Between the time of Augustine and the opening of the second millennium, a number of important factors contributed to the entrenchment in Christian minds of a basically Platonic mode of thinking.

One of these factors was, of course, the systemic breakdown of the Roman Empire in the West and the preservation of it in the East. In 330, Constantine had moved the Imperial capital to the new city of Constantinople, effectively physically dividing an Empire that had already been administratively divided for fifty years. Constantinople became “New Rome”, and the existence of two cities of such major importance served to emphasize the deep linguistic, economic, and social differences between East and West. The Empire was still considered one, of course, but the social and cultural rifts between its citizens in each half continued to grow.

For centuries the school system of the Empire had been educating its citizens in the classical thought of both Greece and Rome (though in the West the Greek works were known largely through Latin translations). But in the West, as the power and abilities of the Imperial government continued to wane, the Roman school system broke down and detailed knowledge of the Greek aspect of the classical heritage began to wane even among the shrinking educational elites. The Western Romans, always intensely practical, had increasingly little time and energy for the highly speculative Greek legacy that was being pursued by their Eastern brethren.[1] Under pressure from barbarian invasions, the disastrous policies of weak or incompetent Emperors, the decline of cities as the centers of cultural activity (and a corresponding increase in ruralization), and numerous other factors the scope and relationship of which continue to occupy historians today, the Western Empire progressively became a shadow of its former self.

In the East, matters were not quite this bad. While the West declined, the Eastern Empire prospered, becoming fabulously wealthy due to the strategic positioning of Constantinople as an economic center that virtually controlled all commerce between Asia Minor and the Mediterranean regions. Then, too, unlike Rome, Constantinople was protected from invasion both geographically (by the Black Sea) and by awesome fortifications. Under such strong Emperors as Justinian (r. 527-565) and Basil I
(r. 867-886), the East maintained a Christian political and cultural bulwark in the world. Still, as with Rome and the West, the prevailing mentality was one of defense and preservation, and not (as would much later be the case) of examining and building upon the past.

Given the circumstances of widespread cultural decline and frequent danger of barbarian invasion, it is entirely understandable why this should be so. With only perhaps a little hyperbole it could be said that between the fifth and eleventh centuries, Christian society in the West was hanging by a thread. For clarity’s sake, let us take Rome itself as the metaphor for the overall situation in the West. When one’s basic mindset is already more concerned with practical application than with theory, and when the authority and the power to maintain a relatively high level of civilization are decaying dramatically, it is not the time to be asking deep, reflective questions (such as whether or not one is bringing too much Hellenism into one’s Christianity). When every day is a very struggle for the most minimal kind of physical survival[2] and vast barbarian armies are sweeping across one’s ravaged homelands, sometimes coming directly up to the gates of one’s city and threatening to put it to fire and sword, it is not the time to wonder whether or not one’s bishop taking up many of the basic administrative and social functions of the now nearly non-existent government is a harbinger of greater problems down the road. And, as time goes on and more and more educational capital is lost to the pressing needs of survival, it is really no wonder if one’s descendants generations later are easily taken in by spurious and forged documents[3] purporting to set “the way things are” in the solid bedrock of ancient patristic Christianity and a supposed basically undiluted “Apostolic Tradition”.

Indeed, a little reflection will show how easy it is for people to slip into thinking “this is the way we’ve always done things.” The need to maintain basic societal order can be a powerful incentive to avoid (and even to suppress) questions that appear to be striking at the very foundation of that societal order. In other words, the human condition of frail fallibility under God can all too easily get in the way of God’s Truth, even though people may be entirely and quite sincerely convinced that they are, in fact, maintaining God’s Truth. It could happen to any of us at any time (but particularly when we’re not looking). There is, therefore, no justification at all for viewpoints that either venerate uncritically or contemptuously dismiss the past. Like our fathers, we living today are as much products of the past as any artifact we dig up out of the ground, so it is of prime importance for us to remember our own limitations as we discuss the limitations of our forebears.

To return to the basic point at hand, in the East Christian civilization was stronger than in the West, but not strong enough to see many things that we, with the benefit of multiple hundreds of years of hindsight, can see. As the educational system in the West was breaking down, it was more or less flourishing in the East—but not in as vibrant and eclectic a form as would have been needed to allow for serious critical thought about some of the matters we are discussing in this series. In the West there were a few intellectual lights (chiefly Boethius and Cassiodorus), but they were too few and too un-influential in their own day to make a significant and comprehensive difference. Their work was an attempt at a stopgap in their own era, but it would have to wait some six hundred years to really explode with its full force on the world of Christian intellectuals and the practicalities that inevitably trickled down from them to the masses.

In light of philosophical-practical concerns, then, let us briefly look at the different ways in which education was promoted and used in West and East, and the mixed blessing that the attitude of preservation-not-improvement had on the transmission and widespread acceptance of a basically Platonic-Realist mode of thinking in both doctrine and practice.

The Imperial government in the East was strong, and tended to control the direction and expressions of cultural output in a most thorough manner. After the sixth century, when the government stopped supporting primary and secondary education to the high degree it had previously done, the already existing cultural barrier was magnified tremendously by a linguistic one. Just as knowledge of Greek waned in the West, knowledge of Latin waned in the East, and this would often have disastrous effects on efforts of each side to understand the theology and practice of the other.[4]

As the centuries passed, the West struggled to keep alive basic societal order in the old Roman form that had dominated for a thousand years, and so invented (no negative connotation implied here) a number of ingenious practical methods[5] of maintaining doctrine and practice—among these the increasing role of the Bishop of Rome in ecclesiopolitical affairs throughout the Western world. The East, by contrast, withdrew into its citadel of abstract contemplation (the hallmark of Greek thought) and increasingly came to view the “Orthodox” Church Fathers as an unchangeable, unsurpassable benchmark of Christian Faith. Interestingly, they still considered themselves to be “Romans”, their Empire to be the “Roman” Empire, and their purpose to be the guardians of undiluted Christian Faith—a fact which helps to greatly illuminate the often titanic struggles over doctrine and practice in this era between the Emperor at Constantinople and the Pope at Rome.

But this attitude of near-desperate conservatism, of trying to link the present to the past in a way that made a coherent whole out of both, was often handicapped by the frequently fragmentary, often incompletely-explained, and sometimes downright contradictory nature of the materials being handed down. Of prime importance in transmission and widespread acceptance of a basically Platonic mode of thinking was the work of a group of men who could collectively be called “the transmitters” because it providentially fell to them to hand down those rudiments of the ancient knowledge and society which would profoundly affect Christian civilization for the next six or seven centuries. Two of these, Boethius (480-525) and a writer we know only as “Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite” will have their own separate treatments in this series due to their place as transmitters of much of the purely philosophical strains of thought we are discussing under the heading of “Realism”. Two others will be only briefly mentioned in closing this installment.

Cassiodorus (480-575) is a very important figure among the “transmitters” largely because of the deep influence his work would have on Medieval pedagogy. Concerned about the sharp decline in learning in the West, Cassiodorus translated some of the works of Greek Church Fathers into Latin. After several unsuccessful attempts to get government and then papal[6] sponsorship of his program of classical and Christian education, Cassiodorus used his own resources to found a monastery at Vivarium

(southern Italy). From this base of operations, he focused on building a library of secular and Christian works. His own most important work was the Institutes concerning Divine and Human Readings, which was basically a thoroughly researched, quite detailed bibliographic listing of the titles Cassiodorus considered necessary for any good library. In conjunction with Boethius’ writings, it was through this work that most Medieval teachers gained their knowledge of “the seven liberal arts”—a basic course of study made up of the “trivium” (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).

In terms of the phenomenon we are here discussing—the transmission of the legacy of antiquity—it should be noted that despite Cassiodorus’ more broad intentions for the school at Vivarium, what actually occurred was, for the most part, a more limited program of preserving the existing state of Christian theological reflection:

The study of Greek was not deeply engrained; translators worked slowly and often without a real command of both languages, and the intellectual capacity of the monks was directed much more towards matters of Christian theology than ancient learning. Even during Cassiodorus’s lifetime, the majority of Greek texts translated at Vivarium were of patristic or canonical writings, relating to questions of church organisation, discipline, and authoritative interpretations of Scripture. The principle of a sound classical education (in the old fashioned pagan sense) as the best preparation for a Christian life could not survive in the restricted and narrow culture of late sixth-century Italy.”[7]

Without doubt such a mindset would not be capable of analyzing such complex issues as the interface of Christian theology and Hellenistic philosophy (much less correcting and building upon it), but would simply concern itself with passing down a very limited selection that would generally be thought of as “what has been received from the Fathers”. Additionally it should be noted that Cassiodorus’ linking of higher education to a monastery helped to set down one of the most common patterns of the early Middle Ages. The monastic movement is far too big a subject to even begin to write about here,[8] but it must assuredly be taken into account in any attempt to understand the preserving mentality of the thousand years between Augustine and the onset of Scholasticism’s more analytic, experimental approach to Christian theology and knowledge.

The second and last of the “transmitters” that we will look at here is Isidore of Seville (560-636). By most accounts, Isidore, the Bishop of Seville, was a very credulous man, more concerned with compiling every bit of data—however trivial and absurd—that he could find than with critically analyzing it. Indeed, he can be fairly be said to have originated the “cut-and-paste”, anthologizing method of research that for a long time would dominate medieval intellectual engagement with the past. Marcia L. Colish describes Isidore and his work this way:

…Isidore’s self-appointed task is to cull what he thinks are the best interpretations of the fathers and to anthologize them. He compares this activity to the assembling of a mixed bouquet of flowers plucked from diverse fields whose editor thereby spares a reader with a short attention span or a distaste for prolixity the chore of doing the research himself. As a genre, then, this work takes the form called the florilegium. It won favor in the early Middle Ages and beyond with readers either too busy or too unprovided with educational opportunities or research facilities to expand on the pre-selected quotations of the anthologist.[9]

Isidore’s work was not confined, however, to the production of vast encyclopedic collections of raw data. He was deeply involved in theorizing about the ideal Christian state and his work in this regard would eventually have a profound impact on political practice and theological knowledge in the West. Due to his manuscripts containing a wide variety of citations on a wide variety of subjects that had come to be largely unknown in the West (including early Christian conciliar decisions), they became widely distributed and studied, particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries. The authority of Isidore became so great, in fact, that spurious decretals purporting to have been written by him were readily accepted in the West and used to buttress the growing doctrinal and practical claims of the Papacy.[10]

It may be noted in closing that these summaries of Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville do not speak explicitly of the transmission of Platonic Realism, but this is only because the avenues of transmission for abstract philosophical principles do not always have to take the form of overtly philosophical treatises. As philosophies work their way through a culture, they inevitably become so much a part of the “substratum” of that culture that they eventually reach a point where they are not even recognized at all, much less questioned or exposed to analysis. They become, in effect, “the way things are,” or “the way things have always been done.”

In this vein there can be little doubt that by means of an attitude of strict preservation of certain selected portions of the antique past (whether carefully selected treatises of certain Church Fathers, florilegium-type collections of “sentences”, and even by later corruptions and forgeries piously attached to the names of great men) the fundamentally Realistic basis of patristic theology was transmitted with great fidelity to the intellectuals and professional theologians of the later Middle Ages. And from there it slowly, inexorably worked its way like leaven throughout the faith and practice of the “ordinary” men and women upon whose daily lives all of society rested.

The work of the “transmitters” should be respected for what it was (as well as for the simple reason that we ourselves are in some sense or another ultimately products of the past which contains that work)—the hard-won, nitty-gritty work of trying as best as they knew how to build and maintain a sanctified, Christian version of the great society that everyone looked wistfully back at in the face of increasingly uncertain times.[11] When we look at what our fathers and brethren had to work with (their greater proximity to ancient paganism at least makes plausible the notion that they would more susceptible to its subtler influences than we are) and the incredible odds they often had to battle against (rampaging barbarians, a collapsing society, invasions of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims), we should not blame them for simply handing on the only kind of faith and practice they had ever known. We would assuredly not have done any better had we been in their shoes.

We now move to surveying the more philosophical contributions of Boethius and the Pseudo-Dionysius to the Realistic matrix that so profoundly defined the first thousand years of Christianity’s spread throughout the world.

NOTES

[1] By “speculative” I do not mean to convey a negative connotation. In this context “speculative” simply means that (to be rather overly simplistic) the Greek mind was more interested in finding out how things worked than with applying that knowledge to real-world problems. This may help to explain why the cause of orthodoxy in the Christological controversies was largely spearheaded by Greek Fathers, with the Latin Fathers (for the most part) simply following their lead and working out intensively detailed practical schemes of applying the doctrines and their supposed corollaries.

[2] It is often difficult for we moderns, especially in America, to appreciate a point like this. We have never known a time when the entire basic societal order was falling apart at the seams; we cannot comprehend what it would be like to be at the mercy of the elements or to be shut up inside a city with an extremely limited food and water supply due to the presence of a terrifying host of invaders just outside our front door. We are so used to having grocery stores on nearly every corner and rarely ever finding any item we happen to want at the moment unavailable that it is surely almost impossible to imagine the sheer uncertainty that would prevail in a largely agricultural society that was bereft of all of the truly amazing techniques and knowledge that we have today for keeping food on our tables. We cannot comprehend a situation in which communication between cities only a few hundred miles apart might take months of perilous journeying through barely cultivated territory, or else, completely breakdown to the basic inability of messengers to travel safely between them. In these and many other ways, we must try to understand the basic life situation our fathers and brethren were faced with before we judge them for compromises and errors that they simply could not have seen even if they had wanted to.

[3] Referring, of course, to such spurious documents as the Pseudo-Isodorian Decretals and the Donation of Constantine, which were used to shore up Papal claims to dominance in the West (particularly in the Papacy’s conflicts with secular rulers over their respective roles in Christendom).

[4] A pertinent example here is the radical difference in the ways that West and East approached the matter of the Trinity. The West tended to start from the unity of the Godhead and work toward the diversity of the Persons. The East reversed this, beginning from the diversity of Persons and working toward the unity of the Godhead. The story of the immense theoretical and practical troubles that arose from Greek and Latin theologians simply not understanding each others’ terminology is a labyrinthine, but interesting study in its own right. See, for example, Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downer’s Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1993), pp. 152-196. Interestingly, the different ways of approach just described also help to illuminate other areas of difference between the East and West, such as the different ecclesiologies of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox.

[5] As one example of this practical mindset, Marcia L. Colish describes Pope Gregory the Great’s program of missions: “…it is worth noting that Gregory was capable of combining centralized direction of this [missionary] endeavor with flexibility in the light of local conditions, a mark of his policy in other areas as well. He advised his missionary to England to adopt ‘go slow’ tactics and not to try to jettison local traditions overnight…This respect for diversity within the orthodox consensus and the belief that unity does not require uniformity is a Gregorian insight that bore rich fruit in the intellectual history of medieval Europe as well as in medieval theology.” Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) pg. 39

[6] By this time the last vestiges of a truly secular Empire-wide government in the West had expired, and the shell of the Empire was increasingly coming under the ideological and practical sway (if not the actual rulership) of the Bishop of Rome. The power of the Papacy in this era was by no means what it would be later on, and a careful reading of such important sources as the Venerable Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (eighth century), the Liber Pontificalis (seventh through ninth centuries), and William of Malmesbury’s History Novella (early twelfth century) shows that while Rome was indeed slowly gaining a primacy that would eventually lead to the sort of Papal Catholicism that existed at the time of the Reformation, it was by no means an always accepted truth that Rome was “in charge” of the Western Church. These qualifications are meant to set in context Cassiodorus’ wish for papal subsidizing of his educational program.

[7] Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pg. 86

[8] Regrettably I must defer discussion of this highly interesting aspect of Christian life in this period to others. See Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1500, Revised Edition, (Harper San Francisco, 1975), pp. 416-446 for one very detailed account. Another is found in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 5 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1996), pp. 308-426.

[9] Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, pg. 50

[10] Philip Schaff gives a concise summary of the contents, meaning, and fraudelent nature of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals in his History of the Christian Church, Vol. 4, pp. 268-273.

[11] Again, space constraints require only the briefest of mentions of another very important factor in the transmission of the legacy of the past: the brief, but very influential, revival of learning under Charlemagne in the ninth century (See Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, pp. 66-75). Some of the most fascinating incidents that took place in this context were the Eucharistic controversies sparked by the work of Berengar of Tours and the debate between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus. In these debates we see how diverse—despite the fundamentally Realist philosophical milieu everyone was operating within—the notions of the “Real Presence” actually were from the patristic age up until the great silencing of the debate by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.