Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Number of quotes: 61
Book ID: 84 Page: 2
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.{*}”[Footnote *] Far from denying the universality of the Roman Catholic Church, the author is rather showing that the Church was, by God’s will and Providence, “incarnated” in and shaped by European civilization, centered in Rome (see page 19), and that on its human side the Catholic Church is Roman and European.
Quote ID: 2220
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 3
Section: 4B
The Catholic understands the soil in which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can, he understands….. . . .
….what cousinship we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions, ….
Quote ID: 2221
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: x
Section: 4B
…our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.“Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.”
“The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”
Quote ID: 2219
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 17
Section: 4B
The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political institution which united and expressed Europe, and was governed from Rome.. . . .
The institution—having accepted the religion, having made of that religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in through every part until it became the spirit of the whole—was slowly modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new soul. It re-arose and still lives.
This institution was first known among men as Republica; we call it today “The Roman Empire.” The Religion which informed and saved it was then called, still is called, and will always be called “The Catholic Church.”
Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.
Quote ID: 2222
Time Periods: 46
Book ID: 84 Page: 18
Section: 4B
Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do not grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church or who have a traditional bias against it.
Quote ID: 2223
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 18
Section: 1A
To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization …. . . .
…to pretend that the Empire or its religion have at any time ceased to be—that is, to pretend that there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present of Europe—all these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.
Quote ID: 2224
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 84 Page: 19
Section: 1A,4B
The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European cities, the routes of communication between them, the universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence, all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.
Quote ID: 2225
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 20
Section: 3D2
Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan qualities—which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant qualities.
Quote ID: 2226
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 22/24
Section: 4B
Now, the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were antagonisms within one State. No differentiation of State against State was conceivable or was attempted.. . . .
The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no appreciable arts or sciences, it was barbaric.
. . . .
The members of these communities….were all tinged with the great Empire on which they bordered. …. They thought in terms of it. They had a sort of grievance when they were not admitted to it. They perpetually begged for admittance.
. . . .
Men lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and which they even regarded as eternal.
Quote ID: 2227
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 84 Page: 30
Section: 4B
….from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first moment in which we can perceive the Church as a developed organism now apparent to all.
Quote ID: 2228
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 84 Page: 31
Section: 4B
Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great provincial town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a comparatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the municipal government of the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to a large class of citizens, free men but not senatorial; beneath these again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves.…we may infer from what we know of that society that the majority would certainly have been of the servile class, free men less numerous, while senators were certainly a very small body (they were the great landowners of the neighborhood); ….
Quote ID: 2229
Time Periods: 04
Book ID: 84 Page: 32
Section: 4B
This last point is essential; because the Roman Empire, though it required no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of its vast population for it was not a system of mere repression — no such system has ever endured), yet could only draw that armed force from a restricted portion of the population.
Quote ID: 2230
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 84 Page: 33
Section: 4B
With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was endowed; that it was possessed of property more or less legally guaranteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the congregations and corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well secured.
Quote ID: 2231
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 84 Page: 33/34
Section: 4B
…a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this was the capital point)….. . . .
the only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the Empire.
. . . .
Like a sort of little State, the Catholic Church included all classes and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which is growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it within its own sphere.
Quote ID: 2232
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 84 Page: 35
Section: 4B
The Catholic Church was not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not a theory nor a habit; it was a clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with passionate conviction.
Quote ID: 2233
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 84 Page: 37
Section: 2C
But it is unhistorical to think of a “Pagan” world opposed to a “Christian” world at that time. The very conception of “a Pagan world” requires some external manifest Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There was none such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the third century.
Quote ID: 2234
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 84 Page: 38
Section: 1A,4B
The conception which the Catholic Church had of itself in the early third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if we use the word “Christianity” we are unhistorical. “Christianity” is a term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception.
Quote ID: 2235
Time Periods: 13
Book ID: 84 Page: 39
Section: 1A,4B
One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoicism, or epicureanism, or neoplatonism; but one cannot talk of “Christianism” or “Christism.” Indeed, no one has been so ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase “Christianity,” used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of “Christianism” or “Christism”; and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.
Quote ID: 2236
Time Periods: 13
Book ID: 84 Page: 44
Section: 4B
…in the years 160-200 and onwards.I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale.
Quote ID: 2237
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 84 Page: 46
Section: 2A5,2C
If you read (in Ignatius’ seven certainly genuine letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, you may think him a wrong-headed enthusiast. But you know that you are reading the work of a man who personally witnessed the beginnings of the Church; you know that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or takes for granted were certainly those of his time, that is, of the origin of Catholicism, though you may think the customs silly and the doctrines nonsense.
Quote ID: 2238
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 84 Page: 46/47
Section: 1A,4B
Well, there comes after this considerable body of contemporary documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man.This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we come to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in volume, of documentary evidence.
Quote ID: 2239
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 84 Page: 51
Section: 3A3
This “State within the States” by the year 200 already had affected the Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done. As the Empire declined, the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.
This note should be used at the same time ( from Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, 125):
“Christianized nobles preserved Roman traditions. Not only did Christianity tolerate their national pride, it offered them a new manifestation of it when Pope Leo I “the Great” (440 - 461), conferring on Rome the praise attributed to the Jewish people, glorified ‘a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city.’”
Quote ID: 2240
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 84 Page: 52/53
Section: 1A,4B
Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that an end did not come. Dissolution was in some strange way checked. Death was averted. And the more closely one looks into the unique history of that salvation—the salvation of all that could be saved in a most ancient and fatigued society—the more one sees that this salvation was effected by no agency save that of the Catholic Church.. . . .
Every other great civilization has, after many centuries of development, either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died and disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, there is nothing left of Assyria.
Quote ID: 2241
Time Periods: 146
Book ID: 84 Page: 58
Section: 3D2
They did not desire, attempt, or even dream, the destruction of the Imperial power: that misfortune—which was gradual and never complete—insofar as it come about at all, came about in spite of the barbarians and not by their conscious effort.. . . .
They did not introduce any new institutions or any new ideas.
Quote ID: 2242
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 58/59
Section: 3D2
There is no link between barbaric society and the feudalism of the Middle Ages; there is no trace of such a link. There is, on the contrary, a very definite and clearly marked historical sequence between Roman civilization and the feudal system, attested by innumerable documents which, once read and compared in their order, leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the mediaeval civilization repose on purely Roman origins.In a word, the gradual cessation of central Imperial rule in Western Europe, the failure of the power and habit of one united organization seated in Rome to color, define and administrate the lives of men, was an internal revolution; it did not come from without. It was a change from within; it was nothing remotely resembling an external, still less a barbaric, conquest from without.
Quote ID: 2243
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 60
Section: 4B
In order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our united civilization had in its first five centuries reposed was the Roman Army. By which I do not mean that the number of soldiers was very large compared with the civilian population, but that the organ which was vital in the State, the thing that really counted, the institution upon which men’s minds turned, and which they thought of as the foundation of all, was the military institution.
Quote ID: 2244
Time Periods: 145
Book ID: 84 Page: 61
Section: 4B
…all that the word “Emperor” –the Latin word Imperator—means, is a commander-in-chief.
Quote ID: 2245
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 84 Page: 64
Section: 3D2
In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of the fifth century, the army, though not yet wholly barbaric, had already become in its most vital part, barbaric. It took its orders, of course, wholly from the Roman State, but great groups within it were only partly even Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking, and were certainly regarded both by themselves and by their Roman masters as non-Roman in manners and in blood.It must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an attack upon the Empire entered the heads of these soldiers, but that the very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them. Had you proposed it they would not even have known what you meant.
Quote ID: 2246
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 65
Section: 3D2
…the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities grew greater and greater; but it never occurred to them to attack the Empire as such. All they wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within it, and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were compelled outside its boundaries.
Quote ID: 2247
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 67/68
Section: 3D2
Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but from birth a Roman; at eighteen years of age he was put by the Court in command of a small Roman auxiliary force originally recruited from the Goths. He was as much a Roman officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any other terms than those of the Roman Army, as any other one of his colleagues about the throne. He had his commission from the Emperor Theodosius, and when Theodosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he counted Alaric’s division as among the most faithful of his Army.. . . .
Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was rewarded by further military dignities in the Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of military titles and of important command, as are all soldiers.
Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of auxiliaries, he asks for the title of Magister Militum, with the dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor refuses it. One of the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric, …
. . . .
The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman service, and is motive, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of years before, by the ambitions of generals.
Quote ID: 2248
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 69
Section: 3D2
The total number of Alaric’s men was at this moment very small; they were perhaps 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about them. They were simply a body of discontented soldiers; they had not come from across the frontier; they were not invaders; they were part of the long established and regular garrisons of the Empire; and, for that matter, many garrisons and troops of equally barbaric origin sided with the regular authorities in the quarrel.
Quote ID: 2249
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 71
Section: 3D2
Odoacer held a regular Roman commission; he was a Roman soldier: Theodoric supplanted him by leave of, and actually under orders from, the Emperor.
Quote ID: 2250
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 71
Section: 3D2
Clovis, the Belgian Fleming, fights no imperial Army. His forebears were Roman officials: his little band of perhaps 8,000 men was victorious in a small and private civil war which made him Master in the North over other rival generals. He defended the Empire against the Eastern barbaric German tribes. He rejoiced in the titles of Consul and Patrician.
Quote ID: 2251
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 71
Section: 3D2
But in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth centuries local government did fall into the hands of those who happened to command the main local forces of the Roman Army, and these were by descent barbarian because the Army had become barbarian in its recruitment.
Quote ID: 2252
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 73
Section: 3D2
Dreadful as the irruption of barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale, the conquest of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to destroy the civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon civilized men. Now to impose one’s view and manner, dare leges (to give laws), is to conquer.
Quote ID: 2253
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 74/75
Section: 4B
Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and wrote his classical work at such a date after Alarie’s Roman adventure and Radagasius’ defeat that the life of a man would span the distance between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those events and his maturity.
Quote ID: 2254
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 84 Page: 75
Section: 4B
Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in his later years, this is what he would have seen:In all the great towns, Roman life was going on as it had always gone one, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters, round whom not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as dependents.
In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its center and headship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the main popular preoccupation.
Quote ID: 2255
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 84 Page: 77
Section: 3D2
They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial powers within the one great Empire of Roe. But there was now no positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but it made no attempt to act.
Quote ID: 2256
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 77
Section: 4B
Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman character; ….. . . .
To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the “Palatium.” This word does not mean “Palace.”
. . . .
But the original word Palatium had a very different meaning in late Roman society. It signified the official seat of Government, and in particular the center from which the writs for Imperial taxation were issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid.
Quote ID: 2257
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 78/80
Section: 4B
The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia and manner of Roman Government.He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor’s delegate had sat: the provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear the official Roman garments: the orb and the scepter were already his symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the Emperor’s local subordinates before him. But in two points this central official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relied for power.
These two points were: first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not habitually give himself an imperial Roman title, but was called Rex.
. . . .
On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever the Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could not do otherwise because the whole machinery he had inherited presupposed absolute power.
. . . .
Now what is the meaning of the word Rex?
It is usually translated by our word “King.” But it does not here mean anything like what our word “King” means when we apply it today—or as we have applied it for many centuries.
. . . .
It means 1) The chief-tain of an auxiliary group of soldiers who holds an Imperial commission: and it means 2) That man acting as a local governor.
Quote ID: 2258
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 84 Page: 83
Section: 3D2
But no Rex ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred for independence against the Emperor. The Rex, the local man, undertook all government simply because the old Government above him, the central Government, had failed. No Rex ever called himself a local Imperator or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the most significant thing in all the transition between the full civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages.
Quote ID: 2259
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 83/85
Section: 3A1A,3D2
Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official name of Palatium.. . . .
This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the Rex, and the Rex was no more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. {8}
The Rex, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior Roman title, such as Vir Illuster, as an Englishman today might be called “Sir Charles So and So” or “Lord So and So,” never anything more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the old popular Roan customs, such as largesse and procession, upon his induction into that office.
Quote ID: 2260
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 87
Section: 3A3
The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, first, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); next, to be the official religion (300 A.D.); finally, to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A. D.).
Quote ID: 2261
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 84 Page: 87/88
Section: 4B
….the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the unity and exactitude of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For this they exiled themselves; for this they would and did run great risks; as minor to this they sank all other things.The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it was only its leader.
Quote ID: 2262
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 84 Page: 88/89
Section: 3C1
The Emperor’s Court did indeed at last—after many variations—abandon it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism stood for the “wealthy” and “respectable” in life.. . . .
It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.
No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the final form of the Church.
The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe was lost: for Arianism lacked vision.
. . . .
Had Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.
Quote ID: 2263
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 89/90
Section: 3D2
Now it so happened that of these local administration or governors who were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a powerful court, one only was not Arian.That one was the Rex Francorum or chieftain of the little barbaric auxiliary force of “Franks” which had been drawn into the Roman system from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine.
. . . .
A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language), succeeded his father, a Roman officer, (9) in the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth century. Unlike the other auxiliary generals, he was pagan.
. . . .
…he could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian Rex; but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.
The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century, as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and baptized by Catholics and not by Arians—in the midst of that enormous struggle.
Clodovicus—known in history as Clovis—came from a remote corner of civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism; they had no tradition that it was “the thing” or “smart” to adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of Europeans. When, therefore, this Rex Francorum was settled in Paris—about the year 500—and was beginning to administer local government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown with the popular feeling and against the Arian Reges in Italy and Spain.
The new armed forces of the Rex Francorum, a general levy continuing the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle, carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul.
Quote ID: 2264
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 94
Section: 1A
The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and the fifth, was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by its acceptation of the Faith.
Quote ID: 2265
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 84 Page: 94
Section: 4B
European civilization is still one, whether men see that unity or no. The Catholic Church is still the soul of it, whether men know it or do not know it.
Quote ID: 2266
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 130
Section: 3D2
We have seen that there was no considerable infiltration of barbarian blood, no “invasions” in our modern sense of the term (or rather, no successful ones); no blotting out of civilization, still less any introduction of new institutions or ideas drawn from barbarism.
Quote ID: 2267
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 84 Page: 132
Section: 3A4C
In the first place, the Dark Ages were a period of intense military action. Christendom was besieged from all around. It was held like a stronghold, and in those centuries of struggle its institutions were molded by military necessities: so that Christendom has ever since had about it the quality of a soldier. There was one unending series of attacks. Pagan and Mohammedan, from the North, from the East and from the South; attacks not comparable to the older raids of external hordes, eager only to enjoy civilization within the Empire, small in number and yet ready to accept the faith and customs of Europe. The barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries—at the end of the United Roman Empire—had been of this lesser kind. The mighty struggles of the eighth, ninth and especially the tenth centuries—of the Dark Ages—were a very different matter.
Quote ID: 2268
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 84 Page: 134
Section: 3G
This Mohammedan swoop was the first and most disastrously successful of the three great assaults.. . . .
Finally, less noticed by history, but quite as grievous, and needing a defense as gallant, was the pagan advance over the North German Plan and up the valley of the Danube.
Quote ID: 2269
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 84 Page: 135
Section: 3G
But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric Germanies right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept religion, letters and arts. He extended Europe to these new boundaries and organized them as a sort of rampart in the East: a thing the Roman Empire had not done.. . . .
This, then, is the first characteristic to be remembered of the Dark Ages: the violence of the physical struggle and the intense physical effort by which Europe was saved.
The second characteristic of the Dark Ages proceeds from this first military one: it may be called Feudalism.
Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of the old Roman provincial centers of administration into the hands of each small local society and its lord.
Quote ID: 2270
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 136/137
Section: 3A1
The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors, taxed and administered by a regular government, to a society of fighting nobles and their descendants, organized upon a basis of independence and in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no longer by slaves in the villages, but by half-free serfs, or “villeins.”
Quote ID: 2271
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 84 Page: 137
Section: 4B
The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was the curious fixity of morals, of traditions, of the forms of religion, and of all that makes up social life.
Quote ID: 2272
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 137/138
Section: 3G
Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the central figure of those centuries. It is spent almost entirely in the saddle.. . . .
The whole story is one of perpetual marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand.
. . . .
Religion during these centuries settled and consolidated, as it were. An enemy would say that it petrified, a friend that it was enormously strengthened by pressure. But whatever the metaphor chosen, the truth indicated will be this: that the Catholic Faith became between the years 600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last vestiges of the antique and Pagan civilization of the Mediterranean were absorbed. A habit of certitude and of fixity, even in the details of thought, was formed in the European mind.
Quote ID: 2273
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 138/139
Section: 4B
The fourth characteristic of the Dark Ages was a material one, and was that which would strike our eyes most immediately if we could transfer ourselves in time, and enjoy a physical impression of that world. This characteristic was derived from what I have just been saying. It was the material counterpart of the moral immobility or steadfastness of the time. It was this: that the external forms of things stood quite unchanged. The semi-circular arch, the short, stout pillar, occasionally (but rarely) the dome: these were everywhere the mark of architecture. There was no change nor any attempt at change. The arts were saved but not increased, and the whole of the work that men did with their hands stood fast in mere tradition. No new town arises, ….. . . .
No new roads were laid. The old Roman military system of highways was kept up and repaired, though kept up and repaired with a declining vigor. The wheel of European life had settled to one slow rate of turning.
Quote ID: 2274
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 141
Section: 3A1,3A4,4B
The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most engrossed, puzzled, and warped the judgment of non-Catholic historians when they have attempted a conspectus of European development; it was the segregation, the homogeneity of and the dominance of clerical organization.The hierarchy of the Church, its unity and its sense of discipline was the chief civil institution and the chief binding social force of the times.
Quote ID: 2275
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 84 Page: 141
Section: 3F
The vast and increasing endowments of great and fixed religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries. They were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.
Quote ID: 2276
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 84 Page: 141
Section: 3A1,3A3,4B
Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution—I have already called it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution—at any rate as a political institution—remained absolute above the social disintegration of the time.167/168 -1A- To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the fifth century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of the Eastern schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault; from within, because it deals with matters not open to positive proof; from without, because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites, who are not of our civilization, are naturally its enemies.
Quote ID: 2277
Time Periods: 57
Book ID: 84 Page: 185
Section: 4B
Corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question—the culmination of so much evil—necessarily arises this the sole vital formula of our time: “Europe must return to the Faith, or she will perish.”
Quote ID: 2278
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 84 Page: 191
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
In such a crux, there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.
Quote ID: 2279
Time Periods: 47
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