Chapter 13 - The Relationship between Mentality and Ideology: Acculturation and Christianization in Galicia, 500–1100

Summary

THE MIDDLE AGES was a time of contrasts and opposites (God and the devil, Christianity and paganism, and so on), a time that can be viewed as one of many contradictions. However, when analysing other societies, specifically societies from the past, it must be remembered that our way of viewing them is very much conditioned by our own way of understanding the world. It is precisely at this intersection between past and present that contradictions arise. Indeed, “historical knowledge is always, in one way or another, self-consciousness: when studying the history of other times men cannot but compare it with their own time.” Therefore, it is our contemporary mentality that sits at the origin of historical curiosity and perception of difference.

Our mentality leads us to perceive medieval culture as a combination of oppositions that may appear irresolvable, similar to understanding life and death as irreversible. However, there was no space for such impossibilities in the medieval world. Integrity and belief in the uniqueness of creation were the characteristic features of this period, though this did not necessarily mean complete harmony. The contrasts that existed were very much rooted in social life, in those irreconcilable oppositions between wealth and poverty, privilege and humiliation, and suchlike. Here is where Christianity played an essential role precisely because the Christian world “eliminated” these very real contradictions by moving them to the higher plane of celestial universal categories. On this plane, solutions could be found.

It might seem, therefore, that Christianity and its doctrine of a just and perfect heavenly life after one's earthly life were the solution to these contradictions. Ultimately, temporal inequalities pale into insignificance when compared with eternal privileges. However, this was not the case. Many reasons contributed to this, including the fact that Christianity itself was one of the reasons behind such contradictions, as it superimposed itself onto other visions of the world in places where it became the official religion. Christianity had its own ideology and the population its own mentality.