STRANGER OR GUIDE?

The curriculum of theological education in English universities is still subject to the malign influence of what I call ‘the myth of the missing millennium’. According to this myth, little or nothing of abiding theological interest was said or done between the year 450 and about 1450 CE. We still treat the intervening centuries as something called the ‘Middle Ages’, the great inertia, wilderness of spirit, between the Fathers and the Renaissance. (And you will have noticed that the media always refer to some particularly mindless piece of civil strife as ‘medieval’ behaviour.) Sustained by the myth, we are not too much troubled by the consequent inexplicability of works of sensitive intelligence as various as Dante's Divine Comedy or this incomparable building in which we meet.

The myth, as regularly propagated, does allow of two exceptions: Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury. (Actually, this list of two names has recently been extended to four, with the addition of Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. It is a triumph of feminism to have persuaded us that, during this thousand years of European history, there were not only two intelligent men, but two intelligent women as well!) Quite how Aquinas' reputation is maintained, I have absolutely no idea, because few English theologians seem ever to have studied more than a tiny handful of his texts and, as usually presented in the textbooks of theology, St Thomas seems to have sustained a concatenation of absurd opinions in a singularly dry and unappealing manner.