Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe
Thomas Cahill
Nan A. Talese, Doubleday, New York
2006

Thomas Cahill inaugurated his “Hinges of History” with the popular How The Irish Saved Civilization in 1996. I am unsure if the author at the time had envisioned a series with this volume, but it did provide him an excellent jumping off point for the consideration of Western Civilization from the vantage point of a positive, consensus building progress as opposed to a negative, destructive devolution.

Cahill’s approach provides an increasingly secular culture an intelligently distilled story of how Judeo-Christian Religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular has made Western Civilization what it is today. So often the two “histories” are told independently of one another, when in fact they are inseparable. How The Irish Saved Civilization tells the story of how Irish Monks preserved many writings of the Classic age of Rome and Greece that would have otherwise been lost in the Barbarian onslaught at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

The author uses the juxtaposition of Sts. Patrick and Augustine to illustrate the practical versus the pedantic application of religion, philosophy, spirituality and theology. In The Gifts of the Jews (1999), the author brings Abraham and Sarah to life, in situ, exposing Abraham as the politically powerful individual he was and how he molded a community out of nothing to ultimately become the most potent thought direction in history.

Desire of the Everlasting Hills (2001) tells the story of the world before and after Jesus Christ. Like he did in The Gifts of the Jews, Cahill sympathetically breathes life into those who came before Jesus, those who knew Him best and those who carried His message. Of note is Cahill’s powerful support of the Gospel of Luke and his near-dismissal of John’s account. Cahill’s introduction to the evangelist St. Paul is a revelation, shining a warm bright light on this important and often misunderstood figure.

Cahill addresses the importance of the Greeks in Sailing the Wine Dark Sea (2004). The title is derived from Homer’s Iliad, one of the two large figures looming in the book. The second is the short-lived specter of Alexander the Great and his tremendous impact on the formation of Western Europe.

These books comprise the series “Introduction” and “The Making of the Ancient World,” respectively. Cahill’s newest book, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006) represents the first of three volumes to address “The Making of the Modern World.”

Cahill readily reduces the Middle Ages into readily understandable and assimilatable bites. He begins in Alexandria at the close of the Classic era prior to the long yawn of the Dark Ages. Cahill likes to smash historic personalities into one another. As he did with Patrick and Augustine in How The Irish Saved Civilization, Cahill provides shave biopsy profiles of the antipodal pagan philosopher Plotinus and Clement of Alexandria, parsing the latter’s laughable etiquette for pious Catholics in the context of the Classically-trained Clement answering the more laughable positions adopted by the apocalyptic Encratites and smug Gnostics. He does the same with Ptolemy and Euclid, and this is just in the introduction.

The book is divided into broad cultural subjects addressing religion, the arts, the sciences, and the geopolitical world of the period. Cahill first discusses the conversion of religious Rome into secular Italy, rubbing Constantine, Gregory, and Augustine of Hippo together is catch fire. Cahill then addresses the advent of feminism as manifest in the life of Hildegard von Bingen and the rising “cult of the Virgin.” Then Cahill turns his attention to, on the surface a much different woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Sandwiched in between these two dominant women is the discussion of the polar opposite Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux, the former considered “one of two or three greatest men to have ever lived,” and the latter, not of that rank. Cahill’s portrait of Francis is equally as empathetic and enduring as he assigned Patrick in How The Irish Saved Civilization. Cahill’s organic descriptions of these saints can make the reader proud of being the same genus and species as Francis and Patrick. Cahill completes his homage to Francis thusly,

“At the end he asked to be stripped of everything, even the bed on which he lay, and to be laid naked on the floor. ‘I have done what is mine,’ were his last whispered words to his companions. ‘May Christ teach you what is yours to do.’ Larks sang and flew in circles above the house where he died. As Francis had always noticed, they are the birds who, ‘are friends of the light.’
     And that is how romance became prayer.”

The author never fully leaves Francis, instead rubbing the ascetic, anarchic peasant monk against the Dominican revolution known as Thomas Aquinas at the University of Paris. But before addressing Aquinas, Cahill introduces Abelard and his principle muse Aristotle (also Aquinas’) as a balance to Augustine’s Platonism in his earlier book.

From Paris, Cahill takes us to Oxford and Sir Roger Bacon, stopping to sum up the previous portraits:

“We know that Thomas was a fat friar and Francis a bone-thin ascetic, that Hildegard was a sickly nun and Eleanor a radiant queen. Of Roger we have no description at all, and he seems at times in his surviving writings so much a sprite, a will-o’-the wisp, that he would be too quick for anyone’s pen to capture on a page.”

Summing Bacon up, the author notes that he was an alchemist trying to spin gold from lead, while in the process propelling science ahead. Bacon believed in the “essential unity of human knowledge,” an idea not unlike that of Einstein’s grand unification theory.

Bonaventure takes on Giotto in the visual arts and Dante reigns supreme ahead of Milton and Shakespeare in literature. This is Cahill’s finest writing since “Drunk in the Morning Light” from Desire of the Everlasting Hills. He wraps up this excursion through Medieval Europe rebuking Dante’s inclusion of Justinian to Heaven in the Divine Comedy.

Mysteries differs from the previous volumes in being more fully integrated with references to the previous volumes. It also contains heat in Cahill’s defense of Catholic thought where there once was almost fatherly apology.

In his chapter, “How the Roman’s Became Italians,” Cahill addresses the recent spate of Catholic intrigue thrillers by closing a discussion on Constantine thusly,

”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 straight anti-Catholic libel…”

To be sure, this is not Cahill singing the praises of a misunderstood epistle writer in the face of similar assessment. Cahill is certainly passionate enough to take up the sword to slay anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment, real and unreal. In doing so, he runs the risk of overstating his position. However, it may be time to do just that.

This review was first published in Blogcritics.org