Comment by crpatino
10 years ago
I think you are projecting the narriative of Progres (TM) onto the accurate facts you are presenting.
i.e. the Catholic Church did not invent checks and balances. They used to have those in the Old Republic, but those were abandoned after the Roman Civilization reached the appex of its, let's call it cultural vitality. I see the authoritarism of the Caesars as a symptom of Rome having run out of fresh ideas, they "jumped the shark" if you will.
I agree the Middle Ages were not some sort of dystopian hell. There was a Dark age after (or more precisely, around) the time when Rome fell. Those were hungry and dangerous times, and the people that survived were more impoverished (both in the material and the intelectual sense) than their forefathers, but survive they did. The Middle Ages is what resulted when the survivors rebuilt society out of the wreckage.
I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs. Superficially they look like a continuation of the same, but they were successful because they had a different cultural sensitivity, they had fresh ideas now, with their own new values and their own expectations of how things should be. And they pushed those in directions that no old Roman philosopher would've been able to imagine.
I think people tend to conflate Middle Ages with "Dark age" because the Middle Ages ended in a relatively mild collapse. The (Christian) Reformation and the Enlightenment allowed much of the cultural treasures of the past age to be preserved, but also caused warfare, famine, dislocation of whole nations, etc. Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
Our world looks superficialy like a continuation of the Renaissance, but it is not. The Renaissance is the apex of the cultural vitality of the Middle Ages, and our own World's foundations rest upon many of its repurposed ideas and institutions. But it had ideas and values of our own, and our forefathers took that in directions that no Scholastic monk would have ever imagined.
So, you can see, we are no closer to a future of endless joy, anymore than any other society that inhabited this planet ever did. We are going our own way around the cycle, and clearly we have ran out of fresh ideas ourselves.
I will not pretend to be subtle, our times will be on the down slope and depending on how fast this proceeds we ourselves or our children may end up in one of those dark ages (no uppercase, thank you very much) where hungry and dangerous is the norm. And then others will come and pick up the pieces. I guess what I expect to acomplish in life is to leave behind some cultural artifacts in good working order; and I hope that, one or two centuries from now, some smart guy will pick those up and push them in directions that I'd never be able to imagine.
I think it's you projecting a narrative here. :)
> I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs.
Seems to me a distinction without a difference. The "new Medieval society" was the same as the old Roman society. It may have been different families in charge in many areas, but they were all cut from the same cloth.
> Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
I think you overestimate the scale of collapse and rebuilding. The most devastating collapse the world has ever seen, World War II, directly transitioned to the biggest boom the world has ever seen.
To me, a collapse is like a forest wildfire. It burns away overgrown areas and makes room for a fresh start. If we see a decline in American hegemony in our lifetime, and that's big if, I'm confident it will be replaced by something far more interesting.
Just FYI, the "dark ages" are not called that because they were literally dark and miserable. They're called the "dark ages" because we don't know much about what happened during this time, due to lack of source material.
I suggest you don't dig too deeply into why this might be, or the provenance of most of the historical documents we have that describe Rome. When I did, the results were quite disturbing.
What was disturbing about them?
The biggest problem is that many of the best known and most important texts describing the history of Rome cannot be reliably traced back further than the 13-15th centuries, and there are strong arguments that some of them were forgeries (which in turn, casts doubt upon the rest).
The fact that many historical documents are forgeries or were edited for political reasons is not in doubt. The Donation of Constantine is one notorious example, in which a document that claimed to be "a forged Roman imperial decree by which the emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope" (quoting wikipedia). In fact it was forged some time in the 700s.
During the Renaissance there was a craze for collecting works of antiquity, to the extent that the Catholic church actually posted large rewards for the discovery of previously unknown manuscripts. Not surprisingly, large numbers of works that were previously entirely unknown or merely rumoured were "discovered", often in circumstances that to a skeptical modern eye seem completely implausible.
A typical origin story involves a scholar/adventurer type venturing to a remote monastery, upon which a previously forgotten ancient manuscript was located. The monks that toiled at the abbey copying these manuscripts throughout the dark ages were invariably ignorant of the great importance of what they had, until the discoverer presented the manuscripts to an amazed and delighted world (and collected a reward).
Examples of texts with such stories are the Annals of Tacitus, the Poems of Catellus, and the History of Velleius Paterculus.
These stories have repetitive, severe problems that would be torn apart in a world that had snopes.com, but of course the medieval era did not. In no particular order:
• The texts frequently have a single source document, with none others ever being found. That document was invariably treated with little caution, meaning that the oldest copies of the text are said to be copies of this one original manuscript. It's implausible that works that were recognised immediately upon "discovery" as great works of literature had literally a single copy in the entire world.
• The origin stories are sometimes absurd, like the Poems which is claimed to be discovered under a beer barrel.
• The texts are often not cited at all or their existence is barely even mentioned from the time they were supposedly written up until the time of their "discovery", at which point citations suddenly appear all over the place. It is difficult to believe that such large and historically important works could be barely noticed by scholars for literally centuries.
• They sometimes have mistakes that a contemporary author could not possibly have made, e.g. in Tacitus' Annals he refers to London as "remarkably celebrated for the multiplicity of its merchants and its commodities" although at the time the book was supposedly written London was little more than a village around the size of Hyde Park at the far end of the empire, and wouldn't have been known to anyone in Rome. A medieval forger with little knowledge of actual ancient history, on the other hand, could have easily made this mistake.
The more you dig into the back stories of important ancient documents, the more you discover that if they had simply been invented for profit, we'd have absolutely no reliable way to discover it.
You sound like you've been reading a lot of Rod Dreher :-). If you haven't been, you might be interested in his blog, where he discusses "The Benedict Option" as a (Christian) response to this sort of cultural decline. He's also working on a book on the topic...