According to Thomas Cahill, we Westerners “are the fortunate
inheritors of two profound traditions that cannot be entirely reconciled but
must compete with one another down the ages in a never-ending tug-of-war” (308),
namely, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Greco-Roman tradition.
Cahill assigns a high place to the influence of the doctrine of the incarnation in the shaping of Western culture. Unlike Eastern Christians, who delighted in reflecting deeply on Trinitarian abstractions influenced by Greek philosophy, the
Roman Christians found their attention drawn to the most down-to-earth aspect of Trinitarian doctrine: the Infleshing, the Incarnation, the Making of the God-Man. What, they asked themselves, are the practical consequences – to human beings – of the Word becoming flesh? From this question will flow, with some notable divagations, the main course of what was to become Western Christianity. (48-49)
This practical emphasis has great influence on our perception of humanity:
The only point at which we can sensibly connect with the Trinity is the point at which, as John’s Gospel puts it, “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” If God became man and took on our weakness, our pain, even our death, these things can no longer be the woeful embarrassments we have always conceived them to be, for they are now shot through with his grace and elevated by his willing participation in them. If God became man, lived an earthly life as all of us do – suckled, sweat, shat, wept, slept, loved, feared, bled, died – but also rose and returned to Heaven, the same route has been opened to all of us, to all “mortal flesh,” now impregnated with divinity. Our despised humanity entitles us, for it is now the humanity of God…
And what shall we say of this face of God turned toward us? Only that it is compassionate beyond all imagining, willing to live, suffer, and die for each of us, so compassionate that it excludes no one, not even the most stupid, the most craven, the most outrageous, the most corrupt. (49)
Cahill states that the incarnation and its significance in regard to our understanding of God, ourselves, and creation, is a major influence in the shaping of Western culture. “In each of the chapters to come, as we journey through the centuries… we shall encounter – in prayer and piety, architecture and art, legend and social ritual, theology and alchemy, science and poetry – the all-compassionate God-Man, the tenderhearted One-for-others” (54).
Before we note its significance in regard to feminism, science, and art, we pause for a parenthesis. Because of the massive popularity of The Da Vinci Code, and all the controversy surrounding it, it is interesting to hear an established and well-respected historian comment on the phenomenon – especially when he doesn’t mince words in his criticism:
The depiction of Christianity in the popular thriller The Da Vinci Code as a fraud perpetrated by Constantine not only is preposterous to any reader with a modicum of historical knowledge but rests on melodramatically anti-Christian assumptions. The book’s further premise that the Catholic Church sends out Opus Dei hit men to murder anyone who has stumbled on the truth is a straightforward anti-Catholic libel. And its notion that Jesus fathered progeny by Mary Magdalene is a fantasy lacking the least historical support (Sidebar, 45-46)
The incarnation of God through the humble means of an ordinary peasant spoke volumes about God’s love and acceptance – in other words, God’s grace.
This early exaltation of Mother and Child already demonstrates the innovative Christian sense of grace, no longer something reserved for the fortunate few—the emperors and their retinues—but broadcast everywhere, bestowed on everyone, “heaped up, pressed down, and overflowing,” even on one as lowly and negligible as a nursing mother…For even the most ordinary people in their most ordinary actions can serve as vessels of God’s grace. (102-103)
Cahill demonstrates how Hildegard broke ground in regard to women theologians, and Eleanor took it a step farther by laying the path for modern feminism: “If Hildegard proved that a woman could be as profound a mystic and as orthodox a theologian as any man of her time, Eleanor proved that a queen could be as free a sexual being, as wise a ruler, as strategic a general as any king. But though Hildegard remains in important aspects forever medieval, Eleanor is an entirely modern woman” (153).
In the time of violent Inquisitions, St. Francis called his followers to live the gospel in a subversive, yet effective, manner. He charged his followers to
go forth on the roads to live the gospel of God’s love and preach it to all – farmer, bishop, emperor, pope – yet condemn no one. Judgment was the exclusive province of the all-merciful God; it was none of a Christian’s concern. ‘Give to others, and it shall be given to you. Forgive and you shall be forgiven’ was Francis’s constant preaching…
Such an approach, in an age when the most visible signs of the Christian religion were the wars and atrocities of the red-crossed crusaders, was shockingly otherworldly – and slyly effective. (164, 165)
Cahill argues that “the Judeo-Christian prejudice in favor of a Creator (and of a beginning for time and for the universe) provides a much better prelude to the scientific enterprise than did the eternal universe of the Greeks” (Sidebar, 226).
Surprisingly, questions about the nature of the Catholic Eucharist “acted as catalyst for the development of Western science, it provided a basis for the development of artistic realism” (264).
The question “What is the Eucharist?” was soon followed by natural philosophers (one day to be called scientists) with the question “What is matter?” The same pondering on this Eucharist sparked in medieval artists a desire to present reality more fully, more accurately. Giotto’s… eucharistic Catholicism, informed by a Franciscan spirit. Pushed him toward a nearly scientific quest to reproduce more exactingly in art the very things his eyes could see, his hands could touch, his heart could love – and preeminently among these lovable things the human body itself. (264)
With many examples, Cahill demonstrates how the interaction between two traditions – Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian – formed our present culture.
The matrix of the Western world, the form that gives it shape, is a Greek matrix, the shape of reason, thought, mind, rational inquiry. Its contents, however, flow into this ancient Greek mold from ancient Jewish and early Christian sources and are matters not of mind but of beating heart, moral action and interaction, and fleshly experience. It is in the course of the Middle Ages – and particularly in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries – that the contents of the mold jell for the first time to produce an early version of our modern world. (307)
His conclusion and summary:
We are the fortunate inheritors of two profound traditions that cannot be entirely reconciled but must compete with one another down the ages in a never-ending tug-of-war. Science could never have asserted its sensible self within Judeo-Christian society had it not been for the goad that Greek reason provided. Feminism, on the other hand, might well have asserted its relevance without classical influence of any kind, for there was within the Greco-Roman world hardly a whit of feminism anywhere. Artistic realism in its many forms is probably best understood as the result of a combination of Greek natural philosophy (and its obsession with measurement and accuracy) and Christian incarnationalism (and its primary project of finding truth in flesh). (308)
By primarily focusing on the people and events of the High Middle Ages – the twelfth, thirteenth, and first half of the fourteenth, ending with the coming of the Black Death in 1347 – Cahill offers a provocative, enjoyable, and visually-compelling overview of this fascinating era.
Leave a comment