-Caveat Lector-
Attached is an excerpt from Prof Carol Quigley's- The evolution of
civilisation
10 Western Civilization
The death of Classical civilization and the barbarian migrations that
accompanied it left the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and an extensive
hinterland behind them in cultural chaos. The area was filled with shattered
social groups and cultural wreckage bobbing about on swirls and eddies as if
a great ship had sunk in a quiet sea. In the next three hundred years
(500-800) these peoples and cultural debris began to integrate to form core
areas of three new civilizations. All of these were on the extreme periphery
of the older Classical society. To the southeast, in Arabia, ap-peared
Islamic civilization; to the northeast, in the Northern Flatlands, appeared
Orthodox Russian civilization; and in the northwest, in France, appeared
Western civilization. Each of these had its distinctive outlook and
organization, as all societies do, and the relationship between the three
became one of the continuing problems of the next fifteen hundred years.
Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for
historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part
of it and lack perspective, and be-cause it presents considerable variation
from our pattern of is the least capable of being exported and because its
pervasive in all the other levels as well. In this particular case there is
the additional necessity for exposition of this aspect, because of
widespread ignorance or misunderstanding of it,
We might begin by saying that Western ideology is opti mistic,
moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic yet social, and dynamic.
All these terms refer only to aspects of the whole and do not really get us
to its essence.
This essence might be summed up in the belief that "Truth unfolds in
time through a communal process." Before we attempt to analyze this rather
cryptic statement, we should say a few words about the more superficial
aspects.
The Western outlook is optimistic because it believes that the world
is basically good and that the greatest good lies in the future. This covers
all the ideas Etienne Gilson included in the term "Christian optimism." The
Classical ideology began by being mundane and ended with a dualism in which
it saw the universe as an evil material world opposed to a good spiritual
sphere. Western ideology be-lieves that the material is good and the
spiritual is better but that they are not opposed to each other since the
material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world. The
world and the flesh are good because they were both made by God (as in the
Old Testament). The material world is necessary to the spiritual in two ways
: ( 1) no SOUR exists without a body and (2) no soul can be saved except by
its own efforts and cooperative actions with other persons, both of which
can be achieved only by bodily actions in this world.
These ideas appeared clearly in the Christian religion, although they had a
very difficult time getting accepted because the dualistic late Classical
ideology regarded the world and the flesh as evil and felt that the spirit
could achieve full spirituality only by freeing itself from the body, from
the world, and from contact with one's fellow man and that such spiritual
achievement was a consequence of the individual's own activity alone,
without cooperation with his fellow men. This attitude appeared very clearly
in Persian thinking about 600 B.C., came into Classical an-tiquity through
the Pythagorean rationalists, and was given a clear, explicit, and
influential statement in Plato's Phaedo about 385 B.C. Although quite
incompatible with the Classi-cal outlook, these ideas became increasingly
influential and became the generally accepted philosophic outlook after the
third century of our era. This led to a phenomenal outgrowth of anchoritism
in the third to sixth centuries. It must be recognized that this philosophic
position was basically in-compatible with the religious ideas of
Christianity. The latter has been threatened ever since by dualistic
heresies (like Arianism, Catharism, or Jansenism) derived from this
philosophic background.
Western ideology believed that the world was good because it was
made by God in six days and that at the end of each day He looked at His
work and said that it was good. This meant that the world was a
comprehensible place (one of the basic ideas of Western science) and that
its existence unfolded in time (not by instantaneous creation or through
eternal existence). The body was also good, being made by God in His own
image. Man needed others in order to de-velop his capacities in time, and
he needed his body, his fellow men, and God's help, as well as his own
efforts to achieve, over time, salvation in the future. This salvation
included the body as well as the soul ("resurrection of the body and life
everlasting") and could be achieved by good works (requiring a body and
one's fellow men) and Gods grace (granted by God Himself taking a human body
living in time in this world). All of these things were clearly stated in
the New Testament, and the objections to them arising from Classical dualism
were firmly rejected at the first church council held at Nicaea in 325. The
full implications of the injunction to "love thy neighbor" were not
corn--pletely unfolded in these two steps but continue to be so through the
present and into the future.
While the aristocratic Classical culture had put the golden age in
the past, more democratic Western culture put it (and salvation) in the
future. This optimistic and hopeful attitude applied to most aspects of
Western life. Its hierarchical aspect appeared originally in the belief that
the spiritual rested on the material (not opposed to it) and also came to
apply to much of life. This led to a basic distinction
(now largely lost) between necessary and important, in which material things
were necessary but spiritual things were important.
The democratic and individualistic aspects of the Western outlook
were always present, and go back, like other aspects, to the New Testament.
They rest on the belief that all men have souls fit for salvation and, in
the long run, have equal opportunity to achieve salvation. These ideas also
appear in Christ's concern with the downtrodden and oppressed, in the belief
that the first and greatest sin was pride (the sin of Lucifer) and that the
greatest virtue was humility, in the Beatitudes and in many parables (such
as that of the lost sheep). It is worthy of note that all these points are
con-cerned not only with the individual's relationship to himself and to God
but also with his relationship to his fellow men. All these, along with the
emphasis on good works and the importance of sacraments, show the
significance of the social element in Western thought. The same significance
was underlined in the idea that man can be fully man and fully please God
only in society. This idea was reflected jn religion in the idea of the
church (the societas perfecta), the belief that salvation could be obtained
most readily through the church, the idea of the sacraments (all of which
require the presence of at least two persons and most of which require
three), the efforts, in the sixth century, to replace anchorites with monks
(that is, to replace a late Classical aberration with a system more
compatible with Western sociality).
All these different aspects of the Western outlook cluster about the
essence of the outlook that we have tried to express in the statement that
"Truth unfolds through a communal process." The outlook to which this
statement refers lies at the foundation of Western culture and is reflected
equally in its religion, its politics, its science, and its economics.
This outlook assumes, first, that there is a truth or goal for man's
activity. Thus it rejects despair, solipsism, skepticism, pessimism, and
chaos. It implies hope, order, and the existence of a meaningful objective
external reality. And it provides the basis for science, religion, and
social action as the West has known these.
Second, this attitude assumes that no one, now, has the truth in any
complete or even adequate way; it must be sought or struggled for. Thus this
outlook rejects smugness, complacency, pride, and personal authority in
favor of the Christian virtues and a kind of basic agnosticism (with the
implication "We don't yet know everything"), as well as the idea of
achievement of good through struggle to reach the
good. The earliest great work of German literature, Parzival, has as its
subtitle "The Brave Man Slowly Wise." This is typical of the Western
ideology's belief that wisdom (or any real achievement) comes as a
consequence of personal effort in time. The same idea is to be found in
Dante's Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare's tragedies (taken as a whole), and in
Beethoven's symphonies.
There are two important ideas here: one is that no one has the whole truth
now but that it can be approached !closer and closer in the future, by
vigorous effort, and the 1 other is that no single individual does this or
achieves this, but that it must be achieved by a communal effort, by a kind
of cooperation in competition in which each individual's efforts help to
correct the errors of others and thus help the development of a consensus
that is closer to the truth than the actions of any single individual ever
could be. We might call these two aspects the temporal and the social. They
are covered in our maxim by the words "unfolds" and "social."
There is also a third idea here; namely, that the resulting
consensus is still not final, although far superior to any earlier or more
individual version. Thus the advance of man-kind or of any single individual
is an endless process in which truth (or any achievement, even the
development of an individual's personality) is constantly approached closer
and closer without ever being finished or reached.
We might mention also another phase of this outlook; namely, the idea that
the cooperative effort that unfolds truth through a continuously developing
consensus is a competitive process. More accurately it is cooperation
through competition, as a game is. This refers to a social process that is
superficially competitive but fundamentally cooperative, or, viewed in
another way, a situation in which individuals compete and even struggle
together for a higher social end (the consensus). This is a dialectic
process and is one of the heritages from Classical antiquity, where this
idea of the emergence of truth from pluralistic debate in the market place
is found in the earlier dialogues of Plato and of other thinkers. It is
worthy of note that Plato, while retaining the form of the dialogue, really
abandoned its function in his later writings (the Republic and those
following) by using Socrates as the spokesman of his own ideas that contain
the whole truth, while the other speakers con-tribute nothing to the final
achievement since their ideas are erroneous and must be corrected by
Socrates.
This idea of the fruitful debate from which truth grows is the basis
for the method of medieval intellectual advance (in spite of the erroneous
theory so widely accepted that medieval ideas were rigid systems imposed by
authority). This conception is of course found behind medieval exposi-tion
as in Abelard's Sic et Non or Aquinas's Summa theologica, but it is much
more fully realized in the process by which medieval ideas were reached than
in the form in which they were presented. However, in both there was a
fundamental assumption that each presentation was tempor-ary and not fully
perfect and was subject to improvement in a later revision as a consequence
of criticism. The idea, so widely spread today that the Summa theologicu was
a final, complete, and permanent presentation of its subject, was not held
at the time by anyone, least of all by Aquinas himself. After all, the
Angelic Doctor offered the world at least three versions of this subject-the
Summa. . . contra GentiZes, the Summa theologicu, and the incomplete but
really much im-proved Compendium Theologiue.
This attitude, to which I have referred by the maxim about the
social unfolding of truth, is the basis of the Western religious outlook.
This outlook believed that religious truth unfolded in time and is not yet
complete.
The Old Testament, for example was not canceled or replaced by the New
Testament but was supplemented by it. And the New Testament was never, in
most of the life of Western civilization, regarded as a literal, explicit,
and final statement of the truth. Rather, recognition of its truths have to
be developed in time, by social action, from basically symbolic statements.
Thus the doctrine of the Christian church was unfolded through church
councils (like that at Nicaea) and by con-ferences of learned doctors and
clerics, without ever any feeling that the process was finished. The
fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the
explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scrip
ture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western
tradition.
Closely related to this idea of the unfolding of doctrine through
the church is the idea of the development of the individual, both in life
and in death, toward the Beatific Vision. The same idea about the
social (and dialectic) unfolding of truth is at the foundation of Western
science. It assumes that science is never static or fully achieved, but
pursues a constantly receding goal to which we approach closer and closer
from the competition-cooperation of indi-vidual scientists, each of whom
offers his experiments and theories to be critically reexamined and debated
by his fel-low scientists in a joint effort to reach a higher (and
temporary) consensus.
The same outlook appears in the basic political ideas of the West.
These are liberal and not authoritarian. They cannot be authoritarian
because no individual or institution has full and final truth; instead a
fuller and more complete truth emerges as a guide to social activity from
the free debate in free assembly of all men's partial truths. Thus
liberalism in this sense is basic in the outlook of the West and goes back,
as we indicated earlier, to the dissociation of state and society in the
Dark Ages when the former van-ished and the latter continued. In its
narrowest version this idea appeared as the theory that all men with
different out-looks or contributions cooperate together to form something
greater than the partial opinions of any of them. This kind of pluralism is
assumed by the PoZycraticus of John of Salisbury in the twelfth century as
much as it is assumed by the United States Constitution in the eighteenth
century.
The same kind of pluralist outlook is the real justification of
capitalism and of all laissez-faire or pluralist economic systems so typical
of the West even in its early period when economic development was taking
its first steps. It is the outlook behind the nineteenth century "Community
of Interests" that has been exposed to such critical onslaughts in the
twentieth century but yet remains as the unstated assumption behind our
economic attitudes as they operate in actions.
Thus we see the basic ideology of the West reflected in all aspects
of the society, and continuing to influence ideas and actions even after it
has been explicitly rejected. It is, for example, behind the theories of
such late and "unconventional" thinkers as Darwin or Marx, both of whom
believed that the Better emerged from the Good by the superficial struggles
of the many to achieve what could never have been reached by any single
individual alone. In fact, of these two, Marxist dialectic materialism is
rather closer to the Western tradition than Darwin's struggle for existence
is. Marx, like his mentor Hegel, was Western in his belief that progress is
achieved through struggle, but, like Hegel, he committed the Western sin of
pride (the sin of Lucifer) in the intellectual arrogance which expected
achievement of a final goa-in the material world and in the near future.
Part of the difficulty to be found in analysis of the history of
Western civilization arises from the vicissitudes of the "Western
tradition." These difficulties were present throughout Western history. In
the early period (say up to 1150) 1 the difficulty arose from the fact that
the religious outlook and practices of our society were incompatible with
the intellectual outlook and philosophy derived from the dualistic ideas of
the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition. Thus, in a figure like Augustine, we
find a Christian religious outlook combined with a Platonic philosophic
outlook with which it is really not compatible. One consequence of this
situation was a great prevalence of dualistic heresies. These were condemned
as part of the religious settlement at Nicaea in 325, 1 but they were not
really overcome in philosophy until the f twelfth century. At this latter
time the triumph of moderate realism, as represented by Abelard, Albertus
Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, over exaggerated realism, as represented by St.
Anselm or William of Champeaux, represented the achievement, within
Christian society, of a philosophy that was compatible with its religious
outlook. The official acceptance by the papacy in the early fourteenth
century of Thomism, in spite of the attacks of the exaggerated realists,
sealed this victory. Such a victory, in accordance with the tradition of the
West, was not a victory of one extreme view over another but rather a
moderate synthesis of the extremes in a higher unity. Thus the exaggerated
retit extremists said that the universal was real and that the individual
was an illusion (a position totally incompatible with Christianity and
therefore never held, in this extreme form, by any orthodox Christian). At
the other end of the spectrum, the nominalists said that the individual was
real and that the universal was only a word (or a subjective concept). The
Thomistic compromise, which was compatible with Christianity and the Western
tradition, said that both the individual and the universal were real. This
synthesis disrupted very soon into two extremist positions, represented in
philosophy by Scotist realism and Occamite nominalism. The same scission
into two extremes was found in religion during the late Middle Ages between
these who advocated salvation through good works (like St. Francis of Assisi
and Thomas a Kempis) and those who advocated salvation through God's grace
(the new ascetics, mystics, and ultimately the Protestants), each group
tending to place such emphasis on its own path to salvation as almost to
deny the other extreme. Or again, within the church ap-peared a split
between those who emphasized it as a tem-poral organization (and thus
corrupted it) and those who emphasized it as a spiritual group, and thus
(like Savonarola, Huss, and Luther) tended to deny its organization.
From this it can be seen that the ideology of the Christian West was
essentially a moderate one. It was constantly threatened, as moderates
always are, by extremism. When these extremists argued for "either-or," the
Western tradi-tion answered "both!" But this answer was no sooner given than
new appeals by extremists sought to reopen the debate, to destroy the
moderates, and to disrupt the synthesis. The extremists from one side (the
Left, if you will) based their appeals on individualism, the senses, and
materialism, and thus on the Christian insistence on the need of the world
and the body. The extremists from the other side (the Right, we might say)
based their appeal on society, rationalism, and spirituality, and thus on
the Christian emphasis on the source God's grace, and the perfect
rationality of God. Ultimately in the history of ideas, the former extreme
goes back to the Hebrews and to the Ionian atomists, while the latter
extreme goes back to Persian Zorastrianism and to the Pythagorean
rationalists, above all, to Plato. Within Western religious 4 history (and
the history of the church, which is both temporal and spiritual) these two
extremes have been rep resented by corruption and by dualistic heresy. It is
easy for us to see how corruption (that is, too great emphasis on the
material and temporal aspect) destroys religion, but it is not so easy for
many to see how too great spirituality (that is, too great emphasis on the
nonmaterial and eternal aspect) can destroy religion. This condition arises
because religion is a linking (from Zigare, to join together, as in English
"ligament" or "ligature") of the two extremes (man and
God) that cannot exist if either extremity is absent.
In the history of Western nonmaterial culture, including religion
and philosophy, the threat to the synthesized moder-ate middle ground from
the Right has come from dualistic rationalism and especially from the
influence of Plato. This influence has worked historically through Augustine
of
Hippo, who was a Platonist in philosophy although a Chris-tian in religion.
In the field of religion itself, this influence has given rise to dualistic
heresies of which the chief, as might be expected, have appealed to
Augustine. Augustine himself was not a heretic. He said, "Man is saved by
God's grace," but he never said, "Man is saved by God's grace alone."
Since the orthodox position (the middle ground) was that man was saved by
God's grace and his own good works among his fellow men, Augustine's
statement was incomplete but not wrong (that is heretical). Only when this
partial statement was accepted as a whole, complete, and final statement did
it become heresy. But the tendency for the Rightest extremists to do this
was very strong, and this tendency was most irresistible among those who
were closest to the Augustinian tradition. Thus Luther, who was an
Augustinian monk, did believe in salvation by grace alone, and the last
great heresy (from the spiritual extremists) was Jansenism, which grew out
of Jansen's book the
Augustinus, a study of Augustine's theology ( 1632). This spread through
figures like Pascal and the Port Royal group and was condemned as a heresy
by the papacy in the bull Unigenitus in 1715.
Of course, the threat to the Western ideology based on synthetic
moderation came equally, if not more easily, from the Left, from the
materialists and nominalists. But this is a well-known story that needs to
be mentioned here only because the loss of the ideology of Western
civilization (like the earlier loss of the ideology of Classical
civilization) will rest rather on the overemphasis on materialism and
selfish individualism than it will on overemphasis of rationalism or
spirituality.
In most civilizations, as we have already shown, there is a strong
tendency for the basic ideology of the society to become lost and
misunderstood during the Age of Conflict and to be abandoned totally in the
Age of Decay. Since Western civilization has gone into an Age of Conflict
three times, the threat to the society's ideology has been practi-cally
endemic. Anyone who wishes to recover this ideology can do so by reflecting
on the word "moderation" or the expression "reconciliation of extremes" or,
more abstrusely, on our maxim about the "unfolding of truth through social
activity over time." When our old professor said of Goethe that he was
"conciliatory," he was saying that he was a figure in the Western tradition;
but when we say that Hitler was an extremist or a fanatic we are equally
clearly excludluding Hitler from the real Western tradition.
1. Mixture
The mixture of cultural elements that formed Western society came
from four chief sources. One of these was Classical culture, whose greatest
influence was in law, government, philosophy, and science. Another was the
Semitic influence, which came largely through Christianity and the Jewish
people and thus spread its effects largely in the field of religion and
morality. The third influence, that of the
barbarians, was a very diffused one, and is chiefly notable in social
relations and technology; while the last, coming from the Saracens, consists
mostly in incidental items and served also as an intermediary in the
transfer of Classical influences.
The creation of the new society was a lengthy and painful process in
which the most vital changes occurred at opposite ends of the cultural
spectrum in the areas of military tech-nology and of religion. The religious
influence, which we have already mentioned, served to divorce peoples'
alle-giance from Classical culture and to focus it on a new ideology for
which men were willing to sacrifice their wealth,
leisure, and safety. The military influence sprang from the need to find a
method by which Christian groups could be defended from the onslaughts of
pagan invaders.
A Christian society could arise and maintain itself only if its
members could be defended against non-Christian intruders. The older,
Classical military tactics had been based on infantry, fighting in compact
masses and highly disciplined so that they could not be broken under enemy
attack but rather would remain in alignment and position so that each
individual could be at least partly covered by the shield and sword of his
neighbor. This infantry technique, which had undergone only slight
modifications in the long period from the Greek hoplites and Macedonian
phalanxes to Roman legions, had become completely obsolete in the fourth
century of our era before the impact of charging horsemen. The threat from
these horsemen rested not only on their possession of mounts but also on the
fact that these horses could be used day after day without resting because
hoof-wear was prevented by iron horseshoes, and the impact of their lances
on standing men was greatly increased by the use of stirrups. We do not know
exactly when horseshoes and stirrups were introduced into the West, but it
is certain that they were invented fairly early in the Christian period in
the Northern Flatlands of Asia, probably by one of the Ural-Altaic-speaking
peoples, and were introduced into Europe during the period of barbarian
migrations. It is pos-sible that the Huns had these innovations as early as
the fourth century, and this may well explain the horrors these people
evoked in the West. One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the
Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively
short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of
horseshoes.
The new military tactic of mounted men fighting in loose groups
armed with lances or spears required so much skill and training that
fighting men had to be specialists, free to practice because they were
supported economically by others. ...................
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