Church and Culture in the Middle Ages (350-814)

In this penetrating study, the German Catholic historian Gustav Schner (1860-1941), examines one of the central questions in the history of Western civilization: what was the true relation between the Catholic Church and medieval culture? Refusing both the Enlightenment caricature of the Middle Ages as a time of barbarism and the opposite temptation to idealize them without qualification, Schner offers a measured account of the period in which the Church stood at the heart of social, intellectual, and cultural life.

For Schner, the Middle Ages were not merely the decline of classical antiquity, but the beginning of a new Western civilization. Modern nations, languages, literatures, cities, schools, and institutions took shape under the formative influence of the Catholic faith. In this sense, the medieval centuries may rightly be called the ecclesiastical period of Western civilization, an age in which the Church not only preserved what was noble in the ancient world, but also gave birth to new cultural forms.

Yet this work is no romanticized portrait. Schner also attends to the shadows of the medieval world, especially the danger that the civilization fostered by the Church could in turn tempt churchmen toward worldliness and obscure their supernatural mission. This volume remains a timely invitation to reconsider the foundations of the West at a moment when those foundations are again under question.