The New Monks Of Europe

One of the best books I have ever read is The Discarded Image by CS Lewis. Scurrying around the house I have been unable to locate my copy but I remember enough about his picture of the later Medieval educated man and how it felt for him to be alive .

When such a man walked out into the night he did not think the stars were nearby.He knew they were unimaginably distant , but they were a finite distance away, and further more they were 'up'. Newtonian Gravity was not available and he thought of up and down going on forever ,a sensation that speaks to your bones. He also envisioned the cosmos as full of light and music. Space was was concieved as a huge Cathedral in which he, man, stood unmoving at the centre . This picture delighted the scholars seeming to place everything in its place and tie in every scrap of knowledge they had. There is none of the existential panic that so typifies the modern mind when it looks out at the stars . Everything was in its allotted place.


This idea of the Cosmos was only part of an all encompassing model which is the eponymous discarded image . Lewis argues that Mediaeval man at his most typical was not a romantic and the Knightly genre was unusual . In serious moments he was a list make, codifier and reconciler.

He had a great job on his hands . The people of that period did not think of themselves as progressing they were conscious of the greater achievements of the Classical era and thought of themselves as comfortably half way done the stairs in a position of equilibrium . They looked back to the golden achievements of the past rather than revering everything modern and progressive.

The Classical period they worshipped was unfortunately one they understood very little. They had no idea then that the dustbin of miscellaneous texts bequeathed from antiquity were of entirely different types and periods . Urban Comedies religious texts Christian and pagan , separated by a thousand years, were treated as equallY ‘true’ . Not unnaturally monstrous contradictions arose, that the Mediaeval mind set about reconciling with assiduous glee together with Germanic folk wisdom . This multi generational task was not unlike the building of Cathedrals .The model encompassed science medicine religion and every aspect of their world. It is itself the great achievement of that period and each Monk liked to add his own flourish to its perfection . Think of the elaborate lettering or the accumulation of detail, in the Gothic style .

The problem with it all was that it was not true . As an artistic exercise it was mesmerising but it did not work . Most of the progress of Victorian medicine was not so much progress as realising the remnants of the model were utterly wrong , with their humours and demons.To the Monk knowledge cam from ‘Auctoritee’ not empirical experiment which would have affronted his religion and his temprement

Shoot forward in time to the present and I have been wondering why it is that such a plainly doomed endeavour as trying to homogenise Europe into a single state acquires such pseudo religious adherence . Are we , experiencing the re-assertion of the Monkish codifying tendency that was so predominant for so long .?

Think of the way a piece of legislation is born . An especially controversial one ( See Christopher Booker The Castle of Lies ) was the near destruction of our lettuce growing industry in the 90s due to the proliferation of viral nitrate regulation . It started with a carcinogen scare on Germany and the attempt to legislate for levels in their own country . This immediately came under the auspices of the EC Commissions standing committee on food as a potential restriction of trade. The proposed restrictions would make growing under glass impossible and so Southern Europe was delighted and supported the regulation which would finish the UK`s £65 million industry centred in Lancashire . Other Northern European countries did not understand the implications and promised support .Commission regulation the input of politicians was not essential . There was no evidence to support the cancer scare and the UK`s product was universally consumed domestically . Nonetheless the UK government were obliged to enforce a law that wiped out our industry . In fact at that time a five year breather was agreed and I am not up to date with the denouement.

My point here is that the supposed attempt to level trade between vastly differing and highly controlling states is inevitably going to spawn an fractal level, of codifying and and complicating . To the Monkish mind the very complexity of it is beautiful.

Like the Medieval system however it does not work and will be exposed by empirical experience . Unlike that discarded image, it bequeaths nothing but ugly inscrutable Articles and memoranda as well as a ravenous Mantioch that sucks the life force of nations into itself and feeds on their still twitching limbs