THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES
Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ continues in good proportion and lucid in his
general description of what we call, in Christian history, “The Dark
Ages”: that is, the period between the first spread of the Mohammedan
disaster (which he, of course, regards as a benefit because it destroyed
or wounded the Catholic Church in the areas occupied by Mohammedans) and
the German capture of the Papacy towards the year 1000.
The general tone is that of the ordinary textbooks written in the
anti-Catholic vein; although there is a rather more violent irritation
than usual against the Faith in Mr. Wells’s general position and
occasional references, it occupies little of this division. To the
errors I will allude in a moment, but I must first point out the merits
of this passage which brings us up to the eve of the Crusades and takes
us from the end of Book V to the midst of Book VI.
Apart from his general lucid and vigorous presentation of a long period
very difficult to summarize, there is an excellent metaphor upon page
396 comparing the fragmentary cohesion of society in the Dark Ages, and
the gradual formation of feudalism in their most disturbed period, to
the physical formation of crystals. The author is naturally a little
confused about his general dates, because he has not had occasion to
read History seriously. Thus he strangely considers the _Fourth_ and
_Fifth(!)_ centuries to have been particularly chaotic in territorial
arrangement, and immediately afterwards uses the term “Feudalism.” That
is, of course, a complete misunderstanding of comparative dates and a
misapprehension of the length of the period and the great changes which
took place in such a length. In the _Fourth_ century the Western world
was entirely united and ordered from Rome, though there was the usual
heavy local fighting and difficulty in guarding the frontiers from
irruption. In the _Fifth_ century there were armed bands raiding across
the frontiers in not very large numbers, and accepted as soldiers of the
Empire, one very bad Asiatic invasion _en masse_, which was beaten, and,
at the end, the disassociation of the Western part of the Empire into
separate vast regional governments under local generals.
_Feudalism_ was an altogether later thing; as much later as _we_ are
later than the Wars of the Roses. It was a thing which became
established in the _Ninth_ century, though you can already see it
forming (unconsciously) in the _Eighth_. It was the break-up of society
into a mass of local governments, very unsystematic and held together
only by personal bond of overlord and vassal. To talk of it in
connection with the _Fourth_ and _Fifth_ centuries is like talking of
industrial capitalism in the same breath with the peasants’ revolt of
1381.
Nevertheless, though the centuries are wildly wrong, the metaphor of
crystals as applied to feudal groupment and regroupment is very good,
and is an excellent example of Mr. Wells’s powers of analogy and
illustration.
I should not quarrel either in this commentary upon Mr. Wells’s general
acceptance of the old-fashioned History which is still conventional in
most of our official teaching here in England, although it is already
badly out of date. Were I writing a commentary upon the book treated
seriously as an essay on European history, I should be more severe upon
this simple acceptation of stuff on which most of our students are still
fed, but which, in the light of modern scholarship, especially of French
scholarship, has the effect of Crinolines and Pegtop Trousers.
I am concerned here with the much more important business of Mr. Wells’s
anti-Catholic motive in writing, and though the false conventional
history which we are still largely taught in England is ultimately
anti-Catholic in motive, yet it is so largely accepted, and the
connection between it and the ultimate religious motive behind it is so
much disguised, that it would hardly be fair to ridicule an
old-fashioned statement save where it is so thoroughly and admittedly
out of date that not even a best-seller ought to admit it into his
popular writing.
For instance, one cannot be surprised to find this popular history,
written in England and depending upon English encylopædias, talking of
an Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country at the beginning of the Dark
Ages—nearly all educated Englishmen even now still speak in those terms,
and have a vague idea at the back of their minds that a number of
Germans, called Anglo-Saxons, came over the sea in boats, centuries ago,
killed all the people who then lived in England, and started everything
over again. And there is a great deal to be said (though I think it is
wrong) for the conventional derivation of Viking from the word for
“bay.”
I will even admit that writing of Charlemagne as speaking Frankish (that
is, a sort of Flemish) as his habitual tongue is not a thing to carp at
in a popular history, though it is almost certainly wrong. All the last
generation believed that kind of thing, and it is still conventional
teaching in England and Germany. Mr. Wells also has the imagination to
see that Charlemagne must have known the Latin tongue as well, and
admits that his talking literary Latin is “open to discussion.” A more
detailed knowledge of the period makes it clear that a man in
Charlemagne’s social position _must_ have talked and thought in Latin,
though it is true that a writer of the time talked of the old Frankish
speech as being the “ancestral tongue” of that great man.
In the same way the description of the changes in the Papacy of the
tenth century is the conventional description of from one hundred and
fifty to fifty years ago—a virtuous German reform of wicked Italians—and
it is natural that the modern scholarship which shows the real struggle
to have been between an attempted renewal of Byzantine influence and the
counter Western Imperial influence should never have been presented to
our author.
All that, though out of date, may pass. But there are certain extreme
statements in what I have called this “old-fashioned conventional
history” which really are too much out of date to go without notice.
For instance, Mr. Wells quotes, quite innocently, as though it were
history, the ridiculous sentence from some other popular history or
other, that “to practise medicine was forbidden by the Church, which
expected cures to be effected by religious rites.” He probably means
that the strong general feeling of the day against _dissection_ of the
dead had clerical support. But to think that there were no doctors in
the Dark Ages is really going a little too far in old-fashionedness: it
is not even 1850. It is 1820.
In the same way the idea that Austrasia and Neustria were the German and
French speaking halves of the Frankish dominion is really too
antiquated. The people who believed that kind of thing and yet could
claim to be scholars have been dead, even the longest-lived of them,
many years since, and to use such language is rather like talking (as
some people still do talk) of the United States as though they were a
colony of Englishmen. The truth is, of course, that the two divisions
were purely administrative, an eastern and a western; the area being too
great for permanent single rule. They were obviously made without any
consideration of language. Who cared about language in the seventh and
early eighth centuries? They were designed to give fairly equal burdens
and resources. The majority of people living in Austrasia had probably
never heard German speech. The only thing in Austrasia that was German
was the broad Eastern fringe, very ill-populated, with no cities that
were not Roman, and with all the culture and the wealth—save Alsace and
the Cologne-Aix, Rhine and lower Moselle region—romance in speech. After
all, Rheims was in Austrasia, and perhaps its most important city.
In the same way, to talk of the “subject population” after the defeat of
Syagrius by his fellow-general, Clovis, is beyond the limit of what is
tolerable in the way of exploded mid-nineteenth century convention.
Everybody knows, since Fustel, that there was no trace of a conquering
and a subject race. The Gallo-Romans, the Flemish-speaking Franks in the
very beginning of the business, sundry German-speaking adventurers and
nobles, chance soldiers from the extreme East, a great many from the
South of Gaul, a mass of clerics, made up that society. It was never
divided by race at all or by speech. That was the quite gratuitous
assumption of people who thought noble Protestant Prussia to be the
modern example of Franks, and decadent Catholic “Latins” to be the
modern example of Gallo-Romans. It has no relation to reality. The
social divisions of the sixth and seventh centuries were between free
and unfree, between those belonging to the Curia and those governed by
it, and (much the most prominent division of all) between Christian and
non-Christian.
This impossible old idea about a German Austrasia has serious
consequences in Mr. Wells’s History, for it makes him still talk of the
two divisions as the origins of modern France and Germany; just as they
used to talk in 1870! Nowadays that kind of thing won’t do.
Nor is it tolerable to speak of Mercia as “holding out stoutly against
the priests and for the ancient Faith and ways.” We leave all that kind
of thing to John Richard Green. The conversion of Mercia naturally came
later than that of Kent and Northumbria because it lay further inland,
but Penda of Mercia marched with the army of Christian Welsh Princes,
and Sussex and the Isle of Wight were evangelized much later than
Mercia.
To talk of Pepin of Heristal as “conquering Neustria” has been
inadmissible for the better part of fifty years. And it is still wilder
to speak of “but small racial or social difference” between the
“Anglo-Saxon, Jute, or Dane.”
The civilized Christian England of the Dark Ages was utterly different
socially, and very different racially, from the Pagan, Saxon or
Scandinavian; it felt so and it said so the whole time. The languages
were similar, though the similarity can be exaggerated: the mind was
different. As for the “Normans,” if the word is used in the sense of the
Northmen of the old pirate raids, then they were simply Scandinavians;
but used as it is on page 400, after mention of the Conquest, it is
quite wrong. The Norman of the Conquest was a Frenchman, much like any
other—short, stocky, round-headed, and with all the French violence, all
the French vice of partizanship and fighting against one’s neighbour,
all the French instinct for simple mechanical order in building and
measurement and legal system, and much of the French fun. Even the
families of known Scandinavian origin were by that time French. William
the Conqueror himself had but one-sixteenth of Scandinavian blood.
Still, these bad errors are after all no more than errors of the
conventional old textbooks, written in the days when all History had the
Protestant air, and any man who has to fill up a popular history in a
hurry from our enyclopædias will naturally be behind the times to that
extent. What is less excusable is a series of chance sentences which
show real ignorance of essentials on which not even the popular
textbooks would go wrong. For instance, the Comitatus of which Tacitus
speaks as surrounding a German chieftain has nothing whatever to do with
our words “Count” and “County.” These come from the Roman official, the
“Comes.” Or, again, to talk of the Roman roads (p. 395) as being
“destroyed” as early as the eighth century, is to show that the writer
knows nothing of the lines of marching or even the sites of battles. The
Roman roads remain the great means of communication much later than
that. Take a map of Roman roads in Western Europe, put pins in it for
the sites of the great religious foundations, the new markets, and
especially for the battles up to, say, 1200, and you will see what their
meaning was.
In the same way, to talk of the Scandinavians “becoming bolder and
ranging further at sea from the _Fifth_ century” is absurd. We know
nothing appreciable about them as pirates or long-voyage men until the
end of the _Eighth_, and the very fact that we know nothing about them
is proof that they did not early or regularly take these very long
voyages.
The worst and most inexcusable direct error is again here in connection
with the Filioque clause, on which, as we saw in my last chapter, Mr.
Wells quite uncannily specializes in mistakes. He seems to think that
this clause was put into the Creed through a sort of personal private
whim of Charlemagne in the Council of Aix, and he compares that decree
to some vulgar fancy or other of the “late Emperor William writing
operas or painting pictures.” He knows that the Spaniards were the first
to put it into the Creed, and he knows that the Pope delayed doing so;
but he does not know apparently what the reason for the _Doctrine_ was,
nor does he appreciate that the vital point at issue was the question of
unity. The Greek-speaking half of the Church had never worried very much
about the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the Procession was
defined in the Creed as coming from the Father had nothing to do with
the idea of excluding the double Procession. The Procession from the
Father was only specifically stated in the Creed as against certain
heretics who had denied that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father;
and the real point about the schism is this: the Universal Church of the
early Councils accepted the Primacy of Rome: of that there is no more
doubt than of the Battle of Waterloo. But the official and State-ridden
Church of the East tended to protest more and more against that Primacy
as it developed into the strong Papal idea of the later Dark Ages and
Early Middle. That is really the whole affair; and the Filioque was but
a pretext.
There appear, of course, those phrases deriving from Mr. Wells’s own
anti-Catholic theology, on which it would be tedious to linger after so
many earlier examples. Thus the Nestorians—because they are
anti-Catholic and far more heretical than the Byzantines—are called
“more intelligent and active-minded than the Greeks,” and, of course,
“on a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking
Christians of the West.” Theology, when in a Catholic form, excites
nothing but ridicule in minds of Mr. Wells’s level of culture—but when
it is Persian—and, best of all, Pagan Persian—it becomes “intense” and
“subtle.” The Blessed Trinity is something of which one “cannot make
head nor tail,” while an obscure Eastern Heresy is respectable.
But the worst mixture of ignorance and sneering at Divine things
combined is on page 386. It is something which I hope it it not too
disrespectful to call balderdash. Because certain Mohammedans seem to
have wondered whether the Koran had been always in the mind of God (I
suppose it was—as all things realized have been in the mind of God), Mr.
Wells immediately makes up out of his head an imaginary Christian
convert to Islam who is introducing to that world the Gospel of St.
John; he actually puts forward the phrase “The Word was God” as meaning
that the Bible was God!
I confess I am bewildered. Mr. Wells cannot be ignorant of the term
Logos—he cannot possibly be as ignorant as that. And yet here he is
plainly thinking that Logos means Holy Writ. Ignorance is ignorance and
muddle-headedness is muddle-headedness; but when they mix and reach that
degree criticism must be silent.
There runs through the whole of this division the nineteenth-century
idea of “progress.” It is taken for granted, in all its crudity, all its
tautology, all its unproved and untrue postulates, and all its flagrant
contrast with reality—for of all forms of mystical enthusiasm that of
“progress” is the stupidest.
Here is an example from page 385. “Politically, Islam was not an
advance, but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary
laws of the desert.” Retrogression towards what—in the name of Heaven,
common sense and the rudiments of education? If I say a motor-bus is not
an “advance” but a “retrogression” from the old horse bus, I must mean,
I suppose, that I like the old horse bus better than the motor-bus
(which I do). Does Mr. Wells mean that the Arab of the desert,
unorganized, and doing what he liked, is his ideal? Then why does he
give us his whole idea of progress as that people should get more and
more together, and regard the stricter unity of mankind as a thing at
once good and inevitable? What does he mean?
I doubt if he knows himself what he means. He had a vague feeling for
the moment, as he wrote the sentence, that it would be jollier to be a
free Pagan Arab playing about than an Arab bound down by a religious
system. Instead of saying that the change was a change towards the “less
jolly,” he calls it a “retrogression”—which simply means that he thinks
the word “progress” means nothing more than “getting towards the kind of
thing I like.” In this, though he may not know it, he is perfectly
right—that _is_ about the only meaning the word “progress” has in the
mouths of its faithful flock. But then, to use Progress as a universal
philosophy is essential nonsense. For different people will always like
different things. Until you have a rational and firm faith (or
philosophy) as to what is best, you have no way of distinguishing
between going forwards and going backwards.
I will not disappoint the reader if I quote, as a savoury, the most
extravagant example of “progress” in this division. It is on page 393,
and runs thus: “Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have never had the
assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there can be little
doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and gathered
confidence during the last few centuries. They have slowly found a means
to power through the development of popular education and popular
literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things plainly
and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human affairs
than they have ever been before in the world’s history.”
So now we know that the anti-Christian of the best-seller, of the sexual
novel, of the star article, and the cheap textbook, is about to take
over the governance of mankind. God help us if he does! But he won’t.