Well, if you're going to take credit for Gothic churches, you have to embrace the Malleus Maleficarum.

Be my guest.

Why wouldn't we?

Harry, why must we always play this game? Can we Christian not reply to your taunt by simply saying to the materialist: "Well, if you're going to take credit for modern science, you have to embrace the gas chamber?"

At least the Inquisitors believed in individual guilt -- rather than guilt by class or race like our materialist energumens.

What is this? Be kind to Inquisitors month?

Month? There's never a bad time to be pro-Inquisition.

And what might Dr. Judd opine?

The good Doctor has more than a little Torquemada in her.

Harry: So long as they were getting witches, I'm no more aghast at The Witch's Halberd (a better translation of Malleus for the times, to my mind) than I am at the modern death penalty. But then again, I'm a bloodthirsty Papist.

I have long thought that the narrative of Greece, Rome, then Europe was more a mythology than an analysis.

Real connection must be found in institutions. The Roman Church and its monastic orders connect the late Roman Empire to Western Europe, but the other institutions that make up European (and its offspring American) civilization were created in the "Middle Ages." The municipalities, universities, law courts, parliments and other institutions that are the fabric of our civilization began in the Middle Ages.

The study of Classical literature did not begin in the renaisance, it began with the study of the Roman Civil Law in the 11th century and the study of Aristotle in the 12th century. But these highlight my point. When these studies began there was no institutional connection between them and their original Authors. Aristotle's Lyceum was closed and its faculty dispersed in the 6th century. The Roman Law fell into desuetude in the Eastern Empire after its Hellinization in the reign of Heraclius (610-41). The revival was purely a litterary affair. There was no institutional connection between the Roman Legal System and the European systems based on the ancient texts. Compare this to the living chain that connects lawyers in the United States with the Inns of the Court and Fleeta and Glanville.

For more information on the importance of the Middle Ages to the Modern world read: Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century by Norman F. Cantor

I should note that the Spanish Inquisition cannot be taxed to the Middle Ages. It began in 1480 at the time of the reconquesta, the discovery of the New World and the Rennaisance.

BTW is Malleus Maleficarum worse than Das Kapital or Mein Kampf?

Everyone, repeat after me: there are no such things as witches, there are no such things as witches,...

That progression from the Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages is exhaustingly chronicled as a fictional transition in Jack Whyte's "The Camulod Chronicles." I'm now engaged in reading book five of seven each of which has averaged over 400 pages. Thanks to you for the continuing distraction that your review engaged me in reading.

It is evident from the article that much of the slander directed at the Middle Ages was generated by the instigators of the Protestant Reformation and directed at the institutions of feudalism and the Catholic Church. No doubt that many of our institutions can trace their development to this era, but it was the sharp break with that world, through the Reformation and Enlightenment, that shaped the world of individual freedom and liberty that we enjoy today. It is easy from today's distant vantage point to look at it's good sides, since we are in no danger of slipping back into a feudal system. But before you get too cozy in your nostalgia for this era, read "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman. Much of the reputation for barbarism was well earned.

Tuchman's no less an axe-grinder.

Robert:

Put Wicca or "The Burning Times" in your Google engine and then say that.

And even Tuchman the "ax-grinder" has plenty of praise for the Middle Ages.

The idea that there has to be an institutional connection to be a real one would not have been accepted by the medievals themselves. They had no institution connection with Aristotle, did they? Yet they all thought of themselves as Aristotelians.

While I'm a mild admirer of Cantor's, I think you misstate his views. Certainly the law courts and parliaments were not creations of the Middle Ages. The law courts, as I pointed out here a while back, were not even predominantly Judeo-Christian. The whole concept of fines was pagan; you won't find it in the Bible.

The so-called Dark Ages were a period during which the Christian religion and the Roman law became universalized--or nearly so--in the West. That's an awesome feat for the time and it's hardly surprising it took awhile. Fines came with Roman Law, if nothing else. You'll recall, Harry, that the New Testament is set in the Empire.

Nonetheless, object (and monetary) restitution does exist in the Old Testament, sometimes several-fold.

Which, I guess, if not a fine, per se, is a step in that direction.

(As well, there existed the idea of the sin-offering, in various formats.)

If we take the heyday of Christianity, when it had the field to itself, as from about 400 to 1600, I can think of about 5 important innovations:

1. the heavy moldboard plow
2. rye
3. the pointed arch and rib vault
4. the credit facilities developed in many forms, mostly in Italy
5. the sternpost rudder (possibly not a true innovation but an independent invention preceded in Asia)

That's about it. To credit the Middle Ages for inventing universities is perverse. There were pagan universities, but the Christians burned them and killed the professors. Talk about reinventing the wheel!

Maybe so, Barry, but not in the context of formal legalism. There isn't even an entry for fine in Smith's Bible Dictionary. Our legal system is largely pagan, with some Jewish elements.

Our legal system is largely pagan, with some Jewish elements.

I thought you were arguing that it wasn't Christian.

The nation state, Christendom, representative governments, capitalism, protestantism, mass publishing...

Yes, David, if it's largely pagan with some Jewish elements, then it is only modestly Christian.

There were two lines of legal development in the Middle Ages, civil law and canon law. Canon law was, one supposes, the more Christian of the two. I don't think anybody's going to want to take credit for it, though.

Orrin, you can hardly count Christendom as an innovation of Christendom. That's putting the cart before the horse.

Representative government is pagan, mass publishing is Asian. Capitalism is pagan.

I'll give you Protestantism. The nation-state, as currently evolved, is more ascribable to the enlightenment and Renaissance. The Middle Ages version, with strong kings ruling more or less homogeneous societies, predates Christianity.

I think Christians can claim the representative republic (Venice), though it developed more in opposition to the culture of the times than with it.

Christianity created Christendom--the idea of a community of all believers. It's a rambunctious one, obviously, but has held together fairly well and achieved incredibly as a whole.

We would still be in the middle ages without the printing press. And the printing press would be unworkable with a pictograph-based language.

Christianity made its contributions, but the Church would have maintained its stranglehold on society absent the alphabet.

What did they need the press for?

The church did not need it, in fact would have been happy to have strangled it. People of faith needed it to exchange ideas on spirituality.

Hard to believe there would have been a Puritan movement without printed books.

The printing press marks a divide in religious outlook between general and ritualized (especially Marian) pre-Gutenberg and individual and analytical after.

No press, no Jonathan Edwards. He could not possibly have existed in a bookless society.

I'm not saying he was a good thing. There wouldn't be near as many lawyers today without printing, either.

Bingo! Bibles.

Yes, the Church hated those.

But Christians gobbled them up.

There you go, proving my point again that even if there is such a thing as Truth, it is impossible to know what it is.

Besides, although I don't dispute the importance of the printed Bible, I was thinking about the huge volume of introspective spiritual inventorying that was created by printing.

Evidently the Bible is not enough, as thousands and thousands of these books still get published every year. The total of titles by now must be in the millions.

Enough? We're still as ignorant as ever. We're only human.

Harry:

The technological theory is Lynn White. It really kind of a non-Communist Marxism and explains a lot less than its proponents claim.

I was not reflecting Cantors views. I was citing him as a pro-medieval author. I am compleltely puzzeled by your assertion about parlaments and courts.

Parliements as we know them were created in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. The Classical world did not, IIRC, have any notion of an assembely of representatives. Although the Icelandic Alding claims a longer history, the true mother of parlaments still sits in London.

Ditto Courts and the law. Both canon and civil law owe their origins to the study of Roman law that began in the Universities in the Middle Ages. The pagan christian distinction is not meaningful here. The Roman Law had been incrementally christianized since the reign of Theodosius I (379-395) and was codified in the thoughouly christian reign of Justinian (527-565).

OJ:

One thing that you need to remember is that by the end of the Western Empire Northwestern europe was pretty thoughoughly depopulated. The growth of European civilization from the 10th century on is largely a story of expanding into empty lands and building new cities and new institutions.

Robert, the impulse behind the parliaments seems to have been Germanic and pagan. I agree its development took in other threads, but I note that Christianity did not produce representative institutions anywhere else.

Similarly with law. The Roman law that was adopted was originally pagan, elaborated it is true by Christians, but elaboration is not innovation. Fines, the central concept of most of our law's enforcement theory, were another Germanic and pagan idea.

Harry:

I think we are talking about different things. What I reponded to was OJ's claim for the creativity, vitality and importance of the Middle Ages. I agreed with OJ on that point and further advanced the thesis that when you look at the institutions (which are the structure of any society), of European Civilization they are, for the most part, products of the Middle Ages.

They are not products of the Clasical era, even though in some cases they have Classical texts as their foundations.

Allow me another example. Modern European and western armies grew out of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Read McNeil and Keagan. Prince Maurice of Orange is a pivotal figure of the 16th Century. He and his contemporaries had studied the classical texts on warfare, but the introduction of firearms and cannons had changed many of the terms of the equation. Furthermore, no soldiers who had learned their trade from the Roman centurions were available. They created the new Model Army out of the materials available to them.

Those institutions of the modern army were spread by officers and non-comms, who learned them from men like Maurice, across the western world. The US army like many others arose from those soldiers and their instituions. The new Iraqi army is being created by the US army in its image, and even though armies have criss crossed the land between the rivers for 7,000 years, the new Iraqi army will look to Maurice of Orange as its foundation and not Alexander the Great, Trajan, Hulagu Khan, Baybars or many others who conquered there.

As for whether things are pagan or Christian, I think it is a waste of time to ask. The non-Jewish elements of Christianity must have come from some where, so we could say that they are pagan. But so what. The Church is vastly more than the synagouge. Those elements come from Roman statecraft. Does that make the Church pagan?

Again the Corpus Juris Civilis was based on pagan antecedents and not on Jewish traditions, that is clear. But, it was written by Christians and in Medieval Europe, studied and reinterpreted by Christians and so it must be deemed to be part of Christian Europe eventhough it is not a theological text.