W. Robert Godfrey

It's the age of great piety.

It's the age of really a culture gripped by Christianity.

And I think we'll see as we go along that there is some truth to that, but it's a pretty romantic notion.

An awful lot of people really didn't know much at all, substantively, about what Christianity was.

Many common people in much of the Middle Ages, all they knew about Christianity was you need to get baptized, you need to go to confession, you need to go to Mass, and if possible, have a priest there when you die.

That was Christianity.

The church knew what the faith was, but what was important for the faithful was simply to make use of what the church taught in terms of sacraments and morality.

And so it was not an age of faith in terms of a profound penetration of the minds and hearts of common people with the truths of Christianity.

So we come back to saying, what is it?

Well, it's the Middle Ages, which means it's between two things.

And historians have been very helpful on this point.

What are the Middle Ages between?

Well, they're between the old period, the ancient period, and the modern period.

You notice none of those adjectives tell you anything.

Old, between, and modern don't actually tell you the substance of what went on in those periods.

It simply says, and is accurate as far as it goes, that these are three periods with somewhat differing emphases, somewhat different characters.

and they can be distinguished from one another.

What I would like to suggest to you is that the Middle Ages are important for us, not just as a way of getting to the Reformation, but as a period in which there was profound thinking, profound building of institutions, remarkable political events that shape us down to this day,

and therefore on their own terms are very worth knowing and studying and reflecting on.

It is a period of history that continues to influence the world in which we live, continues to illustrate for us, if nothing more than that, issues with which we still have to grasp.