Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill

Author:Thomas Cahill [Cahill, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75514-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

INTERMEZZO

Entrances to Other Worlds

The Mediterranean, the Orient, and the Atlantic

The scourge of heaven’s wrath

in the hands of the inhuman

Tartars, erupting as it were from

the secret confines of Hell,

oppresses and crushes the earth.

—POPE ALEXANDER IV TO ALL THE PRINCES OF CHRISTENDOM

TO MEDIEVAL MAN, THE COSMOS WAS full of “secret confines,” arcana no one knew the way to and few knew anything about but which one might stumble upon without warning. As in those fables rooted in the Middle Ages and collected by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, a secret door or a hidden path might lead the unsuspecting traveler almost anywhere. Like Alice’s rabbit hole or the wardrobe that leads to Narnia or Hildegard’s imagined mountain perforated by windows, reality itself was permeable. Not only did Hell have secret cupboards; so did Purgatory and Heaven. And our world of ordinary reality was intersected by other worlds, both nightmarish terrains of infernal cruelty and incandescent landscapes of impossible beauty and passionate peace. When medieval people beheld the night sky, they were not terrified, as would be Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century, by the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” They believed that just above their heads there moved a harmonious universe, resounding with the Music of the Spheres, far too lovely for earthlings to appreciate, and that the sky was full of winged angels in their serried ranks, invisible to most of us most of the time.

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