10. ORIGIN OF THE MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION
In the formation of what we may call our historical mind—namely, that modification of our animal and primitive outlook which has been produced by men of exceptional intellectual venturesomeness—the Greeks played a great part. We have seen how the Greek thinkers introduced for the first time highly subtle and critical ways of scrutinizing old beliefs, and, how they disabused their minds of many an ancient and naïve mistake. But our current ways of thinking are not derived directly from the Greeks; we are separated from them by the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. When we think of Athens we think of the Parthenon and its frieze, of Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, of urbanity and clarity and moderation in all things. When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abélard, and Thomas Aquinas —and very little do these reminiscences have in common with those of Hellas.
It was indeed a different world, with quite different fundamental presuppositions. Marvelous as were the achievements of the Greeks in art and literature, and ingenious as they were in new and varied combinations of ideas, they paid too little attention to the common things of the world to devise the necessary means of penetrating its mysteries. They failed to come upon the lynx-eyed lens, or other instruments of modern investigation, and thus never gained a godlike vision of the remote and the minute. Their critical thought was consequently not grounded in experimental or applied science, and without that the western world was unable to advance or even long maintain their high standards of criticism.
After the Hellenes were absorbed into the vast Roman Empire critical thought and creative intelligence—rare and precarious things at best—began to decline, at first slowly and then with fatal rapidity and completeness. Moreover, new and highly uncritical beliefs and modes of thought became popular. They came from the Near East —Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor—and largely supplanted the critical traditions of the great schools of Greek philosophy. The Stoic and Epicurean dogmas had lost their freshness. The Greek thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation, and over the portal of truth they erased the word "Reason" and wrote "Faith" in its stead; and the people listened gladly to the new prophets, for it was necessary only to believe to be saved, and believing is far easier than thinking.
It was religious and mystical thought which, in contrast to the secular philosophy of the Greeks and the scientific thought of our own day, dominated the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
Before considering this new phase through which the human mind was to pass it is necessary to guard against a common misapprehension in the use of the term "Middle Ages". Our historical textbooks usually include in that period the happenings between the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the voyages of Columbus or the opening of the Protestant revolt. To the student of intellectual history this is unfortunate, for the simple reason that almost all the ideas and even institutions of the Middle Ages, such as the church and monasticism and organized religious intolerance, really originated in the late Roman Empire. Moreover, the intellectual revolution which has ushered in the thought of our day did not get well under way until the seventeenth century. So one may say that medieval thought began long before the accepted beginning of the Middle Ages and persisted a century or so after they are ordinarily esteemed to have come to an end. We have to continue to employ the old expression for convenience' sake, but from the standpoint of the history of the European mind three periods should be distinguished, lying between ancient Greek thought as it was flourishing in Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, and elsewhere at the opening of the Christian era, and the birth of modern science some sixteen hundred years later.
The first of these is the period of the Christian Fathers, culminating in the authoritative writings of Augustine, who died in 430. By this time a great part of the critical Greek books had disappeared in western Europe. As for pagan writers, one has difficulty in thinking of a single name (except that of Lucian) later than Juvenal, who had died nearly three hundred years before Augustine. Worldly knowledge was reduced to pitiful compendiums on which the mediaeval students were later to place great reliance. Scientific, literary, and historical information was scarcely to be had. The western world, so far as it thought at all, devoted its attention to religion and all manner of mystical ideas, old and new. As Harnack has so well said, the world was already intellectually bankrupt before the German invasions and their accompanying disorders plunged it into still deeper ignorance and mental obscurity.
The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from Augustine to Abélard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous villas disappeared; towns vanished or shriveled up; libraries were burned or rotted away from neglect; schools were closed, to be reopened later here and there, after Charlemagne's educational edict, in an especially enterprising monastery or by some exceptional bishop who did not spend his whole time in fighting.
From about the year 1100 conditions began to be more and more favorable to the revival of intellectual ambition, a recovery of forgotten knowledge, and a gradual accumulation of new information and inventions unknown to the Greeks, or indeed to any previous civilization. The main presuppositions of this third period of the later Middle Ages go back, however, to the Roman Empire. They had been formulated by the Church Fathers, transmitted through the Dark Age, and were now elaborated by the professors in the newly established universities under the influence of Aristotle's recovered works and built up into a majestic intellectual structure known as Scholasticism. On these mediaeval university professors—the schoolmen—Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well stand to-day. "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time [they], did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."
Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages. Very gradually only did peculiarly free and audacious individual thinkers escape from this or that mediaeval belief, until in our own day some few have come to reject practically all the presuppositions on which the Scholastic system was reared. But the great mass of Christian believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, still professedly or implicitly adhere to the assumptions of the Middle Ages, at least in all matters in which religious or moral sanctions are concerned. It is true that outside the Catholic clergy the term "mediaeval" is often used in a sense of disparagement, but that should not blind us to the fact that mediaeval presumptions, whether for better or worse, are still common. A few of the most fundamental of these presuppositions especially germane to our theme may be pointed out here.