I am reading the book, "How The Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill, it contains one of the best short accounts of the fall of imperial Rome and the earliest stage of what is generally considered "the dark ages" that I've ever read. Cahill is quite fair in his criticism, showing that the greatness of classical Greco-Roman culture carried the seeds of its own destruction, with the considerable aid of the aristocrats who had both invented that culture and who, ultimately, were co-destroyers of it. One of the distinctions he makes is between the early, heroic period in which it was a life threatening commitment to become a Christian and the frequently corrupt motives and deteriorated, watered-down commitment to the Gospel of Jesus in the very and of the Western empire. His contrast between the empty banalities of Ausonius and the far more significant (though seriously flawed) writing of Augustine is especially convincing on that count.
While reading his account - too long to legally quote from - it was clear that a lot of what he said about the decaying empire was also true of the United States, today and for the past half-century. The corruption of society, the corruption of intellectual life, the corruption of the intelligentsia and the whole edifice of Roman government and society rotted it out from within. In virtually every aspect of that rot, a close parallel could be made to the United States, today. The Roman empire that fell to the alleged barbarians was pretty much on its deathbed when they took advantage of that. While the Christian church didn't escape the same kind of deterioration that the upper classes suffered and, largely, caused, it didn't fall but rose to fill the vacuum of civil authority. Cahill's reconstruction of how things went wrong has the virtue of understanding how much of that kind of thing happen out of mere happenstance, that the things that look like opportunities for corruption are quite often the unforseen and unplanned results of other actions and inaction. While the Church doesn't escape quite serious criticism in that, Cahill does show that a lot of what happened didn't have the intentions of turning into the Monty Python view of the Medieval period, which is what informs most of the allegedly educated understanding of that period, even those held to be intellectual heavyweights in our decaying culture. I strongly suspect that if we don't kill ourselves off, which is looking like an ever worse bet to make, this period will be seen as the advent of a new dark age in the absence of morals and a devalued view of humanity in a pseudo-scientific reduction of us into objects. The conception of human beings is central to how we act and, if anything, the scientific reductionist view is as degraded as any held in pre-modern times. More about that tomorrow.
Here is a passage from the book with comments.
What is really lost when a civilization wearies and grows small is confidence, a confidence built on the order and balance that leisure makes possible. Again, [Kenneth] Clark: "Civilization requires a modicum of material prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence - confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own mental powers....
If there is one thing that most of the more popular conceptions and philosophies of human beings, even the view of even alleged sciences, reduces us to everything from irrational animals whose thinking is unreliable and prone to being, actually, governed by the most violent and vicious of atavistic legacies to us being the mere "lumbering robots" controlled as if by remote control from a naive 1960s era conception of "our genes". Such a view of human beings cannot but be destructive of a concept of government of, by and for The People, who are reduced to objects by such thinking. At its worst, the medieval Christian view of human beings is entirely more generous and ennobling than just about all of what 20th century science proposed. I don't see how anything like even Roman civilization is possible if that is the view of human beings which is commonly held, even if only by the allegedly educated class.
Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations - or civilising epochs - have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists of fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable reults of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid."
Whether insoluble political realities or inner spiritual sickness is more to blame for the fall of classical civilization is, finally, beside the point. The life behind the works we have been studying - the passionate nobility of Virgil, the cool rationality of Cicero, the celestial meditativeness of Plato - this flame of civilization is about to be extinguished. The works themselves will miraculously escape destruction. But they will enter the new world of the Middle Ages as thing so strange they might as well have been left behind by interstellar aliens. One example will suffice to illustrate the strangeness of books to medieval men. The word grammar - the first step in the course of classical study that modeled all educated men from from Plato to Augustine - will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as "glamour." In other words, whoever has grammar - whoever can read - possesses magic inexplicable.
So living civilization died to be reassembled and assessed by scholars of later ages from the texts preserved miraculously in the pages of its books. There is, however, one classical tradition that survived the transition - the still living tradition of Roman Law.
This is the second of Cahill's books I've read, "The Gifts of the Jews" is also very good. I will certainly be reading more of his work.
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