Dec 2004 Christian Spirituality      Continued from previous issue By George A Lane SJ

RELIGIOUS CLIMATE OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a time of momentous transition and turmoil in western Europe. This was the time of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the Avignon Captivity of the popes, and the Great Western Schism wiht three rivals popes trying to rule Christendom. This was also the era of piety represented in The Imitation of Christ. The emphasis we have given the great religious families of Dominic and Francis must be balanced by a more general picture of the religious climate of the times. In his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga writes: To the world when it was half a thousand years younger the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than they do to us. Life seemed to consist in extremes - a fierce religious asceticism and an unrestrained licentiousness, ferocious judicial punishments and great popular waves of pity and mercy, the most horrible crimes and the most extravagant acts of saintliness - and everywhere a sea of tears. All experience had yet to the minds of men the cirectness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms which raised them to the dignity of ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacraments, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulae. We will try to fill inthis picture with an outline of the theories of prayer prevalent at this time and then a description of the popular religious imagination of the same time. There were basically two different attitudes toward the life of prayer and communion with God around 1300. One attitude developed from the Benedictine tradition and proposed a process of natural development through liturgy and lectio divina. This type of prayer is marked by a certain spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness following the direction of the Holy Spirit. The other type of prayer is sacrcely less than a cult of contemplation, a methodical series of psychological techniques for achieving a state of unknowing, a union with God in a very abstruse sense.

- To Be Continued -