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There is an easy way to explain why medieval culture, in spite of its greater chronological proximity, tends to appear more remote and alien to us than the cultures of Classical Antiquity. After all, we associate the beginning of the so-called “process of Modernity,” that is the beginning of the historical trajectory supposed to have led to our own present, with the “Renaissance” of an interest in Greek and Roman Antiquity, which was synonymous with a turning away from medieval culture. So if we see “Renaissance” in the sense of this double movement and as a legacy that determines our present, then the Middle ages turn into a background of Otherness. Three central epistemological contrasts characterize the departure of Modernity from this medieval background and, at the same time, all modern attempts to recuperate Antiquity. Against a self-imagine of humans, coming from “Genesis,” as body and spirit (“dirt” and the “breath of God”), early modern men began to conceive of themselves as “Subjects,” which meant that they moved towards Descartes’ formula “I think therefore I am” and towards an identification of their entire existence with the mind. As a consequence and secondly, an ontological gap opened up between humans as Subjects and the material world as their object of observation, whereas medieval men had believed to inhabit the material world as a divine creation. If, thirdly, medieval men had relied on divine revelation as the exclusive and inalterable source of a knowledge, the early modern Subject’s outside view of the world set into motion a gigantic task of knowledge production as a description, interpretation, and analysis of the world, according to the criteria of the human mind and with the hope of reaching a state of completion.

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With mostly positive, not to say normative connotations, Western cultures refer to this self-assigned knowledge-revision by the name of “Enlightenment” and want to see in the “Historical world view,” as it established itself around 1800, both an achievement of Enlightenment and a condition for its continuation. Different from the medieval conception of time that was simply expecting a stability and continuity of the world as divine creation, the Historical world view, for the first time ever, thought of the future as an open horizon of possibilities that humans could shape. By contrast, it imagined the past to recede behind the present and to lose its orientational value for human experience to the degree that the distance between the past and the present was growing. Between this receding past and that open future, the Historical world view conceived of the present as an imperceptibly short moment of transition. And this imperceptibly short present was finally supposed to turn into the epistemological site where the Subject, based on experience from the past, tried to shape the future by choosing from possibilities that appeared as a field of contingency, in other words as a horizon of alternatives surrounded by “necessity” (conditions not open for choice) and “impossibility” (products of human imagination that humans do not associate with themselves).

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Now had the process of Modernity and the Historical world view as its source of energy fulfilled all of their inherent and explicit promises, the traces of medieval culture might have remained the target of a typically academic, both distant and “archeological” interest. What however strikes me as truly remarkable today, in my own reactions to the Middle ages indeed as well as in those of many colleagues, students, and friends, is a much more powerful yearning for the time before Early Modernity, a yearning that elevates medieval culture to the status of an epistemological and above all of an existential object of desire. Given how many respectable thinkers do still feel comfortable with understanding their existence as part of an ongoing “process of Modernity,” I hesitate to go as far as to state, as if this could be considered a “fact,” that the yearning for medieval culture makes evident the failure, derailment, or even the ending of the process of Modernity (beside the impression that such “radical” statements appear helplessly dated in the 2020s). And yet, the Middle ages would likely have much less of an attraction for us, had it not been for certain complications and frustrations within the process of Modernity. Trying to spot and describe three of them may help us better understand our fascination for medieval culture.

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I start with a focus on the Subject / Object relationship as it had emerged as a predominant epistemological structure between humans and the material world after the end of the Middle ages, a structure initially  implying the expectation that complete knowledge of the world could be achieved. With the role of the human world observer becoming habitually self-reflexive since the mid-eighteen century, at least among intellectuals (who then went by the name of “philosophes”), that optimism began to become more precarious, requiring and provoking ever more complex explanations and justifications in the course of the nineteenth century. A good hundred years after Kant’s “critical” writings in reaction to the new conception of the self-reflexive world observer, the impression of a gap separating world-observer and world had grown so dramatically that it provoked the development of “Phenomenology,” both in Henri Bergson’s and Edmund Husserl’s version, as a final attempt to rescue and to maintain the possibility of world comprehension. Both those thinkers suggested that a careful self-observing analysis of the structures and the functions of the human mind could enable us to become aware of the mind’s impact on our world experience and to then discount (or even “subtract”) these effects from our world experience with the goal of reaching objectivity. In the reception process of the phenomenological project, however, this final stage, that is the hope for a return to objectivity, got lost. Instead of “purifying” world experience from the traces of the human mind, many readers of Husserl, Bergson, and other early phenomenologists lost out of sight the world as an object of observation and increasingly relied just on world descriptions and world constructions emerging from the human mind, especially on those constructions capable of producing consensus. By the third quarter of the twentieth century, this epistemological attitude, under names like “Constructivism,” “Linguistic turn,” “Pragmatism, or “Consensus theory of truth,” found broad positive resonance because it seemed to provide much greater flexibility and even freedom for human interaction and collaboration than the traditional Subject / Object relation. But while Constructivism is far from being extinct today and while we can say that behavior relying on statistics-based projections of the future, as a dominant contemporary mode of practice, is itself a type of Constructivism, a strong feeling of world loss has emerged. It comes with a longing for more pertinent and more binding states of knowledge—often in full awareness of how unlikely or even impossible such a return to impressions of certainty would be. This is the environment in which the medieval belief of physically inhabiting and being part of a familiar material world made by God for humans has turned an object of existential desire.

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Here is a second, substantially different epistemological loop of departing from and returning to certain premises of medieval culture as objects of desire. We have seen how the “imperceptibly short present” of the Historical world view served as the place of agency for a human self-reference that, different from the medieval self-reference of mind and body, was exclusively focused on the mind. Now if we are living in an ever broadening present today, then this contrast between the short and the broad present may explain our longing, both in the everyday (think of early morning athletic exercise) and in our theoretical reflections (think of hybrid disciplines like “neuro-philosophy”), for a return to forms of existence that include and even affirm the body. Cultural products from the Middle ages, with their strong traces of physical presence, seem to fulfill such yearning.

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As a third problem within the profess of Modernity, we can describe how, largely under the influence of electronic technology, the normative situation of processing our environment within the Historical world view, that is the shaping of the future out of a field of contingency surrounded by poles of necessity and impossibility, is now turning into a situation that we should call a “universe of contingency”—because its poles of necessity and impossibility are disappearing. Two examples. There have always been persons born with female or male genitals who knew that they belonged to the opposite sex. Formerly such cases of individual certainty were denied by their anatomical condition considered a state of “necessity,” whereas new possibilities of transexual surgery are now beginning to transform such “necessity” into “choice.” On the side of impossibility, we used to attribute products of our imagination that we could not associate with human life, like “omniscience,” “omnipresence,” or “omnipotence,” with divine beings. In the age of Zoom and Wikipedia, at least omniscience and omnipresence are approaching a status of everyday conditions, which means that the pole of “impossibility” has begun to melt. While we may appreciate such changes as extensions of our freedom, living in a universe of contingency without necessity nor impossibility also overburdens us with a no longer manageable complexity of choice. Such overcomplexity turns into a source of desire for binding orientation in our lives, for an orientation coming from an authority transcendent to our own, for an existential horizon that may remind us of revelation as the exclusive source of knowledge within medieval culture.

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Summing up the three previous remarks, we can say that under the intellectual and technological premises of the early twenty-first century present the form of human self-reference inherent to medieval culture, its typical relationship to the material world, and its dominant conception of knowledge have come back into our existence as a both new and old horizon of desire. Seen from this perspective, I find it fascinating that Martin Heidegger, whose intellectual career had started out from Catholic theology and continued with a book on the conceptual matrix underlying the texts of Duns Scotus, did anticipate such movements of return to the Middle ages in his philosophical work since the publication of Being and Time in 1927. Emphasizing the spatial dimension of human existence, his notion of “Dasein” (“being there”), as a substitution of Subjecthood, brought back the body into human self-reference. The replacement of the modern “Subject / Object-relationship” (for which he used the notion “present-at-hand” (“Vorhandenheit”)) through the concept of “ready-to-hand” (“Zuhandenheit”) reactivated the idea of human life as a bodily life in touch with and surrounded by its material environment. With the intuition of a “self-unconcealment of Being” (“Selbstentbergung des Seins”) Heidegger’s later work found back to a view of knowledge close (although not completely synonymous) to that of “revelation” because it shifted the initiative of knowledge production away from the impulses of human activity to the things of the world as phenomena that show themselves. “Being” (“Sein”) indeed, in its affinity to the “world in and by itself,” is supposed to show itself instead of being interpreted and transformed into knowledge by humans. Contemporary reservations and doubts, especially from the side of Analytic philosophy, may be powerful enough to exclude Heidegger’s (never fully elaborated) network of concepts and intuitions so strongly inspired by medieval culture from ever becoming a common epistemological ground for work in philosophy. On the other hand, we may take the continued appeal of Heidegger’s writing among contemporary readers as an indirect encouragement for taking seriously the value of texts and works from the Middle ages for individual situations and problems of existence today.

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In this spirit, I believe that Christian theology today would be well advised to return to some of its pre-reformatory motifs and strengths, instead of—often quite desperately—pursuing a path of modernization and secularization along which it cannot help remaining behind the standard expectations that are typical for societies of our time. The reception history of Simone Weil’s work, for example, demonstrates how mysticism as the hope for an experience of God as transcendental authority and as bodily immediacy is gaining attraction to the degree that our everyday life has become an existence under the challenges and complexities of the universe of contingency. Likewise, the concept of “Christ’s mystical body,” as an early way of understanding the Christian form of community as mediated by God’s incarnation and therefore including the physical dimension of human life, might suggest a powerful alternative to an existence in growing individual and spiritual isolation. And should we not consider a reinterpretation of the bleak current scenarios of ecological thought evoking a departure of human life from the planet Earth, through the rich and endlessly more comforting tradition of mostly medieval images about the end of the world as fulfillment of redemption?

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Once we understand that a specific relationship exists today between our view of medieval culture and some of the most profound desires emerging from present-day existential situations, it becomes clear that the current fascination of the Middle ages is by no means restrained to its religious or theological traditions. More than through contents, the implicit performative dimension of the textual archive that we refer to as “medieval literature” offers the possibility to imagine and even embody forms of communication and community that converge with our both existential and epistemological longings. Trying to recite troubadour songs or “cantares de amigo,” for example, can help us sense the flavor of a social world where the invention of texts was inseparable from the act of embodying them and where a festive mood of being together was capable of overcoming an initial hierarchical distance between troubadours with their songs and those who listened to them. Since its romantic beginnings, the academic institution of “Medieval studies” has abandoned and criticized as “naïve” similar ways of dealing with its legacy, increasingly replacing them by elevated levels of philological work and ever-more differentiated degrees of historical understanding. Possible experiments and attempts at reconnecting with the earlier disciplinary impulses of reciting and performing vernacular texts from the Middle ages should of course actively use all those scholarly achievements of the past two centuries. This can only intensify the pleasure of playing with materials which, for the moment, have come so surprisingly close to us.