This book was first published in 1995 in the series The Making of Europe. I have now substantially revised and rewritten it. The reason for this decision has been the veritable “dam burst” in the study of late antiquity and of the early Middle Ages which has taken place within the last five years. It would now be imprudent in the extreme to undertake to write a history of this period without allowing one’s judgment to be influenced by these many studies, and without ensuring that readers knew that they now existed. A reader need only note the dates of so many of the books cited in the bibliography to realize the extent to which the study of what used to be known as the period of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and of the “Dark Ages” has entered upon a new phase of creativity.1
Any work of synthesis such as this one involves the author in innumerable decisions and renunciations – which themes to concentrate on and which to disregard, which traditions of scholarship to adhere to, and which to leave to one side as irrelevant, unhelpful, or out of date. Experts in the field will readily recognize the choices on which this particular survey is based. The general reader, however, may benefit from knowing a little more than the narrative text itself can communicate, about what drew me to this theme in the first place and about the traditions of scholarship to which I have turned when writing about the rise of Christianity in western Europe in the way that I have done. To know how this book took on its present shape may help readers to read it with greater understanding.
One thing should be obvious to a reader. This is a book which attempts to set Western Europe itself against a wider world. It is most important that this should be so. As I hope to make plain in my very first chapter, throughout this period the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a far wider Christian world, whose center of gravity lay, rather, in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East.
Throughout this period, the East Roman empire – what we now call the “Byzantine” empire – did not remain a remote and unchanging presence, of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity. Chapters 7 and 8 make plain that, for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire of the West, the eastern empire remained a constant military presence in the western Mediterranean, as was shown by the conquest of the emperor Justinian and by the subsequent tenacity of the Byzantine holdings in Italy, in Africa, and even, for a shorter period, in Spain.
For the entire period between A.D. 535 and 800, Rome was a frontier city. It lay on the western periphery of a great, eastern empire. Every document which the popes issued, at that time, was dated according to the reigns of East Roman rulers who rose and fell over 1,300 miles away, in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and whose careers were determined not by events in western Europe, but by what happened along the eastern stretches of the Danube, on the steppes of the Ukraine, in Iran, and in the Arabian peninsula.
But the continued relevance of the eastern empire for the Christianity of the West was more than a matter of political geography. The eastern empire (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity, which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe. As in a great echo chamber, the theological issues which were debated most fiercely in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch in the fifth and sixth centuries (as we shall see at the end of chapter 4 and in chapter 7) resounded for centuries in the West. They resounded, indeed, wherever Christians had occasion to think about the relation between God and humankind, whether this was in the monasteries of Ireland and southern Scotland, in the Caucasus, in Mesopotamia, or even in the western capital of the Chinese empire at Hsian-fu.
And it is important to realize that the Christianity of the eastern empire was not a static matter. It was in a state of constant change. As we shall see in chapter 17, Greek Christianity changed as drastically, under the impact of the Muslim invasions of the late seventh and eighth centuries, as the Christianity of the West had changed in the centuries after the fall of the Roman empire. A new “Byzantine” empire emerged from the eighth-century crisis known to scholars as the “Iconoclastic Controversy.” This crisis was accompanied by an urgent effort to reform Christian practice and to redefine the Christian past which was similar to the efforts at reform and renewal made, at the same time, in the Frankish empire of Charlemagne.
Last but not least, the rise of Islam and the consequent conquest and conversion to the new faith of most of the Middle East, of North Africa, and even, for half a millennium, of southern Spain, seems to place an insuperable imaginative barrier between ourselves and an ancient Christian world where North Africa, Egypt, and Syria had been the most populous and creative regions of the Christian world. But Islam did not come from nowhere. Nor did it instantly blot out all that had come before it. As we will see in chapter 12, Islam emerged in an Arabian environment thoroughly penetrated by Christian and Jewish ideas. Far from bringing the ancient world to an abrupt end, Islamic culture and Islamic theology developed in constant, mute debate with Jews and with Christians who remained in the majority among the inhabitants of the Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquests.
As we will see in chapter 13, Christian communities formed in the time of the great theological controversies of the reign of Justinian continued for centuries largely unaffected by the great Arab empire which now arched above them. The cultural achievements of the Syriac-speaking Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia in this period are all too easily overlooked. Yet Syriac translations of Greek works, often completed at a time when the war zone between Muslim and Byzantine armies swung disastrously backwards and forwards across northern Syria and Anatolia, built up a “water table” of knowledge of classical Greek thought in Syriac versions which would be tapped, with such success, by Islamic philosophers, doctors, and mathematicians in succeeding centuries.2
Altogether, the shape of this book has been determined, in large part, by a conviction that students of Christianity in western Europe will be rewarded by making the effort to understand how, at the same time, other variants of the Christian faith, in other regions, faced problems which were often more similar than we might think to those which faced their western coreligionists. At that time, eastern Christianity was not an alien world. Often, its problems affected western Europe directly. But even when this was not the case, much can be learned about the particularity of Latin Christianity itself from comparison with its Christian neighbors.
But the reader should know that I was led to offer a book with this particular shape because of my own rethinking, in the light of modern scholarship, of how best to write a history of western Europe itself in the period between the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire, from around A.D. 200, and the conversion of the Scandinavian world in A.D. 1000. For in the past decades I have come to realize that a series of decisive publications now suggest that much of the conventional Grand Narrative of that period might be wrong. The story of the spread of Christianity in late antique and early medieval western Europe could be told in a very different, and altogether more interesting, manner. It might help the reader of this book if I summarize briefly the principal features of the Grand Narrative of European history from which I have departed in this book.
The most striking, and decisive, feature of conventional narratives of the end of the Roman empire and the early Middle Ages has been the insistence that the history of western Europe has always been characterized by a natural unity. This unity was regarded as the ideal. Departures from it were held to be a sign of decay and of aimless anarchy. It was assumed that the unity of western Europe had first come into existence under the Roman empire. From the north of Britain to North Africa, the charmed world enclosed within the Roman frontiers was the first Europe. In 1912, the author of a study of the Romanization of Roman Britain could write: “The safety of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside roared the wild chaos of barbarism.”3 After the year A.D. 400 – so the Grand Narrative continues – the frontiers of the empire collapsed, and “the wild chaos of barbarism” flooded into the empire from across the North Sea, the Rhine, and the Danube. The period of the “barbarian invasions” effectively destroyed the first unity of Europe.
But all was not lost. Christianity had already spread widely in Continental western Europe. It was through the insubstantial but tenacious bonds created by the Catholic Church that the broken unity of Roman Europe was re-created. All roads came to lead, yet again, to Rome, as the papacy established itself as the undisputed center of a new, Catholic West. After A.D. 600, “the age of the barbarian invasions” was followed by “the age of the missionaries.” In textbooks of the period, maps of the “barbarian invasions” showed western Europe crisscrossed by ominous arrows as barbarian tribes appeared to sweep triumphantly from north to south, seeking out the heart of Rome. But on the very next page, a map of “The age of the missionaries” would show the arrows moving in a more benign direction – from Rome all the way to the furthest edges of northwest Europe. The arrows would reach the British Isles, through the famous mission of pope Gregory the Great to the pagan Saxons of Britain, in 597. Then they would bounce, like beams of light reflected from a distant source, as missionaries from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England brought a Christianity renewed by contact with its source in Rome, first to a decadent northern Gaul (in the person of the great Irishman, Columbanus, in 590) and then, in the eighth century (in the persons of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, Willibrord and Boniface) to pagan Holland and, eventually, into the dark woods of Germany.
After A.D. 800, the stridently Catholic Frankish empire founded by Charlemagne seemed, for a moment, to have brought to an end the four centuries of aimless fragmentation which characterized Europe’s loss of its first unity. The hopes inspired by Charlemagne in early twentieth-century scholars are summed up by Christopher Dawson, a deeply humane and learned exponent of a specifically Catholic vision of the history of Europe, in a book entitled, significantly, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. For Dawson, the coronation of Charlemagne as “emperor” at Rome on Christmas Day 800, marked
the full acceptance by the Western barbarians of the ideal of unity for which the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church alike stood.
But Charlemagne’s Catholic empire of Europe did not last:
It was a premature synthesis, since the forces of barbarism both within and without the Empire were still far too strong to be completely assimilated.4
The disintegration of Charlemagne’s empire marked a definitive failure to realize in western Europe
the passionate longing of better minds for a formal unity of government [over and against] the instinct of separation, disorder and anarchy caused by the impulses and barbarous ignorance of the great bulk of mankind.5
The history of the Dark Ages, therefore, ended on a dying fall. Christianity had re-created the unity of Europe on a spiritual level. This spiritual unity would, indeed, be fully realized, in the ensuing centuries, in a Latin Christendom dominated by the medieval papacy. But it would no longer be found, as in the glory days of Rome, in the creation of a single, civilized, political community. One thing was certain: between A.D. 400 and 1000, “the instinct of separation, disorder and anarchy, caused by ungoverned impulses and barbarous ignorance” seemed – except for a few fragile moments – to hold center stage.
It is not surprising, then, that the teaching of the Dark Ages in the first part of the twentieth century was a somewhat depressing business. It appeared that Edward Gibbon had been right in his magisterial summary of the period, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: the fall of the Roman empire coincided with the “triumph of religion and barbarism” throughout western Europe.6 No high culture could be expected to survive such violent disorder. In the opinion of Gibbon and of his later readers, none worth the name did survive. Yet only the Christian religion, precisely because it was a cruder force than was the refined culture of Rome, could hope to rein in the barbarians of the North. The “Rise of Western Christendom” amounted to little more than a salvage operation – the preservation, within Christian monasteries, of what little remained of the culture of Rome and the slow renewal of a sense of community around a “Roman” Catholic Church. And in the period between 400 and 1000, this salvage operation had been, at best, a messy business, unredeemed by flashes of genius, and frequently thwarted by outbursts of “barbarism.”
But at least everyone agreed that the “barbarians,” rough fellows though they were, could be treated as the direct ancestors of the modern nation-states. No one in the nineteenth century doubted that England came from the Anglo-Saxons and that Catholic France had been founded by the Franks of Clovis. The Germans insisted on claiming Charlemagne for themselves. Under similar, romantically “archaic” kings, the Irish managed to remain Irish (just as they always had been and always should be) until their golden age of independence ended with the Norman intrusion of the twelfth century. Even the most Mediterranean of Spaniards have been known to look back with nostalgia to an imagined and distinctive “Visigothic” heritage.
Statues in public places made very clear to everyone what these rude ancestors of the modern nations must have looked like. They were Wagnerian figures with winged helmets, scale-mail breastplates, cloaks trimmed with fur, and baggy trousers bound up with thongs. They carried heavy weapons and sported impressive moustaches. Furthermore, there are few cities in western Europe whose museums and art galleries do not exhibit a nineteenth-century painting of a Christian missionary at work among such ancestors. In such paintings, a figure of a Christian missionary with an ethereal expression and markedly “Roman” features addresses the court of a barbarian king. The king, a bearded figure with crown and furrowed brow, dressed in full “barbarian” splendor and surrounded by brawny counsellors armed to the teeth, sits on his throne and listens intently. Often, as in the case of Clovis, king of the Franks, the ruler is shown humbly approaching the baptismal font in full warrior gear, accompanied by his fur-clad retinue, to bow before a clergyman dressed in a strange cross between a “Roman” toga and the later, Gothic vestments associated with a Catholic bishop.7 These are elevating scenes. Needless to say, they place a severe strain on a modern historian’s sense of the probable. But they are deeply embedded in the visual imagination of most Europeans. It is part of the purpose of this book to remove them from our minds, and to substitute a more truthful and complex image of what happened at this time.
Plainly, two central elements of this picture have changed irrevocably – the image of the barbarian and the image of the missionary. This change has decisively affected the manner in which I deal, in chapters 1, 4, and 5, with the relation between Romans and “barbarians” along the frontiers of the empire, from the first to the fourth centuries; with the nature of the so-called “barbarian settlements” within the empire, in the fifth century; and with the implications of the final taking over by “barbarians” of the Roman frontier zones as far apart as northern Britain, northern Gaul, Austria, and Morocco, in the late fifth century.
A similar revision of standard opinions lies behind my presentation (in chapter 6) of the sixth-century Gaul of Gregory of Tours. For once we remove the screen set up by Gregory’s heartfelt but idiosyncratic narrative of his own times, we can come closer to seeing what it was really like to live in a “low-pressure” but nonetheless stable post-Roman society. Frankish Gaul had by no means sunk into aimless barbarism.
As for the northern barbarians at their most seemingly exotic and intractable – that is, those perched in the Atlantic and North Sea world of Ireland, Britain, and, later, Scandinavia – I trust that what I write in chapter 14 and, again, in chapter 20, may open up a different view from the image of puzzled but well-meaning warlords, straining to catch, from the mouth of a foreign missionary, the elevated message of the Gospels. One point needs to be stressed in modern revisions of the “age of the missionaries.” In coming to the British Isles, Christianity did not encounter isolated societies, each happily locked in the immemorial traditions of their tribe. Rather, when dealing with Ireland and with the Saxons of Britain, I have taken to heart the warning of an archaeologist noted for his contributions on the mysterious Anglo-Saxon burial ship discovered at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia. “The key concepts to abandon,” he writes, sternly underlining the word “abandon,” “are those of ethnicity and tradition.”8
The worlds of the “barbarians” of the northern seas were fluid worlds. They managed to be both distinctive and, at the same time, highly adaptable to foreign influence if brought to them in the right way. Hence my account emphasizes the inner tensions and the adaptability of the barbarian host societies who welcomed Christianity. Such an emphasis differs from the former stereotype of the encounter of high-minded foreigners with the immovable mass of a tradition-bound “barbarian” society. It may help to explain the rapidity and the precise path along which Christianity spread both in Ireland and, a little later, in Saxon Britain in the course of the late sixth and seventh centuries.
Such an approach also helps to direct attention to what is now rightly seen as one of the great triumphs of Dark Age culture: the gradual creation, by the barbarians, of a sense of their own past. It had long been taken for granted by scholars that the “barbarian” societies of Frankish Gaul, of Celtic Ireland, and Saxon Britain, and, later, of Germany and Scandinavia, were societies characterized by traditional customs which reached back into the immemorial past. Each group was thought of as encrusted with a distinctive, “ethnic” past, which was so tenacious that it would endure to become that nation’s “national” past in modern Europe. As long as this assumption was made, the actual writers of the histories and the transcribers of poems, sagas, and legends who had made this “barbarian” past available to us were figures of little interest. For we assumed that they did no more than record (often in a Latin as “barbarous” as the subjects of their discourse) a barbarian past which was really there and had always been there.
What modern scholarship has recovered, precisely through eroding that sense of an impervious, “barbarian” past which waited only to be recorded, is the sheer excitement of men of the pen of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries as they set about to create for themselves an orderly and “usable” view of the origins of their own tribes. The tools with which they did this were, of course, provided largely by the new religion. Not only did Christian intellectuals bring the skills of writing to previously non-literate societies. They brought ways of writing historical narratives which derived from the Old Testament and from the historical traditions of the Roman world which Christians had already adapted to their own needs in earlier centuries. We owe almost all that we know of the history and literature of pre-Christian northern Europe to learned clergymen who set to work with urgency and with great intelligence to make their own, for their own needs, large sections of the pre-Christian past. As a result, the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which saw the triumph of Christianity, can also be seen as the last great age of myth-making in northern Europe.
When approaching this highly original synthesis of pagan past and Christian present, it is not easy to reach a firm conclusion as to how much of the original texture of pre-Christian society actually made it into written form. In parts of chapter 14 and, finally, in chapter 20, I have tried to communicate some of the more fruitful ways in which modern scholars have grappled with this problem. What matters most is what such an attempt at synthesis meant to those who undertook it. The creation of a “usable past” happened all over the Christian world. Here it is important to look again outside the narrow boundaries of western Europe. We now know, from recent studies of the highest quality, that without the robust sense of unity under God conveyed in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation the notion of an “English nation,” indeed of “England” itself, would never have been imposed, in later centuries, on the untidy patchwork of Saxon adventurers, acculturated Britons, and Celtic kingdoms on which Bede looked out in his own day. But we do not so often think of the late fifth-century Armenian Epic Histories of P’awst’os Buzand and the works of his successors, Elishe the Vardapet and Lazarus of P’arp, as doing the same, and with similar, millennium-long consequences for a distinctive Armenian sense of national identity, as we see in chapter 12. Nor do we appreciate that the Irish lawyers, poets, and writers of legends who have preserved for us the richest vernacular heritage of all to emerge from Dark Age western Europe were the exact contemporaries of the first collectors of the poetry and historical traditions of the Arabs. I hope, in chapter 13, to guide readers to recent literature which has done justice to the sheer verve and sense of urgency with which the Muslims of the late seventh century strove to preserve their own identity in a world which could so easily have swamped them. They did so by creating a memory of the Prophet Muhammad lovingly rooted in a purely Arabian environment, in such a way that the landscape of the seventh-century Hijâz has dominated the imagination of the Islamic world from that time until the present.
So much for the “barbarians” and their “missionaries.” But what about the overall theme of the “unity” of western Europe? It is here, I suspect, that scholarship has changed most decisively in recent years. It is these changes of opinion as to what constituted the “unity” of Europe at this time which have caused me to rethink the issue of the nature of Christianity itself and the implications of its expansion in western Europe. Bluntly: what do we mean by the subtitle of this book, “Triumph and Diversity?”
In this matter, I was challenged to rethink my own views by the slow realization, in the course of the 1980s, that I could no longer rely on the most brilliant interpretation ever written of the course of European history from the end of the Roman empire to Charlemagne – Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. No discussion of the nature of “Dark Age” Europe can be complete without a mention of “the Pirenne thesis.” This was because, in his Mohammed and Charlemagne (which appeared in English translation in 1937) and in a series of articles which had appeared 15 years earlier, Pirenne had looked straight through the traditional narrative of the early medieval period – a narrative in which barbarians and missionaries had predominated – to the central issue: the unity of Europe. He propounded an explanation of that unity which virtually ignored the barbarians and which offered a robustly “laicized” explanation for the success of the missionaries.9
Put very briefly, Pirenne’s argument was as follows. The unity created by the Roman empire had not been broken by the “barbarian invasions.” For the barbarian invasions were a non-event. Their long-term destructive impact had been exaggerated by shocked contemporaries. Not only this. The barbarians themselves had brought nothing new. Pirenne’s “barbarians” were utterly stripped of the solidity and the magical aura with which they had been surrounded by previous generations of German nationalist historians. Their laws, their social structure, their worldview had nothing to contribute to the Roman world into which they had moved. They settled into the structures of a still-Roman world like impoverished squatters taking up residence in an ancient palazzo.
For Pirenne, then, in dismembering the Roman empire, the “barbarians” had not broken the unity of Europe. For the unity of Europe rested on something more substantial than a mere political system. It rested on commerce and on the life of cities sustained by commerce. This meant, in fact, that it rested on the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean was the “all-nourishing sea” along which the wealth of the Levant (an eastern Mediterranean still firmly controlled by the East Roman empire) continued to flow into Merovingian Gaul and even beyond. Hence it was possible for a Roman way of life to survive in western Europe (and especially in its Mediterranean regions) for centuries after the Roman empire itself had succumbed to barbarian invasion. Only when the Arab conquests destroyed the unity of the Mediterranean in the course of the seventh century, by placing a hostile power along its eastern and southern shores, was the “Roman” unity of Europe destroyed. It was with the Arab conquest of Carthage, in 698, and not in A.D. 400, that western Europe finally ceased to be “Roman.” Only then did the balance of power and of culture shift drastically to the North. The progress of the Arab armies along the Mediterranean coastline of North Africa – and no surge of creativity from the obscure woods of Germany – was what set the pace for the rise to dominance of the family of Charlemagne, which led to the creation of a northern, Catholic empire based on Aachen. Hence the provocative title of Pirenne’s book, Mohammed and Charlemagne: “It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.”10
One can see at once why such a thesis was especially attractive to those of us who studied the late antique period. It did nothing less than add a quarter of a millennium to the lifespan of the ancient world. It was possible to study the long-term development of late Roman culture and of a “Mediterranean” style of Christianity long after the political “fall” of the Roman empire of the West. A Mediterranean-wide Christianity, in which west and east still mingled through the benign vigor of mercantile exchange, lay, like a well-installed central heating system, at the southern base of Europe. Through commerce and, a little later, even through “Roman” missionaries, it continued to blow regular gusts of warm, late classical air into the cold regions of the North.
Pirenne had given us what his younger contemporary, Christopher Dawson, had tried to give us in his characteristically Catholic insistence on the primacy of Rome – a clue to the unity of Europe. It was commerce, not Catholicism, which had held western Europe together for centuries after the so-called “barbarian invasions.” In making this claim, Pirenne provided western Europe with a center of unequalled solidity. And when it came to solidity, nothing could have seemed more solid than the landscape of the pre-industrial Mediterranean, as this was conjured up (only a decade after the appearance of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne) by the great French exponent of the relationship between history and geography, Fernand Braudel.
Although written about the sixteenth century, Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II quickly became the vade mecum of late antique historians. For this great book gave an inimitably concrete face to a Mediterranean whose decisive role in pre-Carolingian western Europe Pirenne had posited but never, in fact, examined. Braudel’s lovingly circumstantial vision of the essential unity of the Mediterranean world provided the ballast for the brilliant but somewhat frail hypothesis of Pirenne. Historians of late antiquity could now agree that, from A.D. 200 to at least 700, the Mediterranean itself, a clearly defined landscape, encrusted with millennia of experience of human habitation and sharply distinguished from its northern and southern neighbors by a unique ecology and lifestyle, provided a center to western Europe which was notably more palpable than was the somewhat disembodied notion of a spiritual unity realized by the Catholic Church.11
By providing an apparently incontrovertible center to early medieval Europe, Pirenne also defined its periphery. Here, Dawson and Pirenne converged. Europe had a center. If this was not the Rome of the early medieval popes, it was, at least, the Mediterranean zone in which Rome was included, and on whose commercial and cultural vigor the popes based their spiritual claims to centrality within the Latin Church. It also had a periphery. These were the wild, non-Mediterranean lands beyond the immediate reach of the “Roman” south – the Rhine estuary, Britain and Ireland – to whom missionaries came in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries. According to Pirenne’s vision (which, again, he shared with Dawson) they came to the barbarians as the representatives of a benign form of cultural diffusion from an undisputed “center” of “higher civilization” situated in the rich South.
One can imagine the combination of disquiet and excitement when it slowly became plain that this cogent model was no longer acceptable. By the middle of the 1980s, the patient work of the archaeologists had left very little to support Pirenne’s thesis of the continuing commercial vigor of the Mediterranean and of the cities of Merovingian Gaul which had supposedly been nourished by this commerce. The verdict of the archaeologists is clear: by the year 600, much of western Europe was in a state of almost total economic “involution.” Large areas of the hinterland of Italy, Gaul, and Spain had closed in on themselves. Even in what had once been a highly urbanized region, such as Italy, city life had shrunk dramatically.12
It is a bleak view of the western economy. It implies, furthermore, that we may have exaggerated the overall wealth and sophistication of western Europe under the Roman empire. It was not as highly developed a society as we might conclude from its surviving monuments. Even in classical times the apparent prosperity of the Roman cities could not be explained by commerce alone. There had never been a commercial unity to be destroyed. Fragile in the first place, the Roman unity of the West seems to have evaporated more rapidly than we had thought after A.D. 400.
How had this state of affairs come about? The fault lay with the weakening of the late Roman state. This state had been built up to an unparalleled level in order to survive the crisis of the third century (as we shall see in chapter 2). The “downsizing” of this state, in the course of the fifth century, destroyed the “command economy” on which the provinces had become dependent. As we will see in chapter 5, the total reversion of the economy of post-imperial Britain to a condition more crude, in many aspects, than in pre-Roman times, was not due to the inroads of barbarian invaders. Barbarian raiding was secondary. The truly chilling discontinuity in Britain was caused by the withdrawal of the late Roman state.
The fate of post-imperial Britain is a reminder that the long-term cost of having created an entire social order geared to supporting a world empire may have been more destructive for the inhabitants of a Roman province, once the empire which supported this social order had withdrawn, than were the imagined ravages of barbarian invaders. With its insistent gathering of wealth and goods through taxes and their distribution for the maintenance of large armies, of privileged cities, of imperial palaces, and of an entire ruling class implicated in the imperial system, the late Roman state was the crude but vigorous pump which had ensured the circulation of goods in an otherwise primitive economy. Once this pump was removed (as in Britain) or had lost the will to tax (as in Merovingian Gaul and in other “barbarian” kingdoms) the Roman-style economy collapsed. In the absence of a powerful state, no commercial activity, such as Pirenne had posited, was at hand to keep the economies of Europe from sliding into a state of acute regionalism. “Low-pressure” states and sluggish economies were the order of the day. From A.D. 400 onwards, diversity, not unity, was the hallmark of an age without empire.13
A historian of the Christian Church in early medieval western Europe must take seriously the state of modern views on the society and economy against which this Church developed. I trust that I have made available in my footnotes much of the literature on which this picture of the depleted state of post-imperial Europe depends. What concerns us here, however, is the stark fact that we are left with a western Europe without a center. Loyalty to memories of the Roman empire were not enough to provide such a center. Nor was the desire to transfer such loyalties to the popes of Rome sufficiently widespread, in a world characterized by strong regional churches, to bring about a centering of the western world on papal Rome, such as would later occur in the high Middle Ages. Now that the notion of the commercial vigor of the Mediterranean as a unifying force in the first centuries of early medieval western Europe has been removed, through careful study of the circulation of goods and of the fate of former Roman cities, we are left with a world with neither a clearly defined center nor a clearly defined periphery. It looks very much as if post-imperial western Europe was like Oakland, California, as described by Gertrude Stein: “There is no there there.”
Nothing could pose a greater challenge to a religious historian than such a situation. For the fact remains that Pirenne saw one feature of early medieval Europe clearly, even if he explained it wrongly. Christopher Dawson saw the same feature, although he, also, was content to explain it in terms of his warm vision of the emergence of a “Roman” Catholic Europe. This feature which both Pirenne and Dawson saw was the remarkable “inter-connectivity” of the Christianity of this time.
Such inter-connectivity marked the arrival in western Europe of a cultural and religious force which had not existed in the time of the many gods. Christianity was a universal religion. As chapter 1 makes plain, this was already apparent to an intellectual writing in Edessa (Urfa, eastern Turkey) at the beginning of the third century. Christians might not convert everybody; but they could, at least, be everywhere. The possession of sacred Scriptures made of them a potentially worldwide “textual community.” The reader should meditate (as I have often done) on the implications of those humble fragments which show the same book of the Psalms being copied out, at the same time, as a writing exercise by Christian children, both in Panjikent near Samarkand and in northern Ireland. The basic modules of Christianity, also, were remarkably stable and easy to transfer – a bishop, a clergy, a congregation (called in Greek a laos, a “people”: our word for “laity”) and a place in which to worship. Such a basic structure could be subjected to many local variations, but, in one form or another, it travelled well. It formed a basic “cell,” which could be transferred to any region of the known world. Above all, Christians worshipped a God who, in many of his aspects, was above space and time. God and his saints could always be thought of as fully “present” to the believer, wherever he or she happened to be. In God’s high world, there was no distinction between “center” and “periphery.” In the words of the modern inhabitants of Joazeira, a cult site perched in a remote corner of northwest Brazil, Christian believers could be sure that, even if they lived at the notional end of the world (which, in western Europe in this period, happened, quite concretely, to be the west coast of Ireland) they had “Heaven above their heads and Hell below their feet.”
Both Pirenne, the economic historian, and Dawson, the Catholic, saw very clearly the strange “inter-connectivity” of the web of Christian belief and practice which had come to cover much of western Europe by the year 500 and which would cover even more by the year 1000. Where they may have erred is in a premature attempt to ascribe the weaving of such a web to a single, pre-eminent center, whether this center was provided by the effects of a Mediterranean-wide economy or by the draw of a post-imperial, papal Rome.
For the notion of Christianity itself, shared by Pirenne and Dawson, may have misled them. Christianity was a remarkably universal religion, endowed with common codes which could spring up in many different environments. But, at this particular time, it was not necessarily a unitary, still less a uniform religion. Here, I think, it is something of an advantage to be a late antique historian, and to have spent much time, in the past years, studying the Christianities of the eastern Mediterranean and of the Middle East. Such study develops, in the scholar, a healthy taste for diversity. What has to be explained in the history of the Greek, the Coptic, the Syrian, and the Armenian Churches of the East (to name only a few) is the remarkable manner in which their Christianity remained both universal and, at the same time, highly local. As long as we think of the “localization” of Christianity as a failure to achieve some ideal of unity, we seriously misunderstand this phenomenon. Distressing though the fact may be to theologians (today as in the days of Justinian), what strikes the historian about the competing regional Churches of the East was the robust confidence of each of them that they possessed a sufficiently full measure of universal truth to allow each one of them to stand on its own.
The history of western Europe at this time was not marked by the rise of rival Churches, set against each other by differences of doctrine, as was the history of the Churches of the East. But the issue of how to reconcile a universal Christianity with the conditions of a highly regionalized world were similar. Hence my attempt, in chapter 16, to understand the particular combination of local autonomy with loyalty to the idea of a wider Christendom which characterized the Churches of seventh-century Ireland and of Saxon Britain. The title of this chapter, “Micro-Christendoms,” represents a search on my part for a formula with which to express this intriguing phenomenon.
My point is that we should not think of Ireland and Britain simply as distant “peripheries” being drawn, ineluctably, into uniformity with a “center” placed in Rome. Many Irishmen and Saxons carried with them “a Rome in the Mind.”14 These “Romans” (as they called themselves) often strove to bring that distant Rome to their own region. They did this through the transfer of relics, through styles of art and building, and through following distinctive ecclesiastical customs. But they did this very much on their own terms. Their efforts were perceived as having brought to their own region a “microcosm” which reflected, with satisfactory completeness, the “macrocosm” of a worldwide Christianity. They did not aim to subject the “periphery” of the local Christianities of the British Isles to a “center” situated in Rome, as would happen in a later period under the ambitious popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Rather, they strove to cancel out the hiatus between “center” and “periphery” by making “little Romes” available on their home ground.
Those who study the circulation of what have been called “symbolic goods” both in prehistoric and in living tribal societies know what this means. The arrival of objects or persons charged with the charisma of distant places did not carry with it the modern sense of dependence on a distant and “superior” center. Rather, such objects and persons could be seen as coming, in a sense, from heaven. They were welcomed because they were thought of as having enabled the local society to establish a “vertical” link with an overarching cosmos, which was shared by center and periphery alike.15
Even in societies considerably less developed than those of Dark Age Europe, extensive cultural “empires” can be created through such a flow of “symbolic goods.” We are dealing throughout this period with a phenomenon well known to students of the relations between pre-Conquest Mesoamerica and the Anasazi societies of the American southwest. Despite the difficulties of long-distance communication and the overall poverty of the societies involved, a “symbolic system” can come to be established over surprisingly wide areas. Much fruitful study has been devoted to this process: “symbolic systems [are] maintained by the constant circulation of specialists … and by exchanges of women and goods and knowledge.”16
This is as good and as value-free a definition as any that I know of the cultural processes which lay behind the “age of the missionaries” in early medieval Europe. The unusual vibrancy of the exchange of “symbolic goods” from one region to another, despite the “involution” of the local economies, goes a long way to explain the “inter-connectivity” of the western Christianity of this time. This was not an exchange between one, overwhelming “center” and its “periphery.” Rather, it occurred among a loosely spread constellation of centers. Entire new cultural zones were created in northwestern Europe through such exchanges of symbolic goods between local centers. We need only think of the manner in which the Irish Sea became a “Celtic Mediterranean” in the course of the sixth century, crisscrossed by travelling scholars (as we will see in chapter 10), or the manner in which an entire cultural zone emerged in northwestern Europe in the seventh century, embracing Ireland, Britain, and Frankish Neustria in a way which compels us to think away all modern political and ethnic boundaries (as we will see, mainly, in chapters 11 and 14).
Constant inter-regional exchanges of this kind were quite as important in building up the cultural resources of northern Europe as were the occasional widely publicized moments of contact with the distant “center” at Rome. At this time, the “unity” of Western Christendom was like a geodesic dome, made up of interlocking modules. It was not like a great tent, upheld by a single tent-pole fixed in Rome or, more widely, in a still “Roman” Mediterranean. Its history, therefore, was not the sad tale of unity destroyed and then postponed, but rather, it can be read as a tale of not altogether dishonorable diversity.
This view, of course, imposes its own shape upon my narrative. Readers must be prepared to skip around a large area marked by significant diversities. I regret the inconvenience which this complex itinerary must impose on readers. I would recommend, most warmly, that they orient themselves by turning to the maps and chronological tables which are attached to each significant section of the book, and turn to the end of the book to consult the table of principal events placed side by side, region by region, for the full extent of the Christian world. But, alas, I can find no other way to communicate the nature of a Christianity whose principal feature, whose interest to the historian, and, perhaps, whose creativity itself, resided in its very diversity.
Last but not least, the reader is entitled to ask the blunt question: what, then, was the achievement of the Christianity of this age? He or she has usually received, in return, a blunt answer: not much. For, in the words of a fine essay on the subject, “Early medieval Christianity has a bad odour in modern historiography.”17 Our notion of the quality of early medieval Christianity in the centuries after A.D. 400 suffers heavily from the interstitial position which has afflicted the “Dark Age” period as a whole in most modern histories of Europe. This is a Christianity which stands somewhat awkwardly between the acclaimed Golden Age of the Fathers of the Church, who still wrote within the secure and rich cultural environment of the Roman empire (as we will see in chapter 3), and the burst of creativity and sophistication associated with the renaissance of the twelfth century and the subsequent Gothic age. Placed between two such high points, the level of European culture appears to have sagged depressingly in between. Indeed, scholars write as if it was almost necessary for the Christianity of the West to pass through a minor Ice Age of the spirit so that the achievements of later centuries should stand out in greater contrast. It is as if medievalists, having proved to their own satisfaction that their own, “Gothic” age was not nearly as dark as admirers of the Italian Renaissance used to say that it was, needed to defend their notion of a “medieval renaissance” by looking round to find a period of European history which could be treated as authentically “dark.” They fixed on the Christianity of the period between 400 and 1000. “Dark Age” Christianity provided them with “a somber backdrop for the success story of western culture.”18 Even as fine a survey as Richard Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages begins with a chapter entitled, bluntly, “The Primitive Age c.700–c.1050.”19
Yet it is important to wrest ourselves free of this powerful stereotype. There is no denying that the Christianity of that time developed in a social and economic climate which was distinctly chilly. It may, indeed, have been literally a chilly time: there is evidence for a period of unusually cold and rainy climate over all of northern Europe in the sixth century.20 Given such unprepossessing conditions, it was usual to say that the only notable achievement of which the Christian Church in this age was capable was the conversion of the northern barbarians. Scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought of the “barbarians” as singularly mindless creatures. In their view, the task of absorbing the rough populations of the north led to a fatal coarsening of the texture of Christianity itself.
It is often said that, after around A.D. 400, Dark Age Christianity came to differ significantly from its previous late antique forms. It is thought of as having “regressed” into an “archaic” phase. The “archaic” features of this phase consisted in the merging of the individual into the community and in a consequent lack of interest in subjective experience; in the manner in which the life of the believer came to be hedged around with a complex system of taboos by which the clean was separated from the unclean and the sacred from the profane; in the wholesale adoption of the Old Testament, rather than the Gospels, as the model for Christian piety and as the basis of a Christian community; and in a thoroughly “barbaric” joy in the sheer opulence and mindless exactitude of mighty rituals. Opinions vary as to whether this state of affairs was brought about by a widespread collapse of Roman urban culture and of the “enlightened” intellectual traditions associated with it, or by direct contact with the barbarians. One thing was certain: Christianity had triumphed in Europe at the cost of losing its ancient purity and spiritual refinement.21
One need not accept such a view. To begin with, as a historian of the Early Church and of the late antique period, I never cease to wonder at the confidence with which scholars, Christians and non-Christians alike, declare that they somehow know for certain that such and such a feature of the Christian Church is not a manifestation of “true” Christianity – that it marked a decline from some more “pure” state of belief. This seems to me to amount to importing into the lay discipline of history a version of the potent religious myth of the pristine purity of the Primitive Church. This myth began to be formed around the end of the fourth century. It has been wielded with great effect by ecclesiastical reformers from the age of Augustine and John Cassian up to and beyond the Reformation. It has often been used for polemical purposes, to criticize many forms of Christianity through comparing them with an imagined, more perfect time. The Early Christians, however, seem to have regarded their own Church as far from perfect. Rather, I suspect that we are applying to the Christians of a distant age the basically well-bred and highly “spiritualized” notion of Christianity which we, as modern Europeans, Catholics and Protestants alike, still carry in the back of our minds.
Late antique Christianity had never been like this. If it seems more “elevated” than that of early medieval Europe, this may simply be due to a trick of perspective, caused by the changing nature of our evidence. In the third and fourth centuries, we know a lot about the writings of an undoubtedly sophisticated elite and surprisingly little about the day-to-day practice of the average Christian. To mistake the views of the Fathers of the Church for the texture of Christianity as a whole in the Roman world is like taking the grandiose and elegant façade of a surviving Roman building for the sum total of life in a Roman city. Majestically balanced, such a façade was intended to project and still projects a highly sanitized image of classical antiquity. It makes us forget the levels of poverty, malnutrition, and disease which characterized the Roman world as a whole. In the same way, we should not be misled by the writings of the Fathers of the Church into mistaking their elevated views for the rougher texture of life as really lived by Christians. We should not expect to find a modern “sanitized” Christianity in the Early Church any more than we would find it in the early Middle Ages.
To take one obvious example: the more we study a phenomenon such as the cult of the saints, which swept across barbarian Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries, the more we realize that most of what we have been content to condemn as the “archaic,” the “physical,” and the seemingly “superstitious” features associated with its practice in barbarian lands grew directly out of its late antique Mediterranean background.22 Such features were not the result of a later “contamination” of Christianity by a so-called “archaic” mentality.
The cult of the saints may mean nothing to us. But we have to understand how much it did mean, and had meant for so long, to late antique Christians. It was part of the religious common sense of the age. Christians of all levels of culture and ethnic background had tended to take for granted that the saints could be “present” on earth. Christians worshipped the one high God; but, unlike modern, post-Enlightenment Christians, who are wary of the notion of a universe crowded with intermediary beings, they positively gloried in the closeness of invisible guides and protectors (as we will see, especially, in chapters 3, 6, and 17). They did not carry around in their heads “the empty skies of [modern European] missionary Christianity.”23
It is the same with the issue of taboos. As we will see in chapter 10, we happen to know a lot about restrictions on “impure” foods, on “impure” substances, and on “impure” acts from the Penitential books produced first in western Britain and Ireland in the sixth century. We may not like what we read. But we cannot say that such concerns were an entirely novel departure, due to the transplantation of a more “elevated” Christianity into barbarian lands. Such taboos, in fact, had also been more widespread than we think around the Mediterranean. But, in the Mediterranean, they were taken for granted and were little talked about. As a consequence, they have left little trace in the written evidence for late antique Christianity. What made Ireland different was not that its inhabitants were somehow locked in an “archaic” mentality. What was unique about Ireland was the vigor with which the sapientes, the Christian learned men of the island, codified and applied to every aspect of life a system of taboos which previously had been based upon the tacit agreement of local communities. The drawing up of the Penitentials did not represent the corruption of a more “enlightened” Christianity. Rather, it marked a startling victory of the men of the pen who turned a widespread, almost nonverbal, sense of the distinction between the sacred and the profane, and between the pure and the impure (shared alike by barbarian and by Mediterranean Christians) into a finely calibrated system to be used for the guidance of souls.
Early medieval Christianity, in the forms which it took after A.D. 400, cannot be treated as a “fallen” religion: it did not represent a regression from the more elevated standards of its own Early Christian and late antique past into “archaic” modes of thinking. But how did western Christianity continue to elaborate the religious and cultural heritage which it had accumulated in the days of the Roman empire in the very different world of post-imperial Europe?
Here it is important to look carefully, once again, at the overall social and economic conditions of the Roman and post-Roman West. There is a danger that we may exaggerate the height and stability of the Roman achievement, and, as a result, that we may exaggerate the depths to which Europe fell once the empire had been removed. A drastic “downsizing” of many aspects of life cannot be denied for this period. What is not so certain is that such a “downsizing” led to the total destruction or to the fatal depletion of the religious heritage of the Christian Church.
In rethinking this matter I have been greatly helped by one of the most important studies of the ancient and medieval world to appear in recent years – The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell.24 Though limited to the Mediterranean, the book has much to say about historical processes which are relevant also to the cultural history of the post-imperial West as a whole. Among its many cogent arguments, this study of the social and ecological history of the Mediterranean world in pre-industrial times reminds us that change was the essence of Mediterranean life. The ecology of the region ensured that, throughout its history, the Mediterranean has always been crisscrossed by patterns of movement, causing goods, ideas, and persons to flow from point to point. These frequently coagulate at one nodal point or another. But they just as frequently shift away from ancient and apparently unchallengeable centers of “superior” civilization. The pace and mass of the flow of wealth and culture toward any given center or constellation of centers can fluctuate dramatically. A period of “intensification” (marked by the pulling together of resources from widely separated regions) is followed, just as often, by drastic periods of “abatement” – of letting go.
The network of Roman cities which had once covered western Europe was no exception to this rule. In the fifth and sixth centuries, these spectacular “arguments in stone,” the product of centuries of “intensification” which had rested heavily upon the landscape (as we will see in chapters 1 and 2), simply underwent a period of drastic “abatement.” They lost the high visibility which they had once enjoyed all over Europe. For Horden and Purcell, therefore, it comes as no surprise that Rome should empty out after A.D. 450, so that its population dropped from 500,000 to 50,000 within a century. But neither are they surprised that, at the same time, Constantinople, “New Rome,” emerged at the other end of the Mediterranean as a boom city – possibly as the largest human settlement west of China. What we are tempted to describe as the “decline and fall” of an entire civilization is never quite the end of the world. It may be no more than the result of a regional shift in the patterns of “intensification.”
The advantage of this image of change is the fluidity to which it draws attention. The end of the Roman order in the West was not like the crash of a single mighty building. It is more like the shifting contours of a mudbank in an ever-flowing stream: certain prominent ridges are washed away, other, hitherto mute landscapes gain in eminence. But the shifting mud of day-to-day social, economic, and cultural activity remains, to be piled up, once again, in yet another pattern. For certain features of an economy or a culture to lose high visibility does not mean that they have vanished entirely.
This way of seeing change in the ancient and medieval worlds is important for our consideration of the cultural as well as of the economic resources of the West, both within and outside the Mediterranean itself. For it makes it possible to see two developments occurring at one and the same time in this period. The critics of Pirenne cannot be gainsaid: the Roman cities and the patterns of “intensification” on which they had been based suffered from a period of drastic “abatement.” But, at the same time, as we see both in sixth-century Syria (in chapters 7 and 12) and in the seventh-century valley of the Seine (in chapter 11), the effect of the evaporation of the post-Roman cities on the Christian culture of the age was “cushioned” by extensive relocation to the countryside. The production and circulation of the “symbolic goods” associated with Christianity did not come to a halt with the decay of the post-Roman cities. These simply came to travel along different networks, which now linked great rural monasteries to the hunting lodges of kings and to the country houses of a largely nonurban aristocracy. In much of Europe, it was in a largely rural environment that one would find the “goods” which maintained a Europe-wide “symbolic system”: the texts, the relics, the spiritual guides, and the skilled practitioners of teaching, music, art, and architecture.
Furthermore, the economic developments studied in The Corrupting Sea may provide us with an apt analogy for the fate of the culture of the post-imperial West in the sixth and seventh centuries. Discussing the apparent disappearance of a high level of trade throughout the Mediterranean which occurred at this time, Horden and Purcell warn the reader not to conclude from the absence of “glamorous manifestations of high-prestige trade” that the once “all-nourishing” sea lay empty. The little ships were still there. The historian should not neglect “the ‘background noise’ of coast-wise movement which we have found in supposed dark ages.”25
Nor should the historian of post-Roman Christian culture neglect the constant “background noise” of cultural activity. The more we study the production and circulation of manuscripts in this period, the more we are impressed by the number of “little ships” that are still to be found. As we will see in chapter 10, practical literacy (connected with legal practice and with the secular needs of royal courts) was more extensive in many regions of Europe than we had once thought. We are also increasingly struck by the multiplicity of low-profile centers of book production. These were more elusive but more numerous than were the few great scriptoria on which we had once focused our attention. They ensured that the supposed “nadir” of writing associated with the “Dark Ages” was never as deep as we had thought.
Speaking of the achievements of the many centers of learning in seventh-century Ireland, a scholar has concluded that
it would be appropriate to think in terms of an archipelago: a number of small islands are surfacing above the level of the water, but under the surface lies the extensive shelf which gives the islands their stability.26
The same could be said of many other regions of Europe. The moment of self-congratulatory achievement, which we now call “the Carolingian Renaissance,” depended on the existence of that “extensive shelf” of texts, built up in previous centuries. As with trade, so with literature. The “glamorous manifestation” of the literature of the Patristic Age in the fourth and fifth centuries – the product of a quite unusual moment of “intensification” in Christian culture – should not dazzle us to such an extent that we see only a black depth in subsequent centuries.
For if we look carefully, we will not see darkness, but rather, a world which is slowly but surely becoming more like our own. To illustrate this development, let me ask the reader to consider for a moment this book which he or she is now reading. There was nothing like it in the Roman world. Only around A.D. 300 (in chapter 2) did the bound codex, which is the format of this book, replace the unwieldy scroll. Only around 600 (that is, by chapter 10) did the writing in this book become legible as it is here: for the individual words came to be written separately instead of being run together. This change, which is associated with Ireland, marked “the great divide in the history of reading.”27 By the time of the Carolingian Renaissance, around A.D. 800 (in chapter 19), these texts came to be punctuated and divided up into paragraphs, and were written in a uniform script as they are in this book. Last but not least, the system of “A.D.” dates which we now take for granted in any European historical narrative began to appear only around the year A.D. 700 (in chapter 18).28 Altogether, slowly over the centuries, the format and even the meaning of the book itself had changed. The Roman world still speaks to us. But we must remember that it speaks to us now only through books whose shape came into being through the silent labor of generations of “technicians of the word” – lawyers, bureaucrats, and monks – in the centuries of Dark Age Christian Europe.
It is important to remember that this was not the first time that western Europe had experienced a shift of “intensification” into “abatement” such as accompanied the end of the Roman empire. The megalithic culture of the Atlantic regions, which had produced Stonehenge in southern Britain, the menhirs of Brittany, and New Grange in Ireland, had produced “arguments in stone” quite as impressive, in their own age, as were Roman cities. The degree of “intensification” involved in the mobilization of collective labor which went toward their construction was truly awesome. Their successors, in the “Urnfield Period” of around 1300 B.C., had less to show for themselves. They left “no great stone monuments to visit.” Yet prehistorians realize that, through the quiet increments of their technological advances and in their social formations, it is they, and not the spectacular builders of Stone-henge, who are “directly ancestral.”29
Taking place as it did in the silent depths of prehistory, the shift from the Megalithic to the Urnfield culture does not elicit the passion and disquiet which are still evoked by thoughts of the fall of Rome. But it could be said that the Christians of the early medieval West also made the shift from an impressive but distant civilization to one which is “directly ancestral” to us. It was not only the slow emergence of the book which makes us realize that, much as we may admire the Fathers of the Church as representatives of the last, spectacular flowering of ancient culture, it is the contemporaries of Gregory the Great, Columbanus, and Charlemagne who are “directly ancestral” to the Christianity of the European Middle Ages and so of modern times. Whether we like it or not, it is their blood, and not the blood of the Early Church, which runs in our veins.
For it was in the early Middle Ages, and not earlier, that the Christian imagination took on its peculiarly western shape. We are dealing with a series of irrevocable “precipitations” of ideas which had existed in diffuse form in late antique Christianity, but which had never been brought together with such decisive clarity of focus until the seventh and eighth centuries. These novel “precipitations” of ideas did not occur in late antiquity but in the period between 550 and 750. They mark the true “End of Ancient Christianity,” to which I devote Part III of this book.
To take a few examples: the minute calibration of sins and the development of the techniques of confession go back to this time. As we will see in chapter 10, by the sheer act of writing their Penitentials, the sapientes, the men of the pen of sixth-century Ireland, transformed into a comprehensive tool of pastoral care an ancient monastic system of spiritual guidance, which they had read of in texts concerning the Desert Fathers of Egypt. Thereby they opened a way which would lead, eventually, to the establishment of auricular confession as a principal feature of medieval and modern Catholic Christianity. As we shall see in chapter 11, the first steps were also taken at this time toward a notion of purgatory, with all that such a notion implies for the idea of the continuing particularity of every soul and for the creation of permanent imaginative bonds between the living and the dead.
These changes are not associated with dramatic changes in doctrine. They are considerably more important than that. They represent nothing less than a slow reorientation of the Christian imagination of the West as mute, but as irrevocable, as the change from the alien scroll to the “modern” book. It is as if, having travelled all day through a landscape, we looked out the window to find that we had, indeed, entered a different region. Old landmarks are no longer to be seen. New ones dominate the horizon. There are now large monasteries, pastoral systems devoted to confession and to the saying of Mass for the relief of souls in the other world. We can even detect the first, tentative outlines of the “Christian” cemetery, after centuries where such an institution had been strikingly absent.30 It is only by looking back to the beginning of our journey that we realize that these new landmarks (landmarks which we now take for granted as part and parcel of Christianity) had simply not been there when we started out. On issues which intimately affect the Christian view of the afterlife and the day-to-day practice of all believers, we have left behind an ancient Christianity.
The Christians of the East, co-inheritors of the same ancient Christianity, would also come, for the first time, to look strange to the Latin world. As we shall see at the end of chapter 19, the reactions of intellectuals at the court of Charlemagne to the cult of icons in the Greek Church show the beginnings of a lasting parting of the ways in the Christian imagination. For (as we shall see in chapter 17) the Greek theologians who fostered and refined the cult of icons in the ninth century were themselves also “directly ancestral” to their own tradition. Though appealing to the immemorial traditions of the Fathers of the Greek Church, they, in fact, made their own “precipitate” of that tradition. They struck out on a new path which leads directly to a piety still common to the entire Orthodox world, from Greece to Vladivostok. Having created to their own satisfaction their own, distinctive “precipitate” from the Fathers of their own Latin past, Western Christians refused to follow them, with consequences which have lasted up to this day.
It is important to end, therefore, by attempting to recapture something of the momentum which enabled so many discreet but surprisingly irrevocable changes in the Christian heritage to take place at this time. Let us concentrate, first, on the agendas of the elite. For them, I would suggest, the early Middle Ages represented the age par excellence of “applied Christianity.” In East and West alike, we are dealing with persons who were deeply committed to bringing the Early Christian past into the present. They wished to make it available in the condensed form of digests, anthologies, and encyclopedic compilations; to turn the recommendations of ancient Christian authors and the rules of former Christian councils into a finely calibrated system of rules, adjusted to the needs of pastoral guidance; and to ensure that even the material aspects of Christianity – and, most especially, its visual impact – should be discreetly disciplined so as to communicate a correct and salutary message.
The care which went into the material production of texts so as to make them increasingly “reader-friendly” (to which we have referred) was only one aspect of a drive to catch an entire world in the web of inherited Christian words. No subject was too humble – whether this was what to do when a mouse fell into one’s beer – nor too magnificent – such as a glimpse of the dim outlines of heaven and hell – not to be caught by the pen. Paradoxically, as literacy appears to have receded in western Europe, the religion of the elites of both the Latin and the Greek Churches became, if anything, more “textualized”: it drew its guidelines and its sustenance from the texts of former authors. The notion of the “Fathers of the Church” was created in this time. Latins were proud to look back to Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and Greeks to Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria.
After the death of Augustine, in 430, Latin Christians took comfort in the fact that they possessed a Latin Christian literature of their own.31 They had their own “Fathers of the Church.” But far from being placed on a pedestal, the late antique Christian past was treated as a body of living truth, to be applied to every situation of their own times. In that sense, there was no past, any more than the directions of a modern technical manual linger on the “past” of the scientific discoveries which enable a car-engine to be repaired or an electric current to be switched on. What mattered was that the past still “worked” in the present. Thus, for example, when, in 688, archbishop Julian of Toledo wished to console a gout-ridden colleague by composing a meditation on the joys of the life hereafter, he did not choose his own words. Instead, he made a series of extracts from the works of long-dead Fathers of the Church. In the form of extracts which could be easily read and reread, their message was focused on the reader with all the condensed energy of a laser beam. By these means, a doctrine, which all Christians had long taken for granted, would “touch the mind so much more vehemently and pierce the heart.”32
The problem was not to create a new message, nor to contest old ones, but to make sure that a message whose alloy had already been tried and found true in the days of the Fathers of the Church should sink ever deeper into the hearts of individuals and of the Christian people of entire Churches. Even in its most settled areas, early medieval religion had the aspects of a “missionary religion.” Its “ego-ideals” were the preacher, the spiritual guide, and the teacher. Hence, it was not surprising that when two vehicles for the communication of a religious message – the written and the visual: texts and icons – were thought to be in competition with each other, Christian leaders should have clashed so vehemently over which of the two had precedence in the task of “applying” Christianity. In the eighth and ninth centuries, disputes on this topic raged throughout the Christian world, from Iona and Aachen to Jerusalem and Constantinople, at the time of the “Iconoclast Controversy.” The dispute was so fierce because both sides felt that they had a duty to discipline not only the minds but even, now, the eyes of the “Christian people committed to their charge.”
I trust that in my chapters (notably in chapters 8, 10, 17, and 19) I have done justice to at least a few of the more central moments in this long-term mutation of Christian culture. It is a mutation which is easier to describe than to explain. Let me say, briefly, that the conventional explanation does not satisfy me. Early medieval Christian intellectuals are usually presented as men in a hurry. It is believed that their principal concern was to rescue what they could of a battered inheritance from Roman times in an age of violence and economic collapse. To take one well-known example: the work of Cassiodorus, the sixth-century bureaucrat turned monk, has been seen as no more than a salvage operation. It was believed that this work was carried out, with tragic urgency, on the very edge of the abyss of ignorance and disorder into which Italy and all Europe was about to slide. But (as we will see in chapter 8) the work associated with Cassiodorus’ library at Vivarium communicates an entirely different impression. Cassiodorus and his monks did not see themselves in this way. Rather, they set to work inspired by a robust sense of the continuing existence, in East and West alike, of a rich and living tradition. This tradition was not in need of being salvaged. Rather, it needed to be fine-tuned. It needed to be turned into an “applied culture,” adjusted to the needs of “modern times.” What this “applied culture” may have lost in richness, it more than gained in the manner in which it communicated that here was a living wisdom which had settled down, from the first, frenetic moments of its creation, into the sure and confident stride of a long-distance runner.
In this respect, as I point out in chapter 10, early medieval Europe may not have been very different, in the long-term rhythms of its culture, from the Hellenistic and Roman worlds from which it came. Of the traditions of biblical exegesis between 430 and 800, it has been said that “the primary desire appears to have been to mop up in the aftermath of genius.”33 But the need to “mop up in the aftermath of genius” is not a characteristic of this period alone. The same could be said of the entire half-millennium between Alexander’s conquest of the Middle East and the end of the Roman empire. The blinding release of energy associated with the Golden Age of Athens was led, at a lesser voltage, through a teaching tradition which once reached as far as Aï Qanum, in northeast Afghanistan, and which eventually passed through the language barrier between Greek and Latin to dominate the Roman world. Endlessly reproduced, codified, interpreted, and elaborated by schoolmasters and by public intellectuals, it was still active in the days when the young Augustine himself suffered the pains of education in distant North Africa. As Cassiodorus knew very well, an “applied” culture, a Great Tradition carried from generation to generation on the back of its schoolmasters, was nothing new in the history of Europe. What was new was his intention that Christianity, and not a secular culture, should take over from the ancients the well-tried mechanisms of self-perpetuation.
Indeed, it is where it continued to move imperceptibly to the rhythms of a very ancient world that early medieval Christianity often seems most “backward” to us. Like the Greco-Roman world, it was, indeed, a world of schoolmasters – and proud of it. It was also an age whose leaders established a relationship to culture marked by deep existential seriousness. As we will see in chapters 8 and 10, Gregory the Great did not turn away from the classical past either because it was pagan or because he found it to be in an irreparably damaged state. He simply found it a distraction from the main business of life, which was to prepare the soul for judgment.
This reason for the narrowing of Gregory’s vision places him against a very ancient background. His choice (though expressed now in Christian terms) was the same as that of any “philosopher” of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He shared with these philosophers the austere assumption that there was only one permanent and all-important object on which the human mind could always work, slowly but with effect, to bring about irrevocable change: and that was the raw stuff of human nature itself. It was possible to transform the self. Much of the comfort and richness of a culture could and should be sacrificed to that one overriding aim.
What should be stressed is that the drastic focusing of attention which this austere vision of culture implied did not necessarily lead to impoverishment. There is a translucency in the thought of Gregory which is absent in the thunderous abundance of Augustine. Many of the features of Augustine which most appeal to modern persons in works such as his Confessions – his intense subjectivity, his fascination with the disjuncture between the inner and the outer person, the haunting sense of a hiatus between the material and the spiritual world – have been thought through by Gregory to more tranquil conclusions. The grinding tensions which gave energy to Augustine have been resolved through long centuries of spiritual guidance. The itinerary of the soul is more carefully plotted and the baffling diversity of human characters is catalogued with the loving precision of a doctor’s handbook. The search of the troubled soul for transparency to God led Gregory to use a language where the outer and the inner lead more gently into each other, and where physical signs point without wavering to spiritual realities.34
We have entered an altogether more “sacramental” world, different from that of Augustine. It is not a cruder world. But it is a world with different hopes, oriented toward different forms of achievement. The world made sense. It showed the way securely to a beauty which lay beyond itself. Material objects, lovingly constructed and contemplated, could bridge the gulf between human beings and a distant God. It is a world similar to that which had emerged, at much the same time, in the Greek East under the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It is a world which has come to rest. Much as a giant star can collapse into fiery clusters under its own unimaginable mass, so, by the time of Gregory and his eastern peers, the exuberant Christianity of the late antique world has pressed itself down, under its own weight. The result, at times, was not depletion, but rather “precipitates” of rare clarity.
In order to appreciate what this can mean, I would advise the reader to visit the ecclesiastical complex of Sant’Agnese and Santa Costanza on the Via Nomentana in Rome. The fourth-century mausoleum-church of Santa Costanza (originally the tomb of Constantine’s daughter) still belongs to an ancient Christianity, revelling unthinkingly in the abundance provided by a wealthy and still classical empire. It is a delightfully confusing world of wicked pinks and bright greens, where pudgy cherubs romp among the garlands of God’s paradise. To descend into the stillness of the adjoining early seventh-century church of Sant’Agnese is to enter the world in which Gregory felt at home. St. Agnes hovers silently and alone, set against a bottomless sea of gold, above an apse made as exquisite and translucent as a honeycomb by marble columns. The columns draw the eye, in a moment of uncluttered certainty, from the floating figure above, to the altar, which, itself, is placed directly above the relics below. Heaven and earth are back in place; and, in such a church, they can be seen to join.
To stand in a church such as Sant’Agnese is to come close to the principal intellectual and religious agenda of early medieval Christianity. This was a form of Christianity which, in its art and in much of its literature, strove “to remove the dividing line between Earth and Heaven.”35 In Christian worship of the age, “visual art was liberally employed to open doors between this world and the next.”36 Whether this was in a great pilgrimage shrine, blazing with light and heavy with perfume, in an intimate chapel where jewel-studded relic-cases lay on an altar laden with silver and golden plate, sheathed in multicolored silks and screened by intricate surfaces of translucent marble, in the heavy pages of a great, illuminated Bible of the Celtic North, or in the quiet gaze of a Byzantine icon, the Christianity of the period between 400 and 1000 littered Europe and the Middle East with its own equivalents of “arguments in stone.” Here were little islands of the holy, where the sacred was concentrated at its greatest intensity and marked out from the profane by all the skills available to a Dark Age society. Each in its own way was a “portion of Paradise.”37
It takes a considerable effort to gather together in our minds the sheer magnificence of early medieval Christianity. The large basilicas of late antiquity survive around the Mediterranean – in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Their ground-plans and their floor mosaics, at least, astonish archaeologists by their frequency all over the present-day Islamic Middle East and in North Africa. But the majesty of northern Christianity in the early medieval period is strangely muted. Its buildings paid the price of being, indeed, “directly ancestral.” Unlike the haunting Early Christian ruins of the Middle East, they were built on sites where building has been continuous from the early Middle Ages onwards. Many were replaced by the Gothic cathedrals which stand right over them. Many have been devoured by the modern cities of Britain, France, Belgium, and the Rhineland. Anyone who has driven through industrial Newcastle looking for the churches associated with the Venerable Bede knows what I mean. When not swamped in this way by modern developments, the sites around which vibrant microcosms of a Christian order had once clustered in northern Britain and in Ireland are characterized by an unearthly emptiness. There is little in the ethereal beauty of present-day Iona to hint at the solid wealth and artistic skill which had once been massed around it. Compared with Roman or with Gothic Europe, the achievements of that age – such as the works of the Venerable Bede and the Book of Kells – remain strangely “placeless” in our imagination. Because of this, it is only too easy to slip into the romantic error, which makes the achievements of northern Christianity in the early Middle Ages appear as brilliant but as fragile as a streak of winter sunlight over the Atlantic. It is hard to conjure up the very real solidity of their original grandeur.
Part of the reason, of course, is that not all the visual “arguments” of early medieval Christianity were “arguments in stone.” Many involved the assembly in one place of astonishing examples of portable wealth – jewel-work, textiles, perfumes, and written pages. These were all too easily scattered to the winds in future ages, through sale or plunder, in a manner in which the heavy, locked stones of a Roman city could never be scattered.
But this consideration, in itself, brings us back, for the last time, to a consideration of the economy and the society in which Christian art and architecture were developed at this time. The truth is that the elites of early medieval Europe were considerably poorer than those of Roman times. Furthermore, their deployment of wealth was dominated by concerns which did not lead to the piling up of large architectural monuments. From the Gallo-Roman bishops of the fifth century through to the Frankish aristocrats and the Saxon and Irish kings of the seventh century, to the emperors and great popes of the Carolingian age, there is a shabby gentility about the aristocracies of Dark Age Europe which makes the visual and artistic achievements of the time all the more impressive.
For kings and aristocrats had been, in many ways, the principal victims of the general “abatement” of the age. The ending of the relentless system of taxation which had characterized the later Roman empire considerably weakened their ability to extract wealth on a regular basis from their inferiors. No longer policed and bullied every year to pay taxes, the peasantry slipped quietly out of the control of their landlords. Rents fell as taxes vanished. It has been cogently argued, indeed, that in many regions of Europe the Dark Ages were a golden age for the peasantry. Less of their agrarian surplus was taken from them than at any other time in the history of Europe from the foundation of the Roman empire to the end of the ancien régime. It was only with the ever more secure establishment of the landed basis of the Frankish aristocracy in the eighth and ninth centuries, under strong and wealthy kings, that the aristocracies could gather in enough wealth to support more ambitious ventures. In that sense, the “Carolingian Renaissance” was a portent for what would later happen in Europe in the Romanesque and Gothic periods. It marked “the beginning of the return to the normal life of grinding extortion from the peasant classes.”38
In between, the aristocracies had to cut their clothes according to the shape of their cloth. Hence, the enormous importance, in the period between A.D. 400 and 800, of the gift-giving relationship. Though practiced with exceptional intensity in Ireland and Britain, gift-giving was by no means a purely “barbarian” institution: the popes of Rome and the Byzantine emperors were also spectacular givers at this time. What matters is the role which gift-giving played in the transfer of wealth in a distinctly sluggish economy. It was based on a “science of the possible.” It provided a scenario for magnificence which was most appropriate to the economic capacities of the givers and to the social profile of those whom they wished to impress. This meant, in effect, that spasmodic accumulations of wealth (often made from “windfalls” of plunder and the spoils of war) were disbursed to impress relatively small groups of important people – one’s peers and, above all, one’s military followers.39 It goes without saying that holy places received long-term landed endowments. But it was the glory of the gift which lingered in the memory and before the eyes of believers.
As a result of this new rhythm of giving, the urban magnificence which we associate with the Roman period became irrelevant. Right up to the end of the fourth century, in much of western Europe, Roman landowners were assured by the workings of the imperial system of regular and large incomes. They lavished this wealth on “arguments in stone” – on circuses, theaters, baths, public buildings, and on the boisterous ceremonies which took place in these. In doing this, they aimed to impress thousands of civilians, their “fellow-citizens.” And the “ever-chattering stones” of tens of thousands of Roman inscriptions, scattered all over the empire, survive to tell us what they had done.
A few centuries later, in the same areas and often, indeed, within sight of deserted Roman buildings, kings and aristocrats, surrounded by small but indispensable retinues of warriors, would pile gold, silks, and precious objects of all kinds (from Byzantine ivories to the opulent and exotic fur of polar bears) on the altars of small but exquisitely built and ornamented churches and at the gates of the great “holy cities” of the monasteries.40 Thereby they built up their own “arguments in stone,” at lesser overall expense, but in a manner which ensured that local memory would be encrusted with memories of their stunning if spasmodic moments of generosity.
What made such gift-giving meaningful was precisely the sharp structuring of the Christian imagination of the time. Here were places where profane wealth was transformed by contact with the sacred. For, as students of modern Buddhist countries tell us, a system of gift-giving fits very well a certain “shape” of the relations between the local population and those (such as the monks) who both control and “symbolize” in their own persons the presence of the sacred. Gift-giving bridges the sacred and the profane in a manner which enhances the symbolic glory of the sacred while, at the same time, preventing the absorption of the profane. It is “a segregative-connective arrangement” which heightens the boundaries between the two. The kings and the warlords give to the monks. But they do not have to become monks. In the age of Columbanus, of Bede, and of the great abbots of Iona, gift-giving to churches and monasteries did not only bring blessing on the laity. It preserved their identity. For gifts to the sacred “contribute to mediating between two otherwise polarized and even antagonistic sectors.”41 Gifts created “a sort of buffer zone”42 between the seemingly irreconcilable values and lifestyles of a Christian clergy and the warrior elites on whose support the Church now depended.
It was in this way that the upper-class laity of Europe came to press in around the Church. Their frequent gifts “served to create familiarity with supernatural powers.”43 We should not think of such gift-giving as an invariably distant, still less as a cynical relationship. Many pressed in around the Church of their own accord. The more pious among them entered with fervor into the spiritualized gift relationship involved in the exchange of confession and absolution. For the exceptionally pious or the exceptionally grateful, children might even be added to the gold, the silks, and the stone. The Venerable Bede was given to a monastery at the age of seven, as were many leading Christians of the time, all over Europe.
Inevitably, the predominance of the gift-giving relationship defined Christianity as an aristocratic preoccupation. Early medieval Europe was a period of sharply differentiated access to the sacred and to the bodies of knowledge which clustered around it. We must always remember that the most significant division in the Christian Church in this time was not the division between monks and clergy on the one side and the laity on the other. It was between those who could give and reciprocate gifts and those who could not. Abbots, kings and noblemen, priests, lay men and lay women of the upper classes clustered around the churches as equals. They all found themselves, as it were, on the same shelf. They were drawn together in a web slowly woven by the exchange of gifts, of spiritual guidance, and of teaching.44
Those who could not give are less easy to see. Compared with the vivid evidence for the piety of the kings and the aristocrats, the faces of the peasantry are largely lost to us in these centuries. I have attempted, in chapters 6, 16, 18, and 19, to find a place for them, and would urge others to do the same. My suspicion is that there is more to discover on this theme. The peasantry were considerably less passive and less isolated from Christianity than we had thought.45 But their access to it was different, and was frequently judged, by their betters, to be dangerously unconventional.
The final incorporation of the peasantry in the flow of wealth which supported the Church marks, perhaps, the true end of our period. As we will see in chapter 18, by the time of Charlemagne the system of rents and taxes, which had been dislocated to the advantage of the peasantry by the unravelling of the Roman empire, had come to be re-established in new forms. Tithes became compulsory on all baptized Christians – peasants among them. And, with the regular extraction of tithes, the Christianization of Europe enters a new rhythm. In many areas, the later ninth century has been called “the age of the parish.”46 The coming together of church and village (often through the intervention of local landlords – lay or ecclesiastical) occurs at this time in many regions.47 The presence of a church and of a Christian cemetery as a “holy place” for the dead of the village was matched by a quickening of the pace of “admonition” from the pulpit, even at the level of the country clergy. These were the church’s counter-gifts for the universal and compulsory gift of tithes.
With these developments, the outlines of a truly “medieval” order began to come into place. From that time onwards, we look back with a certain puzzlement, and yet with a certain poignancy, from the great imaginative distance placed between us and it by the Middle Ages and by the Reformation, at that older Christianity. Yet there had been a time in the first millennium of our era when this older Christianity had covered western Europe with a more diverse and fragile net, and in so doing had dotted the landscape with little “portions of paradise.” It is to make this distant Christianity more present to us that this book has been written.