Second of a seven-part series.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lee Dise is an accomplished trombonist and computer programmer, who also happens to know a great deal about things like philosophy, theology, history and related disciplines. He’s also a born-again Christian and in this multi-installment series appearing each day, starting this week on HillFaith, Lee will offer an insightful and provocative analysis of how we got from where we were to where we are today. 

The fall of Rome is dated sometime around 476 AD — roughly, the year when Rome quit paying its bills — and one could spend weeks enumerating all of the reasons it fell.  As with most grand failures of politics, the disasters precipitating its fall were spawned in the years preceding it.

Some blame it on the widespread acceptance of Christianity.  Others blame it on catastrophic military defeats such as the Battle of Adrianople (378 AD), which began as an inflamed border crisis between the Romans and Goths, and ended with roughly two-thirds of the Roman forces dead.  Still others blame it on the entrenched institution of slavery, which inflamed grievance and bitterness in the hearts of a large percentage of the Empire’s population.

The role and status of the Roman citizen faded away.  Since its days as a Republic, the Roman citizen had been free to own land and travel throughout the realm.  Emperor Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305 AD, put an end to these rights.

He had hoped to restore Rome’s greatness with public works, but this required raising taxes.  He told the tax collectors not just to tax what the farmers produced, but to estimate what they should have produced and tax that as well — like paying extra income taxes on that second job you didn’t actually have.

The resulting tax burdens were too egregious for the farmers, and, because disappointing the Emperor was dangerous, many of them decided to abandon their lands and flee for the provinces.  This was an unforeseen consequence, and the Emperor dealt with it by binding landowners to “the land of their fathers,” turning the act of fleeing into a capital offense.

The farmers could not pay and they could not run.  This forced them to deed their property to rich and politically powerful landlords who could afford the taxes, in return for retaining a right to work the land and keeping a percentage of their yields.  Thus, medieval serfdom was born and outlived the Empire.

Along with individual freedom and personal wealth, so, too, was gone vast knowledge.  All of Rome’s expertise in road construction, bridge building and plumbing?  Gone.  Expertise is a “use it or lose it” proposition.

Also gone was the widespread availability of old Greek manuscripts and the ability to read them.  The information itself survived in seclusion, preserved by monks, but it was not for hundreds more years that they would be rediscovered.

Against this backdrop of institutionalized serfdom and widespread poverty, there were still a few philosophers who left indelible marks in Western history.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy characterizes medieval philosophy as defined, not by hard chronological boundaries, “but as beginning when thinkers first started to measure their philosophical speculations against the requirements of Christian doctrine and as ending when this was no longer the predominant practice.”

As Christians, we might say the same thing in a different way:  Medieval philosophy assumed God is the measure of all things.  Given that God exists, that is the most important fact of all.

Indeed, we can reduce the number of philosophical epochs to three basic epochs:

• Pre-Christian (ancient Greek and early Roman)
• Christian (medieval and Renaissance)
• Post-Christian (Modernist, i.e., Enlightenment or “Age of Reason,” followed an assortment of Postmodernist currents of thought)

The demarcations between the epochs are gradual, not sudden, for that is the way of all generating processes, including degenerating ones.

Augustine (354-430 AD) was perhaps the greatest medieval philosophers.  Though a child of Rome’s dying years, he greatly influenced the later medieval philosophers.

Augustine’s writings provided second-hand glimpses of Plato, whose writings had not yet faded into seclusion.  He also wrote about many theological issues that are still debated today, notably the problem of pain and God’s foreknowledge vs free will.

Other important early medieval philosophers were Boethius (a. 477-524 AD), known for his work on the problem of universals; Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD), known for his ontological proof of God’s existence; and Peter Abelard (1079-1142), one of the first nominalists, philosophers who denied that abstract objects (such as numbers) have a real existence.

These and other early medieval philosophers are still highly respected for their thorough understanding of logic.

By late medieval times, fragments of the dead Roman Empire began to coalesce in different political entities.  The Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire, trapped in a downward spiral of waning influence and military weakness. It stayed alive only through deft diplomacy, clever bribery, and occasional treachery.

North-central Europe became a loose confederation called the Holy Roman Empire (which historians love to deny was in any way, shape, or form either holy, Roman, or an empire).  Rome’s Iberia became Spain once the Muslims were ejected.  Rome’s Gaul became France.  Britannia become England, and eventually Britain.

As these entities sprang into existence, they grew in power.  The Roman Church achieved spiritual prominence and even some degree of political power, as the Vatican ruled much of the Italian peninsula.

Scholars finally freed the ancient Greek writings from their seclusion and their translations traveled far and wide.  Their influence came to affect profoundly both Western philosophy and Christian religion.  However, it also planted the seeds for their incompatibility.

---

Next: Late Medieval Philosophy and the Basic Questions

Previously: 

Sunday – “Christian Belief and the Consequences of Ideas”

Monday – “Western Civilization as Cultural Synthesis.”

---

THREE BIG THINGS YOU CAN DO TODAY TO HELP HILLFAITH