Wherever individuality gains a nearly absolute sway, where man considers only himself, where his ideas stretch not beyond his own person, where he listens only to his own passions, society (meaning thereby a society calculated for some small degree of extension and permanence) is almost an impossibility. Now this was the moral state of the conquerors of Europe in the epoch treated of. I observed, in the preceding lecture, that we are indebted to the Germans for the vigorous sentiment of individual liberty, of human individuality. But in a state of extreme coarseness and ignorance, this sentiment is pure selfishness in all its brutality and unsociability. It was at this point among the Germans from the fifth to the eighth century. They were concerned only for their own interests, with their own passions and inclinations, and how could they thus accommodate themselves to a state approaching the social? Attempts were made to induce them to enter into it; they even tried it of themselves. But from some act of recklessness, some burst of passion, or some deficiency in understanding, they broke immediately loose. Society was incessantly endeavouring to form itself, but as incessantly was it routed by the act of man, by the absence of those moral conditions which are essential to its existence.
Such were the two disposing causes of the barbaric state. So long as they lasted, barbarism continued. Let us inquire how, and when, they finally ceased.
Europe laboured to get out of this state. It is the nature of man to struggle to emerge from such a chaos, even though he has been plunged into it by his own fault. However brutal and ignorant, however much devoted to his own gratification and passions, there is within him a voice or instinct which repeats to him that he is made for something else, that he has another capacity and destiny. In the midst of his disorganisation, a taste for order and advancement pursues and torments him. Longings for justice, for foresight, for development, agitate his breast even under the yoke of the most boorish selfishness. He feels himself urged to reform the material world, society, and himself; and he labours for this object without much cognisance of the want that goads him. Thus the barbarians aspired at civilisation, although utterly incapable of it, I may say, indeed, utterly detesting it, when its restraints were felt.
There remained, likewise, some considerable remnants of the Roman civilisation. The name of the Empire, the remembrance of that great and glorious society, agitated the memories of men, especially of the town senators, the bishops, the priests, and of all those who had their origin in the Roman era.
Many of the barbarians themselves, or of their barbarian forefathers, had been witnesses of the grandeur of the Empire; they had served in its armies, or fought against it. The image and name of the Roman civilisation had an imposing effect upon them, and they experienced a desire to imitate it, to bring it back, or to preserve some portion of it. In this was an additional stimulus to drive them from the state of barbarism which I have described.
There was a third, which suggests itself to every mind—I mean the Christian church. The church was a society regularly constituted, having principles, rules, and discipline of its own, and actuated by an ardent zeal to extend its influence, and to vanquish its conquerors. Among the Christians of that epoch, in the ranks of the clergy, there were men who had pondered deeply upon all moral and political questions, who held fixed opinions and energetic sentiments upon all things, and strove strenuously to propagate them and render them paramount. No society ever made such efforts as did the Christian church, from the fifth to the tenth century, to extend its sphere, and smooth the external world into its own likeness. When we study its particular history, we shall perceive the full extent of its labours. It attacked barbarism, as it were, on all its sides, to civilise by subduing it.
Finally, there existed a fourth cause of civilisation, one which it is impossible accurately to weigh, but which is not the less real on that account—namely, the influence of great men. No one can say why a great man comes at a particular era, or what he infuses of his own into the development of the world; the secret remains with Providence, but the fact is certain. There are men whom the spectacle of anarchy or of social stagnation strikes and distresses, who are intellectually shocked thereat as with a fact which should not be, and who become possessed with an uncontrollable desire to change it, and to plant some rule, some uniformity, regularity, and permanency in the world before them: a terrible, and often a tyrannical power, committing a thousand iniquities and errors, for human weakness accompanies it; yet a glorious and salutary power, for it gives to humanity a vigorous jerk, an admirable impulse.
These different causes and influences originated various attempts to emancipate European society from the clutch of barbarism, in the epoch stretching from the fifth to the ninth century.
The first of these attempts (although it may have had little effect, yet requires to be noticed, for it emanated from the barbarians themselves) was the digesting the barbarian laws. Between the sixth and eighth centuries, the laws of almost all the barbarous tribes were written. Formerly it was otherwise, these people having mere customs for governance before they established themselves on the ruins of the Roman Empire. There were the laws of the Burgundians, of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks, of the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Saxons, the Frisons, the Bavarians, the Allemanni, &c. Here was evidently a commencement of civilisation, an endeavour to transfer society to the empire of general and regular principles. It was impossible for much success to attend it, for it presented the laws of a society which no longer existed, the laws of the social state of the barbarians before their establishment on the Roman territory, before they had changed a wandering for a sedentary life, and the condition of nomad warriors for that of proprietors. Here and there are found some articles as to the lands which the barbarians had acquired, and as to their relations with the old inhabitants of the country, and even attempts are made to regulate some of the new circumstances with which they were mixed up; but the ground-work of the majority of these laws is the ancient life and state of things in Germany, which were utterly inapplicable to the new society, and have had but little influence in its development.