In Honor of Trinity Sunday

Yesterday was Trinity Sunday, and the Athanasian Creed was read. Now as has long been known, the Athanasian Creed was not actually written by St. Athanasius (AD 293-373). Actually it probably first was used in Gaul around AD 500.

Gaul? AD 500? As you may have guessed, then, it has something to do with Gregory of Tours and his History of the Franks. He does not mention the creed itself, but he illustrates the environment in which it was made. The Franks made their mark in post-Roman history by converting to Orthodoxy/Catholicism. Based around modern Paris, their king Clovis then used that orthodox catholic confession to win support from the Gallo-Roman elite for driving out from southern France the Gothic kings of Spain who professed the Arian faith. So Gregory of Tours was a supporter, at least nominally, of the Catholic and Orthodox Frankish kings against the Arian Gothic kings based in Spain. Arianism may have been kaput among the Latin speaking populations of the West, but among the new barbarian monarchs and their supporters among the native Latins it was still a going concern.

Gregory records a number of theological debates, including one with an Arian and another with a Frankish king who had a new "compromise" position. Here is one debate, in honor of Trinity Sunday:

As envoy to Chilperic [a Frankish king], King Leuvigild [of Spain, a Goth] sent Agilan, a man of low intelligence, untrained in logical argument, but distinguished by his hatred of our Catholic faith. Tours was on his route and he took advantage of this to attack me [i.e. Gregory, as the bishop of Tours] concerning my beliefs and to assail the dogmas of the Church.

"The bishops of the early Church made a foolish pronouncement," he said, "when they asserted that the Son was equal to the Father. How can He be equal to the Father, when He says: My Father is greater than I? It is not right that the Son should be considered equal to he Father when He Himself admits that He is less, when it is to the Father that He complains about the miserable manner of His death, when at the very moment of His death He commends His spirit to the Father, as if He Himself were completely powerless. Surely it is quite obvious that He is less than the Father, both in power and in age!"

In reply to this, I asked him if he believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and if he admitted that He was the wisdom of God, the light, the truth, the life, the justice of God. Agilan answered, "I believe that the Son of God was all those things."

Then I said: "Tell me now, when was the Father without wisdom? When was He without light, without life, without truth, without justice? Just as the Father could not exist without these things, so He could not exist without the Son. These attributes are absolutely essential to the mystery of the Godhead. Similarly the Father could hardly be called the Father if He had no Son. When you quote the Son as having said: My Father is greater than I, you must know that He said this in the lowliness of the flesh, which He had assumed so that He might teach you that you were redeemed not by His power but by His humility. You must also remember, when you quote the words, My Father is greater than I, that He also says in another place, I and my Father are one. His fear of death and the fact that He commended His spirit are a reference to the weakness of the flesh, so that, just as He is believed to be very God, so may He be believed to be very man."

Agilan answered, "He who does what another commands is less than the other; the Son is always less than the Father because He does the will of the Father, whereas there is no proof that the Father does the will of the Son."

"You must not understand," I replied, "that the Father is the Son and that the Son is in the Father, each subsisting in one Godhead. If you want proof that the Father does the will of the Son, consider what our Lord Jesus Christ says when He comes to raise Lazarus
-- that is, if you have any faith in the Gospel at all: Father I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I know that thou hearest me always, but because of the people which by I said it, that they may believe that thou has sent me. When He comes to His Passion, He says: And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. Then the Father replies from Heaven: I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. Therefore the Son is equal to the Godhead, and not inferior in anything else. If you admit that the Son is God, you must agree that He is perfect and that He lacks nothing. If you deny that He is perfect, then you do not admit that He is God."

Agilan answered: "It was after He was made man that He began to be called the Son of God; there was a time when He was not."

"Listen to David speaking in the name of the Lord," I replied, "Out of the womb have I borne thee, before the morning star.* John the Evangelist says: In the beginning was the Words, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, by whom all things were made. You are so blinded by your poisonous heresy that you do not understand the Godhead."

Agilan answered: "Do you believe that the Holy Ghost is God and do you maintain that He is equal to the Father and the Son?"

"In the Three there is one will, one power, one action," I replied, "one God in Trinity and three Persons in unity. There are three Persons, but one kingdom, one majesty, one power, one omnipotence."

Agilan answered: "The Holy Ghost, who is equal to the Father and the Son, according to you, is clearly less than either, for we read that He was promised by the Son and sent by the Father. No one promises anything which is not in his power, and no one sends any person who is not his own inferior. Jesus himself says in the Gospel: If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you."

I replied, "The Son does well to say before His Passion that if He does not return in victory to His Father, having redeemed the world with His own blood and having prepared a habitation in the heart of man, the Holy Ghost, which is God, cannot come down from Heaven into a heart which is idolatrous and spotted with the stain of original sin. As Solomon says: The Holy Ghost will flee deceit.** As you hope for resurrection, do not speak against the Holy Ghost. As the Word of God puts it: Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

Agilan answered, "God is He who sends; he who is sent is not God."

Then I asked him if he believed the doctrine of the Apostles Peter and Paul.

He answered: "I do believe."

"When the Apostle Peter accuses Ananias of behaving fraudulently over the field which he sold," I replied, "he asks: Why hath it seemed good to thee to lie to the Holy Ghost? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. When Paul is differentiating between the dogmas of spiritual graces, he says, But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to each man severally as he will. The man who achieves what he has set out to do is under an obligation to no one. [i.e. if the Holy Ghost has the freedom to distribute spiritual gifts as He wills, then he is not under obligation to the Father or Son.] As I have said already, you are absolutely wrong about the Holy Trinity and, what is more, the way your founder, Arius, met his end shows just how perverse and wicked your sect is."

Agilan answered, "You must not blaspheme against a faith which you yourself do not accept. You notice that we who do not believe the things which you believe nevertheless do not blaspheme against them. It is no crime for one set of people to believe in one doctrine and anotehr set of people to believe in another. Indeed, it is a proverbial saying with us that no harm is done when a man whose affairs take him past the altars of the Gentiles and the Church of God pays respect to both."

I realized what a fool the man was. "You are, I perceive," said I, "at once a defender of the Gentiles and a champion of the heretics. You not only defile the dogmas of the Church, but you also advocate the worship of pagan abominations. You would do much better to arm yourself with the faith which Abraham found near the oak tree, Isaac in the ram, Jacob in the stone, and Moses in the bush; the faith which Aaron wor in the ephod, which David knew when he danced with the timbrel, and which Solomon proclaimed by his wisdom; the faith which all the patriarchs and prophets, and the very Law itself, have celebrated in their oracular pronouncements and represented symbolically in their sacrifices; the faith which our own Martin, as is witnessed still today, possesses in his heart and manifests in his miraculous power. If you were converted to Catholicism, you would believe in the indivisible Trinity, you would be able to receive my blessing, your heart would be cleansed of the poison of false belief, and your sins would be washed away."

Agilan lost his temper and ground his teeth, almost as if he was going off his head. "May my soul leave the confines of my body," he muttered, "before I ever receive a benediction from a priest of your religion!"

"May the Lord never permit my religion or faith to grow so tepid," I answered, "that I waste His blessing upon dogs, or cast the sacredness of His precious pearls before filthy swine!"

At this Agilan gave up the discussion, rose to his feet, and marched out.

Some time later, when he was back again in Spain, he fell seriously ill: as a result he felt a compulsion to accept conversion to our religion (pp. 307-310).

This last note is crucial to understanding Gregory's point. What convinces heretics? The Bible? No, because even though all our arguments are based firmly on the Bible, the heretics are blinded and like Agilan will not listen to truth. What convinces heretics is Pentecostal power -- the direct and miraculous intervention of God. Arius seems wrong according to the Scriptures, but what really makes the case decisive is that how he died: his guts spilled out his anus in the lavatory (p. 135). He must be a heretic! After Agilan hears and denies all the arguments, he gets sick and has to believe. That is why of the witnesses of the Trinity, it is St. Martin who is placed in the last and best place: his miracle-working power is alive as Gregory speaks, through the relics in his church.

*An alternative reading from Psalm 110.
**In the Wisdom of Solomon, a deutero-canonical work.

Gregory of Tours: Historian with the Pentecostal Problem

I have begun reading Gregory, Bishop of Tours (AD 536-594), known generally for his History of the Franks. Fortunately, however, I am also reading Walter Goffart's Narrators of Barbarian History (ah, now you see the connection to the Mongol empire), which puts the work much more effectively in context than the translation's introduction. Goffart points out that as it left Gregory's pen, the work was titled simply "The Histories" and was not particularly focused on the Franks. Nor was his intended audience Franks, but rather the Gallo-Romans of what is now central and southern France. I'll probably blog a few parts of it later, but I'd like to blog some of Goffart's introductory comments, where he uses Gregory's other works to define his position and aims as an author and Christian.

Its [i.e. Gregory's "The Course of the Stars"] wider interest stems from Gregory's disproportionately long introductory paragraphs about the Seven Wonders of the World, commentaries that enjoyed a small medieval circulation apart from the treatise they head. Here . . . Gregory is concerned with miracula "wonders," as distinct from more individualized virtutes, "miracles," worked by God through saints and their relics. Gregory sets out a straightforward argument: philosophers, in their learned leisure, have singled out seven miracula "as more marvellous than others"; they include Noah's Ark and Solomon's Temple as well as classical splendors, such as the Colossus of Rhodes, the Theater at Heraclea, and the Pharos [lighthouse] of Alexandria; these wonders, even if some were built pursuant to God's command, were "none the less established by men" and therefore have perished or are subject to destruction; there are other wonders, however, that come directly from God, "which in no age grow old, by no accident fall, by no loss are diminished, except when the Maker shall have ordained that the universe be destroyed"; these are

the tides,
the annual fruitfulness,
the phoenix,
Mt. Etna,
the springs of Grenoble,
the sun, and
the moon and stars.

. . . Before detailing the reckoning of time from the stars, he wished to remind readers emphatically that stellar motion, like the tides and courses of the sun proceeds from God and is not an inevitable operation of nature (pp. 131-32).

Regardless of the distinctions pre-Christian sages might make, [in Gregory's view] ostensibly ordinary and regular operations of nature did not differ from sudden, arbitrary acts of divine power; a continuum existed between expected and unexpected aspects of God's providential rule; and these facts dissolved human pretensions to wisdom and proved them vain. Opennness to wonders was the true and only science offering men liberation from the death-bringing life they endured.

In this perspective one should not expect the eight books of Miracula to be a record of amazing happenings . . . To grade wonders by degree of supernaturalness hardly concerned Gregory; his object, rather, was to multiply them; "no [ecclesiastical author] has related more miracles than Gregory of Tours." One basis for disbelief had always been that miracles were a thing of the past, richly documented in the Gospels but vanished from the world of everyday experience. The whole thrust of Gregory's Wonders is to illustrate the ordinariness of the miraculous, available today, near at hand, in the most commonplace objects. Far from wishing to stake out a monopoly for [the miracles done by the relics of] his own St. Martin of tours, his narrative celebrate a host of saints, great and small, ancient and modern, and portray the dissemination through every part of Gaul of their holy graves and powerful, wonder-working relics. Gregory himself, who laid no claims to special merit, details personal experiences of the miraculous at every stage of his life and thrusts himself forward as a leading witness to divine generosity. Unlike the miser's hoarded treasure, the riches of heaven were profusely poured out upon humanity, only to be reached for in order to be grasped. Both the Martyrs and the Confessor close with tales of avarice, the message of each book underscored by its contrary (pp. 134-35).

Gregory's determination to multiply the holy is nowhere more apparent than in his positive and uncritical approach to authentication. In the famous foruth-century Life of St. Martin by Suplicius Severus, the first miracle that the saint performs after becoming bishop of Tourse involves the discrediting of a false cult; the people venerated a tomb, thinking its occupant to be a martyr, but Martin summoned up the dead man's spirit and made him confess that he was only an executed robber. Much as Gregory loved the patron of his see, this example went unheeded in his Wonders. . . . St. Martin himself, in his only personal appearances in Gregory's Confessors, calls forth a bishop and religious lady from their graves, lending his prestige to the certification of their holiness and animating their cult. The episcopal authority Gregory wielded, far from being exercised to restrain popular devotion, stoked the delicate flames of belief by increasing the objects of reverence (p. 135).

. . . He may have known that popular piety discriminated among holy objects, just as it preferred martyrs with passion narratives to those without; but Gregory gave no encouragement to such fastidiousness. Where relics were concerned, anything would do: a little dust, a shred of bark, oil from a lamp, wax from a candle, a bit of rope (p. 135) . . . . Early chapters of the Confessors successively celebrate miracles by a stone on which St. Martin sat, a tree that he moved, a chapel at which he prayed, oil from a lamp at his tomb, a grape from a vine that he planted, and a modern apparition of his close to Langes. . . . . (p. 136).

Gregory's lack of discrimination vis-a-vis miracles and relics is consistent with his view that the tides and heavenly bodies were directly and continually actuated by God, not just set in motion at the Creation. Properly, that is, uncritically understood, sudden miraculous events were hardly less frequent or common than the predictable happenings that philosophers called natural phenomena. The ubiquity of miracles is not an idea incidentally reflected in the Wonders. It is the work's central teaching, an unstated lesson conveyed by sheer repetition (p. 136).

As Goffart points out, the usual interpretation is to see this as the result of the age's credulity. Gregory was an able man, but the superstition and credulity of the age infected him as it had everyone else. But Goffart shows that this is not plausible. Gregory's works were directed at an audience which was actually full of skepticism and shrewd common sense, who found it hard to believe or benefit from (as he admits is true for himself as well) from the words of Scripture. Words on a page don't convince, because nobody believes what's written in books. Only what appears before your very eyes, right now, can be believed. And that desire certainty only miracles, especially posthumous miracles, performed by a relic, can give.

As reflected in Gregory's works, his contemporaries in all walks of life credulous and uncritical, but they were also guided by practical common sense. They knew that, as a rule, nothing untoward occurred when one committed perjury, seized church property, oppressed the poor, worked on Sundays, or otherwise offended against divine precepts. To them, as to us, the absence of a thunderbolt from heaven, smiting the offender, was as predictable as tomorrow's sunrise. That comfortable certainty was precisely what Gregory sought to counteract. In opposition to the view of a predictably indifferent nature, operating as it was bound to do, he did not conjure up a contrary philosophy. Their basis was philosophy; his was history -- the evidence, preferably of an eyewitness, recording the multitudinous factual moments when, in defiance of human wisdom and alleged natural necessity, the unexpected occurred (p. 137).

It comes as a surprise to anyone reared on the idea that Merovingian Gaul [i.e. AD 500-750] marks a low point in humane letter that Gregory should still have considered it timely to place himself at the service of Christianity in its combat with the allurements of classical culture. Yet the first preface of the Wonders -- that to the Martyrs -- invokes the locus classicus of Jerome's repudiation of Cicero, amplified in Gregory's rendition into "the clever arguments of Cicero and the false tales of Virgil" (p. 137).

The pastorate he undertook to exercise through his writings could hardly have been directed elsewhere than among the educated, Roman-descended, and hereditarily Christian elements of the Frankish kingdom. The palpable events they were being invited to contemplate were mainly those occurring in their own neighborhood. Addressed to such ears, the [cautionary] tale of Jerome's attachment to classical letters was not wholly anachronistic. Neither were Gregory's efforts to combat "philosophy" (p. 138).

Gregory's miracle stories have three characteristics: 1) they are in his lifetime; 2) they are simply presented one after another; and 3) they make no attempt to hold up the saints as models of conduct. Why?

His reason for appealing to the span of living memory is set ou in the preface to the first book about St. Martin: "The miracles that the Lord our God [performed through] St. Martin in the flesh He now deigns to confirm daily to strengthen the belief of the faithful . . . . Therefore let no one doubt past miracles when he beholds the gift of present signs given forth, since he sees the lame made straight, the blind given sight, etc." (p. 139). . . . The Incarnation was an academic notion if located in the days of Caesar Augustus; it was credible if the miracle of the Word taking flesh occurred repeatedly in the present (pp. 139-40).
Even when connections are obvious, as in the five chapters of Martyrs featuring Arian heretics, Gregory simply runs on from one episode to the next. He plainly asserts that sheer quantity will have greater impact than any verbal at persuasion, such as a thread of argument woven through a more compact whole; as he puts it, the eloquence he lacks will be compensated for by "the very accumulation of numerous miracles" (p. 140).

The lesson of recent miracles was one of deeds, not words. For words in books were futile, incapable of convincing or of occasioning changes in conduct. Gregory claims to have personally experienced their impotence. Tutored by the priest Avitus at Clermont, he had bent over the Scriptures, but "they did not bring me to discernment . . . because I am unable to heed them." If words could move, and not just entertain, men would be living by the Gospel, as they manifestly were not (p. 140) . . . . The verbal recreation of forgotten examples of conduct was a pointless exercise among men possessing rich stores of skepticism (p. 141).

"Therefore because those things which St. Illidius carried out [while alive] before this time [=the present] have, we believe, been forgotten and not come to our knowledge, we shall set out those [miracles done by his relics] which we have experienced by the witness of our own eyes or have learned were perceived by faithful men." Gregory's time frame was very narrow. The past beyond the observer's memory was as good as lost . . . but within what was left, there were were . . . affirmation of divine power that were apprehensible to the sense. And such facts were anything but rare (p. 142).

Goffart points out how both Gregory of Tours and his more or less contemporary Pope Gregory the Great were dealing with the legacy of attacks on the smooth language of the pagan philosophers. Gregory the Great used the analogy of the cave like Plato, but unlike Plato, it was not philosophy that brought to mind the truths beyond the sense but willingness to belief some concrete message.

For both Gregories, however, there remained the grave pastoral problem of how to penetrate the skepticism and doubt of their congregations, of how to overcome the understandable reluctance of men to grasp anything except visible experience. It was very well for divine revelation to be the source of truth, but how else was that revelation to be communicated if not through books? The point of departure for Pope Gregory's allegory [of the cave] is that the Scriptures and Christian letters are unconvincing. Men hear what they say about heaven, but the readings remain mere talk, at best conveying what others, but not the listeners, have experienced (p. 144).

. . . . The foundation of humanistic culture had been the faith [Plato] pioneered in the potential of language -- the inherent power of properly constructed verbal sequences to compel assent. Together with many other Christians, Gregory of Tours celebrated the Lord's "destruction of the vanity of worldly wisdom"; but, where the persuasive force of language was concerned the destruction cut both ways . . . In a baptized world, discourse no longer persuaded as it once had. For the language in which Christian truth was clothed was indistinguishable from, and no more credible than, the language in which philosophical "vanities" were expressed. By undermining the instrument it shared with pagan culture, Christianity had, in its triumph, created a population of skeptics. Few witnesses are more forthright than the two Gregories in testifying to the vanished force of properly constructed verbal sequences. Only experience, not words, commanded credence (pp. 144-45).

[Gregory] would set before them the wonders of today. God's free, inexplicable, and unexpected intrusions into daily life, served up "hot off the fire," were Bishop Gregory's challenge to the skepticism of his audience; and history, conceived in the Wonders as an aggregate of such episodes, was the form he gave to his militant anti-intellectualism. . . . Because words on a page were futile, he would turn his back on style and assign persuasiveness to facts (p. 145).

This is the Pentecostal problem -- how to make people who routinely discount all book learning believe a book, even if it is God's book. And this is the Pentecostal solution: make experience of God's miraculous power a daily affair.

How Did a Moustache Come to Mean Tough Guy?

A few brushes in my life with moustaches:

1) I remember while studying in Inner Mongolia, a friend of mine suggesting at one time I just keep a moustache (at the time I had a beard). He then commented "Of course, you'd look a little like a truck driver."

2) Being in New Jersey for the year, I have taken the New Jersey transit a few times to New York and Philly. Now on the trains are adds for "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" showing various hard men doing high-risk, hyper-masculine things around scantily clad young ladies. Funny thing is, those macho men all have moustaches.

And 3) this coin of the Gothic king Theoderic, who ruled Italy in the early 500s. In everything he is a Roman -- note the toga, the winged victory, the whole deal. But as Bryan Ward-Perkins points out there just one funny thing -- that extra bit of hair on his lips. Theoderic had a moustache. In fact, as he points out, only Goths and other assorted Germanic types had moustaches. A few Roman emperors adopted beards, but beards weren't moustaches; beards meant "thoughtful Greek philosopher scornful of artificial conventions and trying to go back to a more authentic way of life", while moustaches meant "Goth." And very often, to the Roman, "Goth" meant "tough guy who likes to cause pain."

Which brings us right back to the "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" ad. Isn't it amazing the way 1500 years later, beards still mean "thoughtful philosopher scornful of artificial conventions and trying to go back to a more authentic way of life," moustaches (at least certain kinds) still mean "tough guy who likes to cause pain," and no beard at all means either "all business, no nonsense" or else just "does what everyone else does conformist." (Of course Theoderic's toothbrush style moustache kind of says "dweeb," but leave that aside -- the bigger point stands.)

As I said in a previous post, I see a lot of parallels between the clashing conservative-liberal ethics of today and the clashing knight-clerk ethics of the Middle Ages. And of course to some degree the knight-clerk distinction tracks the Germanic warrior ruling class and the Roman civilian class distinction of the Dark Ages. So how much of our contrasting views of liberal and conservatives go back to resentful semi-vegetarian Mediterranean civilians writing books about how they hate being ruled by boorish, gloriously carnivorous, mustachioed, Germanic fighters?

Some New Results in Economic History

Been reading, for comparative purposes, two histories of the fall of the West Roman Empire, one by Peter Heather and the other by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Both are very readable and (I think) solidly reliable pieces of history writing, over-all. Heather is more comprehensive, aiming to tell the whole story, while Ward-Perkins is out to prove a point, that the fall of the West Roman Empire really was a disaster for all concerned. Cool factoid: sixth-seventh Anglo-Saxon Britain actually lost the art of the potter's wheel; Ward-Perkins estimates that the Anglo-Saxons threw Britain back to a level of technology not just lower than the Romans, but lower than that of the prehistoric Iron Age, all the way back to the Bronze Age. The Slavs did pretty much the same to the southern Balkans and Aegean in the seventh-eighth century.

As a set of notes to myself, I'd like to sketch out a few things that I've gleaned from my reading in the above books, in David Hackett Fischer's Great Wave, and Jack Goldstone's piece in this edited volume on China, and other works. What I like about these things is that they can be stated very clearly and succinctly. Popular view of socio-economic history changes slowly. There are lots of views which are the common property of educated persons the world over which are just plain wrong. Usually, they have to do with economic history, since the progress in the field has been so recent.

1) The European economy didn't become qualitatively different from the economies of other Eurasian countries until 1815-1830. The Europe of Luther, Rembrandt, Cromwell, or Voltaire was not consistently wealthier than contemporary Turkey, India, or East Asia, nor did it have any inherent dynamism that those economies lacked. The economies of all these regions went through greater and smaller efflorescences that burgeoned in favorable circumstances and with implementation of new efficiencies, but always came to an end when resources when the efficiency gains were played out and population pressure mounted. The Dutch efflorescence of the seventeenth century, for example, ended in a decline in both top-end wealth and overall productivity in the eighteenth. Sometimes, these declines became Eurasia wide: 1350-1400, 1620-1660, and 1810-1825 were such times of collapse (of varying degrees of severity) from England to China.

But from around 1815-1830, a qualitatively new type of economic growth began around the North Atlantic. By continuously applying science to production for the first time, this new economy produced growth which was not an efflorescence but a cumulative and (so far) unending process. To exaggerate just a bit: economically speaking, George Washington's world had more in common with Julius Caesar's than with Abraham Lincoln's.

2) Before this era of modern growth, the three periods of highest population density in Western European history were: 1) the fourth century AD -- that is, the late Roman empire from the time of Constantine to Theodosius, 2) the early 14th century, that is medieval Europe at the time of the Mongol empire and just before the Black Death; and 3) the 18th century.

Yes, you read that first one right. Archeology has demonstrated that the Roman empire of superstitious, Christian, and philosopher-bashing Constantine and Theodosius was unquestionable richer overall and with a level of mass comfort higher than the nobly pagan Roman empire of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Christians to the lions. Unfortunately, with a series of cascading events, this flourishing Christian empire came to an end in the fifth century with the "barbarian invasions." Historians have shown that the new Germanic kings, with a few notorious exceptions (see Anglo-Saxons above) wanted to preserve the old Roman order, but the archeologists have likewise demonstrated that they couldn't. They just didn't have the unity and skills. Economic decline in the 400s and 500s was slower in France, Spain, North Africa, and Italy than in barbarous England, and probably slowest around the city of Rome itself, but it was steady, and resulted in levels of poverty, depopulation, and technological crudity that by 600-650 was virtually English.

And yes, you read that second one right, too. The period around 1300 saw a population in Western Europe not matched until the eighteenth century. The mid-century collapse -- Black Death, cooling climate, etc. -- has given the fourteenth century a bad name, but it opened as one of the peak efflorescences of European economic history, building on the growth in the thirteenth century (the era of the Gothic cathedrals). It was also a period of tremendous growth in geographical knowledge, especially of Asia, due to the Mongol empire. In some ways -- exploration and military expansion, wealth at the top levels, etc. -- the 1500's recovered the ground lost during the disasters of 1350-1450, but not in basic population and living standards.

So in economic history, the "Middle Ages" is a bogus concept. Some "Middle Ages" really were barbaric and awful, but others were far wealthier, expansionistic and adventurous than the provincial and timid Italian Renaissance.

Although the eighteenth century, as we have been taught an era of prosperity, especially in Britain and China, it was in both cases a prosperity that was of the efflorescence type, which in both cases came to an end in the early nineteenth century. It was not until coming out of the world-wide depression of 1815-1830 that, as I said, you see modern economic growth beginning -- in Britain, but not in China.

3) The idea that over-taxation, over-militarization, and stratification of rich and poor in the 200s and 300s put unbearable strains on the Roman Empire, which then collapsed with the slightest touch from 375 on (the A.H.M. Jones hypothesis) has no merit. The 200s were indeed kind of bad, due to military pressure from a resurgent Iran, and the administration was very different in the 300s than in the 100s, but the empire really did recover and go on to new strengths under Diocletian, Constantine and successors. The whole empire's economy was going strong until 400 or so.

4) The Roman empire wasn't overthrown, the West Roman Empire was overthrown. While the West Roman Empire's economy was falling apart in the 400s and 500s, the East Roman Empire was virtually unaffected. In the early 600s, Avars and Slavs caused a similar Anglo-Saxon-style sudden economic collapse in the Aegean (Greece, the Balkans, western Turkey), but the Levant and Egypt remained unaffected by it. The Arab conquest thus brought the only remaining functioning part of the developed Roman economy under the new Arab empires, and they remained going strong through the 700s.