The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

[CHAPTER XVIII]

THE RETURN OF BARBARISM: THE MIDDLE AGES

Of this kind of "reflux" Vico mentions and examines only one instance: the period of European history which had in his own days for the first time been marked out definitely by historians and given the name (though Vico does not use it) of the "Middle Ages."

That this was a period of decadence and barbarism was certainly not a new thought for consciousness: for, especially in the humanistic period, a general feeling of estrangement and repulsion had been felt towards these centuries of "middle and low Latinity" in which the treasures of the classical literatures were neglected and scattered, and humane studies either lost their vigour or disappeared completely. This consciousness, general on the part of cultivated Europe, was especially full and vivid in Italy; for that country could never forget that though for other peoples the Middle Ages had seen the rise of their fortunes, power and civilisation, for her they had meant the end of Rome's greatness, the humiliation of her name before the arrogant Vandal, Visigoth and Lombard, the devastation of rich cities, and the destruction of majestic monuments whose miserable wreckage could be seen on every hand. Machiavelli had opened his Histories with a famous and striking picture of the general change which followed the fall of the Western Empire. But to pass in review the ruins or to collect the antiquities of the Middle Ages was not the way to penetrate into the spirit of the period, any more than to note a man's faults and the marks which distinguish him from another is the same thing as understanding the soul of either. Vico was the first to understand the soul of the Middle Ages, that is to say, the mental, social and cultural constitution of the period.

Though living in a part of Italy rich not only in documents but in survivals of the Middle Age, Vico confesses that this second period of barbarism is much more obscure to him than the first, and that it is only the first that has enabled him to throw light upon the second. This he expressed by the mere fact that he named the period "the second barbarism," or the "return" or "reflux" of barbarism, and thus considered it as an instance of his ideal law of reflux. The Middle Ages seemed to him both a representation of the primitive conditions of life, and in consequence a reproduction of the social process developing out of them. It was a view as original as it was rich in truth: and it is no objection to it to say that Vico reveals the generic characters rather than the particular traits of the Middle Ages, because we know that the problem he set before himself was precisely the investigation of generic characters or uniformities, and that he avoided history properly so called in order to escape a dilemma between science and faith, between the purely immanental conception of history, excluding revelation and miracle, and the purely transcendent conception, miraculous and therefore difficult to treat in a scientific manner. Even in our own times, it is a fact worth noticing that we have seen a recrudescence of this attempt to harmonise religion and history by abstracting from the individual aspect of events and reducing history to a history of institutions and uniformities.[1] In this position assumed by the problem in Vico's mind we may see the reason for the fact, which some have thought very strange in a Catholic, that he lays no stress on Christianity, and when he encounters it at the outset of the Middle Ages dismisses it in a few words; saying that God, having by superhuman ways shown clearly the truth of the Christian religion, when he opposed the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome, and the doctrine of the Fathers, together with the miracles, to the empty wisdom of Greece, and knowing that armed nations must arise on every hand ready to fight for the divinity of that religion's author, permitted the birth of a new order of civilisation among the nations, in order that the true religion might be established according to the natural course of human affairs.

We must be content then with the resemblances observed by Vico between mediaeval society and that of the early centuries of Greece and Rome, and not take offence if his exemplifications and proofs very often seem fallacious and fanciful. His main historical thought as we know already is robust enough to pass over the errors or to live in the midst of them unimpaired.

We see (to reconstruct his story or picture, with some rearrangement) in the Middle Ages groups of dwellings everywhere springing up on the mountains, each dominated by its fortress as in the divine age of the "Cyclopes"; for the unhappy people, ground down by the violence of barbarian invasions and intestine strife, had no other means of defence. The most ancient cities built in the Middle Ages and almost all capitals of states are as a matter of fact placed upon heights; all new seigneuries formed at the time were called "castella" by the Italians; and this perhaps is also the reason why nobles were called men "born in a high or conspicuous position" (summo, illustri loco nati) while the plebeians living in the plains below were "born in a low or obscure place" (imo, obscuro loco nati). We find asyla or sanctuaries again open especially with the ecclesiastical lords, who were in humanity in advance of their savage times; here took refuge the oppressed and the terrified, to seek protection for person or property. Hence in Germany, a country which must have been wilder than the other parts of Europe, there remained almost more ecclesiastical than secular lords. A famous example of these political formations was the Abbey of St. Laurence at Aversa in the kingdom of Naples, with which was incorporated that of St. Laurence at Capua. This monastery governed either directly or by abbots or monks dependent upon it no less than a hundred and ten churches in Campania, Samnium, Apulia and the ancient Calabria, from the river Volturnus to the gulf of Tarentum; the abbots of St. Laurence were lords or barons of almost the whole of this country. The small chapels which they built in mountainous and remote places for the celebration of the mass and other religious offices became natural sanctuaries for the population, and they built their houses round them: and this is the reason why in Europe so many cities, lands and castles bear the names of saints, and why the churches are the most ancient monuments of this period. Consequently we also find feudalism, not establishing itself in Europe for the first time, but appearing once more. It has been mistakenly believed to be a relic of Roman law after its destruction by the barbarians (such is the theory of Oldenorp and all other jurists) whereas really Roman law itself arose out of the ruins of the feudalism of early Latin barbarism, and mediaeval feudalism was not a new law of the European nations, but a very ancient law renewed by the last barbarism. This feudalism is far from being the "vile matter" which Cujas calls it: it is a heroic matter, one worthy to be celebrated by the most erudite and profound learning of Greece and Rome. And to what is it due, if not to this essential unity of nature, that the choicest expressions of Roman law, which Cujas himself allows to mitigate the barbarism of feudalistic learning, are so precisely adequate to express the properties and attributes of the system that no better terminology could be desired?

With the Middle Ages, then, we return to the fundamental division between heroes and slaves, between "viri" or "barons" ("varones" is the word still used for men, "viri" in Spanish) and mere "homines" as the vassals were called: between "patres" or "patrons" and serfs. The learned students of feudalism who translate "feudum" by "clientela" are really giving something, much more than a good linguistical equivalent; they are unawares giving a historical definition of the feoff. The first feoffs of the Middle Ages were necessarily personal, like the first clientelae of Romulus: a form of vassalage still extant in Vico's time in the north, especially in Poland, where the "kmet" were a kind of slaves who were often used as stakes in their lord's games, and passed with their families into the hands of the winner. Then came rustic feoffs, real in character and consisting in uncultivated land assigned by the victors to the conquered for their sustenance, while they themselves kept the cultivated land: these feoffs were called by the feudalists, with a new elegance of Latinity and an equally sound historical truth, "beneficia." The ancient "next" were the new "liege" or bound men, who were compelled to join in all the friendships and quarrels of their lord, and supplied what in Rome was called "opera militaris," and in the Middle Ages "militare servitium." The feudal bond extended itself to larger political relations, and just as conquered kings became allies or socii of Rome and "upheld the majesty of the Roman people," so there were sovereign feoffs subordinated to higher sovereignties whose representatives, the great kings and lords of large kingdoms and numerous provinces, took the title of "majesty."

Republics became aristocratic once more in government if not in constitution: this is admitted by political writers, among others by Bodin, who even says that his own kingdom of France was purely aristocratic in constitution under the Merovingian and Capetian dynasties. Till the end of the sixteenth century living witnesses to the past remained in the aristocratic kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark; and Poland, mentioned above, preserved the same constitution down to Vico's own time. The first state parliaments of Europe must have consisted like Romulus's senate of the elders of the nobility (seniores, hence seigneurs); and were armed courts of barons or peers like the comitia curiata of old. In these parliaments were decided feudal causes concerning rights or successions or the devolution of feoffs through felony or default of heirs: which causes, confirmed many times by these judgments, formed the customs of feudalism. Vico saw a relic of these parliaments in the Sacred Royal Council at Naples, the president of which assumed the title of "Sacred Royal Majesty," as the councillors did the title of "milites," and whose sentences admitted of no appeal to any other tribunal, but only a request for revision by the Council itself.