In my previous two postings [See Aristotle’s Impact on The Wisdom Tradition; and Carolingian Renaissance] I discussed the state of education – its goals, its effects, and the conditions in which it flourished or floundered – to provide background and context for the subject of this post. The title (Prelude: Towards the Consecration of Learning) implies that learning prior to the creation of collegial institutions and the university was, somehow, not singled out for any special attention or distinction worthy of honor. And if medieval scholasticism was the pedagogy that consecrated learning, that must mean that the prior pedagogies of Aristotle, the wisdom traditions, and Carolingian systematization of classical and Christian authors constituting the best learning of old, pagan Rome with the “New Rome” did not quite reach a level we would consider as consecration. Before I delve into the historical background that gave rise to the medieval university, a few words about consecration, and related concepts – such as dedication, devotion, hallow, sanctify, and venerate. There is much overlap and tautological redundancy, which oftentimes makes a distinction without a difference, when treating topics of religious or sacred significance. At the risk of alienating either or both religious believers or Cartesian doubters, I will limit my purview to places hallowed in time and personal acts of consecration, as described below.
To “consecrate” something is to designate a person, place, or thing as sacred, to dedicate it to a cause or set of values. Usually, the act of consecration applies to a place, such as a battlefield or birthplace of a national icon. Consecration gives the place—often a church or cemetery—a special legal status. As a religious concept, to “consecrate” means to sanctify, purify or hallow – to “make holy” a person, place, or object. Special places, such as historic landmarks and church grottoes, are consecrated as hallowed sanctuaries or sacred ground. To consecrate oneself to some greater purpose is an entirely different matter. Consecrating oneself to a way of life devoted, for example, to healing or visiting the imprisoned, is a common route to the pursuit of holiness. The power of the consecration does not lie merely in a future realm of expectancy. The act of intention, of mere declaration in present conditions, has a power all its own. For example, an act of consecration has performative power merely from its very utterance, such as a minister saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” – affirming the existence of a marriage. So, too, do acts such as the exchange of wedding vows, and the sacraments bestowed through their oral, scriptural rendition – especially the reconciliation of the soul to God that follow from the sinner bearing his soul: “Your sins are forgiven. Go, and sin no more.” Such acts have the performative power to change the storyline of a sinner’s life.
Consecration sanctifies the acts of marriage and reconciliation, as described above, in their performative power. In the case of marriage, each “party” binds the self to perform promises, in fulfilling the vows of the wedding exchange. The absolved sinner promises to sin no more. The power of the promise is that it does not guarantee perfectly loving and honoring the other, nor does it mean to never sin again. In either case, the imperfect “performers”, are conditioned by their state of affairs, to evermore do better in honoring their promises.
A consecrated person need not change her station in life. But she may consecrate herself to a way of life, to a tradition, or to sanctity as an ideal. It may be her intent to consecrate her activities to the topic of this essay – all her learning to teaching and scholarship, to offering counsel, and thereby receive the spiritual gifts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
THROUGH AN AGE, DARKLY
The toll of events that make up the Dark Ages starts with the Fall of Rome to the Germanic barbarian king Odoacer in 476 AD. It has been said that with the fall of Rome, western Europe then plunged into several centuries of darkness. The European landscape had become a puzzled patchwork of isolated Celtic and Germanic tribes, and remnants of Roman enclaves scattered in small hamlets and villages from Brittania to Byzantium. Europe remained in darkness, until the second millennium, when European crusaders in the East discovered the vast wealth of knowledge found in the Islamic Fertile Cresent and nearby Constantinople, especially with its linkage to the Silk Road – a vast trading route that stretched through the Indus Valley all the way into China. What is most familiar to western readers was the rediscovery of the vast corpus of works composed by Aristotle that was transmitted to the West – a West awaiting to be taught and enlightened by the civilizations of the East.
But is this a true account of events? It leaves an impression that the West was without learning, without kingdoms, and without evangelization. In giving a cursory scanning of the west at this time, kingdoms rose and fell, philosophers philosophized, and churchman evangelized new peoples. In a thousand different ways, civilization was being restored through the activity of monks in scriptoriums, as well as the daring adventurers, appointed missionaries, and perfervid preachers to the new orders in Europe.
Despite the widespread accessibility of historical records, digitized and archived, available to historians, there is a lingering reluctance to part with the term “Dark Ages” as beginning with the fall of the western Roman Empire, and ending with the rise of the Medieval schoolmen. Historians, however, have not been able to agree on “when the darkness ended.” Some point to the papal reforms of the tenth century; others point to Abelard and faith by reason; still others to the Thomist synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy into Catholic terminology. But since the scope of this essay is about the collegiality of the university, the light of higher education truly begins with the establishment and chartering of the world’s first university – the University of Bologna in northern Italy, in the year 1088. *
* Prior to 1870 with the birth of the State ** of Italy, Italy was considered a geographic region, akin to regional names like Anatolia, Asia Minor, and Germania. *** Bologna was under Burgundian rule, formerly a constituent part of the original Carolingian Reich.
** See my blog on Toward a More Perfect Union: Two Views of Church and State, which distinguishes between the state and the nation.
*** As for Italy, so for Germany. The regions of Europe ‘on the other side’ of the Rhine River, and north of the Danube River was known as Germania by the Romans. Germania was imagined to be, and, in limited exchanges, experienced as, a land inhabited by hulking, bearded, blood-curdling barbarian warriors, charging into battle under their barritus war-cry. Scattered across hundreds of hamlets and clearings in the forest, they were known for their unrefined, bad-tasting primary beverage of choice (beer), and for the “bossiness” of their women. (See Tacitus and other Roman accounts of Germania.) With the Coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD, Germans maintained their identity to local regions, under the protection of a greater Reich. With the dissolution of the Empire by Napolean in 1806, Germans now had no state or Reich identifiable as “the German State”. Finally, in 1871, after a series of wars initiated by the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, through his “blood and iron” policy, unity was forged, initiating the modern German State.
One final word on the “Dark Ages”. It would be a mistake to gloss over these 500 years as an era of no consequence. There was not a sudden saltus of discontinuity in the records of recorded history, in which the collected wisdom of the past finally went into the dark. As I have shown in my previous two postings, all was not dark in the Europe of the early Middle Ages. Church and state leaders had to “go back to basics” – to assemble, collect, copy, disseminate, preach, and teach an entire continent how to read, write, and calculate, to answer a hunger and yearning for understanding God, Man, and the natural world. They had to proceed, gingerly and gently, through a European Heart of Darkness.
A CONSPIRACY OF MOVEMENTS
Although what I have described thus far are multitudes of men and women, acting in multiple ways that produce the great movements of history, it would be shortsighted to ignore the seed, the single cell, the starting point – that gave birth to it. It begins with a visionary individual, who refuses to believe that “nothing can be done”. Alone at first, she seeks out others who share her vision, and are willing to act on that vision. They engage, as it were, in a conspiracy. Though not considered a federal crime under U.S. statutory law until 1909, conspiracies themselves have been around a long, long time. But my choice of the word conspiracy has nothing to do with murdering officials, fixing prices, or engaging in fraud. I use the word conspiracy as when two or more individuals plan to [do something] with at least one overt act. When two or more people are gathered in the name of some way, truth, or life, for societal renewal, that unless there is a decision to act, and carry out that first, overt act, there is no movement, just romantic indulgence of daydreams. It would take a reworking of the Cartesian epigram “I think, therefore I am” to “we conspire; therefore, we act,” to show how the motions of a conspiratorial few, rather than movements of masses, are the true agents of change and renewal.
IRRUPTION FROM THE SEA
When Charlemagne was presented with the crown as Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800, Charlemagne appeared to be at the summit of power. Although a successful warrior, civil administrator, and educational reformer, a gathering storm was already a-brewing from the north, threatening to turn all that Charlemagne had won into the dustbin of history. What started as a tempest in a teapot, turned into a windstorm of violent proportions. Six years earlier, in 794, the unsuspecting monks at the Lindisfarne monastery, in Northumbria, received “visitors” of a hulking and menacing countenance from the sea. Arriving in a fleet of long, slender boats, they did not have the look of commercial traders, nor of pilgrims seeking spiritual guidance from the monks. These Northmen “sea rowers”, or Vikings (as they came to be called), sacked the monastery of all that could be carried off as booty. Bands of Vikings were on the move, threading their way into the heart of Europe, plying their sleek, sturdy vessels through its navigable arteries of rivers, sometimes to trade, often to plunder, and occasionally to “stay awhile”, eventually becoming permanent settlers in regions stretching from Mercia in Anglo-Saxon England, to the Volga River deep in the Eurasian steppe. One of these Viking “parties”, on route to Iran and Anatolia for profitable trade, not only “stayed awhile” but were asked to stay permanently, by natives of the Volga River basin. Native peoples of this region had their first impression of these newcomers as skillful ros’ (rowers). They were so impressed with their seamanship, that the native peoples, exhausted from seemingly-endless tribal warfare, asked the Rus’ to bring order and stay on to govern them. Thus begins the history of the Rus’ people, or Russian nation, which I will treat as an individual topic all its own, in a later post.
THE RISE OF FEUDALISM
Although the Holy Roman Empire was relatively unaffected by Viking raids, Charlemagne and his successors had to devote considerable resources to defend the peripheries of the realm. The Reich’s subjects in these regions could not await direction from the central palace in Aachen. Authority and decision-making had to devolve to local lords and officials. These arrangements, needed, as they were, for military reasons, devolved into much local autonomy, which would give rise to feudalism. ****
The arrival of feudalism would give rise to a new order in the economic and social arrangements of daily life. Out of the need to maintain unity of the Reich and armed protection in the peripheries, a new class of rulers and warriors – powerful manorial lords over the serfs to their estate; a land studded with castellans ruling from the impregnability of their fortress like castles, like Sauronian masters over their patches of Middle-earth; and a warrior class of knights, known not for chivalric virtue (that would come later), but for the violence of their contestation over a multitude of affronts to their honor in the service of their “lords.”
**** While I limit my treatment of the “Dark Ages” in the context of the Frankish Reich, similar developments were taking place in other parts of Europe. England’s emergence from post-Roman disintegration to the emergence of common law as one of the world’s great legal systems; the reign of Alfred the Great – warrior, scholar, builder, educator, and as loyal son and supporter of both Church and State; and the City of London emerging as the center of English civilization and commerce – whilst bringing to an end the Viking “hit, raid, and run” siege of Europe. Iceland, Norway, and the Danes were evangelized into the Christian fold; and the emergence of a new band of warriors, the Normans, came on the world stage to shape the political and cultural destinies of entire regions, including the Italic peninsula; the Frankish Kingdom, (Frankreich (Francia {in Latin}, later France); and, with William the Conqueror, that of Anglo-Saxon England. The Norman influence forged a mingling of Germanic and Latin culture throughout the west, creating conditions that would cause the emergence of French culture, language, and its institutions from Latinate and Germanic tutelage.
To maintain manorial local rule over serfs tied to the land required, it was thought, that the estate not be parceled out to multitudes of successors in estate. With the institution of primogeniture, the eldest son (usually) inherited the manorial estate as a whole in its entirety. This produced a class of refugees of unsettled younger sons who needed to “find their own path (to ‘success’)”. Many of them banded together to go and settle in urban areas, in search of “something to do”. To have safety in numbers, they gathered and reached out to their fellow countrymen to band together in united opposition to unjust treatment by local officials. These “bands of brothers” evolved into an association of colleagues eager to access the “new learning” from the East. They formed collegial “institutions” to defend their rights and advance their interests. These “colleges” would evolve into a system of teaching and courses of study, examinations and the conferral of degrees, and the establishment of scholarship as the pinnacle of learning. This collegiality found expression in the corporate framework of the university. Its growth, challenges, and contestation among church officials, town burghers, and especially between the townspeople and the university community (the conflict of “town and gown”) will be discussed in a future weblog installment.
