The following was written back in May when I had COVID and read an entire 600 page book in 1 week. I sat on it for a while, but feel like it’s time to release this into the world for anybody who may be interested:
I caught COVID last week and have been in my house far too much for my own liking. I’ve spent more time reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose over the last three days than I had spent reading anything in the past year. The book is about a monk who was formerly an inquisitor who gets called to an abbey in Italy to investigate a suspicious death. It takes place in the 12th/13th century, against a backdrop of the church and the Holy Roman Empire carrying out an inquisition of several heretical sects. If you’re not familiar, heretics were those who taught beliefs contrary to the church’s teachings. Those heretics who did not renounce their beliefs were burned at the stake.
Which led me down a very long wikipedia rabbit hole of various heretical sects and their leaders, the crusades, the act of burning at the stake generally, and the Islamic Golden Age. The following topics have been on my mind a lot, so in addition to simply sharing what I’ve learned, I’d like to tie the first three together with the last one:
- The idea of the Middle Ages generally
- Francis of Assisi, Fra Dolcino and heresy
- The gibbet of Montfaucon
- Nietzsche’s concept of a Will To Power
The Middle Ages, generally speaking
I had a lot of misconceptions about the middle ages, so I’ll try to illustrate a few of them before I do anything else. The term “the middle ages” was invented after the fact, for starters. Nobody during the middle ages woke up in the morning thinking about the fact that they lived in the middle ages. That seems obvious, but it’s worth saying because the way they’re depicted in modern media always shows miserable robed peasants, who seem oddly aware of the idea that they’re living in some kind of “dark age”. Almost nobody was aware of that idea in Europe, unless they were a scholar (read: priest) or a traveling merchant, and there were scant few of those anywhere other than Italy.
The second major thing that I didn’t realize about the middle ages is that the term spans a ridiculously long period of time – roughly a thousand years. If we consider the medieval era to have begun shortly before the fall of Rome, then we could say it lasted from 400 to roughly 1600, depending on how you define the Renaissance and whether you even think it’s meaningfully different from the middle ages (too much to get into here).
A final medieval (and western) misconception: the entire world went dark after the sack of Rome and everybody fell into a great vacuum of time and knowledge. Again, not true. In many ways, the Islamic world flourished mightily during the period roughly 500 years after the fall of Rome. Around the turn of the first millennium AD, Baghdad was the world’s intellectual capital, where the caliphates in power at the time cherished science, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Remember algebra from high school? Its modern methods were formalized by the Persian scholar Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī in a book called Al-Jabr, Latinized into “Algebra”. Medieval muslims did not see the practice of the sciences as antithetical to their religious beliefs in the same way that medieval Christians, or at the least the medieval Roman Catholic Church, did.
Particular heretics and a famous heretic who you may not have known about
Saint Francis of Assisi was the son of a wealthy textile merchant. After being caught as a prisoner of war for a year as a young man, he had a spiritual reckoning and began to struggle with the wealthy position he inherited in life. Multiple times he tried giving some of his father’s fortune to the poor and to the church, but eventually, his father sought to cut him off from his fortune, to which Francis cut himself off instead, taking a vow of poverty which became the hallmark of the order he later founded. That’s about all we need to know of him for now.
Fra Dolcino was the leader of the Apostolic Brethren, a group that (allegedly) took Francis’ vows of poverty too far. In their view, the church had become lavish, and far too focused on power and money to serve the people. Like the Franciscans, they took a vow of poverty, but they roamed around with no home, essentially becoming itinerant beggars. The church didn’t like that, so it tried to force them into an existing order. When that didn’t work, they used brute force to suppress them. The Brethren, led by Fra Dolcino, didn’t like that and they began to fight back. On top of that, Fra Dolcino preached with a female accomplice named Margaret and they may have been involved in other ways. Eventually, Fra Dolcino and Margaret were both captured by the church’s troops, refused to denounce their heretical beliefs and actions and were burned at the stake.
Galileo was also deemed a heretic for endorsing the idea of heliocentrism. He was allowed to discuss the idea under an agreement with Pope Urban VIII, so long as he stated that the sun being at the center of the universe was a “hypothetical proposition”. Over time, Galileo felt strongly that all evidence he could find pointed to it being true. But, since it violated the scripture and theology at the time, he was called a heretic and allowed to either denounce his previous statements and be allowed to live, or not and be burned at the stake. He chose to denounce and lived under house arrest for the last 9 years of his life.
The Gibbet of Montfaucon
There’s an illumination in the Grandes Chroniques de France that shows heretics being burned at the stake. As horrifying as the picture is, even more horrifying to me was the ghastly structure in the background, the Gibbet of Montfaucon. This grid-like structure for making examples of heretics and ordinary criminals was used for almost 500 years to show off the work of the various kings of France in silencing their enemies. It’s hard to imagine what it would have felt like looking at that thing in real life – it sickens my stomach looking at it in an illustration.
What does all of this have to do with the modern era?
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’re one of the few people who may be interested in medieval history. Send me an e-mail so we can get a drink and talk about history and philosophy sometime.
I’ve been diving back into Nietzsche recently and enjoying reading more of his philosophy and about his life and how incredibly misunderstood both were. The most important part of this for our purposes here is Nietzsche’s idea of the Will to Power, and his rejection of Christian morals, making him a true progenitor of modernism.
To avoid going too deep on Nietzsche (you can do that on your own if you want – many books have been written by and about him), Nietzsche’s rejection of the church was largely based on his having grown up with some very bad Catholics (seemingly not in short supply in his time). He saw Judeo-Christian moral values as inherently suppressive, encouraging people to not think freely or be individuals. He harkened back to the Greeks, whom he was obsessed with, admiring their balanced approach to the world, where the ordered and the dis-ordered/chaotic forms of the world not only coexisted but relied upon each other. Morality for the Greeks was not black and white and would not have recognized the concept of good or evil – these are largely Judeo-Christian concepts, at least that’s what Nietzsche would argue. He felt that Judeo-Christian values therefore weakened individuality and made the world into a black and white world of good and evil, where all evil should be dispelled and all good should be embraced.
For the Greeks, being a human meant participating in sports, fighting in wars, acting in plays, having sex freely, exercising the brain through intellectual challenges as well as spiritual reflection (of course, all of this only applied to certain members of Greek society at the time – wealthy men). The will to power, then, evolves out of this and is a kind of willingness to make oneself great through discipline and exercising the elements of our humanity that the Greeks embraced and Judeo-Christian morality rejected. Instead of repressing human urges, and being meek and humble, we should embrace our human side and encourage it to be great – “will” it to power. Obviously, this thesis has been poorly interpreted in the past (most famously by the Nazis, and that largely thanks to Nietzsche’s sister who had ties to the Nazi party), but those are misinterpretations. Nietzsche did not want greatness to come at the expense of other individuals or groups.
In Sum…
The heretics, in their own way, were manifesting a type of will to power in defying the church’s authority. I can’t think of a worse way to die than being burned by your worst enemy, so I have to give my compliments to anybody who managed to not pull a Galileo and was willing to be hung or burnt at the stake for their beliefs. In the same way, I tip my hat to the early martyrs who were torn asunder, crucified or killed in other brutal ways during the early years of Christianity.
The will to power is a strong concept, and anybody who could stare down the gibbet of Montfaucon and decide that they didn’t mind being made into an example in front of their countrymen is deserving of some sort of respect for bringing about their own will to truth in the face of a humiliating certain death. It can be hard sometimes to speak out or live the way you truly desire even when the consequences are minor, yet these people lived their will to power and paid for their actions with their lives.
It’s been interesting reading this book and going down this hole because I read a lot of Enlightenment philosophy growing up, but I don’t think I realized the strength it took for people in Europe to stand up to the authorities of their day, when power was wielded absolutely. It makes me thankful for our modern world, in which we’re (mostly) free to live in a way that is true to ourselves with little intervention from any governing body. Having a greater understanding of the Middle Ages and the history of the church sheds a lot of light on why the Enlightenment was such a pivotal turning point in western history. There are obvious exceptions to this, but on the whole, in most of the free/westernized world, you’re free to pursue your “will to power” (read: lead an authentic life according to your beliefs) and can rely on a consistent rule of law to guide what you can and cannot do. This in opposition to the heretics who faced outright death for criticizing the ruling regimes of their day and choosing to exercise their beliefs in ways that differed from the mainstream.
The Middle Ages were a strange time in European history – there was much more going on than sometimes meets the eye in popular culture (and much, much more going on in the Islamic medieval world than we know of in western popular culture). The history of the middle ages is important to our own modern world, as many of the foundations of modern western society were philosophical ideals that arose out of opposition to the church’s cultural hegemony, and the absolute and unpredictable power of the kingdoms of the middle ages. Many people had to pay with their lives to express their opinions, something Nietzsche might have found admirable, despite the fact that they weren’t necessarily exercising their “human” will to power and were mainly interested in their spiritual will to power, i.e. eternal salvation. Still, it takes a mighty amount of human effort to stare down a burning stake or the Gibbet of Montfaucon and decide that whatever is on the other side is worth it.