Legitimizing Medieval Modernity
The historical rhyming of our modern priestly caste
If you look around at a modern university, you will notice that many of them are built on grounds of religious schools, like Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, etc. These vaunted institutions owe their heraldry to those misty days of the medieval past where monks hunched over sheafs of papyrus for long hours copying out religious texts by quill and candlelight. Now a days though the buildings may be the same, the content within the halls being taught is drastically different, now based in the rigors of empirical science or the humane liberal arts, all together different from our dark, vicious past. Or so the professors in tweed with horned rimmed glasses would like you to think.
The architecture of a place will often tell you about the purpose of it. A drab woodshed is strictly utilitarian, and its condition will tell you about the owner’s attitude towards upkeep, maintenance and aesthetics. The same is true for the universities. Though no doubt there are numerous universities that produce robust scientific insight and discovery as they have throughout modernity, it is also true that more and more the universities are falling back into their misty, dogmatic origins. That of the church.
We can know this by exploring what it is exactly universities are. To analogize – universities are society’s mines for knowledge. Each particular professor takes his individual pick and pursues a particular vein of gold, from which he will take and shape into useful or ornamental conceptual products for society. He offers his goods in forms of books or consulting or classes. These ideas aid the world as they are traded and reshaped throughout their lifetime relevant to their value. But what are we seeing nowadays in the modern ‘jewelry’ stores, to cap the analogy? We are seeing fools’ gold.
This is because the model of scientific inquiry has so far denuded the original underpinnings of the university that in their stead the modern priests of these vaunted institutions have been bereft of any meaning whatsoever in their own lives. But because, as all humans being must, they need a sense of belonging, importance, respect, purpose & identity, these professors keep on professing. Only what do they profess?
Before we answer this question, it is useful to understand the roles that priests have formerly played in society that is no longer as obvious to us moderns as it once ubiquitously was throughout our culture. Stemming from our Judeo-Christian heritage, we have had millennia of the priestly caste in predominant control of the cosmology and cultural narrative throughout western history.
Comparatively, we have only had a few hundred years of rationalistic, positivist Science as the dominant form of knowledge and the penultimate cultural arbiter thanks to the enlightenment beginning in roughly the end of the 17th century. For brevities sake, and because the intent of this article is not an exhaustive history of the development of the priesthood, I will do my best to deliver the broad strokes of western European priesthood, from which our modern university, and thus the role of the professor originates.
Throughout much of western European history since the schism between the catholic and orthodox church priests had many roles. They were the intercessors between God & the layman. They were literate where the people were not. They spoke, understood and translated the language of God to the people. They told of creation, the stories of the past, of the savior, disciples and all other prophets of the Good Book along with the works of the church fathers. They told of the end times and the life ever after. In short, they were the keepers of the cosmology of the Christian world view.
Through cosmology priests made moral claims based on metaphysical positions they gathered from their felt place in the biblical universe. They had pastoral power, according to Michel Foucault. That is, they had the power over the individual as the intercessor between God and the layman, divining the spiritual rectitude one would need relevant to one’s sins. They knew the inner most machinations of people’s minds and souls. And they directed these soul’s developments toward holier ends, ostensibly.
Through cosmology and pastoral power priests were the arbiters of the medieval worlds Overton window – they allowed what was right & wrong, true & false, within the bounds of propriety or out. This was true of nearly every aspect of life. Though no doubt a great many people secretly or overtly flaunted these dogmas established through the priesthood, a greater majority followed them to the letter.
This was the impetus for Martin Luther’s revolt against the Catholic church, as he spent much of his younger life stridently attempting to follow the rules of the church that pointed towards salvation, such as fasting, pilgrimages and confession. However, none of his efforts gave him the slightest ounce of peace. We can also see the behavioral structures of Catholic life in movies like the Magdalene Sisters, where ‘sinful’ Irish girls are kidnapped and forced to live in dehumanizing conditions due to erring afoul of the Catholic prescriptions for righteous behavior & attitude.
Through cultural arbitration came the power of legitimization. Defined by Habermas as the ‘Appeal to Expertise’, the priests were the top of the hierarchy of societies knowledge, so much so that they ordained kings through medieval and renaissance times. They signified & decreed the ultimate authority of God. Yet as God’s worldly ambassadors, much of the power was held by the church. As Habermas says, ‘Our behavior is oriented by norms requiring justification & interpretive system guaranteeing our identity.’ With the construction of these norms and identity being derived from the bible which only priests could read, it is no wonder that the church could in turn be the guiding hand in demarcating the power of sovereigns and in turn those sovereigns right to monopolies on violence, allegiance and taxes. Which the church no doubt saw its fair share of profit in the temporal domain.
In fact, up until the time of Luther and only just less so afterwards, the Catholic church was a temporal empire like it’s neighbor the Holy Roman Empire or any other contemporary. It was through an intransigent class of ‘shepherds’ that the Holy See was able to field armies and build incredible monuments to God in the form of resplendent material wealth.
Where did this funding for such temporal manifestations of power such as armies, cities, art and a thriving bureaucracy originate? From the people no doubt; particularly tithes & later indulgences. This was the greatest vein of gold ever hit upon by the Church prior to Martin Luther’s attacks on it. By having a epistemological monopoly on the worldview of the afterlife of individuals, the material production of the society was redirected by priests, siphoning off untold amounts of wealth back to Rome and its peoples and projects, all in the name of God.
This no doubt had roots in local beneficiaries, and likewise served that purpose. But it was also in conjunction with a much broader redistribution of wealth from otherwise unaffiliated communities to a larger bureaucratic, temporal governing entity because a priestly class imposed a singular world view that deigned this righteous.
Because the identity was guaranteed (one of God’s children) then the ability to overcome innate prejudices of numerous disparate associations that hitherto would’ve prevented cooperation were overcome. This was also the role of the priest and was accomplished by the amalgamation of the afore mentioned capacities.
Moreover, where did one learn the arts & crafts of such an ambitious and effective position in the world? Nowhere else but monasteries and the university, upon which the epistemic bedrock for all else was hewn.
Now, let us see if we can find any similarities between our cultural forerunners and their modern, enlightened counterparts.
Modern Manifestations
Given that we've already established that the modern universities mission is de facto to teach the enlightenment world view of empirical inquiry, we must distinguish between two forms this process of enquiry, most popularly known as Science, has taken. This comes from Matthias Desmet’s new book, a clinical psychologist from the Netherlands, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. He distinguishes between big ‘S’ Science, that maintains an open mind having gone through 300 some years of compiling empirical inquiry across the gamut of domains available to human rationality that incorporates the fact that the rational human mind cannot in fact know everything. That there must be room made for man as a spiritual, ethical and symbolic creature and in turn we should theorize about these obvious phenomena.
This brand of science is contrasted with little ‘s’ science, which is based on an entirely mechanistic, materialistic world view that only trusts the senses as a means for perceiving life. Therefor all elements of life must be reduced to verifiable numbers on a graph, or something of the like. The novel must be reduced to the study of its words. Love to the physical sensations manifested when partners hold hands. Ethics to demographics. This is the science of dogma, the world view that cannot not allow for anything to be discussed, queried or explored unless it has prescribed to run an internal check list.
Universities teach both types of science today. It is the quality of character of the professor espousing the lessons that determines which brand students receive. And unfortunately, more and more the latter is being promulgated, with a vicious positive feedback loop.
Because those in the enlightenment, those who formulated the original principles of Science, broke, flaunted and subverted dogmas of their day, they made substantial progress in fields of discovery through their deep interest in a certain domain, whether it be mathematics or psychology.
The modern science that is the vast majority of what passes for scholarship these days has been overtime deluded into the industrialized, fragmented mining of ever increasingly siloed, atomized and meaningless bits of information. This incentivizes the members of modern-day academia to respond to both their economic and spiritual poverty.
Because the modern university system promulgates further specialization of technical knowledge, knowledge becomes farther and farther away from being verifiable. One has to accept the truth from an ‘expert’ because he knows best, and one cannot hope to compete with such accomplished understanding of their particular domain due to the time sink to develop such expertise. So, the theory goes. This lays hand in glove with the properties of legitimization that we had seen from Habermas earlier. It essentially boils down to ‘I say so’ because laymen are unable to counter with the sufficient technical jargon; it’s volubility and obscurity, that is produced by the university professor and that grants him the power of authority. Even though someone may be obviously and glaringly wrong, this is still not grounds for illegitimacy in the modern academic world because the dogmas that gird modern ‘social science’ are not in fact scientific in the least.
Why is this the case? Because, for many reasons, the ideology of science does not allow for the questioning of it. Everything must fit within the prescribed world view. Sound familiar? People were burnt at the stake many moons ago for a variety of beliefs and behaviors that fell outside church strictures. Today, we are facing the same phenomena.
Is it any wonder? Though we have changed much of the vocabulary and gotten rid of some of the previous metaphysical tenets, the basis of the universities remains essentially the same – the development of knowledge branches. Originally this was a theological endeavor, then it was a purely rational. Now, at it’s best, it is an endeavor that makes room for the nonrational while at its worst it breeds the mire of irrational. Just as the Catholic church did before.
Science, and its priests provided an eschatology just like medieval times. The big bang, the ‘global climate crises’ and the Marxist revolution leading into Utopia are just secularized versions of Adam & Eve, the Apocalypse and Heaven. Though, stripped of their symbolic, moral and aesthetic dimensions, to their own detriment.
Another parallel to the medieval priesthood is the tenet that by understanding the proper metaphysics one then can make moral claims about the world and go about discerning what a proper moral identity is. This is exactly the case for today as well. Only instead of an individual’s actions being evil under the litany of possibilities broadly defined as sin, the discerning principle for evil today is demographic data. Equity is the chief arbiter of morality, and so one’s demographics must fit the ideal lest one be deemed racist or any other of the intolerable, inexorable ‘isms’ that humanity is blighted with original demographic sin by. In turn, helping or hurting the progress of equity becomes the milestone for one’s moral progress. This in turn informs one’s identity, taking care of the warm and fuzzy feeling of belonging in a broader narrative that all humans require to thrive.
This ultimately leads to the shill being pedaled at your local bookstores, where the Social Science department is filled with literally anything but. It is in fact filled with memoirs filled with cherry picked, unreliable, at best weakly correlative demographic data that does not in any sense constitute rigorous science and is then laced with twisted anecdotes designed to manipulate you into feeling sympathy and guilt. But because the priestly caste of our knowledge factories, those who hold the cards on the Overton window and the legitimization processes, need to make money and have hood winked their blessed flocks into believing reading such ‘science’ will deliver them from sin and make them pious should they utter the correct incantations, we have a society that is totally bastardizing the greatest hope it has to make the world a better place.
So, it seems that modern professors behave quite a bit like medieval priests. Maybe it wouldn’t be so insulting if they were just a little bit more honest about it. But it is doubtful that their world view will even allow for such a possibility.