ANCIENT civilisation used to be considered as the direct parent of modern society, with nothing between them but a chaos of merely negative lapse of time, as is sufficiently indicated by the name given to the latter period—the Middle Ages.
But it is now recognised that this supposed chaos had an order of its own, and was an integral and necessary part of the evolution of primitive into modern life. And it may here be said that the close resemblance on many points between the pre-classical period of antiquity, the epoch of the Homeric poems, and the 49 Middle Ages is very noteworthy. We have now to inquire into the transition which brought about the change from the one system to the other.
first as to the economical side. The classical system of production was founded on chattel-slavery, the mediæval on serfdom, and it was the change from the one labour-system to the other which was the special characteristic of the transition.
Agriculture was the dominating industry of the classical world, and this part of labour was almost entirely the work of chattel-slaves, the property of the great landowners. As long as the Empire was at peace about its great centres, this system went on without serious check, since the servile insurrections belong to the times of civil brawl before the Empire; though it is true that reflection of the miseries of the slaves is to be found in the chronic brigandage and piracy that infested ancient civilisation during its whole period. But as the Empire contracted its boundaries, and actual war drew near its centre, while its grasping and corrupt 50 tax-gathering bureaucracy dried up its resources, destroyed its markets, and withered its population, the approach of sheer ruin shattered the foundation of chattel-slavery on which it rested. And it must be remembered, once for all, that neither prosperity nor adversity, neither good emperors nor bad, neither peace nor war, could release Roman society from this plague of tax-gathering, any more than any increasing sense of the responsibility of the rich for the lives of the poor, or any fresh aspirations towards individual righteousness, can free modern society from the thraldom of the hunt for profit.
The great commercial estates of the Romans, under the name of Latifundia, had absorbed all the agricultural industry of the earlier Roman state, which had once been in the hands of the blood relations and household slaves of the paterfamilias. But now the profit of working these lands by the instrument of wellorganised slavery was vanishing, owing to the break up of the ancient world-market, and the consequently impending ruin. Nothing now remained for the masters 51 of these slaves but to shake off the responsibility for their livelihood, and allow them to cultivate the land in a rough and unorganised way, as partially independent peasants, paying rent in kind and service to the landowners. This seems to have been one of the methods of the merging of the chattel-slave into the medieval serf.
At the same time, not only did this go on very gradually, but domestic slavery and the servile condition of the craftsmen was synchronous with it.
The other element towards the birth of the feudal system was added by the tribal barbarians who broke in on the last days of the Empire. These bore with them ideas and customs that differed in detail rather than in essence from those of the earlier classical epoch; and though they no doubt had “thralls,” i.e. chattel-slaves, yet those thralls at worst were in as good a position as he household slaves of the peasant-lord of early Rome, were frequently manumitted, and remained the freedmen of their former masters, still doing service to them.
And this idea of service in return for 52 protection, which had been once a Roman idea, was still an essential part of the life of the barbarian tribes, and they imported it into the society that was gradually growing up from the débris of classical society.
Thus met the two elements necessary for the social life of the new epoch— one the result of the internal decay of the old system; the other, the growth of the unbroken original barbaric constitution.
But the ethical and religious conditions were also changing, along with the economical: the break-up of the constitution of the cities destroyed the social religion of city-worship; and though some of the forms of the old ancestor religions and nature-cults of the ancient tribes still survived, the real characteristics of that religion had vanished.
To fill the void so created in men’s minds after the fall of this public faith, there arose another that concentrated the interest on the individual personality, now completely dissociated from its old social ties; concentrated it indeed on this individuality as being something 53 supernatural, and bearing a mysterious relationship with the supreme supernatural power of the universe. Thus it created a religion of the holiness of the soul, as distinct from that righteousness of the material man shown through his actions under a sense of his responsibility to his fellow-men, as embodied in the society of which he was a part.
This personal religion took the form of Mysteries, some of which were of ancestral or nature-worship origin, but which now received a new application, and symbolised in their ritual spectacles the state of the soul after death, and its ultimate union, when thoroughly purified, with the Supreme Essence or the Divinity of things. In its pagan form as a matter of course it implied a complete distinction between the cultivated, who could aspire to an understanding of such high matters, and the unleisured vulgar herd, who saw in the Mysteries mere ceremonies, with an exoteric significance only. As this new religious spirit developed into Christianity, that exclusiveness proved to be the ruin of its pagan garb since Christianity 54 proclaimed the accessibility of all men, “learned and lewd,” to a full share in all its benefits: though, after all, the exclusiveness soon reasserted itself and created a distinction, not this time between the initiated and the profane, or the philosopher and the common man, but between those devoted to a holy life and those living in the world. Christianity was thus enabled to carry through the whole of society a tendency before confined to certain classes of the population alone. Thus the church triumphed, nor was its victory without direct economical causes, for the accumulation of wealth in the hands of men whose profession forbade luxury, which wealth was actually largely spent in the maintenance of the poor, had a strong propagandist influence in times which, to judge from the hints left us by history, immediately preceded the official establishment of the Christian religion.
It is also undoubted that the contests which took place throughout the 4th century, and which were practically ended by the edicts of Theodosius suppressing the public exercise of the pagan 55 rites, were mixed with desire on the part of the church to enter into the inheritance of the treasures of the various pagan priesthoods. Thus the official religion of Europe was revolutionised without hope of return.
With the change in economics and religion went also the change in the arts. The Archaic art of the classical nations was expressive, spontaneous, and ornamental; in the hands of a people so full of talent of all kinds as the Greeks it rapidly developed in skill of execution, until men aspired to perfection in it where perfection was possible; their strong logical sense perceived the necessary limit herein, and checked all attempts on the outside of that limit; and as a consequence they attained the desired perfection at the expense on the one hand of the full possibilities of epic expression, and on the other of architectonic ornament. As the public feeling—the sense of delight in the service of the city—died out, so what life there was in this perfect but limited art died with 1t, and at last a caput mortuum of mere plausible academic art was all that 56 was left, which, however, lasted a long time, until, in fact, Classicism had fallen before Christianity. Then after an interregnum of inferiority at once rude and timid, the new art began, influenced doubtless by the communication with the East. Finally, it becomes obvious to us in the buildings raised by - Justinian, especially St. Sophia at Constantinople, which show a new creation, bearing with it indeed tokens of its birth out of classicism, but yet totally different even as to detail, both in form and spirit. The full weight of the causes which lay behind this transformation will be better appreciated when we come to deal with the art of the fully developed Middle Ages. It is enough here to say that a new style was created, that it only awaited the influence of the barbaric tribes to attain completeness, and that it developed step by step along with the development of the new society in complete accord with all its necessities and aspirations.
The broken fragments of the Roman Empire amidst all this overturn, had to 57 reckon with that element of the change which was at once most formidable on the surface and most potent for the reconstruction of society, to wit, the incursions of the northern barbarian tribes.
The political change was brought about in this way: Gaul and Spain, Northern Africa, Roman Germany, Britain, countries all populated by colonists and Romanised natives, and even part of Italy itself, fell under the domination of the Teutonic tribes, and the ancestral tribal leaders became their kings and governors, not seldom under the recognised Roman titles of Patrician, Comes, etc. The law of the countries so conquered was the Roman civil law, with the tribal customs grafted on to it. Whatever oral works of imagination they might have carried with them, their literature soon became that of Rome only; for the great epical and mythological poems of the race have been kept alive solely by those tribes who never crossed Roman civilisation.
Their tribal religion soon gave way, nominally at least, to the official religion of the Empire, but nevertheless they 58 impressed some of their customary traditions on the Mediæval Church of the West, and took away some of its eastern character. Medieval Catholicism retained in consequence a certain portion of the this-worldliness and the solidarity of barbarian society, and so shows on one side a communistic interest in the corporation, whether church, guild, parish, or even monastery, which is quite alien to the individualistic introspectivism of the Christianity of the decaying Empire; the latter appears, on the other hand, sporadically, throughout the Middle Ages, in later times gathering volume under the Lollards, and at last culminating in the Protestantism of the Reformation.
This interpenetration of progressive barbarism and decaying Roman civilisation, so essential to the life of the new epoch, began with the first invasion of Italy by the Goths (406), and went on through centuries of confused war and struggle, till the process of welding together the varying elements grew complete about the time of Charles the Great, who was crowned at Rome in the 59 year 800. Thus was created the phantom of the Holy Roman, really the German, Empire of the Middle Ages, which continued the legend of Roman domination after the feudal system itself had fallen, while Rome became merely a memory of past history, an ideal for men to look backward to in an age particularly prone to forming such ideals.