Why Medieval?

Why explore medieval poetry and theology, in contrast to returning to the early church, the Reformation, or another familiar time period? 

Those readings would help us too. But the medieval period and its writings, thought, and art are especially foreign to most of us — and they’re weird and fun. Naturally, as a medievalist, I am a little biased. But medieval texts have again and again led me to Jesus and to the expectations I have read onto him. …

Everyone, even Peter and Nicodemus, meets Jesus through the inevitably challenging combination of their bodies, personal histories, institutional histories, times, personalities, fears, hopes, likes, dislikes — and the aid of the Holy Spirit. 

Even Peter, one of the people who knew Jesus best, believed in a Christ who would overthrow Rome to great glory and bring the Jewish people back to dominion over Israel. Like Peter, we all have our own ideas about who Jesus is, ideas mired in our cultural expectations of saviorship. With varying degrees of self-awareness, each one of us may worship self-help Jesus, historical Jesus, super angry Jesus, archconservative Jesus, lefty anarchist Jesus, or some combination thereof. Sometimes these caricatures capture aspects of Jesus well, but they exaggerate some features while diminishing others. Sometimes they distort him beyond recognition. The church has witnessed the disastrous social consequences of some of these representations: Jesuses in the Middle Ages who encouraged murdering the Jews, Jesuses during the American Civil War who were pro – chattel slavery, and Jesuses who support capital punishment today. How are we to avoid these pitfalls in our ideas about Jesus and his character? 

C. S. Lewis offered a persuasive answer. In his preface to Saint Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Lewis noted that wherever one finds Christian laity reading together, typically they are reading books by people of their own time and place, and usually of their own theological or ideological party. But as we seek truth, Lewis argued, the church’s past writings are a gift to us. He wrote, 

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.… Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a mass of common assumptions.… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is anything magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.¹ 

Like Peter, recognizing Jesus’s divinity and then almost immediately denying it because of his own ideas about what divinity should look like, we all read out of the context and history of the time in which we live. Our knowledge of the internet, chattel slavery, capitalism, the United States of America, T‑shirts, the Holocaust, smartphones, and all the millions of things big and small that have happened over the last two thousand years doesn’t disappear while we read. We swim in a sea of common assumptions and knowledge about science and the way the world works, what constitutes a human, right and wrong, and the things in between. Like fish, we can’t escape, on our own, this ocean of unspoken commitments and beliefs. 

More specifically, we read out of our own bodies and places and life experiences. I inevitably read like a mother, trained scholar, and millennial American white woman. You may read differently. Though we are called to go back to the Gospels over and over, time and again our biases will cloud the text before us. It’s hard to break out of this conundrum. 

Lewis helps us here. The traditions and writings of the church of ages past are a gift. They keep, in Lewis’s memorable phrase, ​“the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” clearing out the accumulated musty air behind the closed doors and windows of our own assumptions. In our reading, where we stumble and what we find meaningful both matter. Both reveal where we have culturally contained Jesus and expose our strengths and weaknesses in understanding him. As Lewis argued, the strangeness of the past illuminates the damaging things we believe in order to make Jesus more palatable, understandable, or like us. 

This book [Jesus through Medieval Eyes] explores the answers to Jesus’ question ​“Who do you say I am?” from medieval artists, mystics, and theologians. Some of these answers are metaphorical; some are drawn directly from Scripture. They do not wholesale replace our own answers to the question but enrich and sometimes even correct them. 

In reading these exploring, adoring, faithful witnesses from the past, we can come to know Jesus — and ourselves — better. What we find strange or beautiful in these medieval witnesses can reveal our concerns, hidden biases, and even new truths. They also teach us new and profound ways to love him. 

As such, this book is not meant to be read as a straightforward work of medieval history or theology or literary criticism. It is instead a conversation with literature, history, and theology, an interpretive process — a wrestling with the medieval church on that tricky question from Jesus. None of the medieval representations in these chapters can capture Christ in his fullness, yet each uniquely highlights aspects of his character through art, metaphor, and style. I like to think of them as different faces of Jesus. 

Here you will meet a Jesus who wears armor, slays dragons, and jousts in tournaments for the souls of sinners. You will meet a Jesus who lactates and breastfeeds his beloved babies, who gestates them in his wounds on the cross and gives birth in the agony of his death. You will meet the frightening yet winsome Jesus enthroned on doomsday, who looks in the eyes of every person who ever lived. You will meet a Jesus who is the passionate, sensual lover of your soul. You will meet a Jesus who is a good medieval domesticized Christian who receives his saintly mother’s cooking from angels in a sort of divine take-out delivery service. You will meet the abstract Jesus of the University, who is described with a specialized and precise vocabulary that has much to offer us today. And you will meet again — because we have all met him before, though not necessarily on these terms — the suffering Jesus on the cross, whose every drop of blood speaks grace and mercy and love to you specifically.