“EVEN in external things, we see how the life of a people can be transformed by some invention or art or of life that has been borrowed from without, as in the case of the introduction of the horse among the American Indians by the Spaniards.
Far more important, however, is the spread of new forms of thought. It is true that a philosopher like Aristotle, or a religious leader like Mohammed, is the offspring of a particular culture, and could not have appeared in any other land, or at any other period but his own. Nevertheless, the influence of such men far transcends cultural and racial boundaries. It is true that by becoming a Moslem the Negro or the Turk undergoes cultural transformation; a new cultural type arises which is neither that of Moslem Arabia nor that of the native pagan people. But the fact that such a process can occur at all is fatal to the Spenglerian theory of absolutely isolated and unrelated cultural cycles. It readmits the principle of causality and the opportunity for rational analysis which Spengler professes to banish for ever. And even if he denies that such an admixture is a true culture, and relegates the peoples in question to his category of Fellachenvolker—“Fellahin peoples”—can he exclude the factor of alien intellectual influences from the parent culture itself?
Thus, for example, in the dealing with Islam we must not only take account of the culture of the Arabs of Arabia, who created the original Islamic State. There is also the Byzantine-Syro-Egyptian culture which had a vital influence on Islam even before the days of the Abbasids; there is the culture of Khorasan and Trans-Oxiana, mainly Persian, but possibly containing a Bactrian Greek element, and certainly affected by Indian Buddhist influence; finally there are the non-cultured peoples—the Turks, who were for centuries in contact with Persian and Chinese civilization, the Berbers, who had previously been under the influence of the Roman-Hellenistic culture, and last of all the Negroes. All these cultures and peoples brought their contributions to the civilization of mediaeval Islam, so that under the surface uniformity of Arabic language and religion and institutions, an extraordinary process of fermentation and change was taking place.
Again take the apparently much simpler case of our Western European culture. Here we have several peoples, composed of different racial elements, all co-operating in the development of a common culture heritage. The life-cycles of these peoples do not necessarily synchronize, nor do they all come under the influence of the common culture-heritage in the same measure. Italy was in the direct line of the Graeco-Roman tradition which only lightly affected the civilization of the Baltic lands. Yet Herr Spengler takes the view that the whole of our civilization is essentially the work of one people—the Germans. Consequently he begins its life-cycle, not with the Barbarian Invasions, as the parallel of the ancient world would suggest, but in the centuries which produced the Crusades, the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal. This initial error falsifies his whole series of analogies between the ancient and modern cultures. He compares the Athenian democracy to the Bourbons instead of to Renaissance Italy, the age of Alexander to that of Napoleon instead of to the first European expansion in the sixteenth century, and the present age to that of the early Punic wars instead of to the Imperial epoch. Hence the depressing character of his forecast, since he would have us spend the next two centuries in that work of material organization which has actually occupied us for the last two hundred years.
In reality, since our civilization is the work of several peoples it embraces several parallel life-cycles. The most representative of these is no doubt that of the French, which stands mid-way between the early ripening of the Italians and the late maturity of the Germans. Indeed in many respects France has a similar importance to our culture to that which the Hellas possessed for the culture of antiquity. Nevertheless this is but an average standard, and it can only be applied with exactitude to the French portion of the Western European culture-area.
~Christopher Dawson: selected from Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations. (1922; 1929)
[Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880–1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history.]
WE have seen how, during the Dark Ages, the Western Mediterranean had been separated from Christian Europe and had been the centre of a brilliant cultural development derived from the Islamic East. And it was here, rather than in the crusading state of Syria and the Latin Empire of Constantinople, that the East and West came into contact with one another, and the vital process of cultural transmission and adaptation took place.
The process began in Southern Italy, where in the second half of the eleventh century an African monk of Monte Cassino, Constantine, initiated the work of translation, and the school of Salerno became a meeting-place of reek, Arabic and Jewish influences, at least in medical studies. But it was in Spain that the main work of translation took place, above all at Toledo, where the Archbishop, Raymond of Sauvetat (1126-51) established a school of translators which continued its activity through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so that Toledo for a time became equal to Paris and Bologna as a factor in medieval culture. The scholars of Toledo not only translated into Latin the whole Aristotelian corpus in its Arabic form, they also produced versions of the principal works of the great Moslem and Jewish philosophers and men of science: Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Al Battani, Avicenna Ibn Gebirol and Al Ghazali. Finally there were the original thinkers, like Domingo Gonzalez, the Archdeacon of Segovia, who first attempted to make a new synthesis between the philosophy of Avicenna (itself a synthesis of the Aristotelian and Neo-platonic traditions), with the Augustinian tradition of Latin Christianity.
The most striking thing about this movement was its cosmopolitan character. Jews and Arabs and Greeks co-operated with Spaniards and Italians and Englishmen. Already at the beginning of the twelfth century an English scholar, Adelard of Bath, who had been educated in the cathedral schools of Northern France, was travelling in Spain, Southern Italy and the Near East and translating the works of Euclid and the ninth-century mathematicians and astronomers of Central Asia such as Al Khwarizmi and Abu Ma’shar of Balkh. To Adelard and his successors—the Italians Plato of Tivoli and Gerard of Cremona, and the Englishmen Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley and Alfred of Sereschel—this was like the discovery of a new world, and they called on their compatriots to leave their elementary studies and their barren arguments, and set themselves to school with the Arabs and the ancient Greeks who alone possessed the genuine tradition of scientific and philosophic knowledge.
One might well have supposed that the Mohammedan and pagan origins of the new learning would have prevented its acceptance by Western Christendom, but in spite of the opposition of conservatives and the suspicions of the guardians of orthodoxy the new teaching made its way with remarkable rapidity into the rising universities, so that by the middle of the thirteenth century the works of Aristotle were being studied and commented and discussed at Paris and Oxford and Toulouse and Cologne.
At Paris the main effort of the numerous summas and commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard was directed to the interpretation of theology in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics and their mutual integration. At Oxford, on the other hand, under the influence of Robert Grosseteste and the Franciscan school, it was the scientific and mathematical aspects of the new learning that were most studied and gave the school at Oxford its original character.
Finally, the Aristotelian tradition was represented in its purest and most uncompromising form by the teaching of the Spanish Moslem Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 11-26-98), whose works were translated after 1217 by Michael Scot (d. 1232), the court astrologer of Frederick II, and found enthusiastic disciples in Siger of Brabant and his followers in the university of Paris from 1270 to 1280, and at Bologna and Padua in the fourteenth century.
The result if this great influx of new knowledge and new ideas was to provide the universities and the international society of scholars and teachers who frequented them with the materials from which to construct a new intellectual synthesis. The dialecticians were no longer compelled to masticate and remasticate the old scholastic commonplaces. They had at last something solid to get their teeth into. And for a hundred years there was, in consequence, such a development of philosophical studies as the world had not seen since the great age of ancient Greece. The effect on the general culture may be seen in a unique form in the Divina Commedia of Dante, the great literary achievement of the Middle Ages, in which every aspect of life and every facet of personal and historic experience is illuminated by a metaphysical vision of the universe as an intelligible unity. And behind the Divina Commedia there is the work of St. Thomas and St. Albert and a hundred lesser men, all of them devoted to the building up of a great structure of thought in which every aspect of knowledge is co-ordinated and subordinated to the divine science—Theologia—the final transcendent end of every created intelligence.
The great interest in this synthesis is not its logical completeness, for that was to be found already in a rudimentary form in the traditional curriculum of the earlier medieval schools, but rather the way in which the mind of Western Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hellenic science and annexed the alien world of the Moslem thought without losing its spiritual continuity or its specifically religious values. No doubt all this was questioned by later critics of scholasticism, like Luther and his contemporaries who maintained that medieval philosophy had abandoned evangelical truth to follow Aristotle and the vain deceits of human wisdom. But in order to maintain this view they were compelled to push their condemnation further, and to condemn the whole traditions of Western Catholicism right back to the age of the Fathers.
But if we look at the development of Western Christendom as a whole, it is clear that the intellectual synthesis if the thirteenth century was not a contradiction but the crown and completion of centuries of continuous effort to achieve an integration of the religious doctrine of the Christian Church with the intellectual tradition of ancient culture. This aim was already set out in a rudimentary form by the encyclopaedists of the sixth and seventh centuries like Cassiodorus and Boethius and Isidore of Seville, but it was not completely achieved until the thirteenth century with the recovery of the full inheritance of Greek philosophy and science, with the creation of the new intellectual organs of Christendom—the university corporations and the Orders of Friars.
~Christopher Dawson: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Chap. X. ‘The Medieval City: School and University.’
