - all founding dates that also reflect, with a slight time lag, the fact that cities became centres of social understanding from the 11th/12th century onwards.

What is achieved here as a standard can also be seen in a new word from the 14th century: From then on, there is the word 'education' and with it the life-historical claim for which it stands. In view of the 'overcoming' of education through technically controllable competences such as the erosion of the university as a place of free universitas studiorum, we can only remind ourselves of this. If we do so, we are reminded of a medieval achievement. This may make it clear that civilisational standards are not vested rights, but are threatened and endangered at all times. Achievements of civilisation are based on an awareness of necessity: we should make them present, especially when they appear to be a thing of the past. For this reason - not in the sense of 'going back to' - the presence of the past is needed.

Freud pointed out the danger posed by the return of the repressed. Only the ability to deal with the data of one's own history can help against this. Without this intracultural skill, the dialogue between cultures and the religious ferments that impregnate them is unlikely to be possible. This is precisely where it is important not to suppress differences, but to understand them in order to learn to differentiate. This is why we need a sense of the presence of the past.

Prof Dr Johann Kreuzer is a university lecturer in philosophy.