When I teach medieval theology to students, many of whom have little theological knowledge or experience of religion, they often look at me incredulously. They cannot believe that people believed. They are surprised by the intensity of theological speculation during the Middle Ages, and the evidence that an entire intellectual system was produced around faith in the fundamental event of Christ's resurrection. They are often particularly shocked to find out that the foundations of the university as an institution, the very institution in which we have our lessons, lay in the teaching of Christian theology. They think of the university as a place of science and of reason, as a place in which they learn about the world and try to think uncompromisingly about the truth. I explain to them that medieval theologians also thought that the university was a place for confrontation with the truth, informed by principles of science and reason. They used the word scientia, but for them it meant knowledge. They used the word ratio, and for them it meant the rational order of things through which God had informed and made the world. My point to the students is that medieval scholars believed in their intellectual protocols, and had faith that they were producing knowledge that was real and truthful.

It is, I think, an important lesson for anyone to learn, that communities build the world around them based on shared beliefs, and develop systems of meaning that fortify and nurture those beliefs. Culture is to some degree a feedback loop in which mutually constitutive messages buttress one another to build consensus. In my teaching I ask the students to think about what unspoken, and shared, assumptions underlie our conversation in the classroom. What is the unsaid mutuality that enables us to sit in the same room and talk to each other? This is a denaturalizing moment. We try to work out what is hiding in plain sight, what are the shared assumptions about knowledge and identity that enable us to communicate at that moment. What, in short, is our faith that generates our inquiry? Often, the answer is that as a collective we are invested in a fuzzy secular humanism. In thinking about what went without saying in the Middle Ages, I want my students to ask themselves what goes without saying in their own world.