Medieval man thirsted for the truth. No other society, with the possible exception of that which bore the culture of classical China, has invested the man of learning with the dignity and importance given him by the Middle Ages. The medieval passion for understanding, however, had nothing in common with our modem enthusiasm for the techniques of scientific investigation. Medieval man was interested neither in pursuing nature and history empirically nor in mastering reality theoretically. He chose to plunge into truth by way of meditation; then he drew from his meditations the spiritual laws governing all reality. The roots for all truths were given him by authority: the roots of divine truth by Scripture and the Church; of natural truth by the thought of antiquity. These foundations for religious and natural truth were painstakingly penetrated, and when fully understood they acted as the bases for interpreting whatever truths could be grasped through immediate experience. From this fusion of natural and supernatural truths, there grew a new and deeper understanding of the world and of all reality. The ideal underlying a process of strict experimentation or, as we would term it, scientific investigation was foreign to the Middle Ages. Whenever it did appear it was sensed to be something alien, even dangerous. It is significant that Albert the Great, although canonized a saint, became a magician in medieval story and legend.
The medieval conception of the world also gave birth to an elemental and powerful feeling for the symbolic value of existence itself. Medieval man saw symbols everywhere. He did not look upon reality in terms of energy, the elements, or physical laws; he saw things in terms of form. The forms he saw not only had their own meaning, but they pointed also to something higher, ultimately to the things of eternity, to the Most High Himself, to God. All forms became symbols of the divine. They came down from above, appearing as it were “from their own other side.” These symbolic forms were found in Christian cult and in the arts, in the customs and speech of the people and in communal life. Indeed they influenced the work of the intellect to such an extent that one often feels the intellectual explanation of a phenomenon, or the elaboration of a theory, was guided less by the matter at hand than by a number-symbolism intrinsic to the formal structure of the mind itself.
The philosophical-theological Summae were more than a systematic attempt to determine what being must “be”; they were an attempt to determine what being must "mean." The meaning expressed in the Summae arose not alone from its content; it arose equally from the very mode of statement and amplification. This fact reveals a fourth component in the basic medieval drive—the artistic. As used in molding and shaping the thought of the Summae, anistic form was not mere rhetorical adornment; it was not merely a desirable—in final analysis an unessential—means of expression; it was the “how” used to express the really essential “what.” The medieval passion for truth was so intense that it was bound up inextricably with a will to fashion and form all things. Thus the very construction of a quaestio as it was used to pose a problem guaranteed clarity of investigation, an adequate weighing of pro and con and of the relations between the problem and previous thought. To the quaestio was given a formal aesthetic value comparable with that of a sonnet or a fugue. A quaestio was not simply a medium by which truth could be read by the mind understanding it; it was a truth formed and shaped by mind to speak to mind. Artistic form then embodied another yet certain truth about the world. It was simply the truth that reality itself was ordered harmoniously in being, that it could be formed and fashioned by the artistic genius of man. A complete Summa in its articles, its questions and its parts was a structured unity within which the human spirit could linger and take its repose. A Summa was not only a book of science; it was a “space,” vast in its ontology—deep and ordered—wherein the human spirit found its proper place and exercised that self-discipline necessary to experience security.
It is cheap and false to condemn the medieval use of authority as “slavery.” Modern man makes this judgment not merely because he enjoys the discovery of autonomous investigation but because he resents the Middle Ages. His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution. But authority is needed not only by the childish but also in the life of every man, even the most mature. Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque—force.
As long as medieval man was gripped by his own vision of existence, as long as he heard its music sounding in the depths of his heart, he never experienced authority as shackling. It was a bridge leading to the absolute; it was the flag of the world. Authority provided medieval man with the opportunity to construct an order whose magnificence of form, intensity of manner and richness of life were such that he would have judged our world as paltry.
Taken from The End of the Modern World by Romano Guardini.