NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - FOURTEEN

 NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- FOURTEEN  

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD WAS “THE AGE OF FAITH”

 The Age of Faith

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Originally published © June 30, 2016/August 22, 2021

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. As knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions that were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

Will Durant (1885 – 1981), American historian, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1, 1935, p. 71.

PRELUDE TO “THE AGE OF FAITH”

As indicated in PART ELEVEN of this series (Improbable Christianity: The Jesus Story), during the first hundred years after the death of Jesus, with the martyrdom of James, the brother of Jesus in 62 C.E., who led the small Jerusalem Jewish Christian sect, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple by Rome in 70 C.E., the prospects did not look good for Christianity.

Peter and Paul had been executed in Rome in 66 C.E., and there was essentially no proselytizing leadership. Yet the Gentile brand of Christianity continued to spread throughout the Roman world, while paradoxically more Christians were being persecuted than ever.

Irrational man craves comfort and security but he is also inclined to be strangely death-defying in adversity, especially when he embraces a cause larger than himself. Those in power are often slow to realize this. That was not the case with Constantine, who was battling to have exclusive control of the Roman Empire.

Everything changed for him and Christianity at the “Battle of the Milvian Bridge” when Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 C.E., legalized the faith in 313, and made Christianity the State Religion of the Roman Empire in 380.

In a short 100 years, the Roman Empire would disappear (476), but Christianity would find a way to survive for the next 300 years following Rome’s collapse.

PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE AGES

When we refer to “The Middle Ages,” we are addressing primarily European history, which started with The Fall of Rome in 476 C.E. when the Western Roman Empire ended to the time of Christopher Columbus and the discovering of the new world in 1492 C.E., or roughly 1,000 years.

This period is also known as The Medieval Age or “The Dark Ages” as it was during this time that the Greco-Roman culture disintegrated while Christianity ascended to a new dominate in the West, while Islam was on the rise in the East. More narrowly, The Dark Ages refers to the earlier period of 476 to 800 when Charlemagne became king of the Holy Roman Empire.

Across Europe after 476, with the invasion of the Visigoths and German barbarian tribes from the North, towns, and cities were decimated, inhabitants vanquished from their homes, farms, and businesses with thousands dying of starvation, malnutrition, exposure to the elements, disease, and violence. Very few could read or write, and so little is known of this period.

Much of the Greco-Roman knowledge in science, engineering, technology, medicine, the arts, and literature was lost. After 300 years, Europe was lifted partially out of this darkness with the development of feudalism. It was the crowning of Emperor Charlemagne in 800, however, that stopped the societal hemorrhaging, restoring some semblance of order and control, governance and commerce, education, and civilization. Europe’s long nightmare was coming to an end.

During the Middle Ages, Europe changed as the remains of the Roman Empire in Western Europe slowly became independent countries of England, France (The Franks), Germany (Germania), Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Poland, and Russia.

After Christianity became the faith of the Roman Empire in 380 and flourished during the next 100 years before the Fall of Rome, it found a way to survive despite The Dark Ages, now as the Roman Catholic Church, not simply Christianity.

Historians Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1918) and Will Durant (The Age of Faith, 1935) consider The Dark Ages closer to 500 years (566 – 1095) than 300 years (496 – 800).

In any case, unraveling the Roman Empire started in the year 335 as Emperor Constantine, feeling near death, called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided the Roman Empire among them. To his eldest son, Constantine II, he assigned the Western Empire – Britain, Gaul, and Spain; to his son, Constantius, the Easter Empire – Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt; to his youngest son, Constans,

North Africa, Italy, Illyricum, and Thrace, including the new and old capitals of Constantinople and Rome, and to two nephews, Armenia, Macedonia, and Greece.

Constantine, as the first Roman Emperor, had risked a great deal in restoring the monarchy and unifying the Roman Empire under this controversial new Gentile Christian faith. With his death (337), he hoped to ensure the sanctity of the empire by dividing it into sectors among his family to avoid civil war and internecine conflict. He was wrong. Edward Gibbon writes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Chapter 38:

The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterward violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and the enemy; the vigor of the military the government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.

Common agreement is that for 500 to 700 years during the “Dark Ages” there was little output in education, the arts, and other cultural pursuits while there was a clear retrogression during the Barbarian invasions, which effectively wrecked Roman civilization. These invasions destroyed not only cities but monasteries, libraries, schools, and institutions such as law, governance, and the military.

It was into this vacuum that the Roman Catholic Church stepped to restore a modicum of order to the crumbling walls of Western Civilization. It did this through its monks and primarily through its network of monasteries largely in Ireland (see Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, 1995).

It was a blessing for the church as it could promulgate its doctrine and dogma introducing the Laws of the Gospels and the Ethics of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to his mission of brotherly love safe from the marauding criminals, reigning terror across the European continent.

The preservation of Western Civilization through the copying of ancient manuscripts begin in the sixth century when a retired Roman senator named Cassiodorus (485 – 585) established a monastery at Vivarium in southern Italy and endowed it with a fine library wherein the copying of manuscripts was its function. Thereafter, most monasteries were endowed with scriptoria as part of their libraries, which were rooms where ancient literature was transcribed by monks as part of their manual labor.

The best-known scholar of the “Dark Ages” was the English ecclesiastic Alcuin (735 – 804) who worked closely with Charlemagne to restore study and scholarship in the whole of West-Central Europe. Works he managed to preserve were by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus, Pompeius, and Virgil.

Perhaps the greatest abbot after Benedict was Desiderius, who became Pope Victor III in 1086 near the end of the “Dark Middle Ages.” He transcribed the works of Horace and Seneca and Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”) and Ovid’s Fasti (“On the Roman Calendar”).

There were many other scholars during the “Dark Ages” transcribing ancient works. While the Roman Catholic Church, mainly in Ireland, was preserving its Christian record, the Church helped preserve the ancient pagan culture of the greats of that earlier period which would have otherwise been lost.

THE AGE OF FAITH

Aristotle’s theology was based on the perception that there must be something above and beyond the chains of cause and effect for those chains to exist at all. Tracing how things cause one another to change and the move was the source of many of Aristotle’s most fundamental insights. He was a critical observer.

He believed that causes must themselves be caused and all motion must be caused by something that is already in motion. The trouble with this is that it led to an infinite regress: that is, if all causes have antecedent causes, there is no First Cause.

He asked himself, “Why is there change rather than stillness?” He answered that there must be a First Cause, an “unmoved mover” that is the source of all change and motion while being itself unchanging and unmoving. This unmoved mover to motivate the heavens to move must be perfect, so Aristotle came to associate this “it” with God.

Western theology and science would rise out of Aristotelian logic and would become the boilerplate of the “Age of Faith” with a dramatic shift in the Middle Ages. Monks barricaded in monasteries recorded the written records of ancient scholars and preserved them for posterity.

The medieval world emerged from the “Dark Ages” of the disintegration of the Roman Empire of the West in the fourth and fifth century with what could be called a gestation period to emerge first with the Italian Renaissance and then with the European “Age of the Enlightenment.”

The Italian Renaissance was the earliest manifestation of the general European Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement that began in Italy in the 14th century and lasted until the 16th century, marking the transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern era.

The Age of the Enlightenment or simply The Age of Reason is an era from the 1620s to the 1780s in which cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional authority. It included the American Revolution of 1776 and ended with the French Revolution in 1789, which also marked the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804 – 1815).

An assembly of aristocrats during the “Age of the Enlightenment”

ST. AUGUSTINE

During an earlier gestation period would emerge the influential figure of St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church with his philosophical Confessions (397 – 401) and The City of God (412 – 427). Next to St. Paul, Augustine was to exert the greatest influence on Christianity for both Catholics and Protestants. Augustine was so typically real that he could be inspirational to 21st-century young people in that he struggled mightily with his savage conscience as a youth for personal and spiritual identity in a time of inordinate change.

St. Augustine’s life, with its pagan beginnings and his ultimate acceptance of Christ, is a recapitulation of the larger struggle within the Roman Empire for its essence and viability. Born of a Christian mother and pagan father, Augustine was attracted in his youth to the leading cults and philosophies of his day. He flirted with Manicheans (an extreme form of Gnosticism), which gave him a lifelong bias towards religious or philosophical dualism. This proved a palpable influence on his interpretation of his personal history and the world history of his day.

The City of this World and The City of God are for Augustine the foundation stones of the Christian faith. Moreover, he saw the struggle within himself as categorical: his love of worldly things versus his love of the Lord.

Although reared Christian, he gave up his religion when he went to school in Carthage, found he had a knack for rhetoric, joined the Manicheans taught for them in Rome and Milan, then became distrustful of Manichean tenets, ending in renouncing the cult and launching himself into a deep study of Platonism and Plato's skepticism.

After two years of grave doubt, he suddenly decided to embrace Christianity. This decision was largely influenced by the eloquent persuasion of the bishop in Milan, St. Ambrose, who baptized him on Easter Sunday in the year 387. He was thirty-three years old.

Four years later, he was ordained a priest, and then in 396 consecrated a bishop. A man of extraordinary intellectual power, Augustine was to influence succeeding generations even more than his own for his ideas were to fuel the theology, morals, politics, and philosophy of the Western Christian world.

St. Augustine straddled the fourth and fifth century, already in his mid-forties when he decided to take stock of his life and write a book in the form of an intimate prayer to God with the title Testimony (400). We know this book today as Confessions. Up to that point, his longer works were mainly polemical. Catholic historian Garry Wills reports in Saint Augustine’s Memory (2002) that these

disputations were on such subjects as African schismatic (Donatists) and Roman Empire-wide heretics (Manicheans). This course change in his life from polemicist to defender of the faith was to signal, at least in part, his Confessions, as he chose to go deep into himself to emerge as the visionary for others on a larger public stage.

The 5th century was a transitional age in which knowledge of the ancient world was nourishing and giving birth to medieval thought. Augustine’s work of 22 books presented human history in terms of the conflict between the spiritual and temporal worlds. The City of God defined the attitude of Western society through the centuries and presaged the confusion that lay ahead.

Augustine expressed the “end of the world” escapist feeling of the time. Beyond the realm of the senses, he declared, was the spiritual and eternal world of truth that was the goal of all man’s striving. The way to enter this divine world was not by examining the external world of the senses, but by turning inward. Truth, he argued, came not from the external world or the mind, but the illuminating presence of God.

Augustine divided people into those favored and those not. Those who dwelt in The City of God would have eternity with the deity, and those in The City of the World would be condemned to permanent torment with Satan.

The Roman Catholic Church was the earthly Kingdom of God, and would one day reign with supreme power in a theocratic society. Augustine ideology was a tool the Church would use over the following thousand years in an attempt to manipulate and control secular rulers in Western Europe, and through them, their subjects.

The ability to read and write raised the Christian Church hierarchy to an extremely powerful position over many illiterate kings and princes, who were more interested in power and conquests than in learning, and therefore were dependent upon the clergy, the most literate in the realm, who could keep the books, read maps, write out strategies, administer to the territories, collate supplies, and interpret documents.

New phrases came into the language such as “auditing accounts” and “holding hearing” and “coordinating assets.” Language became quite colorful as high society and those in charge preferred oral to written presentations as many could not read or could not read well.

It was easy for the Church through its monastic orders and bishops to control this mainly illiterate world. By the early middle ages, Roman state schooling had vanished and nothing replaced it that might compete with the educational system controlled by the Church. Meanwhile, the Church consolidated its authority by taking draconian action against any challenges. The Church would never realize such power again.

GNOSTICS

When the 2nd-century Gnostic thinkers proposed a way to salvation through scholarship and self-knowledge, Gnostic books were burned and they were banned. The Church consolidated its power with a tightly controlled canon of official knowledge, the source in a single text, the Bible, which was accessible only to the literate ecclesiastic hierarchy. Gnostic believed that they, alone, truly understood Christ’s message and that other streams within Christianity had misinterpreted Jesus's mission and sayings.

Knowledge to Gnostics was not an intellectual exercise, but a passive understanding of aspects of spirituality. Rather, knowledge helped liberate individuals to break free of the bondage to the world. The Supreme Father God is unknowable by human senses. Sophia a virgin who gave birth to a defective, inferior Creator-God known as Demiurge. This lower God is Jehovah, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). He thinks he is supreme but isn’t. He is viewed by Gnostics as fundamentally evil, jealous, rigid, lacking in compassion, and prone to genocide.

Spirit is of a divine origin and good; the body is inherently earthly and evil. Gnostics were hostile to the physical world, to matter, and the human body. But trapped in some people’s bodies were sparks of the divinity supplied by Sophia. Gnostics divided people into three groups: the spiritual, who would be saved; the soulish, who could be saved if they followed the Gnostic path; and the carnal who are hopelessly lost. Evil is not a result of the degeneracy of Adam and Eve, but the creation of an imperfect world by an inferior God.

Christ is looking on as a liberator rather than a savior. His purpose was to spread knowledge to free the individual to return to the spiritual home. Gnostics believed Christ’s resurrection occurred at or before Jesus’ death on the cross. Gnostic divide the universe into three kingdoms: the Earthly Cosmos with the earth the center of the universe surrounded by seven concentric heavenly spheres; the Intermediate Kingdom of an inner blue circle of darkness and an outer yellow ring of light, which is within the realm of Sophia; and the Kingdom of God with an outer sphere of the unknowable Supreme God, and the inner ring of the Son.

Classical researcher into early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, tells an interesting story in The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which provides us with a perspective on their beliefs. In 1945, an Egyptian peasant unearthed what proved to be the Gnostic Gospels or sacred books of one of the earliest Christian sects. His mother used many of these books for fuel before the remainder were turned over to authorities as precious manuscripts. Pagels takes us through those gospels to show how some of the Gnostic ideas have survived. She points out that Gnostic:

· Expressed ideas that the orthodox abhorred;

· Questioned whether suffering, labor, and death derive from human sin;

· Speak of the feminine element in the divine;

· Believed Christ resurrection is to be understood symbolically, not literally;

· Denounced catholic Christians as heretics;

Pagels concludes:

When Muhammed ‘Ali smashed that jar with papyrus on the cliff near Nag Hammadi and was disappointed not to find gold, he could not have imagined the implications of his accidental find. Had they been discovered 1,000 years earlier, the gnostic texts almost certainly would have been burned for their heresy. But they remained hidden until the twentieth century when our own cultural experience has given us a new perspective on the issues they raise. Today we read them with different eyes, not merely as “madness and blasphemy” but as Christians in the first centuries experienced them – a powerful alternative to what we know as an orthodox Christian tradition. Only now are we beginning to consider the questions with which they confront us?

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as it is, finds Catholics and Protestants share three basic premises:

· They accept the canons of the New Testament;

· They confess belief in the Apostolic Creed; and

· They affirm specific forms of the church institution.

From the second century, C.E., Christianity became an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who acted as guardians of the “true faith.” The majority of the churches, with the Roman church taking the lead, rejected other viewpoints as heresy. Moreover, the Christian movement, paradoxically, depended heavily on the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which also served an important political function. It legitimized the authority of Church Fathers to impose an exclusive leadership over the churches as the successor of the apostle, Peter. From the second century, the doctrine has served to validate the apostolic succession of the Bishop of Rome and the basis of papal authority to this day.

Gnostic Christians who interpret the resurrection in other ways have no claim to authority; when they claim priority over the orthodox, they are denounced as heretics.

Bishop Irenaeus (130 – 202 C.E.) was one of the Church Fathers and apologists who advocated this emphatic doctrine. He insisted there could be only “one true church,” and outside that church, there could be no salvation. He also claimed the church was universal or catholic, and only the church teachings should be followed, otherwise, people were heretics living in sin. This orthodoxy gained military support sometime after the reign of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century with heretics routinely excommunicated and often physically punished.

Gnostics have some traction today as orthodox Christianity, as the apostolic creed defines it, contains some ideas that Gnostics questioned that are being questioned today. The creed requires that Christians confess that God is perfectly good, but still, he created a world of pain and suffering, injustice and death; that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin mother; and that after being executed by order of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, he arose again from the dead from his grave “on the third day.”

In short, Gnostics questioned these tenets as well as Christian doctrine’s total reliance on the New Testament, or the Christian belief that suffering, labor, and death were derived from human sin. They supported the feminine element in the divine (Sophia) with God as Father and Mother and they treated Christ’s resurrection symbolically rather than literally.

THE CHURCH AS AN ACQUISITION DOMAIN

From nearly the beginning, the Roman Catholic Church has been something of a bank. To increase Church revenue, its authority introduced the concept of religious tithing encouraging parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the Church. It didn’t stop here.

The power of the monarchs was recognized, but the Church imposed restrictions on pursuits without its blessings. Not only did the Holy Father, the See of Rome, the Supreme Pontiff attempt to remove the Church from subservience to lay authority, but cleverly introduced a ritual that laid claim to the Church’s preeminence over temporal authority.

European kings and emperors were shown the advantage of vesting themselves in a religious character. Thus coronations commenced being religious ceremonies with the Holy See placing the crown on the head of the new monarch signaling that the ultimate authority was that of the Lord’s custodian, the Church. This ensured Roman Catholic Church ecclesiastical power and security while suggesting blind obedience to the Church. It was unopposed until the contretemps of the Church with King Henry VIII of England.

When King Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine of Aragon, failed to give him a male heir, he petitioned Pope Clement VII in 1527 for an annulment. The pope refused to grant that request and a war followed between the king and the Church, ending in 1534 with the Act of Supremacy whereby King Henry VIII claimed to be Head of the Church of England.

The Protestant Reformation, started by Martin Luther in 1517, was already gaining momentum. Roman Catholic dominance would never be the same. Ecclesiastical control was ubiquitous with the crown’s most trusted confidantes often Church spies or persons more loyal to the Church than to the crown. That was true of Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535) who refused to renounce his allegiance to the Church and was beheaded by King Henry VIII.

Up to that point, Sir Thomas More lived in veritable luxury as kings routinely provided priests, bishops, and abbots with land and sometimes even manors and peasants to work the estates.

The tide of change is usually clear in retrospect, but not always clear when it is happening. The combination of Martin Luther posting his 95 theses on the church door of his Wittenberg chapel in 1517, and King Henry VIII renouncing the Roman Catholic Church’s authority over him by the proclamation of the Supremacy Act in 1534, moved Europe from the middle ages and into modernity.

Pope Clement VII, and succeeding pontiffs during the 16th and 17th centuries for their pride, arrogance, stubbornness, and lack of vision, hastened the collapse of Church Authority when the aim was to retard the process.

This has often been a fault of the Church when it played politics, and seldom wisely, rather than true to its mission, which was spiritual.

When things are going well when there is no demonstrable threat to the status quo when business as usual practices are unchallenged as faulty as they may be when it is little or no learning or consequences to major or minor snafus, the inclination is to kill the messenger when he reports bad news.

That was the climate of the Church in the eleventh to the fifteenth century. The Church of the 11th century had a firm grip on power and no monarch did anything of consequence without the knowledge of and approval of the Church. Churches had been established in all known settlements in Northern Europe, which made it possible for the growth of the parish system. The Church was the core of the community. Every town and every village in Western Europe had a local church and therefore palpable power to exercise and control activities.

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns that took place in the Middle East by knights and warriors of Europe between the late 11th century and the 15th century, military expeditions sanctioned by the Popes of Rome of the era.

The Crusades first arose as a “call to arms” in a sermon by Pope Urban II (1042 – 1099). He urged military support for the Byzantine Empire or the Eastern Roman Catholic Church. The Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I (1056 – 1118), needed reinforcements for his conflict with westward migrating Turks in Anatolia.

One of Urban’s alleged aims was to guarantee access to the holy sites in the Holy Land to pilgrims that were then under Muslim control. A more obvious aim, historians insist, may have been to reunite the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom, which had been divided since the split in 1054, and reestablish himself as the Supreme Pontiff of the reunited Church.

Not commonly known is that hundreds of thousands of the crusaders were not of royal blood, not Knights of the Crown, but peasants who became crusades by taking a public vow and receiving plenary indulgences from the Church forgiving all their sins, which meant if they died in the cause they would go straight to heaven. This was called the “Apotheosis at Jerusalem.” There were of course others, much like those who entered foreign legions of a later day, did so to gain wealth, adventure, and political advantage. Whatever the reason, Pope Urban II established a precedence that would continue for several centuries, and like our modern Viet Nam, have nothing but casualties to show for it.

The Church, in any case, believed it had the God-given right to subjugate the world to its will. After all, the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible had given man dominion over the earth with Genesis proclaiming:

“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands, they are delivered. Have dominion the earth and subdue it.”

Today, a thousand years later, in the name of “progress,” we are members of the “Future Perfect” generation leaving behind the “Past Imperfect” and the “Present Ridiculous.” This is the ecclesiastical mindset of our secular civil religion with its unintended consequences ahead just as they were for the Holy Crusades. Nearly 2 million (soldiers and civilians) died in that crusade, and nothing changed. In the Vietnam War, some 1.3 million died.

Christian doctrine gave humankind a position separate in nature from the rest of creation as if we were a breed apart. The dominant Christian view was since animals and plants lacked a conscience and did not have a soul this precluded us from treating them with the same humanity as a man. The manipulation of nature to man’s interest, which could enhance its value and synthetic beauty, was mankind’s right and duty by the dictates of his faith. He was not obliged to live in harmony with nature, but to exercise power and dominion over nature. That was God’s will.

This would have wide repercussions to our day. Primitives and their culture in the New World were deemed subhuman and inferior, and therefore these societies could be erased without conscience for they were being replaced by God’s acolyte, the Christian faith.

REDEEMING VALUE OF THE MONKS

The eleventh-century Benedictine monks were the first to systematically apply their faith to the restorative value of nature to their daily lives, and in the process begin to restore nature through the improvement of nature. This would influence and be reflected in the social behavior of Europeans for centuries to come. Conservation previously was not in the European character or the conduct of Europeans towards themselves much less towards nature.

Benedictines, who wished to be far from the rabble of the crowd sought out monastic sites far removed from the haunts of men in wild and isolated places, often on the tops of mountains. There they would apply their knowledge of nature first for food and support, and then to enquire into the mysteries of nature which would lead to science.

One order of Benedictines was that of Cistercians, whose motto was “Work is prayer,” predates by some nine centuries the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran claims that “Work is love made visible.” Thanks to the Cistercians, many of the tools of technology and work survived the Fall of Rome.

The Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in France introduced the use of waterpower in the 12th century that would lead to machinery becoming central to European life. Before that time, mechanization for industrial use was not common. Once introduced, the medieval world would then be symbolized and later reflected in the Cistercians’ use of waterpower as Europe would come to depend on this enormous conversion to mechanization.

The Cistercian monastic community generally ran its factory. The monks used waterpower for crushing wheat, sieving flour, weaving cloth, and tanning. And as French author Jean Gimpel (1918 – 1996) points out in “The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages” (1978) Cistercians led the technological explosion with 742 monasteries all with the same 12th-century proficiency in this technology.

The Cistercians were a reform-minded Benedictine order established at Citeaux in 1098 with the order becoming known for its technological sophistication. The network of monasteries kept close communications with each other profiting through the sharing of information.

 
The Benedictine order was also known for its skill in metallurgy. Although Cistercians needed iron for their use, these monasteries would offer their surplus for sale. In fact, from the 13th century through the 17th century, the Cistercians were the leading iron producers of the Champagne region of France. Ever eager to increase the efficiency of monastery operations, the Cistercians used the slag from their furnaces as fertilizer because of its concentration in phosphates.

Whether it be the mining of salt, lead, iron, alum, or gypsum, or metallurgy, quarrying marble, running cutler’s shops and glassworks, or forging metal plates, there was no activity that these monks of the 12th century did not display creativity and a fertile spirit of research. Utilizing their labor force, they instructed and trained it to perfection. Monastic know-how would spread throughout Europe.

The extent of monastic skills and technological cleverness is still being discovered. In the late 1990s, University of Bradford archeometallurgist Gerry McDonnell found evidence near Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, England (one of the monasteries that King Henry VIII ordered closed in the 1530s as part of his seizure of Church properties) of a degree of technological sophistication that pointed ahead to the great machines of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

In exploring the debris of Rievaulx and Laskill (an outstation about four miles from the monastery), McDonnell expected to find, based on the documentary evidence he had consulted, that the monks had built a furnace to extract iron from ore that was an advance for the times. And he did.

One other system of social control that sprang from monasteries was the measurement of time to allocate the time to perform daily tasks and the time to conduct collective prayer. Cistercians searched for a better form of timekeeping. This resulted in the development of the mechanical weight-driven clock in the 13th century.

Like nearly every other initiative, innovation, or invention of the Cistercians, once it became common knowledge, it invariably had social as well as the technological impact on Europeans. For example, being able to precisely control time came to marshal the social forces of Europeans into more regulated behavior. Such relevance and wisdom are the focus of the narrative of “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (2005) by American author Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Modern science was born in the monasteries and in the parishes where priests, often in secret, probed the mysteries of nature that troubled them. Monasteries, among other church facilities, looked to how they could market products from agricultural to manufacturing to the creative arts to literature. Long before Adam Smith was talking about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, monks were promoting a free market economy. The Church invented the university, first as Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and then later as the Vatican sponsored universities in the high Middle Ages of the 11th to 14th century. Disciples were theology, law, and medicine. These universities first sprang up in England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The quietest and unobtrusive contributor to Western Civilization was the Benedictine monks.

We know monks for preserving much of the literature of the ancient world but are less familiar with the monastic orders beyond that. It all started with St. Benedict of Nursia (480 – 547) when he built his first monastery. His contributions are so great that he has vied with Emperor Charlemagne as the “Father of Europe.”

Although scholarly pursuits get most of the attention of medieval monasteries, they also cultivated the manual arts, perfecting farming, carpentry, plumbing, and building. St. Benedict in establishing the order (529) was known for moderation and aversion of the difficult or unattractive tasks, yet his monks were not afraid of hard or dangerous work, draining and reclaiming swamps, ridding them of pestilence, and then building dikes turning the land in productive crops.

Woods writes in How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (2005):

The monastic contribution with which many people are familiar involves the copying of manuscripts, both sacred and profane. This task, and those who carried it out, were accorded special honor. A Carthusian prior wrote:

"This work in a certain sense is an immortal work, if one may say it, not passing away, but ever remaining; a work, so to speak, that is not a work; a work which above all others is most proper for educated religious men."

The monks appreciated the classical inheritance far more than modern students realize. Describing the holdings at his library at York, the great Alcuin (735 – 804), the polyglot who worked closely with Charlemagne in restoring study and scholarship in west-central Europe . . .

The great Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Sylvester II, did not confine himself to teaching logic; he also brought his students to an appreciation of Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius, Terence, Statius, and Virgil. We hear of lectures being delivered on the classical authors at places like St. Alban’s and Paderborn. A school exercise composed by St. Hildebert survives to us in which he had pieced together excerpts from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, Terence, and others; John Henry Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth century’s great convert from Anglicanism and an accomplished historian in his own right, suggests that St. Hildebert knew Horace practically by heart.

It was the monastic library and the scriptorium, the room set aside for the copying of texts, to which much of ancient Latin literature owes its transmission to us today, though at times the libraries and schools associated with the great cathedrals would play an important role as well. In the eleventh century, just as a variety of forms of monastic life were poised to eclipse the traditional Benedictine, the mother monastery of the Benedictine tradition, Monte Cassino, enjoyed a sudden revival. It has been called "the most dramatic single event in the history of Latin scholarship in the eleventh century." In addition to an outpouring of artistic and intellectual endeavor, Monte Cassino also displayed something of a classical revival, as a new interest in ancient texts, emerged:

At one swoop several texts were recovered which might otherwise have been lost forever; to this one monastery in this one period, we owe the preservation of the later Annals and Histories of Tacitus (Plate XIV), the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the Dialogues of Seneca, Varro’s De lingua Latina, Frontinus’ De Aquis, and thirty-odd lines of Juvenal’s sixth satire that is not to be found in any other manuscript.

To give you a sense of the early impact of monks, Archbishop John Chrysostom (349 -  407) of Constantinople, an early Father of the Church, tells us that it was customary in his day for people of Antioch to send their sons to be educated by the Benedictine monks, while St. Benedict himself had personally instructed the sons of Roman nobles. St. Boniface established a school in every monastery he founded in Germany, and in England St. Augustine (of Canterbury, not St. Augustine of Hippo) and his monks set up school wherever they went. Indeed, St. Patrick is given credit for encouraging Irish scholarship, and the Irish monasteries would develop into important centers of learning dispensing instruction to monks and laymen alike (see How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, 1995).

What is missing here, and what will be our next consideration is the Cradle of Civilization and the fertile culture that emanated from Mesopotamia, and which was also preserved, which in many ways might have been even more important to the survival of man.

NEXT -- NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – FIFTEEN – OUR DEBT TO ARABIC CULTURE & RISE OF CLERICAL SKEPTICS