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Lecture 16
The Church Fathers: St. Jerome and
St. Augustine
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There
were many ways in which Christianity was made more popular among Roman
pagans. For instance, early mystery cults made the Romans more prepared to
accept something like Christianity once it made its appearance. The Roman
persecutions of Jews and Christians had the unintended consequence of
producing a vast and well-known list of saints and martyrs. The Jews had also
allowed Christians to use their synagogues. The conversion of Constantine
in the early 4th century certainly had an effect on the growth of
Christianity. Furthermore, Jesus was a real man, not some mythical figure or
hero -- he commanded the faith of the dispossessed. And monasticism provided
a religious outlet for those men and women who abandoned Rome and the
material world. The monks became the heroes of Christian civilization (see Lecture
19). And evangelicals seemed to be everywhere spreading
"good news."
Christianity was also a religion of the written word. It
was a religion of the book. The Jews gave the west its oral history in the
thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew. And by the end of
the second century, Christianity had the twenty-seven books of the New
Testament, written in Greek. By the 5th century, complete editions of the Old
Testament and New Testament were rare, bulky and expensive. What was usually
printed were sections of the Bible: the first five books of the Old Testament
(the Pentateuch) and the book of Psalms, and the first four books of the New
Testament (the Gospels), the Epistles of St. Paul and the Acts of the
Apostles.
What we need to take into account is the relationship between
the church and classical culture. By the 4th century, it is correct to speak
of a Christian literature that had developed around the interpretation,
reinterpretation and commentary of the Old and New Testament. The
relationship between the church and classical culture was tenuous at best.
Christianity had the effect of making a synthesis between the Hebrew and
Greco-Roman intellectual traditions. Christianity absorbed Hebrew monotheism
and retained the Old Testament as the Word of God. As Christianity evolved,
however, it also absorbed various elements of Greek thought -- and such an
absorption helps to explain why Christianity succeeded in converting more
people of the of the world of Late Antiquity.
To many of the early Church Fathers,
classical philosophy was erroneous for the simple reason that it did not
emanate from divine revelation. It was secular and pagan. The early Church
Fathers complained that whereas Greek philosophers may have argued over
words, Christianity possessed the Word, true wisdom as revealed by
God. So, the early Church Fathers believed that studying Greek thought would
contaminate Christian morality and promote heresy. For the early Church
Fathers, there would be no compromise between Greek philosophy and Christian
revelation. The early Church Father, Tertullian
(150-225) once wrote that "with our faith, we desire no further belief.
For this is our faith that there is nothing which we ought to believe
besides."
However, there were other Church Fathers who defended the
value of studying classical literature and philosophy. The classical Greeks
could aid in the moral development of children because the Greeks, though pagan,
still embraced a virtuous life. Knowledge of Greek thought helped Christians
to explain their beliefs logically and enabled them to argue intelligently
with critics of Christianity. It was Clement of Alexandria
(c.150-220) who brought reason to the support of faith by trying to make
Christianity more intellectually respectable. As Clement once wrote in his Stromata
(Miscellanies), "thus philosophy acted as a schoolmaster to the
Greek, preparing them for Christ, as the laws of the Jews prepared them for
Christ."
Using the language and techniques of Greek philosophy,
Christian intellectuals changed Christianity from a simple ethical creed into
a theoretical system. From this "Hellenization of Christianity,"
theology was born. Christ was depicted as the divine Logos (reason) in
human form. Roman Stoicism was incorporated into the belief that all are
equal and united in Christ.
 It is clear that the Church Fathers became Christian
intellectuals and theologians. Christian theology became even more popular
when the Church Father, ST.
JEROME (c.342-420), translated the Old Testament and New
Testament into Latin. He accomplished this around 400, just ten years after
Theodosius had declared Christianity to be the state religion of the Roman
Empire.
Jerome grew up in Italy, studied at Rome, was baptized and
served as a personal secretary to the Pope. Throughout his life, he remained
an admirer of Cicero,
Virgil
and Lucretius
and he defended the study of Latin literature by Christians. He lived for a
while as a hermit in the desert near Antioch. After becoming a priest, he
visited Palestine and studied the Scriptures in Constantinople. He eventually
became secretary to Pope Damascus
and an advisor to a group of men and women drawn to the ascetic life. He left
Rome and established a monastery near Bethlehem. He wrote lives of the
saints and promoted the spread of monasticism. But his Latin version of the
Bible -- known as the Vulgate or common version -- was a major achievement,
for Jerome's version of the Bible became the standard version for the next
ten centuries, in other words, right down to the Protestant Reformation of
the 16th century.
 The most important of all Church Fathers was Augustine of
Hippo, better known as ST.
AUGUSTINE. He was born in North Africa and 354 and died at the age
76 in 430. His father was a pagan, his mother a Christian. He was, then, the
product of a mixed marriage. He loved his mother dearly, a fact which partially
explains his later conversion to Christianity. He was educated at Carthage in
North Africa, and very quickly yielded to earthly temptation. At the age of
eighteen, he took a concubine or mistress and together they had one child, a
son. It was at this time that Augustine was attracted to the heretical
teachings of a man called Mani
(216-276), who believed that one God could not be responsible for both good
and evil. So, there had to be two gods. Such an opinion, of course, is
heresy. In 387, and under the influence of men like St. Jerome, and his
mother, he became a Christian.
In 399, Augustine was elected Bishop of Hippo, one of the
intellectual centers of North Africa. Hippo was also the focus of a lively
debate on numerous theological issues. In a certain sense, late 4th century
Carthage was similar to the intellectual environment of Athens 1000 years
earlier. In other words, Carthage was flooded with new ideas. Augustine spent
more than thirty years combating heresy, writing commentaries and
interpretations of Christian theology. He wrote the first autobiography in
western history, The
Confessions. His most important work, however, is The
City of God, a massive book written between 413 and 426. The City
of God was written to show that it was God's plan that Rome would fall
and that Christianity was the salvation of mankind. In other words, according
to St. Augustine, history has direction, history has meaning -- the unfolding
of God's grand plan.
In The City of God, Augustine brings together the
sacred history of the Jewish people, the pagan history of the Greeks and
Romans, and the Christian expectation of future salvation. He quotes Herodotus,
Plato,
Cicero,
Tacitus,
Aristotle,
the Old Testament, the New Testament as well as the interpretations and
commentaries of the Church Fathers.
The City of God contrasts two cities: the
City of God and the City of Man. He taught that the City of Man -- that is,
Rome -- was evil and destined to decline and fall. Augustine saw this with
his own eyes. In other words, he was not looking back into history, he was
looking at his own present. The City of God was invisible -- it was not of
this earth. It was otherworldly. The chosen or the elect -- the true
Christian -- should recognize that earthly existence was little more than an
illusion. Furthermore, there was a higher reality beyond Rome. That higher
reality was the City of God. It was only in the City of God that the chosen
would find their final resting place. If any of this sounds like Plato and
the Allegory of the Cave, then you are on the right track. Augustine
studied Plato -- he was a neo-Platonist. He combined Christianity with
Plato's higher reality of Ideas and Forms. In the end, what Augustine
accomplished was nothing less than a synthesis of Christianity and classical
humanism.
Of course, Augustine did not believe that Christ, by his
death, had opened the door to heaven for every soul. Most of humanity
remained condemned to eternal punishment -- only a handful of souls had the
gift of faith and the promise of heaven. People could not overcome their sins
-- moral and spiritual regeneration came only from God's grace, and it was
God who determined who would be saved, and who would be damned (the notion of
predestination would appear again, with greater force, during the Protestant
Reformation of the 16th century). Although Augustine's influence was
impressive, the Church rejected his idea of predestination, that only a small
number of people would find salvation. Instead, the Church emphasized that
Christ had made possible the salvation of all. With Augustine, the
human-centered outlook of classical humanism gave way to a God-centered world
view. The fulfillment of God's grand design became the chief concern of human
endeavor.
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Lecture 17
Byzantine Civilization
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In
410, the "eternal city" of Rome was sacked. From 451 to 453 Italy
suffered the invasions of Attila the Hun who was known by all as the
"scourge of God." By the 5th century, power in Western Europe had
passed from the hands of the Roman emperors to those of barbarian chieftains.
In 476, the date usually assigned to the fall the Roman Empire, the barbarian
Odovacer (c.434-493), deposed the western emperor Romulus Augustulus
and ruled in his place (on the Fall of Rome, see Lecture
14).
By the end of the 5th century the western Empire was split
into various Germanic kingdoms. The Ostrogoths
settled in Italy, the Franks
in northern Gaul, the Burgundians
in Provence, the Visigoths
in southern Gaul and Spain, the Vandals
in Africa and the western Mediterranean, and the Angles and Saxons in
England. Barbarians were clearly the masters of western Europe, but they were
also willing to accommodate themselves to the people they conquered. (See map
of barbarian migration, Shockwave required.)
Despite the military defeat of the Roman Empire by these
various barbarian tribes, these victories did not lead to a cultural defeat
of the Roman Empire. To be sure, the barbarians were militarily superior, but
the Romans managed to maintain their cultural strength. In other words, Roman
language, law, and government continued to exist alongside new Germanic
institutions. Together with this accommodation, was the fact that the
Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Vandals became a Christianized people.
However, their religious creed was considered heretical by the Church. They
were Arian
Christians -- Christians who believed that Jesus Christ was not of
one identical substance with God. The Arian heresy was founded by a priest
named Arius and was condemned in 325 by the Council of Nicaea.
Despite the fact that the Church was hostile to the Arian
form of Christianity, the Germans admired Roman culture. They never wanted to
destroy it. Just the same, the Germans were a rural people, and preferred the
countryside to urban life. By 500, the Franks were converted to the Orthodox
form of Christianity supported by the bishops at Rome. As Roman Christians, the
Franks eventually helped conquer and convert the Goths and other barbarians
in western Europe.
The period of history from roughly 500 to 1000 is called
the early Middle Ages. It is oftentimes called Late Antiquity as well (see
the excellent introduction, "A
Visual Tour Through late Antiquity"). While we will return to
the Frankish Kingdom in later lectures (see Lecture
20), it is important to understand that during the period of
the early Middle Ages, Europe was born. This is a period of time in which a
distinctive western European culture began to emerge. Whether we look to
geography, government, religion, culture, or language, western Europe became
a land distinct from both the Byzantine world and the Muslim world (see Lecture
18). Although this period marks the decline of the Roman
world, it is also a time of recovery and experimentation with new ideas and
institutions.
The crucial feature of the early Middle Ages was a unique
blending of three distinct traditions: the Greco-Roman tradition, the
Judeo-Christian tradition, and Germanic custom.
As western Europe fell to the Germanic invasions, imperial
power shifted to the Byzantine Empire, that is, the eastern part of the Roman
Empire, with its capital at Constantinople. The eastern provinces of the
former Roman Empire had always outnumbered those in the west. Its
civilization was far older and it had larger cities, which were also more
numerous than in the west.
It was Constantine the Great
who began the rebuilding of Byzantium in 324, renaming the city
Constantinople and dedicating it in 330. Constantinople became the sole
capital of the Empire and remained so until the late 8th century when
Charlemagne strengthened the Frankish Kingdom. Although the Byzantine Empire
remained in existence until it was defeated by the Turks in 1453, our focus
shall be on the early period of Byzantine history up to the year 632.
 The greatest of all the eastern emperors was clearly Justinian
(c.482-565), who reigned for thirty-eight years between 527 and 565.
Justinian was reformer in the fashion of Augustus Caesar. It was Justinian's
desire to restore the Empire -- both East and West -- to all of its former
glory. In fact, it has been said that his desire to restore the former Roman
Empire was an obsession. His greatest accomplishment toward this end was the
revision and codification of Roman law. Justinian understood that a strong
government could not exist without good laws. Although the Romans prided
themselves on their written laws, several centuries of written laws had
brought nothing but confusion. In Justinian's day, a man could have spent a
lifetime studying the laws without ever mastering them. The laws had grown
too numerous and too confusing. Justinian created a commission of sixteen men
to bring order out of all the laws. These men worked for six years and
studied more than 2000 texts. In 534, the commission produced the Corpus
Juris Civilis – the Body of Civil Law. The Corpus,
written in Latin, became the standard legal work until the middle of the 19th
century. As such, the Corpus is one of the most sophisticated legal
systems ever produced and symbolized Justinian's efforts to create a reunited
and well-governed Empire. Justinian was clearly a man who was driven by his
obsession. He was aided by his predecessors, who were able to fend off
Germanic invasions, something the western empire could not do until much
later. Justinian was also aided by his wife, Theodora
(c.500-547), the daughter of a bearkeeper at the Hippodrome, and no less
ambitious than her husband. Together, she and Justinian brought new energy to
an old, conservative regime.
In 532, mob violence erupted in Constantinople. These
riots were called the Nika Riots ("Nika"= "Victory!"),
and grew from political unrest over the government's fiscal measures. Rival
factions of Blues and Greens (admirers of rival chariot-racing teams) fought
in the streets. Justinian wanted to leave the city during the riots, but two
of his generals (Belisarius and Narses) and his wife Theodora, persuaded him
to stay. Theodora took it upon herself to raise a personal army, an army that
eventually killed 35,000 people in a single day.
Following Justinian's victory -- actually Theodora's --
Justinian sent his armies to recapture parts of the former western Empire. In
533, he sent his armies to North Africa to destroy the Vandal Kingdom. The
same year his generals took Sicily and Rome. However, victory was only
temporary. By 565, Roman Italy was invaded and overtaken by the Lombards.
Back at Constantinople, Justinian tried to rebuild the
city. He built aqueducts to supply the city with water. Overseeing all sorts
of government buildings, he was responsible for the construction of at least
twenty-five churches, the Hagia
Sophia being the most well-known. The Hagia Sophia (Church of
the Holy Wisdom) was initially constructed under Constantine and
reconstructed around 400. Justinian commissioned two Greek architects
(Isidoros and Anthemios) to build a new kind of church with a great dome at
the center. The dome rises 180 feet and the church itself covers 25,000
square feet. The interior was light and airy and covered with mosaics.
Religion as well as law served Justinian's efforts to
centralize the imperial office. Since the 5th century the patriarch of
Constantinople had crowned emperors in Constantinople, a practice which
reflected the close ties between secular and religious leaders. In 380,
Christianity had been proclaimed the official religion of the eastern Empire.
All other religions and sects were denounced as "demented and
insane." Orthodox Christianity was not, however, the only religion
within the Empire with a significant number of followers. Nor did the rulers
view religion as merely a political tool. At one time or another the
Christian heresies of Arianism
(the belief that Jesus was not of one substance with God), Monophysitism
(Jesus has one nature – a composite divine/human one, not a fully divine and
fully human), and Iconoclasm
(the attempt to abolish the use of icons/images in church services) also
received imperial support. Persecution and absorption into popular
Christianity served to cut short many pagan religious practices.
There were also a large number of Jews living in the
Byzantine world. However, the Romans had considered the Jews in comparison to
Christians to be narrow, dogmatic, and intolerant people, and had little love
for them. Under Roman law Jews had legal protection as long as they did not
proselytize among Christians, build new synagogues, or attempt to enter
public office. Whereas Justinian adopted a policy of voluntary Jewish
conversion, the later emperors ordered all Jews to be baptized, and granted
tax breaks to those who voluntarily complied. Neither effort was successful
in converting the Jews of the Empire.
During the reign of Justinian, the Empire's strength was
in its more than 1500 cities. The largest, with perhaps 350,000 inhabitants,
was Constantinople, the cultural crossroads of east and west, north and
south. Councils composed of around 200 local wealthy landowners governed the
cities. Known as decurions, they made up the intellectual and economic
elite of the Empire. A 5th century record gives us some sense of the size and
splendor of Constantinople. According to the record, there were five imperial
and nine princely palaces; eight public and 153 private baths; five
granaries; two theaters; a hippodrome; 322 streets; 4388 substantial houses;
52 porticoes; 20 public and 120 private bakers; and 14 churches. The most
popular entertainments were the theater, frequently denounced by the clergy
for nudity and immorality, and the races at the hippodrome. Numerous public
taverns and baths also existed.
During the reign of Heraclius
(610-641), the Empire took a decidedly eastern, as opposed to Roman,
direction. Heraclius spoke Greek, not Latin and his entire reign was
preoccupied with resisting Persian and Islamic invasions. Islamic armies
overran the Empire after 632, directly attacking Constantinople for the first
time in 677. Not until the reign of Leo III in the early 8th century were the
Islamic armies defeated and most of Asia Minor retained by the Byzantines.
 Leo,
however, offended western Christians when he forbade the use of images in
eastern churches and tried to enforce the ban in the west. This became a
source of conflict to western Christians, who had carefully nurtured the
adoration of Jesus, Mary, and the saints in images and icons. The banning of
images became a major expression of eastern imperial involvement in church
dogma and practice that the western church had always resisted. In addition
to creating a new division within Christendom, the new ban on images brought
about the destruction of much religious art.
Throughout the period of the early Middle Ages the
Byzantine Empire served as a protective barrier between western Europe and
the Persian, Arab, and Turkish armies. The Byzantines were also a major conduit
of classical learning and science into the west down to the Renaissance.
Throughout the centuries and while western Europeans were fumbling to create
a new culture of their own, the cities of the Byzantine Empire provided them
an outstanding model of a civilized society.
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Lecture 18
Islamic Civilization
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On
the outer edge of the Latin world, in Spain, Sicily, and North Africa, and
surrounding Byzantium in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, was the world of Islam.
For centuries, Islam was both a threat and the source of new ideas to the
Greek East and Latin West. Between the 7th and 12th centuries, Islam became
the center of a brilliant civilization and of a great scientific,
philosophic, and artistic culture. Although its language was neither Greek
nor Latin, Islam absorbed a great deal of Greek culture which it managed to
preserve for the Latin West. In general, it can be said that Islam absorbed
and added its culture to the heritage of Greece, Rome, Judaism, Christianity,
and the Near East.
 In
the beginning the Muslims were both open and cautious. They borrowed and
integrated elements of other cultures into their own. The new religion of
Islam, which we will get to in a moment, adopted elements of Christian,
Jewish, and pagan religious beliefs and practices. The Muslims tolerated
religious minorities within territories they had conquered so long as these
minorities recognized Islamic political rule, paid taxes, and did not
proselytize among Muslims. Still, the Muslims were careful to protect the purity
of their religion, language, and law from any foreign influence. With the
passage of time, and with increased conflict with both eastern and western
Christians, this protective instinct grew stronger. In the end, Islamic
culture did not penetrate the west in the same way that Germanic culture did,
but would remain strange as well as threatening to the West.
Fundamental to Islam was its religion -- this, of course,
is true for the medieval west as well. However, we know more about early
Christianity then we do about early Islam. And the reason is clear.
Christianity was produced by a literate culture. Islamic religion, however,
was formed largely in an illiterate, nomadic culture.
The home of Islam is the Arabian Peninsula. The Peninsula
is predominantly desert and the tribes who inhabited this area were nomadic,
that is, they traveled from place to place. Politically, Islam was not a
unified territory nor was there any centralized government.
The great unifying agent in Islamic civilization was
clearly that of Muhammad
(c.570-632). He was born at Mecca and raised by family of modest means. His
father had died in the year of his birth and his mother died when he was 6
years old. At the time of Muhammad's birth, Mecca was one of the most
prosperous caravan cities. However, Mecca was still tied to the traditional
social and religious life of the Arabian world. In other words, it was
governed by the tribal societies of the desert. Membership in the tribe was
determined by blood descent. In such an order, the interests of the
individual were always subordinate to those of the group or tribe. Each tribe
worshipped its own gods in the form of objects from nature (moon, sky, dog,
cat, ram) but all Arabs worshipped one object in common: the Kaaba, a
large black stone enshrined at Mecca. It was the Kaaba that made Mecca
significant as a place of worship and pilgrimage.
As a youth, Muhammad worked as a merchant's assistant,
traveling the major trade routes of the Peninsula. When he was 25, he married
the widow of a wealthy merchant and became a man of means. He also became a
kind of social activist, critical of Meccan materialism, paganism, and the
unjust treatment of the poor and needy.
Muhammad worked hard at his career but like so many
"saviors" and prophets, Muhammad was plagued by doubts. His doubt
increased to such an extent that he left Meccan society and lived a life of
isolation in the desert. In 610, and at the age of 40, he received his first
revelation and began to preach. He believed his revelations came directly
from God, a God who spoke to him through the angel Gabriel, who recited God's
word to him at irregular intervals. These revelations grew into the Qur'an
which his followers compiled between 650 and 651. The basic message Muhammad
received was a summons to all Arabs to submit to God's will. Islam means
"submission to the will of God."
There was little that was new in Muhammad's message. It
had been uttered by a long line of Jewish prophets going back to Noah but now
ending with Muhammad, the last of God's chosen prophets. The Qur'an also
recognized Jesus Christ as a prophet but did not view him as God's co-eternal
and co-equal son. Like Judaism, Islam was a monotheistic and theocratic
religion, not a Trinitarian one like Christianity.
The basic beliefs of Muhammad's religion were (1) that God
is good and omnipotent, (2) that God will judge all men on the last day and
assign them their place in either Heaven or Hell, (3) that men should thank
God for making the world as it is, (4) that God expects men to be generous
with their wealth, and (5) that Muhammad was a prophet sent by God to teach
men and warn them of the last judgment.
It ought to be clear that many of these beliefs are
similar to those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, Muhammad's
religion was not a mere copy. Instead, Muhammad's religion grew as a result
of the social and economic conditions of Mecca itself. One other difference
ought to be noted. Christianity was produced in an urban environment while
the faith of Muhammad was fashioned from his life in the desert.
For Muhammad, there were also five obligations which were
essential to his faith: (1) the profession of faith ¨C there is no God but
Allah and Muhammad was the last prophet, (2) prayers had to be uttered five
times daily, (3) the giving of alms, or charity, (4) fasting, and (5) the
pilgrimage to Mecca. These laws are recorded in the Qur'an, a book which
contains all of the revelations of Muhammad.
Muhammad believed that God had chosen him to be the last
prophet. Abraham and Moses were prophets. So too was Jesus Christ. But
Muhammad believed that Jesus was not the son of God. The Jews and Christians,
according to Muhammad, had strayed from the true faith, a faith which
Muhammad believed he had had revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. It was his
task to convert them and bring them back to the true word.
Despite the faith of his flock, Muhammad met with
disappointment as he preached his religion at Mecca. Jews and Christians
failed to convert. His faith was totally rejected by the authorities at
Mecca. It should be obvious that the merchants at Mecca would have objected
to Muhammad's belief ¨C actually a profession of faith ¨C that men should be
generous with their wealth. The authorities tried to quiet Muhammad and so he
left for the northern city of Medina in the year 622. The journey to Medina
¨C the hegira (the "breaking of former ties") ¨C became the
true foundation of the Islamic faith. The hegira also marks the
beginning of the Islamic calendar.
At Medina, Muhammad created an Islamic community. Besides
the profession of faith, Muhammad also specified that at his community there
would be strict rules governing diet; wine, gambling and usury were
prohibited; he set up his own legal system; and prohibited infanticide. After
settling in Medina, his followers began to attack the caravans on their way
to and from Mecca. By 624 his army was powerful enough to conquer Mecca and
make it the center of the new religion.
Muhammad died in 632 and his death presented his followers
with a series of profound problems. He never claimed to be of divine origin
yet his loyal followers saw no reason to separate religious and political
authority. Submitting to the will of Allah was no different than submitting
to the will of Muhammad. Unfortunately, Muhammad never named a successor. Who
would lead the faithful? Soon after his death, some of his followers selected
Abu
Bakr, a wealthy merchant and Muhammad's father-in-law as
caliph, or temporal leader.
In the early 7th century, Muhammad and successive caliphs,
took up the Arabic custom of making raids against their enemies. The Qur'an
called these raids the jihad ("striving in the way of the
Lord"). The jihad was not carried out as a means to convert
others for the simple reason that acts of conversion to the Islamic faith
were voluntary. The Byzantines and Persians were the first to feel the
pressure of Arab raids. At Yarmuk
in 636, the Muslims defeated the Byzantine army. Syria fell in 640. A decade
later, the Muslims had conquered the entire Persian empire. Egypt,
North Africa and Spain
(with its center at Córdoba) were all conquered and under Muslim rule by the
720s. In 732, a Muslim army was defeated at the Battle
of Tours, and Muslim expansion in Europe came to an abrupt halt.
One of the main problems confronting the Islamic world was
the choice of caliph. When Muhammad's son-in-law was assassinated, Muawiyah,
a general, became caliph.. Muawiyah made the caliphate hereditary in his own
family, thus creating the Umayyad
dynasty. One of the first things Muawiyah did was to move the capital of the
Muslim world from Medina to Damascus in Syria. However, internal dissension
over the caliphate created a split in Islam between the Shiites, or those who
accepted only the descendants of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, as the true
rulers, and the Sunnites, who claimed the descendants of the Umayyads were the
true rulers. This split exists to this day.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, under the Abbasid
caliphs, Islamic civilization entered a golden age. Arabic, Byzantine,
Persian and Indian cultural traditions were integrated. And while in Europe,
learning seemed to be at its lowest point, the Muslims created what I suppose
could be called a "high civilization." Thanks to Muslim scholars,
ancient Greek learning, acquired from their contact with Byzantine scholars,
was kept alive and was eventually transferred to the West in the 12th century
and after (see Lecture
26). But not only did Muslim scholars preserve the heritage
of Greek science
and philosophy, they added to it by writing commentaries and glosses,
thus adding to what eventually became the western intellectual tradition.
Throughout the Qur'an one can find a strong emphasis on the value of
knowledge in the Islamic faith. The Qur'an encourages Muslims to learn and
acquire knowledge, stemming from, but not limited to, the Muslim emphasis on
knowing the unity of God. Because Muslims believe that Allah is all-knowing,
they also believe that the human world's quest for knowledge leads to further
knowing of Allah.
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Lecture 19
Early Medieval Monasticism
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He went into the church pondering these things, and just
then it happened that the Gospel was being read, and he heard the Lord saying
to the rich man, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and
give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." It was as if by
God's design he held the saints in his recollection, and as if the passage
were read on his account. Immediately Antony went out from the Lord's house
and gave to the townspeople the possessions he had from his forebears. (Saint
Athanasius, The Life of Saint Anthony)
Sometime around the year 270, a twenty year old boy called
Anthony
(251-356), a Christian who had been raised in Egypt, entered a church and
Christian monasticism was born. After giving away all his possessions,
Anthony went to live in the desert. Although he returned to the "old
world" several times in his life, he continued to live in solitude for
the rest of his life. In the desert he prayed and supported his existence by
manual labor. He soon became famous for his holiness and men came to live
near him, and imitate his solitary existence. Anthony clearly embraced the
ascetic life, a form of existence which became increasingly popular after
Christianity had been made the favored religion of the Roman Empire. Now that
martyrdom was no longer possible, many people saw in Anthony a fundamentally
new way of demonstrating their devotion to God.
It is ironic that given the preeminence of the papacy and
the Church at Rome, it was the monks and the monastic movement that
effectively shaped early medieval civilization. The ascetic ideal of fleeing
the materialistic world, giving up all worldly possessions and devoting
oneself to worship is common to many religions. What, I think, separates the
European monastic movement is that for many centuries, the monks became the
heroes of medieval civilization.
Christian monasticism began with the flight of Saint
Anthony in the third century in Egypt. There Anthony lived a solitary and
ascetic life. But there were practical difficulties that prevented the spread
of this solitary or "eremetic" monasticism (from the Greek, the
word "monk" means single or alone). The hermit could not easily
find food nor could he participate in the common prayer now required of all
Christians. To make matters worse, living as a hermit meant psychological
problems. To bring a solution to these problems, another hermit of the
desert, Pachomius
(f. 4th century) grouped his followers into a community and drew up for them
the first monastic rule. His monks were to practice chastity, poverty and
obedience to a spiritual abbot (or "father").
By the fifth century, this form of "cenobitic"
("living in common") monasticism gained a powerful appeal in
the west and spread rapidly. Of course, like any other movement, the monastic
movement quickly divided into various sects and forms. One basic reason for
this development is that all the great Church Fathers such as Augustine,
Jerome and Ambrose, had all given specific instructions to monks and others
of an ascetic temperament (on the Church Fathers, see Lecture
16). The monks roamed Europe, founding monasteries and
preaching to the pagans. They also made an effort to reform the Church. And
most important of all, it was the monks of early medieval Europe who kept
learning alive. Their illuminated manuscripts are not only works of art, but
clear signs of their dedication to their spiritual lives.
 It was ST.
BENEDICT OF NURSIA (c.480-c.543) who brought
uniformity and order into the early medieval monastic movement. The Benedictine Rule,
as it became known, is the only surviving work in his own hand and, as a
result, there is considerable controversy surrounding its
composition. Spending his youth as a student at Rome, Benedict was
disgusted by the vice and corruption he encountered in the papal city. He
fled into the wilderness and, as so often happened with ascetics like
Benedict, he began to attract disciples. Benedict organized these disciples
into communities, originally at Subiaco.
Driven from Subiaco by a jealous priest, Benedict founded a new community at Monte Cassino
(529). Toward the end of his life, Benedict drew up his rule for this
community. The Rule served as a constitution to be applied to many
communities. Endowed the full authority, it was the abbot who had sovereignty
over the community -- he was elected for life and could not be replaced. A
monk could neither leave the community nor could he refuse obedience.
As heroes of medieval Europe, the monks exerted a very
powerful influence over all facets of society. The were know to possess
outstanding agricultural skills and because Benedict specific that their
lives include routine stints of manual labor, they restored a dignity to
human labor that the Romans and the barbarians had denied. Furthermore, as
managers of large estates they were able to set an example of sound farming
practice from which everyone could conceivably benefit.
Over time, powerful medieval families began to construct
monasteries on their own estates. Whether their motivations were spiritual or
not, it is clear that having a monastery on one's estate was a sure sign of
grace. The abbots were frequently related to these powerful families and so
it happened that the monastic estates were managed in the interests of these
powerful families. In this way, monasteries very quickly became integrated
into the power relations of medieval society.
From a cultural perspective, the monasteries housed perhaps
the most literate of all members of medieval society. After all, it was
assumed that all monks could read and write. Monasteries also contained
libraries and scriptoria, or writing rooms, in which manuscripts were
copied. These manuscripts were often decorated or illuminated. But why did
monks spend so much time and energy illuminating manuscripts. Since their
lives were dedicated to the Word and preserving the Word for others, what
better way to demonstrate the Word than by giving it the lavish attention it
deserved?
The monks became the heroes of early medieval Europe for a
number of reasons. They had clearly dedicated their lives to the devotion of
God. Their lives served as examples for others. They also provided a sense of
security in a world that always seemed on the brink of tumult and
catastrophe. They founded an organization, the monastery, which allowed them
to live communally -- some monks worked the earth, some copied and
illuminated manuscripts, while still others read and studied. And, of course,
because of their asceticism, the monks became the vehicles of economic and
cultural change -- they helped teach medieval Europe to save and invest
for the future. Of course, what the monks and their monasteries meant for
Europe in, say, 800, meant something vastly different more than 700 years
later when the Christian humanist, Erasmus, could write of the monks that
"they are so detested that it is considered bad luck if one crosses your
path." (see his Praise
of Folly)
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Lecture 20
Charlemagne and the Carolingian
Renaissance
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He who ordains the fate of kingdoms and the march of the
centuries, the all-powerful Disposer of events, having destroyed one
extraordinary image, that of the Romans, which had, it was true, feet of
iron, or even feet of clay, then raised up, among the Franks, the golden head
of a second image, equally remarkable, in the person of the illustrious
Charlemagne.
---Notker the Stammerer, monk of Saint Gall (844)
Introduction
We have seen how Byzantine civilization grew out of the wreckage of the Roman Empire (see Lecture 17). Furthermore, this civilization, centered at Constantinople, drew extensively on the Greco-Roman tradition. From Greece came Hellenistic culture and all that culture had to offer in terms of art, architecture, philosophy, science and literature. From Rome came the much more practical details of law and administration. It was Justinian (c.482-565) who best represented this assimilation of Roman law. And, of course, added to the Greco-Roman tradition was Christianity -- the great unifying agent of the early Middle Ages both east and west. Islamic civilization also benefited from the Greco-Roman tradition, especially in the areas of Greek science and philosophy. Islamic scholars placed Aristotle on a pedestal and called him simply, "The Philosopher." While Islam did not call itself Christian, it did have a religion which was as persuasive in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and Spain as Christianity was in Western Europe (see Lecture 18).
Between the 6th and 9th centuries, Byzantine and Islamic
civilization flourished -- the result was a material civilization which far
outshone their western neighbors. The west had to remake itself. In the wake
of the demise of the Roman Empire, European peasants, nobles and clergyman
had to literally remake their lives. Our image of this period in western
history is one of darkness. Greece and Rome, even during its bad times,
always appears more brilliant than the early Middle Ages even its peak. There
appears to be little or no intellectual pursuit -- no creativity, no
innovation in the arts, the learning, no science. Perhaps the metaphor of a Dark
Ages is not that far from the truth.
One reason why this may be so is that most Europeans had
other things on their mind. As the urban life of Rome gave way to the
countryside, people became more closely attached to the land. Their very
survival depended upon it. These people needed security and protection and
these seemed to be the two words which best express the common needs of the
general population of Europe. Serfdom (see Lecture
22) and feudalism promised security and protection,
however, feudalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. What
began as an attempt to restore social, political, military and economic
order, ended up producing nothing less than anarchy (see Lecture
21).
Before we turn to Charlemagne the foundation of the
Frankish Kingdom, we need to spend some time discussing a few intellectual
trends of the early Middle Ages. Our discussion may shed some light on this
rather dark age. Although the majority of Europeans were busy reconstructing
their lives -- trying to find protection and security -- there were scholars
who were desperately trying to keep learning alive. As you might expect,
these were Christian scholars. I would like to suggest that these scholars
were not that original in their thinking. On the other hand, like St.
Augustine (354-430), they did help keep classical learning alive.
The two individuals I am about to mention retained a profound respect for the
intellect of Greece and Rome. At the same time, they were devout Christians.
They were trying to create a Christian culture which combined the Greco-Roman
tradition with a faith in Christianity and support of the Church.
Boethius
"The last of the Roman philosophers, and the first of the scholastic theologians," Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.475-524), was a Roman statesman and philosopher, and was descended from a prominent senatorial family. He studied philosophy, mathematics and poetry at Plato's Academy, and through his studies at Athens he gained the knowledge that later enabled him to translate Greek philosophic writings into Latin. Soon after 500, he served the court of Theodoric (455-526), king of the Goths, who ruled Italy. In 510, Boethius was appointed consul and "Master of Offices." As consul, he attempted to check the oppressive behavior of his fellow officials. In 522, and during a religious controversy, Boethius managed to choose the wrong side. He was arrested, condemned and sent into exile to await execution. But Boethius was a man of principal, like Socrates, and rather than given to stronger powers, he stood firm in his opinions.  While waiting execution, this admirable scholar wrote a
short book called, The
Consolation of Philosophy. In the Consolation, BOETHIUS
carried on a conversation with Philosophy, who appears as a woman. In other
words, he turned not to God or to Christ or his faith, but to his early
training in philosophy. He reassured himself, in the tradition of Socrates
and the Stoics, that "if then you are master of yourself, you will be in
possession of that which you will never wish to lose, in which Fortune will
never be able to take from you." This is classical humanism defined.
The Consolation is a marvelous book and its debt is
clearly Socratic and Stoic. Imagine this scholar imprisoned, waiting for a
certain death. It was Stoicism which gave him spirit and support. Oddly
enough, the words Christ or Christianity do not appear in his book. Boethius
exerted a major influence in western intellectual life. Until the 12th
century, virtually all of what Europe knew about Aristotle came from
Boethius. He even helped to diffuse Euclidean geometry to the Middle Ages. He
wanted to unite faith and reason -- and wanted to show that they did not
conflict with one another, but complemented one another. His influence was
far and wide. As late as 1600, Elizabeth, the Queen of England, made the Consolation
required reading at her court. She even saw through its translation into
English. Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Chaucer were all familiar students
of the Consolation of Boethius.
But Boethius -- remember, we left him in prison -- soon
met a horrible fate at the hands of the Gothic officials. In 524, Theodoric
confirmed his sentence and after days of cruel torture, Boethius was the
bludgeoned to death. Like Socrates, Sir Thomas More, Bruno and Galileo,
Boethius fell victim to stronger and much crueler powers. He was an
intellectual who stood by his principles. Boethius helped to keep classical
scholarship alive. So too did Cassiodoris
(c.485-c.580), Gregory
of Tours (538-c.594) and Isidore of Seville
(c.560-636). And in his own unique way, so too did St. Augustine.
There was something vital in this Greco-Roman tradition
that had to be preserved. And soon we shall see what the 12th and 13th
centuries were to make of all this, for in those centuries, St.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) managed to blend Aristotle, a pagan
philosopher, with Christianity. Reason and faith were not opposites, but two
necessary roads to truth (i.e. the medieval synthesis).
The Venerable Bede
The other scholar I'd like to mention was the Venerable Bede (c.673-735). Bede was born near Monkwearmouth, near Durham, in England and educated at a Benedictine monastery under Benedict Biscop. He was later transferred to the daughter monastery at Jarrow. He devoted himself to Latin, Greek, and the literature of the Church Fathers. He also studied Hebrew, medicine and astronomy. He was by all accounts, a polymath. He wrote lives of the Saints, hymns, epigrams, works on Christian chronology, and commentaries on the Old and New Testament.
Bede's most valuable work was the Ecclesiastical
History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica
Gentis Anglorum), to which we are indebted for almost all our information
on the ancient history of England down to the year 731. The History
begins with an account of England's geography and early inhabitants and
carries the story from Caesar's landing in 55B.C. through the conversion of
the Anglo-Saxons and spread of the Christian faith down to his own day. It is
to Bede, furthermore, that we received the expression "A.D." or anno
domini ("from the Lord's incarnation"). He used a variety of
sources to write his history including chronicles, biographies, records,
public documents, and oral and written communications from his contemporaries.
He used these sources critically, as would a modern historian, yet he still
believed in miracles and saw all history in terms of the story of man's
salvation. History, in other words, had a purpose, and that purpose was human
salvation. This is perhaps not that unusual considering that the age in which
we're speaking is often called the Age of Faith.
The Kingdom of the Franks
It was during the early Middle Ages, roughly 500-1000, that a new form of government appeared. This government was Germanic in origin. Rome had built her government around an emperor and his elaborate and extensive administrative bureaucracy. The Germans had a different idea. What developed were kingdoms -- the king had to constantly move around his land in order to show and prove himself to his subjects. While all this was going on, the Church became controlled by members of the educated elite. These elites provided the bureaucrats and administrative officials necessary to maintain religious authority. While the Church preserved Roman and Latin culture, the Germans literally changed the Church in order to incorporate it into their own society.
The Franks
expanded their territory to the west -- from Germany into what is now modern
France. Although they remained tied to the traditions of their homeland, the
further west they moved into Gaul, the less Germanized they became. In other
words, their customs and institutions changed as they moved away from their
traditional lands. The Franks and other Germanic tribes were never absorbed
into the Roman world, rather, they added a Germanic impression to that world.
And, as we will see, feudalism itself grew out of this combination of
Germanic custom and Roman law.
The real impact of the Franks upon
Western Europe dates from the year 481, when the Frankish king Clovis
(465-511) assumed the throne. When he took power, Clovis was only 15 years
old. Just the same, he was an ambitious, able and decidedly ruthless king. Between
486 and 511, Clovis conquered a few provinces still ruled by Roman
patricians. He also destroyed the kingdoms of the Alemanni, the Burgundians
and the Visogoths in Gaul. The most significant event of his career was his CONVERSION
TO CHRISTIANITY, the impetus to which was supplied by his wife, Clotilde.
Clovis compared himself to Constantine
-- another ruler who had experienced a conversion. His followers and loyal
subjects followed suit and embraced Roman Christianity. Such an act further
explains just how and why Europe was Christianized.
Clovis turned his wars of aggression and conquest into
holy wars. These were wars against heretics and his people, the Franks,
considered themselves to be the protectors of the faith. So, from the time of
his conversion and long after his death, the history of the Franks was
inextricably connected with a Roman Church. This is a precedent which would
be embraced by France almost down to the present day.
When Clovis died in 511, Gaul was the scene of numerous
civil wars. The cause of these civil wars was the Frankish law of
inheritance. The law was as follows: if a man with four sons died, his land
was divided into four equal parts. Each son would be given land for use only.
No one could be said to have owned the land as private property. In other
words the law specified use and not ownership or possession. This same law
was applied to royal power. The Frankish kingdom was regarded as a larger
state which could be divided for purposes of administration. Such a scheme
was fertile ground for conflict.
An amazing or brilliant ruler is often followed by a ruler
of lesser quality. After Clovis, there was no successor equal to his power or
to his influence. By 640, the Merovingian dynasty established by Clovis,
rapidly declined. Finances were out of control, the land was continually
divided, and political control was turned over to local administrative
officials, the Mayors of the Palace. By the end of the 7th century, the
Mayors had been established on hereditary lines. These hereditary mayors were
the ancestors of Charles the Great or Charlemagne (in Latin, Carolus Magnus).
The Carolingians inherited land that retained some of the attributes of Roman
administration, specifically laws and systems of taxation.
Charlemagne
The Frankish Mayors of the Palace represented a new aristocracy -- the class of warriors. This class attained its wealth solely from land. Frankish culture was not urban and as a result in the early Middle Ages we see a general decline of urban life not to be revived into well after the 12th century.  It
has been said that it was during the reign of CHARLEMAGNE (742-814) that the transition from classical to
early medieval civilization was completed. He came to the throne of the
Frankish kingdom in 771 and ruled until 814. His reign spans more than 40
years and it was during this time that a new civilization -- a European
civilization -- came into existence. If anything characterizes Charlemagne's
rule it was stability. His reign was based on harmony which developed between
three elements: the Roman past, the Germanic way of life, and Christianity.
Charlemagne devoted his entire reign to blending these three elements into
one kingdom and by doing this, he secured a foundation upon which European
society would develop.
Frankish society was entirely rural and was composed of
three classes or orders: (1) the peasants - those who work, (2) the nobility
- those who fight, and, (3) the clergy - those who pray (see Lecture
23). In general, life was brutal and harsh for the early
medieval peasant. Even in the wealthiest parts of Europe, the story is one of
poverty and hardship. Their diet was poor and many peasants died
undernourished. Most were illiterate although a few were devout Christians.
The majority could not understand Latin, the language of the Church. The
nobility were better off. Their diet, although they had more food, was still
not very nutritional. They lived in larger houses than the peasants but their
castles were often just as cold as the peasant's small hut. Furthermore, most
of nobility were illiterate and crude. They spent most of their time
fighting. Their religious beliefs were, for the most part, similar to those
of the peasants. At the upper level were the clergy. They were the most
educated and perhaps the only people to truly understand Christianity since
they were the only people who had access to the Bible. It was the clergy who
held a monopoly on knowledge, religious beliefs and religious practice.
When Charlemagne took the throne in 771, he immediately
implemented two policies. The first policy was one of expansion.
Charlemagne's goal was to unite all Germanic people into one kingdom. The second
policy was religious in that Charlemagne wanted to convert all of the
Frankish kingdom, and those lands he conquered, to Christianity. As a result,
Charlemagne's reign was marked by almost continual warfare.
Because Charlemagne's armies were always fighting, he
began to give his warriors land so they could support and equip themselves.
With this in mind, Charlemagne was able to secure an army of warriors who
were deeply devoted and loyal to him. By the year 800, the Frankish kingdom
included all of modern France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, almost all of
Germany and large areas of Italy and Spain. It seemed clear that Charlemagne
was yet another Constantine, perhaps even another Augustus Caesar.
Toward the end of the year
800, Pope Leo III asked Charlemagne to come to Rome. On Christmas Day
Charlemagne attended mass at St. Peters. When he finished his prayers, Pope
Leo prostrated himself before Charlemagne and then placed a crown upon his
head. Pope Leo then said "life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned
by God, the great and peaceful emperor of the Romans." This was an
extremely important act. Charlemagne became the first emperor in the west
since the last Roman emperor was deposed in 476. Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard
(c.770-840), has recorded that Charlemagne was not very much interested in
Pope Leo's offering. Had Charlemagne known what was to happen on that
Christmas day, he never would have attended the mass. The bottom line is this
-- Charlemagne had no intention of being absorbed into the Roman Church. From
the point of view of Pope Leo, the CORONATION
OF CHARLEMAGNE signified the Pope's claim to dispense the imperial
crown. It was Leo's desire to assert papal supremacy over a unified
Christendom and he did this by coronating Charlemagne.
By gaining the imperial title, Charlemagne received no new
lands. He never intended to make Rome the center of his empire. In fact, from
Christmas Day 800 to his death in 814, Charlemagne never returned to Rome.
Instead, Charlemagne returned to France as emperor and began a most effective
system of rule. He divided his kingdom into several hundred counties or
administrative units. Along the borders of the kingdom, Charlemagne appointed
military governors. To insure that this system worked effectively,
Charlemagne sent out messengers (missi domini), one from the church
and one lay person, to check on local affairs and report directly to him.
Charlemagne also traveled freely throughout his kingdom in order to make
direct contact with his people. This was in accordance with the German
tradition of maintaining loyalty. He could also supervise his always
troublesome nobility and maintain the loyalty of his subjects. There was no
fixed capital but Charlemagne spent most of his time at Aachen.
In terms of commerce, Charlemagne standardized the minting
of coins based on the silver standard. This also actively encouraged trade,
especially in the North Sea. The Franks manufactured swords, pottery and
glassware in northern France which they exported to England, Scandinavia and
the Lowlands. He also initiated trade between the Franks and the Muslims and
made commercial pacts with the merchants of Venice who traded with both
Byzantium and Islam.
The most durable and significant of all Charlemagne's
efforts was the revival of learning in his kingdom. This was especially so
among the clergy, many of whom were barely literate. On the whole, the monks
were not much better educated. Even those monks who spent their days copying
manuscripts could barely read or understand them. The manuscripts from the
7th and 8th centuries were confusing. They were all written in uppercase
letters and without punctuation. There were many errors made in copying and
handwriting was poor. There were, however, a few educated monks as well as
the beginnings of a few great libraries. But Charlemagne could not find one
good copy of the Bible, nor a complete text of the Benedictine Rule.
He had to send to Rome for them. Above all, Charlemagne wanted unity in the
Frankish Church, a Church wholly under his supervision. Charlemagne, although
illiterate as a youth, was devoted to new ideas and to learning. He studied
Latin, Greek, rhetoric, logic and astronomy. He wanted to meet an educated
man -- he was very lucky. He was in northern Italy when he met the
Anglo-Saxon scholar, Alcuin.
Alcuin
(c.735-804) lived in York where there was a library which contained a vast
collection of manuscripts. Charlemagne persuaded Alcuin to come to Aachen in
order to design a curriculum for the palace school. Alcuin devised a course
of study that was intended to train the clergy and the monks. Here we find
the origins of the seven liberal arts: the trivium comprised grammar
(how to write), rhetoric (how to speak) and logic (how to think) while the quadrivium
was made up of the mathematical arts, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and
music. All of this meant a classical and literary education. Students read
Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Plato and Cicero.
By the 9th century, most monasteries had writing rooms or scriptoria.
It was here that manuscripts were copied. The texts were studied with care.
It was no longer merely a matter of copying texts. It was now first necessary
to correct any mistakes which had been made over years of copying. Copying
was indeed difficult: lighting was poor, the monk's hands were cramped by
cold weather and there was no standard scholarly language. What Charlemagne
did was institute a standard writing style. Remember, previous texts were all
uppercase, without punctuation and there was no separation between words. The
letters of the new script, called the Carolingian minuscule, were written in
upper and lower case, with punctuation and words were separated. It should be
obvious that this new script was much easier to read, in fact, it is the
script we use today. Charlemagne also standardized medieval Latin. After all,
much had changed in the Latin language over the past 1000 years. New words,
phrases, and idioms had appeared over the centuries in these now had to be
incorporated into the language. So what Charlemagne did was take account of
all these changes and include them in a new scholarly language which we know
as medieval Latin.
One of the most important consequences of the Carolingian
Renaissance was that Charlemagne encouraged the spread of uniform religious
practices as well as a uniform culture. Charlemagne set out to construct a respublica
Christiana, a Christian republic. Despite the fact that Charlemagne
unified his empire, elevated education, standardized coins, handwriting and
even scholarly Latin, his Empire declined in strength within a generation or
two following his death in the year 814. His was a hard act to follow. His
rule was so brilliant, so superior, that those emperors who came after him
seemed inferior. We've seen this before with Alexander the Great, Augustus
Caesar, Constantine, Justinian and Mohammed.
Although the Frankish kingdom went into decline, the death
of Charlemagne was only one cause of the decline. We must consider the
renewed invasions from barbarian tribes. The Muslims invaded Sicily in 827
and 895, invasions which disrupted trade between the Franks and Italy. The
Vikings came from Denmark, Sweden and Norway and invaded the Empire in the
8th and 9th centuries. The Danes attacked England, and northern Gaul. The
Swedes attacked areas in central and eastern Europe and Norwegians attacked
England, Scotland and Ireland and by the 10th century, had found their way to
Greenland. The third group of invaders were the Magyars who came from
modern-day Hungary. Their raids were so terrible that European peasants would
burn their fields and destroy their villages rather than give them over. All
these invasions came to an end by the 10th and 11th centuries for the simple
reason that these tribes were converted to Christianity. And it would be the complex
institution known as feudalism which would offer Europeans protection from
these invasions, based as it was on security, protection and mutual
obligations.
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Lecture 21
Feudalism and the Feudal
Relationship
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In
the wake of Charlemagne's death, the Carolingian Empire faced monumental
problems (see Lecture
20). The Frankish Kingdom was constantly divided into
smaller and smaller states and for the most part, no one was satisfied with
the results. There were strong kings who dreamed of reuniting the Franks
under their own rule, however, in the brutality that was the 9th century, the
only men of power who can be said to have made any gain whatsoever were the
great landowners. It was the landowner who provided the costly armies for the
Carolingians. They often played one ruler or against another in a constant
game of mutiny, desertion, extortion and immunity from the king's
representatives..
Although the 9th century can be characterized as an age of
confusion, the situation was made worse by a renewed series of invasions
throughout the century. Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and
Saracens from the South plundered the continent. The great landowners raised
their own armies and built castles to protect the open country. Such resistance
on the part of the landowners also had the effect of increasing their
authority at the same time that it made them less dependent on the central
government.
The wave of invasions came to an end to the 10th century,
however, European recovery was slow. Although the barbarians in England,
Ireland, and Normandy assimilated themselves to Christianity, those tribes of
Eastern Europe were a far more difficult group to absorb. As result of the
invasions normal communications and travel were destroyed. It was therefore
necessary that local self-sufficiency, which was already strong, was
intensified by the needs of security and protection. It was necessary that
European society be reorganized so that each area could meet its minimum
means from its own resources.
There is little doubt that the chronic absence of any
effective central government and the threat of both war and famine
contributed to the general awareness of the need for security and protection.
The institution known as feudalism appeared in this atmosphere of collapsing
central authority, civil war, invasion and overall economic stagnation. The
term feudalism refers to that social, political, and economic system that
emerged from the experience of the 9th century. Feudalism highlighted the
fact that only those men who could guarantee immediate protection and
security from a war, invasion, and famine, were the true lords. In other
words, feudal society was society dominated by warriors. What people needed
most was the assurance that they could depend on others when needed as a
result, powerful individuals were recognized as superiors by lesser men who
pledged themselves to them, promising them service.
Feudal society, then, was a society dominated by a vast
network of mutual relationships based almost entirely on personal loyalty and
service. This practice grew out of two primary sources. On the one hand, the
tribal bonds characteristic of the invading tribes began to decline due to
their Christianization. On the other hand, the fall of Rome and its aftermath
led to a general weakening of one's loyalty to the state, which had been
characteristic of the later years of the Roman Empire.
 So
far we have established that feudal society was based on security and
protection. Feudalism was also a political, economic, military, and social
arrangement. Of course, if we were to ask a medieval king to describe
feudalism, he would not really know what it was we were asking of him. The
reason is clear. Feudalism is the word used to describe a complex set of
relationships which appeared following the reign of Charlemagne. There is no
handbook of feudalism. Because of this feudalism is sometimes difficult to
describe. Added to this complication, there is a considerable degree of
variation as regards how and where feudalism made its first appearance.
However, the heartland of the feudal system is in Europe, specifically that
area which falls between the Loire and Rhine rivers. In general, feudalism
first made its appearance in western Europe and more slowly in central and eastern
Europe. Consequently, feudalism first disappeared in the west and more slowly
in the east and in Russia.
The network of mutual relationships which together
constituted what we have been calling feudal society, enabled warriors to
acquire large armies and to rule over territory without necessarily owning
the land or having any royal title to their rule. Large groups of vassals
would eventually became a professional military class with its own code of
conduct. These military organizations appeared as a result of the absence of
strong central government.
In the sixth and seventh centuries there involved the
custom of individual freemen, who did not belong to any protecting group, to
place themselves under the protection of a more powerful freeman. In this way
stronger men were able to build up armies and become local political and
judicial powers, and the lesser men were able to solve the problem of
security and protection. Men who entrusted themselves to others were known as
ingenui in obsequio, or "freemen in a contractual relation of
dependence." Those who gave themselves to the king were called antrustiones.
All men of this type came to be described collectively as vassals.
The landed nobility, like kings, made every effort to
acquire as many vassals as they could for the obvious reason that
military strength during this period lay in numbers. Of course, it was
absolutely impossible to maintain these growing armies on what was provided
by the lord's household alone, or to support them by payment. What involved
was the practice of granting the vassals land as a benefice or fief.
The vassals were expected to live on the land, maintain their horses,
and supply themselves with weapons of war. The fief was inhabited by
peasants, and the crops that they raised provided the vassal with his
means of support.
The whole practice of vassalage involved fealty to
the lord. To swear fealty was tantamount to promising to refrain from any
action that might threaten the well-being of the lord and to perform personal
services for him at his request. The primary service was military duty as a
mounted knight. This, of course, could involve a variety of activities: a
short or long military campaign, escort duty, standing guard, providing
lodgings when the lord traveled through the vassal's territory, or the giving
of a gift when the lord's son was knighted or when his eldest daughter
married. In general, the vassal owed a number of obligations to his lord. The
incidence of bargaining and bickering over the terms of service was great.
Eventually, limitations were placed on the number of days a lord could
require services from his vassal. For example, in France in the 11th century
about forty days of service a year were considered normal. A vassal could
also by his way out of military service. The lord, in turn, would apply this
payment to the hiring of mercenaries, a practice which proved more efficient
but also more costly.
The vassals also expect to give the lord advice when he
requested it and to sit as a member of his court. The vassal owed the lord
financial assistance when necessary. For example, financial assistance was
required if a lord were captured and needed ransom or if he were outfitting
himself for a crusade or other military campaign.
Both lord and vassal were bound by honor to abide by the
oath of loyalty. It became an accepted custom for a vassal to renounce his
loyalty to his lord if the latter failed to protect him from enemies,
mistreated him, or increased the vassal's obligations as fixed by the feudal
contract. Of course, if a vassal did not live up to his obligations, the lord
would summon him to his court, where he would be tried for treachery. If
found guilty, the vassal could lose his fief or perhaps his life.
In the early 9th century, bishops and abbots swore oaths
of fealty and received their offices from the king as a benefice. The king
formerly "invested" these clerics in their offices during a special
ceremony. Such a practice eventually provoked a serious confrontation with
the Church in the 11th century (the Investiture Controversy).
A lord also had obligations to his vassals which were very
specific. The lord was obliged to protect the vassal from physical harm and
to protect him in court. After fealty was sworn the lord provided for the
vassal by bestowing upon him a benefice or fief. The fief was usually land
necessary to maintain the vassal, but oftentimes the vassal would receive
regular payments of money from a lord. This made it possible for a landowner
in one area to acquire vassals among the landowners of another. Hopefully you
can recognize grounds for future conflict.
In the 9th century a fief varied in size from one or more
small villas to agricultural holdings of twenty-five to forty-eight acres.
Vast estates were created by the king's vassals, many of whom received
benefices consisting of as many as two hundred such holdings. Vassals of the
king, strengthened by such large benefices, created their own vassals. These,
in turn, created still further vassals of their own. The general effect of
such a practice fragmented the land and authority from the highest to the
lowest levels by the end of the 9th century. Added to this fragmentation, and
the complexities that it produced, there developed a practice of multiple
vassalage. That is, one vassal would receive a benefice from more than
one lord. This concept lead in the 9th century to the concept of liege
homage, that is, the one lord whom the vassal must obey even if it meant
the harm of his other masters.
Over time the occupation of land gradually led to claims
of hereditary possession. Such a practice became a legally recognized
principle in the 9th century and laid the grounds for claims to real
ownership. Fiefs given as royal donations became hereditary possessions.
The problem of loyalty was reflected in the ceremonial
developments of the act of commendation in which a freeman became a
vassal. In the mid-8th century an oath of fealty highlighted this
ceremony. A vassal reinforced his promise to his lord by swearing a special
oath with his hand on a sacred relic or the Bible. By the 10th and 11th
centuries paying homage to the lord involved not only the swearing of such an
oath but the placements of the vassal's hands between the lord's and a
sealing of the ceremony with a kiss.
As the centuries passed, personal loyalty and service
became almost secondary to the acquisition of property. The fief overshadowed
fealty, the benefice became more important than vassalage, and freemen began
to swear allegiance to the highest bidder only. In other words, the personal
relationships embodied in the concept of feudal society as it made its
appearance in the 8th and 9th centuries had become, by the 10th an 11th
centuries, merely the means for the acquisition of more private property.
Feudal society provided stability, security, and protection throughout the
period of the early Middle Ages and aided in the development of political
centralization during the high Middle Ages. Of course, the political stability
promised by the feudal relationship eventually devolved into total anarchy,
one result of which was the Hundred
Years' War (see Lecture
30).
Derived from traditional Germanic law, feudal law was very
different from Roman law. Roman law was deemed universal because it had been
created by a central government for a world empire. Furthermore, Roman law
was rational because it was believed to be in accordance with natural laws
applicable to all, and it was systematic in that it offered a framework of
standards that applied to individual cases. Feudal laws, on the other hand,
were local and personal. In the Roman view, the individual as a citizen of
Rome owed specific obligations to the state. In the feudal relationship, a
vassal owed loyalty and service to a lord according to the terms of their personal
agreement.
In the feudal way of things, lords and kings did not make
law since they were guided by tradition and precedent. Patterns of
landownership were regarded as expressions of ancient and unchanging custom.
In general, when conflicts developed between vassal and lord, or between
lords, the demand was almost always made for the restoration of customary
rights.
Feudal lords were warriors plain and simple. Manual labor
or trade was shunned as degrading to men of such high stature. There was only
one vocation and that was fighting. Combat demonstrated a lord's honor and
his reputation. It was also a measure of his wealth and influence in feudal
society. But what does a warrior do when there was no one to fight? By the
12th century the nobility began to stage tournaments in which knights engaged
each other in battle in order to prove their skill, courage and honor. The
victors in these "celebrations" gained prestige and honor in the
eyes of fellow nobles and peasants alike. A code of behavior, chivalry,
evolved from these feudal contests of skill. A worthy knight was expected to
exhibit the outward signs of this code of knightly behavior: bravery,
loyalty, respect and courage.
Over time, a religious element was introduced into the
warrior culture we have just described. The Church sought to use the fighting
spirit of the feudal knight for Christian ends. So, to the Germanic tradition
of loyalty and courage was added a Christian component: a knight was expected
to honor the laws of the Church in the service of God. A knight was supposed
to protect the weak and defend the Church against heretics of all shades. It
is no accident that the very ceremony of knighthood was now placed within a
Christian framework.
[N.B. -- my treatment of
medieval feudalism has been decidedly brief - an indication, I suppose, of
the difficulty of examining such a crucial yet difficult topic. Please visit
my FEUDALISM
RESOURCES page for additional information.]
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Lecture 22
European Agrarian Society:
Manorialism
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One of the greatest achievements of the early Middle Ages
was the emergence of the single-family farm as the basic unit of production.
Villa owners, that is, former Roman patricians, were forced to settle their
slaves on their own estates. The wreckage of the Roman Empire and with it,
the decline of any form of centralized government, demanded such a
development. This development often called manorialism or serfdom, marks the
beginning of the European peasantry, a class or order of laborers who did not
really disappear until quite recently. Before we turn our attention to
serfdom or manorialism, it is necessary to highlight a few technological
achievements of the period, roughly 500-1000.
By the 6th century a series of new farm implements began
to make their appearance. The first development was the heavy plow which was
needed to turn over the hard soil of northern Europe. The older
"scratch" plow had crisscrossed the field with only slight
penetration and required light, well-drained soils. The heavy plow or
"moldboard" cut deep into the soil and turned it so that it formed
a ridge, thus providing a natural drainage system. It also allowed the deep
planting of seeds. The heavy plow, by eliminating the need for cross-plowing,
also had the effect of changing the shape of fields in northern Europe from
squarish to long and narrow. The old square shape of fields was inappropriate
to the new plow -- to use it effectively all the lands of a village had to be
reorganized into vast, fenceless open fields plowed in long narrow strips.
This invited cooperation.
The only drawback as that it required an increased amount
of animal power to draw it across the soil. So, a second innovation attempted
to overcome this drawback: the introduction of teams of oxen. This became possible
through the adoption of two pieces of technology known to the Romans: the
rigid horse collar and the tandem harness. The rigid collar and tandem
harness allowed teams to pull with equal strength and greater efficiency. And
this invited cooperation as well for how many peasants can be said to have
owned eight oxen, the number requisite to pull the heavy plow? If they wished
to use this new piece of technology they would have to pool their teams.
Added to this was the fact that each peasant might "own" and
harvest fifty or sixty small strips scattered widely over the entire arable
land of the village. The result was the growth of a powerful village council
of peasants to settle disputes and to decide how the total collection of
small strips ought to be managed. This was the essence of the manorial system
as it operated in northern Europe.
Northern European farmers also began to experiment with
the three-field system of crop rotation. Under the older, two-field system,
the arable land was divided in half. One field was planted in the fall with
winter wheat while the other field remained fallow. Under the three-field
system, the same land would be divided into thirds. One field would be
planted in the fall with winter wheat or rye and harvested in early summer.
In late spring a second field planted with oats, barley, legumes or lentils ,
which were harvested in late summer. The third field would remain fallow.
Such a system improved the arability of the soil since the tendency to
overuse was greatly diminished. The importance of this cannot be overlooked.
Without additional plowing, it would be possible for the land to yield more
food. The increased amount of vegetable protein made available meant that
European peasants might enjoy an improved level of nutrition. Lastly, the
diversification into other crops such as oats, meant that horses could be fed
properly. And the horse would eventually replace oxen as the preferred method
of animal power.
These innovations in agricultural techniques -- medieval
microchips, if you will -- were by no means the only ones to make their
appearance during the early Middle Ages. Iron became increasingly utilized to
make agricultural implements since it was more durable than wood. New farm
implements were either discovered or refined such as the toothed harrow.
There was also a startling incidence of windmills. All this meant greater
food production and with much greater efficiency. These developments took
place, gradually and regionally, on the medieval manor. The manor was the fundamental
unit of economic, political and social organization. It was, furthermore, the
only life the medieval serf or peasant ever knew. The manor was a tightly
disciplined community of peasants organized collectively under the authority
of a lord. Manors were usually divided into two parts: the demense
defined the lord's land and was worked by the serf and then there were the
small farms of the serfs themselves. There were also extensive common lands
(held by men in common by the grace of God) used by the serfs for grazing,
gleaning, hunting and fishing. The typical medieval manor also contained
various workshops which manufactured clothes, shoes, tools and weapons. There
were bakeries, wine presses and grist mills.
A lord controlled at least one manorial village and great
lords might control hundreds. A small manor estate might contain a dozen
families while larger estates might include fifty or sixty. The manorial
village was never completely self-sufficient because salt, millstones or
perhaps metalware were not available and had to be obtained from outside
sources. However, the medieval manor did serve as a balanced economic
setting. Peasants grew their grain and raised cattle, sheep, hogs and goats.
There were blacksmiths, carpenters and stonemasons who built and repaired
dwellings. The village priest cared for the souls of the inhabitants and it
was up to the lord to defend the manor estate from outside attack.
When a manor was attacked by a rival lord, the peasants
usually found protection inside the walls of their lord's house. By the 12th
century, the lord's home had become in many cases, a well-fortified castle.
Peasants generally lived, worked and died within the lord's estate and were
buried in the village churchyard. The world of the medieval peasant was
clearly the world and experience of the manor estate.
There was a complex set of personal relationships which
defined the obligations between serf and lord. In return for security and the
right to cultivate fields and to pass their holdings on to their sons, the
serf had many obligations to their lord. As a result, the personal freedom of
the serf was restricted in a number of ways. Bound to the land, they could
not leave the manor without the lord's consent. Before a serf could marry, he
had to gain the consent of the lord as well as pay a small fee. A lord could
select a wife for his serf and force him to marry her. A serf who refused was
ordered to pay a fine. In addition to working their own land, the serfs also
had to work the land of their lords. The lord's land had to be harvested by
the serfs before they could harvest their own land. Other services exacted by
the lord included digging ditches, gathering firewood, building and repairing
fences, and repairing roads and bridges. In general, more than half of a
serf's workweek was devoted to rendering services to the lord. The serf also
paid a variety of dues to the lord: the annual capitation or head tax
(literally, a tax on existence), the taille (a tax on the serf's
property), and the heriot (an inheritance tax). Lastly, medieval serfs
paid a number of banalities which were taxes paid to use the lord's
mills, ovens and presses.
The serf's existence was certainly a harsh one. The manor
offered protection to the serfs, something desperately needed in this time of
uncertainty. The manor also promoted group cooperation. How else could fifty
serfs use a handful of oxen to plow their fields? They had to learn to work
collectively for the collective good of the village community. The serf knew
his place in medieval society and readily accepted it. So too did the
medieval nobility and clergy. The medieval manor therefore sustained the
three orders of medieval society: those who pray, those who fight, and those
who work.
Literacy may have reached its lowest level on the manor
estate but at least the serf was protected and secure.
Manorialism and feudalism presupposed a stable social
order in which every individual knew their place. People believed that
society functioned smoothly when individuals accepted their status and
performed their proper roles. Consequently, a person's rights, duties, and
relationship to the law depended on his or her ranking in the social order.
To change position was to upset the delicate balance. No one, serfs included,
should be deprived of the traditional rights associated with his or her rank
in the medieval matrix. This arrangement was justified by the clergy:
God himself has willed that among men, some must be lords
and some serfs, in such a fashion that the lords venerate and love God, and
that the serfs love and venerate their lord following the word of the
Apostle; serfs obey your temporal lords with fear and trembling; lords treat
your serfs according to justice and equity.
In the high Middle Ages, the revival of an urban economy,
the humanization of Christianity, the growth of universities and the
emergence of centralized governments would undermine feudal and manorial
relationships. Although the relationship of dependence remained, feudal
institutions gradually disappeared.
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Lecture 23
Medieval Society: The Three Orders
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Here below, some pray, others fight, still others work . .
.
from the beginning, mankind has been divided into three
parts,
among men of prayer, farmers, and men of war . . .
Two passages written at the beginning of the 11th century
-- the first by Bishop Adalbero of Laon, the second by Gerard of Cambrai. The
image of a tripartite society divided by function has become a hallmark of
medieval European history. I think that an understanding of this tripartite
division of European society is important both for our understanding of
medieval European history, but also for the subsequent history of the
Continent, especially in the 18th century. It was during that century that
the ancien regime faced its gravest challenge during the heady days of
the French Revolution. One of the first things the revolutionaries abolished
was feudalism (August 4, 1789) and with it, the remnants of a society based
on status and prestige, a society based on the division of orders according
to one's function -- those who work, those who fight and those who pray.
THOSE WHO WORK
By the 11th and 12th centuries, the vast majority of European men and women were peasants who were the land of their lords. We know very little about these people for the simple fact that the nobility and clergy did not keep written records about them. When the peasantry of Europe was mentioned, it was usually in relation to the obligations they owed their superiors.
In the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman
Empire the line separating slave and serf became less distinct. Of course,
both slaves and serf lacked freedom and were subject to the will of the
lord. Throughout the long history of medieval serfdom, the serf was
required to perform labor services for his lord. Although the number of
days devoted to working the lord's land varied from place to place, it was
usually three days a week, accepted harvest time, when the lord would expect
even more. Furthermore, the serf was tied to the land and his condition was
hereditary. By the 12th century and England, it was indeed common for some
serfs to be made free. With the rise of towns, the increased productivity
of the land, long-distance trade, and the development of a money economy,
more and more serfs managed to find themselves living in a condition of
freedom. Of course, what this really meant was that the peasants could
now rent his land from the lord for a certain period of time. Equally
important, with the passage of time many serfs no longer owed their lords a
labor obligation, but rather various direct and indirect taxes on almost
every task on the medieval manor. Because many landlords had lost their serfs,
the lords relaxed ancient obligations and duties.
Most medieval European peasants lived on vast estates
called manors (from the Latin, meaning "dwelling" or
"residence"). The medieval manor varied in size from as little as
100 acres to more than 1000. A manor could also include one village, a
few villages, or none at all.
The land of the manor was divided into two parts: the demense
was the lord's land worked by the peasants. The other part was held by
the peasants. Their plot was usually much larger based on the condition that
they cultivate the lord's demense before their own. The land itself
was divided into long strips and it was entirely possible that one serf would
have to work in number of strips spread out across the manor. Furthermore,
the medieval estate required cooperation among all serfs since horses and
plows were few. Medieval manors also had tracts of forest as well as open
meadow for the grazing of cattle and sheep. It was from the forest and meadow
that the serf could practice gleaning -- the gathering of firewood or thatch,
fishing and hunting -- in order to subsidize the rather meager diet of his
family.
It ought to be clear that life on the medieval manor was
simple and uncomplicated. The serf's life was basically the life of the
manor on which he or she was born. Most serfs never traveled beyond the
estate of their lord. Although such an arrangement may strike us as far
to local, the family of the serf did maintain a strong sense of family and
community, and was also certain of support from his lord or other members of
the village community in times of trouble. In other words, people knew
what to expect from life. There was a sense of continuity and
simplicity embraced by medieval society, something we moderns would probably
have a hard time understanding. Of course, life on the medieval manor was
perhaps dull and uninspiring. If we consider that nearly every day of the
medieval peasant's existence was dedicated to farming arable land, there must
have been little time left over for things of an intellectual or cultural
nature.
Of all the characteristics of medieval peasant society
that European historians have discussed over the last several decades, none
was perhaps more important than the Christian religion as practiced by ordinary
men and women. Unlike the practice of religion today, medieval men and women
saw Christian belief and practice permeate all aspects of everyday life. In
other words, Christianity was a matrix of ideas and modes of behavior not
easy to dislodge from the mind set of medieval men and women.
The village Church was the center of the medieval
community. Nearly all of the important events in the short life of
medieval men and women took place within the confines of the Church or
churchyard. A person was usually baptized within hours of birth. Men
and women confessed their sins to the priest and received the sacraments of
Eucharist on Holy Days. There were also feasts that accompanied baptisms,
weddings and generals, and were held in the churchyard. The village priest
also read messages from secular and Church authorities.
Popular medieval religion was shot through with rituals
and symbolism. For instance, before slicing bread a woman would tap the sign
of the cross on it with her knife. The entire calendar was created with
reference to many Holy Days. Everyone participated in village
processions.
But what did Christianity mean to the medieval peasant?
For the most part, they accepted what their family, and custom, and the
village priest had told them. Although the mass was in Latin, the
priest delivered sermons, usually on the Gospel, in the vernacular. Paintings
and stained-glass windows on the walls of the church offered the meaning of
biblical stories. Peasants had a strong sense of the existence of God,
believing that God was directly involved in human affairs and could reward
the virtuous. Of course, they believed that God punished men and women
for their sins with disease, plague, poor harvest, and war. The Devil
seemed to be everywhere, forcing people to commit evil deeds and thoughts.
In general, the life of evil men and women who lived off
the land was short and hard. But life in the village community did
entail cooperation and the values of a simple life. Although these
people did not have the luxuries which the 21st century has bequeathed upon
us, they did have a life that was regular and consistent and shot through
with a singularity of purpose.
THOSE WHO FIGHT
The nobility influenced all aspects of medieval politics, economics, religion, and culture. It is perhaps for this reason alone that European society from about the 12th century on may be termed aristocratic. In fact, the aristocracy continue to hold within its grasp political and social power right down to the eve of the Great War of 1914-1918. Although the nobility of medieval Europe varied from place to place, and from time to time, a few general conclusions can be made.
As the second Estate, the medieval nobility had special
legal status. A man who was a member of the nobility was free in his
person and in his possessions. His only limitation concerned his military
obligation to his lord. As a member of the nobility, he had certain
rights and responsibilities: he could raise troops and command them in the
field, he held his own courts of justice, he could coined his own
money. He was the lord of all those people who settled on his land.
The medieval nobility was, of course, was an Estate of
warriors -- those who fight. His social function was to protect the weak and
the poor. And this was to be accomplished with a horse and a sword, the two
visible signs of his nobility. He was also encouraged to display the virtues
of chivalry, a code of conduct created by the clergy to curb the brutality of
this order of knights.
When a young member of the nobility finally came into possession
of his property, he acquired authority over land and people. The
nobility rarely lived up to this standard. The reasons for this may be
that the nobility wanted immediate gratification. The problem was,
there were many times when the nobility were not involved in warfare either
with foreign enemies or rival lords. In other words. in times of peace the
nobility needed an outlet for their warlike aggression. This came with
their participation in the medieval tournament.
The medieval nobility lived without working.
Instead, one's identification with the nobility came from their ability as a
warrior and also with their complete jurisdiction over their property.
Such jurisdiction allowed them to gratify their desires for lavish living.
Since the status of the medieval noble depended on his household, it seems
obvious that he would make every attempt to increase the number of retainers,
or vassals, he could maintain. His clothes grew more elegant, his castle
larger, his food and table more ornate.
The noble also had to look after his own land. He
had to appoint wise stewards who would watch his estate, collect direct and
indirect taxes as well as rents, while he made every effort to obtain more
status by fighting were serving the court of his lord. And since a
great lord's estates were usually scattered over wide area, he was constantly
on the move. Although the Church condemned fighting and killing, it was not
able to stop the violence so characteristic of the medieval nobility. As a
result the nobility of Europe became a constant thorn in the side for nearly
all European monarchs. From the 13th century on, the medieval kings
began to draw upon the middle classes in order to create a bureaucracy that
would eventually lay the foundation for royal absolutism of the 16th and 17th
centuries. Lastly, it was the Holy Crusades that managed to give the
European nobility a chance to dedicate themselves to their Christian lords by
conducting missions to rid the Holy Lands of the infidels. European monarchs were
more than happy to see their nobility go off and fight, from the one hand,
the Crusades served as a safety valve, and on the other, preserved the
prestigious status of the monarchies themselves.
THOSE WHO PRAY
At the top of medieval society was the first Estate, the clergy, those who pray. It was the village priest who was to oversee the spiritual life of his flock on the medieval manor. His duties were to administer the necessary sacraments with regularity and consistency. He was also important to absolve men and women of their sins for the act of confession. He was also, as we have already seen, the usual source of secular and ecclesiastical pronouncements. His role, then, in the medieval village was extraordinary. Of course, not all village priests were as dedicated to the holiness of their flock as we would like to believe. However, it was the village priest with whom medieval men and women identified the Church, its teachings, and authority.
Although monasticism was firmly entrenched in medieval
society by the time of Charlemagne (see Lecture
19), by the 11th or 12 century, monks had become more
visible members of town and village alike. The monasteries were dedicated to
prayer and supplying the evil Europe with the ideal of a Christian
civilization. Monasteries also produced and educated elite that were utilized
in service to lords and kings. The monks also kept alive classical
culture and introduced the techniques of efficient and profitable land
management.
By the 11th or 12 century, the original mission of the
monastic movement had been altered to accommodate the children of the
nobility with an honorable an aristocratic life. Such a life also held
out the possibility for an ecclesiastical career. By the 13th century
the older Benedictine monasteries had to compete with new orders such as the
Dominicans and Franciscans (see Lecture
27). As a result, more monks had to be recruited from
the middle classes who inhabited the area near an abbey.
As medieval Europe prospered during the 12th century
Renaissance and after, there was a marked increase in the number of cities in
large towns. In these sorts of places one could see firsthand the
representatives of the Church. What the townspeople began to observe
was a clergy who seemed more willing to live the life of a European prince or
noble, then someone whose sole duty was the spiritual guidance of the
people. The Church, it was commonly believed, seemed to be inhabited by
people who were interested only in the aggrandizement of their own wealth,
power, and prestige. The stage seemed to be said for the rise in heresy
of the 12th century and after. Most medieval men and women regarded
their Christianity with seriousness and genuine faith. If monks, and
bishops, and other members of the clergy, were engaged in acts of holiness,
then why did it seem that they were living a life of luxury and opulence?
These were questions that would become of utmost importance in the following
centuries leading up to the Protestant Reformation.
Our exposition of the three estates has been decidedly
brief, however, it must again be stressed that medieval European society
cannot really be understood without reference to this carefully graded
hierarchy based on function and status. Indeed, prestige and status
oftentimes became more important than wealth or land. Just the same,
this tripartite division of society predominated European history right down
to the 18th and 19th centuries when the French and Industrial Revolutions
changed all social relationships for good.
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Lecture 24
The Medieval World View
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For
the most part, it can be said that great thinkers lead two lives. Their first
life occurs while they are busy at work in their earthly garden. But there is
also a second life which begins the moment their life ceases and continues as
long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful. In the history of the
western intellectual tradition -- a tradition reaching back to the
pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia -- there have always been great thinkers
who have attempted to explain the nature and scope of human knowledge.
 Toward the end of the 18th century, a German idealist
philosopher published a number of important philosophical treatises --
treatises which he called critiques. The Critique of Practical Reason,
The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Judgment were
the work of IMMANUEL
KANT (1724-1804). The great question which plagued Kant, as
well as all philosophers before or after him, was this: what is knowledge?
This is an epistemological question and is often joined by other questions:
what is reality? what is illusion? What can we know? What does it mean to
know something? In the INTRODUCTION to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), Kant began with the following words:
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with
experience.
This, of course, is the credo of the empiricist. John Locke
(1632-1704) was an empiricist. So too were Galileo
(1564-1642), and Isaac
Newton (1642-1727). In fact, most scientists are empiricists by
nature. This should tell you something. It was Locke who, in the late 17th
century, argued that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate
upon which experience records itself as knowledge. What you see is what you
get. For Alfred
North Whitehead (1861-1947), "the point is, that an elephant, when
present, is noticed." Things exist -- we experience them -- and this
becomes knowledge. But Locke was a rather "modern" empiricist.
One of the first empiricists was Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.). In fact, it's safe to say that it was Aristotle who made the
empirical point of view a reality. Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the
Great. Aristotle had also been the pupil of Plato
(c.427-347 B.C.), who was in turn, the student of Socrates
(c.469-399 B.C.). Plato, simply stated, believed that universal ideas of
things -- like justice, beauty, truth -- had an objective existence all their
own. What this means is that these things existed whether men perceived
(apprehended) them or not. They had an independent reality which Plato
believed men could come to grasp as knowledge. These ideas exist apriori,
that is, they exist prior to experience and hence, transcend experience. For
Plato, our senses are deceptive and what we experience in our daily lives is
not reality but the shadow of reality. This is one of the messages of Plato's
Republic,
specifically THE
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE. Plato's doctrine of the Forms
(Ideas, or Universals) concerns itself with innate ideas -- ideas which exist
before men have experience of them. This philosophical school has come to be
known as rationalism. So, between 384 and 330 B.C. in Athens, the two major
western philosophical traditions of thought were born. For 2000 years,
philosophers had to choose whether they followed Plato and his rationalism,
or Aristotle and his empiricism. Indeed, Plato comes off as the first
philosopher and Aristotle as his first critic. As Whitehead wrote in Process
and Reality (1929):
The safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to
Plato.
Now, getting back to Kant. "Though all our knowledge
begins with experience," he wrote, "it does not follow that it all
arises out of experience." What Kant did with this one simple statement
was to supply a synthesis -- necessary perhaps -- of 2000 years of
philosophical discussion on the nature and scope of human knowledge. This
single act secured for this solitary Lutheran philosopher a central place in
the western intellectual tradition. This much said, however, a synthetic act
was created much earlier using different philosophical tools but with an end
result whose ramifications were no less profound.
 It was the "Dumb Ox" of Roccasecca, as SAINT
THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274) was called, who, by the end of the 13th
century, had also supplied a necessary intellectual synthesis. By the end of
the 13th century, Christianity had become the world view of medieval Europe.
But Christianity -- especially a Christianity as interpreted by its institutional
form, the Church -- was always confronted by challenges. One such challenge
was Human Reason -- a capacity to think which had been discovered by the
Greeks, accepted by the Romans, but which had been labeled pagan by centuries
of intellectual arrogance on the part of the Church Fathers. The Church
Fathers -- Origen
(185-254), St.
Jerome (c.342-420) and St.
Augustine (354-430) -- sought to explain the Holy Writ through
Revelation and Faith alone. But, they soon realized that they needed the
classical authors to aid them in their writing. So, men like Plato or Cicero
(106-43 B.C.) were thorns in the side of Christian thinkers like Jerome and
Augustine.
Aquinas recognized this and sought reconciliation. But
instead of uniting two philosophical traditions as Kant was to do in the
1780s, Aquinas joined two methods. Reason was no longer conceived as the
nemesis of Faith. Neither was Philosophy the enemy of Theology. Instead,
Aquinas joined the two by claiming that both were paths to a single truth: "God
exists." Hopefully, this should ring a few bells for this is very
similar to what Abelard had done a century earlier. Before we turn to the
synthesis of Aquinas, it is necessary to examine the historical context from
which this synthesis appeared.
By the end of the 12th century there were signs of a
widespread awakening and progress felt across Europe. For instance, the lords
of the manor were learning to make better use of their serfs. They did this
by emancipating them and so from this point on the serfs were now called
peasants. Peasants were no longer tied to the land by labor obligations owed
to the lord. Now, they paid rent instead. Meanwhile, suburbs began to appear
around older cities and hundreds of new villages sprang into being. Overall,
European society was becoming more diversified and life was beginning to hold
more comforts. And in terms of intellectual history, this period has come be
characterized as the 12th Century Renaissance.
All across northern Europe and England, peasants were
freed from labor obligations and were now offered land -- for rent -- under
very attractive terms. Peasants expanded into new territories. They leveled
forests and drained swamps wherever they went. The peasants also had better
tools at their disposal. The plough was now in general use, wind mills were
more common and the land seemed to be yielding more. Despite numerous
setbacks, the peasantry of northern Europe slowly recognized that a three
field system of crop rotation would yield more than the older two field
system. The bottom line is this -- peasants were better fed, less afraid of
famine and could now raise more children because the land could support a
larger, or at least growing, population. And the peasants did raise more
children for one of the signs of increased economic prosperity was at the
same time an increase in the population.
In areas where peasants normally congregated, villages
became towns and towns became cities. A process of urbanization was under way
-- a process which the Romans had to abandon in the 3rd century under the
pressures of barbarian invasion. Rome was a specifically urban civilization.
The Romans liked their cities and the conveniences the city offered. But by
the 4th century at the latest, this began to change as Germanic tribes moved
south of the Danube River, deeper and deeper into the heart of the Roman
Empire. With the final collapse of the Empire in the 5th century Germanic
tribes were everywhere. Not only did they bring their language, religions and
customs, they also brought with them a preference for the open country and a
general distaste for anything citified. So, between the 5th century and the
11th century, the urban civilization of the former Roman Empire declined. The
process of urbanization would not begin anew until the 11th century at the
earliest. One of the reasons why this is so is that the threat of barbarian
migration began to subside. And the reason this took place was that slowly
but surely, the chieftains of the barbarian tribes were converted to Christianity.
And once a chieftain was converted, so too were his people converted as an
act of homage and loyalty.
The economic factors of renewed urbanization affected all
orders of European society. However, it was the European peasantry who reaped
the fewest benefits of this progress. Just the same, landlords were now
making less demands on the peasantry. Peasants could rent land to which they
could direct all their energy. They could also pass this land on to their
sons. In other words, a degree of liberty had begun to infiltrate the world
of the European peasant. While the peasants roughed out their lives in the
countryside, there were artisans who inhabited towns and cities. As craftsmen
and shopkeepers, builders and tradesmen, they had the potential to spread the
fruits of their labor over a wider market, a market stretching from the North
Sea to North Africa and from Constantinople to Lisbon. In the towns of Italy
-- especially port towns like Genoa, Pisa and Venice -- a passion for
money-making resulted in what would eventually become a genuinely capitalist
society. It was in Italy that the commercial practices and attitudes so
characteristic of later ages first emerged. Italian merchants learned how to
change money, they perfected double-entry bookkeeping, and they formed
trading associations in order to protect their mercantile interests. So, by
the 13th century, there existed a bourgeois mentality characterized by the
spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking, the pursuit of gain and with all that,
the demand for greater political freedom. However, although we can locate a
growing bourgeois mentality, there is at this time no evidence of a nascent
bourgeois culture -- that again would come with time.
The ruling orders were also changing fast. The nobility were
the men who reaped the most benefits from the emancipation of the serfs and
the subsequent increase in agricultural productivity. With improved
productivity, the nobility could now collect higher rents and obtain greater
profits from the sale of surplus agricultural goods. And while the nobility
clearly made more money, they were always quick to find new and quicker ways
to spend it. So, they began to improve their castles -- castles became larger
and more elaborate. They sought out better armor and weapons. The artisans of
the growing towns and cities, now joined together in cooperatives known as
guilds, were only too happy to supply the nobility with whatever it was they
needed. And while the nobility built bigger and more impenetrable castles,
and obtained the best in armor and weaponry, they also began to dress in
finer clothes which the merchants of the cities, now also members of their
own guilds, brought to them.
Many members of the nobility across Europe sought a
refinement of life. The economic changes which I have already briefly
described brought with them cultural and intellectual progress, especially
when compared with the centuries which had come before. The Crusades, for the
most part, were over. What was the medieval knight to do now that his main
business of the day -- killing the infidels and their children -- had come to
an end? Hunting and tournaments, at least for some nobles, began to give way
to a lively interest in culture and education. The feudal court, once merely
a gathering place for knights to fill their bellies while engaged in a Holy
Quest, now became centers of intense literary activity. But, with all this
said, it would be incorrect to say that the medieval knight was a more
cultured individual. The medieval knight was still a fighting machine, he was
still a fierce and oftentimes gluttonous warrior.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, something like a revival
of the arts and letters was taking place across England and the Continent.
This revival -- or Renaissance -- was more pronounced in Western Europe than
in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is almost a general characteristic of European
history as a whole, that compared to the West, Eastern Europe seemed backward
and primitive. One of the major characteristics of this Renaissance was the
rediscovery of numerous Latin classics. For the philosophers, theologians and
poets of the 12th and 13th centuries, there was much wisdom to be obtained in
the pages of Virgil's
(70-19 B.C.) Aeneid,
or Ovid's
(43 B.C.-A.D. 17) Metamorphosis
or the letters and political speeches of that greatest of Roman orators,
Cicero, or the Stoicism
of a Seneca (5 B.C.-A.D. 65).
Besides the ideas implicit in these classical authors, the
major contribution of the rediscovery of these texts was a style of writing.
That style was classical Latin. Just think about it. 12th century scholars
were now reading texts written in Latin over 1200 years ago. It goes without
saying that the Latin language had undergone profound transformations over
the years, just as the English language has changed over the past 100 years.
Imagine what it must have been like to discover ancient texts written in a
more or less recognizable form, but which were more expressive and more
lyrical. As a result, 12th and 13th century poets began to express their own
thoughts and feelings in a language which now came to them naturally. And,
it's also worth mentioning that these poets were now writing for an
increasingly larger audience. There was a greater use of rhyme and meter and
while most poetry remained religious in nature, there were other writers who
were beginning to emote over more secular themes.
It was the Wandering Scholars or
Goliards who used the vernacular instead of classical or even medieval or
Carolingian Latin. The Goliards wrote free and joyous poetry -- they have a
near immediate appeal to the modern reader because they stand outside the
image of medieval piety and religious devotion. GOLIARDIC
VERSE -- meant to be sung rather than simply read -- praises
the pleasures of this world as well as despair over the uncertainties of
life. The Goliards were also deeply critical of the "system" --
especially the privileged orders of the knights, bishops and professors. The
wandering scholars were dissatisfied with their own age and so they reveled
in a rather boisterous, drunken life -- they were Europe's first bohemians.
The growth of vernacular literature happened most readily
in those places where the authority of the Church seemed to be weakest. But
there were other reasons why we can observe this shift from medieval Latin to
the vernacular. In the south of France, professional scribes were finding it
more and more difficult to write official documents in Latin. The words of
the spoken language, the langue d'oc came much easier to them. After
all, it was the spoken language which had grown and so literature, whether an
official document or poem, had to reflect this change. By 1200, most official
documents were now composed in the vernacular. Other examples of vernacular
texts abound: the Chanson
de Roland is perhaps the best French example. From Germany we have
the Kaiserchronik.
And of course, the 14th century could almost be called the golden age of
vernacular literature for there we find Geoffrey Chaucer's (1345-1400) Canterbury Tales,
Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313-1375) Decameron,
William Langland's (c.1332-c.1400) Piers
Plowman, Jean Froissart's (c.1333-c.1405) Chronicles
and Dante's (1265-1321) Divine
Comedy.
While these developments took place across Europe and
England, a new institution appeared at which much of this new learning could
be found. By the 13th century, universities had been established at Oxford,
Paris, Berlin, Padua and Bologna. We have the so-called Dark Ages to thank
for the university. University students could obtain a B.A., M.A. or Ph.D.
degree in one of four higher faculties: Theology, Philosophy, Medicine or
Law. (D.D., Ph.D., M.D., J.D.) Some schools specialized in law such as the
University of Bologna -- a university run and controlled by the students.
Other universities, like Paris, specialized in theology and philosophy. Padua
specialized in medicine. It was at the university that the western
intellectual tradition we are most interested in can be found. Indeed, it is
at the university that the modern intellectual can be found. At Paris, for
instance, we meet Abelard, a teacher so eloquent, so persuasive and so
masterful that he attracted students from all over Europe. Even after his
expulsion from Paris because of his affair with Heloise, students flocked to
his side to hear his dissertations on theology and philosophy. Abelard, in
other words, was a product of the university which in turn was a product of
the city which was a product of economic and social circumstances which made
the rise of cities possible in the first place. And while the university was
a breeding ground of consent and conformity to papal authority and Christian
dogma, the university could also be fertile soil for dissent or, at the very
least, a spirit of inquiry. Abelard was no heretic, but by calling the
authority of the Church Fathers into question, he certainly had made the
conscious choice to voice his dissent. A spirit of inquiry and skepticism was
perhaps here to stay.
Although we may be apt to label a man like Abelard a
dissenter, or even a radical, he never frontally assaulted the Church or its
authority. Instead he raised questions and let the reader decide. But by the
beginning of the 13th century, there were numerous and much more direct
challenges to the Church which we need to consider. These challenges will
help us understand the intellectual or religious environment in which a man
like Aquinas lived.
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Lecture 25
The Holy Crusades
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From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of
Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been
brought to our ears: namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an
accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth, which
has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded
the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by sword, pillage, and
fire. . . .
---Pope Urban II, Proclamation at Clermont, 1095
The Crusades, like so much of the modern conflict, were
not wholly rational movements that could be explained away by purely economic
or territorial ambition or by the clash of rights and interests. They were
fueled, on all sides, by myths and passions that were far more effective in
getting people to act than any purely political motivation. The medieval holy
wars in the Middle East could not be solved by rational treatises or neat
territorial solutions. Fundamental passions were involved which touched the
identity of Christians, Muslims and Jews and which were sacred to the
identity of each. They have not changed very much in the holy wars of today.
---Karen Armstrong, Holy War, 1988
Beginning in the 11th century, the people of western
Europe launched a series of armed expeditions, or Crusades, to the East and
Constantinople. The reason for the Crusades is relatively clear: the West
wanted to free the Holy Lands from Islamic influence. The first of early
Crusades were part of a religious revivalism. The initiative was taken by
popes and supported by religious enthusiasm and therefore the Crusades
demonstrated papal leadership as well as popular religious beliefs. They were
also an indication of the growing self-awareness and self-confidence of
Europe in general.
Europe no longer waited anxiously for an attack from
outside enemies. Now and for the first time, Europeans took the initiative
and sent their armies into the Holy Lands. It took courage to undertake such
an adventure, a courage based on the conviction that the Crusades were
ultimately the will of God. An unintended consequence of the Crusades was
that the West became more fully acquainted with the ideas and technology of a
civilization far more advanced than their own. The Crusades also highlight
the initial phase of western expansion into new lands, a movement of the
peoples of Europe that has influenced the course of western civilization ever
since.
 From the third century on, Christians had visited the
scenes of Christ's life. In Jerusalem, St. Helena
had discovered what was believed to be the True Cross and her son, CONSTANTINE
(c.274-337), built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there. Before the Muslim
conquest of the 7th century, pilgrims came from Byzantium and the West in
search of sacred relics for their churches. Pilgrimages were a dangerous
business and could only be taken amidst hardship. But by the reign of Charlemagne,
conditions had improved for western pilgrims: Caliph Harun al-Rashid
(763-809) allowed Charlemagne to endow a hostel in Jerusalem for the use by
pilgrim traffic.
Stability in both the Muslim and Byzantine worlds was
essential for the easy and safe continuance of pilgrim traffic. But in the
early 11th century this stability broke down as the Egyptian ruler of
Palestine, Hakim (c.996-1021), abandoned the tolerant practices of his
predecessors, and began to persecute Christians and Jews and to make travel
to the Holy Lands difficult once again. Hakim destroyed Constantine's Church
of the Holy Sepulchre and declared himself to be God incarnate.
By 1050 the Seljuk Turks had created a state in Persia. In
1055 they entered Baghdad on the invitation of the Abbasid caliph and became
the champions of Sunnite Islam against the Shi'ite rulers of Egypt. In the
1050s Seljuk forces raided deep into Anatolia, almost to the Aegean. Their advance
culminated in the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, followed by the
occupation of most of Asia Minor and the establishment of a new sultanate at
Nicaea. Jerusalem fell in 1071 and became part of the new Seljuk state of
Syria.
In 1081, and amid disorder, palace intrigue and the
capital in danger, the general Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) came to the
Byzantine throne. He held off a Norman attack on the Dalmatian coast through
an alliance with Venice, and he played one Turkish potentate off against
another, slowly reestablishing a Byzantine foothold in Asia Minor. Civil wars
among the Turks and the increase of brigands made pilgrim traffic exceedingly
difficult.
The schism
between Eastern and Western churches provided the papacy with an additional
incentive to intervene in the east. In 1073 Pope Gregory VII
(c.1020-1085) sent an ambassador to Constantinople, who reported that the
emperor was anxious for reconciliation. Gregory VII planned to reunite the
churches by extending the holy
war from Spain to Asia. He would send the Byzantines an army
of western knights, which he would lead himself.
Pope
Urban II (c.1042-1099) carried on the tradition of Gregory VII. To
his Council of Piacenza (1095) came envoys from Alexius, who asked for military
help against the Turks. Since Turkish power was declining, perhaps it was a
good time to strike. Historians have never understood why Pope Urban II
promulgated the First
Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Perhaps we can glean
some purpose by looking at the speech itself.
Oh, race of Franks, race from across the mountains, race
chosen and beloved by God, as shines forth in very many of your works, set
apart from all nations by the situation of your country, as well as by your
Catholic faith and the honor of the Holy Church! To you our discourse is
addressed, and for you our exhortation is intended. We wish you to know what
a grievous cause has led us to your country, what peril, threatening you and
all the faithful, has brought us.
From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of
Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been
brought to our ears: namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an
accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth,
which has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God, has
invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by sword,
pillage, and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own
country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel torture; it has either entirely
destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own
religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their
uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the
circumcision their either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of
the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they
perforate their navels, and, dragging forth the end of the intestines, bind
it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until his
viscera have gushed forth, and he falls prostrate upon the ground. Others
they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend
their necks, and then, attacking them with naked swords, they attempt to cut
through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape
of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent. The kingdom of the
Greeks is now dismembered by them, and deprived of territory so vast in
extent that it can not be traversed in a march of two months. On whom,
therefore, is the task of avenging those wrongs and of recovering this
territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God
has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily energy, and the
strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you. . . .
What are we saying? Listen and learn! You, girt about with
the badge of knighthood, are arrogant with great pride; you rage against your
brothers and cut each other in pieces. This is not the soldiery of Christ,
which rends asunder the sheep-fold of the Redeemer. The Holy Church has
reserved a soldiery for herself to help her people, but you debase her
wickedly to her hurt. Let us confess the truth, whose heralds we ought to be;
truly, you are not holding to the way which leads to life. You, the
oppressors of children, plunderers of widows; you, guilty of homicide, of
sacrilege, robbers of another's rights; you who await the pay of thieves for
the shedding of Christian blood; as vultures smell fetid corpses, so do you
sense battles from afar and rush to them eagerly. verily, this is the worst
way, for it is utterly removed from God! If, forsooth, you wish to be mindful
of your souls, either lay down the girdle of such knighthood, or advance
boldly, as knights of Christ, and rush as quickly as you can to the defense
of the Eastern Church. For she it is from whom the joy of your whole salvation
have come forth, who poured into your mouths the milk of divine wisdom, who
set before you the holy teachings of the Gospels. We say this, brethren, that
you may restrain your murderous hands from the destruction of your brothers,
and in behalf of your relatives in faith oppose yourself to the Gentiles.
Under Jesus Christ, our Leader, may you struggle for your Jerusalem. . . .
But if it befall you to die this side of it, be sure that to have died on the
way is of equal value, if Christ shall find you in His army. God pays with
the same coin, whether at the first or the eleventh hour. You should shudder,
brethren, you should shudder at raising a violent hand against Christians; it
is less wicked to brandish your sword against Saracens. It is the only warfare
that is righteous, for it is charity to risk your life for your brothers.
Pope Urban II emphasized the appeal received from the
Eastern Christians and painted the hardships that now faced pilgrims to
Jerusalem. He summoned his listeners to form themselves, rich and poor alike,
into an army, which God would assist. Killing each other at home would give
way to fighting a holy war. Poverty at home would be relieved by riches
obtained from the East. If a man were killed doing the work of God, he would
automatically be absolved of his sins and assured of salvation. The audience
greeted the oration with cries of "God wills it," and the First
Crusade had been launched.
On the more popular level, it was Peter the Hermit
(c.1050-1115), an unkempt old man who lived on fish and wine, who proved to
be the most effective preacher of the Crusade. In France and Germany he
recruited an undisciplined mob of peasants, including women and children.
They believed Peter was leading them to the New Jerusalem, flowing with milk
and honey. The followers of Peter came up the Rhine, across Hungary, where
4000 Hungarians were killed in a riot over the sale of a pair of shoes, and
into Byzantine territory at Belgrade. The Byzantines, who had hoped for a
well-trained army, were appalled by Peter's mob. They proceeded to arrange
military escorts and to take all precautions against trouble. Despite their
efforts, the undisciplined crusaders burned houses and stole everything,
including the lead from the roofs of churches. Once in Constantinople, the
crusaders were graciously received by Alexius Comnenus, who shipped them
across the Straits as quickly as possible. In Asia Minor, they quarreled
among themselves, murdered the Christian inhabitants and scored no success
against the Turks. They were eventually massacred.
At the upper levels of European society no kings had
enlisted in the Crusades, but a number of great lords had been recruited
including Godrey of Bouillon (c.1061-1100) and his brother Baldwin
(1058-1118), Count Raymond of Toulouse, Count Stephen of Blois (c.1097-1154),
and Bohemond (c.1057-1111), a Norman prince from southern Italy.
Better-equipped and disciplined, the armies led by these lords converged on
Constantinople by different routes.
Emperor Alexius found himself in a difficult position. He
was willing to allow the crusaders from Europe to carve out principalities
for themselves from Turkish occupied land. At the same time, however, he
wanted to assure himself that Byzantine lands would be returned to his
control and that any new states created would be his dominions. He understood
the practice of European vassalage and the importance attached to an oath
taken to an lord. So, he decided to require each European lord to take an
oath of liege homage to him upon their arrival. Alexius had to resort to
bribery in order to obtain such oaths.
The armies were ferried across the Straits. There was no
one in command but the armies did act as a unit, following the orders of the
leaders assembled in council. In June 1097 at Nicaea, the Seljuk capital, the
Turks surrendered at the last minute to Byzantine forces rather than suffer
an assault from the Crusader armies. Crossing Asia Minor, the crusaders
defeated the Turks at Dorylaeum, captured the Seljuk sultan's tent and
treasure, and opened the road to further advance. Godfrey's brother Baldwin,
marched to Edessa, an ancient imperial city near the Eurphrates,
strategically situated for the defense of Syria from attacks coming from the
east. Baldwin became count of Edessa, lord of the first crusader state to be
established (1098).
Meanwhile, the main body of the
army was besieging the great city of Antioch which was finally conquered
after seven months. Antioch became the second crusader state under Bohemond.
The other crusaders then took Jerusalem by assault in July 1099, followed by
the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews, men, women, and children, an
event recorded by FULCHER
OF CHARTRES. Godfrey of Bouillon was chosen as "defender of the
Holy Sepulcher," and the third crusader state had been founded. When
Godfrey died not long afterward, his brother Baldwin of Edessa became the
first king of Jerusalem in 1100. Venetian, Genoese and Pisan fleets assisted
in the gradual conquest of coastal cities ensuring the flow of
communications, supplied and reinforcements between the East and the West. In
1109 the son of Raymond of Toulouse founded the fourth and last crusader state
near the seaport of Tripoli.
Early in their occupation of the eastern Mediterranean the
crusaders founded the military orders of knighthood. The first of these were
the Templars,
created around 1119 by a Burgundian knight who sympathized with the hardships
of Christian pilgrims. The Templars banded together to protect the helpless
on their pilgrimage. The Templars took vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience and were given headquarters near the ruins of the Temple of
Solomon. St.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) inspired their rule,
based on the rules for his own Cistercians
and confirmed by the pope in 1128. A second order, the Hospitallers,
was founded soon after the Templars, and was attached to the ancient Hospital
of St. John of Jerusalem.
Composed of knights, chaplains, and brothers under the
command of a grand master, with branches both in the East and in Europe, the
two military orders were the most effective fighting forces in the Holy Land.
Each had a special uniform: the Templars wore red crosses on white, the
Hospitalers white crosses on black. Later, a third, purely German group
became the order of the Teutonic
Knights with headquarters at Acre (they word black crosses on
white).
The orders grew very wealthy. They had fortresses and
churches of their own in the Holy Land as well as villages from which they
obtained necessary supplies. Western monarchs endowed the knights richly with
lands in Europe. Over time, the original intent of these military orders
became lost in personal conflicts. The knights were, after all, a quarrelsome
lot. They often allied themselves with Muslims, and so completely lost sight
of their original vows of poverty that they engaged in banking and
large-scale financial operations. In the early 14th century the Templars were
destroyed by Philip IV (1268-1314) of France. The Hospitalers moved first to
Cyprus and then to Rhodes in the early 14th century. They were driven to
Malta by the Turks in 1522 and continued there until Napoleon's seizure of
the island in 1798.
It is a wonder that the crusader states lasted as long as
they did. It was neither their castles nor the existence of military orders
that made their success possible but the disunity of the Muslims. When the
Muslims did achieve unity, crusader states fell. So, in the late 1120s,
Zangi, governor of Mosul on the Tigris, succeeded in unifying the local
Muslim rulers, In 1144 he took Edessa. Two years later Zangi was
assassinated, but the Muslim reconquest had begun.
In response to the conquest of Edessa, St. Bernard
preached the so-called Second Crusade. Thanks to the enormous enthusiasm he
unleashed, King Louis VII (1120-1180) of France and King Conrad III
(1093-1152) of Germany came to the East. But the Second
Crusade proved to be a failure. Relations with the Byzantines
were worse than ever. The western armies were almost wiped out in Asia Minor.
When the remnants of this army reached the Holy land, they found themselves
in conflict with the local lords who feared that these newcomers would take
over their kingdom. The crusader's failure to take Damascus in 1149 brought
its own punishment. In 1154 Zangi's son took Damascus. "Because of my
preaching, towns and castles are empty of inhabitants. Seven women can
scarcely find one man," St. Bernard once boasted. Now he could only
lament that:
we have fallen on evil days, in which the Lord, provoked
by our sins, has judged the world, with justice, indeed, but not with his
wonted mercy. . . . The sons of the Church have been overthrown in the
desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. . . . The judgments of
the Lord are righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him
blessed who is not scandalized therein.
The next act of Muslim reconquest was carried out in Egypt
by a general who was sent to assist one of the quarreling factions in Cairo.
This general became vizier of Egypt and died in 1169, leaving his office to
his nephew Saladin (1137-1193), a chivalrous and humane man who became the
greatest Muslim leader during the period of the Crusades. Saladin brought the
Muslims cities of Syria and Mesopotamia under his control and distributed
them to faithful members of his own family. By 1183 his brother ruled Egypt
and his sons ruled Damascus and Aleppo. In 1187 Jerusalem fell and soon there
was nothing left to the Christians except the port of Tyre and a few castles.
These events made a Third Crusade (1189-1192) necessary.
The Holy Roman emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (c.1123-1190) led a German force
through Byzantium, only to be drowned (1190) before reaching the Holy Land.
Some of his troops, however, continued on to Palestine. There they were
joined by Philip
Augustus of France and Richard the Lionhearted
(1157-1199) of England, former rivals in the West. The main thrust of the
Third Crusade was the siege of Acre, which was finally captured in 1191.
Jerusalem could not be taken but Saladin signed a treaty
with Richard allowing Christians to visit the city freely.
Innocent
III (1160-1216) came to the papal throne in 1198 and called
for the Fourth Crusade. A number of powerful lords answered the call and
decided to proceed by sea. The Venetians agreed to furnish transportation and
food and also contributed fifty warships on condition that they would share
equally in all future conquests. Enrico Dandolo (c.1108-1205) agreed to
forgive the debt temporarily if the crusaders would help him conquer Zara, a
town on the eastern side of the Adriatic that had revolted against Venetian
domination. So the Fourth Crusade began with the sack and destruction of a
Roman Catholic town in 1202! The pope excommunicated the crusaders.
The crusaders then turned their sights on a new goal:
Constantinople. The German king, Philip of Swabia proposed that the massed
armies escort Alexius, a prince with a strong claim to the throne, to
Constantinople and enthrone him. If successful, Alexius would finance the
subsequent expedition, the goal of which was Egypt. In the spring of 1203,
the fortified crusaders attacked Constantinople. Despite advanced warning,
the usurper Alexius III, had done little to prepare the city. In the initial
assault, the crusaders won a complete naval victory though the city held its
ground. A second attack by both land and sea broke through the defenses and
Alexius III fled the city. The young Alexius was then crowned Alexius IV. The
city was eventually damaged when a group of Franks set fire to a mosque in
the Saracen quarter and Alexius IV refused to make the promised payment.
Convinced that Alexius IV could not make peace with the crusaders, a faction
of senators, clergy and the populace deposed Alexius, who was later murdered
in prison by yet another usurper.
In March 1204 the crusaders and Venetians agreed to seize
the city a second time and to elect a Latin emperor. This siege ended in a
second capture and a three-day sack of Constantinople. The pope criticized
the outrage. Whole libraries and collections of art were destroyed but the
Venetians managed to salvage what they could and sent it all back to Venice.
Of particular importance were sacred relics including a fragment identified
as the True Cross and part of the head of John the Baptist.
 Faith at its purest and most innocent was perhaps inherent
in one of the most horrifying and disastrous episodes, the so-called CHILDREN'S
CRUSADE of 1212. For these children, faith, love and hope could
destroy the infidels where force alone had failed. Their motivation was more
simple, more primitive and naive. Their faith and love was part of that
general trend toward regeneration and spiritual awakening that we mentioned
at the start of this lecture.
There were two Children's Crusades which started
simultaneously in 1212, one from the Rhineland, the other in the Loire
valley. A ten year old boy, Nicholas, preached the Children's Crusade at
Cologne and is said to have recruited more than 20,000 children to his cause.
When the pilgrims reached Italy, many of the girls were taken into brothels
and others were taken as servants. Those boys who eventually carried on to
the east were sold as slaves.
In May 1212, there appeared at Saint-Denis, a twelve year
old boy by the name of Stephen. He was alleged to have gathered 30,000
children but at Marseilles they fell into the hands of thieves and were sold
as slaves at Alexandria. Over 2000 alone perished when their ships sank in
the Mediterranean. The Children's Crusades were not merely a brief episode
but rather part of that deeply rooted unrest which had disturbed the
conscience of the masses. Above all, the miracles associated with Stephen
(it's said that animals, birds, fish and butterflies joined him) point
forward to two other figures -- St. Francis of Assisi
and Joan
of Arc.
In the Fifth Crusade (1218-1221) the Christians attempted
the conquest of Egypt on the notion that this was the center of Muslim
strength. That Crusade was a miserable failure. Emperor Frederick II
(1194-1250) personally led the Sixth Crusade (1228-1229). No fighting was
involved. Speaking Arabic and long familiar with the Muslims from his
experience in Sicily, Frederick secured more for the Christians by
negotiation than any crusader had secured by force since the First Crusade.
In 1229 he signed a treaty with Saladin's nephew that restored Jerusalem to
the Latin world. Bethlehem and Nazareth were also handed over and a ten year
truce was signed.
The last two major crusades were organized by the saintly
king of France, Louis IX (1215-1270). In 1248, Louis attacked Egypt with the
idea of then regaining Palestine. A horrible strategist, Louis' and his army
were defeated, taken prisoner, and made to pay an enormous ransom to obtain
their freedom. Louis tried again in 1270, leading his troops on an expedition
to Tunis in North Africa. There was no success here either as Louis and much
of his army died from plague.
Slowly, the Christian possessions in the Holy Lands were
retaken. Acre, the last stronghold of the crusaders, surrendered in 1291.
The ultimate effect of the Crusades on European history is
certainly debatable. What is certain is that the crusaders made very little
direct impact on the east where the only visible remnants of their conquests
were their castles. There may have been some broadening of perspective that
comes from the exchange and the clash between two cultures, but the
interaction between Muslim and Christian was more meaningful in Spain and
Sicily than it was in the Holy Lands.
The Crusades did manage to reduce the number of quarrelsome
and contentious knights in Europe. The Crusades provided an outlet for their
penchant for fighting and it has been argued that European monarchs were able
to consolidate their control much more easily now that the warrior class had
been reduced in number.
The Crusades also contributed to the economic growth of
the Italian port cities of Genoa, Pisa and Venice. Of course, the great
wealth and growing population of 11th century Europe had made the Crusades
possible in the first place. The Crusades may have enhanced trade but they
certainly were not the cause of the revival of trade. Italian merchants would
have pursued their trade with the east regardless of whether or not the
Crusades took place.
In general, it can be said that the almost incredible
success of the First Crusade helped raise the self-confidence of the medieval
west. For centuries Europe had been on the defensive against Islam -- now a
western army could march into a center of Islamic power and take their
coveted prize. With this in mind, the 12th century became an age of optimism
and rebirth (see Lecture
26). To the Christians of the west it must have seemed as if
God was on their side and that they could accomplish anything. But there was
a negative side to the crusading balance sheet. There is no escaping the fact
of the Crusader's savage butchery -- of Jews at home and of Muslims abroad.
The Crusades certainly accelerated the deterioration of western relations
with the Byzantine Empire and contributed to the destruction of that realm,
with the disastrous consequences that followed. And western colonialism in
the Holy Land was only the beginning of a long history of colonialism that
has continued into the 20th century.
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Lecture 26
The 12th Century Renaissance
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Our own generation enjoys the legacy bequeathed to it by
that which preceded it. We frequently know more, not because we have moved
ahead by our own natural ability, but because we are supported by the menial
strength of others, and possess riches that we have inherited from our
forefathers. Bernard of Clairvaux used to compare us to punt dwarfs perched
on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than
our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because
we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.
---John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon, 1159-60
By the end of the 11th century, western Europe had made
some remarkable advances in a number of areas. By today's standards these
advances would appear small if not even insignificant. Nonetheless, advances
were made in social organization, technology, intellectual pursuit and
education. This overall improvement continued throughout the 12th century at
an accelerated rate. The people who inhabited western Europe showed
tremendous energy and persistence in all of their activities whether
religious, political, economic or cultural. They had a willingness to
experiment with new types of organization and in general, were receptive to
new ideas. They produced great leaders who gave form to their aspirations.
These leaders were supported by public opinion which for the most part was
much more homogenous than it is today.
 Great
Churchmen such as St.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1152) were almost entirely
dependent upon public opinion. A man such as Bernard could dominate Europe
because people believed the ideals he expressed. Great kings like Henry II of
England (1133-1189) drew their strength from a general public's desire for
law and order. PETER ABELARD (1079-1143) was a great teacher because he had an eager
audience -- he could hardly live without the students who came from all over
Europe to attend his classes at Paris. Without a doubt, the 12th century in
western Europe can be characterized as a flowering of civilization, indeed, a
renaissance.
It is clear that all European social life during the
Middle Ages was based upon several dominant ideals. These ideals were
inspired by the Christian faith as interpreted by the Church. Not everyone
lived up to these ideals, but everyone was affected by them. Ordinary men and
women might sin but they were more than careful to do penance before the
situation got out of hand. It can be said with certainty that the Church
ordered everything -- sight and sound, time and space, fell under the control
and word of the Church. In her wonderful book, A Distant Mirror: The
Calamitous 14th Century (1978), the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that:
Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking
instructions called for boiling an egg "during the length of time wherein
you say a Miserere." It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and
eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship
their subject matter. Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it
was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy to
dislodge. (p. 32)
With Tuchman's quote in mind, the dominant force in this
climate of opinion was clearly the Christian Church. But, the religion of the
12th century was undergoing a gradual transformation. Whereas in an earlier
time, man was becoming more Christian, in the 12th century, there were
efforts underway to make Christianity more human. That is, more oriented
toward man. During the historical Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries,
this sentiment would be expressed by the word humanism.
 12th
century Europe embraced a relatively new optimistic faith. There were many
people who could neither accept nor believe that the majority of mankind
would be damned forever. At the same time as this concern for what was human
in Christianity occurred, there was also a strong desire for a more personal
and intense religious experience, something we will witness again during the
Protestant Reformation. The Christian Matrix, the monopoly of Christian
knowledge by popes, clerics and monks and the intense personal devotion of
the common person ought to reveal to us that the medieval world was nothing
less than an Age of Faith.
The second important group of ideals concerned the
medieval concept of justice. This concept of justice came as much from
Christian virtue and divine law as it did from the real world of 12th century
politics. Justice, both secular and divine, became the key to good
government, peace and security. Because of this, the 12th century made great
efforts to improve their judicial systems. The study of Roman law was revived
and a summary of the laws of the Church was given by the Benedictine monk
Gratian (f.12th century) in his collection of canon laws known as the Decretium
Gratiani (c.1140). Early medieval courts found themselves in hopeless
situations when faced with contradictory statements by opposing parties. The
courts usually took refuge in the judgment of God alone. By the 12th century,
there was expressed a general dissatisfaction with law and the courts.
Jurists experimented with proofs and demonstrations, the use of witnesses
increased as did the utilization of juries. Even stronger than these more
technical improvements was a change in the spirit of the people. There was a
growing desire to obtain legal solutions to controversies instead of fighting
them out. In the end, the courts were forced to make themselves more
efficient. And as the courts tried more cases per term (instead of two or
three year), they gained valuable experience which aided in the development
of law and the concept of justice in general.
Christian faith and ideal of justice affected all people
in western Europe. Less widespread but still of supreme importance in our
story, was the growing desire for knowledge. This desire influenced thousands
of men and women of all social classes. Some of this knowledge was in
theology and still more in jurisprudence. But the desire for knowledge had
roots of its own, that is the love of study for its own sake, independent of
the Church or courts of law. Some Church Fathers opposed this secular
tendency but in the end, the love of learning overcame opposition.
Students in the 12th century were eager for knowledge and
sought it out with enthusiasm. They read the Latin classics, analyzed the texts
of Roman law, they read and commented on the works of the Church Fathers. The
most advanced scholars knew that the Muslims of Islamic civilization had
great storehouses of knowledge so they traveled to Spain to tap these new
sources of information. Others went to Constantinople to obtain translations
of Greek manuscripts. In the end, these scholars renewed western knowledge of
Greek science and philosophy and to this added the treasures of Arabic
mathematics and medicine. This renewed energy started men thinking about
basic scientific problems and translations of the 12th century began, I
think, a line of investigation which lead, in the end, to Copernicus
and Galileo
in the early 17th century.
We do not know precisely how many students attended the
lectures of Europe's greatest scholars. However, it is obvious that the old
monastic and cathedral schools could not absorb the increasing number of
students. So, students began to congregate in cities where a likely master
could be found. From this development came the great universities of the late
12th century -- Oxford, Paris and Bologna.
Many men in the 12th century were ambitious and certainly
wanted to better themselves. This was usually accomplished by creating
fortunes. In other words, there were some men who were interested in profits
alone. However, this profit motive, if we can call it such, was clearly not as
strong as it would become in the 16th century and after. The largest group of
ambitious men were the peasants. The peasants did not really want greater
wealth since they were more interested in improving their status. As a
dominant ideal, status was more important than wealth. This is obviously the
case in a society where one's position was governed by a carefully graded
hierarchy, a matrix (those who work, those who fight, those who pray -- see Lecture
23). The peasant who went to the German frontier to clear
land or to France to work as a member of a textile guild did not necessarily
do so in order to increase his wealth. What he did gain was more freedom for
himself and greater opportunities for his children.
The new students who attended European universities also
gained more in status than they did in wealth. Some entered the clergy but
these positions were declining in number. Sons of the nobility entered
monasteries for the status it brought to them and their families. Joining a
monastery also had the psychological and social effect of bringing the family
closer to God. The study of law was prestigious in itself and students sought
profit and power through its study. But even in jurisprudence there were
those men who studied law for its own sake, in other words, for knowledge
alone. The landholding class were sure to make as much money as they could by
renting their land as well as by opportune marriages with other wealthy
families. But they tended to spend their money as fast as they could make it.
In general, the class of landlords and landowners were not good businessman
by any modern standard. Their ideal was free and easy spending and not
thrift. They wanted to live nobly, that is, they wanted to live without
working. They were, as an order, more apt to run into debt and make some
shrewd investments that increase their income and profits.
We would expect to see the town dweller or bourgeoisie to
be the one order most fully imbued and dominated by the profit motive. Status
meant less to them than did money. They prized money so much because they
were more skilled in using it to increase their wealth. They knew how to
split the risks of a long voyage by selling shares in a ship. They also knew
about loans and interest. But even in the 12th century towns, the profit
motive was not entirely dominant. There were few external restraints: guilds
had not yet developed their detailed regulations. The restraints this order
faced were inherent in the nature of early medieval business practice.
Merchants and artisans were a small minority living in a society which did
not really trust them. These merchants and artisans had to give each other
mutual support in order to preserve their rights and property. While they
shared common dangers they also shared their business opportunities. Without
this cooperation and mutual support, the economic life of the town and
country would have been weakened. As a result, great concentrations of wealth
among this order of people were rare.
While ambition and desire for worldly success were pretty
much common in the 12th century, they were not always associated with a
desire to make money. Improvement in one's status was the most common
ambition. Wealth was less important than such things that is personal
freedom, titles, high office or the reputation one earned as a scholar.
From what has been said it ought to be clear that the 12th
century was both original and energetic. In this way, it was perhaps a worthy
rival to the Golden Age of Greece and Rome. Today, we are still influenced by
the 12th century: in art, literature, educational systems and social
relationships. As I have already mentioned, the 12th century witnessed a
growing desire for knowledge. The thousands of students who roamed Europe at
the end of the century were interested in every scrap of knowledge they could
find. They studied all available texts in western Europe and made long
journeys to Spain or to Constantinople to secure Greek and Arabic material
which interested them. Their first task was to be able to use language as a
precise instrument of learning and that language was Latin. So, the 12th
century saw a revival of the classics in order to increase one's vocabulary
and improve style. More attention was also given to the study of logic. Logic
developed clear thinking and accurate reasoning: logic also drove scholars to
the east in order to read Greek translations of Aristotle
who was, after all, the greatest master of logic. And in seeking translations
of Aristotle's logic, the scholars also found Arabic science and the great
commentaries of Muslim scholars. The knowledge of Latin and logic thus helped
the general revival of law and theology. In addition to Aristotle, came the
mathematics of Euclid, the astronomy of Ptolemy
and the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates.
Legal studies were centered in Italy where Roman law was
never forgotten. Irnerius of Bologna was perhaps the first great teacher of
law. He taught the careful reading of texts and this had the result of
producing man with real knowledge of the law. The study of Roman law was also
soon supplemented by the study of canon law, the law of the Church. Here it
Bologna was also Gratian whom we've already mentioned. Gratian's great
contribution was to codify canon law in 1141 by making it more systematic and
logical. Students flocked to the university at Bologna to study the great
bodies of law under great teachers.
If Italy was the center of
jurisprudence, then France was certainly the home of theology. And it was
Peter Abelard who was the most famous of the 12th century French theologians.
Abelard gave up his rights to his father's fief so that he could study at
Paris. His first interest was logic but he soon turned to theology. He was an
intelligent but cranky man and disliked by his fellow teachers for his very
outspoken criticism of their work. His SIC
ET NON (or Yes and No) accumulated the opinions of church
fathers on both sides of shocking questions. He seduced Heloise, the niece of
the prominent Parisian clergyman, Bishop Fulbert. This act barred him from
promotion in the Church. Other theologians borrowed from Abelard's style but
were far less inflammatory. They tried to build a logical structure into
Christian theology, a structure, I suppose, which would meet the needs of the
Christian matrix.
The great increase in the number of students and in the
attitudes of a man like Abelard and others, worried the Church, the teachers,
and the students themselves. The Church worry about the content and
implications of the new learning. There was, after all, much in Aristotle and
Muslim scholars which seemed to contradict Christian dogma. The church
perhaps feared the excessive rationalism of scholars who thought they could
find a logical explanation for everything. The teachers at the medieval
schools faced the problem of collecting fees from poor scholars and of
meeting competition from the many unqualified teachers who populated the
growing towns. Finally, the students were always strangers in the towns where
they congregated. These students were regularly over charged for their fees
and poorly treated by the townspeople. The older or cathedral and monastic
schools could not cope with these problems. A new institution was needed and
that institution was the university or universitas, an expression
which referred not to a place but to a group of people.
The first university was conceived at Bologna in Italy.
The law students at Bologna were mature adult males. They resented the high
fees they were charged, they feared the wrath of the townspeople, and they
believed that their professors were not giving them their money's worth. The
students organized to protect themselves and stipulated regulations which
limited the cost of their rooms and board. They also specified the minimum
content of their courses. In turn, professors formed their own corporations
in which their most important concern was the standardization of admission to
the profession.
At Paris, professors formed their own corporate body.
Students would not be admitted to higher learning until they had passed the
arts course and no one could teach until they had graduated from the
appropriate faculty. In the 12th century there were only four higher
faculties: Theology, Medicine, Law, and Philosophy.
Regardless of which medieval university we choose to
investigate, students began their career in the faculty of arts. There they
studied grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium) and arithmetic,
astronomy, geometry and music (the quadrivium). These are the seven
liberal arts which had been specified by Alcuin as part of the Carolingian
Renaissance in the 8th and 9th centuries (see Lecture
20). A master would lecture on various subjects but the bulk
of one's education came from what was called the DISPUTATION. The student would be asked a multitude of questions
and was forced to defend his position with impeccable logical argument.
The student studied in the Arts Faculty for three years
and if he had done well received the Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.). He then
went on to study for another year or two whereupon he was eligible to receive
the Masters of Arts degree (M.A.). After a few more years he could enter the
higher faculty and receive the Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.).The J.D.
degree (Doctor of Jurisprudence), M.D. degree (Doctor of Medicine) and the
D.D. degree (Doctor of Divinity) were all derived from this scheme.
The Doctor of Philosophy degree was granted after original
work was completed. The student would complete a work of original scholarship
(the dissertation or thesis) and would have to defend that work in front of a
large audience. This audience would include his Masters as well as anyone
else who cared to attend. This is similar to today's Ph.D. defense:
examinations are open to the public although the rigorous nature of the 12th
century disputation has perhaps been lost in modern times.
The university was no playground for the wealthy. True, it
offered an outlet for social mobility. Fees were paid according to one's
status and it was entirely possible that these fees could be waived. Some
students were housed together according to their academic interest and a
Master was assigned to each house. These houses were eventually referred to
as colleges. For instance, when I was an undergraduate student at Boston
University, I was enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts. Some of my friends
were in the College of Public Communication and others in the College of
Business Administration. Together, these individual colleges constitute the
university. To take another example, at Harvard each dormitory or house, as
they are properly called, contains a tutor or master.
The medieval university also employed what were referred
to as stationers. These individuals would produce readable copies of
important texts. Students would borrow eight pages at time, take them back to
their house and copy them. These pages would be returned the next day in the
student would borrow another eight pages.
At Paris, Vienna and Oxford there is a great deal of
evidence which points to student rowdyism: gambling, drinking, whoring and
street fighting. The evidence also points to a rather clear demarcation
between "town" and "gown." Even worse, and capable of
even more violence, were the passions aroused between students of different
nationalities. A contemporary account of medieval students at Paris by Jacques
de Vitry is quite revealing.
They affirmed that the English were drunkards and had
tails; the sons of France proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women.
They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at their feasts; the
Normans, vain and boastful; the Potevins, traitors and always adventurers.
The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed
to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of
Arthur. The Lombards were called avaricious, vicious and cowardly; the
Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and
cruel, the inhabitants of Brabent, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands and
ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, yielding as butter, and
slothful. After such insults from words they often came to blows.
These were schools run by Masters and much of this
"fun" was as much the result of the student's dissatisfaction with
their professors as it was the open hostility of the townspeople. The
situation was quite different at Bologna as this was a "student's
university." At Bologna students determined what would be taught as well
as the frequency of class meetings. The arts faculty was not as prominent an
element as it was at Paris or Oxford.
Again, it is not known precisely how many students
attended the 12th century universities at Paris, Oxford or Bologna. But there
were other scholars in 12th century or who were not associated with
university. These were the "Wandering Scholars," the 12th century
equivalent, I suppose, of the counter-revolutionaries of the 1960s. These
"scholars" had no fixed place in medieval society and they were pretty
much uncertain about their life in general. They tried to attach themselves
to a patron and were critical of just about everything, especially the
Church. The majority of the scholars were anonymous but they left their mark
on the western intellectual tradition by composing poetry. They introduced
rhythm and rhyme into medieval poetry and wrote both in Latin and in the
vernacular. These wandering scholars attached themselves to a man by the name
of Golias, and formed what was called "Order of Vagrants." Their
style of verse, as well as their lifestyles became known as Goliardic and
collectively they are called the Goliards (see Lecture
24). In general their poetry sang the glories of "wine,
women and song." They usually gathered in taverns and got drunk in order
to forget their miseries. They felt uncertain of their fate, life was nothing
more than a "wheel of fortune."
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Lecture 27
Heretics, Heresies and the Church
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The most important medieval institution was the Church --
not just the Church, but orthodox Christianity as interpreted by the Church.
By the 11th century, medieval Christianity was composed of a body of faith
drawn from several sources: Holy Scriptures, the Church Fathers, the popes,
numerous ecclesiastical councils and finally, the clergy. What resulted was
Christian dogma -- a set of beliefs to which every good Christian would offer
their acceptance. These beliefs can be summarized as follows:
However, the experience of every Christian for more than
one thousand years agreed with Paul's warning, "There must also be
heresies." Dissent from the Church meant damnation, for outside the
Church there was no salvation. Paul had also commanded, "A man that is a
heretic, after the first and second warning, avoid." Heresy (from the
Latin, secte) meant treason to God, the worst offense against
Christian society. Heresy meant contamination -- an infection from which true
believers had to protect themselves. For the Middle Ages, heresy was
doctrinal error held stubbornly in defiance of the Church. Gratian (f. 12th
century), who taught law at Bologna, argued that heresy was the rejection of
orthodox doctrine after correction was offered. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274),
defined it as the denial of faith as defined by the Church. "He is a
heretic," wrote one 12th century theologian:
who, while keeping the outward appearance of Christian
religion, devises or follows false opinions for a desire for human approval,
earthly reward, or worldly pleasures.
Such were the "official" definitions of heresy.
But in reality, heresy meant all this and more. A person chose to become a
heretic out of intellectual arrogance or as a form of resistance to Church
authority and organization. Women became heretics because they were denied
entrance into the clergy. In other words, just as there were sound
theological reasons why one person would become a heretic, there were equally
sound political, economic, intellectual and social causes as well. In general,
then, heresy meant something much more than just doctrinal error. And
although there were numerous heresies which appeared in the 12th and 13th
centuries, some characteristics were common to them all: a desire to return
to the apostolic practices of early Christianity; the need to free Christians
from their enslavement to a material world; a protest against the
concentration of authority in the Church; a challenge to the sacraments,
especially baptism, and; an emphasis on chastity, preaching, communal life
and moral purity.
The Church had been faced with heretics and heresy
throughout its existence. The Gnostics,
who believed that the release and salvation of man is only to come through
the apprehension of gnosis, or special knowledge, appeared in the
first few centuries after Paul had issued his warning. From Persia in the 3rd
century came Manichaeus or Mani (215-276), who taught a dualistic
religion (Manicheanism)
of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. The Messalians from Armenia taught that
Satan was the son of the First Principle and who rebelled in pride, was
thrown out and created the material world in which all men are confined. Priscillian
(c.340-385), Bishop of Ávila in Spain, practiced monastic asceticism combined
with astrology and dualism. Priscillian was excommunicated by a synod at
Saragossa in 380 but was ultimately executed -- the first case of capital
punishment for heresy in the history of the Church. The Paulicans of Armenia,
another dualist sect (6th century), rejected the Old Testament and much of
the New. They repudiated the sacraments and practiced iconoclasm. The Bogomils
of 10th century Bulgaria taught a life of penitence, prayer, wandering and
simple worship in order to escape a world deemed evil by nature. For the
Bogomils, only the New Testament revealed the word of God. They rejected the
sacraments and rituals of any kind. Renouncing the world, meat and wine were
strictly forbidden. Marriage was the work of the devil. The Church detected
heretical thinking at Ravenna (970), France (1000, 1022, 1025), Italy (1028)
and in Germany (1048).
The Fourth Lateran Council
was a watershed in the religious life of the middle ages. On November 11,
1215, Pope
Innocent III (1160-1216) painted an alarming picture of a Church
dissolving in a sea of heresy.
He could paint such a picture because the success of popular heretical and
evangelical movements, such as the Waldensians
and Albigensians,
was positively explosive. The Church was faced with the threat of change by
these heresies, a threat reflected in the THIRD
CANON of the Council. Heresy threatened the very foundation of
the Church and of papal authority. But criticism came from elsewhere as well
-- nobles, physicians, judges, merchants, men and women joined with the lower
orders in order to criticize Church abuses and infidelity.
The people, the bulk of Europe's population, were
especially critical. They did not understand the fineries of theological
thought. Nor did they understand Church government. They complained about the
un-Christian lives of the higher clergy. Had they been able to read Dante's Divine
Comedy, they would have nodded in approval as Dante situated
seven popes in Hell. To make matters worse, none of the people understood
Latin. If and when they bothered to attend mass, they heard strange words uttered
while the clergy conducted rituals and ceremonies which they clearly did not
understand. If the Middle Ages was the age of Christendom, or a Christian
Kingdom in Europe, then just what did it mean to be a Christian? What is a
good Christian? The people began to recognize their need for their own Gospel
-- they sought their own Christ, not the Christ manufactured by Rome. It is
clear that the institution of the Church would not give these people what
they wanted. And so, as a form of protest, many of these people were
attracted to heresy. The heretics seemed to fill a role the Church could not.
Two major factors conditioned a person's choice to become
a heretic. First, most people had lost all confidence in the highest Church
authorities -- the popes and bishops. Second, they were dissatisfied with a
monastic form of life. With liberty and new-found freedoms characteristic of
13th century society, most people would rather enjoy some of what life had to
offer rather than abandon themselves to the rigors and denials of an ascetic
life in the monastery (a life specified by the Benedictine Rule).
And this led to a fundamental problem of medieval Christianity: how could an
individual reconcile their worldly endeavors with their spiritual needs?
The European awakening was a double-edged sword. The
growth of cities, trade, universities and culture showed people that there
were rewards to be found in the life of the material world. But, this came
into direct conflict with their religious aspirations -- aspirations which,
in fact, had been fabricated by the Church. Christianity was a form of social
control and it was in the 12th and 13th centuries that more people became
aware of this fact (see Innocent
and the Great Schism). Religion was not to be
questioned nor abandoned. Neither was Christianity. What was challenged,
however, was the authority of the Church.
With this is mind, beginning in the 12th century a
religious movement began to spread across western Europe. This movement took
the form of wandering preachers who called for repentance, poverty and an
apostolic life in imitation of Christ. These wandering preachers were trying
to spread good news. They appealed to the anti-clerical and anti-monastic
beliefs of the people. More important, they carried the Gospel to the people.
If the people could not get guidance from the clergy, they certainly needed
to get it from some other source. In other words, the people were more than
prepared for the message the wandering priests were about to give them. These
priests told them what they wanted to hear.
As early as the year 1030, heretical groups from Milan
preferred burning at the stake than recant their beliefs. Only the Gospel was
the true source of authority. Throughout the 12th century and into the 13th,
heresies arose among individual thinkers, theologians and philosophers. Their
ideas first took hold among the nobility but eventually filtered down to the
peasantry. Although we have seen why the peasantry might have been willing to
follow the heretics, why the nobility? The nobility saw heresy as a way of
combating papal authority. Second, heresy could also be used to attack the
authority of secular powers. Third, since all men wanted to go to Heaven it
seemed to the nobility that the closer they got to the Church, the better
their chances of salvation. But, these men could not join monasteries, whose
doors were closed. Nor could they enter Church government since those
positions were now hereditary. So, as a form of protest, the nobility joined
the ranks of the heretical movements.
Although one explanation for the rise of heresy can be
found in the general idea that the spiritual needs of the majority of people
were not being met, there is perhaps another explanation. By the 13th
century, the division between the old world and the new was not yet that
large. This is why ancient heresies and religions, many of them pre-dating Christianity,
and superstitions and astrology, could exist side by side with orthodox
Christian belief. In fact, the history of early Christianity would have been
quite different without these pre-Christian religious beliefs. Christianity
did not appear in a vacuum. It fell upon the shoulders of the Church to stamp
out these heresies as quickly as they had appeared. And the Church tried to
stamp out heresy with Crusades,
the Inquisition
and even by sending Dominican
friars out to the cities and towns to convert the spiritually starved
communities of Europe.
A few examples of heretical
thinking ought to suffice. Around 1175, and in the city of Lyons in France, a
hotbed of Christian orthodoxy as well as heresy, the citizen Peter Waldo
commissioned a poor student to translate the Gospels into French. A Christian
lay movement began to grow around Peter Waldo (or Valdes). The movement,
known as the "Poor Men of Lyons" or simply, the Waldensians,
had as its main activity the reading of the Bible in the vernacular and a
life in strict imitation of Christ. The Poor men of Lyons suffered bitter
opposition by the Archbishop so what began as a revolt then became downright
heresy. The Waldensians were opposed to relics and the cult of Saints. They
would not honor nor would they pray for the dead. They would rather pray in a
barn or a stable than a Church. "Away with the cathedrals!" they
said. For the Waldensians, a vernacular Bible, vernacular prayer and songs, a
communal life, schools of their own and well-organized missionary work and
propaganda brought about the rapid spread of their ideas in Italy, southern
France and Spain. Their violent anti-clericalism and anti-Roman preaching
brought them into sympathy with another heretical groups, the Cathari.
The Cathari of southern France, also know as the Albigensians,
were far more dangerous than the Waldensians. At least this was how the
Church interpreted them. The Cathari were not even nominally Christian since
their spiritual doctrines were drawn from religious beliefs which pre-dated
Christianity. The Cathari were pre-Christian, non-Christian and
anti-Christian all at one and the same time (they often referred to
themselves as the "Elect," "Good Men," "Perfect, and
"Consoled"). Between 1150 and 1250, the Cathari built at least
sixteen churches: six were located in Italy, another six in Constantinople
and four in France. The Cathari rejected nearly everything associated with
the Judeo-Christian tradition: existing political authority, kings and
princes, the death penalty, the taking of oaths and war. Furthermore, they
rejected the material world as evil. All the Cathari claimed to die by their
own hand -- starvation was preferred.
As a sacrament, baptism in water was intended to absolve
all men and women of their sins as a result of the Fall. But, for the
Cathari, baptism in water was erroneous because water was of this world, and
therefore evil. The soul must be freed from the material world, not conjoined
to it. So, Cathari baptism was much different. The convert must undergo an
extensive period of training, instruction and total abstinence from pleasure.
Indulgence in the flesh was regarded as a crime and physical contact of any
kind was forbidden. Milk, eggs, meat and cheese could not be consumed since
they were the products of animal procreation. The convert had to fast three,
forty-day periods per year. After training, testing, instruction and fasting,
which would last a lifetime, the convert would undergo the endura, in
which the convert starved to death. To avoid recontamination of the soul by
the material world, the dying convert was baptized by the "laying of
hands."
 Bizarre
as they sound, both the Cathari and Waldensians managed to win thousands of
converts. Nobles found in these heretical groups a way to assault bishops and
other members of the clergy. The people, meanwhile, were now given some form
of spiritual guidance. The movement spread so rapidly that the Church had to
react and it did so by proclaiming a Crusade. The Church also secured the
services of a Spanish monk by the name of ST.
DOMINIC (c.1170-1221). Dominic insisted that his followers live
in poverty by begging, and he and his followers were sent to southern France
to tame and convert the Cathari. Using intellectual arguments, the Dominicans
met with some success but in the end, all that was established was a new
religious order -- the Dominicans -- who now stood outside the Church. But
there was a problem inherent in all of this. The Church sends out Dominic to
convert heretics back to Rome. Instead, Dominic created the Dominicans, in essence,
a rival sect. Although the Dominicans were not heretics, they were serving a
role that ought to have been served by the Church itself. What this tells me,
and what it must have told 13th century men and women, was that the Church
was just not doing its job.  The
Church had to reach more people by giving them the spiritual guidance that
they demanded. So, while Dominic traveled the French countryside appealing to
human intellect, another man, by the name of Francis of Assisi
(1181/2-1226, born Giovanni Bernardone) began an appeal to the human heart.
The son of a wealthy merchant, the young Francis dreamed of becoming a
powerful knight. However, an injury he suffered while in his teens made the
prospects of knighthood improbable. Francis lived a life of ease and all the
townspeople of Assisi looked up to him, as I suppose today, some people look
up to entertainers and sports figures. Francis enjoyed his popularity but
something happened to him. He began to look inward to his soul and he
discovered that he could no longer reconcile his life in the material world
and his quest for higher spiritual truth. So, like Peter Waldo and Muhammad
before him, and Luther to come, Francis rejected the material world. He
wanted to live like Christ -- in poverty. So he abandoned the world. He began
to devote himself to the care of the poor and sick and on April 16, 1210, he
was inspired to rebuild the ruined church of San Damiano. He renounced his
patrimony, even to his clothes, and lived as a hermit. But as he preached his
wisdom to the lost souls of the neighboring villages, many people were
attracted to his teachings and to his lifestyle. Again, the only reason why
Francis could attract so much support is that he was clearly giving the
people a spiritual message which they wanted to hear. His zeal became
infectious and by 1210 he had a brotherhood of eleven for which he drew up a RULE
which was orally accepted by Innocent III. Before he knew it, and quite
against his wishes, Francis had become the leader of a completely new
religious order, the Franciscans.
By the year of his death in 1226, there were more than
5000 Franciscans with another 1000 or more waiting for admission into the
order. St. Francis, like Dominic, was no heretic. But, and here is the irony,
the strength of his movement is that people were appealing to his order and
not the Church, for spiritual guidance. All this clearly shows that first,
the Church was clearly losing ground in providing its flock with necessary
spirituality. Second, it shows an amazing spiritual vitality among the people
of Europe as a whole. The people did not reject Christianity. What they were
rejecting was the way the Church hierarchy had interpreted and manipulated
Christian dogma. Evangelists like Waldo, the Cathari, Dominicans and Franciscans
could only exist and flourish because they told the people what they wanted
to hear. And the people were eager for spiritual guidance. An evangelical
movement is a clear sign of crisis or decay. After all, is a revival
necessary if most people are satisfied? So, the fact that there were so many
revival movements in Italy, southern France and elsewhere -- and there are
dozens more which we have not mentioned -- all attests to the decay of the
Christian Church as an institution. Some sort of revitalization, perhaps from
within, seemed absolutely necessary.
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Lecture 28
Aquinas and Dante
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The
medieval philosopher, SAINT
THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274), was born in the castle of his father at
Roccasecca, near Naples. His education began at the ancient Benedictine
monastery at Monte Cassino. He went on to study at the University at Naples
and received his M.A. degree in 1244 -- he was then 20 years old. At this
time and up to 1256, we find the "Dumb Ox," as he was called,
studying philosophy and theology under the tutelage of the Dominicans
at Paris and Cologne. In 1256, he received his doctorate in theology and
taught at Paris until 1259. For the next ten years Aquinas spent his time in
various Dominican monasteries surrounding Rome. Here we find him lecturing on
philosophy and theology. His special interest was the philosophy of Aristotle.
By 1269, Aquinas returned to the University of Paris where
he presented his lectures on a variety of theological and philosophical
questions. In 1274, and while on his way to Rome, Aquinas died of fever,
barely fifty years of age. All his most important writings, but especially
the Summa
Theologica and the Summa
Contra Gentiles, were written in Latin between
1252 and 1273. I mention these details about his education because Aquinas
was, like Abelard before him, a university man. He was an intellectual in the
modern sense of the word.
Although Thomism
-- as the thought of Aquinas is known -- was eclectic to the core it can be
said with certainty that the greatest influence upon his thought was the
philosophy of Aristotle whom Aquinas simply referred to as "The
Philosopher." How Aquinas came to know "The Philosopher" is
important for the intellectual history of the west. After the fall of Rome
and after Justinian closed Plato's Academy
and the Lyceum of Aristotle in 529, the majority of the major texts of Greek
philosophy became unavailable. But Islamic scholars in the Near East saved
many of these ancient manuscripts they had found in Byzantine libraries and,
from the richest library in the ancient world, the library at Alexandria.
Between the 8th and 9th centuries, Islamic scholars like Avicenna
(980-1037) and Averroës
(1126-1198) as well as the Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides
(1135-1204), studied these manuscripts and wrote commentaries on them. By the
12th century, these manuscripts as well as the commentaries on them, made
their way back into Europe by way of Spain, Sicily and North Africa. And all
of this was due to the Crusades and the reactivation of trade which the end
of the Crusades made possible. These texts also helped to make the 12th
century Renaissance a reality (see Lecture
26). By the middle of the 13th century, French and Italian
universities were literally inundated with these ancient texts, especially
the philosophical works of Aristotle.
Aquinas studied Aristotle like no other man had before or
since and he used Aristotle to justify his entire thinking. Aquinas' theory
of knowledge is not a vision of divine truth -- you might expect that coming
from this very Christian saint. Rather, his theory of knowledge is a sober
statement of how men know the world. Man is a rational animal and the world
can be understood by human reason. A being endowed with reason, man can
understand the universe. But as an animal, man can know only that which he
can experience with his senses. This is Aristotelianism to the core. As
Aquinas himself put it: "whatever is known is known in the manner in
which man can know it." This is a fundamental principle of all knowledge
according to Aquinas and could lead man in two directions:
To find these principles or first causes is the whole
object of our knowledge. What experience conveys can be put into language and
expressed in words, propositions and demonstrations. Though man cannot say
all that the world is, what he can say is truly said. This is a theory of the
function of the individual knower. The mind knows itself, knows its objects,
and finally, the mind knows its own nature. St.
Augustine (354-430) struggled with these same questions nearly 800
years before Aquinas. But Augustine wanted to understand the intelligibility
of the universe -- Aquinas wanted to understand the intelligibility of the
individual human soul. The focus of Augustine was the world -- for Aquinas,
it was man.
Aquinas was not satisfied with knowing things as they are
-- he wanted to know why. And this took him to Aristotelian logic. Aquinas
found truth in logical argument -- if you could argue back and forth
successfully, then you could find the first principle or first cause. And of
course, the first cause, the prime mover, was God. Just to give you an idea
of the logical power of Aquinas' thinking, consider the following statement
taken from the Summa
Contra Gentiles:
Since man's ultimate knowledge does not consist in that
knowledge of God whereby He is known to all or to many in some vague kind of
way; nor in that knowledge of God whereby He is known through demonstration
in the speculative sciences; nor in that knowledge whereby He is known
through faith, as we have proved above; and since it is not possible in this
life to reach a higher understanding of God in His essence¡thus knowing God
through that which is nearest to Him, in a manner of speaking, as we have
also proved; and since we must found our ultimate happiness upon some kind of
knowledge of God, as we have shown;--it is not possible for man's happiness
to be in this life.
We may poke fun at Aquinas for expending so much energy to
prove by logical argument what millions of people for the past 2000 years
have accepted on faith alone. But, the Thomistic synthesis is indicative of
tendencies within the western intellectual tradition.
Theology had developed -- dogmatically, of course -- since
the days of the early Church, let's say, since the 2nd or 3rd century. This
theology was strengthened as more people converted to Christianity and as
more bishops and theologians began to write their treatises and commentaries
on the Holy Scriptures. Pagan philosophers -- great as they might have been
-- had to be shunned simply because they had never known Christ. Even Dante's
guide through Inferno and Purgatory, the great Roman poet Virgil
(70-19 B.C.), could not make the final ascent to the mountain because he was,
after all, a pagan. This theology and dogmatism was under steady attack at
least as early as 1100 -- a new spirit of inquiry seemed to be haunting
theologians and Christian philosophers. Again, it was Peter Abelard who
hinted at this trend when he wrote in his Preface to Sic et Non,
"By doubting we come to inquiry; and through inquiry we perceive
truth." Why should we inquire when the Scriptures are truth? But the
Scriptures we hold in our hands and the Scriptures interpreted by Saint
Dominic, or Waldo or the Cathari or a Pope or a Lateran Council, are two
different things. The argument here is that religious conformity had finally
broken down. The conformity or dogmatism of the early Church was now confronted
by a general awakening of the European mind. This awakening took various
forms among different groups of people across the European continent.
Many heretics like the Waldensians set up their own
religious organizations while remaining Christians. The Cathari of southern
France did not even claim to be Christian -- the evil God Jehovah allowed the
persecution and crucifixion of the good God, Jesus Christ (see Lecture
27). And the Dominicans and Franciscans were
extra-ecclesiastical religious orders who, while defending Christian dogma,
had the unintended consequence of asserting their independence. And Aquinas,
the Dumb Ox from Roccasecca, a Dominican who taught at Paris, sought an
academic, university-based reconciliation between reason and faith. His
greatest achievement was perhaps the proof of God's existence using
Aristotelian logic.
Heresy was never beaten back -- the Inquisition set out to
"round up the usual suspects" but the awakening of the European
mind, I suppose, was here to stay. Even the heretic Martin
Luther (1483-1546) never came before the bench of the
Inquisition. His Reformation based on justification by faith alone was
condemned by the Pope at Rome, but ironically, his movement was never
effectively suppressed. In fact, the very growth of Lutheranism, Calvinism
and dozens of other Protestant sects shows that the Church could no longer
maintain its dogmatic authority.
The clash between reason and faith was perhaps inevitable
considering the intellectual, social, economic and cultural changes of the
12th and 13th centuries. While one never conquered the other, it is clear
that some sort of synthesis was desperately needed. This synthesis came with
Thomas Aquinas. So strong was the Church's support of Aquinas, he was made a
saint in 1323 and his thought became the foundation of the Roman Catholic
Church down to the present day.
For the intellectual history of Europe, Aquinas utilized
Aristotelian logic as an instrument of both theological and philosophical
analysis. Faith and reason are two roads to a single truth. What reason
cannot uncover, faith will. Truth is the knowledge of God and God's will. As
a theologian and a philosopher -- this is the meaning of the word
Scholasticism -- Aquinas helped to fashion a world view for high medieval
Europe. This was a world view which expressed the divinity and truth of
Christianity and was supported by rigorous logical argument.
 While Aquinas was certainly the New Aristotle of the 13th
century, it was DANTE ALIGHIERI
(1265-1321) who was perhaps the new Virgil, or even the new Homer. Dante was
born in Florence, a city synonymous with the Italian Renaissance. Like Saint Francis,
Dante came from a family of modest wealth (his father was a notary). In 1274,
at the age of nine, Dante fell in love with a young girl by the name of
Beatrice, the daughter of yet another wealthy family. It has been said that
this one event determined Dante's career as a poet. Dante's greatest work, The
Divine Comedy, was written after 1302, a period
marked by Dante's political exile from the city of Florence. As we have
already seen, Dante's guide through Inferno or Hell, was the Roman poet and
pagan, Virgil. In Hell they meet Homer, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Socrates, and
Plato. Noble and wise though these men certainly were, they must remain in
Hell for the simple reason that they were pagans. In Hell we also find
gluttons, thieves, murderers and men like Cassius, Brutus and Judas. Dante
and his guide then find themselves in Purgatory where man is purged of sin
before he, if he is lucky, makes the ascent to Paradise. They eventually come
to the Garden of Eden but Virgil must remain behind because without faith in
Christ, he cannot achieve purity. With Virgil left behind, Dante now enters
Paradise where he encounters St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, Jerome,
Augustine and all the other saints, martyrs and Church Fathers. It is here
that Dante also learns about the structure of the cosmos. It is a universe
spherical in shape -- or rather, it is depicted as a series of concentric
spheres. The spheres are arranged in hierarchical order -- the smallest
(inner) sphere contains formless matter. As we move outward from sphere to
sphere we move from matter to plants to animals to man. The spheres above man
contain the heavenly bodies, the angels and finally, God. We have reached the
first principle of Aquinas or, as Aristotle called it, the prime mover. Here
Dante receives an angelic vision -- it is a vision of man made in God's
image. So, for Dante, the way to God is found in human life. This was
Abelard's message. It was the message of Aquinas as well. There are two roads
to truth, not one.
Although the cosmology and theology of The
Divine Comedy is clearly that of Aristotle and
Aquinas, Dante was quite critical of the Church at Rome. His criticisms were
common for the time -- the failure of popes and the clergy to live up the
requirements of their office. And while it is true that he called the Church
a harlot, he never disputed Church doctrine or orthodoxy. For Dante, the
message was quite clear -- the Church was not serving the spiritual needs of
the flock. For instance, in Inferno Dante and Virgil meet up with
thieves, gluttons and Judas Iscariot. They also meet seven popes.
Abelard, Aquinas and Dante helped to construct a world
view which placed reason and faith at the center of man's quest for truth.
That truth was God and God's will. However, over the course of the next
several centuries, reason and faith would be slowly drawn apart. The European
mind awakened itself from centuries-old slumber and began to explain and justify
itself according to the principles of a new synthesis. In the immediate
future lay bleak years. The Black Death of 1347 would destroy nearly
thirty-five per cent of Europe's population (see Lecture
29). France and England would go to war for more than a
century (see Lecture
30). The economy would collapse. Turmoil and disorder seemed
to be the order of the day. The Italian and Northern Renaissance, of course,
would damn all of this as a Dark Age. Europe was about to face even more
disasters but the awakening of the European mind was real and continual. And
again, it was the religious institution we call the medieval Church which was
to take the real brunt of the attack. And then there was the Protestant
Reformation of the 16th century. A revolutionary event to the core, it was
Martin Luther who perhaps completed what Abelard had begun.
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