The Waning of the Enlightenment

Johan Huizinga's book The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in English in 1924.¹ In it he describes the decadence of medieval civilization in the 14th and 15th centuries. He shows the decline, trivialization, decadence, or irrelevance of one medieval form after another. Here is how he explains his unique intention in his Preface:

History has always been far more engrossed by problems of origins than by those of decline and fall . . . . But in history, as in nature, birth and death are equally balanced. The decay of overripe forms of civilization is as suggestive a spectacle as the growth of new ones. And it occasionally happens that a period in which one had, hitherto, been mainly looking for the coming to birth of new things, suddenly reveals itself as an epoch of fading and decay.

Huizinga, to be sure, has not lacked for critics. James K. McConica, lecturing in 1995 to the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, asserted: "There was no 'Middle Ages' to decline; there was no 'Renaissance' to be reborn. There was no waning of vitality in the intellectual endeavors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the agenda was revised."² That may well be true as far as it goes, but it does not really detract from Huizinga's claim that societal forms once vital had become moribund by the 15th century.

What I hope to do here is look at our own period through Huizinga's lens: to see it as a period that "suddenly reveals itself as an epoch of fading and decay." Applying historical principles to one's own time is always a perilous enterprise. But if Huizinga has come upon a valid principle of general historiography, it should be applicable to this period as well as to any other. My hope is that if we look carefully enough at which societal forms are moribund in our own day, we may be able to discern which forms are not. The forms that seem to me to be now moribund are those of the Enlightenment; hence the title I have given this essay.

According to Huizinga, late medieval thought was marred by "a too systematic idealism." Ideas became divorced from daily human existence:

Ideas, being conceived as entities and of importance only by virtue of their relation with the Absolute, easily range themselves as so many fixed stars on the firmament of thought. Once defined, they only lend themselves to classification, subdivision and distinction according to purely deductive norms

(214).

Johan Huizinga

The preoccupation with ideas gave rise to a tendency to look at social institutions and patterns in terms of what they aspired to instead of what they actually did. The Church was the Bride of Christ. Her priests were shepherds of their flocks, ready to lay down their lives for their sheep. Kings and great lords were fathers to their people. Knights were sworn defenders of widows, orphans, gentle ladies, and the poor. Love was a response to the beauty of the beloved, spiritual no less than physical. Artists and craftsmen served God in the beauty of holiness. Monks, nuns, and friars prayed for their benefactors, living and dead. Worldly clergy, oppressive kings and lords, looting knights, philandering lovers, drunken artists, shoddy craftsmen, and religious who were false to their vows were denounced from the pulpit and occasionally corrected in the courts, but they were not seen as affecting the institutions they represented or undermining their authority.

When medieval civilization was taking shape, this focus on the ideal—one might call it a ruthless disregard of the pragmatic—was a source of major achievement. The preoccupation with classification and analysis gave us St. Thomas Aquinas in theology and Gratian in law. A cosmic amalgamation of classification and symbol gave us Dante. A theoretical articulation of society gave us Magna Carta. The aspiration to replicate the Heavenly Kingdom in the midst of a laggard economy and a tenuous security gave us the monasteries, the guilds, the orders of chivalry, and the divine insouciance of St. Francis. The idealization of love led to a...