Philosophical Context: The High Middle Ages

Introduction

The Medieval intellectual world is often caricatured as simply ignorant, a “Dark Ages” of superstition before science arrived. This is deeply unfair. Medieval thinkers were sophisticated, rigorous, and working within a framework that was internally coherent and, on its own terms, profoundly beautiful. That framework rested on core commitments: that the universe was created and governed by God; that human beings occupied a specific place in a divinely ordered hierarchy; that the deepest truths were accessible through revelation and faith rather than through unaided reason; and that the proper posture of the human soul was one of obedience, humility, and surrender to a reality that exceeded its comprehension.

Hamlet is set in a world that still operates largely on these assumptions — a world of ghosts with unfinished business, divine judgment, hierarchical duty, and the weight of the afterlife pressing down on every decision. Shakespeare’s protagonist has a Renaissance mind, but he inhabits a Medieval world. The tension between those two worldviews is a substantial source of drama throughout the play; these readings establish the Medieval side of that tension.

The Human Position

What is a human being, and where do we stand in the order of things?

The Medieval answer is clear, and it is given not as a philosophical argument but as a description of reality: human beings are creatures of God, made in his image but fallen through sin, positioned in a Great Chain of Being that extends from God and the angels at the top through humanity in the middle, down to animals, plants, and inanimate matter at the bottom. One’s place in this chain is not something one chose or can change. It is given. The human task is not to reinvent ourselves (as Pico will later propose) but to fulfill the role we have been assigned: to survive our limited time in the temporal world unscathed by sin and to work toward salvation through faith and obedience.

Augustine’s Confessions dramatizes the psychological dimension of this struggle. The drama of the Confessions is the drama of Augustine’s surrender to God, the agonizing difficulty of submitting his will to a truth he already recognizes. His inner conflict is not between competing identities or values (as it might be for a modern character), but between his fallen nature, which clings to worldly pleasures, and grace, which calls him toward God. “Cast yourself fearlessly on him,” Continence tells him. “He will not pull back and let you fall.” The human position, in Augustine’s account, is one of radical dependence.

The anonymous ballad “The Unquiet Grave” captures the Medieval sense of the human position in a different register, emotional rather than theological. The living lover sits on the grave of the dead beloved, refusing to let go. The dead woman speaks from the grave to tell him that his grief is futile: “The stalk is withered dry, my love, / So will our hearts decay; / So make yourself content, my love, / Till God calls you away.” Human life is transient, and the proper response to that transience is not rebellion or despair but acceptance of God’s will.

Connection to Hamlet

More than any other moment in the play, the graveyard scene is saturated with the Medieval conviction that the body is temporary. Hamlet literally enacts a memento mori tableau for the audience when he contemplates the skull of Yorick, but his obsession with the physical reality of death (“imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay”) completely rejects the expected Medieval consolation; there is no mention of the afterlife in the graveyard until Laertes arrives to imagine his dead sister as a “ministering angel.” And yet a scene later Hamlet reminds himself that there is “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and accepts that God will shape the outcome of his duel with Laertes.

Looking forward: Pico della Mirandola will explode this framework in 1486. His God does not assign human beings a fixed place; He gives them the freedom to become whatever they choose. Where Augustine’s human being needs to surrender the will, Pico’s human being has the power to exercise it. The Renaissance will take off in pursuit of glory, knowledge, and the extension of human power over nature that will ultimately reshape the direction of European history.

Knowledge and Its Limits

How do we know what we know, and how far can knowledge take us?

The Medieval framework for knowledge rests on two pillars: revelation (what God has disclosed through Scripture and the Church) and authority (what the ancient thinkers, above all Aristotle, have established through reason). The relationship between faith and reason was debated intensely — Aquinas devoted enormous intellectual energy to reconciling Aristotle with Christian theology — but the hierarchy was generally clear: reason serves faith. Where the two conflict, faith takes precedence, because God’s knowledge is infinite and ours is not.

The Cloud of Unknowing pushes this hierarchy to its mystical extreme. The anonymous monk argues that God cannot be reached by the intellect at all — only by love. “God is always quite unable to be comprehended by the first faculty, that of intelligence, but he is totally and perfectly comprehensible by the second, the power of love.” The path to God requires not more knowledge but less — a deliberate embrace of intellectual darkness, a “cloud of unknowing” between yourself and the divine. “Leave your intellectual and your imaginative skills strictly alone.” This is not anti-intellectualism; it is a claim that the deepest reality exceeds the capacity of the mind and can only be approached through the heart’s surrender.

Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions offers an interesting counterpoint. Writing in the twelfth century, Adelard reasons through the question of how the earth is supported in space using what looks like proto-scientific reasoning — chains of logical deduction from first principles. But notice that his reasoning still operates within the Aristotelian framework: elements have “natural places,” objects tend toward the center, and the whole argument assumes a finite, ordered cosmos with a fixed middle point. The reasoning is rigorous, but the intellectual horizon is bounded by inherited authority.

The summary of Aristotelian physics makes those boundaries explicit: four elements with natural places, celestial bodies made of incorruptible ether, a clear distinction between earthly corruption and heavenly perfection. This is the cosmology that Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton will demolish — but in the Medieval period it is not a hypothesis; it is the structure of reality.

Connection to Hamlet

The ghost is a Medieval epistemological figure. His claim — that he is Hamlet’s father, murdered by Claudius — arrives not through observation or rational inquiry but through revelation, through a supernatural authority that demands to be believed and obeyed. A Medieval Hamlet would accept the ghost’s word as the word of one returned from purgatory, a bearer of divine truth, and act. But Hamlet is a student from Wittenberg, formed in the Renaissance culture of firsthand evidence and rational scrutiny. He devises an empirical test — the play-within-the-play — to verify what the ghost has told him. The very act of testing reveals how far he has traveled from the Medieval epistemological world: in that world, the authority of a returning spirit is not something you verify. You obey it.

Looking forward: The Renaissance will replace authority with observation. Galileo’s rebuke — “come with arguments or demonstrations, and bring us no more texts and authorities” — is a direct rejection of the Medieval epistemological order. Descartes will try to rebuild knowledge from scratch, trusting nothing that cannot survive radical doubt. The Medieval confidence that knowledge has stable foundations (God, Scripture, Aristotle) will give way to the exhilarating and terrifying discovery that those foundations can be questioned — and that questioning them changes everything.

The Individual and Authority

What is the relationship between the person and the structures that govern them?

In the Medieval world, the question almost does not arise — or rather, it arises only in the form of temptation. The proper relationship between the individual and authority (divine, ecclesiastical, political) is obedience. Not blind obedience — Aquinas and others develop sophisticated accounts of when and how earthly authority can be challenged — but the default posture is one of submission. The soul’s task is to align itself with God’s will, not to assert its own.

Augustine’s Confessions is the great narrative of this alignment. The entire arc of the book moves toward the moment of surrender — the moment when Augustine stops resisting and allows God to claim him. The passage in your reading captures the agonizing final stages: Augustine knows what he should do, he is almost there, but his will is divided against itself. The “trifles of trifles” — his old habits, pleasures, attachments — pull him back. What finally breaks the deadlock is not a rational argument but an act of grace: he hears a child’s voice saying “take up and read,” opens the Bible, and the conversion is accomplished. The individual does not overcome authority; the individual is overcome by authority — and this is presented as liberation, not subjugation.

The Cloud of Unknowing reinforces this posture. The monk instructs his student to “beat constantly against the cloud of unknowing” — to persist in the practice of self-emptying prayer, not as an exercise of will but as a surrender of will. “It doesn’t matter how many virtues a man acquires, without this true love they are bound to be warped and thus imperfect.” The virtues themselves are insufficient without the foundational act of turning the soul toward God. Individual effort matters, but only as preparation for a submission that transcends effort.

Connection to Hamlet

The ghost’s command is a test of the Medieval framework of authority: a figure from beyond the grave, speaking with the weight of divine sanction, demands that his son avenge his murder. The Medieval response is clear — obey. Claudius holds the throne by usurpation; the old king’s claim supersedes the living king’s authority; filial and divine duty align in a single command. A Medieval Hamlet would not deliberate. The entire machinery of the play’s delay — the soliloquies, the testing, the feigned madness, the “To be or not to be” — is the machinery of a consciousness that cannot simply submit to authority even when that authority comes from beyond the grave. What is new and Renaissance about Hamlet is precisely his inability to do what Augustine does: surrender his will to a truth he already recognizes.

Looking forward: Luther’s “Here I stand” is the inversion of Augustine’s surrender. Where Augustine submits his individual conscience to divine authority as mediated by the Church, Luther sets his individual conscience against the Church — insisting that the institution has corrupted the very truth it claims to guard. This is the crack that will eventually split the Medieval world open. Once individual conscience can legitimately oppose institutional authority, the entire framework of obedience begins to shift. Hobbes will try to rebuild absolute authority on secular grounds; Locke will argue for authority by consent; Rousseau will reimagine the social contract; and by the time we reach Ellison, the narrator of Invisible Man will be fleeing every form of institutional authority, searching for a self that no system can contain.

Looking Forward: The Full Arc

This unit exists to give students a baseline — not a straw man to be knocked down, but a coherent and in many ways admirable intellectual world whose assumptions the rest of the course will trace, challenge, transform, and in some cases mourn the loss of. The Medieval certainties — a meaningful universe, a knowable human place within it, a trustworthy path to truth, a legitimate structure of authority — are not stupid or naive. They represent answers to permanent human questions. What makes the subsequent periods compelling is not that they simply reject those answers but that they struggle with the consequences of losing them.

Hamlet stands at the threshold. It is a play written by a Renaissance mind about a protagonist who is trying to act in a world that is still, in its bones, Medieval — a world of ghosts, divine judgment, filial duty, and the certainty that the dead have claims on the living. Hamlet’s tragedy is not that the Medieval world is wrong. It is that he can no longer fully inhabit it, and the Renaissance world has not yet given him anything stable to stand on instead. Pascal’s vertigo, Ahab’s rage, the invisible man’s underground exile — all of these are, in different ways, responses to the absence of the certainties the Medieval world once provided. But Hamlet is the first — the character who feels the ground shift beneath his feet and cannot find his footing.