The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (25 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Chapter Five
 
THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES: THE BRIGHT AGES
 
W
e all know what the Middle Ages were like. My freshmen know. They’ve learned it from the infallible authority known as High School Platitudes.
 
First, the Middle Ages were dark. People lived in squalor. Beset by terrible fears, they burned kindly old ladies peddling herbal remedies, calling them witches. They made no progress in the natural sciences. They knew nothing of the world beyond their time and place, and had no desire to know. Their studies were narrow and dogmatic, and the few great minds of their era plied their intelligence to discover how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Life was so miserable that most people, especially the dirt-peasant majority, lived only for the next world, placing all their hope in a heaven beyond the stars.
 
Guess What?
 
Medieval Europe’s creativity and vitality makes our age look sluggish and drab.
 
The Middle Ages was the true era of love.
 
A warming climate—much warmer than today—was good for culture.
 
 
Let’s set the record straight. From 962 (the crowning of Otto the Great as Holy Roman Emperor) to 1321 (the death of Dante), Europe enjoyed one of the most magnificent flourishings of culture the world has seen. In some ways it was the most magnificent
.
And this was not
despite
the fact that the daily tolling of the church bells provided the rhythm of men’s lives, but
because
of it. Because the people believed they lived in a
comic
world, that is a world redeemed from sin, wherein the Savior had triumphed over darkness and death, they could love that world aright. They were pilgrims at heart, who yet passionately loved their native
 
 
131
 
lands, their town walls, their hillsides, their many colorful festivals, their local food and drink. They enjoyed the freedom of hope. They were not pressed to death with the urgency to create a heaven upon earth, a longing that ends in despair, or the gulag.
 
You won’t hear this tale on television or in school. A powerful Church should be a regular monster, destroying intellectual endeavor and enforcing dreariness upon art—long before academe made artistic dreariness a mark of sophistication. Forswearing instant gratification (not that everyone in the Middle Ages did forswear it) should produce a continent of mopes, or seething villains, or something miserable which Americans with their dropout factories and nearly three million incarcerated men know nothing of. Besides, because we all believe in inevitable social progress, everything must have been terrible in the past, at least compared to today. Why, I feel myself progressing morally with every tick of the clock; don’t you? Mainly, the Middle Ages must have been bad because they were
middle
.
 
Any close study will disabuse us of this PC bigotry.
 
Islam vs. civilization
 
Before I discuss what this flourishing brought us, I’d like to note that the real question is not
why
it happened, but why it didn’t happen
sooner
. It might have, were it not for three things over which the Christians in the West had little or no influence.
 
The first of these were the invasions of the old empire by Germans and Slavs and others. Some had already been converted to a form of Christianity (the Goths were Arians), and were attracted by the high culture of the Roman cities in Gaul and Italy and Greece. Some, like the Huns, were spurred by the love of marauding. Still others, like the Vandals (whence we derive our word for people who smash things for fun and profit), blazed across the continent, yet eventually settled down to stable kingdoms under law.
 
These incursions—lasting many centuries, until Otto the Great thwarted the Magyars in 954, and until those seacoast and river pillagers the Vikings were brought to the Christian faith—made trade difficult and costly. Economies shriveled; coinage vanished; people had to live on what they got from the land. With a poor climate and empty purses, that was often little enough. Peasants were reduced to serfdom, trading their labor and freedom for whatever poor protection the local lord could provide. Worse still for the culture, the chaos and the danger of the seaways severed the Greek East from the Latin West, and so vast tracts of Greek philosophy, science, and literature were lost.
 
The chaos might have been overcome from the East, had the empire in Byzantium been strong and outward-looking. It was not. It too was pressed by Eastern tribes, but, more important, it had to resist the second factor, jihadist Islam. Recall that in the days of Augustine, around 400 AD, all of Africa north of the Sahara, including the Nile Valley from the sea to the heart of the Sudan, was Greco-Roman in culture, and mainly Christian in faith. Augustine was an African, and died as bishop of Hippo Regius, in what is now Tunisia. Tertullian was an African. Anthony, the hermit whose example over the 108 years of his life spurred a tremendous movement of desert piety, lived in Egypt. Alexandria was the scholarly capital of the world. The wildfire of Mohammed swept it away, and an ancient civilization, extending from Spain to Persia, was no more.
 
 
 
Marx Misreads the Middle Ages
 
The PC myths about the Middle Ages are passed down to us, in part, from Karl Marx.
 
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.
Karl Marx
,
The Communist Manifesto
(79)
 
 
No, they didn’t. Take the medieval journeyman. He benefited from training he had received as an apprentice, and when he produced a work of sufficiently impressive quality—literally, a master-piece—he too would become a full member of a guild. In fact, the guild system is exactly what Marx’s contemporary, Pope Leo XIII, a great opponent of socialism, recommended for the workingman, whom Marx held in scorn.
 
 
So the Byzantine Empire never had the power to return Greek learning to the West and unite the lands under one law. It had enough to do at home. It did have moments of glory, winning time for itself and the West, as when Leo the Isaurian crushed the Muslim navy in 717 with ballistics and a naphthaline concoction known as “Greek fire.” But for the most part, the West was on its own.
 
Warmer is better—someone tell Al Gore
 
The third factor is a subtle one. We hear a lot about global warming these days, and since I’m no geologist I won’t venture an opinion, except to say that in history the great threat to man has not been warming but cooling. It’s obvious why. If you shorten the growing season by a few weeks and make the summer highs a little cooler, you remove millions of acres of land from the plow. You put stubby grass and mosses where cattle used to graze on the savannah; and you turn into savannah what used to be prime land for growing cereal grains.
 
The cooling helps explain the barbarian invasions: they and their cattle were cold and hungry. And, as I’ve noted, one winter they had a Rhine River frozen solid, so they could cross where they pleased, and the Roman legions, already stretched thin, could do nothing about it.
 
Cooling weather causes the occasional failed harvest. But if harvests are only fair, any outright failures will deplete your stores of grain. People grow sickly. Life expectancy drops. Population shrinks. The cities— dependent upon storeable grain—empty. Town life withers away. People cannot afford the division of labor that allows for scholars, accountants, merchants, sculptors, actors, whatever. Back to the land they go: for man needs bread.
 
But when one or two of these factors had disappeared or been overcome, Europe was ready for its grand resurgence. Consider its cultural advantages. Christianity had scrubbed away most of the late Greco-Roman prejudice against manual labor. Recall Benedict and his monastic rule. Monks, whatever their background, worked the land. They cleared the thick, damp German forests of trees and stumps. They drained the marshes. They dug wells, built granaries, planted vineyards, and communicated technological innovations among themselves, in a network extending across Europe.

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