The Middle Ages [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The whole notion of the "Middle Ages" bids fair to go out of fashion. It belongs to ways of thinking of other ages than ours. Men felt in the Renaissance that, after dark centuries of ignorance, they were reforging the link with the only form of civilization which had permitted man to express the eternal values inherent in human nature: the classical past. In the nineteenth' century, when Western man was beginning to think of himself as the standard-bearer of evolution and progress rather than as a mere detail in a history of dates and facts, the historian Michelet still insisted that there were three contrasting phases: the first developing according to the natural order of history; the second, a grandiose adventure of the spirit led on by the mirage of the invisible; and the third—come to triumph after the French Revolution—presaging for a second time a new development in the natural order of life. The West has not only conquered the planet by force of arms, it has also convinced all mankind of the superiority of its intellectual techniques as the one way to grasp and hold control of the terrestrial stage where man acts out his gallant epic. But this means also that the West can never again view itself in quite the same perspectives as of old. In the first place, the very act of imposing on other peoples its own modes of technical organization as the sole guide to prosperity has led the West to discover that in the realm of knowledge there exist other values, other modalities than its own. Simultaneously, it has deepened the understanding to be gained by its native methods of reflection and analysis and has also transformed its own grasp of problems on the levels of both physical causality and conceptual relationships. Embracing an incredibly multiplied number of phenomena both in time and space, extending its knowledge to both the infinitely great and the infinitely minute, the West has armed itself during the past half century with new tools of thought as well as new techniques of action. The result: our past appears to us in new perspectives. It is no longer possible for us to carry on with the idea that the development of human consciousness has taken place in a straight line only, and that that line has been the only valid form of thought 5