Before the Renaissance

Glimmers of Light during the Dark Ages

(It suddenly occurred to me this evening that I haven’t yet shared my views of the Renaissance via this Substack that is very much about a New Renaissance. Before I do so, I thought I’d share my view of the period from the 500s to the 1100s in most of western, central, and northern Europe. Pardon me for ignoring, at least here, the Greek and “Eastern Christian” world during these centuries, which in many ways was more advanced than the “Western Christian” world.)

The Western Dark Ages

            Western Christianity was severely harmed by the fall of the 60-million-person Roman Empire.  The bishops of Rome and the “Latin fathers” were just getting the Roman Catholic Church founded in the 400s when the Roman Empire, already in major decline, was taken over by several million people called the Germanic, northern, “Theut,” or Teutonic peoples.

            By 455, the entire Roman Empire was under Germanic chieftains and generals.  The least civilized tribe, the Anglo-Saxons, took over England, and in 568 the crude and primitive Lombard tribe took over northern Italy.  Ultimately, it was the Germanic Franks who came to rule the rest of the Roman Empire, so the Catholic Dark Ages from the 400s to the 900s (or 1000s) can most aptly be called the Frankish Dark Ages.

            The energetic Franks were no more brutal than the Romans, and could be generous and kind.  But the Franks were civilized only in agriculture.  They had no law, no state, no sense of public authority, and no loyalty to office-holders other than the crude loyalty of marauding gangs — loyalty to the chief who could feed and enrich soldiers.  The Franks were ignorant, uncouth, boorish, and crude – and intensely hostile toward Greco-Roman civilization. 

            Spiritually, the Franks and Anglo-Saxons engaged in magical thinking and animism.  They worshiped the forces of nature and were superstitious. 

            And so medieval Roman Catholicism was weakened, even debased, by rising magic, animism, superstition, and other irrationality.  The Catholic Dark Ages from the 500s to the 900s (or 1000s) became infamous for people’s obsession with protective spirits, homage to touch-wood and relics, the use of spells, and the practice of magic. 

            By the 500s the Dark Ages were in full swing throughout Roman Catholic Europe.  From the ignorance of the Dark Ages arose the chaos, cultural disintegration, fear, cruelty, near-universal poverty, superstition, dogmatism, and intolerance of the Dark Ages.  Catholic Europe would not reemerge as a true civilization until the 1100s.

Strengths in Medieval Catholic Life, Thought, and Society

            Crushed by crudeness in the 400s and 500s, somehow millions of medieval Catholics held onto their vitality, color, merriment, and simple joys for the blessings in their lives.  Somehow millions held onto the heartfelt, fervent, prayerful, and tender sentiments of their Christian faith.

            In the 500s, Benedict of Nursia (480-547) built a dozen monasteries with libraries, most notably the abbey of Monte Cassino, with planned daily reading, meditation, worship, and manual labor.  In unlit cubicles, Benedictine monks often went blind copying books, but they preserved scriptures, theological treatises, and works of European culture.   

            Devout and disciplined but not ascetic, in many respects Benedictine communities became the foundation of medieval Western society.  All over Europe the black-robed Benedictines established schools, libraries, and scriptoria.  By the 600s, the English Benedictines ran the best schools in Europe.  Between 600 and 1100, nine out of ten literate men in Catholic Europe had been instructed in a monastic school.   

            In 787,  Charlemagne (742-814), the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire – which then entailed much of western Europe – directed every cathedral and monastery to build a school to teach boys reading, literature, writing, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.  This revival of Christian learning was part of Charlemagne’s enlightened effort to build the empire into a civilization of goodness and intelligence.

            Alcuin of York (735-804) built new schools, libraries, and scriptoria and led the educational reforms which spread across much of the realm.  With Alcuin’s textbooks and new curriculum, literacy and intelligence flourished in France, Germany, and England.  At each parish in his diocese, Bishop Theodulf of Orleans (c. 755-821) organized a school with no fee — the first free general education in history. 

            In the 1100s, Peter Abelard (1079-1147) emerged as the first modern Christian champion of the rational pursuit of truth.  Not since the 400s had Catholic thinkers done real thinking about the nature of Deity, the natural world, and human beings – and the relationships between them.  Western Christianity’s intellectual quest now resumed and the great modern discussion began.

            In Toledo, Spain, Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114-87) gathered both books and scholars from all over Europe.  By 1200, medieval universities were already better than ancient ones.  Aided by large university libraries, European scholarship was taking hold.  By the 1200s, efforts were underway to collect knowledge systematically into compendium for each field and into encyclopedias. 

            The intense love-in-action of Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and the Franciscans deeply moved Catholics of the 1200s and beyond.  Enthusiasm for the Franciscan ideal reinvigorated Christianity with a new concern for people who are suffering and with a new spirit of service.

            The Franciscans also reminded people of the importance of a will filled with goodness and love.  They emphasized spiritual beauty, transcendent Platonic love, and direct awareness of spiritual reality (as did the Benedictines). 

     Franciscans like Bonaventure (1221-74) and John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) asserted that our will is more important than our intellect and that the good is more important than the true.    We can gain true knowledge of what is Divine and spiritual, Bonaventure insisted, from intuitive or experiential communion with the Divine.       

At the same time, Dominic Guzman (1170-1221) and the Dominicans advocated analysis of – the application of logic to — the facts and other information that come before us. 

In his comprehensive new Catholic belief system called Thomism, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74) emphasized the importance of the intellect as well as wisdom, intuition, understanding of Divine realities, gifts of the Spirit, light, love, and the devoted, consecrated self in service to Deity.

            Aquinas maintained that all we can know about God is that God is infinite and perfect goodness, love, truth, intelligence, and power.  Aquinas firmly separated (1) knowledge of the supernatural world of God (from Divine revelation), (2) knowledge of other minds and our own mind (from our internal sense), and (3) natural knowledge (from our external senses).

            Roger Bacon (c. 1214-92) advocated inductive reasoning and argued for progress by advancing through lines of logic that are confirmed and proven by experience and experiment.

            As the first modern empirical thinker, William of Occam (c. 1288-c. 1347), a Franciscan at Oxford, separated science from metaphysics.  For knowledge of God, matters of being, and ultimate truth, Occam advocated intuition and revelation.  For knowledge of the natural universe (and symbolic and other pure forms of thought), Occam favored exclusive use of observation, measurement, logic, and analysis.

            Even more than Roger Bacon, Occam promoted finding causes and forming scientific conclusions from observing, investigating, and analyzing individual things and facts — the more specifically, the better.  And more than any previous European thinker, Occam favored quantifying the natural universe.

There was also the revival of law, starting in Bologna in the 1100s.  There was — in the Magna Carta of 1215 — the right, without long imprisonment beforehand, to a trial by a jury of one’s peers in which all witnesses are sworn under oath to tell the truth.  And there were more representative governments: Spain’s Cortes, Iceland’s Althing, France’s Estates-General, England’s Parliament, and the independent republics of Italy.