Epic of the West

National Review, Jan 26, 2004 by Robert Louis Wilken

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200-1000 AD, 2nd ed.

by Peter Brown

(Blackwell, 640 pp., $29.95)

In this, his most mature book, Peter Brown, the author of the acclaimed biography of Augustine of Hippo, invites his readers to imagine things very big and to meditate on things very small. The largeness is found in the vast scope of the narrative, from the early years of Christian history up to the conversion of Iceland at the end of the first millennium; the smallness is evident in his uncanny eye for surprising and arresting details.

The conventional narrative of the rise of Western civilization runs something along these lines: For centuries Rome was the center of a civilization that reached from Britain in the north to North Africa and Egypt in the south to Syria in the east. In the 5th century the frontiers of the Empire collapsed and barbarians from the north invaded the territories once ruled by Rome. So began an age of chaos and ignorance, once depicted in history books as the "dark ages." Into this world came missionaries, often monks dispatched from Rome like Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent to convert the Saxons of Britain. With the conversion of the Franks to Catholic Christianity and the rise of a Carolingian kingdom straddling the Rhine, the ground was prepared for the building of European civilization. It was a story about the West told from the perspective of the West, with little attention paid to Byzantium, Christians of the East, or Islam.

One of the most commanding and readable exponents of this vision was the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. In his account of the "making of Europe," the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day 800 marked the "acceptance by the Western barbarians of the idea of unity for which the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church alike stood."

A quite different interpretation is associated with the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, whose Mohammed and Charlemagne appeared in English in 1939. Pirenne argued that unity was found not in Rome but in the Mediterranean itself: The great water basin over which Rome had cast its net of political authority was the nourishing mother that sustained ancient cultural and economic life. Even after the decline of the Western Empire the commercial life of the cities of the Mediterranean--with Constantinople at the center--irrigated the lands to the north. For Pirenne, too, the barbarians had little cultural or historical significance. But in his view what destroyed the cohesion of the ancient world was the rise of Islam, whose armies swiftly conquered the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, marched across North Africa, and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to subdue Christian Spain. With the conquest of Islam the Mediterranean was no longer a Roman sea and the balance of power shifted irrevocably to the north. Without Mohammed there would have been no Charlemagne.

Alas, the patient scholarship of the last generation has undermined the grand arches that rose over the telling of the rise of the West. Take, Brown says, the stereotype of the barbarians, these distinctive "Wagnerian figures with winged helmets, scale-mail breast-plates, cloaks trimmed with fur, and baggy trousers." Today we realize that the barbarians were not nomads, but farmers and peasants, and lived in much the same way as their neighbors in the Empire. In an illuminating image Brown describes the Empire's borders (along the Rhine and Danube) as a kind of catchment into which Roman and Germanic life flowed to create a new world at home with Roman ways and pulsing with energy. At the same time economic historians have shown that Pirenne's ruminations about the commercial vigor of the Mediterranean world after the fall of the Western Empire in 476 stand on sand: By 600, Brown asserts, Western Europe was in a state of economic "involution," and as the Empire receded, both society and economy collapsed. "Diversity, not unity, was the hallmark of an age without empire."

At this point a less gifted historian would have made "diversity" the theme of his book. But Brown is not conventional. He grants that the traditional idea of a center had to be abandoned, but he also knows that the narrative would lack coherence if there had been nothing to hold together the world that was aborning in the years from 500 to 1000. For Brown the glue is the "interconnectivity of Christianity," the extraordinary fact that the entire world (seen from the perspective of the Mediterranean), from Ireland on the edge of Europe to the steppes of Asia, shared a common Christian inheritance. Archaeologists, for example, discovered fragments of a schoolboy's copybook in northern Ireland and potsherds of another child from east of Samarkand in Central Asia. In one case the youngster spoke Irish but wrote in Latin, and in the other his native language was Soghdian but he was writing in Syriac, the international literary language of Eastern Christianity. Each was copying the Psalms of David.