On a Vulgar Error
by C.S. Lewis
No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way Prosaic
mad, inelegant, or what not.
Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say How
modern and how ugly? They did not.
Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.
If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?
Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.
If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?
So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.
Modernity is possessed by progress. So much so, it despises history. The future is the heaven it can never obtain and the past is all its failed attempts to get there. Modernity hates tradition and worships novelty. "Next" and "new" are the word and sacrament of advance.
The Medieval mindset, by contrast, encourages looking back in order to better look around. The Medieval mind compares "now" to "before" in order to compare and contrast advantages and difficulties. It thinks in terms of trade-offs, while Modernity considers only solutions. Modernity is blind to the side effects of progress and thus is continually obsessed with fixing the unforeseen problems caused by previous foolproof solutions.
The Medieval mindset does not reject advance, but insists on assessing it -- testing all things, keeping the good and tossing the bad. The Medieval mindset is one of adoption by evaluation whereas Modernity calls for revolution by abandonment.
The Medieval mind is centered upon accepting Christ, not in rejecting Modernity. The Medieval mindset would not resist the phone or the internet simply as "new" technologies. It wouldn't welcome or refuse them solely for the sake of their newness, but neither would it necessarily fawn over them for their novelty. The heart of the Medieval worldview dwelt pondering within the Church, not rejecting anything invented outside of it.
Medievalism is the novelty of vetting novelty. Modernity is the tedium of tossing tradition and the monotony of obsessing over obscurities. Medievalism is the originality of rejecting some originals while Modernity is the predictability of infatuation with innovation.
Modernity is a vaccination against tradition. It pits artificial against beneficial and prefers unique over ubiquitous. Medievalism is inherited immunity. It considers utility without forgetting vanity. It prefers well-worn assiduity to fresh-baked fixation. It curates continuity instead of manufacturing monotony.
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