Dictionary and Thesaurus
I'm not in love with the idea of "the contributions" of the past. It reminds
me a bit too much of my elementary school days....
Teacher: What do we owe to the Ancient Greeks?
Class responding in unison: Democracy!.
Teacher: And what do we owe to the Ancient Romans?
Class responding in unison: Representative government!
Teacher: And what do we owe to the Ancient Egyptians?
Class responding in unison: Duh!
Teacher: Embalming! We owe embalming to the Ancient
Egyptians.
I was only a kid, but I was already weighed down with a burden of debt and
half expected a bunch of Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians to appear
at my back door, demanding payment. I told myself that the Egyptians
weren't going to get much from me since embalming was a yucky business at
best.
But that's one way of studying history. There are other - and, in my
humble opinion, better - ways of going about it. You can study a past
civilization like an anthropologist observes the people of some South Sea
Island, or you could simply relax and appreciate the way they did things,
enjoy their art and architecture, literature and music, and perhaps try to
understand how their society worked and how they looked at the world.
That's a pleasant and worthwhile thing to do. It broadens one's horizons,
stimulates thought, and leads to a greater toleration of the variety of
human beings and their ways. That's why History is usually classified as
one of the Humanities, and it's why I usually view with suspicion people
who stick it under the Social Sciences.
But that approach is not very useful, and people seem to like
useful things, although I have noticed that they are very easily led to
spend their money on football and basketball games, rock concerts, movies,
posters, life-sized busts of Elvis Presley with a night light inside, and
other things that that I don't believe actually qualify as really
useful. But it's perfectly legitimate to study the past in order to look
for the origins of those things that are presently important parts of our
lives. Socrates' motto was Know yourself, by which he meant
that you have to understand who you are, what your purpose in life is, and
how you came to be the person you are before you try to understand other
people and other things.
I'll go along with that. So let me suggest what I think are the things that
originated in the middle ages that have been most important in shaping my
life. I could jump at the obvious ones, and say that probably the most
important contribution of medieval Europe was its development, in the
thirteenth century, of eye-glasses. If there were no eye-glasses, I couldn't
see well enough to avoid walking into houses and trees much less be able to
earn a living. I suppose that Sam the Dog would continue to keep me from
walking out into the street and getting run over, but Sam the Dog is getting
old and can't see too well himself. He's beginning to depend upon me to point
out squirrels that he can chase up into the trees, but that's another story.
I'll try to limit myself to the big things, the sort of things that might
have shaped your life as well as mine.
1. FREEDOM
Sir Kenneth Clark wrote and directed a series of movies on the History of
Art which he called Civilisation (which is how the British
spell it. They also drink a mixture of beer and cider and make the worst
coffee in the world). In the first scene of the first movie, Sir Kenneth
is sitting with the great Roman aqueduct of Nimes (in France) behind him
and is saying (as he nonchalantly waves his hand at the mass of stone
behind him) I don't know what civilisation consists of, but I know it
when I see it. I must confess that scene irritates me deeply, and that
I often find myself muttering something like Yeah? Well, Kenny, old
chap, how many slaves do you think were killed or beaten to death to build
that thing behind you?
The fact of the matter is that Ancient Rome, like Ancient Greece, Ancient
Egypt, and every other civilization preceding medieval Europe, was a slave
society, and all of the great monuments of antiquity that we admire so
much were built with the blood and sweat and bodies of slaves.
But, you might say, medieval Europe was not a free society, was
it? What about the serfs and oppressed peasants? True enough, but the
Romans thought of their slaves simply as possessions. The Roman
slave-owner had absolute power over his slaves and could torture them to
death for the fun of it if he wished, without anyone suggesting that there
might be anything wrong with what he was doing. In medieval society, by
contrast, every man and woman was regarded as a unique creation of God and
as the possessor of a soul which was the gift of God. Throughout the
medieval period, people became more and more convinced that slavery was
evil and against the law of God. The passage from the Gospel According to
St Matthew was often quoted: The laborer is worthy of his hire,
which people understood to mean that labor had to be bought from a person,
not simply taken away from him. By the close of the middle ages, slavery
had virtually vanished from Western Europe.
But didn't those same Europeans enslave the Africans? Yes, that's
true, but that was something of an exception. They imitated the
long-standing Muslim trade in African slaves in order to get workers to
exploit the fever-ridden lands of the New World. Black slavery reached its
peak in the 17th and 18th centuries, but many Europeans had always thought
that the slave trade was evil. It was Europeans who made it illegal and
ended it during the nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of men of
European descent died to end slavery in America. We often fall short of
the ideal of freedom for all, but we do have that ideal. It was
born in medieval Europe and sprang from the Europeans' view of the nature
of human beings.
2. EQUALITY
You're probably surprised that I think that a stratified and status-ridden
society like medieval Europe was the origin of the concept of equality. As
I said, we often fall short of our ideals, but our ideal of the integrity
of the individual was born in medieval Europe. The Greek Stoics,
whose philosophy had a great effect on the early Christian Church, held
that there was a Brotherhood of Man and that the highest calling of every
person was to treat others justly and compassionately. In the minds of the
Stoics, however, this meant that people should be kind to their slaves,
not that there shouldn't be any slaves at all.
Under the best of conditions, such as in a well-run Benedictine monastery,
medieval Europeans strove to achieve this ideal of equality. A tightly-run
organization such as a monastery required some hierarchy, but the
Benedictines based theirs solely upon seniority. Whoever had entered the
monastery first held precedence over all those who had entered afterwards,
regardless of what rank or status they might have held in secular life.
There is a neat story about this. A nobleman had decided to abandon
secular life and enter a monastery that he had endowed with considerable
wealth. When he rode up to the gate of the monastery, with his slave
trotting along behind him and carrying his luggage, the abbot had the
gates opened wide and greeted the noble with deference. When he was asked
to step inside, the noble told his slave to take in his baggage. The slave
did so and entered the monastery a couple of paces in front of his master.
For the rest of his life, the noble had to defer to his former slave since
the slave had entered monastic life before he had.
It's easy enough to see that the idea of democracy, that the people should
have the deciding voice in the actions of the state, society, and economy,
depends upon the acceptance of the ideals of freedom and equality. That being
the case, the idea that we owe democracy to the Greeks is a fiction. The
people of Athens, the most "democratic" of the Greek city-states, did not
allow women, slaves, and foreigners to vote, and a person was considered to
be a foreigner unless his grandfather had enjoyed the rights of Athenian
citizenship. It was, in fact, a closed society, and no one was allowed
in.
3. CONSTITUTIONAL LAW As long as we're talking about
monasteries, you might consider re-reading
the Benedictine Rule, the written law that governed monastic life through the medieval period and
down to the present day. You'll note that the abbot has absolute power,
except that he must keep to the regulations laid down in the Rule
and that he must confer with his monks on all important matters. The fact
was that a chapter of the Rule was read to the monks each day, so
that they knew what those regulations were. Benedict never said anything
in his rule about rebellion, but one can find numerous instance in the
history of the period when monks rejected the authority of an abbot who
was ignoring the Rule, expelled him, and elected another leader in
his place. So the authority of the abbot was not absolute, but was limited
by a written document which everyone understood. I should think that is
the essence of constitutional law.
This sort of approach to governance was largely limited to the cloistered
monastery, but I suspect that it had a slow and steady influence upon the
secular world, if only as an ideal. Benedictine monks served the kings and
princes of Western Europe as administrators and advisors throughout the
medieval period. Lanfranc was the advisor of William I of England,
and Anselm was the advisor of William II. Both had been abbots of
the little Norman Benedictine monastery of Bec, where the study of law had
reached a high point in the early eleventh century. At the same time,
scholars such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas
emphasized that there were universal laws, established by God, that
humans, no matter how powerful they might be, could not set aside.
Although much is made of the degree to which the Founding Fathers of the
United States were influenced by the Romans, the opening words of the
Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal
and that they are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable
rights...
read very much as if Thomas Jefferson was influenced by the medieval thinkers
who searched for the relationship between Divine and the Natural Laws. His
phrase, the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, would seem to me to
confirm that the fundamental ideals of our nation were derived as much from
medieval thought as from either the Greeks or the Romans.
4. THE DIGNITY OF LABOR
There was, in the small town where I went to high school, quite a gap
between the social classes. On the one hand, there were several wealthy
families who owned factories and, on the other hand, the people who worked
in those factories. There were also the families of doctors, lawyers, and
store-owners who tried very hard to keep up with the wealthy families. My
parents came from what used to be called "the working class," and both I
and my friends worked full- or part-time from the age of sixteen, the
minimum age when it became legal to do so. The sons and daughters of the
wealthy families in my town lived quite differently. While I and my
friends worked in a factory during the summers, they spent their
summers in their family's summer home on Georgian Bay or some similar
place, or travelled to Europe. The person with the lead role in the school
play, the winner of the Daughters of the American Revolution Essay
contest, the class valedictorian, the cheer leaders, and even the half-
back who was sent in to score a touchdown after the football team had
taken the ball down to the one-yard line were all the sons and daughters
of the wealthy. I don't know if such social inequities and snobbery still
exist in small towns today. I hope not. But it might explain why I think
that the concept of the dignity of labor is so important.
I mentioned that civilizations before medieval Europe were all based upon
the exploitation of a mass of enslaved human beings. In such a society, it
would have been impossible not to consider labor a pursuit fitting only to
a slave. Even if free people were forced to work in order to gain food and
shelter, they were regarded as having lowered themselves by soiling their
hands with labor. People went to extremes in order to demonstrate to
everyone that they did not have to work for a living. In China, the
Mandarins, or upper class, used to let their fingernails grow to such a
length that they could scarcely hold a tea cup in their hands. They bound
up the feet of their daughters so that the girls would grow up to have
club feet and be unable to walk unaided. All of this was to show that they
did not, could not, labor. Traces of this attitude still exist today. Why
do people go to tanning parlors when they know that tanning harms the skin
and can lead to skin cancer? The answer would seem to be that a tanned
skin is considered beautiful. It shows that you don't have to spend summer
days in a factory or office. Back when most people worked outside, some
people were very careful to wear broad-brimmed hats or wear gloves and
carry parasols to shield their skin from the sun, and used white powder on
their face and arms. Thorstein Veblen wrote an interesting book on this
matter called
The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Medieval society might have been stratified into "Those who fight, those who
work, and those who pray," but, throughout the medieval period, the
Church exerted a steady influence in establishing that work was not demeaning
and that a human being did not lose his or her dignity through labor. The
Benedictine monks were supposed to spend one third of their time sleeping,
one-third praying, and one-third working. The work might consist of
painting pictures or copying manuscripts, but it was still considered work,
and the monks of Cluny emphasized to all of their rich and
noble patrons that they each did physical labor. "Joyous labor is a praise of
God" was one of the mottos of the time. Even the holy hermits who retreated
into isolation built their shelters with their own hands and worked little
gardens from which they fed themselves. The wandering Franciscans who lived
by charity were ordered not simply to accept food that was given to them, but
to ask to be given some work to do so that they might earn what they
received. Over the years, Europeans developed an attitude toward labor that
was unique among the advanced civilizations of the world.
Of course, it's not easy for people to accept the idea that, somehow or
another, it's better to work than to goof off, or that something that is
earned is worth more than something that is simply given to one. The human
is, so they say, innately lazy, and so class distinctions and snobbery
keep creeping back into society. But the general tendency is for the mass
of the people to reject the idea that they are somehow inferior because
they have to work for what they get, and this is an important factor in
keeping our society as free as it is. Our problems seem to spring from a
lack of truly productive jobs, not an aversion to them.
5. THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE
Many students, in their answers to history essay questions, write such
things as the people did this or the people demanded that.
For the most part, throughout history, the people have had little
or no say in what happened to them. Even when they did, not everyone
thought that it was a good idea. The Founding Fathers of the United States
tended to equate democracy with mob rule, and tried to avoid
it by limiting the power of the people by removing them from the actual
processes of decision-making. Ancient Athens is supposed to have been a
democracy, but participation in the government of the city was limited to
a minority of the population. Ancient Rome is supposed to have had
representative government, but the Roman Senate was an hereditary body
limited to the wealthy and noble, in which the Senators represented nobody
except themselves.
The principle of popular sovereignty seems to have been a product of
the middle ages. The Church would sometime note vox populi vox Dei,
"The voice of the people is the voice of God," but didn't often put the
principle into practice. The residents of the medieval towns of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries did put it into practice, however, when they
rebelled against their overlords, gained charters of liberties, and set
themselves up as independent, self-governing "commonwealths." The Swiss
peasants of the mountain cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden put it into
practice when they overthrew their Habsburg lords and began to rule
themselves. So did John Ball, John Wyclif, and Jan Hus (why was everyone
named "John"?) when they rejected the notion that God intended that a few
should rule over the many. So, too, did William of Ockham, when he argued
that "categories" such as justice, truth, and beauty were constructed by
common consent.
Most of the medieval institutions of popular will did not survive.
Parliament, Switzerland, the folk moot of Iceland, and a few others lasted
into the modern era, but it was not until the so-called liberal
revolutions that began in the late eighteenth century that the mass of
the people began to attempt to seize power for themselves. I don't
believe, though, that this would have happened if it had not been for the
men and women of medieval Europe. For centuries, they kept challenging the
idea that the submission of the many to the few was a natural state of
affairs or in accordance with Divine Will. The men and women of modern
times simply continued what their forebears had begun, until the time came
when it was possible to challenge aristocratic rule directly. I don't
suppose than anyone would argue that the mass of the people really decides
what happens in modern society, but that is the ideal toward which most of
us strive we, and the world would be a much worse place were that not
so.
Anyway, that's my choice for the five most important contributions of the
middle ages to the modern world. This sort of thing is always a personal
matter; someone else might propose five completely different things. One
might argue for the university, Protestantism, the
establishment of a world economy, the Industrial Revolution,
the Capitalist system, or any one of a number of other things. The
challenge is to try to decide what is basic.
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