The warm browns of leather books and wooden shelves glowed as the door opened. Entering the private study, I found the smell of old books and dust hanging heavy in the air. My host was bringing me into a treasure chamber: his personal library, the result of decades of careful acquisition.
This private collection—located in a Southern California suburb—contained thousands of years of history. From the saber-toothed tiger fang to the handwritten letters of Ulysses S. Grant, I was literally put in touch with realities coming to me from across the centuries.
Perhaps the item that struck me most was the two-handled clay cup from Greece, dated to about 450 BC. So excellently preserved that I could have drunk coffee out of it, this mug was covered in simple geometric patterns in white, orange, and black glaze. Suddenly, as I held it in my hands, a surprising realization dawned: this was made by someone just like me.
But that moment of comprehension contradicted a deep-seated assumption. Even those who love old things might still tend to feel that people of long ago were … well, not really very human. More primitive. Less sophisticated. It was a startling experience to see the glaze painted just like the mugs created by local artisans in my own hometown—or even as I might have painted it in a pottery class.
There was something uncanny about the evident humanness of such an old artifact—and, I suppose, something comforting as well. Somehow, out of the strokes on that piece of pottery arose in me the knowledge that I share a deeply significant faculty with a Greek craftsman of 2500 years ago: the uniquely human ability to make ordered and proportional objects, to deliberately form patterns, and even pursue something as ‘useless’ as the joy resulting from decoration on something as humdrum as a cup.
The same was true of other artifacts. The male and female figures on a large vase from a hundred years later—350 BC, contemporary with Aristotle—reveal sure, careful, and intentional brushwork. The black lines and the smooth joints in the clay at the vase’s handle must have been created by dexterous hands.
Another beautiful experience was paging through several illuminated Divine Office books from the 13th and 14th centuries. One hefty tome—perhaps with a five-inch wide spine—surprised me by smelling strongly of smoke. Every page of that breviary emitted a strong wood-smoke smell—presumably from the ‘central heating’ of its various medieval homes! Another codex smelled strongly like animal glue, the vellum pages themselves releasing a pungent but not unpleasant odor.
If our prayer books no longer smell like fireplaces or dead animals, however, they do provide some of the same pleas to God. In one 13th-century breviary, I deciphered (despite the obscure script) the same Latin phrases I hear whenever I attend the Traditional Latin Mass: Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, “Almighty, everlasting God …”—the opening of a Collect.
Despite having pored over various books on illumination and having tried my hand at the art myself, the gold leaf on a 14th-century breviary took me quite by surprise. Not only was the detail in the decorative borders exquisite, the gold was much brighter and untarnished than you might presume. Written in a more readable font, I could recognize dozens of lines of the Vulgate psalms.
Where the Greek mug had reminded me of the continuous nature of human activity, however, these gilt pages spoke to me of the difference between the true artistry of former times and the regress of modern ‘progress.’ We assume that we, as ‘superior moderns,’ with our smartphones and sociology and spandex, can always out-compute and out-explain and out-sex our predecessors in the species. That might be partly true (and not always to our credit); but there are ways in which we are vastly outshone by our predecessors. Indeed, the sheepskin pages of this book reminded me of that fact.
The average man or woman of today, despite many more years of school, actually knows less math than the children taught in the one-room schoolhouses of the 19th century, the scholastics of medieval universities or even the youths of Plato’s Athens. The fact that a modern man or woman can pull out a smartphone with a calculator app really doesn’t mean we are more advanced. In fact, in many ways such technology has retarded our progress since we no longer do these calculations ourselves and cannot explain why they work. Looking further afield, the exponential growth of mental illness among the world’s youth seems inextricably tied to a mis-use of digital technology which that technology cannot help to remedy.
In thinking about what we moderns have to ‘show for ourselves,’ I can’t help remarking that we certainly don’t have many (if any) artists on par with the anonymous illuminators of the Middle Ages. Without wanting to demean the real art that emerges in our own day, I would also point to the general decline of society in general—whether you focus on aspects arising from the Enlightenment, Industrial, or Sexual Revolution. Stepping back, it is hard to conceive of modern man as ‘more advanced’ when we consider that it is our age that has produced Picasso’s and Pollock’s in the visual arts. Do we have anything like these glittering, abiding prayer books to show as proof of our grasp of reality?
We have something to learn from the ancients not because they were ‘proto-moderns’ (the oh-so-psychological Augustine or the persecuted Galileo), but because they were not moderns. Fundamentally, we have the same powers as our ancestors—if only we would not stifle them. Let us not assume we are so different. Our commonness might just hold the key to regaining our sanity.
Next time I find myself assuming that just because someone lived 2000 years ago, he mustn’t have been very smart or ‘with it,’ I’ll try to remember the pottery and books I touched with my own hands (you can at catch a glimpse of them here).
