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Historical survey shows church's critical role during the Dark Ages |
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By Brian Welter - Catholic News Service
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
"The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000" by Chris Wickham. Viking (New York, 2009) 651 pp., $35.
While Chris Wickham's long survey "The Inheritance of Rome" does not
specifically focus on church history, he shows how the church,
especially in its institutional structure, played a leading role in the
formation of Western European society and politics after the fall of
Rome (A.D. 476).
The church was essential to the survival of Greco-Roman culture and
politics. It was the only institution to survive, relatively intact,
the fifth and six centuries, when the Germanic peoples took over the
government and aristocratic levers of power. The ruling segment of
society was no longer an educated, administrative group, but a warrior
class all across Europe, from Spain in the southwest to England and
German lands in the north.
Even bishops campaigned militarily against opponents or to execute
their orders, since by this time the episcopacy was largely reserved
for the aristocratic classes.
Since the warrior ruling class no longer needed book learning, the
church began to control education. To be educated meant to be educated
in the church, the way that the church desired.
Central to this whole period in the West was the Carolingian dynasty,
exemplified most famously by Charlemagne. He in particular wed church
to statecraft, starting with his moral, religious program.
Wickham, a professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford,
describes the moral ideal of Charlemagne and the Carolingians in
detail. Charlemagne's deeply militaristic streak, which led to terrible
wars in Saxony and Italy that expanded the empire by half again,
carried a religious trace. He pushed for the Christianization of
Saxony, which went alongside the appropriation of the peasant lands
there for the aristocracy, and allied himself closely with the papacy
in Rome, defending it against the Lombards.
But Charlemagne's educational push at his own court was as important
for Europe's Christianization. He rewarded intellectuals, who came to
his court to teach, write books and exchange ideas. This Carolingian
Renaissance allowed the Western church to catch up, if only a little,
with the theological sophistication of the Greek churches to the East.
The Carolingians also pushed for a more educated priesthood, no small
challenge given the almost total lack of educational infrastructure in
many areas of western Europe.
As a long general survey, "The Inheritance of Rome" also examines the
growth of royal and administrative power in England (again, by taking
land from the peasants), Germany, Spain and the newly Arabized lands of
the East. Wickham gives the reader a clear sense of how the Arabs in
north Africa and the Near East (Syria, Palestine, Iraq) took over the
old Roman and Persian imperial structure, and how these regions were
only slowly Arabized.
He thus challenges the still-believed lie that the Arab Muslims
converted everyone by the sword: Quite the opposite. Islam was at first
a tribal religion and the Arab military garrisons across their
conquered lands did not want to give up the heavier taxes levied on
non-Muslims. Slowly, though, Christians in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere
began to convert so they could more easily deal with the Islamic
governments; peasants converted to avoid the religion tax.
"The Inheritance of Rome," though often focusing on economic or
political issues, does show how the united Christian culture of late
ancient Rome broke up into the three blocs of Latin Christian West,
Orthodox Christian East (via the painful Iconoclast controversy) and
Arab-dominated Muslim lands.
Welter is a freelance contributor to the B.C. Catholic, the newspaper
of the Archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia, and is studying for
his doctorate in systematic theology.
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