At Comment, from Matthew Milliner, who is a professor of history at Wheaton. He notes signs of the continuing appeal of ancient Christiana practices and sensibilities. The continuing popularity and growth of the ancient-future trend among evangelicals, in particular.
His metaphor is the admonition – cited in Scripture and in the words of St. Francis at the beginning of his piece – to leave some part of a field untended or unmown. Don’t try to manage everything, to leave everything neat and controlled.
I like the piece – the missing piece though, is that he can’t or won’t consider (at least here) how the Reformation itself contributed to this mindset. But other than that, he offers plenty of food for thought for all of us, including Catholics, of course.
Accordingly, a new generation of Christians gave their mowers a rest, and stopped assuming that only the ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman layers of the past were worthy of investigation. Once we remembered that the Holy Spirit has long been with the church, leading her into all truth, the forgotten flowers began to appear. While teaching at Wheaton College, Professor Robert Webber (1933–2007) faithfully recorded the first of them in his string of remarkable books, but I can testify that in the decades since Webber’s departure, these ancient-future flowers continue to germinate. Without space to name all of them, I can think of at least four recent blossoms, alliterated to bolster my evangelical credibility: meaning, maps, monasticism, and mysticism.
Take maps:
All this is true enough, one might reply. But is the Mappa Mundi “accurate”? Does it not depict griffins and unicorns? While we may have learned more hard facts about biology since the Mappa Mundi was created, at least the map’s creators retained a sense of wonder and reverence about the animals they saw fit to include, however fanciful. The moral wisdom radiating from a leopard or a peacock in medieval bestiaries is far more sophisticated, and playful, than our celebrity-hosted nature shows today, however impressive the camera techniques. We may have expensive lenses to amplify our literal reading of nature, but they had allegorical, moral, and anagogical lenses as well.
When the moral dimension is considered, the Mappa Mundi is very “accurate” indeed—and, I repeat, superior. Many in the present have tried to “decolonize” their maps by de-centring North America and Europe. Good for them. But these reconstructions are far less daring than the Mappa Mundi, which puts what is now India, Iraq, and Iran on top, with England (where the map itself was made!) tucked off in a corner. The Enlightenment gave us Eurocentrism, not the Middle Ages.
But if Eurocentrism is to be lamented, how about self-centrism? Indeed, Google Earth’s only centre is the scroller’s will. But the centre of the world, the navel, for the Mappa Mundi is the Holy Land itself, the only land that has the privilege of being the centre thanks to God’s election of the chosen people (not by merit but by grace). Moreover, it is only Jerusalem that has any right to be the centre of Christendom, as the diverse Christian communities—Armenian, Orthodox, Coptic, Syrians, Ethiopian, Franciscan—radiating in every direction from the Holy Sepulchre attest. (And lest Protestants be left out, it was a California Episcopalian who designed the star in the Sepulchre’s dome!) A simpler way of putting it is that only Jerusalem-centred maps like the Mappa Mundi are up to date, for only they can make sense of new research regarding global Christian communities on offer in books like Vince Bantu’s extraordinary A Multitude of Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity’s Global Identity.
Charlotte was Both 