Tread Softly

Tread softly Alex Conradie The medieval mind and emotional landscape of the Middle Ages may only be understood through the prism of a bygone & aggrieved Christianity. The modern world simply does not share the insistent principle that the life of the spirit and the after-world is superior to the here and now. Indeed, the rupture of this medieval principle created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages. Overwrought with rapacious war & foul plague, medieval Europe lacked key elements of the Renaissance; a general optimism in the future and a belief in the worth of the individual. The founding of a Carthusian charterhouse in 1398, Mount Grace Priory, mirrored a world that had lost faith in itself and in dire need of grace. The purpose of a charterhouse was an austere devotion to prayer & intercession for a hapless world. Carthusians took flight from a heartless world as hermits in isolated cells, rarely meeting together other than in communal prayer. Monasticism is neither peculiar to Christianity nor limited to the medieval. The 1st century Essenes also sought solitude and, in sharp contrast to Christ, willed their separation from an impure world. In the eastern monastic tradition, Buddhism has existed since 500 BC. Whether founded in Judaism or Buddhism, monasteries imply discord with the outside world's morality. The monastic impulse may have deeper roots than the purely religious. Fundamental to the human heart is a desire to delve into why we are here. After all, the ability to contemplate our existence & circumstance is what separates us from our primate cousins. Though the evolutionary necessity of self-awareness is contentious; there in lies the rub. Thinking in the symbolic abstract also brings us into unplumbed discord with the natural world from which no flight is possible. While wavering at a precipice in the emotional landscape of the modern world, loudly we trudge in the Garden of Eden.