BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - THE EVIDENCE
So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman Empire (that is of European
civilization and of the Catholic Church with which that civilization was
identified) from the origins both of the Church and of the Empire, to the
turning point of the fifth century. We have seen the character of that
turning point.
There was a gradual decline in the power of the central monarchy, an
increasing use of auxiliary barbarian troops in the army upon which Roman
society was founded, until at last (in the years from 400 to 500 A.D.)
authority, though Roman in every detail of its form, gradually ceased
to be exercised from Rome or Constantinople, but fell imperceptibly
into the hands of a number of local governments. We have seen that the
administration of these local governments usually devolved on the chief
officers of the auxiliary barbarian troops, who were also, as a rule, their
chieftains by some kind of inheritance.
We have seen that there was no considerable infiltration of barbarian
blood, no "invasions" in our modern sense of the term--(or rather,
no successful ones); no blotting out of civilization, still less any
introduction of new institutions or ideas drawn from barbarism.
The coast regions of Eastern Britain (the strongest example of all, for
there the change was most severe) were reconquered for civilization and
for the Faith by the efforts of St. Augustine; Africa was recaptured for
the direct rule of the Emperor: so was Italy and the South of Spain. At
the end of the seventh century that which was in the future to be called
Christendom (and which is nothing more than the Roman Empire continuing
though transformed) is again reunited.
What followed was a whole series of generations in which the forms of
civilization were set and crystallized in a few very simple, traditional
and easily appreciated types. The whole standard of Europe was lowered to
the level of its fundamentals, as it were. The primary arts upon which we
depend for our food and drink, and raiment and shelter survived intact.
The secondary arts reposing upon these, failed and disappeared almost
in proportion to their distance from fundamental necessities of our
race. History became no more than a simple chronicle. Letters, in the
finer sense, almost ceased. Four hundred years more were to pass before
Europe was to reawaken from this sort of sleep into which her spirit had
retreated, and the passage from the full civilization of Rome through this
period of simple and sometimes barbarous things, is properly called the
Dark Ages.
It is of great importance for anyone who would comprehend the general story
of Europe, to grasp the nature of those half-hidden centuries. They may be
compared to a lake into which the activities of the old world flowed and
stirred and then were still, and from which in good time the activities of
the Middle Ages, properly so called, were again to flow.
Again one may compare the Dark Ages to the leafsoil of a forest. They are
formed by the disintegration of an antique florescence. They are the bed
from which new florescence shall spring.
It is a curious phenomenon to consider: this hibernation, or sleep: this
rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and reflux
of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse than to
a growth. It makes us remember that rhythm which is observed in all
forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere progress from simplicity to
complexity which used to be affirmed as the main law of history.
The contemplation of the Dark Ages affords a powerful criticism of that
superficial theory of social evolution which is among the intellectual
plagues of our own generation. Much more is the story of Europe like the
waking and the sleeping of a mature man, than like any indefinite increase
in the aptitudes and powers of a growing body.
Though the prime characteristic of the Dark Ages is one of recollection,
and though they are chiefly marked by this note of Europe sinking back into
herself, very much more must be known of them before we have the truth,
even in its most general form.
I will put in the form of a category or list the chief points which we must
bear in mind.
In the first place the Dark Ages were a period of intense military action.
Christendom was besieged from all around. It was held like a stronghold,
and in those centuries of struggle its institutions were molded by military
necessities: so that Christendom has ever since had about it the quality of
a soldier. There was one unending series of attacks, Pagan and Mohammedan,
from the North, from the East and from the South; attacks not comparable to
the older raids of external hordes, eager only to enjoy civilization within
the Empire, small in number and yet ready to accept the faith and customs
of Europe. The barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries--at
the end of the United Roman Empire--had been of this lesser kind.
The mighty struggles of the eighth, ninth and especially the tenth
centuries--of the Dark Ages--were a very different matter. Had the military
institutions of Europe failed in that struggle, our civilization would
have been wiped out; and indeed at one or two critical points, as in the
middle of the eighth against the Mohammedan, and at the end of the ninth
century against the northern pirates, all human judgment would have decided
that Europe was doomed.
In point of fact, as we shall see in a moment, Europe was just barely
saved. It was saved by the sword and by the intense Christian ideal which
nerved the sword arm. But it was only just barely saved.
The first assault came from Islam.
A new intense and vividly anti-Christian thing arose in a moment, as it
were, out of nothing, out of the hot sands to the East and spread like a
fire. It consumed all the Levant. It arrived at the doors of the West. This
was no mere rush of barbarism. The Mohammedan world was as cultured as
our own in its first expansion. It maintained a higher and an increasing
culture while ours declined; and its conquest, where it conquered us, was
the conquest of something materially superior for the moment over the
remaining arts and traditions of Christian Europe.
Just at the moment when Britain was finally won back to Europe, and when
the unity of the West seemed to be recovered (though its life had fallen
to so much lower a plane), we lost North Africa; it was swept from end
to end in one tidal rush by that new force which aimed fiercely at our
destruction. Immediately afterwards the first Mohammedan force crossed the
Straits of Gibraltar; and in a few months after its landing the whole of
the Spanish Peninsula, that strong Rock as it had seemed of ancient Roman
culture, the hard Iberian land, crumbled. Politically, at least, and right
up to the Pyrenees, Asia had it in its grip. In the mountain valleys alone,
and especially in the tangle of highlands which occupies the northwestern
corner of the Spanish square, individual communities of soldiers held out.
From these the gradual reconquest of Spain by Christendom was to proceed,
but for the moment they were crowded and penned upon the Asturian hills
like men fighting against a wall.
Even Gaul was threatened: a Mohammedan host poured up into its very centre
far beyond Poitiers: halfway to Tours. Luckily it was defeated; but Moslem
garrisons continued to hold out in the Southern districts, in the northern
fringes of the Pyrenees and along the shore line of the Narbonese and
Provence.
Southern Italy was raided and partly occupied. The islands of the
Mediterranean fell.
Against this sudden successful spring which had lopped off half of the
West, the Dark Ages, and especially the French of the Dark Ages, spent a
great part of their military energy. The knights of Northern Spain and the
chiefs of the unconquered valleys recruited their forces perpetually from
Gaul beyond the Pyrenees; and the northern valley of the Ebro, the high
plains of Castile and Leon, were the training ground of European valor
for three hundred years. The Basques were the unyielding basis of all the
advance.
This Mohammedan swoop was the first and most disastrously successful of the
three great assaults.
Next came the Scandinavian pirates.
Their descent was a purely barbaric thing, not numerous but (since pirates
can destroy much with small numbers) for centuries unexhausted. They
harried all the rivers and coasts of Britain, of Gaul, and of the
Netherlands. They appeared in the Southern seas and their efforts seemed
indefatigable. Britain especially (where the raiders bore the local name of
"Danes") suffered from a ceaseless pillage, and these new enemies had no
attraction to the Roman land save loot. They merely destroyed. They refused
our religion. Had they succeeded they would not have mingled with us, but
would have ended us.
Both in Northern Gaul and in Britain their chieftains acquired something of
a foothold, but only after the perilous moment in which their armies were
checked; they were tamed and constrained to accept the society they had
attacked.
This critical moment when Europe seemed doomed was the last generation
of the ninth century. France had been harried up to the gates of Paris.
Britain was so raided that its last independent king, Alfred, was in
hiding.
Both in Britain and Gaul Christendom triumphed and in the same generation.
Paris stood a successful siege, and the family which defended it was
destined to become the royal family of all France at the inception of the
Middle Ages. Alfred of Wessex in the same decade recovered South England.
In both provinces of Christendom the situation was saved. The chiefs of the
pirates were baptized; and though Northern barbarism remained a material
menace for another hundred years, there was no further danger of our
destruction.
Finally, less noticed by history, but quite as grievous, and needing a
defence as gallant, was the pagan advance over the North German Plain and
up the valley of the Danube.
All the frontier of Christendom upon this line from Augsburg and the Lech
to the course of the Elbe and the North Sea, was but a line of fortresses
and continual battlefields. It was but recently organized land. Until
the generations before the year 800 there was no civilization beyond the
Rhine save the upper Danube partially reclaimed, and a very scanty single
extension up the valley of the Lower Main.
But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric Germanies
right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept religion, letters
and arts. He extended Europe to these new boundaries and organized them as
a sort of rampart in the East: a thing the Roman Empire had not done. The
Church was the cement of this new belt of defence--the imperfect population
of which were evangelized from Ireland and Britain. It was an experiment,
this creation of the Germanies by Western culture, this spiritual
colonization of a March beyond the limits of the Empire. It did not
completely succeed, as the Reformation proves; but it had at least the
strength in the century after Charlemagne, its founder, to withstand the
Eastern attack upon Christendom.
The attack was not racial. It was Pagan Slav, mixed with much that was left
of Pagan German, even Mongol. Its character was the advance of the savage
against the civilized man, and it remained a peril two generations longer
than the peril which Gaul and Britain had staved off from the North.
This, then, is the first characteristic to be remembered of the Dark Ages:
the violence of the physical struggle and the intense physical effort by
which Europe was saved.
The second characteristic of the Dark Ages proceeds from this first
military one: it may be called Feudalism.
Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of the
old Roman provincial centres of administration into the hands of each small
local society and its lord. On such a basis there was a reconstruction of
society from below: these local lords associating themselves under greater
men, and these again holding together in great national groups under a
national overlord.
In the violence of the struggle through which Christendom passed, town and
village, valley and castle, had often to defend itself alone.
The great Roman landed estates, with their masses of dependents and slaves,
under a lord or owner, had never disappeared. The descendants of these
Roman, Gallic, British, owners formed the fighting class of the Dark
Ages, and in this new function of theirs, perpetually lifted up to be the
sole depositories of authority in some small imperiled countryside, they
grew to be nearly independent units. For the purposes of cohesion that
family which possessed most estates in a district tended to become the
leader of it. Whole provinces were thus formed and grouped, and the vaguer
sentiments of a larger unity expressed themselves by the choice of some one
family, one of the most powerful in every county, who would be the overlord
of all the other lords, great and small.
Side by side with this growth of local independence and of voluntary local
groupings, went the transformation of the old imperial nominated offices
into hereditary and personal things.
A count, for instance, was originally a "comes" or "companion" of
the Emperor. The word dates from long before the break-up of the central
authority of Rome. A count later was a great official: a local governor
and judge--the Vice-Roy of a large district (a French county and English
shire). His office was revocable, like other official appointments. He was
appointed for a season, first at the Emperor's, later at the local King's
discretion, to a particular local government. In the Dark Ages the count
becomes hereditary. He thinks of his government as a possession which his
son should rightly have after him. He bases his right to his government
upon the possession of great estates within the area of that government.
In a word, he comes to think of himself not as an official at all but as
a feudal overlord, and all society (and the remaining shadow of central
authority itself) agrees with him.
The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of
Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors,
taxed and administered by a regular government, to a society of fighting
nobles and their descendants, organized upon a basis of independence and
in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no longer by slaves in
the villages, but by half-free serfs or "villeins."
Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalize this
living and real thing. It was pretended--by a legal fiction--that the
central King owned nearly all the land, that the great overlords "held"
their land of him, the lesser lords "holding" theirs hereditarily of the
overlords, and so forth. This idea of "holding" instead of "owning," though
it gave an easy machinery for confiscation in time of rebellion, was legal
theory only, and, so far as men's views of property went, a mere form. The
reality was what I have described.
The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was the curious fixity of morals,
of traditions, of the forms of religion, and of all that makes up social
life.
We may presume that all civilization originally sprang from a soil in which
custom was equally permanent.
We know that in the great civilizations of the East an enduring fixity of
form is normal.
But in the general history of Europe, it has been otherwise. There has
been a perpetual flux in the outward form of things, in architecture,
in dress, and in the statement of philosophy as well (though not in its
fundamentals).
In this mobile surface of European history the Dark Ages form a sort of
island of changelessness. There is an absence of any great heresies in the
West, and, save in one or two names, an absence of speculation. It was as
though men had no time for any other activity but the ceaseless business of
arms and of the defence of the West.
Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the central figure of those
centuries. It is spent almost entirely in the saddle. One season finds
him upon the Elbe, the next upon the Pyrenees. One Easter he celebrates
in Northern Gaul, another in Rome. The whole story is one of perpetual
marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the
boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to
learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its
passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand. An anxious and
sometimes desperate determination to preserve the memory of a great but
half-forgotten past is the business of his court, which dissolves just
before the worst of the Pagan assault; as it is the business of Alfred,
who arises a century later, just after the worst assault has been finally
repelled.
Religion during these centuries settled and consolidated, as it were.
An enemy would say that it petrified, a friend that it was enormously
strengthened by pressure. But whatever the metaphor chosen, the truth
indicated will be this: that the Catholic Faith became between the years
600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last vestiges of the antique and
Pagan civilization of the Mediterranean were absorbed. A habit of certitude
and of fixity even in the details of thought was formed in the European
mind.
It is to be noted in this connection that geographically the centre of
things had somewhat shifted. With the loss of Spain and of Northern Africa,
the Mohammedan raiding of Southern Italy and the islands, the Mediterranean
was no longer a vehicle of Western civilization, but the frontier of it.
Rome itself might now be regarded as a frontier town. The eruption of the
barbarians from the East along the Danube had singularly cut off the Latin
West from Constantinople and from all the high culture of its Empire.
Therefore, the centre of that which resisted in the West, the geographical
nucleus of the island of Christendom, which was besieged all round, was
France, and in particular Northern France. Northern Italy, the Germanies,
the Pyrenees and the upper valley of the Ebro were essentially the marches
of Gaul. Gaul was to preserve all that could be preserved of the material
side of Europe, and also of the European spirit. And therefore the New
World, when it arose, with its Gothic Architecture, its Parliaments, its
Universities, and, in general, its spring of the Middle Ages, was to be a
Gallic thing.
The fourth characteristic of the Dark Ages was a material one, and was that
which would strike our eyes most immediately if we could transfer ourselves
in time, and enjoy a physical impression of that world. This characteristic
was derived from what I have just been saying. It was the material
counterpart of the moral immobility or steadfastness of the time. It
was this: that the external forms of things stood quite unchanged. The
semi-circular arch, the short, stout pillar, occasionally (but rarely) the
dome: these were everywhere the mark of architecture. There was no change
nor any attempt at change. The arts were saved but not increased, and
the whole of the work that men did with their hands stood fast in mere
tradition. No new town arises. If one is mentioned (Oxford, for instance)
for the first time in the Dark Ages, whether in Britain or in Gaul, one
may fairly presume a Roman origin for it, even though there be no actual
mention of it handed down from Roman times.
No new roads were laid. The old Roman military system of highways was kept
up and repaired, though kept up and repaired with a declining vigor. The
wheel of European life had settled to one slow rate of turning.
Not only were all these forms enduring, they were also few and simple. One
type of public building and of church, one type of writing, everywhere
recognizable, one type of agriculture, with very few products to
differentiate it, alone remained.
The fifth characteristic of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only
apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character which
I have just been describing. It is this: the Dark Ages were the point
during which there very gradually germinated and came into outward
existence things which still remain among us and help to differentiate our
Christendom from the past of classical antiquity.
This is true of certain material things. The spur, the double bridle, the
stirrup, the book in leaves distinct from the old roll--and very much
else. It is true of the road system of Europe wherever that road system
has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages with the
gradual break-down of expensive causeways over marshes; with the gradual
decline of certain centres; with bridges left unrepaired; culverts choked
and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that you got the
deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river valley in
England, where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its low-lying
banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us in our road
system: you may see the modern road leaving the old Roman line and picking
its way across the wet lands from one drier point to another, and rejoining
the Roman line beyond. It is a thing you will see in almost anyone of our
Strettons, Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords, etc., which everywhere mark the
crossing of a Roman road over a water course.
But much more than in material things the Dark Ages set a mold wherein the
European mind grew. For instance, it was they that gave to us two forms of
legend. The one something older than history, older than the Roman order,
something Western reappearing with the release of the mind from the rigid
accuracy of a high civilization; the other that legend which preserves
historical truth under a guise of phantasy.
Of the first, the British story of Tristan is one example out of a
thousand. Of the second, the legend of Constantine, which gradually and
unconsciously developed into the famous Donation.
The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story coloring and enlivening all our
European life, and what is more, largely preserving historic truth; for
nothing is more valuable to true history than legend. They also gave us
our order in speech. Great hosts of words unknown to antiquity sprang
up naturally among the people when the force of the classical centre
failed. Some of them were words of the languages before the Roman armies
came--cask, for instance, the old Iberian word. Some of them were the camp
talk of the soldiers. Spade, for instance, and "épée," the same piece of
Greek slang, "the broad one," which has come to mean in French a sword; in
English that with which we dig the earth. Masses of technical words in the
old Roman laws turned into popular usage through that appetite the poor
have for long official phrases: for instance, our English words wild,
weald, wold, waste, gain, rider, rode, ledge, say, and a
thousand others, all branch out from the lawyers' phrases of the later
Roman Empire.
In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages crystallized also--by a process
which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses--that rich mass
of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress, which
differentiates one place from another, when the communications of a high
material civilization break down. In all this the Dark Ages are a comfort
to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the process of
increasing complexity reaches its term; that the strain of development is
at last relieved; that humanity sooner or later returns upon itself; that
there is an end in repose and that the repose is fruitful.
The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most engrossed,
puzzled, and warped the judgment of non-Catholic historians when they have
attempted a conspectus of European development; it was the segregation, the
homogeneity of and the dominance of clerical organization. The hierarchy
of the Church, its unity and its sense of discipline was the chief civil
institution and the chief binding social force of the times. Side by side
with it went the establishment of the monastic institution which everywhere
took on a separate life of its own, preserved what could be preserved of
arts and letters, drained the marshes and cleared the forests, and formed
the ideal economic unit for such a period; almost the only economic unit in
which capital could then be accumulated and preserved. The great order of
St. Benedict formed a framework of living points upon which was stretched
the moral life of Europe. The vast and increasing endowments of great and
fixed religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries.
They were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the
fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their
violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic
tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.
Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution--I have already called
it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution--at any rate as a political
institution--remained absolute above the social disintegration of the time.
All natural things were slowly growing up unchecked and disturbing the
strict lines of the old centralized governmental order which men still
remembered. In language Europe was a medley of infinitely varying local
dialects.
Thousands upon thousands of local customs were coming to be separate laws
in each separate village.
Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed history. The tribal basis
from which we spring was thrusting its instincts back into the strict
and rational Latin fabric of the State. Status was everywhere replacing
contract, and habit replacing a reason for things. Above this medley the
only absolute organization that could be was that of the Church. The Papacy
was the one centre whose shifting could not even be imagined. The Latin
tongue, in the late form in which the Church used it, was everywhere the
same, and everywhere suited to rituals that differed but slightly from
province to province when we contrast them with the millioned diversity of
local habit and speech.
Whenever a high civilization was to re-arise out of the soil of the Dark
Ages, it was certain first to show a full organization of the Church
under some Pope of exceptional vigor, and next to show that Pope, or his
successors in this tradition, at issue with new civil powers. Whenever
central government should rise again and in whatever form, a conflict would
begin between the new kings and the clerical organization which had so
strengthened itself during the Dark Ages.
Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its long sleep. The eleventh century
was the moment of its awakening. Three great forces--the personality of St.
Gregory VII., the appearance (by a happy accident of slight cross breeding:
a touch of Scandinavian blood added to the French race) of the Norman race,
finally the Crusades--drew out of the darkness the enormous vigor of the
early Middle Ages. They were to produce an intense and active civilization
of their own; a civilization which was undoubtedly the highest and the
best our race has known, conformable to the instincts of the European,
fulfilling his nature, giving him that happiness which is the end of men.
As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages, after
four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater heights
when it suffered shipwreck.
With that disaster, the disaster of the Reformation, I shall deal later in
this series.
In my next chapter I shall describe the inception of the Middle Ages, and
show what they were before our promise in them was ruined.
I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages might be compared to a long
sleep of Europe: a sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old society in the
fifth century to the spring and rising of the eleventh and twelfth. The
metaphor is far too simple, of course, for that sleep was a sleep of war.
In all those centuries Europe was desperately holding its own against the
attack of all that desired to destroy it: refined and ardent Islam from the
South, letterless barbarian pagans from the East and North. At any rate,
from that sleep or that besieging Europe awoke or was relieved.
I said that three great forces, humanly speaking, worked this miracle; the
personality of St. Gregory VII.; the brief appearance, by a happy accident,
of the Norman State; and finally the Crusades.
The Normans of history, the true French Normans we know, are stirring a
generation after the year 1000. St. Gregory filled that same generation. He
was a young man when the Norman effort began. He died, full of an enormous
achievement, in 1085. As much as one man could, he, the heir of Cluny,
had re-made Europe. Immediately after his death there was heard the march
of the Crusades. From these three the vigor of a fresh, young, renewed
Europe proceeds.
Much might be added. The perpetual and successful chivalric charge against
the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified it. Asia
was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of the Pyrenees
perpetually cavalcaded the high adventurers of Christendom. The Basques--a
strange and very strong small people--were the pivot of that reconquest,
but the valley of the torrent of the Aragon was its channel. The life of
St. Gregory is contemporaneous with that of El Cid Campeador. In the same
year that St. Gregory died, Toledo, the sacred centre of Spain, was at last
forced from the Mohammedans, and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All
Southern Europe was alive with the sword.
In that same moment romance appeared; the great songs: the greatest of them
all, the Song of Roland; then was a ferment of the European mind, eager
from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields. That watching
skepticism which flanks and follows the march of the Faith when the Faith
is most vigorous had also begun to speak.
There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that
something of the unfruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke and
Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas,
was to appear. The plastic arts leapt up: Color and Stone. Humor fully
returned: general travel: vision. In general, the moment was one of
expectation and of advance. It was spring.
For the purposes of these few pages I must confine the attention of my
reader to those three tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I have
said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., and the Crusades.
Of the Norman race we may say that it resembled in history those mirae or
new stars which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for some few
hours or weeks or years, and then are lost or merged in the infinity of
things. He is indeed unhistorical who would pretend William the Conqueror,
the organizer and maker of what we now call England, Robert the Wizard, the
conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman names that light Europe in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be even partly Scandinavians. They
were Gauls: short in stature, lucid in design, vigorous in stroke, positive
in philosophy. They bore no outward relation to the soft and tall and
sentimental North from which some few of their remote ancestry had drawn
ancestral names.
But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and
ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was merely Gallo-Roman, would commit an
error: an error far less gross but still misleading. In speech, in manner,
in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the horse, in the cooking of
food, in that most intimate part of man, his jests, the Norman was wholly
and apparently a Gaul. In his body--hard, short, square, broad-shouldered,
alert--the Norman was a Frenchman only. But no other part of Gaul then
did what Normandy did: nor could any other French province show, as
Normandy showed, immediate, organized and creative power, during the few
years that the marvel lasted.
That marvel is capable of explanation and I will attempt to explain it.
Those dull, blundering and murderous ravagings of the coasts of Christian
Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (few in number, futile in achievement)
which we call in English history, "The Danish Invasions," were called upon
the opposite coast of the Channel, "The Invasions of the Nordmanni" or "the
Men of the North." They came from the Baltic and from Norway. They were
part of the universal assault which the Dark Ages of Christendom had to
sustain: part of a ceaseless pressure from without against civilization;
and they were but a part of it. They were few, as pirates always must be.
It was on the estuaries of a few continental rivers and in the British
Isles that they counted most in the lives of Europeans.
Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was the estuary of the Seine.
The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end of the
ninth century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly becoming the
political centre of Gaul.
So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold of
the Roman Empire that the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement
(by inter-marriage with and granting of land in, a fixed Roman province)
was a policy still obvious to those who still called themselves "The
Emperors" of the West.
In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of tradition,
produced its last example and the barbarian troublers from the sea were
given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The maritime
province "Lugdunensis Secunda" [Footnote: The delimitation of this province
dated from Diocletian. It was already six hundred years old, its later
name of "Normandy" masked this essential fact that it was and is a Roman
division, as for that matter are probably our English counties.] was handed
over to them for settlement, that is, they might not attempt a partition of
the land outside its boundaries.
On the analogy of all similar experiments we can be fairly certain of what
happened, though there is no contemporary record of such domestic details
in the case of Normandy.
The barbarians, few in number, coming into a fertile and thickly populated
Roman province, only slightly affected its blood, but their leaders
occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs of existing childless
lords, took to wife the heiresses of others; enfeoffed groups of small men;
took a share of the revenue; helped to answer for military levy and general
government. Their chief was responsible to the crown.
To the mass of the population the new arrangement would make no change;
they were no longer slaves, but they were still serfs. Secure of their
small farms, but still bound to work for their lord, it mattered little to
them whether that lord of theirs had married his daughter to a pirate or
had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the management of the estate.
All the change the serf would notice from the settlement was that the
harrying and the plundering of occasional barbarian raids had ceased.
In the governing class of perhaps some ten to twenty thousand families the
difference would be very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers, though
insignificant in number compared with the total population, were a very
large fraction added to so small a body. The additional blood, though
numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly throughout the whole
community. Scandinavian names and habits may have had at first some little
effect upon the owner-class with which the Scandinavians first mingled; it
soon disappeared. But, as had been the case centuries before in the earlier
experiments of that sort, it was the barbarian chief and his hereditary
descendants who took over the local government and "held it," as the phrase
went, of the universal government of Gaul.
These "North-men," the new and striking addition to the province, the
Gallo-Romans called, as we have seen "Nordmanni." The Roman province,
within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second Lyonnese,
came to be called "Normannia." For a century the slight admixture of
new blood worked in the general Gallo-Roman mass of the province and,
numerically small though it was, influenced its character, or rather
produced a new thing; just as in certain chemical combinations the small
admixture of a new element transforms the whole. With the beginning of the
eleventh century, as everything was springing into new life, when the great
saint who, from the chair of Peter, was to restore the Church was already
born, when the advance of the Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to
strike its decisive conquering blows, there appeared, a sudden phenomenon,
this new thing--French in speech and habit and disposition of body, yet
just differentiated from the rest of Frenchmen--the Norman Race.
It possessed these characteristics--a great love of exact order, an alert
military temper and a passion for reality which made its building even of
ships (though it was not in the main seafaring) excellent, and of churches
and of castles the most solid of its time.
All the Normans' characteristics (once the race was formed), led them
to advance. They conquered England and organized it; they conquered and
organized Sicily and Southern Italy; they made of Normandy itself the model
state in a confused time; they surveyed land; they developed a regular
tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they endured for but a hundred years, and
after that brief coruscation they are wholly merged again in the mass of
European things!
You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin in, say 1030, for
the beginning of the Norman thing; you may take the Court of young Henry
II. with his Southerners and his high culture in, say 1160, most certainly
for the burial of it. During that little space of time the Norman had not
only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men, he had also provided
the sword of the new Papacy and he had furnished the framework of the
crusading host. But before his adventure was done the French language and
the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the Euphrates.
Of the Papacy and the Crusades I now speak.
St. Gregory VII., the second of the great re-creative forces of that time,
was of the Tuscan peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian in speech,
by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his career or no is a
very test of whether that historian understands the nature of Europe. For
St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing upon Europe. He made nothing new. What he
did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He provoked a resurrection of
the flesh. He made corporate the centralized Church and the West.
For instance; it was the ideal, the doctrine, the tradition, the major
custom by far, that the clergy should be celibate. He enforced celibacy as
universal discipline.
The awful majesty of the Papacy had been present in all men's minds as a
vast political conception for centuries too long to recall; St. Gregory
organized that monarchy, and gave it proper instruments of rule.
The Unity of the Church had been the constant image without which
Christendom could not be; St. Gregory VII. at every point made that unity
tangible and visible. The Protestant historians who, for the most part, see
in the man a sporadic phenomenon, by such a misconception betray the source
of their anaemia and prove their intellectual nourishment to be unfed from
the fountain of European life. St. Gregory VII. was not an inventor, but a
renovator. He worked not upon, but in, his material; and his material was
the nature of Europe: our nature.
Of the awful obstacles such workers must encounter all history speaks.
They are at conflict not only with evil, but with inertia; and with local
interest, with blurred vision and with restricted landscapes. Always they
think themselves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died. Always they
prove themselves before posterity to have done much more than any other
mold of man. Napoleon also was of this kind.
When St. Gregory was dead the Europe which he left was the monument of
that triumph whose completion he had doubted and the fear of whose failure
had put upon his dying lips the phrase: "I have loved justice and hated
iniquity, therefore I die in exile."
Immediately after his death came the stupendous Gallic effort of the
Crusades.
The Crusades were the second of the main armed eruptions of the Gauls. The
first, centuries before, had been the Gallic invasion of Italy and Greece
and the Mediterranean shores in the old Pagan time. The third, centuries
later, was to be the wave of the Revolution and of Napoleon.
The preface to the Crusades appeared in those endless and already
successful wars of Christendom against Asia upon the high plateaus of
Spain. These had taught the enthusiasm and the method by which Asia,
for so long at high tide flooding a beleaguered Europe, might be slowly
repelled, and from these had proceeded the military science and the
aptitude for strain which made possible the advance of two thousand miles
upon the Holy Land. The consequences of this last and third factor in the
re-awakening of Europe were so many that I can give but a list of them
here.
The West, still primitive, discovered through the Crusades the intensive
culture, the accumulated wealth, the fixed civilized traditions of the
Greek Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It discovered also, in a
vivid new experience, the East. The mere covering of so much land, the mere
seeing of so many sights by a million men expanded and broke the walls
of the mind of the Dark Ages. The Mediterranean came to be covered with
Christian ships, and took its place again with fertile rapidity as the
great highway of exchange.
Europe awoke. All architecture is transformed, and that quite new thing,
the Gothic, arises. The conception of representative assembly, monastic
in origin, fruitfully transferred to civilian soil, appears in the
institutions of Christendom. The vernacular languages appear, and with them
the beginnings of our literature: the Tuscan, the Castilian, the Langue
d'Oc, the Northern French, somewhat later the English. Even the primitive
tongues that had always kept their vitality from beyond recorded time,
the Celtic and the German [Footnote: I mean, in neither of the groups of
tongues as we first find them recorded, for by that time each--especially
the German--was full of Southern words borrowed from the Empire; but the
original stocks which survived side by side with this new vocabulary. For
instance, our first knowledge of Teutonic dialect is of the eighth century
(the so-called Early Gothic fraud) but even then quite half the words
or more are truly German, apparently unaffected by the Imperial laws
and speech.] begin to take on new creative powers and to produce a new
literature. That fundamental institution of Europe, the University, arises;
first in Italy, immediately after in Paris--which last becomes the type and
centre of the scheme.
The central civil governments begin to correspond to their natural limits,
the English monarchy is fixed first, the French kingdom is coalescing, the
Spanish regions will soon combine. The Middle Ages are born.
The flower of that capital experiment in the history of our race was
the thirteenth century. Edward I. of England, St. Louis of France, Pope
Innocent III., were the types of its governing manhood. Everywhere Europe
was renewed; there were new white walls around the cities, new white Gothic
churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law codified, the classics
rediscovered, the questions of philosophy sprung to activity and producing
in their first vigor, as it were, the summit of expository power in St.
Thomas, surely the strongest, the most virile, intellect which our European
blood has given to the world.
Two notes mark the time for anyone who is acquainted with its building, its
letters, and its wars: a note of youth, and a note of content. Europe was
imagined to be at last achieved, and that ineradicable dream of a permanent
and satisfactory society seemed to have taken on flesh and to have come to
live forever among Christian men.
No such permanence and no such good is permitted to humanity; and the great
experiment, as I have called it, was destined to fail.
While it flourished, all that is specially characteristic of our European
descent and nature stood visibly present in the daily life, and in the
large, as in the small, institutions, of Europe.
Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or all; we
produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman; we founded
coöperative industry. In arms that military type arose which lives upon the
virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may breed. Above all, an
intense and living appetite for truth, a perception of reality, invigorated
these generations. They saw what was before them, they called things by
their names. Never was political or social formula less divorced from fact,
never was the mass of our civilization better welded--and in spite of all
this the thing did not endure.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was
tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue
successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of sophistry in
philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not an institution of
the thirteenth but the fourteenth debased it; the Papacy professional and a
prisoner, the parliaments tending to oligarchy, the popular ideals dimmed
in the minds of the rulers, the new and vigorous and democratic monastic
orders already touched with mere wealth and beginning also to change--but
these last can always, and do always, restore themselves.
Upon all this came the enormous incident of the Black Death. Here half the
people, there a third, there again a quarter, died; from that additional
blow the great experiment of the Middle Ages could not recover.
Men clung to their ideal for yet another hundred and fifty years. The vital
forces it had developed still carried Europe from one material perfection
to another; the art of government, the suggestion of letters, the technique
of sculpture and of painting (here raised by a better vision, there
degraded by a worse one), everywhere developed and grew manifold. But
the supreme achievement of the thirteenth century was seen in the later
fourteenth to be ephemeral, and in the fifteenth it was apparent that the
attempt to found a simple and satisfied Europe had failed.
The full causes of that failure cannot be analyzed. One may say that
science and history were too slight; that the material side of life was
insufficient; that the full knowledge of the past which is necessary to
permanence was lacking--or one may say that the ideal was too high for men.
I, for my part, incline to believe that wills other than those of mortals
were in combat for the soul of Europe, as they are in combat daily for the
souls of individual men, and that in this spiritual battle, fought over our
heads perpetually, some accident of the struggle turned it against us for a
time. If that suggestion be fantastic (which no doubt it is), at any rate
none other is complete.
With the end of the fifteenth century there was to come a supreme test
and temptation. The fall of Constantinople and the release of Greek: the
rediscovery of the Classic past: the Press: the new great voyages--India to
the East, America to the West--had (in the one lifetime of a man [Footnote:
The lifetime of one very great and famous man did cover it. Ferdinand,
King of Aragon, the mighty Spaniard, the father of the noblest of English
queens, was born the year before Constantinople fell. He died the year
before Luther found himself swept to the head of a chaotic wave.] between
1453 and 1515) suddenly brought Europe into a new, a magic, and a dangerous
land.
To the provinces of Europe, shaken by an intellectual tempest of physical
discovery, disturbed by an abrupt and undigested enlargement in the
material world, in physical science, and in the knowledge of antiquity, was
to be offered a fruit of which each might taste if it would, but the taste
of which would lead, if it were acquired, to evils no citizen of Europe
then dreamt of; to things which even the criminal intrigues and the cruel
tyrants of the fifteenth century would have shuddered to contemplate, and
to a disaster which very nearly overset our ship of history and very nearly
lost us forever its cargo of letters, of philosophy, of the arts, and of
all our other powers.
That disaster is commonly called "The Reformation." I do not pretend to
analyze its material causes, for I doubt if any of its causes were wholly
material. I rather take the shape of the event and show how the ancient
and civilized boundaries of Europe stood firm, though shaken, under the
tempest; how that tempest might have ravaged no more than those outlying
parts newly incorporated--never sufficiently penetrated perhaps with
the Faith and the proper habits of ordered men--the outer Germanies and
Scandinavia.
The disaster would have been upon a scale not too considerable, and Europe
might quickly have righted herself after the gust should be passed, had not
one exception of capital amount marked the intensest crisis of the storm.
That exception to the resistance offered by the rest of ancient Europe was
the defection of Britain.
Conversely with this loss of an ancient province of the Empire, one nation,
and one alone, of those which the Roman Empire had not bred, stood the
strain and preserved the continuity of Christian tradition: that nation was
Ireland.
BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - THE EVIDENCE