Pour les siècles des siècles: La civilisation chrétienne de l’occident médiéval by Oleg Voskoboynikov (review)

With this monograph, Oleg Voskoboynikov seeks to capture the form and content of the medieval mind. He anchors his study on the symbolic meaning behind artistic, architectural, theological, philosophical, and discursive production. Methodologically, his source base tends to privilege those deemed “little known,” either forgotten or ignored by historians (8). Although some may consider this a weakness, this approach to sourcing his study gives place to peripheral evidence as he builds a model for understanding the medieval mind and its enduring legacy.

For the purposes of this study, Voskoboynikov defines “medieval” as spanning the period from the Emperor Constantine (r. 306–312) to the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321). He argues that between these dates, European culture cohered around distinctly Christian symbols that theologians, princes, and artists of all media debated and propagated in word and deed. These two chronological bookends symbolize important moments in the development of Western thought, from the legalization of Christianity by Constantine to just before the Papal Schism (1378–1417) began the process of undermining the integrity of unifying Christian metaphors in Western Europe. Importantly, this periodization solves a problem, in Voskoboynikov’s view, created by the various political and cultural shifts occurring in the premodern world. With this established, Voskoboynikov continues more or less chronologically from the fourth century to the fourteenth, focusing on certain themes he considers paramount. For example, his second chapter entitled “Origine” (“Origin”) traces both the development of a central place for Christian scriptures within Catholic faith and practice and also their capital position in Western Europe as a social organizing principal for Christian civilization. In the third chapter, “Vision Symbolique” (“Symbolic Vision”), he examines the work of Jerome and Augustine as critical in weaving within European social fabric a place for both holy scriptures and the symbolic understanding of civilization as a physical reflection of heaven. Symbolic interpretations, Voskoboynikov argues, came to replace empiricism as a dominate mode of European thought in the Middle Ages.

In the following three chapters, Voskoboynikov chiefly examines texts pertaining to the eleventh through fourteenth centuries for what they say about the mentalities toward the collective (the Church), the Individual, and the Transcendent. Throughout, the paradox of the material and spiritual is a significant leitmotif, which Voskoboynikov points out time and again as having appeared in various media. In the last two chapters, the author examines how medieval poetry and architecture treated the dichotomies of the physical and spiritual, profane and sacred, pagan and Christian. He ends the last chapter underscoring how both the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, codified into Catholic dogma in the thirteenth century, stood with the Gothic cathedral as symbols of the medieval fusion of the physical and spiritual.

Sweeping in scope and ambitious, Pour les siècles des siècles sees the Middle Ages as an era where Christian symbols provided the basis for unifying diverse people across time and space. Voskoboynikov finds that these images and metaphors created an enduring set of aesthetic and intellectual principles that are the Middle Ages’ bequest to the modern West. Although these connections between the Middle Ages and our day are, perhaps, lacking in development, Voskoboynikov’s work nonetheless deserves the attention of both medievalists and modernists alike whose inquiries concern art, architecture, the mentalities, or culture broadly speaking.