They set the Bible against Christian tradition and sought to recover the purity and simplicity of primitive Christianity behind all the supposed accretions of a thousand years of ecclesiastical mediation. The view of European history as having a negatively characterised middle was reinforced by the Protestant Reformers. between the two moments of humane light and glory thus became the dark middle period. The proud spirits of the Renaissance supposed themselves to have recaptured and even surpassed the Ancient birth of humanism. It depicted the immediately preceding centuries as a barren period characterized by darkness and ignorance, in comparison with the earlier glories of Greece and Rome. The mediaeval as an historical period and cultural characteristic was invented in the European Renaissance-which we treat in the next Section of the Foundation Year Programme. When we study and evaluate the mediaeval, we are engaged simultaneously in a confrontation with what we represent as an external enemy and with ourselves. Thus Westerners accusing their adversaries of being mediaeval are attacking something in their own formative history, something about themselves and their past they fear and hate. Significantly, however, the “Middle Ages” or “Dark Ages” is a period only within European history. On the other side, modern Westerners label their Muslim opposition as “mediaeval,” a name evoking the dark and backward, a confusion of religion and the secular bringing cruelty and ignorance.

On the one side, as in the Middle Ages, Islam thinks itself attacked by a new group of invasive Christian Crusaders, once again desecrating their holy places, occupying their homelands, and massacring them. It belongs to their war of words both sides hurl the mediaeval as an abuse. Urn:oclc:877724506 Republisher_date 20120322235525 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120315011401 Scanner mediaeval is present to both sides in the current conflicts between the Anglo-American Protestant powers, who depict themselves as the defenders of our Western Christian Civilization, on the one hand, and the Islamic Middle East, on the other. Urn:lcp:passionofwestern00tarn:epub:448f61af-b064-4e75-ab95-5570e8847fec Extramarc UCLA Voyager Foldoutcount 0 Identifier passionofwestern00tarn Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3gx5d75p Isbn 9780345368096ĩ0020142 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL20720750M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:50:34 Boxid IA175201 Boxid_2 CH120121115-BL1 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1.

The passion of the western mind