Medieval and contemporaneity world-visual and art parallels

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MEDIEVAL AND CONTEMPORANEITY WORLD-VISUAL AND ART PARALLELS

Karpov Victor

Relevance of the topic. Awareness of the speed and diversity of the directions's development of modern civilization forces to critically evaluate the achievements and potential opportunities of conceptual, cultural innovations present as well as directs to the study of those structural elements of the past through which evolutionary processes acquire integrity and systemic character. The mentioned issue helps to identify appropriate cultural mechanisms that appear in the process of epochs shifting within essentially periods that are remoted in time. Therefore, an application of a certain direction of the research on the example of comparing the worldview and artistic characteristics of the Middle Ages with modern algorithms of sociocultural development is especially relevant.

Analysis of existing studies and publications. The identification of various forms of interaction between time-disparate epochs is an essential step towards a holistic perception of the historical and cultural development of humankind. Based on the study of the appropriate mechanisms, social development appears not only in the light of economic and civilizational achievements but also in the context of the migration of ideological ideas and the inheritance of the thinking level, social structures and social ties as well as the priority of the humanitarian guide for centuries. Hence, in the second half of the twentieth century, Claire Graves [29] and his followers Chris Cowan, Beck and Ken Wilber developed a social evolution theory of spiral dynamics [27]. It is based on the conviction that a person passes through various paradigms of consciousness as society which contain spiritual traditions, cultural ideas or moral foundations of one, at certain stages, they change and construct new conceptual models of the world, taking into account the previous experience. The mentioned thesis is consonant with the statement of Hans-Georg Gadamer who brought hermeneutics out of the "communication with texts" and defined its universal task in restoring the links between the epochs. Gadamer believed that individual generations, like people, lose mutual understanding. Therefore, there is a need for the search for common features or a common goal, restore the lost dialogue, which is based on a complex reconstruction of judgments, beliefs, and perceptions of past eras [8]. In this direction, such researchers as Fernand Braudel [5], Jacques Le Goff [9], Huizinga [21], Umberto Eco [10, 26, 28], as well as Sergei Krymsky [13], Yuri Avvakumov [1], Bohdanа Krysa [14].

The importance to revive such symbolic bridges was expressed by Jose Ortega y Gasset: "the radical rupture between the past with the present is that fact which characterizes our time in sum... The last remnants of the spirit of continuity and tradition have disappeared. Models, norms, and rules serve us no longer. People are forced to solve the own problems without active assistance from the past, in absolute actualism of the art, science or political problems. The European lost the own shadow "[23, 308]. In terms of the current times, individualls are witnessing the loss of Ukraine's own shadow. The mentioned issue has actualized the challenges of the modern dimension of the globalization of the world, in which the predominance of economic levers is increasingly felt. The cultural industry replaces culture; the individual is replaced by unification, standardization, mass consciousness which creates nothing and lacks orientation, inspires controlled processes of cultural universalization in the conditions of rapid growth of sociocultural interactions [22]. In such conditions, the restoration of the "lost shadow" image acquires the content of historical and cultural research as well as the predictive function of modern technogenic society evolution.

The research aims to identify related worldview and artistic parallels between the epochs of the Middle Ages and modern times that were disaggregated in time, as well as to determine the forms of interaction of these links.

Statement of the primary material. Convincing evidence of the deep-rootedness of modern society in the Middle Ages belong to Umberto Eco. The author was sure that a mentioned period is the key to understanding the culture of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as a link for the understanding of today's problems [20, p. 26]. Umberto Eco as a philosopher, linguist, literary critic, expert on semiotics, and, most importantly, an authoritative medievalist, defined the characteristic cultural features on which it is possible to draw expressive parallels between distant in time epochs. In a particular context, it is appropriate to recall Jacques Le Goff, who, under the influence of Fernand Braudel's theory of "long time duree" [5], proposed and substantiated the concept of the "long Middle Ages" [9]. Ukrainian medievalists Dr. Yuri Avvakumov [1, p. 12] and Bohdana Krysa [14, p. 3] applied the mentioned thesis with the peculiarities of Ukrainian culture, noting its close relationship with Christianity and, consequently, the unique and long process of operating the Christian literary and artistic heritage in Ukraine. In the continuity of the epochs, the view expressed by the Ukrainian philosopher Sergei Krymsky about the existence of a "polyphony of time" or "meta time culture" is relevant due to the through images: "The life of culture cannot change of the old to the new, in the past to the future, it does not fall under the arrow of time, it accumulates the potential of all times"[13, p. 692].

The recognition of the Middle Ages continuity is inseparable from the knowledge of the spirit of this era, its worldview priorities and artistic achievements, combined with single Christian doctrine. However, the historical context along with specific ideological differences between the Western and Eastern churches, caused a tangible division of the worldviews of Catholic Europe and Byzantine Empire, is particularly distinctly traced in the late period of the indicated time.

In Western Europe, in the clerical milieu, the world of Augustine the Blessed, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Abelard and many other philosophers and theologians developed dominant philosophical thought, formed an intellectual tradition, inspired scholasticism and all further European rationalism.

The era of High Scholasticism, along with the establishment of pedagogical principles and the formation of universities, tended to generalize existing knowledge, which led to the appearance of encyclopedias, “summae, ” herbaria, bestiary, and lapidarium. The mentioned genres of scientific "accumulation" are characterized by a claim to universality, consonant with the modern globalization processes, substantially accelerated due to technical innovations. The universalism of the academic texts demonstrated a sense of unity and completeness of the world and the form and orderliness of the encyclopaedism were based on the technique of inventory and cataloging, which in the present has been simplified to the maximum due to the Internet resource and search engines. In particular, such services are provided by Google, YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, Independent academia and other numerous services which save and disseminate information instantly.

A certain foresight of this technological explosion was the iconic definition of the Universe as a Universal Library, which was suggested by the famous 20th-century intellectual and writer Jorge Luis Borges. According to the author's opinion, the Ecumenical Library is the place of preservation of all possible books, revealing the world of the past, present, and future. In a certain context, the recognition of the Creator by the Universal Book or catalog of catalogs [3] is significant. Thus, Borges appeals to medieval priorities, is also manifested in the imitation of collections of other genres. Indicative in this respect is the "Book of Fictional Creatures, " written in the form of an encyclopedia and is analogous to the medieval bestiary [4].

It is important to note that the improvement of methods of cognition of the surrounding world and its reflection in the form of a syncretic encyclopedia has become not just an essential achievement of the Christian civilization of the medieval West. The collections and generalizations of the endless links of interrelated events defined by scholastic philosophy were based on the affirmation of the idea of infinite improvement, which included a substantial framework of the universal Order, based on the perfection of the celestial hierarchy. On this basis, Umberto Eco conducts a clear analogy between scholasticism, especially Thomist formamentis and structuralism of the twentieth century, criticizing its excessive segmentation and classification [10]. According to Eko, like scholasticism, structuralism claims the importance of universal logic, however, the closure of the system gradually replaces reality with the scheme, which turns the method of cognition into conservative ideology.

It is vital that we find a definite opposition to the scholastic rationalism of the West in the Middle Ages. Byzantine Christianity centered around mystical theology and ascetic practices as a means of moral perfection. The culmination was the emergence of the spiritual practice of hesychasm, formed by the theology of St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), whose teaching shows synergetic views on the world and man, man and society, the man in himself [11]. "A human", Palamas wrote, "this great world, enclosed in a small one, is the concentration of all that exists and the pinnacle of God's creations" [12, 342]. Such a doctrine provides a solid theological foundation of the present humanism and shows the great interest in the era of man and his sensations. Palamas argues that dispassion does not consist in the withering away of the passionate part of the soul, but, on the contrary, in the union of man with God, the passionate powers of the soul change and are sanctified. On a certain basis, a special artistic style was formed in the second half of the 13th and 15th centuries, which was called "calophonic" (with the beautiful voice), and in the historical context is defined as the day of the Palaeologi of the Renaissance [25]. During this period, Byzantine music loses its former simplicity, attention is paid to the perfect performance of elaborate melismatic chants, new types of books for special training of singers arise, the notation is improved, composer schools are formed and the like. Thus, the late Byzantine period became the basis for the formation of pre-humanist tendencies [17], and next to Western scholasticism ordered the universe with the place in it of man as part of the World Order.

One of the ways of interaction between the Universe and a human was the art and Beauty understanding. In particular, Umberto Eco noted that it is the aesthetic practices that show us the vision of the world. The scientist stressed that the world is chaotic, and if it shows a specific appearance of order, it is due to art, which organizes the world with the help of its conceptual models [26]. An example of such an organization, inspired by the modern sense of chaos and crisis, is the new artistic model inherent in Joyce's poetics. Eco traces the path of a famous Irishman from a Jesuit college with the priority of late scholasticism to the destruction of language, and the creation of a new form of the universe is in the expansion.

The medieval legacy, relevant both for Joyce and for contemporary culture as a whole, is acquired at a deeper level - like the drama of an open mind, trying to integrate and find new rules, while also nostalgic for the lost order of the past. In this context, Joyce creates one of the most complex literary sounds of the world, his sound picture, reveals himself at all levels in the "Finnegan Wake" - phonetic, metric-rhythmic, imaginative and motive. The writer processes words according to the principle of sounding, arranges rhythmically organized sequences, which, in contrast to the traditional grammatical and semantic organization of the text, bring to the forefront harmony of sound. Connecting functions perform sound refrains, the coincidence of stresses, phonetic rhyme, varieties of sound alliteration and variation of the intonational order, collectively acquire a cross-cutting character in the text and underlie the formation of semantic blocks. Thus, the audible perception of the reader is activated, in which the correlation of sound with meaning not only creates its artistic reality, which is practically unknown in the literature and simultaneously actualizes the context necessary for this - the modern man and the world that surrounds him [2].

The influence of Joyce's poetics affected the work of an outstanding Austrian writer of the 20th century. Herman Broch "The Death of Virgil, " which contains a story about the last eighteen hours of ill Aeneid's author [7]. Virgil spendt the night and part of the day in meditations and memories that change the half-breed and vision: "Light is more than earth, the earth is bigger than a human, and a person will never live unless she inhales the scents of her native land, unless she returns to her native earth, if, returning to his native land, earthly receive no light, if its, man, only thanks to the earth will not receive light - thanks to the earth, becomes a light. And never the earth is closer, dearer to the light, and the light is closer, favored to the earth than in the evening before dawn and before dawn "[7, 13]. A similar style of presentation with the concept of "weaving of words" [16] is characteristic of Christian hymnography - medieval liturgical chants:

I'm a barren country before,

The earth is fertile:

І from a barren womb, the fruit is sacred.

Miracle scary, feeder of our life:

I am the heavenly bread in my belly,

Milk from the breast feeds.

Sticheron in the Lord cried,

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin

The origin of "weaving of words" reaches a high rhetorical style of the Byzantine homiletics and hagiography and is already observed in the works of Kirill Turovsky (XII) within the Kievan Rus period. Further development of the poetic form of rhyming is associated with the personality of the Patriarch of Constantinople Philotheus Kokkinos (c. 1300-1379), a disciple and follower of St. Gregory Palamas [18].

The poetic style of Christian hymnography can be correlated with the principles of the "open work" model of Umberto Eco, in particular, with aspects such as sign and metaphoricity with the permanence of ambiguity and a large number of potential meanings, the deletion of which depends on the level of intelligence, language proficiency and cultural horizons of the reader. In this context, texts are also literally open, the incompleteness of which is connected not with form, but with the infinity of interpretations. Thus, the structure of the work, according to Eco, is transformed into a mirror of the cosmos [28], while the sacred texts are a mirror of the heavenly world, the comprehension of which lies in deep symbolism.

Symbolism was mainly instrumental in interpreting medieval thinking, creating space for countless varieties of relationships. There was a mystical connection, and a specific combination of different things took place and the coding of canonical plots with subsequent interpretation. In this context, the artistic work acquired a plurality of meanings and inspired to find an in-depth content, stimulated the development of medieval exegesis, which in the twentieth century manifested itself in the form of hermeneutical treatment.

Umberto Eco finds an interesting connection between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century in terms of the modern mass culture, declared the transition to the stage of "civilization vision" or visual information. A certain issue is typical for medieval culture since the population was illiterate and required maximum visualization of Christian dogma postulates. Thus, "Bible of the Poor" (Biblia pauperum) appeared which illustrated the plots of Holy Scripture generously. Comics of the twentieth century received a similar kind, and the difference consisted only in the sense of the depicted one.

The medieval cathedrals with numerous sculptures, bas-reliefs, mosaics, stained-glass windows played a similar educational function using visual art. Cathedrals replaced the liturgical books for most Christians by optical logic as well as were the means of communication and catechesis which enabled Umberto Eco to compare their function with modern mass media [20, 50]. However, unlike contemporary information sources, the medieval temple symbolized a universal model of the world with the unconditional authority of its Creator. The mentioned idea is the main difference between the parallel projections of the medieval Christian worldview and the secular landmarks of modern society, for which Nietzsche's famous expression "God is dead" is relevant.

The phenomenon where a Human recognized him/herself as a God, led to a cardinal change in priorities and devaluation of spiritual motivations. In a particular context, it is appropriate to redirect the title of Ferdinand Seibt's book "Shine and Poverty of the Middle Ages" [12] to the present innovative technical superpowers and, as never before, the actual problem of human loneliness in the world of endless information networks [19]. In a particular way, modern civilization identified the medieval encyclopedic universe with the metaphorical idea of the universal labyrinth, manifested at the deep levels of the human psyche, meaninglessly wandering in the infinity of the electronic universe. The world moves from neuroesthetics to neuro-art within creativity field [30] in which a person secluded in the own artistic representations and images creating his/her universe while preserving the worldview form of the Middle Ages.

Conclusions. The development of the human culture has demonstrated the presence of expressive worldview and artistic parallels between the remote in time periods of the Middle Ages and the present. It is noted that the mentioned similarity is based on the presence of internal mechanisms inspired by the ideological characteristics of Christian society. It is stated that the results of understanding the connection of the particular epochs are an essential factor within the reflection of social relations and cultural forms of various civilizational types assistance. For a specific context, the historical and cultural model of the humanity development acquires structural integrity and predictability due to the formation of the future value categories.

philosophical artistic middle ideological

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