Modernization

Medieval Europe

The development of an explicitly “modern” identity in contrast to an antique and outmoded past, however, can be located fairly precisely in late-medieval Europe. In the 12th and 13th centuries, twin developments in popular religiosity and in theological reflection gave rise to the sense that European culture was “modern” and had distanced itself from its past. First, the movement known as devotion moderna (“modern devotion”) fostered a renewed sense of religious interiority and emotional forms of religious practice. Second, the theological movement known as the via moderna (“the modern way”) encouraged a break with church tradition and emphasized the use of human rationality for making judgments about empirical realities. These movements combined with a heightened sense of historicity, thanks to the millennialism surrounding the year 1000, to create the foundations of the modern West. The distinctive characteristics of this modernity include a heightened sense of individual human subjectivity in the context of an inert, objective world, alongside a new appreciation for the possibility of manipulating the empirical world so as to achieve an idealized future.

The late-medieval period therefore laid the groundwork for a revolutionary shift away from a sacred cosmos to an empirical world increasingly available for use and calculation. The rejection of the “ancient way” was also a significant step toward the equalization of individuals and a new appreciation for human liberty. The poverty debates of the Franciscans in the 13th and 14th centuries gave way to the first invocation of the human “rights” discourse, and the retrieval of ancient Roman law in the 12th and 13th centuries became the foundation for political systems based on the right to own property. At the same time, the Catholic Church was undergoing significant transformation as it began to rationalize its administrative and legal systems. The bureaucratic expansion of the Church came into conflict with the nascent experience of human individuality, rationality, and the “modern way,” however. These conflicting tendencies reached a breaking point in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

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