The idea of the essential limitations of the Renaissance has been growing on me gradually. But the more I work with it, the more natural it seems. Where did the synthetic movement of the High Middle Ages come from? We have wonderful models of the city of Rome at the height of the Empire, and no doubt the city is extraordinarily impressive and apparently cogent architecturally. But that’s simply to say that the Romans had developed a relatively coherent culture, in some sense. It was not necessarily a conscious synthesis. The nearest things to the Medieval summas – epitomized, I suppose, by Thomas Aquinas – might be Aristotle or Plotinus. And perhaps if we had Plato’s lecture notes – once extant, now lost – as well as his finished dialogues, we might add him to the list. And from the perspective of our present knowledge of the development of classical Greek philosophy, we know that the teachers each tried to carry the sum of contemporary knowledge as well as posit an integrative base. But the key here is the ‘perspective of our present knowledge’. Undoubtedly Aristotle prompted Aquinas. But the synthesizing process was already underway. The recovery of Aristotle simply advanced and underwrote it.
            As I say, I’m getting righteously tired of the antireligious stance of the intellectual, not only in the present but throughout the post-Medieval history. And not particularly from the perspective of a religionist, much less a fundamentalist. Isn’t it about time to say that our aggressive intellectual atheism has violated the basic premises of intellectual inquiry long enough? It’s not a question of belief. It’s a question of open-mindedness and fair play. We laugh at the geocentric universe of the Middle Ages, but we don’t laugh at its actual author, namely, Aristotle. And the Medieval model was a significant advance on Aristotle because it involved a material world very nearly in the modern sense, whereas the Aristotelian world still involved a mutually pervasive nature of subject and object: world and ‘psyche’ were rigidly mirroring. The Medieval isolation of ‘substance’ as ‘matter’ set the stage for both Copernicus and Newton. The universe may have been geocentric, but it was a ‘material’ world in the sense that its creation set it apart, not only from the divine, but from the strictly rational, as well – perhaps an achieved result of the tradition inaugurated by Socrates, but while the classical cycle was grounded in the linguistic distinction between consciousness and matter, the formal key to their separation could not be found. The Medieval distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the nominal’ set the stage both for the ‘realism’ that leads to ‘objectivity’ and the isolation of the ‘rational’ that eventuates in the terminal reduction of logic, the quandary of ‘philosophy’ in our own day. But it also liberated consciousness as the subject from anything except the perceptual or experiential link with ‘matter’.

             But my topic is getting away from me. Long before the recovery of Aristotle and the Summa of Aquinas, the synthetic aspiration and actuality in the Medieval was already manifest not only in the architecture, but in city planning that intentionally integrated the city around the religious core represented by the church. Perhaps we could say that Augustine supplied enough of the classical impulse toward a comprehensive intellectualism. But, again, something essentially peripheral and tangential cannot explain or justify the extraordinary cultural coalescence. We don’t need a Henry Adams to see the cohesion, although Adams tends to justify it in terms of the Virgin, as causal, whereas the elevation of the central symbols of Christianity were probably as much consequential as causal. Presumably there was something in the Christian religion, in terms of an empathetic process. And if we are going to use pure philosophy as a kind of explanatory thread, then presumably the emergence of the material, the rational and the personal within the context of the developing culture may explain the cohesive focus. All of these could be brought to bear on the suffering Jesus or on the compassionate mother. But, undoubtedly, these developments stand outside the frame of orthodoxy and dogma. In other words, if the emergence of ‘realism’ and the beginnings of the modern sense of ‘selfhood’ are more or less simultaneous with the first impulse toward cohesion or synthesis in the Middle Ages, we cannot strictly assign them to ‘Christianity’ as such.
            At the same time, I’m not all that certain that it’s appropriate to search the confluent traditions in hopes of finding anything explicitly causal. We could point, for example, to the pervasive history of the goddess, apparently in terms of the Celtic diffusion, in an amulet form – that is, as an intimate protectress – and in a kind of surreal, reductive form suggesting not only fertility, but an infantile presence, in all probability not pejorative in any sense, but an indication of spiritual immediacy. Or we could look at a pre-urban northern European culture that could organize itself sufficiently to confront Roman military might at the time of one of the greatest generals in history, namely, Julius Caesar. This last has caused not a few earlier historians to make any number of suggestions concerning characteristic ‘Germanic’ traits. Obviously, one has no desire to involve oneself in the present polemic on culture and ethnicity. But the persistence of cultural personality is still unexplained.
            What we can say is that the ‘Gothic’ is sui generis. Romanesque differs radically. Rome gave the peoples to the north the arch. But what emerged from the north, in both traditionally ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ regions, bears no resemblance and little affinity for any prior architecture.

             The problem with the Middle Ages is not so much the synthesis as the success. Perhaps, if the papacy had not suppressed the evolutionary process, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, we might recognize the origins of the modern in the Medieval. It is probably cheap to say that ‘heresy’ raised its ugly head, and the pope responded appropriately. Our country now is a study in the uses of the ‘heretic’ when one wants to consolidate power. And, of course, the pope had no desire to be outdone by the emergent princes who were beginning to assemble nations out of principalities at the height of the Middle Ages. The process extends into the Renaissance, of course. But the consolidating force must have been obvious almost from the beginning. And since the papal states were minimal and the pope only had a personal security force for an army, as a general rule, the key to his power, from a political standpoint, was necessarily fear.
            But, again, I’m letting my topic get away from me. In brief, the intellectual synthesis was like the architectural. It was created out of native elements. Just as the arch had become native through the Romanesque – the transitional architecture of the regions –  ‘Christianity’ had now also become indigenous, as a cultural function. We see cultural equivalents to the Romanesque transition in architecture, such as the European traditions for ‘Christmas’. But the intellectual tradition carries it further and makes it fully indigenous. I have argued elsewhere that the appearance of the ‘creator’ God is a Medieval invention. While the God of Genesis is the ‘creator of heaven and earth’, he seems to mold pre-existing conditions. The Genesis account is primarily about the relationship between God and humanity. It is not until the isolation of ‘the real’ and ‘the material’ in Medieval philosophy that God can become the fully prior creator. With this final elevation of God, we have the equal ‘elevation’ of the individual, the beginning of the definitive isolation of ‘self’ and ‘person’, as philosophically defined entities, and therefore as the prior condition for the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance and the modern developments of psychology.
            About the time of Aquinas, the pope tried to thwart this. The church very nearly anathematized his work. But, from an historical point of view, it was already too late for the pope. He could standardize dogma, effectively halting theological development in terms of the church. And, of course, for his developing political purposes, not only a monumental, but an immovable theological base was essential. It was essential that the church become the unchanging foundation of an eternal culture – an ethnological impossibility, but, at that point, a relatively easy feat of political illusion.

             What began at this point was a series of cyclical movements. But we have to understand that the High Middle Ages had achieved an intellectual and spiritual synthesis not only ‘beyond’ dogma and but also embodying – not just the seeds – but the global ground from which the Renaissance manifested. In terms of the evolutionary process of the philosophy of the culture, the Renaissance isolated the basic elements inherent in that original global synthesis. As such it involved a ‘purification’ process, a reduction to a pure form as the self-defined ‘classicism’ which was actually a Renaissance creation. But as it isolated the basic or essential themes that were in fact the revolutionary consequences of the Medieval, Renaissance thinkers began to move toward synthetic statements within the context of ‘fields’ of knowledge. The separation between person, human reason and the material world opened each of these arenas to both developmental ‘discoveries’ and a synthetic ideal of ‘whole knowledge’ within the given domain.

             If I have said that the problem with the Medieval is its success, it is precisely in the area of the grand synthetic statement, the summation or summa of knowledge. The characteristic of the Medieval philosopher or theologian is the attempt to synthesize all knowledge in a tangible form and within the frame of a singular work or body of work. And, of course, the thinkers were not hesitant in accepting authority, of incorporating a range of prior work within the framework of the summation. As a consequence, much of the truly creative thinking is buried in these intellectual juggernauts, which, from our perspective, commonly seem endlessly repetitive.
            This is what allowed the pope and the church, as they cut off the progressive aspect of the process, to proclaim and identify a ‘timeless’ dogma as the basis of the church. Obviously, such a process in itself is reactive. But telescoping the repeated material created an aura of incontrovertible truth. Unfortunately, when the ‘new thinkers’ emerged, it was altogether too easy, from their side, to ignore the actual creative and progressive materials within the frame of these juggernauts that in fact not only foretold the new developments, but established the ground for them.

             So this sets the stage. But our primary concern here is the nature of the cycle that was thus set up. The ‘purification’ of the ‘classical’ or ‘puritan’ impulse stood – at least until this final ‘post-modern’ period – over against a presumed synthetic impulse, which, for want of a better term, I have called the ‘Gothic’ – since that seems to be the primal epithet in terms of defining the Medieval. The threads released from the Medieval have moved out through their distinct cultural domains, here pulling down hereditary hierarchies in the political, there ‘purifying’ the art of architecture, here transforming the stiffness of abstraction in the representational arts into the fluid and dynamic ‘realism’ by which we ‘know’ the Renaissance, there overturning the summa in favor of a philosophy that more and more focuses on the moment of experience and idea. And so on and so forth. But as we trace the lines of development, we see the cycle repeating. Even in science we witness the building up of systems and a return to the incremental fact, not once or twice, but over and over again.