Europe and the Faith Part 9

This doctrine of _personal_ immortality is the prime mark of the European and stamps his leaders.h.i.+p upon the world.

Its original seat--long before history begins--lay perhaps in Ireland, later in Britain, certainly reduced to definition either in Britain or in Gaul. It increasingly influenced Greece and even had some influence upon the Jews before the Romans subdued them. But it remained an opinion, an idea looming in the dark, till it was seen strong and concrete in the full light of the Catholic Church. Oddly enough, Mahomet, who in most things reacted towards weakness of flesh and spirit, adopted this Western doctrine fully; it provided his system with its vigor. Everywhere is that doctrine of immortality the note of superior intelligence and will, especially in its contrast with the thin pantheism and negations of Asia. Everywhere does it accompany health and decision.

Its only worthy counterpart (equally European but rare, uprooted and private) is the bold affirmation of complete and final death.

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.

To this I might have attached the continued carelessness for the plastic arts and for much in letters, the continued growth in holiness, and all that "salting," as it were, which preserved civilization and kept it whole until, after the long sequestration of the Dark Ages, it should discover an opportunity for revival.

My s.p.a.ce has not permitted me to describe these things, I must turn at once to the last, and what is for my readers the chief, of the historical problems presented by the beginning of the Dark Ages. That problem is the fate of Britain.

The importance of deciding what happened in Britain when the central government of Rome failed, does not lie in the fact that an historical conclusion one way or the other can affect the truth. 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. But the problem presented by the fate of Britain at that critical moment when the provinces of the Roman Empire became independent of any common secular control, has this practical importance: that those who read it wrongly and who provide their readers with a false solution (as the Protestant German school and their copiers in English, Freeman, Green and the rest have done) those who talk of "the coming of the English," "the Anglo-Saxon conquest," and the rest, not only furnish arguments against the proper unity of our European story but also produce a warped att.i.tude in the mind. Such men as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the entry into the Dark Ages, take for granted many other things historically untrue. Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else that is historical truth: for instance, the character of the Normans; and even contemporary and momentous truth before our eyes today: for instance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. They not only render an Englishman ignorant of his own nation and therefore of himself, they also render all men ignorant of Europe: for a knowledge of Britain in the period 500-700 as in the period 1530-1630 is the test of European history: and if you are wrong on these two points you are wrong on the whole.

A man who desires to make out that the Empire--that is European civilization--was "conquered" by barbarians cannot today, in the light of modern research, prove his case in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain, or in the valley of the Rhine. The old German thesis of a barbaric "conquest" upon the Continent, possible when modern history was a child, has necessarily been abandoned in its maturity. But that thesis still tries to make out a plausible case when it speaks of Britain, because so much of the record here is lost that there is more room for make-believe; and having made it out, the tale of a German and barbaric England, his false result will powerfully affect modern and immediate conclusions upon our common civilization, upon our inst.i.tutions, and their nature, and in particular upon the Faith and its authority in Europe.

For if _Britain_ be something other than _England_: if what we now know is not original to this Island, but is of the Northern German barbarism in race and tradition, if, in the breakdown of the Roman Empire, Britain was the one exceptional province which really did become a separate barbaric thing, cut off at the roots from the rest of civilization, then those who desire to believe that the inst.i.tutions of Europe are of no universal effect, that the ancient laws of the Empire as on property and marriage--were local, and in particular that the Reformation was the revolt of a race--and of a strong and conquering race--against the decaying traditions of Rome, have something to stand on. It does not indeed help them to prove that our civilization is bad or that the Faith is untrue, but it permits them to despair of, or to despise, the unity of Europe, and to regard the present Protestant world as something which is destined to supplant that unity.

Such a point of view is wrong historically as it is wrong in morals. It will find no basis of military success in the future any more than it has in the past. [Footnote: I wrote and first printed these words in 1912.

I leave them standing with greater force in 1920.] It must ultimately break down if ever it should attempt to put into practice its theory of superiority in barbaric things. But meanwhile as a self-confident theory it can do harm indefinitely great by warping a great section of the European mind; bidding it refer its character to imaginary barbaric origins, so divorcing it from the majestic spirit of Western Civilization. The North German "Teutonic" school of false popular history can create its own imaginary past, and lend to such a figment the authority of antiquity and of lineage.

To show how false this modern school of history has been, but also what opportunities it had for advancing its thesis, is the object of what follows.

Britain, be it remembered, is today the only part of the Roman world in which a conscious antagonism to the ancient and permanent civilization of Europe exists. The Northern Germanies and Scandinavia, which have had, since the Reformation, a religious agreement with all that is still politically powerful in Britain, lay outside the old civilization. They would not have survived the schism of the sixteenth century had Britain resisted that schism. When we come to deal with the story of the Reformation in Britain, we shall see how the strong popular resistance to the Reformation nearly overcame that small wealthy cla.s.s which used the religious excitement of an active minority as an engine to obtain material advantage for themselves. But as a fact in _Britain_ the popular resistance to the Reformation failed. A violent and almost universal persecution directed, in the main by the wealthier cla.s.ses, against the religion of the English populace and the wealth which endowed it just happened to succeed.

In little more than a hundred years the newly enriched had won the battle.

By the year 1600 the Faith of the British ma.s.ses had been stamped out from the Highlands to the Channel.

It is our business to understand that this phenomenon, the moral severance of Britain from Europe, was a phenomenon of the sixteenth century and not of the fifth, and that Britain was in no way predestined by race or tradition to so lamentable and tragic a loss.

Let us state the factors in the problem.

The main factor in the problem is that the history of Great Britain from just before the middle of the fifth century (say the years 420 to 445) until the landing of St. Augustine in 597 is a blank.

It is of the first importance to the student of the general history in Europe to seize this point. It is true of no other Roman western province, and the truth of it has permitted a vast amount of empty a.s.sertion, most of it recent, and nearly all of it as demonstrably (as it is obviously) created by a religious bias. When there is no proof or record men can imagine almost anything, and the anti-Catholic historians have stretched imagination to the last possible limit in filling this blank with whatever could tell against the continuity of civilization.

It is the business of those who love historic truth to get rid of such speculations as of so much rubbish, and to restore to the general reader the few certain facts upon which he can solidly build.

Let me repeat that, had Britain remained true to the unity of Europe in that unfortunate oppression of the sixteenth century which ended in the loss of the Faith, had the populace stood firm or been able to succeed in the field and under arms, or to strike terror into their oppressors by an efficient revolt, in other words had the England of the Tudors remained Catholic, the solution of this ancient problem of the early Dark Ages would present no immediate advantage, nor perhaps would the problem interest men even academically. England would now be one with Europe as she had been for a thousand years before the uprooting of the Reformation. But, as things are, the need for correction is immediate and its success of momentous effect. No true historian, even though he should most bitterly resent the effect of Catholicism upon the European mind, can do other than combat what was, until quite recently, the prevalent teaching with regard to the fate of Britain when the central government of the Empire decayed.

I will first deal with the evidence--such as it is--which has come down to us upon the fate of Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, and next consider the conclusions to which such evidence should lead us.

THE EVIDENCE

When we have to deal with a gap in history (and though none in Western European history is so strangely empty as this, yet there are very many minor ones which enable us to reason from their a.n.a.logy), two methods of bridging the gap are present to the historian. The first is research into such rare contemporary records as may ill.u.s.trate the period: the second is the parallel of what has happened elsewhere in the same case, or better still (when that is possible) the example of what was proceeding in similar places and under similar circ.u.mstances at the same time. And there is a third thing: both of these methods must be submitted to the criterion of common sense more thoroughly and more absolutely than the evidence of fuller periods. For when you have full evidence, even of a thing extraordinary, you must admit its truth. But when there is little evidence guess-work comes in, and common sense is the correction of guess-work.

If, for instance, I learn, as I can learn from contemporary records and from the witness of men still living, that at the battle of Gettysburg infantry advanced so boldly as to bayonet gunners at their guns, I must believe it although the event is astonis.h.i.+ng.

If I learn, as I can learn, that a highly civilized and informed government like that of the French in 1870, entering into a war against a great rival, had only the old muzzle-loading cannon when their enemies were already equipped with modern breech-loading pieces, I must accept it on overwhelming evidence, in spite of my astonishment.

When even the miraculous appears in a record--if its human evidence is multiple, converging and exact--I must accept it or deny the value of human evidence.

But when I am dealing with a period or an event for which evidence is lacking or deficient, then obviously it is a sound criterion of criticism to accept the probable and not to presuppose the improbable. Common sense and general experience are nowhere more necessary than in their application, whether in a court of law or in the study of history, to those problems whose difficulty consists in the absence of direct proof.

[Footnote: For instance, there is no contemporary account mentioning London during the last half of the fifth and nearly all the sixth century. Green, Freeman, Stubbs, say (making it up as they go along) that London ceased to exist: disappeared! Then (they a.s.sert) after a long period of complete abandonment it was laboriously cleared by a totally new race of men and as laboriously rebuilt on exactly the same site. The thing is not physically impossible, but it is so exceedingly improbable that common sense laughs at it.]

Remembering all this, let us first set down what is positively known from record with regard to the fate of Britain in the hundred and fifty years of "the gap."

We begin by noting that there were many groups of German soldiery in Britain before the Pirate raids and that the southwest was--whether on account of earlier pirate raids or on account of Saxon settlers the descendants of Roman soldiers--called "the Saxon sh.o.r.e" long before the Imperial system broke down.

Next we turn to doc.u.ments.

There is exactly one contemporary doc.u.ment professing to tell us anything at all of what happened within this considerable period, exactly one doc.u.ment set down by a witness; and that doc.u.ment is almost valueless for our purpose.

It bears the t.i.tle, _De Excidio Brittaniae Liber Querulus_. St. Gildas, a monk, was its author. The exact date of its compilation is a matter of dispute--necessarily so, for the whole of that time is quite dark. But it is certainly not earlier than 545. So it was written one hundred years after the beginning of that darkness which covers British history for one hundred and fifty years; most of the Roman regulars had been called away for a continental campaign in 410. They had often so left the island before. But this time the troops sent out on expedition did not return.

Britain was visited in 429 and 447 by men who left records. It was not till 597 that St. Augustine landed. St. Augustine landed only fifty years at the most after Gildas wrote his _Liber Querulus_, whereas the snapping of the links between the Continent and southeastern Britain had taken place at least a hundred years before.

Well, it so happens that this book is, as I have called it, almost valueless for history. It is good in morals; its author complains, as all just men must do in all times, of the wickedness of powerful men, and of the vices of princes. It is a homily. The motive of it is not history, but the reformation of morals. In all matters extending to more than a lifetime before that of the writer, in all matters, that is, on which he could not obtain personal evidence, he is hopelessly at sea. He is valuable only as giving us the general impression of military and social struggles as they struck a monk who desired to make them the text of a sermon.

He vaguely talks of Saxon auxiliaries from the North Sea being hired (in the traditional Roman manner) by some Prince in Roman Britain to fight savages who had come out of the Highlands of Scotland and were raiding.

He says this use of new auxiliaries began after the Third Consuls.h.i.+p of Aetius (whom he calls "Agitius"), that is, after 446 A.D. He talks still more vaguely of the election of local kings to defend the island from the excesses of these auxiliaries. He is quite as much concerned with the incursions of robber bands of Irish and Scotch into the civilized Roman province as he is with the few Saxon auxiliaries who were thus called in to supplement the arms of the Roman provincials.

He speaks only of a handful of these auxiliaries, three boatloads; but he is so vague and ill-instructed on the whole of this early period--a hundred years before his time--that one must treat his account of the transaction as half legendary. He tells us that "more numerous companies followed," and we know what that means in the case of the Roman auxiliaries throughout the Empire, a few thousand armed men.

He goes on to say that these auxiliaries mutinying for pay (another parallel to what we should expect from the history of all the previous hundred years all over Europe), threatened to plunder the civil population.

Then comes one sentence of rhetoric saying how they ravaged the countrysides "in punishment for our previous sins," until the "flames" of the tumult actually "licked the Western Ocean." It is all (and there is much more) just like what we read in the rhetoric of the lettered men on the Continent who watched the comparatively small but destructive bands of barbarian auxiliaries in revolt, with their accompaniment of escaped slaves and local ne'er-do-wells, crossing Gaul and pillaging. If we had no record of the continental troubles but that of some one religious man using a local disaster as the opportunity for a moral discourse, historians could have talked of Gaul exactly as they talk of Britain on the sole authority of St. Gildas. All the exaggeration to which we are used in continental records is here: the "gleaming sword" and the "flame crackling," the "destruction" of cities (which afterward quietly continue an unbroken life!) and all the rest of it. We know perfectly well that on the Continent similar language was used to describe the predatory actions of little bodies of barbarian auxiliaries; actions calamitous and tragic no doubt, but not universal and in no way finally destructive of civilization.

It must not be forgotten that St. Gildas also tells us of the return home of many barbarians with plunder (which is again what we should have expected). But at the end of this account he makes an interesting point which shows that--even if we had nothing but his written record to judge by--the barbarian pirates had got some sort of foothold on the eastern coasts of the island.

For after describing how the Romano-British of the province organized themselves under one Ambrosius Aurelia.n.u.s, and stood their ground, he tells us that "sometimes the citizens" (that is, the Roman and civilized men) "sometimes the enemy were successful," down to the thorough defeat of some raiding body or other of the Pagans at an unknown place which he calls "Mons Badonicus." This decisive action, he also tells us, took place in the year of his own birth.

Now the importance of this last point is that Gildas after that date can talk of things which he really knew. Let anyone who reads this page recall a great event contemporary with or nearly following his own birth, and see how different is his knowledge of it from his knowledge of that which came even a few years before. This is so today with all the advantages of full record. How much greater would be the contrasts between things really known and hearsay when there was none!

This defeat of the pagan Pirates at Mt. Badon Gildas calls the last but not the least slaughter of the barbarians; and though he probably wrote in the West of Britain, yet we know certainly from his contemporary evidence _that during the whole of his own lifetime up to the writing of his book_--a matter of some forty-four years--there was no more serious fighting. In other words, we are _certain_ that the little pagan courts settled on the east coast of Britain were balanced by a remaining ma.s.s of declining Roman civilization elsewhere, and that there was no attempt at anything like expansion or conquest from the east westward. For this state of affairs, remember, we have direct contemporary evidence during the whole lifetime of a man and up to within at the most fifty years--perhaps less--from the day when St. Augustine landed in Kent and restored record and letters to the east coast.

We have more rhetoric and more homilies about the "deserted cities and the wickedness of men and the evil life of the Kings;" but that you might hear at any period. All we really get from Gildas is: (1) the confused tradition of a rather heavy predatory raid conducted by barbaric auxiliaries summoned from across the North Sea in true Roman fas.h.i.+on to help a Roman province against uncivilized invaders, Scotch and Irish; (2) (which is most important) the obtaining by these auxiliary troops or their rulers (though in small numbers it is true), of political power over some territory within the island; (3) the early cessation of any racial struggle, or conflict between Christian and Pagan, or between Barbarian and Roman; even of so much as would strike a man living within the small area of Britain, and the confinement of the new little pagan Pirate courts to the east coast during the whole of the first half of the sixth century.

Here let us turn the light of common sense on to these most imperfect, confused and few facts which Gildas gives us. What sort of thing would a middle-aged man, writing in the decline of letters and with nothing but poor and demonstrably distorted verbal records to go by, set down with regard to a piece of warfare, if (a) that man were a monk and a man of peace, (b) his object were obviously not history, but a sermon on morals, and (c) the fighting was between the Catholic Faith, which was all in all to the men of his time, and Pagans? Obviously he would make all he could of the old and terrified legends of the time long before his birth, he would get more precise as his birth approached (though always gloomy and exaggerating the evil), and he would begin to tell us precise facts with regard to the time he could himself remember. Well, all we get from St.

Gildas is the predatory incursions of pagan savages from Scotland and Ireland, long, long before he was born; a small number of auxiliaries called in to help the Roman Provincials against these; the permanent settlement of these auxiliaries in some quarter or other of the island (we know from other evidence that it was the east and southeast coast); and (d) what is of capital importance because it is really contemporary, _the settling down of the whole matter, apparently during Gildas' own lifetime in the sixth century_--from say 500 A.D. or earlier to say 545 or later.

I have devoted so much s.p.a.ce to this one writer, whose record would hardly count in a time where any sufficient historical doc.u.ment existed, because his book is _absolutely the only one contemporary piece of evidence we have upon the pirate, or Saxon, raiding of Britain_. [Footnote: The single sentence in Prosper is insignificant--and what is more, demonstrably false as it stands.] There are interesting fragments about it in the various doc.u.ments known (to us) collectively today as "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle"--but these doc.u.ments were compiled many hundreds of years afterwards and had nothing better to go on than St. Gildas himself and possibly a few vague legends.

Now we happen to have in this connection a doc.u.ment which, though not contemporary must be considered as evidence of a kind. It is sober and full, written by one of the really great men of Catholic and European civilization, written in a spirit of wide judgment and written by a founder of history, the Venerable Bede.

True, the Venerable Bede's _Ecclesiastical History_ was not produced until _three hundred years after_ the first raids of these predatory bands, not until nearly two hundred years after St. Gildas, and not until one hundred and forty years after reading and writing and the full tide of Roman civilization had come back to Eastern Britain with St. Augustine: but certain fundamental statements of his are evidence.

Thus the fact that the Venerable Bede takes for granted permanent pirate settlements (established as regular, if small, states), all the way along the North Sea coast from the northern part of Britain in which he wrote, brought down to the central south by Southampton Water, is a powerful or rather a conclusive argument in favor of the existence of such states some time before he wrote. It is not credible that a man of this weight would write as he does without solid tradition behind him; and he tells us that the settlers on this coast of Britain came from three lowland Frisian tribes, German and Danish, called Saxons, Jutes and Angles.

The first name "Saxon" was _at that time_ the name of certain pirates inhabiting two or three small islands on the coasts between the Elbe and the Rhone. [Footnote: The name has retained a vague significance for centuries and Is now attached to a population largely Slavonic and wholly Protestant, south of Berlin--hundred of miles from its original seat.]

Ptolemy puts these "Saxons" two hundred years earlier, just beyond the mouth of the Elbe; the Romans knew them as scattered pirates in the North Sea, irritating the coasts of Gaul and Britain for generations. The name later spread to a large island confederation: but that was the way with German tribal names. The German tribal names do not stand for fixed races or even provinces, but for chance agglomerations which suddenly rise and as suddenly disappear. The local term, "Saxon," in the fifth and sixth century had nothing to do with the general term, "Saxon," applied to all northwest of the Germanies two hundred years and more afterwards. These pirates then provided small bands of fighting men under chieftains who founded small organized governments north of the Thames Estuary, at the head of Southampton Water, and on the Suss.e.x coast, when they may or may not have found (but more probably _did_ find) existing settlements of their own people already established as colonies by the Romans. The chiefs very probably captured the Roman fiscal organization of the place, but seem rapidly to have degraded society by their barbaric incompetence. They learnt no new language, but continued to talk that of their original seat on the Continent, which language was split up into a number of local dialects, each of which was a mixture of original German and adopted Greek, Latin and even Celtic words.