Day 21 -- Bayeux Redux

Wednesday was a much lighter day after the long trip to Mont Saint-Michele.

We hung around the Château for quite a while, including a return to the strange toy room in the main house. Later we went into Bayeux again.

This was my day to see the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry is pretty impressive not only ih sheer size but also in artistic execution. The most interesting things I learned about the tapestry involved its history. So famous to us now, it was once used during the troubles of the French Revolution to cover military wagons. Only someone stepping in to save it kept it from being lost forever.

Also interesting was the vulgarity of a few of the images on the tapestry. I won’t post the image here because, hey, what is this, the Middle Ages? But considering that this tapestry’s chief display was in a church, the nudity and vulgar suggestiveness of the scenes 14 and 15 are surprising to our modern sensibilities. But as I had already discovered at the Musée de Cluny, the art of the Middle Ages does not shy away from the ‘vulgar’ in the sense of ‘ordinary’ at all.

Also impressive were the jumping horses (as in scene 40). Without a camera to understand how horses look when the jump, this is a pretty impressive accomplishment -- especially given some much later attempts before the camera.

Out in the streets I noted the mixture of what we have come to understand as ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ in the architectural designs of the older buildings. On one support is a picture of Cain and Abel, on another a mermaid, on another St. Michael, on another a common agricultural scene.

The Medieval World did have one thing on us -- unity of vision.

Back at the château, I wandered around taking pictures of particulars of the place -- an old pump, a neglected kitten, ironware.

Day 21 Reflection One

I had read C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image with the faculty of Trinity School at River Ridge, and it flashed through my mind in Paris (especially at the Musée de Cluny), but on this day in Bayeux the whole Medieval model really began to sink in more fully.

There was an elegance and completeness to the Medieval model. This was gained, sometimes, yes, at the expense of the facts and particulars, but it was elegant and complete nonetheless. And I think we have been trying to find our way back to such elegance and completeness ever since -- to that old unity of physics and metaphysics.

Science provides us some significant answers as to “how things work,” but while our theology and spiritually continues to up in dialogue with science and other fields of inquiry, we have not yet managed anything resembling the old harmony of the Medieval model and we may never again.

Part of the problem we face is a culture that is geared towards knowing rather than being. Google is our intellectual paradigm -- knowledge of things, stored for access, ready to be retrieved when necessary to serve a utilitarian purpose.

Romano Guardini is again helpful and inspiring here.

“True education is rooted in being, not in knowledge ... The educated person is the one who has been shaped by the inward law of form, whose being and action and thinking and deeds and person and environment conform to an inner image. Such persons thus have unity in great diversity.”

Day 21 Reflection Two

Despite what I wrote above, the trip through Europe has inspired both a true sense of the value of what has been lost as well as a general optimism for the future.

I do find myself concerned not only for what has been lost, but for a possible loss of value itself. The consumerist culture and mindset does not encourage us to value the world of things, ideas or even persons and ways of life. Like everything else, these seem to have become disposable to us. We seem to have lost a capacity to value.

But I am also not a proponent of declinism. A good understanding of history assures me that are not simply getting “worse” -- at least not in any uncomplicated sense.

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