Medieval Thought
Sunday 29 September 2024
notes
Notes for the book Medieval Thought, St Augustine to Ockham by the late Gordon Leff, published in 1965 as part of Penguin's Pelican series.
Part 1: The Aftermath of Rome (c.400—1000)
Introduction to the period
Leff frames his introduction to the early period of Medieval Thought through the breakdown of the Roman Empire – its collapse gives rise, he writes, to an apparant paradox: On the one hand there is the confusion of continuous invasions, ‘transitory kingdoms’, the ‘replacement of Roman law and order by instability and unrest’; and on the other, from the c11th onward, a series of ‘positive achievements’ and ‘imposing names’ which, through making themselves apparent with a ‘sudden flowering of society’, force us to recognise developments across the period. (p.23)
The collapse of the Roman Empire was not, of course, felt evenly across the region or distributed uniformly over time. In ‘Romanized provinces’ such as those in North Africa, Gaul, Spain and Italy there was no immediate break with Roman ways, despite continued attacks from ‘the outside’ by Germanic tribes (Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc) and dissolution ‘from within’, with the growing allyship of ‘barbarian’ groups (foderati). In those regions along the Rhine and in North-West Europe there was, however, a significant ‘reversion’ which only became more pronounced in Britain after the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the c5th. (p.24–25)
A twofold division therefore emerged within Western Europe between the 5th – 11th centuries:
- The West became divorced from the Empire in the East, a process of extrication which developed into the c7th and held firm until the c11th (at which time such regions could begin to ‘vie with the higher civilization of Byzantium’).
- And then, within the West itself, there emerged a ‘marked divegence between the countries north of the Alps and Italy.’ A gradual shift in focus within Europe moved the locus of development from the Mediterranean cities (which had been foci of trade with the East) to the North West as agrarian societies took hold once again. (p.25)
Leff here makes an interesting point in ‘playing down’ these changes, arguing that such shifts should not be understood as a “sudden lapse from civilization” but rather:
...most of the areas beyond those fringing the Medierranean had always been more barbarian than Roman. The Empire had been largely an artificial creation without firm foundations, upheld primarily by the army and the tax-gatherer; its industry was driven by slavery [...]; its trade [...] was not for large-scale needs; its culture did not extend beyond its own ruling class1 (p.26).
The Church was then the only organisation able to retain such a ‘universal character’ and consequently became the most influential actor during this period, a ‘bastion of order’ with the capacity to preserve the past and reshape the future. Following on from Imperial modes of administration it was able to take charge of cities and partially hold together a fractious region. All the remaining ‘Barbarian’ kingdoms or alternate modes of organisation that formed out of the Roman Empire, were ‘swept away by succeeding incursions’ (bar the Franks): the Justinians by the Lombards in c6th; the Islamic incursions into the Mediterranean during the c7–8th; and the Viking invasions of the c9–10th in the north-west (p.26-27).
With this background of external attack and internal division established, Leff positions the empire of Charlemagne – King of the Franks (768–814) – as a key moment through which we can “glimpse [...] the new order of society that was emerging”. Here we learn of:
- the growing authority of the papacy through names such as Gregory the Great, St Benedict and St Augustine, its unifying doctrine and growing monasticism;
- the power of the Frankish Kingdom through Clovis and Charles Martel; and
- the ‘pre-eminence of Anglo-Saxon culture’ through Bede and St Boniface (p.27).
The Carolingian Empire reveals and confirms 4 key points within the ‘aftermath of Rome’:
- That the centre of gravity (the ‘foci’ of European culture) had shifted from the Mediterranean (cities) to north-western Europe (agrarian societies).
- That wealth and authority had become bound up with landholding, in other words, the establishment of an essentialy feudal order. This included systems of vassalage, compacts of service and protection which distributed authority (Leff adds, “one of the great stumbling-blocks to effective royal power was the rival jurisdiction of the aristocracy over their own retainers”).
- The ‘supreme importance of the church’ which was ‘alone [the] cohesive force amid the welter of tribes and kingdoms’. In this way the Church also became indispensable to law & order (“spiritual power played an important part of governing a conquered people”) and conversion (from the late c6th) became one of its leading activities. It also held a monopoly on technqiues of government such as learning and literacy (monasteries were to the Middle Ages what academies were to Ancient Greece). Such was the power of the Church that only kings who cooperated with it were able to succeed (as in the Carolingian Empire).
- The position of the king is revealed as neither the supreme or ‘absolute’ military or administrative power (as in imperial Rome) but rather contingent upon ‘the local aristocracy for law and order.’ While in the centralised bureaucracy of Rome ‘what the Emperor decreed had the force of law’, in the network of custom and obligation that comprised the Middle Ages, ‘decrees’ of this kind could have no such effect (p.27–29).
This final aspect puts into clear relief the manner in which a European ‘telos’ was rediscovered. The development of the role of the King, from ‘personification of the tribe’ to ‘God's representative’, shows the “...revival of the imperial idea [...] that Christendom was the heir to Rome.” It also shows how dependent these Kingdoms were on the personality of their rulers, and the central place that the Papacy occupied in Western Europe (p.30).
The main impact these transcontinental changes had on the production of ‘culture and learning’ was, therefore, to tie ‘thought’ to the church – to make it ‘inseperable from ecclesiastical and monastic life [...] subordinated to the training of clerks and monks’. However, Leff writes, as the image of the Roman Empire waned from memory, ‘things Roman became evermore an object of veneration’. The Carolingian renaissance is then positioned, once again, as a prism through which one might see this growing veneration – and the development of a more independent, more organised approach to learning and knowledge preservation – take hold.
“Despite the blows by the Northmen against the main moastic centres, enough of their work survived to help the cultural revival of the eleventh century.” (p.30-31)
St Augustine and his Successors
Leff writes that within the ‘dark ages’ there is a need to distinguish between the c5–6th and what comes after for two reasons:
- They were still close to classical thinking, with a ‘high level of expression and culture’;
- They contained two thinkers who were to have an enormous influence on the whole of the middle ages: St Augustine and Boethius.
St Augustine
The North African scholar St Augustine moved through a series of beliefs in his lifetime; from Manicheism, through scepticism and Neoplatonism, to Christianity. As with all ‘early Fathers’