Alongside Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I’m also reading Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World. So far a good complementary pair.
Guardini:
It became clear to medieval man when he turned his spirit in upon itself, when he descended to the core of his soul, that he reached a frontier of “inner finiteness.” Beyond it was the dwelling place of God again, but it was just as inconceivable as was the great expanse of transcendence where dwelt the Lord. To maintain his total cosmology, medieval man had to allow his spirit to think of “something” lying beyond the innermost side of that frontier of “inner finiteness”—a not-something and yet a something—the “place of God,” Who has crossed over and come into the world, into man’s soul as Immanence. There also “lived” God. In the Empyrean, however, God reigned publicly as the high Lord of all things; within the depths of the human soul He dwelt inwardly and privately. Both were “places” transcending the two farthest poles of reality: the first, lying beyond the uttermost sphere of creation; the second, lying buried to the “other side” of the inmost core of the soul of man.
Between these extreme points floated the world. As a whole and in each of its parts the world was the portrait of God; that is, the rank and excellence of every created being was determined by the degree to which it bore within itself the stamp of God’s image. A vast hierarchy of being—the non-living, the plants and the animals—was formed by the interrelations of the many things found in these realms of essence. At the highest, man in his rational-spiritual life was enabled to gather all lesser things into a unity unknown to the ancients and true to the revealed creation of God, into the unity of the macrocosm in all its ranks and degrees, in the fullness of its meaning.
Modern astronomy has refuted this total construction of the medieval genius which gave expression to reality as it is directly grasped by the human eye and consciousness. For this very reason the theory has a most penetrating symbolic power in human thought. Even today its existential validity cannot be denied, while its influence upon the ways of medieval man was profound.
He goes on to describe what he calls “the key to medieval efforts”: “namely, that medieval man neither wished to explore the mysteries of the world empirically nor did he want to illuminate them by a rational methodology.”
[T]he medieval thinker went directly to the world of existing things, to those things which he experienced immediately in sensation; he reflected upon their essences and status within the interdependent ordering of creation. From those reflections medieval man garnered a wisdom which even today has its value. Medieval anthropology, for example, in both principle and application, is superior to its modern counterpart. In morality and moral attitude, medieval life had a firmer yet richer hold on reality than is possible for modern man; it also made possible a fuller perfecting of human nature. In social philosophy and jurisprudence, medieval thought encompassed and ordered its concrete cultural situation to its own time, yet it offers insights which have basic validity for man at any time.