Henri Pirenne: Mohammed and Charlemagne

First part here.

Second here.

For anti-Christian, anti-reality bigots, the world ended on a dark day in 476 A.D. when the pagan, slave-owning, militaristic despotism steeped in blood and bondage called the Western Roman Empire ‘fell’ to Germanic ‘Barbarians’, barely clothed, toothless, fouling themselves, champing and chimping like African apes over the great ‘classical world’ of the Romans.  Nothing was left, all was ruin, and darkness reigned. This standard-Atheist-Humanist view is the complete opposite of reality in many ways.  The contraction in Western European society occurred with the Musulman invasions of the 7^th and 8^th centuries.  Not only is this common-sense, but empirically and archaeologically proven.  But it runs counter to the Atheist-Humanist love of Muhammadanism, in which rainbows vie with unicorns who tussle with magical pots of gold for attention and relevancy. 

The deranged violence, war, slavery and destruction of the Musulman Jihad, obvious and present in the modern world as well as the medieval, is ascribed to be the fault of Christians, lascivious monks and illiterate Catholic peasants, too stupid to invent the thousand of items which propelled Catholic Europe to world-wide domination by the 15^th century.  The Jihad was to their benefit the Atheist-Humanists chant, it brought civilisation, they intone.  The intellectual barrenness of the modern age can be summed up in the non-existent criticism of the Muhammadan cult and the fantastical illiteracy about its cultural-civilisational destruction, which is now resurrected as the opposite, proving the general uselessness of education and university systems in the modern world.

Pirenne devotes many pages outlining the intellectual life of 6^th century post-Roman Western Europe.  Not much had changed from the 4^th century, except improvement and greater erudition.  ‘Intellectual’ life did not descend into darkness, writing, poetry, art all flourished post 476 A.D.  The Germanic states which took over the Western empire, did not change anything and invested in cultural refinements including schools and libraries.  Monasteries were busy with scribing and copying, and the urban populations educated their children in the same manner as before the ‘fall’. 

“We learn through him (Pasiphae a rhetorician) that the schools of rhetoric in Rome were as busy as ever.  He wrote his panegyric of Theodoric between 504 and 508, in the inflated and pretentious style as that which marks his biography of Anthony, the monk of Lerins.  He also wrote of grammar, of rhetoric which ‘commands the universe’ and of the bases of the Christian’s education.”

Education, literacy and artistic output in many genres only accelerated post Rome 476.  Pirenne lists a few examples:

Boethius, a Roman Christian born in 480, made a consul in 510, be become a minister in the Ostrogothic government and reformed the monetary system.  He translated Aristotle, Isagogue the Porphyry, and various works of Greek musicians and mathematicians.  He wrote the important work which influenced medieval thought, ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, merging Stoic and Christian ideals.  He was executed for treason, plotting with the Byzantines who tried, and succeeded for a time, in reconquering Italy.

Cassiodorus was born in 477, and was the principal minister in the Ostrogothic government.  He withdrew to the religious life in 540 and established a monastery.  He set his monks the task of compiling all the ancient works of classic antiquity.  The medieval compilation of literally tonnes of pagan books and their translation, restoration and cataloguing can be traced to this era.

Pirenne mentions many different Romano-Christian actors in the realm of writing, poetry and education; including Fortunatus, Arator, Caribert, Duke Lupus, Andarchius, Gogo, Barthenius, Dracontius, Felicianus, Florentinus, Felix, Luxorius, Mavortius, Coronatus, Calbulus, Parthenius, Fulgentius, Sidonius and King Chilperic, amongst many others.  As Pirenne concludes:  “In short the invasions did not modify the character of the intellectual life in the basin of the Mediterranean….the old tradition survived.  Since there were still writers, there must still have been a public to read them, and even a comparatively scholarly public….This intellectual life which preserved the traditions of antiquity must have continued into the 7^th century, since Pope Gregory the Great reproached Didier, Bishop of Vienne, with giving all his time to grammar, and in Spain there were historians of some merit up to the time of the Arab conquest.”

In the 7^th century Christian scholars continued the ‘old traditions’ building libraries, encyclopaedias and manifests of technologies, inventions and tools.  Isidore of Seville is one example, “…..tried to make the science of the ages accessible to his contemporaries.  Not a trace of the classic spirit survived in his writings.  They related facts, and contained useful recipes.  He was the Encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages.”

In the 6^th and 7^th centuries Western Romano-Christian civilisation was engaged in endless building projects.  Churches, water systems, canals, windmills, watermills and road building were common.  Many of the structures were aesthetically adorned with new advances in sculpture and art.  The pagan world was being merged in the Christian and medieval world.  A dynamism developed, longer terms of trade, credit, and cultural confidence, must of it influenced by the great Christian city and empire of Constantinople, the largest urban complex in the world and a hive of manufacturing and technological output. 

The world did not crash into darkness in 476 A.D.  Quite the opposite.  The fetters of Roman pagan militarism were lifted, the crushing weight of a corrupt state pushed away, and the Christian ethos of freedom enshrined.  Light not darkness flowed post Rome.