237. Fall of Rome to Carolingian Age

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A History of Europe

by Henri Pirenne 
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Book One
The End of the Roman World in the West

Chapter I
The Barbarian Kingdoms in the Roman Empire
2. The New States

p35 ... The court [of the Frankish king after the fall of Rome in the West] was composed of various dignitaries whose titles show that they were once borne by slaves, as was the case with all dignitaries of Germanic origin: the marshal (the horse-slave), the seneschal (the senior slave)... But these servants, these household officers, shared in their master's fortunes, and naturally enough, since what was royal was public, they became his ministers.... 

It wouldn't surprise me if Napoleon was aware of this and even reminded his marshals about the origin of their title from time to time. 


Chapter III
The Musulman Invasion
2. The Consequences of the Invasion

p50 ...For centuries Europe had gravetated about the Mediterranean. It was by means of the Mediterranean that civilization had extended itself; by means of the Mediterranean the various parts of the civilized world had communicated one with another. On all its shores social life was the same in its fundamental characteristics; religion was the same; manners and customs and ideas were the same, or very nearly so. The Germanic invasion had not changed the situation in any essential respect. In spite of all that had happened, we may say that in the middle of the 7th century Europe still constituted, as in the time of the Roman Empire, a Mediterranean unity. 

This is a little confusing as in the previous chapter Pirenne demonstrated that the Eastern Roman Empire of Justinian -- which had just reclaimed Italy, Africa, and Spain -- was in reality the Roman Empire.


Now, under the sudden impact of Islam, this unity was abruptly shattered. The greater part of this familiar sea -- which the Romans had called "our sea," mare nostrum -- became alien and hostile. The intercourse between the West and the East... was interrupted... The community in which they had lived so long was destroyed for centuries to come...
...

p51 the Byzantine Empire, henceforth confined between the coast of Illyria and the Upper Euphrates, devoted the bulk of its forces to withstanding the pressure of Islam. In its long history, down to the day when it finally succumbed, in the middle of the 15th century... it was to know some moments of splendour... But this history, most of the time was alien to that of Western Europe. Venice alone kept in touch with Byzantium, and found, in her role of intermediary between East and West, the beginning of her future greatness...

As for the West, its separation from Byzantium confronted it with a completely novel situation. This separation seemed to exclude it from civilization, since from the beginning of the ages all the forms of civilized life and all social progress had come to it from the East... For the Christianity of the West, when its traditional lines of communication were cut, became a world apart, able to count only on itself, and in respect of its further development it was turned to the still barbarous regions beyond the Rhine and the shores of the North Sea, European society, continuously expanding, crossed the ancient frontiers of the Roman Empire. A new Europe was created with the rise of the Frankish Empire, in which was elaborated the Western civilization which was one day to become that of the whole world.

Pirenne doesn't specifically mention piracy and the coastal raiding of the Saracens in the south and the Vikings in the north, but this had a substantial effect on "civilization" and trade along the coasts. Cities either fortified or moved inland to safer locations. He does, a little later, describe how the Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan navies eventually restored some degree of order to the Eastern Mediterranean so that trade could resume.

Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch
Chapter I
The Church


p55 During the vicissitudes of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, when Europe was torn by the conflicts of the Germans, the Empire, and Islam, what became of the Catholic Church, the great force of the near future? It contented itself with continuing to exist, or rather to vegetate. Its influence upon the course of events was negligible; its moral influence over society was imperceptible. And yet, amidst the ruins of the Empire, it remained intact. It had saved its organization, its hierarchy, its incalculable wealth in land. And it had no enemies. The Germans no less than the Romans were its dutiful children...

...it [the Church] had become barbarized. The Latin literature of Christendom, which was still so vigorous in the 4th century, the century of Saint Augustine, had nothing to show in the 5th century... After this the life of the mind became dormant... the world had to wait for Gregory the Great before the study of theology and religious and moral philosophy was revived, though in quite a new spirit... Introduced into Ireland in the 4th century, Christianity had rapidly spread through the country. In this remote isle, which had no communication with the Continent, it created for itself an original organization, in which the great monastic colonies were the centers of a most ardent religious life. In these centers there were large number of ascetics and proselytes, who, from the 6th century onwards, began to leave their native country, some to seek, in distant lands, inaccessible solitudes, and others, souls to be converted. When the Norsemen discovered Iceland in the 9th century they were astonished to find that the only inhabitants of its misty shores were monks who had come from Ireland. They were Irishmen, too, who devoted themselves with such enthusiasm to the conversion of Northern Gaul and Germany... One must have read the portraits which Gregory of Tours has traced of some of his colleagues to form any idea of the state of their knowledge and their morals. Many of them could hardly read... The honest Gregory is indignant... And what an example he furnishes in his own person... of the decadence of the Church! The Latin which he writes -- as he is aware -- is a barbarous idiom, taking strange liberties with grammar, syntax and the vocabulary; and his morality -- but this, unhappily, he does not realize -- is capable of very irregular indulgences and very surprising judgements. [I read him in translation, so I don't know about his Latin but can confirm the rest.] And after his time things were even worse...

p57 ...decadent though it was, the Church was the great civilizing force of the period... It was through the Church that the Roman tradition was perpetuated; it was the Church that prevented Europe from relapsing into barbarism... [In that last paragraph Pirenne used "barbarous" properly to refer to language and the degeneracy of language. But here he seems to be using "barbarism" in the more common sense of crude and savage. Or maybe this is the fault of the translator?] the Church remained intact, in spite of its temporary decadence; the clergy were protected by the mighty edifice that sheltered them, and by the discipline imposed upon them. Ignorant, negligent, and immoral though some of the bishops may have been, they could not absolve themselves from the essential duties of their functions... Writing, without which no civilization is possible, appertained so exclusively to the Church from the end of the Merovingian period that even to this day the word that describes the ecclesiastic also describes the scribe: clerc in French, clerk in English, klerk in Flemish and Old German, diaca in Old Russian. During the 8th century intellectual culture was confined to a sacerdotal class... Not only were the clergy venerated because of their religious character; not only did they posses, in the eyes of laymen, the prestige which knowledge enjoys in an ignorant community, but they were also an indispensable auxiliary to civil society. The State could not dispense with their services. In the Carolingian period, when the last traces of lay education had disappeared, it was from the clergy that the State was obliged to borrow its staff of scribes, the heads of its chancellery, and all those agents or counsellors in whom a certain degree of intellectual culture was essential. The State became clericalized, because it could not to otherwise, under penalty of relapsing into barbarism... [now "barbarism" seems to mean illiterate] this was not because their character as apostles of Christ made them peculiarly fit to serve it. The servants of Him who has said that His kingdom is not of this world had not learned from Him the conduct of secular affairs. If they had the requisite knowledge it was because they had acquired it from Rome... In short, it was not because it was Christian, but because it was Roman that the Church acquired and maintained for centuries its control over society... The inevitable collaboration between Church and State, which was presently established, bore within it the germ of formidable conflict, which no one could have foreseen in the beginning.

p59 On entering the service of the State, the Church did not submit itself to its employer. Whatever the concessions which it may have made, at certain moments... it still remained, with regard to the State, an independent power. It claimed and enjoyed, in Western Europe, a liberty which it did not enjoy in the Roman or the Byzantine Empire. This was... because the Church was from the first in an economic situation which enabled it to live and develop itself on its own resources... The immense fortune in real estate which lay at its disposal it owed to Constantine and his successors, who transferred to it the wealth of the pagan temples. They not only made the Church the greatest landed proprietor in the world; they also made it a privileged proprietor, by exempting its members from the poll-tax and its property from the land tax...

Whenever I think about the history of Europe I, unlike Pirenne, apparently, think about the great Houses. Starting with the ultimate noble House, the Habsburgs, I find that their lineage is traced back to the Etichonids in Alsace and Burgundy -- the area around Dijon is mentioned in Wiki as a possible point of origin around the 7th century. Curiously, they are described as being, "of Frankish, Burgundian or Visigothic origin" -- which is awfully vague. 

I can't find even that much about the House of Hohenzollern or of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The House Bourbon (and House Capet) seem to be Frankish, as you would expect.

174. God's Presence

Previous - 173. Augustine, not a Cynic

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God's Presence

This section of the chapter is almost exactly a page and I skimmed through it the first time because, blah blah blah. But, it is the core of this chapter and of all the chapters that have to do with religion (especially Day, but also Perkins and (Ida) Eisenhower and even Johnson. You can even add Eliot when you take into account her childhood.) 

p196 The second large observation [the first being "...though people are born with magnificent qualities, original sin had perverted their desires..."] that flows from Augustine's internal excavation is that the human mind does not contain itself, but stretches out toward infinity. It's not only rottenness Augustine finds within, but also intimations of perfection, sensations of transcendence, emotions and thoughts and feelings that extend beyond the finite and into another realm...

As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, Ausgustine's study of memory led him to the "understanding that the human spirit in its depth and heights reaches into eternity and that this vertical dimension is more important for the understanding of man than merely his rational capacity for forming general concepts."

The path inward leads upward. A person goes into himself but finds himself directed toward God's infinity. He senses the nature of God and his eternal creation even in his own mind, a small piece of creation... 

p197 ... Human life points beyond itself. Augustine looks inside himself and makes contact with certain universal moral sentiments. He is simultaneously aware that he can conceive of perfection, but it is also far beyond his power to attain. There must be a higher power, and eternal moral order.

As Niebuhr put it, "man is an individual but he is not self-sufficing. The law of his nature is love, a harmonious relation of life to life in obedience to the divine center and source of his life. This law is violated when man seeks to make himself the center and source of his own life."

This is the counter-argument to Voltaire and the Enlightenment. To the entire middle-class value system and world order. 

On the other hand, it isn't so different from early Greek, mystical, thought where the cosmos was not just atoms and the void. Or like any other form of pantheism. You could even plug in the Dionysian religious underlying order that Nietzsche argued for in The Birth of Tragedy. 

But then there's the sociological/cultural anthropological way of viewing this: We have evolved to have mystical (positively reinforcing) reactions to sharing religious feelings with our primary group. Since mystical states can be induced or inhibited by chemistry, we can only say what we experience without concluding much about an underlying reality as a basis for these experiences. Even so, it may still be true that true happiness for many, if not most, people requires we follow the conclusions of Augustine and Niebuhr. Not that that much limits our options, since this would allow for most any kind of mystical religion as well as the secular cults of National Socialism and Communism. The Aztecs (I'm guessing), Mussolini, and Mao were also good at selling this notion of not making yourself the center and source of your own life.

Martha Grimes, again

I was wrong about never having read The Lamorna Wink. I have read it, but probably 14 years ago and I'd forgotten most of the early details because I had been rushing through trying to find some plot -- never a good idea with Grimes.

I'm still, slowly, working my way through and something related to what I wrote last time, but very sad, struck me this evening. Richard Jury has finally shown up now that we're down to the final quarter of the book, so we had the first scene with Jury and Plant. The sad thought I had was that, when Martha Grimes dies (or stops writing) we, her readers, will lose not just herself, but all these characters she trots out every mystery plus the whole Emma and Hotel Paradise tribe. The shear number of cats and minor characters that depend on Ms Grimes for their continued existence gives one pause.  

Fortunately, what she's written can't be unwritten, so they will continue to live on in that sense. And, really, how much longer can Emma remain 12? But this does make me concerned for her health.

Next - 175. Agency

173. Augustine, not a Cynic

Previous - 172. George, the 3rd time

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And I'm back after a week pause, Augustine took forever. My two upcoming greening events are short ones so shouldn't prevent my posting steadily at least through the end of The Road To Character. 

Berkeley 4th of July

The night before, I discovered the bus I've always taken to the Berkeley Marina no longer goes there. There is another bus that does get you there, but the official trip planner software can't give you a sensible trip plan, so I had to work out my own from the schedules and route maps. I ended up arriving an hour early because I wasn't confident in the information I was getting. 

The event itself was the same as ever, though the food area wasn't as busy as I remember and we had more staff than normal -- not ideal for me since I like to keep busy. Still, I did my thing and things were in good shape when I left at 8:30 before the fireworks started. I walked out all the way to San Pablo Ave, as I had planned, where I could catch a bus to downtown Oakland. This is where the evening took a turn for the Berkeley weird.

I turned the corner onto San Pablo and headed for the bus stop right past the corner, but then made a quick u-turn and waited at the corner because there was a very angry, ranting crazy woman pacing into the street from the bus stop. I probably waited five minutes for the bus, and the ride to Broadway in Oakland took about twenty minutes -- of course she got on my bus -- and she never stopped ranting. I was standing or sitting far enough away that I couldn't actually understand her words, but my favorite part of her presentation was when she, periodically, took off her long wig and waved it in the air at the person who was unfortunate enough to be her current audience.

Already tired from my eight hour (on my feet) shift followed by my long walk from the Marina, just listening to her endless ranting made me even more tired. I can't imagine what that would be like. I would not want to walk a mile in her shoes.

To my surprise, she didn't transfer to BART, so I rode into SF in peace. What I was actually looking forward to was finally taking advantage of my late night senior rate discount on the cable car up to my house. It's still $3 for a seven block ride, which is why I haven't done it, but at the end of a day like this it's worth every dollar. But the cable cars weren't running. Instead there were free shuttle buses. So I actually saved an extra $3, but still haven't managed to take advantage of my discount.

Augustine

p193 Brooks gives us an account of an incident in Milan when Augustine encounters a beggar who has just finished a good meal, had a few drinks, and is joking and joyful. Augustine finds himself envying the beggar who has such a satisfying and stress free life. This causes him to question his own entire way of life.

Now this incident with the satisfied beggar is puzzling. For one thing, if anything this should have turned him into a Cynic in the classical sense. What seems to have struck him here -- the beggar's satisfaction after a good meal and a few drinks compared to his own ceaseless striving for recognition and success -- was Diogenes's whole point. 

p195 Then there's the incident where, as a teenager, he steals some pears for the thrill of it, and later wonders about this and thinks it is a consequence of original sin: Dostoevsky would love this story but I fail to see the "originality" of the sin. What is more remarkable is the socialization by which most of us learn not to steal pears. That the "thrill" he felt at 16 is related to that socialization, the violation of it, I don't doubt. But the wonder is that we are usually able to control ourselves, not when we fail to do so. 

The ever vigilant, invisible sky fairy is one clever way to get children to not steal pears, but it certainly isn't the only way or even the best way. You can almost see evil (in this case the thrill of violating good) as a side effect, yet another unanticipated consequence, of the moral sense we are trying to inculcate in the young citizen. A feral child wandering in from the wild might pick and eat a pear or even pick a pear to throw at something, but could that feral child derive a thrill from picking someone else's pear? I don't see how.   

Next - 174. God's Presence