The New Middle Ages
It seems to me only appropriate that the first post of this newsletter should offer an explanation of the title. The new middle ages is a concept put forth by a number of twentieth-century Russian philosophers, particularly Pavel Florensky and Nikolai Berdyaev. To put it simply, these thinkers saw around them what they considered to be the end of an age. The age that was dying was characterized by light, reason, and humanism. The age approaching was to be characterized by night, intuition, mysticism, magic. Each of these ages represents a spiritual cycle, a day and a night as it were, corresponding to a duality in the human spirit. As Florensky puts it,
The human spirit has two aspects: nighttime and daytime, male and female. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, sleep and wakefulness (sleep is not an absence of life, but life sui generis: without sleep our souls would not be nourished).1
These two poles of the human spirit are, according to this view, expressed not only on an individual level but throughout culture and thus permeate every facet of human society. Of course, each individual may or may not live in accordance with the dominant tendency of his or her age, but the age as a whole reflects the pattern that structures the great majority of human lives.
Both Berdyaev and Florensky saw the age that was in the process of ending in the twentieth century as beginning in the humanism of the Renaissance, for it was there, in the discovery of the unique powers of humanity, that the modern era properly has its genesis. At first, this age was one that maintained its connection to the spiritual depths of life and thus was able to maintain the integrity of the human spirit while releasing untold riches of human capacity. But this integrity was not to last, and humanism separated itself from the spiritual foundations of life, seeking an autonomy that would ultimately lead to dissolution:
It [the Renaissance] freed the creative forces of man and gave his powers their highest expression in art, and in that it operated within the realm of truth. But it also separated him from the spiritual fountains of life; it denied the spiritual man, who cannot but be a creator, and affirmed in his place the natural man alone, the slave of necessity.2
Since created beings are united in the principle of their creation, the severing of humanity from its transcendent source resulted in its increasing fragmentation: “man ceased to be a spiritual organism, and so false centres were formed at the peripheries of his life: the subordinate organs of human life, having lost organic relationship with their true centre, proclaimed themselves to be independent vital centres.”3 The Renaissance advanced towards the Enlightenment, to positivism, and finally to secularity and the nihilism that runs rampant within it. This process saw the splintering of knowledge into ever more isolated specializations, the shattering of shared values and the communities that they founded, and the tendency to forcefully impose new centers by which humanity could be drawn together. The various aspects of humanity, severed from their center in the spirit, become isolated, empty, open to the exploitation of foreign powers.
Such an age is of necessity one of idols. The spiritual center of humanity, the principle and force of the unity of all things, is the One God of Christianity (or, if you like, of any number of theistic traditions). The loss of this center is also the loss of faith in God. The result is the creation of new, synthetic religions, whether they be nationalist utopian dreams, scientific reductionism, or the revival of pagan polytheistic worship. Every level of reality begins to come apart, from the ecological to the political, and divided into various tribes of idol worshipers. In this sense, the world Berdyaev is describing is one resembling the earthly city of St. Augustine, in which there can be no unity because there is no common love. Each group, even each individual, follows a different passion, a different desire; shared love, the force by which beings are directed toward a common end, is foreign to this city and the age that corresponds to it, which know only a multiplicity of contradictory principles. In the end the inhabitants of this city or age must, like the men in Raskolnikov’s dream, eat each other because they cannot agree on what is evil and what is good. This multiplicity of principles is one that is inherently unstable and self-negating. Unable to achieve the balance of a common end or point of reference, the fractured forces of humanity marched toward destruction, as the history of the twentieth century showed. That the despiritualized human autonomy that grew out of the Renaissance should destroy itself was, therefore, inevitable. The farther humanity strayed from the unity of its homeland, the more it began to split apart and shake in the contradictions of its members.
Thus exhausted, the age that began in the Renaissance was to give way to a twilight in which a new age would be born, and it was in this twilight that these philosophers believed themselves to be living:
a change in consciousness has already occurred, but we do not notice it only because it has occurred slowly and gradually. . . . Thus, we find ourselves at the threshold of a new reality. Before our eyes the husk falls off from the culture of the past and a new culture appears, just as in springtime the greening trees open their buds. I am saying that we are seeing the advent of a new historical period; this does not mean that individual people have sensed this change; it means that it has taken place in all the domains and activities of culture.4
Florensky believed this shift was bringing with it a new world-understanding in which the analysis of rationalism would break down and give way to a holistic and intuitive approach to reality. As the hubris of analysis and mechanical thinking wears away, the new age becomes increasingly conducive to the religious point of view. Where the so-called Renaissance worldview, at least in its later development, sought to explain reality strictly in terms of autonomous reason, of the human mind standing alone and looking outward, the new understanding sees that reason is insufficient and must transcend itself if it is to have any foundation. Where the Renaissance view saw the specialization of knowledge, with each branch ever more distant and disconnected from the others, the new world is one wherein all of knowledge is increasingly unified, where the mind turns from the illumination of the external world to the contemplation of the internal, to metaphysics, to being in the full splendor and terror of her nakedness:
Night belongs more to metaphysics, to ontology, than does the day. The veil of day, whether in nature or in history, is not fixed and is easily drawn aside. And the whole significance of our epoch, which is a so distressing one for the practical life of individuals, is contained in this clear view of the abyss of Being, in this looking face to face with the principle of life.5
In the religious sphere, the world understanding of the new middle ages, like that of the old, is one involving the intensification of humanity’s spiritual faculties. Such a transition is marked by a spirit of asceticism. Only with a genuine turning away from the external life and the cares and passions by which it is run can humanity begin to restore the internal life, the life of contemplation and connection to the depth whence springs the human spirit. “There is good reason to believe that man’s creative forces cannot be regenerated or his identity re-established except by a renewal of religious asceticism.”6 This will lead, on the one hand, to a resurgence of faith in God and in Christianity, but, on the other hand, to the increase in spiritual powers of evil. As the long-suppressed hunger of humanity’s soul begins to awaken, the avenues for its expression and exploitation will multiple exponentially. For many, God will become the new center of their lives: “God must again be the centre of our whole life–our thought, our feeling, our only dream, our only desire, our only hope.”7 Others will be torn apart and dragged to the side of malign entities wreaking havoc on the nascent religious impulses of new generations. “An authentic satanism could exist precisely in the Middle Ages,” warns Florensky.8
Berdyaev believed that a new growth of humanity’s spiritual faculties would, moreover, be characterized by an emphasis on the feminine. Not on the feminism of his day (or ours, for that matter), which all too often seeks to masculinize women, but on a genuine encounter with the divine feminine, the eternal femininity that is a balance to the analytical male mind. For Berdyaev, such femininity is characterized by intuition, by a deep connection to the elemental and the earthly, to the magical and the relational.
None of this is to say that these thinkers were advocating for any kind of blind nostalgia for the past. The new middle ages is not a “going back” to the past, but rather a return to those principles that were significant in the middle ages precisely because of their timelessness. As the transitory clouds of the day are replaced by the night, the unchanging stars reveal themselves. To refer to a new middle ages at all, then, is a matter of speaking, a convenient schema by which to mark out the cycles of history.
Of course, it is worthwhile remembering the time in which Florensky and Berdyaev lived. The early twentieth century was a time of extreme upheaval. Both of the works that I have quoted above were written during and after the first World War and the Russian Revolution. Anyone living at such a time would inevitably feel that a world was ending, and it is conceivable that the signs such thinkers perceived as indicating the end of an age were selected by minds accustomed by cataclysm and instability to see everywhere the ending of cycles. I am not, moreover, prepared to evaluate the narrative of the historical origins of modern mechanistic thinking, secularity, or what have you put forward by these thinkers. Nevertheless, I believe that the patterns that Florensky and Berdyaev identified are in many remarkable ways applicable to our present era. Indeed, much of what they have to say has only become more relevant in the twenty-first century. I suspect that most readers will recognize something of our present situation and uneasiness in the following:
The power of the machine and the chronic ‘speeding up’ that it involves have created myths and phantoms and directed man’s life towards these figments which, nevertheless, give an impression of being more real than realities. But is there in fact so much reality, in the sense of being, ontological reality, in their stock-exchanges, banks, paper-money, monstrous manufactories of useless things or of weapons for the destruction of life, in the ostentation of their luxury, the oratory of their politicians and men-of-law, their newspaper-journalism? Is there so much reality in the progressive increase of our insatiable wants? We see malignant endlessness everywhere, an endlessness that has a horror of solutions.9
Who has not walked the halls of the local grocery store or contemplated the malaise of fast food and pornography that infect our culture like a parasite and not been struck by this “malignant endlessness” of desire, the ever-increasing abundance of our baser impulses and the uselessness of the products that ceaselessly inundate our streets and homes? We are surrounded by unreality and superficiality. This unreality must give way, and we seem to be living at the edge of the twilight that marks the transition from one era to the next. Indeed, Berdyaev seems to be indicated precisely our era when he states that
the end of Capitalism is the end of modern history and the beginning of the new middle ages. The imposing humanist enterprise has failed and the remains ought to be scrapped. But first of all perhaps technical civilization will try the experiment of developing itself to its uttermost limits, till it becomes a diabolical sorcery just as Communism has done.10
Technical civilization certainly has sought to develop itself beyond all bounds, and we are currently reaping the consequences. But as the environmental, political, and economic crises build, it is increasingly understood that the technical culture that is so often lauded as the solution is largely the cause of the problems that it is now supposed to be able to fix. The culture of science and technology has become a cult, worshipping progress and mechanism, but the evidence suggests that it is dying, as more and more people wake up to the dark realities of the world it has created (no matter how much good it has done). We are, in all likelihood, witnessing the zenith of a wave that must crash one way or another, the last and emptiest fit of an exhausted cultural movement. The credibility of the mechanistic superstitions of scientism are falling away, and the myth of progress is consistently refuted by contemporary circumstances. Fewer and fewer people are convinced by models that see the world as an endlessly manipulable and growing machine, and science itself is often viewed as a dubious enterprise, full of charlatans and too capricious to base one’s actions upon.
While the technical echelons of our society continue to dream of space ages and genetically modified slave races, much of American culture has moved on and bears a remarkable resemblance to the trends described as belonging to “nighttime consciousness.” In some respects, Florensky’s descriptions of the transition between ages are more applicable to our age than to his. Everywhere occult interests and sham mysticism are spreading their tendrils, and the times are once again filled with speech of spirits, ghosts, and angels. At least for those of us who grew up surrounded by New Age, such speech is common place, almost taken for granted. A new dynamism has opened up in the human spirit, which everywhere grasps after the numinous, and with this trend toward the spiritual has come a slow but apparent interest in religion. Besides the more obvious turn towards Eastern religions and neopagan syntheses that much of American culture has displayed since at least the 1960s (however shallow and consumeristic much of this has been), I believe there is also a turn back towards Christianity. These two movement are not coincidental. One need only read the recent article by Paul Kingsnorth, in which he describes his peregrinations through Zen and Wicca, slow recognition of Christ, and eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, to see that the spiritual seeking engaged in by many Western people frequently ends in Christ.
The presence of an eternal feminine in certain corners of contemporary religious discourse is also worth noting, as it does indeed seem that this may be a significant feature of a growing religious consciousness. Much of this is a direct result of Florensky, Berdyaev, and the other Russian Sophiologists, who in varying ways articulated a vision of a “divine feminine,” an aspect of God comprehensible in feminine terms (although of course not in the sense of applying a creaturely gender to the divine). This is only one component of the discourse regarding the eternal feminine, however, and Sophiology itself is not limited to its Russian expression. With the vast cultural upheavals related to gender that our age has seen, it is quite likely that a new understanding of the spiritual nature of gender is called for, and especially for the deeper spiritual presence of the feminine. Michael Martin, who has done much to deepen the discussion regarding Sophiology and the changing theological awareness of gender, states that
the Western psyche has been clamoring for a regenerated imagination of the ontological reality of gender for at least a thousand years . . . the same Western psyche has been in search of a holistic and healthy imagination of gender from at least the time of Lady Wisdom’s expulsion from worship in First Temple Judaism under the reforms of King Josiah.
During the Middle Ages, the Christian psyche was on the way to rectifying this situation. Beguine mysticism, with its holy feminine eroticism, Franciscan spirituality, with its deep relationship to Nature, and the lays of the Troubadours and their adoration of the Lady all rendered witness to the need of the re-entrance of the Divine Feminine into culture.11
It is not implausible that the new middle ages, already dawning in the compost of the collapsing world, will see the revitalization of this project.
In addition, public consciousness seems remarkably aware that some sort of horizon has been reached, that a world is passing away. The endless apocalyptic films, the constant warnings of climate scientists, the political upheavals ravaging the US and global societies constantly remind us of this fact. Many able commentators believe that we are already experiencing the decline of our civilization. John Michael Greer, for instance, believes we are fifty years into a “long descent” into a new dark ages, from which “technic” cultures will emerge, able to balance the forces of our technological age in a way that achieves ecological balance and wisdom. One cannot help but see a resemblance here to the fracturing of centers and institutions predicted by Berdyaev and the organic, guild-like institutions that he saw as likely to replace the monoliths of our age.
These changes may still be only marginal, and my perspective is in all likelihood distorted by the context in which I live and the books with which I surround myself. We are, after all, still living in age characterized more by digital media than religious practice. Nevertheless, the cracks seem to be everywhere, and anyone paying attention would be hard pressed to say that we are resting upon firm foundations. Our culture faces the crises of a sort of eschaton, the transition from one way of being to another. What this other shall be remains to be seen. What is, I think, undeniably clear is that something is ending, and perhaps much quicker than many of us would care to admit. The new world is one that must be characterized by new ideas, new practices, new depths, and new relationships, and this change will influence every level of humanity, from individual consciousness to the highest levels of social structure. The calamities that this necessarily entails are likely to be brutal (indeed, many already have been), but we may hope that whatever world rises from the old, it will, at least in some respects, be superior to the one it has replaced. Whatever the case may be, I believe many of the trends identified above are real, and will only continue to become more apparent in the coming years.
Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism, trans. Boris Jakim (Semantron Press, 2014), 9.
Nicolas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, trans. Boris Jakim (Semantron Press, 2009), 23–24.
Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 17.
Florensky, Science & Mysticism, 16.
Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 72.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 106.
Florensky, Science & Mysticism, 10.
Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 91–92
Ibid., 95.
Intro to Jesus the Imagination, Vol. 5: The Divine Feminine, retrieved from https://www.thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com/post/the-divine-feminine-leading-us-ever-onward