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A story has a plot: a beginning, a middle and an end. A civilisation does not have a story in this sense. We are captured by story if we think a civilisation must have a rise and fall, though it will have an end.
European civilisation is unique because it is the only civilisation which has imposed itself on the rest of the world. It did this by conquest and settlement; by its economic power; by the power of its ideas; and because it had things that everyone else wanted. Today every country on earth uses the discoveries of science and the technologies that flow from it, and science was a European invention.
At its beginning European civilisation was made up of three elements: 1. the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome 2. Christianity, which is an odd offshoot of the religion of the Jews, Judaism 3. the culture of the German warriors who invaded the Roman Empire.
If we look for the origins of our philosophy, our art, our literature, our maths, our science, our medicine and our thinking about politics — in all these intellectual endeavours we are taken back to Ancient Greece.
The Romans were better than the Greeks at fighting. They were better than the Greeks at law, which they used to run their empire. They were better than the Greeks at engineering, which was useful both for fighting and running an empire. But in everything else they acknowledged
So when we talk about the Roman Empire being Greco-Roman it is because the Romans wanted it that way.
So in the religion of the Jews, as in Christianity, religion and morality are closely linked, which is not the case with all religions.
Jesus knew the Jewish law and teaching very well and his own teaching grew out of this. Part of his teaching was to sum up the essence of the law. This was one of his summations: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and love your neighbour as yourself.
The third group in the mixture are the German warriors who invaded the Roman Empire. They lived on the northern borders and in the 400s they flooded in.
The Germans were illiterate and left no written records, and so we have very little information about them before they invaded. The best account — probably not a first-hand account — is by a Roman historian, Tacitus, in the first century AD.
The Greek view was that the world is simple, logical and mathematical. The Christian view was that the world is evil, and Christ alone saves. The German warriors’ view was that fighting is fun. It is this unlikely mixture that comes together to make European civilisation.
The Romans were usually very tolerant. They ruled an empire which was composed of a variety of races and religions; if you kept the peace the Romans were prepared to let you follow your own path. You could govern yourself. You could practise your own religion, with this exception: you had to sacrifice to the emperor.
The Romans believed the emperor was something like a god. The sacrifice you were required to make was trifling. There might be a portrait or statue of the emperor and, in front of it, a flame. You had to take a pinch of salt and drop it in the flame. The flame would flare up. That was enough.
The Romans usually excused the Jews from honouring the emperor. They thought of them as cranky and volatile, but recognisable, an ancient people with their temple and their god, occupying a certain tract of country. By contrast, Christians were following a new religion and Christians could be anyone, anywhere.
Then a miracle happened. An emperor, Constantine, in 313 AD became a Christian or at least gave official support to the Christian churches.
This is the first link between the three elements: the Roman Empire becomes Christian.
One of the bishops — the bishop of Rome — had managed to make himself into the pope and to govern the church.
The church ran and enforced its own system of taxation because everyone was obliged to pay money to support it.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the church survived — it was like a government in itself. The pope was a parallel figure to the Roman emperor, controlling a hierarchy of officials beneath him. Here we see the second link in the making of the mixture: the church becomes Roman.
These Christian scholars thought of the great philosophers and moralists of Greece and Rome as possessing some of the truth, though Christianity was of course the full truth. But the Greek philosophers could be used as a guide to the truth and to argue about the truth. So although they were pagan, the church preserved and used their writings. This is the third link: the church preserves Greek and Roman learning.
For their part the German warriors found that they had to run the societies they had invaded, which is not really what they expected to do, and they had to do so in very difficult circumstances. They themselves were illiterate; in the chaos that they had caused, the remaining Roman administration collapsed; trade and the towns shrank. The warrior chiefs set themselves up as kings and created little kingdoms; they fought among themselves; kingdoms rose and fell rapidly. It was many centuries before the outlines of the modern states of western Europe appeared: France, Spain, England.
Governments in these circumstances were extremely weak. They were so weak they were not able even to collect taxation. (To us this seems a contradiction in terms – a government that doesn’t tax!) Instead of being the chief, the German warrior now turned himself into a king and allotted land to his companions, who were turning themselves into the nobility, on the condition that when the king needed an army the nobles would provide it for him.
Today heads of state inspect guards of honour. They move along the ranks, appearing to scrutinise the soldiers, perhaps saying a word or two. This is a carry-over from an early medieval practice when the king was really scrutinising the soldiers he had been sent and saying to himself: what sort of rubbish have they sent this time?
Not everything is the king’s was the foundation of European thinking about government. From the right to private property derives the notion of individual rights, which is a central part of the Western tradition. The notion that government must be limited arose because at the beginning government in fact was extremely limited.
Quite quickly the bishops were able to persuade the warriors that they would kill more of their enemies if they accepted the Christian god. These were conquerors of a special sort: they accepted the religion of the people they had conquered. The church made it quite clear to these new rulers, kings and nobles, that one of their duties was to uphold the Christian faith. This is our last link: German warriors support Christianity.
once Christianity had been taken up by Constantine and become an official state religion it had to change its views about violence. Governments must fight, and if the church wanted the support of governments it had to agree that governments can sometimes fight justly.
Over the centuries the warrior changed into the knight. A knight loved fighting, he was proud of his ability to fight, but he fought for good causes. The church encouraged him to fight non-Christians
A knight also protected the weak, especially high-born women.
So with this new moral overtone to his fighting, a man became a knight in a sort of religious ceremony.
This attitude of protecting and honouring ladies was long lasting in European culture. After the knights disappeared it became the attitude of a ‘gentleman’, the descendant of the Christian knight.
It was because women had this degree of respect in European culture that feminism was fairly readily accepted. It is a different story in other cultures.
There was no printing; books rot and perish. It was the monks in the monasteries, often not knowing what they were copying — hence the many mistakes — who preserved so much of the treasures of Greece and Rome.
The Christian church preserved Greek and Roman learning and used it to support its own doctrine.
So Greek philosophy, Greek learning and Greek logic were all pressed into service in support of Christianity.
Let us summarise how the mix was working in the Middle Ages. We have warriors becoming Christian knights, we have Greek and Roman learning supporting Christianity. The church, in the middle of this odd alliance, is managing to hold the whole thing together. Learning is Christian, the knights are Christian, the world is Christendom, the realm of Christ.
The Renaissance is often depicted as the discovery or rediscovery of Greek and Roman learning.
They wanted to make art like the ancient artists did, to build buildings like theirs, to write Latin like they did, to think like they did.
It was also a more ‘worldly’ world. The ancients had been far more concerned with men and their doings on this earth than with their life after death.
The ancients had celebrated man’s capacity and powers and they hadn’t dwelt on his depravity.
With the Renaissance begins the long process of the secularisation of European society.
What happened in the Renaissance was that the people of one culture and tradition thought themselves into another culture and tradition.
The human body as a thing of beauty and perfection is a Greek invention.
The nude is sufficient in itself, very properly in this state; the naked body is without clothes and reduced by their absence.
Adam is blaming Eve; Eve is blaming the serpent; both are ashamed of their nakedness, which in part they cover. These are very definitely not nudes; they embody the Christian teaching that the body is evil, a source of sin.
From nude to naked to nude can stand for the movement from classical to medieval to modern, which is how the Renaissance understood itself.
The Renaissance was the first great disruption of the medieval world; the second was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This was a direct attack on the church. Its aim was to return the Christian church to what it was like before it became Roman.
The pope and the bishops ruled the church and determined its teaching. The church offered you salvation but only by means that it controlled. You needed priests and bishops in order to be saved.
If you were rich and dying, the priest might tell you very firmly that you would not go to heaven unless you left a good deal of your wealth to the church.
In the Middle Ages most priests, bishops and archbishops did not enter the church because they were particularly pious or religious; men joined the church because it was the largest and richest organisation of the day.
