restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
The Passion and Troy as Medieval?
It ought to be worthy of some comment that the Wests two foundational cradle documents, The Bible and Homer, are both, in the spring of 2004, subjects for popular cinema: The Passion of the Christ and Troy. The West has not one but two Golden Ages: Greco-Roman antiquity and the Biblical-Medieval ages, or put simply, Athens and Jerusalem. The conflict and dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem have given to Western culture the power to rejuvenate itself repeatedly in a renaissance after a period of jejune desiccation and stale petrifaction. Are our own times just so jejune? Are we witnessing the rebirth of the medieval period, a swing to Jerusalem?
Consider the top ten domestic grossing films as of 11 April, taken from http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm:
Rank
Title(click to view)
Studio
Lifetime Gross
Year
1
Par.
$600,788,188
1997
2
Fox
$460,998,007
1977
3
Uni.
$435,110,554
1982
4
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Fox
$431,088,301
1999
5
Sony
$403,706,375
2002
6
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
NL
$375,628,000
2003
7
Uni.
$357,067,947
1993
8
NM
$354,877,000
2004
9
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
NL
$341,786,758
2002
10
BV
$339,714,978
2003
Now just consider these movies: No westerns, no spy thrillers, no detective mysteries, no war movies, no comedies, no horror films, no slice-of-life, no Bambi and no Flipper all that was the pop-cinema of the 1950s. Not even any political correctness. Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 7 are sci-fi versions of the Medieval Chivalric Quest-Romance. Number One is oriented toward women (and The Woman as Lady is a discovery of the 12th Century) and may be considered a Medieval romance in the literal meaning of romance. Numbers 6, 8, and 9 are from the hands of Tridentine Ultramontane Catholics. Numbers 6 and 9 are neo-medieval epics, composed by two medievalists at Oxford Tolkien with C. S. Lewisencouragement and critique both building on the work of the third greatest English medievalist: William Paton Ker (cf. his Epic and Romance). The Medieval-ness of #8 needs no comment.
Is the 21st Century, at least in its pop-entertainment, becoming a re-tread of the Middle Ages both Catholic Christian and Germanic-Celtic pagan? By Medieval I have two meanings, lower and upper case. By medieval, I am drawing on the work of the Japanese economist Taichi Sakaiya, The Knowledge-Value Revolution. A medieval period, Sakaiya argues, has two characteristics: the consumption of ideas (or other mental states) rather than material things, and a detachment from the imitation of reality. Consider the Doryphoros by Polykleitos from circa 420 B.C. (I use the copy in the Archaeological Museum of Naples), and the St. Francis by Berlingheri, circa A.D. 1230, in Santa Croce, Florence (and painted shortly after the saints death, and with possible knowledge of his actual appearance):
Which work has more bits of information? When considering the relation of head to body, which work comes closer to empirical reality? And to which style and content do the films above approach? The answers are obvious. Even science fiction (a genre that may be fading) is ultimately nothing more than plausible fantasy the incredible that a scientific age can somehow believe in. Do critics who charge The Passion with sado-masochism simply prefer the spiritual vision of Polykleitos to that of Grünewald?:
With Medieval, on the other hand, there has been since my own school days a paradigm shift (to use a popular term). Rather than thinking of the end of antiquity as A.D. 476, Peter Browns The World of Late Antiquity has extended our understanding of the period from circa A.D. 200 to 800. For myself, Late Antiquity is both medieval and proto-Medieval, and thus we can think of the period from the Arch of Septimius Severus until the contest for the doors of the Baptistery in Florence (A.D. 1401) as the Middle Ages. I should add, the term Dark Ages has long been abandoned by historians as a prejudice of the Enlightenment.
Current cultural events also raise questions about history itself. Instead of a Hegelian pastness of the past or a Marxist material determinism, is Fernand Braudels concept of the longue duree true: that history is the study of how things dont change? Braudel in the mid-th Century went to the south of France and studied peasants, only to find that despite their having cell phones, computers, cars, and cable-access (to use contemporary terms), these peasants havent changed in the past 900 years. To use a metaphor, instead of the past passing, is it just buried by later construction — construction that is periodically razed, or removed as the buried is excavated in an act of cultural archaeology? Are German Romantiker and other Counter-Enlightenment intellectuals the precursors of an age just now dawning? Will the Enlightenment and the Age of Progress be only ephemeral events, to be discarded by their longer enduring predecessors?
And now that ne plus ultra of war stories, and the summation of the Athenian ideal, The Iliad, is about to be medievalized by the film Troy, due in the theater 14 May complete with Brad Pitt as Achilles. Look, and laugh:
As Diomedes? Maybe. As Patroclos? Perhaps. But Achilles? I dont think so. Homer it aint more The Spirit of Romance than the spirit of epic. Will we soon see Odysseus redone resembling that Other Man of Sorrows? Someone pass this on to Michael Medved for his judgement. (The counter-argument: Was Homer himself in a position as Malory, looking back to a past and mythic medieval age?)
However disloyal to The Iliad the movie Troy might be, we can expect no outcry from our cultural elite about Troy the way we witnessed their general excoriation of The Passion most likely because this elite is Athenian, at least in the tradition of the Sophists or of Alexandrian decadence; and also because this elite notes the shift to Jerusalem, fears it, and seeks a Titus to raze the holy city to the ground and sent its citizens into a Diaspora. Whether Troy will make the Top Ten remains to be seen.
In short: Are our cultural Marxists as in touch with our real culture as Lucretius would have been in the court of St. Louis? Will the nay-sayers to The Passion be seen as out of touch as Plinys letter on the Christians? Is it time for someone to write history of the 20th Century as The World of Late Modernity or The Autumn of the Modern Ages? Should we now anticipate the passing of Cartesian rationalism; the revival of both paganism and Christianity; the decline of that ultimate modern invention, the centralized State; the rise of the decentralized Medieval polis? Will that quasi-martyr (for daring to worship publicly Someone other than the emperor), Judge Moore, laugh all the way to Elysium? After some future Edict of Milan, will a pilgrimage church be built over his tomb, and his icon and relics venerated?
Get ready for St. Mels.
April 20, 2004
Sidney Cundiff is president of the Piedmont Chapter of the North Carolina League of the South. He may be reached for comment here.