Mediaevalism and Modern Life
Cram, Ralph Adams
May 12, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL MEDIAEVALISM AND MODERN...
...without doubt, visible to its members, and, I beI need not rehearse the old story of the gradual relieve, equally without doubt, will show itself more covery of the mediaeval sense...
...teenth century...
...by this very difference it lived and sades make their own contribution toward the making moved and had its being...
...as this has been lived-hiddenly as compared with Philosophy followed on with increasing momentum, other more clamorous manifestations-by many who and now at last, during our own generation, we have have, perhaps, struck deeper to its wellsprings than seen politics, sociology, and economics, wide-eyed and those who have been making the sort of history that wondering, proclaiming to an indifferent world that here, in the very heart of the dark ages may, perhaps, they themselves confidently express in "outlines" of this, that, and the other...
...Saint...
...The customaries and could be said of any others in England...
...it is, in a manner of quite ready for the sunrise...
...evocation of aesthetic emotion, and discovers for itself There is nothing more striking in recent history than the reality behind the record and finds in this a fundathe rediscovery of the middle-ages during the last hun- mental truth and a dynamic energy that relate themdred years, and the progressive appreciation of their selves to the very problems of contemporary existence...
...be found the solution of the very problems of today...
...The meaningless jumble of violent happenings that com- philosophy of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas manded a humorous contempt...
...heart while the acceptance of any mediaeval principles in any category of life must have brought the whole T HE foundation of the Mediaeval Academy of fabric to the ground-a catastrophe that may only America is an event the significance of which is, have been delayed until the fulness of time...
...It seems to have shown widely with the years as its activities increase, as its itself more or less contemporaneously in Germany and scope grows wider, and as its relationship to life beEngland, and a little later in France...
...rules of religious orders, the charters of free cities, the When you come to think of it, it is not surprising laws and regulations of trade and craft guilds, the imthat this should be so...
...At first it was comes more apparent...
...Cram forms a portion of an the character and quality of the middle-ages must have address delivered recently in Boston at the first annual meeting produced a grievous and distasteful searching of the of the Mediaeval Academy of America.-The Editors...
...Even Hallam in his History of the The Visigothic codes of Spain, the constitutions of Middle-Ages could say in a footnote that he had heard the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, Bracton's De Legiof three men who had read something of the philos- bus flash a vivid light on our own increasing troubles ophy of Thomas Aquinas, but that he doubted if this with democratic political theory...
...This foundation is no sporadic visible in the literary and artistic fields alone, hardly event born of antiquarian zeal and nourished on the more than a "false dawn" in an eastern sky not yet pabulum of self-appreciation...
...a fallow interval of as the luminous predecessor of William James and general degradation that intervened between the glory Bergson and Einstein, but to supplement, to coordinate of the renaissance and the greater glory of the nine- and to correct...
...Knighthood and chivalry and the cruteenth centuries...
...Victor reveals itself not only ages and that was the end of it...
...its inevitability under the circumstances, its sequence of events...
...It is this aspect of the Academy that I would em- Here is a very remarkable and yet a very normal phasize...
...May 12, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL MEDIAEVALISM AND MODERN LIFE By RALPH ADAMS CRAM (The following article by Mr...
...It is the outgrowth of life itself its powerful incentive to the aesthetic revolution...
...significance, not only in themselves and in the chron- The architecture and the sculpture, the painting and icles of world history, but for us now in our own time the music of the middle-ages are no longer material of change and decay and rejuvenescence...
...Any real consciousness of of human life more beautiful and worth while...
...Beginning in archaeology and proprovince and its privileges as a summation of vital and ceeding to the dilettante and the connoisseur and so significant, if thus far uncoordinated, movements, its to the creative artist, this growing consciousness at intimate relationship to life itself-the life of today, last expands beyond the study of past things and the the life of tomorrow and thereafter...
...From literature it extends speaking, an inevitable event, following on in due time into architecture, then to painting, while religion sudas the result-in some sense as the fulfilment-of cerdenly awoke to consciousness of its existence and gave tain processes that have been operating and expanding for three generations...
...They were the dark Aquinas, and Hugh St...
...The world of the eighteenth plicit principles of the feudal system offer their reveand nineteenth centuries was in every exact particular lation of a possible way out of our industrial and ecothe precise antithesis of that of the twelfth and thir- nomic morass...
...A century ago solely for use as archaeological data and as the excuse there was hardly one who looked on mediaevalism for verbose and erudite monographs-they are living (assuming that he did so fantastic a thing) save with forms dispelling the lassitude of a later day, bringing eyes that at the most generous saw no more than a new energy into what had become moribund...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 1
