A Guide to Pre-Modern Textual Engagement
The challenge of engaging with ancient and medieval texts often lies in the ingrained assumptions of the modern reader. To truly comprehend such works, it is imperative to set aside contemporary sensibilities and adopt a mode of perception characteristic of the pre-modern era.
This requires a fundamental shift in understanding history, authorship, meaning, cosmology, and the nature of space and time. The objective is not to impose modern frameworks upon the past, but to enter into the worldview of the original inhabitants and authors, thereby seeing the text, and indeed the world, through their eyes.
The Contrasting Frameworks: Modernity vs. Antiquity
Modern thought is often characterised by a distinct set of assumptions that diverge significantly from those prevalent in the Middle Ages. Historically, modern people have viewed history as a linear sequence of cause and effect.
This contrasts sharply with the medieval understanding of history as an ongoing battle between good and evil, in which the most significant event - the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ - has already occurred, and good ultimately triumphs.
A critical difference lies in the modern tendency to flatten and separate space and time. This leads to an understanding where categories are distinct and mutually independent, divorced from living practice. In contrast, pre-modern centuries perceived space and time as intertwined aspects of lived experience, locked in a stable, one-to-one correspondence. Furthermore, the modern world frequently subordinates religious understanding to scientific principles, even amongst those who seek to defend faith.
This often manifests as an attempt to conform sacred scriptures to fringe scientific theories, demonstrating an underlying agreement with atheists that science is the ultimate standard. For the modern individual, the Church and Holy Scriptures frequently appear as foreign entities. However, adopting a medieval perspective necessitates a transformation: these ancient traditions and texts should be perceived not as alien, but as one's true home.
The goal is to move beyond viewing ancient literature as a mirror that reflects one's own face and existing biases, towards seeing it as a window through which one can gaze upon Paradise, the Heavenly City, and the divine love that orders creation.
Essential Shifts in Pre-Modern Reading
To authentically engage with ancient literature and thought, four critical shifts in understanding are required:
A Shift in the Approach to Authorship and Originality
The modern conception of authorship, largely shaped since the 19th century, diverges considerably from its medieval counterpart. Textual criticism, as a discipline, focuses on identifying differences, no matter how minute, within texts to propose new theories regarding their age, authorship, and provenance. This pursuit is often driven by the contemporary academic necessity for new publications.
At its extreme, this modern approach views discrepancies not merely as mistakes, but as accidental tells of dishonesty, suggesting authors failed to maintain coherence in their narratives. It posits that historical forces - economic, political, social - rather than divine guidance, directed both the composition and transmission of works.
Post-modernism further deconstructs this by declaring the "author is dead," asserting that a text is a fluid reality, manipulable to redistribute social and economic power through various critical lenses, regardless of the author's original intent. For instance, a post-colonial reading of Beowulf, despite the lack of historical context for such concepts, exemplifies this arbitrary reinterpretation.
In contrast, the pre-modern mind approached reading with credulity. It was assumed that the author harboured love for the reader, as the creation of a book was an act of love, given the immense expense and labour involved (e.g. using animal skins, which represented significant lost economic opportunity).
The Holy Spirit was believed to have guided not only the process of composition, but also that of transmission, ensuring that the received text was precisely what was intended. A book, therefore, was perceived as a gift received from Authority, a concept embedded in the etymological link between author and authority.
Difficulties or differences found in manuscripts were not seen as flaws, but as providential signals indicating a deeper meaning for the reader to unearth. This understanding explains why the Church rejected early attempts to create a single, harmonised gospel account, such as Tatian's Diatessaron.
The existence of four distinct Gospel accounts, with their subtle differences, was upheld precisely because these variations were understood to conceal profound mysteries. For example, the differing accounts of the Myrrh-bearing women at the Tomb in the Synoptic Gospels point to a beautiful mystery concerning the Resurrection and the Mother of God, as expounded by Church Fathers like Saint Gregory Palamas.
Furthermore, the practice of attributing works to established authorities (e.g. The Wisdom of Solomon, The Psalms of David) was not a claim of literal, individual authorship for every syllable, but a recognition that the work belonged to a specific chain of tradition or wisdom. The notion that such traditional texts might include later additions was not considered problematic before the 19th century. Sacred texts were copied with high fidelity, but works farther removed from Holy Scripture were more susceptible to significant changes.
A medieval book is akin to a cathedral: built over centuries by different hands with evolving tastes, yet forming an organic, coherent whole. Attempting to isolate an original piece within such a structure would cause it to collapse. Authorship was often understood as a composite endeavour, and many medieval authors did not sign their work, viewing it as an act of pride. The stability of a medieval text was directly proportional to its closeness to Holy Scripture, the primary book and "text of texts".
A Shift in the Meaning of Words and Things
Modernity, with its tendency towards flattening and separation, often restricts meaning to a binary: either literal (understood in the most obvious, materialistic, measurable sense, akin to what a camera might capture) or allegorical (having a purely symbolic meaning). This limited understanding struggles with the concept of multiple, complementary layers of meaning.
Medieval people, however, believed that all written works, regardless of style, were to some degree a continuation or concretisation of the Holy Scriptures. This conviction led to the belief that books could possess multiple, complementary layers of meaning. As articulated by Saint Maximus the Confessor concerning Holy Scripture, "words authored by the Holy Spirit ought not to be understood as having only one meaning".
This understanding developed into the four-fold sense of scriptural interpretation, which was also applied to secular literature like Homer:
Literal (or Historical): This refers to what actually happened, the recorded event, or the direct meaning of the text. It is crucial to grasp this level accurately, without glossing over details, to ensure a sound foundation for further interpretation.
Typological: This level connects the text, story, or symbol to the Life of Christ, his mother, or the Church. A prominent example is the Brazen Serpent in the Old Testament, which historically was a bronze serpent God instructed Moses to make for healing, but typologically points to Christ being lifted on the cross.
Moral (or Tropological): This extracts lessons on how one should behave based on the events or teachings within the text. However, reducing a story solely to its moral can sap its vitality, as seen in Victorian attempts to rewrite fairy tales purely for moral instruction.
Anagogical (or Eschatological): This connects the text to "last things," such as the end of the world, the end of a cycle, or, most importantly, the end of one's own life.
Beyond words, medieval thought held that things themselves possess inherent meaning and significance. A tree, for instance, is not an arbitrary organism devoid of meaning; its existence carries significance, even if not explicitly stated. Even common elements like Bread and Wine were understood to contain multiple layers of meaning simultaneously, not just one exclusive interpretation.
Dante Alighieri himself explained his Divine Comedy using this polysemous approach, demonstrating how a single verse could signify distinct truths at the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels. Crucially, this polysemy is not arbitrary; rather, all multiple meanings are directed towards a central truth, typically rooted in the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which serves as the ultimate interpretive map for both scripture and creation.
Even pagan fairy tales, like those collected by the Brothers Grimm, contain the gospel story encoded within them on a typological level, not necessarily by deliberate intent, but because it is how the world lays itself out. This perspective also allowed medieval Christians to reinterpret pagan symbols, such as the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil, as consonant with the Christian Cross, fostering a rich poetic tradition.
A Shift in the Conception of the Cosmos
Heaven Above, Hell Beneath
The medieval vision of the cosmos fundamentally differs from the modern, Copernican model. It was not geocentric in the sense of the Earth being at the geometric centre of the universe, but rather geostatic, with the Earth understood as being at the bottom of a great stairway leading up towards God.
This contrasts with the modern understanding of outer space as a vast, empty, arbitrary blackness. In this cosmology, the Earth was the lowest point, and the centre of the Earth was the furthest point from God, serving as the dwelling place of Lucifer after his fall from Heaven. The idea of a flat Earth was not a medieval belief; ancient Greeks had already demonstrated the Earth's sphericity through mathematics millennia prior.
A key dividing line in this cosmology was the barrier of the Moon. Below the Moon lay the sublunary world, the realm of time, change, death, decay, and repentance. Beyond the Moon, in the celestial spheres, things were fixed, moving in perfect, ordered harmony.
The medieval world was held together and moved by love, a concept beautifully articulated by Dante's phrase "the love that moves the sun and the other stars". This is distinct from the modern conception of a universe governed by impersonal laws (e.g. universal gravitation, thermodynamics). While modern physics, particularly quantum physics, has begun to challenge the predictability of a law-governed universe, it lacks a compelling alternative unifying principle.
For the medieval mind, the world was moved by a principle of attention, where everything "moveth forward to come to its kindly stead" or rightful home.
An apple falls because it is made of Earth and seeks to return to it. This imaginative projection of human striving and desire onto the cosmos creates a fundamentally different reality than one governed by mechanistic "regulations". The reduction of Christianity to mere moralism is often a reflection of this modern cosmic police state mindset.
A Shift in the Understanding of Space and Time
Modernity is characterised by the separation of space and time from living practice, treating them as distinct, mutually independent categories. This separation is exacerbated by technology, allowing rapid displacement in space (e.g. driving a car 100 miles in an hour and a half) and abstracting interactions (e.g. virtual conversations).
The metric system exemplifies this modern approach: it quantifies the Earth and divides it into arbitrary, universally standardised units, detaching measurement from direct human experience. In contrast, traditional measurement systems (e.g. feet, cubits) were often intuitive and based on the human body, directly rooted in lived experience. Attempts to manipulate time, such as introducing a 10-day week, have consistently failed because certain fundamental rhythms, like the seven-day week or the four quadrants of light and darkness, are deeply immutable to human experience.
In the Orthodox tradition, two distinct words for time exist:
Chronos: Refers to linear, chronological time, marked by the passage of moments and associated with decay.
Kairos: Denotes qualified time, the eternal moment, wherein events that occurred millennia ago can become experientially closer than recent occurrences. Experiencing the Resurrection during Orthodox Pascha exemplifies this, making an event from 2000 years prior more immediate than a recent historical event.
Similarly, two words describe space:
Kora: Denotes normal, undifferentiated space.
Topos: Refers to a particular, qualified place, indicating a hierarchy of existence within space.
In the Liturgy, Chronos transforms into Kairos, and undifferentiated space becomes a specific, qualified place. This perspective redefines history: it is not merely a sequence of cause and effect, but a battle between good and evil in which God is constantly intervening.
Consequently, events like the Annunciation and Incarnation are not seen as mere blips or interruptions in an ordinary, linear progression of humanity. Instead, viewed through Kairos, they represent a culmination point where the righteousness of all human history, from Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, and David - distills into a single, decisive moment, manifesting all of God's prior interventions on behalf of His people.
This eschatological vision means that the future can illuminate and make sense of the past, with the end collapsing into the beginning in the person of Christ. Post-modernism, in its reinterpretation of the past based on the present but without a grounding in ultimate truth, represents a failure of eschatology.
Man as Microcosm: The Unifying Principle
At the heart of the medieval worldview, and crucial for understanding ancient literature and the concept of salvation, is the belief that man is a microcosm – a little cosmos. This perspective is anthropocosmic, viewing man as integrally connected to the universe, rather than anthropocentric, placing man at its detached centre.
This contrasts sharply with modern tendencies to reduce human identity to a cellular or DNA level, thereby conceding ground to materialism. In traditional cultures, concepts like gender were understood as more primary than biological sex, not as free-floating constructs, but as coherent aspects playing out the same pattern at different levels.
The human heart, though a small vessel, was believed to contain the entire world: "dragons are there, lions are there, there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil... but there too is God and the angels, life is there and the kingdom, there too is light and there are the apostles and the Heavenly cities and the treasuries of Grace. All things lie within that little space".
The spiritual practice of going down into your heart is not an act of self-preoccupation, but a means of praying for the entire world. Saint Maximus the Confessor expressed this interconnectedness by stating that the church building is a human being, every human being is a church, and similarly, the cosmos is a human being, every human being is a cosmos, and the scriptures are a human being, with every human being being a scripture.
Cultivating a Mystogogical Vision
The ultimate goal of adopting these pre-modern ways of reading is to cultivate a mystogogical vision of the cosmos. A vision that recognises that the relationship between the seen and the unseen is real; it is symbolic, yet not arbitrary.
This understanding is inherently apocalyptic in its original sense - a lifting of the veil - constantly revealing the nature of this relationship within humanity (the microcosm) and, most importantly, within the Liturgy. The relationships between these elements are not static but dynamic, moving and dancing, akin to the movements within the Liturgy.
By embracing these shifts, one can move beyond any initial alienation caused by aspects of traditional Christianity or ancient texts that might appear offensive to modern sensibilities, such as monasticism or rules governing access to altar areas.
One can begin to discern the underlying patterns and truths in Orthodoxy. Taking this approach allows the modern reader to become a good kind of tourist, one who does not merely observe from a distance but immerses themselves in the foreign landscape of the past, allowing it to modify their thinking and feeling, thereby seeing these ancient traditions and texts not as foreign, but as their true home. This is achieved not solely through intellectual study but also through active participation - attending church.