[This
is Chapter Five of Murphey’s book Understanding
the Modern Predicament.]
Chapter
Five
THE
MISSING PARADIGM: THE MIDDLE AGES
From the preceding two chapters, we
have seen that the role of human immaturity has been essential to understanding
both the Greek and the Roman experiences. In the present chapter we will see
that the same is true about the Middle Ages; it was a period in which
"what was missing" was every bit as important as the factors that
were actually present. The Burkean conservative believes the medieval model to
contain a paradigm that satisfies permanent truths about the human condition,
but I find this far from acceptable.
It may seem that a relatively
pessimistic view of the Middle Ages, mitigated only slightly by a recognition that
certain advances were made during the period, is easy to justify. But this is
no longer the case. Since the early nineteenth century historians have become
more appreciative of the Middle Ages. This greater
appreciation, which contrasts so sharply with the view held by the humanistic
historians of the fifteenth and subsequent centuries, has often bordered on
apologetics. The result is that I am flying in the face of the modern tendency
when I point to the void that underlay the Middle
Ages.
Some important progress was in fact
made during the Middle Ages. To the extent the
Renaissance historians failed to emphasize this progress they overstated the
"darkness" of the period. Such an overstatement is to have been
expected; with society once again on the move with the exhilarating sense of
freedom that came from an expansion of mental effort and the rediscovery of
ancient learning, the tendency, understandably, was to overreact.
Yet, it is hard to read the recent
literature about the Middle Ages without feeling that
there has been an overreaction in the opposite direction. The effort is to put
the best possible face on the period. Its worst features are passed over or
explained away. We still have not arrived at a good historical understanding.
As to this favorably oriented distortion, there is the testimony of Karl
Morrison that "medievalists have laboriously tallied references to Cicero
and Virgil, reconstructing curricula of instruction, and registered any outbursts
of what Highet calls the 'sense of beauty,' seeking to establish as fact that
the humane spirit, the knowledge and admiration of the classics, and the
secularism of the Renaissance were present in the early Middle Ages.”1
The following apologia is found, for
example, in Loren MacKinney's The Medieval World, published in 1938:
"The Italian humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
misunderstanding the period from the decline of the
The
view that the period was one of "active reconstruction" is a possible
interpretation. But MacKinney often stretches his analysis out of shape to
justify it. He reports that "throughout (the tenth) century, historical
literature flourished." He gives as supporting evidence the fact that
monasteries kept yearbooks "in which local events were briefly
recorded." He says these yearbooks were "the seeds from which real
histories grew." We feel some letdown, then, when he informs us that
"often the record for an entire year fills less than half a page of modern
print." This does not justify a conclusion that historical literature
flourished, even though he has shown that historical records had not entirely
died out. The critics writing in the fifteenth century seem to have been closer
to a correct inference from the facts.
MacKinney's emphasis is again
apparent when he pleads that "the truth is that, at its worst, the tenth century was by no means
a total loss to civilization." Surely it is possible to admit this much
and still rank the tenth century very poorly in comparison with either the ancient
or the modern world.
Many recent historians have taken
the position that "each age must be judged by its own standards."
This reflects at least in part an historicist
philosophical position. This perspective is evident in Morrison's statement
that "if the early Middle Ages seem dark, or a period of
'gloomy and almost static barbarism' to students of classical learning,
it is because they are applying to that age goals and standards which the age
itself did not acknowledge or strive after."
But such a reflection is only half
true. Its validity depends upon the historian's purpose. There may be times we
will accept the value-system of an epoch itself, but if we seek to evaluate
matters of life and death, health and disease, knowledge and ignorance, anarchy
and order, what we seek is an evaluation according to our own values and
understanding. A relativistic perspective will not be the appropriate method.
When "judged by his own standards,” even the life
of a slave or of the worst barbarian may be perfectly acceptable. Such
relativism is particularly out of place in an analysis of the "voids"
underlying a period of history, since it would deprive us of the standards we
seek to apply.
According to the editors of Lord
Acton's essays on the history of freedom, his reaction to modern historiography
was similar to my own. They report that "the second tendency
against which
The apologetic treatment of the Middle Ages has been the result of a combination of factors.
These have included the Romantic reaction to humanism in the early nineteenth
century, the tendency of historians of a scientific frame of mind to view men
of other ages from a clinical perspective, the relativistic outlook of
Historicism, and the more or less natural bias of scholars specializing in the
medieval period.
Another major contributing factor
has been the tendency of socialist authors to identify with the Middle Ages. Two main reasons have existed for this
tendency: First, the socialist intellectual has found that medieval thought and
values had much in common with his own doctrine and attachments. Second,
because of their tactical position vis a vis
capitalism, socialist authors have found it necessary to portray the Industrial
Revolution in the blackest terms. For this purpose it has been necessary to
rehabilitate the Middle Ages so that the factory
system will seem a deterioration or at least not an improvement.
The writings of R.H. Tawney give a
good example of this socialist perspective. In The Acquisitive Society
he urged the organization of society on the basis of "functions" (a
"socially useful service") rather than on "acquisitive
rights." In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism he reviewed
feudalism and found much to his liking, although he did call it
"exploitive" and would not have carried it bodily into the present.
He admired the Middle Ages for its "functional
view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics."4
He went so far as to say that "the last of the Schoolmen was Karl
Marx," -- although we could add R. H. Tawney. He told that during the
Middle Ages "society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of
economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though
varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was
thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights
apportioned thereto." He said "there is no place in medieval theory
for economic activity which is not related to a moral end." In the
medieval view "the ideal -- if only man's nature could rise to it -- is
communism." With regard to technical economic doctrine he particularly
liked the medieval "teaching with regard to the just price and the
prohibition of usury." He summed up his position with an analogy to
socialist thought, saying that "the medieval insistence that riches exist
for man, not man for riches, (and) the argument of the Socialist who urges that
production
should be
organized for service, not for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize
the instrumental character of economic activities by reference to an ideal
which is held to express the true nature of man."
Those who seek to rehabilitate
history's verdict about the Middle Ages are not
without some supporting evidence. There were areas of progress; everything
wasn't bleak. Over a long period a "revolution" in agricultural
methods prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. Although Forbes and
Dijksterhuis have spoken of "a deplorable lack of written evidence on the
arts and crafts of the Middle Ages," a major development occurred in
"the introduction of prime movers to take the place of muscle energy in
moving machinery and tools."5 There were less than
a
hundred watermills in
Any view that fails to consider
these advances is to that extent deficient, but a recital of such achievements
can only be part of the picture.
Ludwig von Mises observed that one
of the characteristics of life based on capitalism and technology is that the
amenities of life are enjoyed not just by the wealthy, but by the average
citizen.7 Forbes' and Dijksterhuis' History of Science and
Technology illustrates the extent to which this did not occur during the
Middle Ages: "Hardly any progress," they indicate, "was made in
improving the amenities of life during the Middle Ages. The only light sources
were still the torch, the candle, and the oil lamp. Good beeswax and tallow candles
were now available, but they were mainly used in churches and the houses of the
rich; the poor used oil lamps or went to bed early. Neither did the latter
profit from the invention of spectacles around 1290, because for a long time
they remained too expensive except for the very few." They continue,
saying "the open firearms of the hearth was still
the only means of heating the house...Neither were there any great changes in
food. Butter took the place of oil in the houses of the rich, but the poor used
rape-seed and colza oil, beef fat, or lard. In general bread, vegetables, and
fish formed the mainstay of the medieval diet, meat appearing irregularly on
the table even of the rich.”
Knowledge and technique is not
always gained or even retained; it can be lost. The early thirteenth century
surgeon Gilbert discovered a method for the repair of severed intestines that
was lost and not rediscovered until centuries later when John B. Murphy
popularized his "Murphy's Button" as the technique for end-to-end
anastomosis. A medical historian points out
that this "does suggest that many great discoveries have in
fact been born, lived, died, and been forgotten by all the
world, as Gilbert's alder button was forgotten."8 Much of the Middle Ages is noted for its loss of knowledge.
The most significant criticism of
the medieval period lies in its having encouraged habits of thought that
repealed the epistemological basis for civilization, and further in its having
actively obstructed the redevelopment of a sound epistemology. Dampier went to
the heart of the matter with an expressive metaphor when he said that "the
scattered seedlings of science had to grow in a vast and confused jungle which
was always threatening to choke them, and not in the open healthy prairie of
ignorance which seems to be envisaged by some historians of science.”9
History records an inexhaustible
chain of fascinating and yet morbid examples of the suppression of creative
thought. The tone was set by Tertullian's earlier "I believe, because it
is impossible."10 Men of the most constructive bent were often
hounded, tortured or killed.
In
the seventeenth century the Inquisition condemned Galileo's theory that the
earth revolved around the sun.11 In 1616 he
was forced to assert that his theory was false and to promise not to republish
it. G. F. Young tells that "Galileo was therefore in 1633 charged with
having gone back on his promise of 1616, and summoned to appear before the
Inquisition in Rome, to answer for his writings which, in maintaining the fixed
position of the sun and the movement of the earth round it, propounded a
doctrine which was declared by the Pope to be in flat contradiction to the
Bible."12 Young says that "at Rome Galileo, now seventy
years old and broken in health, was threatened with torture by the Inquisition;
his theories were formally condemned, he was made to recant on his knees his
so-called errors, and especially to declare his doctrine as to the movement of
the earth false, and was kept a prisoner."
Twelve centuries earlier, Arabian
science had benefited from the Greek, Roman and Egyptian medical classics that
Bishop Nestor of
We are told, too, that
"anything savouring of Atomism inevitably aroused suspicion in the Middle Ages because it always suggested Epicureanism and
thus heresy." William of Conches ran into opposition on this account in
the twelfth century for his Philosophica mundi, which contained
"corpuscular considerations."
In the sixth century, Boethius was
executed for treason by Theodoric; in prison he had written The Consolation
of Philosophy. Three centuries later the monk Gottschalk was tortured and
sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery for arguing that "if one
followed Augustine's theology to its logical conclusion, men
were predestined to hell as well as to heaven." A century later
"a grammarian of
The Greek physician Galen wrote more
than 500 medical treatises in the second century A.D. As the Middle Ages set in
his work became revered, with the effect that it became impossible to question
him. Galen became the established authority. His anatomy was followed for
almost fourteen centuries, until finally in the sixteenth century Andreas
Vesalius secretly dissected human bodies in graveyards and at places of
execution. A medical historian notes with appropriate emphasis the startling
discovery Vesalius made: "Then Vesalius made a major discovery. He
obtained the skeleton of a monkey and found that it conformed to Galen's
anatomical ideas about humans. Now he understood! Galen's anatomy had been
based only on the dissection of lower animals! He had not really observed
cadavers! No wonder he was full of errors -- and how criminal it had been to
canonize those errors so solemnly!”13
But this remarkable discovery --
that the anatomy so slavishly followed for almost fourteen centuries was based
on monkeys instead of men -- was not appreciated. In 1543 Vesalius published his
De Humani Fabrica, but "from then on," we are told, "his
life was a downhill slide." An old teacher attacked him, the medical
profession opposed him. He burned the manuscript of a new book and withdrew,
becoming a drifter. Later "the Inquisition closed in on him, it is said,
and he was saved by the Emperor, on condition that he journey to the Holy Land
in atonement for his 'crime."'
The fact that during the reign of
Henry VIII in England a law was enacted entitled “An Act for Abolishing
Diversity of Opinion” tells us something about the mentality of the period.
A plague swept across Europe just
before the middle of the fourteenth century. Florence is said to have suffered
one hundred thousand dead and Paris and Avignon each had more than fifty
thousand deaths. At Oxford the student population was reduced from thirty
thousand to six thousand.14
Castiglioni reports in his History
of Medicine that "various theories were proposed as to the cause of
this terrific scourge. Among the most prominent was that it was owing to the
conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on the 24th of March 1345." He
says that "another natural reaction was the belief that the scourge was
due to the poisoning of wells, expecially by the lepers and the Jews."
There is a fascinating incident
about this plague in Atkinson's Magic, Myth and Medicine. The story of
the Jewish physician Balavignus is surely one of the more tragic in history.
"Following the sanitary laws as set down in Leviticus, Balavignus had all
refuse burned. Naturally the rats left the ghettos and gravitated to gentile
quarters in search of food. The Jews consequently suffered less from the
disease than did their Christian neighbors, the mortality in the ghettos being
five percent of what it was among the Christians." The result was that
"this was so noticeable that Jews at once fell under suspicion. It was
observed that they covered their wells and took away their buckets. This led to
the belief that they were not only escaping the plague themselves but were in a
conspiracy to destroy the Christians by the disease. One day it was said that
someone had seen a Jew deposit a bag containing poison in a well. This report
so infuriated the people that a general massacre of the Jews was begun. Hecker
tells us: 'In this terrible year an unbridled spirit of fanaticism and thirst
for blood caused the death of nearly all the Jewish population in Strassburg
...At Eslengen the whole Jewish community in despair burned themselves in the
synagogue."
Balavignus himself was tortured,
forced to confess and then burned at the stake. "Soon in the smoking
embers lay the mortal remains of this great man who, had his advice been
heeded, would have proved to be one of the world's greatest benefactors."
This wasn't the only time militant ignorance
prevented the use of sanitation to stop the plague. Balavignus' lesson was
suppressed and three centuries later it was still being suppressed. The
following passage about the plague of 1629 appears in Young's account of the
Medici: "The pestilence raged for thirteen dismal months, during which
time in and around the city twelve thousand people died. Ferdinand established
a Board of Health, and this body issued many wise regulations, while they also
forced the inmates of the immense number of monasteries and convents with which
the city was crowded both to obey sanitary rules, and also to bear their share
in receiving and helping those who were convalescent. But Ferdinand's sound
sanitary regulations were denounced by the priests as impious; the Pope
demanded that the Board of Health should be censured, and required that a
severe penance should be exacted from its members."
Aristotle's writings exercised a
dominant influence in Scholastic thought (so much so that it became a serious
obstacle to further inquiry, as any philosophy would when applied by an
authoritarian mentality). But even his works had at first been condemned.
Although the University of Paris adopted his writings in 1225, this was only
after a Provincial Council in Paris had condemned them in 1209.
It was also in the thirteenth
century that Roger Bacon, who understood so well the role of experimentation in
science, analyzed the causes of man's intellectual failure to be "Undue
Regard to Authority, Habit, Prejudice, and False Conceit of Knowledge." At
first, Bacon received the protection of Pope Clement IV, but after Clement's
death he was imprisoned for fifteen years by Pope Nicholas IV.
Although much of the persecution of
thoughtful men came from the Church as a dominant institution, the persecution
was by no means limited to the Counter-Reformation, when the Church was under
stress. My examples have covered the entire medieval period. During the Roman
Empire, Christianity was first tolerated, then persecuted, then actively supported
by the Emperors. For its own sake, when it gained ascendancy, Christianity was
not a tolerant religion. Thorndike says that "finally, with Constantine,
Christianity triumphed; and soon began in its turn to persecute all pagans and
heretics."15
Considerable dispute existed over
matters of doctrine within the early Church, particularly about the Trinity and
the divinity of Christ. The Council of Nicaea was convened by the Emperor
Constantine in the fourth century and "anathematized" the Arians, who
did not believe in the Trinity. "Thus, early in Christian history
conservatism triumphed," MacKinney says, "and branded as heretical
all who believed in unitarianism or denied the absolute divinity of
Christ." The state combined with the Church to persecute heretical groups,
which included the Donatists, Circumcellions, Montanists, Priscillians,
Manicheans, Novations, Meletians, Nestorians, Monophysites and Pelagians.
We are
reminded of Gibbon's remark that "the appellation of heretic has always
been applied to the less numerous party."
It has not always been the Church
that has persecuted intellect. We have seen the role the Roman state played in
combination with the early Church. We vividly recall the treatment Socrates
received at the hands of Athenian democracy. Cicero quite literally lost his
head in later Republican Rome. And the modern age is not without its Billy
Mitchells and Boris Pasternaks.
It was Calvin, a Protestant, who
burned Servetus. Even empiricists have not been immune to brutality, as we see
in the case of the Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century. "He is
accused," we discover from Taton, "of having performed such inhuman
experiments as placing a prisoner in a closed barrel in order to see whether
his soul departed when he died, of raising children in absolute silence to find
out what language they would speak spontaneously, or again of disemboweling two
men to discover the respective effects of sleep and movement on their
alimentary canal."16 Frederick's language experiment with the children
is a repetition of one made, according to Herodotus, by Psammetichus of Egypt.17
The problem of intolerance, brutality, lack of empathy for others is so deeply
rooted in human nature that it cannot be ascribed to any one institution or
doctrine. It reflects immaturity -- a civilizational
void. In the Middle Ages this void gaped particularly wide.
Nor do we need to look only at
persecutions. The point is also illustrated by a number of instances in which
ideas became stagnant under authoritarian acceptance. A grammar written by a
fourth century teacher in Rome, Donatus, was used for twelve centuries.
Priscian's fifth century grammar was used throughout the Middle Ages. We have
already seen how Galen's anatomy was accepted without question for almost
fourteen centuries. Ptolemy dominated astronomy until the sixteenth century,
while medieval astronomers occupied themselves primarily by calculating tables.18
Medicine was thoroughly dogmatic.
Castiglioni tells us that "the Church solemnly affirmed the principle that
the canonical writings should be regarded as a supreme indisputable authority,
not only in matters of faith but also in science. Medicine oriented itself
rapidly in this direction. The first Christian physicians...preached the
all-importance of faith and recognized the complete authority of the Nazarene,
whose gospel is addressed to suffering humanity awaiting salvation."
Later, the medical knowledge of the
school at Salerno was put into the form of a poem, the famous Flos medicinae
or Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. This was memorized by thousands of
doctors "for whom each of these verses had the quality of Holy Writ."
Although the poem itself contained "useful, simple and true maxims,"
the authoritarian nature of its acceptance makes it easy to understand why
medieval medicine remained in a barbaric state for so long.
This barbarism is illustrated by
Taton when he tells us that "the Leech Book of Bald is a good
example of this mixture of ancient, Christian, and popular beliefs. Its cure for
snake-bite, for instance, was a snake soaked in holy water." Castiglioni
reports that in the early Middle Ages “there was formed a Christian religious
medicine in which prayer, the imposition of hands, unction with holy oil, were
regarded as the most important remedies, those to which the faithful should
have exclusive or almost exclusive recourse in seeking divine aid for the cure
of bodily ills." Many saints were thought to have healing powers and it
was long thought that the kings of England and France could cure scrofula by a
touch of the hand. Atkinson relates that "the Anglo-Saxon believed that
disease was either the result of an elf shot or of demons, or was due to the
destruction of the body by worms; these worms are pictured in their manuscripts
as monstrous creatures and they, as well as the demons and elf shots, were to
be dealt with by charms or by the administration to the patient of nauseating
and repulsive remedies which were meant to disgust the elfish enemies and thus
drive them away."
In the late Middle Ages,
Scholasticism was elevated to an unchallengeable position. Edwin Hoyt shows
that it consisted of Aristotelianism planted in a sterile soil. He says that
"at its highest point Scholasticism was founded on the philosophy of Aristotle.
But what an arid ground that philosophy came out upon when it was deposited in
Europe."19 He says "the Scholastics...began to hold that
there was no greater knowledge than Aristotle's." According to Taton
"the Aristotelian dialectic came to be considered tantamount to science
and reason." Castiglioni adds that "here science became progressively
crystallized in the rigid forms of scholasticism; neither clinical observation
nor attempts at experimental investigation could have the slightest effect on
this solid edifice."
This review of both the persecution
of some ideas and the authoritarian acceptance of others has shown the extent
to which the medieval period abused the epistemological preconditions of
civilization. The causes for this mental reversal went deep and point to the
existence of a broad void at the end of the ancient era. Christianity was a
symptom, not itself the underlying cause, of this void.
The insights of Jose Ortega y Gasset
are helpful. In Man and Crisis he interprets the crisis that terminated
Roman civilization as having been an existential crisis. The "system of
convictions" that held men together shattered and men came to hold only
"negative convictions." Having lost their bearings they despaired of
themselves, so that "the problematical thing was the very self of the
subject himself."20 To Ortega, "this is the state of mind
which led men to the Christian solution." He makes an analogy between the
Christian converts and the Cynic agitators.
Men fled from the world. With regard
to the Christian converts, Ortega tells us that "in the radicalism of
their speeches they all agree. They preach against the wealth of the rich, the
pride of the powerful; they are against learned men, against the established
culture, against complications of every type. In their minds, he is most right
and of most value who knows nothing, who has nothing -- the simple man, the
poor man, the humble man, the churchless." The result was "to turn
all values inside out. If wealth does not give happiness, poverty will; if
learning does not solve everything then true wisdom will lie in
ignorance." Christianity was itself born out of the desperation of ancient
man, which according to Ortega began in the first century B.C. and grew during the
Empire. There are later analogies in history in the nihilism of the nineteenth
century Russian intelligentsia and of the German Youth Movement before World
War I and of the New Left in America and Europe in the late 1960s.
In this escapist atmosphere,
supernaturalism had strong appeal as a radical solution. When all else proved
false, concern for the "other world" and a denial of this one seemed
a desirable refuge. Man returned to his more primordial beginnings; there was a
regression to the mental processes of the cargo cultists.
It is something of a mistake,
though, to say that the men of the fourth and fifth centuries had
"returned" to supernaturalism. A truer perception would be that much
of mankind has never been fully away from it. We need merely to read Plutarch's
references to divine omens to know that this is so. Even at its most advanced,
ancient civilization (as indeed our civilization today) was mixed. It retained
a strong underlay of residual barbarism. When he turned extravagantly to supernaturalism,
the despairing man of ancient times merely grabbed hold of something that was
already familiar to him and used it to negate the civilizational elements that
no longer commanded his confidence.
Christian tradition understandably
takes the most favorable possible view of this development. From its perspective, Christianity was a
positive force bringing renewal to man. If this were correct, a great positive
stepped in at the end of Roman civilization to take the place of the decay and
desperation.
Facts and logic, though, require a
very different interpretation of Christianity. It would be a momentous
contradiction that the finest development in man can have come from the most
debased human materials. Simple cause-and-effect suggests that Augustinian
Christianity was of the same quality as the men who formulated it (though this
could not be conclusive against it, since as an argument the observation would
be ad hominem). An honest appraisal cannot be flattering:
Augustinian Christianity was a form of reemergent barbarism.
MacKinney says "there are many
curious tales which illustrate the ardent Christian asceticism of this period.
One pious hermit was said to have gone without bread for eighty years; another
reveled in such filth that he was covered with vermin; another, in order to
escape all wordly influences, resolved never to look at his own body, and
refused even to take off his clothes. All of the holiest of the hermits
resorted to drastic physical tortures in order to fight off the temptations of
the Devil...By standing in ice cold water, rolling in thorns, or lashing
themselves with whips, the true soldiers of Christ were usually able to defeat
the wiles of the Evil One."
Is it possible that such men were
the carriers of a higher culture? Were they the precursors of advanced
civilization? To say so is to argue a paradox and to make cultural pathology a
paradigm.
St. Simeon Stylites "was
reputed to have lived for years on the top of a sixty-foot pillar." It can
be argued that as an extremist he was not representative of early Christianity,
and it is true that the behavior of the hermits and the stylites went beyond
that of many others. But we know also that St. Augustine held predominant
influence for eight centuries, and that his Confessions suggest an
extremism akin to that of the hermits and the stylites; he was their
intellectual mentor, if not an imitator of their behavior. "The friendship
of this world is fornication against Thee," he was able to say."21
He "despised earthly happiness;" "deliver me out of the bonds of
desire, wherewith I was bound most straitly to carnal concupiscence, and out of
the drudgery of worldly things." "Not even the infant whose life is
but a day upon the earth" is free of sin; men in general are wicked; the
life of this world is marred by "the muddy concupiscence of the
flesh."
Augustine labeled empirical
curiosity about the world "the lust of the eyes," arguing that
"the soul hath...a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title
of knowledge and learning...of making experiments through the flesh. The seat
whereof being in the appetite of knowledge, and sight being the sense chiefly
used for attaining knowledge, it is in Divine language called The lust of the
eyes. ..(T)he general experience of the senses, as was said, is called The lust
of the eyes. ..Hence men go to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is
besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but
to know...(T)he theatres do not carry me away, nor care I to know the courses
of the stars."
This involves, of course, a matter
of values. The Augustinian view is defensible if we care to do nothing
practical about disease, filth and suffering, and if we wish to know nothing
about "the courses of the stars," the roundness of the earth, the
chemical composition of helium. But if we see the humanistic value of low
infant mortality, of a man sleeping peacefully under anesthetic during an
amputation, of the ability to walk on the moon, of clean clothes and a washed
body, then we must wonder whether Augustinianism was not in fact the voice of
the internal barbarism that both contributed to and emerged from the collapse
of Roman civilization.
We analyze these things
dispassionately. To obtain their true meaning in terms of values, however, it
is necessary to permit ourselves a more subjective perspective. If we do this,
it becomes apparent that if we had lived during those times and had been at all
sensitive, it would have seemed that we lived not in a civilized community, but
in something more closely resembling an ant-heap. All that our contemporaries
would have viewed as sanity we would have perceived as terribly distorted.
Surely it would have been appropriate for Balavignus, Servetus, Vesalius,
Galileo and Roger Bacon, as they sat in prison or went to the stake, to have
cried "This is insane!" There is irony in the fact that hundreds of
thousands of people died of the plague without any knowledge that it was their
own primitivism that was the real sine qua non of their deaths. Most
died thoroughly committed to the "insanity" -- the condition of
epistemological pathology -- that they insisted was normal and right.
Such reflections shouldn't make us
smug. We are not divorced from the infancy of mankind. Although the Middle Ages
were the most pronounced manifestation of humanity's barbaric residuals, it is
impossible to come to grips with human life even today without appreciating
them.
1. Karl F. Morrison, “The Church, Reform, and
Renaissance in the Early Middle Ages," Life and Thought in the Early
Middle Ages, Robert Hoyt (ed.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1967), pp. 144, 158.
2. Loren Carey MacKinney, The Medieval World
(New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1938}, pp. 3, 291, 298, 262, 293-4,
282, 66, 69, 53, 94, 95.
3. John Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom
and Other Essays (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967),
Introduction by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, pp. xx, xxi.
4. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (New York; Mentor Books, 1960), pp. 27, 39, 29, 35, 39, 233.
5. R.
J. Forbes and E. J. Dijksterhuis, A History of Science and Technology
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 129, 130, 132, 136, 134, 139, 141, 142-3,
109, 148.
6. Lynn
White, Jr., "The Life of the Silent Majority," Life and Thought in
the Early Middle Ages, Robert Hoyt (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1967), pp. 93, 96.
7. Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist
Mentality (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1956), pp. 79-80.
8. D.
T. Atkinson, Magic, Myth and Medicine (Greenwich: Premier Books, 1956),
pp. 50, 42, 118-9, 93, 60-1, 82-3.
9. William Cecil Dampier, A History of
Science (Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 82, 84, 90-1, 64.
10. A.
Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, A Brief History of Science (New York:
Signet Books, 1964), p. 55.
11. The reader may be surprised
that I refer to the seventeenth century (and sometimes to the eighteenth and
even the early nineteenth) in the context of the Middle Ages: these centuries
are far later than customary historical classifications place the Middle Ages.
My treatment is not due to naiveté; it is because, despite all of the changes
brought by onrushing modernity, a major portion of the medieval mix -- social
hierarchy, authoritarian mental processes, towering religion, guilds, feudal
traits, etc. -- remained as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. It
only requires, for example, a reading of a history of the French Revolution to
see how much medievalism there was still to be overcome in the late eighteenth
century.
12. G.
F. Young, The Medici (New York: Modern Library, 1930), pp. 672-3, 668.
13. L.
T. Woodward, The History of Surgery (Derby, Conn.: Monarch Books, Inc.,
1963), pp. 26, 28, 29.
14.
Arturo Castiglioni, A History of Medicine {New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1958), pp. 357, 360, 256, 309, 245, 250, 385-7, 329.
15.
Lynn Thorndike, The History of Medieval Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 3d ed., 1949), p. 60.
16. Rene
Taton, History of Science (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1963), pp. 511,
481, 475, 487.
17.
Herodotus, The Histories (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 102.
18. It
is illustrative of my point that the Middle Ages in many respects continued
into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Rousseau, writing in 1762,
still believed in the Ptolemaic theory that the sun revolves around the earth.
It is really quite a parody on his own theory of education when in Emile
he says of his pupil "Let him not be taught science, let him discover
it" and then shows the level of "commonsense" scientific
knowledge this method had given Rousseau himself: "Since the sun revolves
round the earth it describes a circle, and every circle must have a center;
that we know already. This center is invisible, it is in the middle of the
earth, but we can mark out two opposite points on the earth's surface which
correspond to it. A skewer passed through the three points and prolonged to the
sky at either end would represent the earth's axis and the sun's daily
course." Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: J. M. Dent &
Sons, Ltd., 1911), pp. 131, 133.
19.
Edwin P. Hoyt, A Short History of Science (New York: John Day Company,
1965), Vol. I, pp. 223, 227.
20.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
Inc., 1962), pp. 134, 132.
21.
Saint Augustine, Confessions (New York: Modern Library, 1949), pp. 16,
189, 154, 9, 231-3.