Top forties in yellow
Christianity
and the Medieval Mind
I.
The Centrality and Authority of “Unam Sanctum”: the
·
From
birth to death: the role of the 7 sacraments (Fiero
93)
·
Instruments
of power: excommunication and the Inquisition (110)
·
Enormously
wealthy and largest landowner in
II.
Varieties of Religious Experience: Parallels with the movement from Romanesque to Gothic
Architecture
|
“Scaring
the hell out of sinners”: the
heavy emphasis of sermon literature on human mortality and sin: Innocent III’s “On the Misery of the Human Condition” (96-97)—a memento mori |
“Gothic” Gentler
calls to Faith: the prominence of Mary as intercessor. St. Francis and the
mendicant life, a life of humility, poverty, simplicity, and reverence for
God’s creation: “The Canticle of Brother Sun” (111-112) |
III. Reconciling Faith
and Reason: Early Harbingers of Humanism
·
Returning
Crusaders introduce Arabic numbering and the decimal system to
·
The
Rise of the Medieval University (112-113):
--Liberal arts curriculum: the trivium
(grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium
(arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music)
--Ultimately all education led to religious orders
--Oral method of education
--Students controlled the salaries and teaching
schedules of their professors!
·
Medieval
Scholasticism (113-115):
--Methods of rational inquiry applied to spiritual
matters
--Ontological “proofs” of God’s existence
--The supreme example of the Dominican theologian
and Scholastic Thomas Aquinas. Note comprehensiveness and the use of the
dialectical method: objection→answer→reply
IV.
Allegory and the Medieval Imagination
Allegory: an extended symbolic
narrative, often with more than one level of interpretation. As a didactic kind of literature, allegory asks the
reader to move beyond the literal level of the story to grasp a higher,
symbolic level of meaning. Some simple
examples:
·
Everyman, the morality play, and
personification
A bit more complex: Hildegard
of Bingen’s Visions from the Scivias (95).
Hildegard’s
visions are more difficult to interpret because they are intensely personal and
mystic, often transgressing literal and naturalistic representation. It’s perfectly clear what the great lake
“breathing forth a stinking fiery smoke” (91) represents, but what about “the
form of a man” and the “loathsome fog” that follows (96-97)? In the second
vision, it’s clear enough that the great “One sitting on the
mountain” (64) is Christ or the voice of revelation (or both), but what about
the “figure full of eyes everywhere” (52-53)?
the boy “in the pale tunic and white shoes”
(57-58)? the men appearing in little windows on the
way up the iron mountain? The assumption
guiding mystic presentation of divine truths is that they transcend ordinary
moral apprehension or even understanding; they instead appear in flashes of
insight granted by divine illumination!
The Grand-daddy of All Allegories: Dante’s Divine Comedy
The allegorical method of reading
scripture arose from two impulses: 1) to provide a seamless unity of Old and
New Testaments by reading events and characters in the Old as an allegorical prefiguration of events and characters in the New; 2) to
provide an order for conflicting interpretations of biblical passages.
The Four-fold Levels of
Interpretation:
↑ anagogic (in
terms of final things: heaven and/or the
Second Coming)
↑ moral (in
terms of the individual soul)
↑ allegorical
(in terms of Christ’s life)
↑ literal,
historical
These levels comprise a hierarchy, an order
moving one from bottom to top: reading purposefully and symbolically moves one
from the literal to the spiritual. For an example of hierarchical layering
similar to that of the four-fold levels, see the order
of a nave wall (Fiero 125).
Dante’s Inferno
Map
of Dante’s Inferno: punishment of sins teaches reader about the
nature of the sin (symbolic
retribution)
Know your threes!
Inferno . . . Purgatory . . .
33 + 1=34 . . . . . 33 . . . . . .
. . . . .33
=100 cantos overall
sins of incontinence (lack of self-control)
. . . violence . . . fraud (the divisions of Hell)
the spotted Leopard (
aba . . . bcb . . . cdc
(terza rima)
Dante's
Inferno Test - Impurity, Sin, and Damnation
