by Peter Watson
Careful consideration of the archaeological evidence, therefore, leads us to conclude that, with one major exception, the barbarians did not appear from nowhere and that there was no raw ‘clash of civilisations’ in any overnight sense.
The exception was the Huns. A nomadic confederation under central Asian leadership, and living in the late fourth century in an area near the Black Sea, the Huns ‘were like no people ever seen before by Romans or their neighbours’.128 Everything–lifestyle, appearance, above all style of warfare–was terrible to the Old World, and more than anything else the Huns’ arrival changed the way the Romans and barbarians thought about themselves. These steppe nomads had to keep moving to survive. Aided by their own invention, the double-reflex bow, which allowed them to fire deadly volleys of arrows while still on horseback, they attracted supporters from many tribes, growing from a band to an army and existing on pillage. Save for the reign of Attila (444–453, the ‘scourge of God’ but whose name means ‘Daddy’ in Gothic, showing how ethnically diverse they were), the Huns were never a unified or centralised people, and they disintegrated after a few generations. But their intervention–barbarian within barbarian–enabled other tribes to take advantage of the empire the Huns had ravaged.
These people were more primitive than the Romans–they did not have sophisticated systems of law or politics, no great communal architecture, no educational system, so far as we can tell, no great literature that has survived. (The earliest law code, the Visigoths’ code of Euric, dates from c. 470–480.129) But the Germanic invaders were more flexible and less implacable than some accounts imply. One by one, during the sixth century, the tribes adapted to Christianity and this had a curious consequence. A division was established that would never be fully rectified in Europe, a national gap between Latin and Germanic peoples, a social gap between Latin-versed clergymen and dialect-speaking peasants.130 ‘Because Franks and Anglo-Saxons were learning these [Christian] traditions as pupils instead of applying them as masters, they were haunted by feelings of inferiority. Frankish and Germanic writers had to suffer being mocked as “barbarians” by Latins throughout the entire Middle Ages.’131 Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, wrote in 830 that he himself was regarded as ‘little more than a barbarian, ill-practised in the Roman tongue’. This division between Latin and Germanic peoples would never be entirely removed from the European mind-set, nor the associated notion that the former were somehow more ‘cultured’ than the latter. But the conversion of the Franks and Saxons to Christianity produced the final twist in this particular story. From then on, it was pagans and heretics who were the barbarians. This set the stage for the most vicious battle of ideas in the High Middle Ages. As we shall see, paganism, though ‘defeated’, was by no means destroyed.
11
The Near-Death of the Book, the Birth of Christian Art
To Chapter 11 Notes and References
Augustus, a practical man, had limited the extent of the Roman empire, on one side to the three great rivers, the Rhine, the Danube and the Euphrates, and on the other, to the desert belt of Africa and Arabia. He felt that these were natural borders which both made the further expansion of empire difficult and at the same time helped to repel enemies. Despite this, by the third century a credible threat had developed along several sections of the imperial frontier as a number of tribes hitherto settled outside the borders decided to go on to the offensive.1 By this time, in particular, the region beyond the Rhine was no longer split into the many small tribes as described by Tacitus in his famous book. As was explained in the last chapter, these numerous clans had coalesced into larger groups and from the third century onwards, warfare on both the Persian and Germanic fronts was continuous, with only rare breaks. A combination of geography and diplomacy ensured that the great bulk of the German attacks was directed against the western empire, while the eastern half remained less affected, especially after the Sassanid attacks were contained from the 240s on (there was, for instance, no fall in the value of money there). Constantinople–a fortress protected by the sea–remained impregnable. This would have incalculable consequences for the preservation of ideas in the dark ages.2
The imperial government moved at first to Milan, then to Ravenna (which was difficult to attack from the land and was open to the sea).3 The Visigoths blockaded Rome itself three times and, on the third occasion, in 410, captured the city, ransacked it, carrying off as hostage the emperor’s sister, Galla Placida. In the early fifth century, Gaiseric, king of the Vandals and Alans, landed in Africa, from Spain, where they had been entrenched, and the first sovereign Germanic state to exist on Roman soil was formed.4 In the days of Augustus and Trajan, when the city was home to twenty-nine public libraries, Rome had a population of more than a million. During these bloody years, its population dropped to a low of 30,000 and it had ‘neither the funds to support libraries, nor yet the people to use them’.5 The disturbance to the existing order was, as Joseph Vogt puts it, ‘undoubtedly tremendous’.6 At the turn of the fourth century, brigandage was so bad that in some areas people were allowed to carry arms in self-defence, the worst-hit provinces being those affected by German invasions.7 By now many public buildings were in ruins, citizens were forbidden to change occupations, permits were required for an absence from town (people were always trying to leave, to find work on the land). After the late fifth century, there is no record of the Senate. Taxation was increased, and increased again. A new Latin word, Romania, was coined, to describe the civilised life of the Roman world, as distinct from savage barbarism.8
As ever, though, we do well not to exaggerate. Many of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy managed to keep their estates intact, even during the period of Germanic occupation. Fifth-century authors still managed to compile works which praised Rome and even listed her achievements. Again according to Joseph Vogt, the workshops of the potters and weavers ‘appear to have suffered little interference from the storm’. The Visigothic king Theodoric I and his sons were initiated into Latin literature and Roman law by Avitus, and were grateful.9 There are signs of dual law operating in the former empire: Roman law for the Romans, Burgundian law (with lighter penalties) for the Burgundians.10 It was messy and, at times no doubt, unsatisfactory. But it was not complete chaos.
The picture which has emerged, therefore, is of one where the barbarians did as much damage as was necessary to instil their authority, while at the same time appreciating the superiority of the Roman civilisation, or at least large parts of it. We have to be careful, therefore, in attributing to the Franks, Vandals, Goths and others the blame for the loss of learning that undoubtedly seems to have occurred at this time. There were other reasons.
This brings us back to Christianity. As was mentioned above, in early antiquity religious toleration had been the rule rather than the exception, but that changed with the animosity with which the pagans and Christians regarded one another.11 We should not overlook the change that had come about in men’s attitudes with the arrival of Christianity as a state religion. There was an overwhelming desire to ‘surrender to the new divine powers which bound men inwardly’ and ‘a need for’ suprahuman revelation. As a result, the thinkers of the period were not much interested in (or were discouraged from) unravelling the secrets of the physical world: ‘The supreme task of Christian scholarship was to apprehend and deepen the truths of revelation.’12 Whereas paganism had imposed few restrictions on the intellectuals of Rome, Christianity actively rejected scientific inquiry. The scientific study of the heavens could be neglected, said Ambrose, bishop of Milan (374–397) at the time it was the capital of the western empire, ‘for wherein does it assist our salvation?’ The Romans had been more than comfortable with the notion, first aired in Greece, that the earth was a globe. In his Natural History, Pliny had written ‘that human beings are distributed all around the earth, and stand with their feet pointing towards each other, and that the top of the sky is alike for them all and the earth trodden underfoot at the centre in the
same way from any direction.’ Three hundred years later, Lactantius challenged this. ‘Is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?…that the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth?’13 Lactantius’ view became so much the accepted doctrine that, in 748, a Christian priest named Vergilius was convicted of heresy for believing in the Antipodes.
The whole structure of Christian thinking was at times inimical to pagan/classical traditions. Rhetoric provides one example. Traditionally, of course, rhetoric could not be separated from the individual who composed it. But in the Christian mind, it was God who spoke through his preachers. This is based on Paul, who stressed the power of the spirit–it is the spirit rather than the individual who speaks, which ultimately means that philosophy and independent thinking in general is rejected as a means of finding truth.14 Gregory of Nyssa was one of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers, great orators who were sympathetic to classical philosophy. Even he was moved to say: ‘The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone–to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.’ By the same token, the dialectical method–as epitomised by Aristotle, for example–was also outlawed: there can be no dialogue with God. It was largely as a result of this that, save for two works of logic, Aristotle vanished from the western world, preserved only because his works were hoarded by Arab interpreters. Scholars in Alexandria and Constantinople continued to read Aristotle and Plato but, as was mentioned above, saw their role as custodial rather than to add new ideas. In 529, as we have seen, Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens on the grounds that philosophical speculation had become an aid to heretics and an ‘inflamer’ of disputes among Christians. Many scholars headed east, first to Edessa, a Mesopotamian city housing several famous schools, then across the border with Persia to Nisibis, where the university was considered the best in Asia. This, says Richard Rubenstein, is how the Arabs inherited Aristotle and the treasures of Greek science. The Nestorians, who were famous as linguists, translated much Greek science and medicine into Syriac, then the international language spoken in Syria and Mesopotamia.15
Medicine provides other examples of the Christian closing of the western mind. The Greeks had not been especially successful in finding cures for illnesses but they had introduced the method of observation of symptoms, and the idea that illness was a natural process. In the second century AD, in Rome, the great physician Galen had argued that a supreme god had created the body ‘with a purpose to which all its parts tended’.16 This fitted Christian thinking so completely that, around 500, Galen’s writings were collected into sixteen volumes and served as canonical medical texts for a thousand years. It marked the abandonment of the scientific approach in favour of magic and miracles. Sacred springs and shrines were now invoked as cures, the plague was understood as ‘sent by God’ as a punishment, with medieval paintings in Italy still showing pestilence as being delivered from God through arrows, as had originally been the case with Apollo, more than a thousand years before in Homer’s world. Hippocrates had described epilepsy as a natural illness; as late as the fourteenth century, John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended that the malady could be cured by the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog. This approach was summed up most succinctly by John Chrysostom, a keen disciple of Paul. ‘Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words.’17 It was not just indifference. Philastrius of Brescia implied that the search for empirical knowledge was itself heresy. ‘There is a certain heresy concerning earthquakes that they come not from God’s command but, it is thought, from the very nature of the elements…Paying no attention to God’s power, they [the heretics] presume to attribute the motions of force to the elements of nature…like certain foolish philosophers who, ascribing this to nature, know not the power of God.’18 Reports of miracles in the sixth century were much greater than in the third and the very idea of causation as a natural process was downplayed.
In some Christian quarters even books–texts–were a source of deep suspicion: they might be full of error and they might record traffic with the occult. In the account of the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, detailing the actions of Valens, the eastern emperor in the fourth century, who conducted a persecution of pagan practices, he said that ‘throughout the Oriental provinces, owners of books, through fear of a like fate, burned their entire libraries, so great was the terror that had seized upon all’.19 His editor remarked ‘Valens greatly diminished our knowledge of the ancient writers, in particular of the philosophers.’ Several observers noted that books ceased to be readily available and that learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve.20 In Alexandria it was noted that ‘philosophy and culture are now at a point of a most horrible desolation’. Edward Gibbon reported a story that Bishop Theophilus of the city allowed the library to be pillaged, ‘and nearly twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice’. Basil of Caesarea lamented the atrophy of debate in his home city. ‘Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the agora, nothing more of all that made our city famous.’21 Charles Freeman tells us that when Isidore of Seville began compiling his collection of Etymologies, a summary of sacred and secular knowledge, at the end of the sixth century, and although he had his own library, he was already finding it difficult to locate the texts of classical authors that he lacked. ‘The authors stood,’ he said, ‘like blue hills on the far horizon and now it was hard to place them even chronologically.’
Rome was virtually devoid of books by the middle of the fourth century, according to Luciano Canfora. The twenty-nine famous lending libraries had been closed, for one reason or another. In Alexandria, in 391, the Christian archbishop had destroyed the great library of the temple of Serapis, second only to the Mouseion in size and prestige. The Mouseion itself survived for the time being, largely because it appears to have become a repository of sacred Christian texts, though they were ill-copied parchments ‘crawling with errors’ because Greek was more and more a foreign language. But when the Arabs conquered Alexandria, just before Christmas in 640, the chief librarian of the Mouseion pleaded with the conqueror, Amr ibn-al-As, to spare the library. He passed the request back to the caliph, who remarked ‘If their content is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.’22 The books were thus distributed around the public baths as fuel for the stoves. The burning scrolls heated the bath waters of Alexandria for six months. Only the works of Aristotle escaped the flames.
The papacy had a library, or at least an archive to begin with, which appears to have survived intact (in general, and for obvious reasons, Christian libraries survived better than non-Christian ones). It was established by Damasus I (366–384), who installed it in the church of San Lorenzo which he had built himself at the family home, on a site close to what is now the Cancelleria. Later it was moved to the Lateran Palace, where the papal offices were. Over time, bibles and manuals and various Christian writings were added, many of them heretical. In one room of the Lateran Palace, dated to the seventh century, a mural has been found, showing St Augustine seated before a book, with a scroll in one hand. This room, it is presumed, was the original papal library.23
Another ancient library was that at Seville, in Spain, which belonged to Isidore, bishop there from 600 to 636. This library certainly included many secular works as well as Christian texts, even though the bishop thought the secular works unfit reading for his
monks.24 Isidore’s books have disappeared but we know what was in his library because he composed a series of verses to go over the doors and bookshelves. The first verse begins plainly enough: ‘Here are masses of books, both sacred and secular.’ From the other verses we know that, among the Christian authors, he possessed Origen, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome, while among secular authors there were Paulus (poetry), Gaius (law), Hippocrates and Galen (both medicine).
However, one by one, the schools of classical antiquity closed (Justinian, remember, had shut the philosophical school in Athens in 529), so that by the middle of the sixth century only Constantinople and Alexandria remained. This was accompanied by a narrowing in the range of literature that was read. ‘After the third century it becomes more and more uncommon to find any educated man showing knowledge of texts that have not come down to the modern world.’25 Modern scholars believe this reflects a state of affairs whereby a prominent schoolmaster (Eugenius is a candidate) selected a syllabus that was so successful that all other schools copied it. ‘With the general decline of culture and impoverishment of the empire no texts outside this range were read and copied often enough to be guaranteed survival.’26 For example, seven plays by Aeschylus were selected and seven by Sophocles–and that is all we know.
