Medieval and Modern contrasted - by Thomas Howard

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From Chance or the Dance? A critique of modern secularism by Thomas Howard, 1969.

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There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark.

They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.

Men believed in things like the Last Judgment and fiery torment. They believed that demented people had devils in them, and that disease was a plague from heaven. They believed that they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some bearing on the way in which they would finally experience reality. They believed in portents and charms and talismans. And they believed that God was in heaven and Beelzebub in hell and that the Holy Ghost had impregnated the Virgin Mary and that the earth and sky were full of angelic and demonic conflict.

Altogether, life was very weighty, and there was no telling what might lie behind things. The ages were, as I say, dark.


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Then the light came. It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age.

Charms, angels, devils, plagues, and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit.

Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them, scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer.

Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things.

The age was called enlightened.

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The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

That is, to the darkened mind it did not mean nothing that the sun went down and night came and the moon and stars appeared and then dawn and the sun and morning again and another day, which would itself wax and then wane into twilight and dusk and night. It did not mean nothing to them that the time of work was under the aegis of the bright sun and that it was the sun that poured life into the seeds that they were planting and that brought out the sweat on their foreheads, and that the time of rest was under the scepter of the silver moon.

This was the diurnal exhibition of what was True—that there are a panoply and a rhythm and a cycle, a waxing and a waning, a rising and a setting and then a rising again. And to them it was not for nothing that the king wore a crown of gold and that the lord mayor wore medallions. This was the political exhibition of what was, in fact, True—that there are royalty and authority and hierarchy at the heart of things and that it is possible to see this in lions and eagles and queen bees as well as in the court of the king.

To them it was not for nothing that a man went in to a woman in private and uncovered her and knew ecstasy in the experience of her being. This was simply a case in point of what was True anyway—that there is a mystery of being not to be thrown open to all, and that the right knowledge of another being is ecstatic, and that what appears under these carnal forms is, in fact, the image of what is actually True.

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The former mind, in a word, read vast significance into everything. Nature and politics and animals and sex—these were all exhibitions in their own way of sex-these were all exhibitions in their own way of the way things are.

This mind fancied that everything meant everything, and that it all rushed up finally to heaven. We have an idea of royalty, this mind said, which we observe in our politics and which we attribute to lions and eagles, and we have this idea because there is a great King at the top of things, and he has set things thus so that our fancies will be drawn toward his royal Person, and we will recognize the hard realities of which the stuff of our world has been a poor shadow when we stumble into his royal court.

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So this mind handled all the data of experience as though they were images—cases in point, that is, of each other and of the way things are. So that when they came across the idea, say, of the incarnation of the god, it made perfect sense to them, since it was in the nature of things to appear in images—royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers, delicacy in butterflies and fawns, terror in oceans and thunder, glory in roses and sunsets—so of course the god might appear in flesh and blood, how else?

And when they heard about a thing like resurrection, they could believe it, since they thought they could see the same thing (life issuing from death) in other realms—seedtime and harvest, and morning and evening, and renunciation and reward—and so what else did it all mean but that it is the way things are that life triumphs over death?

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This mind saw things as images because it saw correspondences running in all directions among things.

That is, the world was not a random tumble of things all appearing separately, jostling one another and struggling helter-skelter for a place in the sun. On the contrary, one thing signaled another. One thing was a case in point of another.

A goshawk tearing a field mouse seemed a case in point of what is also visible in the fierce duke who plunders the neighboring duchy. A lamb was an instance of timidity, mildness, harmlessness. The earth receiving life from the sun and bringing forth grass and trees and nourishing everything from itself was like all the other mothers we can observe—doves and ewes and our own mothers.

The inclination to trace correspondences among things transfigured those things—goshawks, lambs, the earth, kings—into images of one another, so that on all levels it was felt that this suggested that.

It is a way of looking at things that goes farther than saying that this is like that: it says that both this and that are instances of the way things are. The sun pours energy into the earth and the man pours energy into the woman because that is how fruit begins—by the union of the one thing and the other; by the union of what appears under stellar categories as sun and earth, and under human categories as man and woman.

That is, in both instances, there is enacted under the appropriate species what lies at the root of things.

From Chance or the Dance? A critique of modern secularism by Thomas Howard, 1969


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COMMENT

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

This aphorism, and the passage as a whole, highlights that we are dealing with a metaphysical change: a change in the basic assumptions by which experience is organized; a change in what constitutes knowledge and not a change due to knowledge.

This change seems to have been led from 'the top': from the intellectual class. It is the intellectuals who first and most whole-heartedly embraced the idea that nothing means anything.

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But why did intellectuals rebel against the inbuilt, inborn, natural, spontaneous, universal and necessary human assumption that everything means everything?

In principle this might be due to a push or a pull. Intellectuals might either be repelled by 'everything means everything', or they might be attracted by 'nothing means anything'.

My feeling is that it was the attraction of 'nothing means anything', the attraction of using this as a weapon against... against whoever or whatever stood in the path of the gratification of intellectuals.

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That seems to me to be the big story of general intellectual history during the past millennium: an unrelenting series of writings, paintings, theatre, movies - all by intellectuals using the 'nothing means anything' argument against persons and institutions who oppose them.

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Intellectuals use this wholly general argument against specific persons and institutions without realizing (or caring?) that in doing so they are destroying all possibility of meaning, purpose and connection in life.

It is the endemic un-willingness to apply their knock-down metaphysical 'argument' to their own ideas which indicates that general intellectual activity has been and remains fundamentally unserious.

It is the endemic inability to recognize that their short-term knock-down metaphysical 'argument' over the longer term destroys not just their enemies, but also themselves (destroys in fact - the world and reason for existing) which indicates that general intellectual activity has been and remains fundamentally incompetent.   

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Although there are a few exceptions, intellectual activity has been, for hundreds of years, at root un-serious and incompetent; or if you prefer spiteful and reckless...

The mass of intellectual activity is not a noble thing, as often asserted and assumed; it is in contrast a prideful thing - and this applies as much or more to the geniuses as to the intellectual footsoldiers .

Therefore, to assert the intrinsic worth of intellectual activity per se is merely to make a blanket excuse for pride; to assert the intrinsic value of power - to excuse generation upon generation of ingrained impulsive malice.

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And that is the 'reason' for the metaphysical shift from everything means everything to nothing means anything.


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