An epidemic of anxiety. A glut of information. A plague of “morbid self-introspection.” The complaints of Victorian anti-modernists and medievalists are remarkably similar to those of self-described traditionalists today. The cure to modern ills, they believed, could be found in the medieval agrarian past, with its chivalrous knights and merry yeomen. Medievalist organizations sought to restore respect for craftsmanship, an energetic culture, and a vibrant spirituality.
A few decades in, and the Victorian anti-modernists had accomplished nothing but the easing of the transition into the modern world. Ironically, they helped dissolve the remnants of the medieval societal order they claimed to be protecting. Three strands of the movement are particularly illuminating: The Arts and Crafts movement, the Martialist movement, and the religious revival. Their story provides a set of difficult questions that any modern “traditionalists” will need to face if they hope to achieve any meaningful social change.
The most predictable backlash against Victorian factory culture was found in the Arts and Crafts movement, which valorized the medieval craftsman. Authors praised the guild model, with its social support, communal labor, and direct connection between the processes and products of labor. A survey of the Craftsman, the primary American Arts and Crafts magazine, circulated among the intelligentsia and upper-class, reveals that it quickly adapted its practices to be useful and practicable by the audience reading it. Under the auspices of making work “meaningful,” authors shifted their focus from the conditions of labor to the frame of mind in which it was conducted. The “guild spirit” turned into factory paternalism, the direct predecessor of “job enrichment” programs. The movement bolstered pre-existing socio-economic arrangements, suggesting that factories could reap all of the benefits of medieval craftsmanship. As for hand-made crafts, they had their place—as therapy for tired businessmen. Horace Traubel, a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement, summarized the move well: “Our cry is not ‘Back to the Land!’ Our cry is ‘Back to Yourself.’” Therefore, while hypothetically rebuking over-reliance on alienating factory technology, it required no practical change in the structures of technological use. This vignette grants us the first of our 3 questions: Is the “anti-modernist” movement actually actually asking people to interact differently and less with the technologies of the modern age?
The martial movement, with its knights and barbarians, promised intensity of experience, a rebuke to the imagined “effete softness” of Victorian society. According to William Morris, Victorian author of Icelandic warrior epics, his fierce, bloody Viking myths were more than entertainment—they were a cure to society’s ills. We must, he wrote, “get back to a clear-eyed view of things…We have been educated away from it all. We are out of touch.” The solution lay in the “primeval epic life.” The round-table language of the movement obscured the fact that it was ultimately an individual, therapeutic, self-improvement enterprise. It was another piece of the Victorian search for personal meaning and sincere experience. Instead of seeking a particular goal, martial, knight-like societies organized to create “real men,” who could “act vigorously.” As Historian TJ Jackson Lears describes in his book No Place of Grace, “activity was an end in itself, and the only commitment was to the idea of commitment.” Especially among Christian organizations, the intensity of their energy obscured its vagueness of purpose. The general principles of energy and morality, free-floating as they were, were quickly applied to the quest for foreign markets, and anti-modernism became a great cheerleader for modernity. When put baldly, the martial philosophy was bizarrely contradictory: it promised a return to traditional anti-modern values through “unrestrained corporate expansion.” The second of our questions: Are the movement’s communal goals clearly elaborated, or are they pursuing “energy” and “intensity,” codewords for the same self-improvement pursued by mainstream culture?
Finally, and most worryingly, the church’s embrace of medieval spirituality drove the modernization of the function of the church into a modern, therapeutic institution.
Phillip Rieff’s sociological argument in the Triumph of the Therapeutic provides a helpful account of the fundamental differences between medieval and modern “therapies,” or ways of solving unhappiness. Medieval culture oriented the self outward, asking people to commit themselves to communities. Most people today think of monastic asceticism as the improvement of the self, as one becomes liberated from the commitments of the world. To the medieval, asceticism is actually the renunciation of the self, intentionally binding yourself into new institutions and instructions. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers provides a remarkable summary of the ascetic therapies of self-commitment which defined the Medieval world. Approached by a discontented brother, Abba Moses instructed him: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Discontent was solved by additional repression. The moderns, typified by Freud, saw the true self as repressed, not formed, by institutions. Meaning is located in the individual. The more free you are, the more “yourself” that you are. The Victorian obsession with finding internal “meaning” masked an absence of frame of reference beyond the self. Lears summarized the situation well:, “Superficially at odds, the antimodernist, avant-garde, and advertiser have often been brothers under the skin,” bound by the search for “authentic experience.”
The focus on the “vitality” and “innocence” of the medieval church within the Victorian era revealed that churches expected only a greater intensity of experience, not change in practice. They promised to stir the emotions of their churchgoers, never asking them to pay “the high personal costs of social organization.” In the Middle Ages, St. Francis was mentioned in sermons as a model for merchants because he renounced his family’s wealth, according to his biography by William Cook. In American Victorian churches, announcing that God wanted wealthy petitioners to give all to the poor would have been perceived as absurd and extremist. The historical attributes of saints were stripped away, leaving kitschy, cookie-tin figures or a dark ferment of romanticism. When speaking of a return to the intensity of medieval experience, churches were promising liberation instead of asking for commitment. They were therefore more modern than the dry, formal churches they denounced!
Lack of religious enthusiasm was a serious, soul-deadening issue, and authentic medieval stories could serve as helpful correctives. However, too often when the “inapplicable residues of mystery culture” were stripped away, the therapeutic assumptions of the culture stared you in the face. This leads to the most pertinent question: Is religion being used solely as a therapeutic device? Are the church’s therapies those of commitment, or pleasure?
Victorian medievalism was rooted in specific economic and cultural trends and much of the societal stultification that drove Victorian discontent has been turned on its head completely. However, the questions that it asks of all modernist movements are helpful in evaluating contemporary anti-modernism.
How is technology being used within the movement? “Medievalists” today, with their AI generated knights and online propaganda strategies, are falling directly into the technocratic, self-expressive, entertainment driven world of the mass-media they claim to defy. Though they may use agrarian images in their “ideal life” memes, they see the farm as a personal pleasure-retreat. There are no demands made of corporate structures or big agriculture.
Are the goals clearly elaborated, or are they pursuing “energy” and “intensity?” Online “traditionalists” seek domination and control of the self, lionizing mass accumulation of wealth and disrespect for social mores. This realization makes sense of the idolization of Elon Musk and other hyper-modernist figures that often accompany medieval imagery– they have collapsed all goals into a quest for “sincere experience” and “control of your environment.” Regardless of your thoughts on Musk, he certainly isn’t promoting traditionalism!
Is religion being used solely as a therapeutic device? Are their therapies those of commitment, or pleasure? This is the worrying side of the numbers which depict a shift towards Christianity among young men. Christianity is more than just a tool for “cultural flourishing.” A Christianity which makes no demands of its adherents, while perfectly matching their cultural assumptions should be deeply suspect. Medieval “Christendom,” itself a 20th century concept which amalgamates a thousand years of small kingdoms into a vague mass, is often nothing more than reflection of current cultural desires.
Bluntly, modern “traditionalists” are often nothing more than race-baiting influencer-hucksters who bedeck their therapeutic, hyper-online shill with disparate medieval imagery. These scam-artists take advantage of young people with a genuine longing for a lively culture, give historical Christianity a terrible name, narrow the expanse of Christian history to a tiny sliver of Western Europe, and replace the historical Middle Ages with a Tolkienite yeoman utopia.
Our therapeutic focus has left us with unfulfilling work, self-centered religiosity, and general restlessness. I believe that it’s possible to learn real lessons from the Middle Ages. However, this will require the humbling recognition that dissent always takes place within culture and our “common-sense” assumptions are very different from those of the Medievals. We may be pursuing the exact same therapeutic and economic aims as the broader culture—merely on a farm instead of in a Google breakroom. I’ll conclude by offering two suggestions:
I. Engage with actual medieval authors, assuming that they are radically different from you. Good history is always a process of challenging assumptions and should feel alien. Tug a little bit on the threads of cultural difference, and the whole veil of false familiarity will unravel. As C.S. Lewis says in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, historical books reveal to us our “cultural blind spots.”
II. Think communally. One church garden is worth more than all of the memes about “based traditionalism” on the internet. If you want an actual return to agrarian values, it has to start with contact with your real, rooted local community. There’s no such thing as a revival of one.
Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, as well as the later medievalisms of the Jesus Revolution and 60’s Franciscanism prove that Christian anti-modernism is not a null cause, and that our inherited images can be helpful in forming a community-oriented vision of the future. The Victorian medievalists remind us that this task requires discernment and care.
