The gains of the Church, and more particularly of the papacy, were more solid than those of the Western Empire. England had been converted by a monastic mission under the orders of Gregory the Great, and remained much more subject to Rome than were the countries with bishops accustomed to local autonomy. The conversion of Germany was largely the work of Saint Boniface (680-754), an English missionary, who was a friend of Charles Martel and Pepin, and completely faithful to the Pope. Boniface founded many monasteries in Germany; his friend Saint Gall founded the Swiss monastery which bears his name. According to some authorities, Boniface anointed Pepin as king with a ritual taken from the First Book of Kings.
Saint Boniface was a native of Devonshire, educated at Exeter and Winchester. He went to Frisia in 716, but soon had to return. In 717 he went to Rome, and in 719 Pope Gregory II sent him to Germany to convert the Germans and to combat the influence of the Irish missionaries (who, it will be remembered, erred as to the date of Easter and the shape of the tonsure). After considerable successes, he returned to Rome in 722, where he was made bishop by Gregory II, to whom he took an oath of obedience. The Pope gave him a letter to Charles Martel, and charged him to suppress heresy in addition to converting the heathen. In 732 he became archbishop; in 738 he visited Rome a third time. In 741 Pope Zacharias made him legate, and charged him to reform the Frankish Church. He founded the abbey of Fulda, to which he gave a rule stricter than the Benedictine. Then he had a controversy with an Irish bishop of Salzburg, named Virgil, who maintained that there are other worlds than ours, but was nevertheless canonized. In 754, after returning to Frisia, Boniface and his companions were massacred by the heathen. It was owing to him that German Christianity was papal, not Irish.
English monasteries, particularly those of Yorkshire, were of great importance at this time. Such civilization as had existed in Roman Britain had disappeared, and the new civilization introduced by Christian missionaries centred almost entirely round the Benedictine abbeys, which owed everything directly to Rome. The Venerable Bede was a monk at Jarrow. His pupil Ecgbert, first archbishop of York, founded a cathedral school, where Alcuin was educated.
Alcuin is an important figure in the culture of the time. He went to Rome in 780, and in the course of his journey met Charlemagne at Parma. The Emperor employed him to teach Latin to the Franks and to educate the royal family. He spent a considerable part of his life at the court of Charlemagne, engaged in teaching and in founding schools. At the end of his life he was abbot of St, Martin’s at Tours. He wrote a number of books, including a verse history of the church at York. The emperor, though uneducated, had a considerable belief in the value of culture, and for a brief period diminished the darkness of the dark ages. But his work in this direction was ephemeral. The culture of Yorkshire was for a time destroyed by the Danes, that of France was damaged by the Normans. The Saracens raided Southern Italy, conquered Sicily, and in 846 even attacked Rome. On the whole, the tenth century was, in Western Christendom, about the darkest epoch; for the ninth is redeemed by the English ecclesiastics and by the astonishing figure of Johannes Scotus, as to whom I shall have more to say presently.
The decay of Carolingian power after the death of Charlemagne and the division of his empire redounded, at first, to the advantage of the papacy. Pope Nicholas I (858-867) raised papal power to a far greater height than it had ever attained before. He quarrelled with the Emperors of the East and the West, with King Charles the Bald of France and King Lothar II of Lorraine, and with the episcopate of nearly every Christian country; but in almost all his quarrels he was successful. The clergy in many regions had become dependent on the local princes, and he set to work to remedy this state of affairs. His two greatest controversies concerned the divorce of Lothar II and the uncanonical deposition of Ignatius, patriarch of Constantinople. The power of the Church, throughout the Middle Ages, had a great deal to do with royal divorces. Kings were men of headstrong passions, who felt that the indissolubility of marriage was a doctrine for subjects only. The Church, however, could alone solemnize a marriage, and if the Church declared a marriage invalid, a disputed succession and a dynastic war were very likely to result. The Church, therefore, was in a very strong position in opposing royal divorces and irregular marriages. In England, it lost this position under Henry VIII, but recovered it under Edward VIII.
When Lothar II demanded a divorce, the clergy of his kingdom agreed. Pope Nicholas, however, deposed the bishops who had acquiesced, and totally refused to admit the king’s plea for divorce. Lothar’s brother, the Emperor Louis II, thereupon marched on Rome with the intention of overawing the Pope; but superstitious terrors prevailed, and he retired. In the end, the Pope’s will was victorious.
The business of the Patriarch Ignatius was interesting, as showing that the Pope could still assert himself in the East. Ignatius, who was obnoxious to the Regent Bardas, was deposed, and Photius, hitherto a layman, was elevated to his place. The Byzantine government asked the Pope to sanction this proceeding. He sent two legates to inquire into the matter; when they arrived in Constantinople, they were terrorized, and gave their assent. For some time, the facts were concealed from the Pope, but when he came to know them, he took a high line. He summoned a council in Rome to consider the question; he deposed one of the legates from his bishopric, and also the archbishop of Syracuse, who had consecrated Photius; he anathematized Photius, deposed all whom he had ordained, and restored all who had been deposed for opposing him. The Emperor Michael III was furious, and wrote the Pope an angry letter, but the Pope replied: “The day of king-priests and emperor-pontiffs is past, Christianity has separated the two functions, and Christian emperors have need of the Pope in view of the life eternal, whereas popes have no need of emperors except as regards temporal things.” Photius and the Emperor retorted by summoning a council, which excommunicated the Pope and declared the Roman Church heretical. Soon after this, however, Michael III was murdered, and his successor Basil restored Ignatius, explicitly recognizing papal jurisdiction in the matter. This triumph happened just after the death of Nicholas, and was attributable almost entirely to the accidents of palace revolutions. After the death of Ignatius, Photius again became patriarch, and the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches was widened. Thus it cannot be said that Nicholas’s policy in this matter was victorious in the long run.
Nicholas had almost more difficulty in imposing his will upon the episcopate than upon kings. Archbishops had come to consider themselves very great men, and they were reluctant to submit tamely to an ecclesiastical monarch. He maintained, however, that bishops owe their existence to the Pope, and while he lived he succeeded, on the whole, in making this view prevail. There was, throughout these centuries, great doubt as to how bishops should be appointed. Originally they were elected by the acclamation of the faithful in their cathedral city; then, frequently, by a synod of neighbouring bishops; then, sometimes, by the king, and sometimes by the Pope. Bishops could be deposed for grave causes, but it was not clear whether they should be tried by the Pope or by a provincial synod. All these uncertainties made the powers of an office dependent upon the energy and astuteness of its holders. Nicholas stretched papal power to the utmost limits of which it was then capable; under his successors, it sank again to a very low ebb.
During the tenth century, the papacy was completely under the control of the local Roman aristocracy. There was, as yet, no fixed rule as to the election of popes; sometimes they owed their elevation to popular acclaim, sometimes to emperors or kings, and sometimes, as in the tenth century, to the holders of local urban power in Rome. Rome was, at this time, not a civilized city, as it had still been in the time of Gregory the Great. At times there were faction fights; at other times some rich family acquired control by a combination of violence and corruption. The disorder and weakness of Western Europe was so great at this period that Christendom might have seemed in danger of complete destruction. The emperor and the king of France were powerless to curb
the anarchy produced in their realms by feudal potentates who were nominally their vassals. The Hungarians made raids on Northern Italy. The Normans raided the French coast, until, in 911, they were given Normandy and in return became Christians. But the greatest danger in Italy and Southern France came from the Saracens, who could not be converted, and had no reverence for the Church. They completed the conquest of Sicily about the end of the ninth century; they were established on the River Garigliano, near Naples; they destroyed Monte Cassino and other great monasteries; they had a settlement on the coast of Provence, whence they raided Italy and the Alpine valleys, interrupting traffic between Rome and the North.
The conquest of Italy by the Saracens was prevented by the Eastern Empire, which overcame the Saracens of the Garigliano in 915. But it was not strong enough to govern Rome, as it had done after Justinian’s conquest, and the papacy became, for about a hundred years, a perquisite of the Roman aristocracy or of the counts of Tusculum. The most powerful Romans, at the beginning of the tenth century, were the “Senator” Theophylact and his daughter Marozia, in whose family the papacy nearly became hereditary. Marozia had several husbands in succession, and an unknown number of lovers. One of the latter she elevated to the papacy, under the title of Sergius II (904-911). His and her son was Pope John XI (931-936); her grandson was John XII (955-964), who became Pope at the age of sixteen and “completed the debasement of the papacy by his debauched life and the orgies of which the Lateran palace soon became the scene.”* Marozia is presumably the basis for the legend of a female “Pope Joan.”
The popes of this period naturally lost whatever influence their predecessors had retained in the East. They lost also the power, which Nicholas I had successfully exercised, over bishops north of the Alps. Provincial councils asserted their complete independence of the Pope, but they failed to maintain independence of sovereigns and feudal lords. Bishops, more and more, became assimilated to lay feudal magnates. “The Church itself thus appears as the victim of the same anarchy in which lay society is weltering; all evil appetites range unchecked, and, more than ever, such of the clergy as still retain some concern for religion and for the salvation of the souls committed to their charge mourn over the universal decadence and direct the eyes of the faithful towards the spectre of the end of the world’and of the Last Judgment.”†
It is a mistake, however, to suppose that a special dread of the end of the world in the year 1000 prevailed at this time, as used to be thought. Christians, from Saint Paul onward, believed the end of the world to be at hand, but they went on with their ordinary business none the less.
The year 1000 may be conveniently taken as marking the end of the lowest depth to which the civilization of Western Europe sank. From this point the upward movement began which continued till 1914. In the beginning, progress was mainly due to monastic reform. Outside the monastic orders, the clergy had become, for the most part, violent, immoral, and worldly; they were corrupted by the wealth and power that they owed to the benefactions of the pious. The same thing happened, over and over again, even to the monastic orders; but reformers, with new zeal, revived their moral force as often as it had decayed.
Another reason which makes the year 1000 a turning-point is the cessation, at about this time, of conquest by both Mohammedans and northern barbarians, so far at least as Western Europe is concerned. Goths, Lombards, Hungarians, and Normans came in successive waves; each horde in turn was Christianized, but each in turn weakened the civilized tradition. The Western Empire broke up into many barbarian kingdoms; the kings lost authority over their vassals; there was universal anarchy, with perpetual violence both on a large and on a small scale. At last all the races of vigorous northern conquerors had been converted to Christianity, and had acquired settled habitations. The Normans, who were the last comers, proved peculiarly capable of civilization. They reconquered Sicily from the Saracens, and made Italy safe from the Mohammedans. They brought England back into the Roman world, from which the Danes had largely excluded it. Once settled in Normandy, they allowed France to revive, and helped materially in the process.
Our use of the phrase the “Dark Ages” to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in many other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary. No one could have guessed that Western Europe would later become dominant, both in power and in culture. To us, it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view. Most of the cultural content of our civilization comes to us from the Eastern Mediterranean, from Greeks and Jews. As for power: Western Europe was dominant from the Punic Wars to the fall of Rome—say, roughly, during the six centuries from 200 B.C. to A.D. 400. After that time, no State in Western Europe could compare in power with China, Japan, or the Caliphate.
Our superiority since the Renaissance is due partly to science and scientific technique, partly to political institutions slowly built up during the Middle Ages. There is no reason, in the nature of things, why this superiority should continue. In the present war, great military strength has been shown by Russia, China, and Japan. All these combine Western technique with Eastern ideology—Byzantine, Confucian, or Shinto. India, if liberated, will contribute another Oriental element. It seems not unlikely that, during the next few centuries, civilization, if it survives, will have greater diversity than it has had since the Renaissance. There is an imperialism of culture which is harder to overcome than the imperialism of power. Long after the Western Empire fell—indeed until the Reformation—all European culture retained a tincture of Roman imperialism. It now has, for us, a West-European imperialistic flavour. I think that, if we are to feel at home in the world after the present war, we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes this will bring about, I do not know, but I am convinced that they will be profound and of the greatest importance.
CHAPTER VIII
John the Scot
JOHN THE SCOT, or Johannes Scotus, to which is sometimes added Eriugena or Erigena,* is the most astonishing person of the ninth century; he would have been less surprising if he had lived in the fifth or the fifteenth century. He was an Irishman, a Neoplatonist, an accomplished Greek scholar, a Pelagian, a pantheist. He spent much of his life under the patronage of Charles the Bald, king of France, and though he was certainly far from orthodox, yet, so far as we know, he escaped persecution. He set reason above faith, and cared nothing for the authority of ecclesiastics; yet his arbitrament was invoked to settle their controversies.
To understand the occurrence of such a man, we must turn our attention first to Irish culture in the centuries following Saint Patrick. Apart from the extremely painful fact that Saint Patrick was an Englishman, there are two other scarcely less painful circumstances: first, that there were Christians in Ireland before he went there; second, that, whatever he may have done for Irish Christianity, it was not to him that Irish culture was due. At the time of the invasion of Gaul (says a Gaulish author), first by Attila, then by the Goths, Vandals, and Alaric, “all the learned men on their side the sea fled, and in the countries beyond sea, namely Ireland, and wherever else they betook themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous advance in learning.”* If any of these men sought refuge in England, the Angles and Saxons and Jutes must have mopped them up; but those who went to Ireland succeeded, in combination with the missionaries, in transplanting a great deal of the knowledge and civilization that was disappearing from the Continent. There is good reason to believe that, throughout the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, a knowledge of Greek, as well as a considerable familiarity with Latin classics, survived among the Irish.† Greek was known in England from the time of Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury (669-690)
, who was himself a Greek, educated at Athens; it may also have become known, in the North, through Irish missionaries. “During the latter part of the seventh century,” says Montague James, “it was in Ireland that the thirst for knowledge was keenest, and the work of teaching was most actively carried on. There the Latin language (and in a less degree the Greek) was studied from a scholar’s point of view…. It was when, impelled in the first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they had already learnt to value.”‡ Heiric of Auxerre, about 876, describes this influx of Irish scholars: “Ireland, despising the dangers of the sea, is migrating almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all the most learned doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the bidding of Solomon the wise”—i. e., King Charles the Bald.*
The lives of learned men have at many times been perforce nomadic. At the beginning of Greek philosophy, many of the philosophers were refugees from the Persians; at the end of it, in the time of Justinian, they became refugees to the Persians. In the fifth century, as we have just seen, men of learning fled from Gaul to the Western Isles to escape the Germans; in the ninth century, they fled back from England and Ireland to escape the Scandinavians. In our own day, German philosophers have to fly even further West to escape their compatriots. I wonder whether it will be equally long before a return flight takes place.
Too little is known of the Irish in the days when they were preserving for Europe the tradition of classical culture. This learning was connected with monasteries, and was full of piety, as their penitentials show; but it does not seem to have been much concerned with theological niceties. Being monastic rather than episcopal, it had not the administrative outlook that characterized Continental ecclesiastics from Gregory the Great onwards. And being in the main cut off from effective contact with Rome, it still regarded the Pope as he was regarded in the time of Saint Ambrose, not as he came to be regarded later. Pelagius, though probably a Briton, is thought by some to have been an Irishman. It is likely that his heresy survived in Ireland, where authority could not stamp it out, as it did, with difficulty, in Gaul. These circumstances do something to account for the extraordinary freedom and freshness of John the Scot’s speculations.
A History of Western Philosophy Page 50
