The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [7]
Augustine combined these views with the teachings of the Scriptures in a book called The City of God. This work, which offered a complete set of rules for living and an integrated structure for Christian society, was to influence Christian thinking for a thousand years. It showed how, since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, there had been two ‘cities’ in human society, one allied to God, the other to Satan. These had taken the form of Church and state. Augustine believed that Rome had fallen because the Christian Church had been subservient to a pagan secular authority. He advocated the opposite: that the state should obey the moral authority of the Church.
Even as he wrote, the Vandals were crossing from Gibraltar to destroy Carthage and bring the end of Roman rule in Africa. Augustine offered escape to a spiritual life in the monasteries. If the world was not worth study, deserting it for a life of contemplation could only be for the good. Belief was more important than earthly knowledge. Credo ut intelligam (understanding comes only through belief) was the creed which would see the monasteries through the Dark Ages that lay ahead.
The reaction of the Carthaginian proconsul Martianus Capella to the fall of Rome was more pragmatic. He saw that the expansive, public life of the Empire was gone for good. If the Romans were to survive at all, it would be in a very different world,with everything on a much smaller scale.Without the centralising influence of Rome, the Empire would be fragmented into tiny states and cities that would have to exist autonomously on limited resources. They would need condensed forms of Roman knowledge to help them.
A medieval manuscript miniature exalts the great book, St Augustine’s City of God, held by its author, who is shown reading from it to the listening community of the faithful.
Such a condensation was Capella’s packaged version, in nine volumes, of the imperial school curriculum. That course had been divided into two sections, the first of which contained all the rules for the teaching of the primary subjects of rhetoric, grammar and argument. These had been the staple of early instruction in an expanding Roman imperialist society with a need to win over conquered tribes with oratory, teach them Latin, and formulate complex legislation to hold everything together.
To these three early subjects Capella added four more from the Empire’s later years. As Rome grew it had become necessary to expand the school curriculum with more practical subjects relevant to the day to day organisation of sophisticated urban life. Music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy were added. These subjects formed the advanced studies. Capella’s book detailed these seven subjects, which were known as the seven liberal arts, together with an encyclopedic anthology of all the facts relating to them. His work was to become standard reference for education for the next six centuries.
As the monastic communities spread northwards in the seventh century, they took Capella’s book with them into a world very different from Carthage in its splendid decay. Dark Age Europe was a land of darkness indeed, of almost impenetrable woods in which roamed wild animals: boar, bear, wolves and men too violent to live in the tiny clusters of huts scattered through the forest. Roman administration had been replaced by small kingdoms of barbarians, but their writ did not extend far beyond the bounds of their encampments among the ruined cities. They lived as isolated as did the forest communities.
A ninth-century Anglo-Saxon silver brooch. Note the simple, distorted animal and human figures, and the primitive, geometric views of nature. The centre is dominated by the ever-present heavenly figure.
A pen drawing from the margin of a twelfth-century psalter. Women are shown shearing sheep, spinning the