the frontier: empire, europe, the medieval and urban & tribal culture
I suppose that what turns us away from the Middle Ages is the assumption that the church is synonymous with Christianity throughout the period. And, of course, from our perspective, we see the reactive nature of the church, particularly as the Middle Ages transition into the early modernity of the Renaissance, and the church seems to enforce itself as the enemy of our present view. Some have more intimate reasons for antipathy, whether personal or intellectual, but the generic view of those who hold themselves to be enlightened or liberal devolves from this retrospective view of the confrontation, a confrontation that the church seems to hold as somehow a persisting necessity. But the church was always a political entity.
While Bible literacy may not have been a strong point, culturally, outside the framework of the church, what was happening in the ‘secular’ culture as well as within ecclesiastical institutions clearly transcended the dogmatic limitations ultimately enunciated by the church and preserved by petrification since. What is fascinating to me is that a powerful spirituality was at work both outside and inside the church, and this spirituality, in both places commonly challenged or passed beyond the limitations ultimately established by dogma. The Middle Ages – let us say from 800 to 1300 CE – was the period – after the first four centuries of Christian development – of greatest theological ferment, at least, of course, in the western church. But the church did not dictate the spiritual focus. That is, up to the point at which the popes found the political handles to manipulate and control the emergent states, the church itself was the beneficiary of the spiritual focus and intensity of the culture.
We go through a period of minimal record between the last of the Roman emperors, some of whom are northerners, and the emergent culture of the Middle Ages proper. But the religion that emerges looks almost as much like a modified version of European ‘paganism’ as of something ‘purely Christian’ – whatever that might be. While pre-Christian religion may have been brutal, it was obviously serious. ‘Conversion’ was not accidental, and the force of the old religions apparently persisted, so much so, as I say, that ‘Christianity’ in Europe emerges looking like a variant of the seasonal and cyclical indigenous understanding and practice.
All of this undoubtedly involves a range of topics appropriate for later development. But my concern here is as much social and historical as theological. We tend to view the Middle Ages as a time of anarchy, a perspective that allows us to dismiss much of what was happening at the time as if it were insignificant or irrelevant to the present. And while undoubtedly the era involved a great deal of violence and displacement, when we look at our own culture and the history of the last century – particularly its first half – I think we have to address the medieval with some degree of modesty. If the Middle Ages encompasses the Mongol incursions, the Norse depredations and the Black Death, we have our Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
But the High Middle Ages also embodied a kind of cultural unity within diversity that in many respects is the inverse of the homogenized urban culture of the present. The cultural unity was spiritual and intellectual, and pervaded the provincial, however atomized and diverse. The educated could pass from one end of Europe to the other on the basis of Latin as a lingua franca. The courtly ideal never existed as a reality. Culturally, it was a self-conscious creation to both express and establish a ‘spiritually’ grounded mode of governing, Obviously, ‘princes’ and other small aristocrats could generally do as they pleased within their holdings. But the formulation of the courtly ideal and its dispersion throughout Europe in all of the emergent languages suggests its normative force. And both within the secular and religious culture, we find a tremendous ferment and daring in the expression and development of spirituality as a legitimate intellectual and cultural ideal, as well.
If we only see the backside of the church’s reactive response, as it consolidated its political power, we lose the seed time of our own culture, and a source for an alternative to the cultural questions and political realities that now confront us.
As a result of the 1890 census, which declared the frontier of the U.S. to be closed, Frederick Jackson Turner promulgated his famous thesis of the frontier, both in terms of the developmental sequence at the frontier itself and in terms of the reductionist force of the frontier, dispensing with the extraneous cultural baggage brought by European settlers. But I think anyone who studies U.S. history must eventually observe the reductionist force of the frontier in older areas away from the active demarcation where the First Nations were dispossessed and supplanted by proto-urban or proto-European culture. The most obvious reductive force, in terms of the common presentation of the history, is the force of new wealth as it returned from its sources on the frontier to the older cities. The frontier provincial as arriviste becomes a cliché in the literature, but the force of that wealth as an expression of the ‘provincial’s’ mindset cannot be discounted. While it is easy enough to say that the provincial debases the culture with his innate simplicity and sometime arrogance, it is probably more accurate to describe it, as I have, simply as a ‘reductive’ force. The rawness also reinvigorates the older culture.
The problem with the common view that somehow holds Europe as a continuous development from the late Roman Empire – with only a ‘dark age’ of decay and recovery – is that much of the transalpine land was not altogether different from the American continents at the first appearance of the European – at least, that is, before the Roman influence began to affect the northern and northwestern tribes directly. Europe was a region of tribal peoples not unlike the First Nations of the North American continent. But, of course, the Roman influence cannot be discounted. And while Caesar ‘conquered’ Europe and thus obviously established conditions for Roman colonization, Europe as such emerged largely out of the tribal peoples. Provence, of course, had been extensively ‘Romanized’, but even there, in the upshot, power fell back into the hands of more or less ‘indigenous’ peoples.
If we want to understand what happened in Europe, perhaps we should turn in the other direction and look at the Chinese empire, where we can see the effects of a longterm core imperial culture that rose and fell a number of times. What we see clearly, in that case, is how the development of the core extended into the tribal regions, beyond the tribes originally designated under the confederating term of ‘Han’. Commerce and infrastructure extend into the bordering tribal regions, eliciting social and political development as well as the exploitation of raw materials and advances of native craft. The net effect, of course, is to move the peoples out of purely tribal structures and attitudes, producing a proto-urban mindset that – if not proto-imperial – at least involves a tendency toward political centralization – perhaps a ‘proto-national’ mindset.
In the event, what this meant for the Chinese empire was that outlying tribal peoples became strong enough so that, more than once, when the core decayed, the erstwhile tribal people were able to conquer and expropriate the imperial throne. Of course, we only see this a single time in the case of Rome. But the imperial power of Rome proved to be an anomaly. The geography of China meant that conquerors from the periphery simply supplanted the throne, more or less at its original location, and, in assuming the government, ultimately assimilated with the Han culture. What diverts us and creates the peculiar illusion of continuity in the west in terms of Rome is the persisting influence of the church. But even the church goes through extended periods of dispossession, not only in the Babylonian captivity, but also earlier, when northern peoples espoused ‘heresies’ and northern political leaders were more than willing to utilize the split between Rome and Constantinople as political leverage.
As dominant political figures started to emerge, they used papal authorization as a form of external certification for their relatively tenuous domestic positions. But the power moved in both directions. And the survival of the papal lineage as against the shorter political dynasties meant that in the long term the residual power fell to the papacy. By the High Middle Ages, we see the primacy of this political power. But it was acquired and not original. And since much of the papacy was about this acquisition of power, the pope had less control over the developments within the church, at least in terms of theology, until he had acquired a political dominance that allowed him to use external force for internal hegemony. The reactive narrowing of the church in the High Middle Ages – the papal imperialism over internal doctrine – undoubtedly constituted a significant force in the dissolution of the unity of medieval Europe. The emergent national leaders naturally wished to diminish the influence of the pope, and therefore began to protect secular alternatives to ecclesiastical polity.
So what I’m saying here is that the ‘dark’ period of what used to be known as ‘the dark ages’ was in fact a relatively complete dissolution not only of highly centralized political power, but of the continuous cultural influence of Rome as well. We have some preservation of Roman law. But we can assume that that is because Roman law had been partially assimilated as indigenous practice, particularly in the larger communities left after the collapse of the Roman occupation. But this is not to say that what was happening in Europe at the time was wholly or mostly anarchic.
The difference between Europe and what happened in the areas now constituted by the United States is that, in the U.S. territories, the Euro-Americans more or less altogether displaced the First Nations. What happened initially in Europe, as we suggested, is much the same as the Chinese model. The ‘Goths’ destroyed the original imperial line of Rome. But, unlike the Chinese model, while the empire closed with Gothic emperors, the resurgent or reductive force of the northern frontier simply collapsed the Roman center, finally. Apparently, the centrality of power in Rome was relatively anomalous geographically. The peculiar history of Rome would seem to have justified its power, and not specifically its location. And when we look at the period closely, it would appear that Rome and Italy as a whole underwent a cultural dissolution essentially as profound as the dissolution throughout Europe. The Byzantine Empire retains some political hegemony, and is commonly held up both as a model and as one of the retentive sources from which culture was reestablished in Europe.
But this exposes the peculiar bias of history itself. The response to Frederick Jackson Turner’s paper makes it clear that what happens on the frontier is not anarchic and probably not even highly individualistic. In addition to his explicit descriptions of the changes wrought by and at the frontier, Turner had espoused the myth of the individualistic frontiersman and projected it onto the American character. But the myth belongs to a Daniel Boone kind of self-aggrandizement, or perhaps to the handful of trappers and mountaineers who moved ahead of the frontier. The frontier itself always depended on mutual support, and was largely created by would-be bourgeois with small means, who understood that they could create equity from small capital on the frontier.
The frontier is not anarchic. And the point is that, from the collapse of the Roman Empire, much of northern Europe was still frontier, at least in terms of proto-urban culture. The difference between the earliest medieval Europe and the U.S. territories of the 18th and 19th centuries is that it was the European tribal peoples themselves who developed the medieval frontier.
The bias of history is that if we cannot see order, order must not exist. And from the traditional historical perspective, order is not only urban culture, order is the political hegemony and centralization characteristic of urban culture. Thus, tribal culture always looks anarchic. The historian tends to view clan and kinship relation and the relatively fluid nature of tribal power as functions of anthropology or sociology rather than history. And the fact that tribal culture, when at a remove from urban culture, tends to be self-sustaining and relatively non-expansive, makes it appear ‘a-historical’, if we define history in terms of dynasties and the events of power.
The historian of the medieval tends to look at the migrations of tribes and the various periods of depredations as signs that the social and political situation must have been pervasively and continuously desperate. But the record of depredations – the very fact of depredations – suggests that the sedentary population was commonly producing a degree of wealth that made depredation worthwhile. The element most commonly missing from the frontier is the true cultural artifact, not in the sense of archaeology, but in the sense of history. At the same time, even the archaeological artifacts tend to be minimal. The frontiersman is establishing equity, not producing the signs of permanent wealth.
Undoubtedly centralized political power commonly is based in and tends to foster long range commerce. And because of the peculiar bias of the historian, long range commerce and intellectual exchange are signs of ‘civilization’, a terminology that is radically exact in this case. But the lack of urban culture, the literal meaning of ‘civilization’, does not portend an essential lack of development. The development of a Roman infrastructure, both physically and socially or financially, undoubtedly generated distance trade in a range of goods. But this does not alter the fact that much of the northern Europe of the day was undeveloped forest. Tribes were aware of and protective of their territories, even though the areas themselves may have been thinly populated. The collapse of long range trade does not preclude the local or even distance distribution of goods necessary for land development, nor does it preclude the development itself. The lack of cultural artifact simply implies that we are in an era of frontier development. And the physical Roman infrastructure supplied the basis for development, just as the expansive force of the Roman imperium transmitted directly and indirectly to the tribes provided the continuing impulse for tribal expansion, the proto-urban seed consciousness.
I have followed this line of thought for two reasons. First of all, I have already asserted in previous posts that European culture was essentially sui generis. If what I am saying here about Europe and the frontier is true, then the process that produced, not only ‘modern’ Europe, but medieval Europe as well began with a reduction of the whole to a more or less common denominator of frontier process, both the ‘highly civilized’ and the raw forest areas. While emergent Europe adopted elements from all available sources when it progressed from the strictly ‘frontier’ process, this was because Europe itself had reached a point of self-sustaining development that naturally engaged the cultural. If the medieval begins by assigning its own cultural creativity to the partial models and vagrant remnants of other cultures, this, in itself, is a testimony to the pervasive reductionist frontier moment from which it was emerging. If we analyze the European expression of these ‘sources’, we find, in most cases, a considerable distance between the sources themselves and the earliest apparent European versions. Perhaps, in the visual arts, we could trace a more or less wholesale adoption of the Byzantine as a model for painting. But every other art seems an amalgam from the first. And socially and politically, the developments seem uniquely grounded in something indigenous, although the reviving political centralization naturally adopts the residual Latin terminology, historical debate continues on the values of the terms in early medieval Europe.
And while the cultural adoptive process continues throughout the Middle Ages, in every instance, the old is integrated on the basis of a highly creative if not essentially new ground. Plato and Aristotle as understood in the High Middle Ages are ultimately not the Plato and Aristotle of the classical Greek milieu – however much the texts are being ‘purified’ by scholarship – but a reinterpretation of the vector of Platonic or Aristotelian thought in the light of the medieval mindset. And the vector itself is defined by the mindset. If we miss this fact, it is because our understanding of Plato and Aristotle is still guided by the medieval misdirection.
The second reason I have pursued this is because of the radical difference between tribal culture and urban culture pointed up by imperialist history, but following its peculiar course in Europe. In the Americas, the tribal people, when not wiped out or assimilated, were reduced to relatively insignificant enclaves. That is, the ‘frontier’ was more or less strictly a function of the invading culture. In the history of the Chinese empire, victorious tribal people tended to be absorbed from the top down, the dynasties ending as essentially Chinese. That is, the ‘frontier’ involved a cyclical reversion in which tribal people strengthened by the presence of empire eventually dominated the center. But in Europe the transition from tribal to urban is largely tribal in itself. Rome supplies the model and impetus, breaking the pattern of a relatively balanced and sustaining tribal lifeway in which ‘development’ or ‘expansion’ are largely alien concepts. Not to say that the tribes did not expand or engage in territorial conflict, but aggressive and self-conscious or intentional expansionism are generally foreign to the tribal cultural understanding.
What we are facing now, if not the radical destruction of civilization as we understand it, is the closing of the endless market, the end of the potential frontier for imperialist expansion. I am told that this is something that Marx foresaw, although I must admit that his work, at least in translation, is so dauntingly a-literate that I have rarely been able to read more than a page or two. Moreover, he incorrectly defines money, at the outset, as a function of labor rather than commerce, so much of his theory has always been unapproachable, as far as I was concerned. But the finite nature of the market should be a primary concern, if we can halt the poisoning of the environment. Perhaps the market still has a great deal of headroom, of unresolved ‘frontier’ space. But unlimited population growth will create diminishing returns, ultimately, if this is not already the case. And a balanced economy becomes as much a necessity as halting both farming by poison and the present alteration of the atmosphere.
We cannot ‘return’ to the tribal as initially constituted, unless we presume a tiny residual human survival after a planetary debacle, as well as the survival of the planet itself as a habitable sphere. The question is how to return to a tribal mentality of non-expansion, in the face of the present attitudes, which, for their ‘value base’, seem to rely on the present behavior of credit, and not on any legitimately human ideal. But what the credit seems to have done is reduce the world itself to a frontier mentality, in which equity building, under the guise of ‘security’, is the only concern. Serious commentators, with a straight face, describe ‘American culture’ in terms of burgers and cola.
The medieval produced a legitimate unity. The unity was not ‘the church’ or necessarily a reflection of the church. The reverse seems true. The church acquired much of its political power because it pre-empted the unity by claiming to represent it, while at the same time destroying the unity by attempting to reify it as dogma. In other words, the unity was a vivifying and fluid spiritual principle. As long as it survived, it bound together a set of provinces of incredible diversity, creating both secular and religious patterns, not of unanimity, but of collective possibility.
The solution is not political, but cultural.
I am tempted to write on my pad and then edit and re edit. Instead, I will try to write with as much spontaneity as I can.
Like the frontier. Like any revolution. There are my individual boundaries that ebb and flow; seem more solid and well defined and then shedding those definitions like a shell, become for a while amorphous and flowing.
I have for a while been reluctant to take on new definitions. I am afraid that the new layer will be restrictive. But I suppose that is all a part of the process, isn't it. I will never get it "right". I must reduce it. I must make it understandable to myself for the moment. I will absorb a lot from my surroundings, learn from other's perceptions in this process. Yet that which is raw and emergent will continue to push from within.
Perhaps the solution is also individual.
Reply to this
Hi Suzie, Antonio used to say...'individuals get enlightened not societies..."
The beauty of Jeremy's vision is that its largeness has profound implications for us as individuals. He has done the work that then gives us a glimpse into the cultural underpinnings of our sub conscious mind.
Gauguin asks, Where do we come from? Who are We? Where are we going?
We are as we will be beyond definition, beyond conception. Show me your face before mother and father!
Reply to this
Thank you Will. As I read Jeremy's entry I saw parallels between the mass movements that he was describing and my own individual experience. It seems the large reflects the small. I am not sure what you mean by "the cultural underpinnings of our sub conscious mind". Please go into that more for me.
And thank you, Jeremy, for your work and your self.
Reply to this
I reply to myself before you have a chance: maybe I am affected more than I know by culture. Maybe a part of me is the whole experience.
Reply to this
The 'largeness' of vision and focus is appreciated. It brings light and objectivity.
Reply to this