The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  “The role that impetus played in Buridan’s dynamics is exactly the one that Galileo attributed to impeto or momento, Descartes to ‘quantity of motion,’ and Leibniz finally to vis viva. So exact is this correspondence that, in order to exhibit Galileo’s dynamics, Torricelli, in his Lezioni accademiche, often took up Buridan’s reasons and almost his exact words.

  “Nicole Oresme attributed to the earth a natural impetus similar to the one Buridan attributed to the celestial orbs. In order to account for the vertical fall of weights, he allowed that one must compose this impetus by which the mobile rotates around the earth with the impetus engendered by weight. The principle he distinctly formulated was only obscurely indicated by Copernicus and merely repeated by Giordano Bruno. Galileo used geometry to derive the consequences of that principle, but without correcting the incorrect form of the law of inertia implied in it”.28

  Duhem’s rediscovery of Medieval science was not well received by other French scientists because it demonstrated the place of metaphysics in an era where secularism and atheism were the vogue.

  During the 13th century a medical corpus was being created based on case studies, which classified diseases and their symptoms. The physician Theodoric Borgognoni, who became Bishop of Cervia, wrote the four volume Cyrurgia (“Surgery”). He used anaesthetics for surgery, comprising an inhalation of opium, mandrake, hemlock, mulberry juice, and ivy soaked in a sponge. He wrote on the prevention of the festering of wounds by the use of wine as a disinfectant; a technique used by his father. This lost knowledge did not become part of medical procedure again until the antiseptic techniques of Joseph Lister during the 1860s. Until then allowing wounds to fester was regarded as a healing process, based on Greek and Arabic procedure, on which he wrote: “For it is not necessary that bloody matter (pus) be generated in wounds - for there can be no error greater than this, and nothing else which impedes nature so much, and prolongs the sickness”. This treatment was in vogue up until World War II when a U.S. surgeon, Eldridge Campbell, on duty in Italy, was introduced to the “revolutionary method of wound treatment” used by Theodoric seven centuries previously.29 Borgognoni’s test for shoulder dislocation, by being able to touch the opposite ear or shoulder with the hand of the affected arm, remains in use.30

  Henry de Mondeville, chief surgeon to the armies of Philip the Fair and Louis X, using Borgognoni’s method to disinfect wounds, surgical incisions, needles, thread and dressings, wrote a treatise on the results.

  Gilbert Anglicus wrote on the contagious nature of smallpox, and advice to travellers to only drink distilled water, and to sea voyagers to eat fruit; practices that were not rediscovered until the 18th century. Such was the knowledge of medicine in the Medieval epoch until 1498 when Niccolo da Reggio translated the Greek text of Galen into Latin, which was soon translated throughout Europe into the 16th century. A regression ensued for centuries. The knowledge of anatomy was discarded as were the antiseptic methods of Borgognoni and Mandeville.

  The accurate maps of the coasts of Europe, North Africa and the Near East and Mediterranean that were widely distributed from the 13th century were discarded for the mythic geography of Ptolemy, which was translated from Greek in 1409. Again, Western learning had been retarded by recourse to the Greek. Fortunately, Western sea-craft that had been developing since the Medieval epoch, overcame by practice retrogressive theories, and the Age of Discovery ensued regardless.

  * * *

  1 Robert Stark, 1996.

  2 Lawrence R. Brown, 1963, 307.

  3 Denis de Rougemont, 1966, 46.

  4 Angilbert, Monumenta germ.Poet.Carol. I, 368. Quoted by Denis de Rougemont, 46.

  5 Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith.

  6 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine”, 1866.

  7 G. Ronald Murphy (translator) , 198, 51-52.

  8 Ibid., 147-148.

  9 Ibid., 158-161.

  10 Cindy Wood, 166.

  11 John, 10: 9.

  12 Calvin B. Kendall, 13.

  13 Edward Grant, 552.

  14 Charles H. Moore, “Development and Character of Gothic Architecture”, I 8.

  15 Ibid., G 19.

  16 Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, “The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature”, in The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art, 1982.

  17 Koran, 21.32.

  18 James Dickie, Allah and Eternity: Mosques, Madrases and Tombs, in Architecture of the Islamic World, George Michell (ed.), 33.

  19 Ernst J. Grube, 1995, 13.

  20 Evgenii Trubetskoi, “A World View in Painting”, in Icons: Theology in Color, 16-17.

  21 Sergei Bulgakov, 1997, 150-151.

  22 Trubetskoi, “A World View in Painting”, 16.

  23 Shun-xun Nan and Beverly Foit-Albert, 2007, 4.

  24 Ibid., 3.

  25 Ibid., 7.

  26 Ibid., 8.

  27 David C. Lindberg, Robert S. Westman (eds.) P. Duhem, (1905), “Preface”, Les Origines de la statique 1 (Paris: A. Hermman, 1905) iv, in “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield”, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution , 14.

  28 Pierre Duhem Mémoires de la Société des Sciences Physiques et naturelles de Bordeaux (1917) cited in Roger Ariew and Peter Barker (eds.), 1996, 193-196. See: Roger Ariew, “Pierre Duhem”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/duhem/

  29 A. J. Popp, “Crossroads at Salerno: Eldridge Campbell and the Writings of Theodorico Borgognoni on wound healing”, 1995, 174-179.

  30 Michael Rogers McVaugh, 159.

  Decline of The West

  The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were eras of great advance, but nonetheless part of the West’s aging, not its youth: where there were great material advances, there was also a spiritual decline. The manner by which the so-called “Gothic” era was disparaged as “barbaric” and the Medieval as “superstition”, that is to say, the epoch of Western High Culture, is indicative of the renunciation by the Western intelligentsia of its own origins, and its revival of what it thought was the pre-Western Graeco-Roman culture, in referring to a “renaissance”. As we have seen, the origins of the Western sciences and arts were uniquely Western, not Classical or Arab. The name Gothic applied to Medieval culture originated during the Renaissance, and was adopted from the Romans who called the “barbarian” tribes “Goths”, circa 250 A.D. The fallacy persists.

  To recognise the splendour of the Gothic era, of an epoch supposedly steeped in superstition and ignorance, would imply the honouring of an epoch based on Faith and the Church as custodians of learning. Such an admission has for centuries been unacceptable to the intelligentsia. A consideration of the High Culture of the Gothic era might also imply that the “imaginative” faculties, as Vico pointed out during the Renaissance, are more conducive to High Culture than the “reasonable”, that is, the rationalistic. This implies, as Vico insisted, the embracing rather than the repression, of the religious character.

  The Reformation was more destructive to the Western culture-organism than any political ideology could be. The English Reformation under Henry VIII, in the name of “freedom” from “popery”, fractured the Western culture-organism with petty-state nationalism, and destroyed the counter-balance of the Church, delivering the “people” in the name of “freedom” into the soulless embrace of a rising oligarchy. In the Spenglerian sense, this was an epoch where the forces of “money” fought the forces of “blood”1 (what we more mundanely call “new money” and “old money”). Henry’s revolution was like all such revolutions in the name of “the people”: against tradition. Adrian Pabst, lecturer in politics at the University of Kent, cogently wrote of the epoch:

  “To the mind of many, Henry’s tumultuous rule stripped corrupt Catholicism of power and wealth in favour of England’s sovereign Church and her free people. In reality however, the break with Rome and the dissolution of t
he monasteries at home eliminated key pillars of resistance against the forces of nationalism, absolutism and capitalism. As such, this key historical moment holds important lessons for religion, politics and economics today.

  “…The violent dissolution of the monasteries in the second half of the 1530s consolidated monarchical absolutism and created the conditions for capitalism. By handing over expropriated land to barons in exchange for their political support, Henry did not simply reinforce the Crown vis-a-vis the Church. He also weakened and destroyed the network of trans-local monastic orders which since the Norman Conquest had helped create and uphold the complex space of intermediary associations that tended to diffuse central power and mediate between individuals and the state, including localities, guilds and agrarian communities. By eliminating the monasteries and cutting ties with the papacy, Henry established a monarchical power vertical that commanded unprecedented fiscal control and military might – the basis for his foreign policy adventurism which further isolated England from the rest of Europe…

  “Crucially, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and his son Edward VI redistributed one quarter of national wealth at the expense of the peasantry. The endowment of monasteries, including landed property, was transferred to the newly created Court of Augmentations – an early modern precursor of quangos, charged with overseeing monastic expropriation. The triple effect was to curb the social and educational functions of monastic orders, channel wealth and income to the Crown and concentrate land ownership in the hands of the nobility, local magnates and the newly landed gentry.

  “Coupled with the forced expropriation of free peasant proprietors by feudal lords during the ‘enclosure movement’ throughout the 16th century, land ceased to be commonly owned and became privatised. This process … created the surplus wealth that was used for financial speculation abroad. The ruling classes diverted resources for their own enrichment and self-aggrandisement. As such, the perennial sanctity of life and land was subordinated to secular sacrality of the national state and the transnational market. Thus capitalism was born. Curiously, Henry’s quest for national sovereignty made England more dependent on foreign markets than ever before.

  “By contrast, elsewhere in Europe the papacy and the monasteries provided a counterweight to secular national monarchs and their vassals. In this sense, the Church retarded the advent of capitalism. Despite widespread corruption and inefficiency, monastic orders preserved a complex space which was not governed by the secular logic of commodification and speculative profit but instead by the religious imperative to support the locality and practice charity.

  “…By removing the mediation of the church and other associative institutions, the central state and the free market came to collude at the expense of civil society, local communities and personal welfare”.2

  This for Western civilisation was the birth of international capitalism, free trade, the fracturing of the social organism by the elimination of the monastic orders and the guilds, and the sundering of the West as a culture-organism bounded by a common spiritual outlook and a religious nexus. The Reformation throughout the rest of Europe extended the facture of the West and the rise of oligarchy. Protestantism provided a religious justification for capitalism, and for the excesses of oligarchic exploitation that marked the industrialised West. Max Weber in his seminal study of Protestantism and capitalism writes of the attitude that was to destroy the traditional Western ethos:

  “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling”.3

  Hence, working women and children to excessive hours, with the menfolk, where during the Medieval epoch the eight hour day or less was enshrined in guild charters, became an act of piety. The new ethos was justified by the statement of Saint Paul: “He who will not work shall not eat”. According to Puritanism, unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace. Weber contrast this with the Medieval spiritual ethos that placed work in context:

  “Here the difference from the medieval viewpoint becomes quite evident. Thomas Aquinas also gave an interpretation of that statement of St. Paul. But for him labour is only necessary naturali ratione for the maintenance of individual and community. Where this end is achieved, the precept ceases to have any meaning. Moreover, it holds only for the race, not for every individual. It does not apply to anyone who can live without labour on his possessions, and of course contemplation, as a spiritual form of action in the Kingdom of God, takes precedence over the commandment in its literal sense. Moreover, for the popular theology of the time, the highest form of monastic productivity lay in the increase of the Thesaurus ecclesie through prayer and chant”.4

  Protestantism Judaised Christianity with its focus on the Old Testament, hence grievously subverting the Western psyche and ethos that had made Christianity synonymous with the West for a thousand years. Weber wrote of this:

  “But all the more emphasis was placed on those parts of the Old Testament which praise formal legality as a sign of conduct pleasing to God. They held the theory that the Mosaic Law had only lost its validity through Christ in so far as it contained ceremonial or purely historical precepts applying only to the Jewish people, but that otherwise it had always been valid as an expression of the natural law, and must hence be retained. This made it possible, on the one hand, to eliminate elements which could not be reconciled with modern life. But still, through its numerous related features, Old Testament morality was able to give a powerful impetus to that spirit of self-righteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism of this form of Protestantism.

  “Thus when authors, as was the case with several contemporaries as well as later writers, characterize the basic ethical tendency of Puritanism, especially in England, as English Hebrews they are, correctly understood, not wrong. It is necessary, however, not to think of Palestinian Judaism at the time of the writing of the Scriptures, but of Judaism as it became under the influence of many centuries of formalistic, legalistic, and Talmudic education. Even then one must be very careful in drawing parallels. The general tendency of the older Judaism toward a naive acceptance of life as such was far removed from the special characteristics of Puritanism. It was, however, just as far – and this ought not to be overlooked – from the economic ethics of mediaeval and modern Judaism, in the traits which determined the positions of both in the development of the capitalistic ethos. The Jews stood on the side of the politically and speculatively oriented adventurous capitalism; their ethos was, in a word, that of pariah-capitalism. But Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labour. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose”.5

  Another significant result of the Reformation was the hitherto despised practice of usury; the lending of money at interest. The traditional religions, including Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, had all condemned usury. Zwingli, Luther and Calvin, undermined the traditional prohibitions on usury by stating that there were circumstances in which it is justified. Other authors of the Reformation such as the 16th century French jurist Molinaeus wrote a justification, Treatise on Contracts and Usury, which as banned by the Church. The 18th century Classical English economists Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, defended usury.6 This provided the mechanism of insertional finance for the perpetual rule of money: plutocracy. There are
few nations not in its grip.

  The ascetics of Puritanism came into conflict with King Charles I. Allowing popular amusements on Sunday caused particular outrage. After conflicts with some of the merchants of the City of London an alliance was formed among Puritans and merchants which culminated in regicide and Cromwell’s Parliamentary dictatorship. Interestingly, the Puritans identified with Renaissance scientism, which provided them with a further weapon against Catholicism. Weber stated that “the great men of the Puritan movement were thoroughly steeped in the culture of the Renaissance”.7

  However, there remained a fanatical aversion to the arts, which were as much an ungodly waste of time as the sports, taverns and dancing that Charles had allowed on the Sabbath. Weber stated that,

  “the situation is quite different when one looks at non-scientific literature and especially the fine arts. Here asceticism descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie old England’. And not only worldly merriment felt its effect. The Puritan’s ferocious hatred of everything which smacked of superstition, of all survivals of magical or sacramental salvation, applied to the Christmas festivities and the May Pole and all spontaneous religious art”.8

  How the arts could flourish in Holland, despite Cavlinism, was explained by Weber. There was “room in Holland for a great, often uncouthly realistic art”. The Calvinist “authoritarian moral discipline” was not able to completely stifle “the joy in life” among prominent circles, “after the short supremacy of the Calvinistic theocracy had been transformed into a moderate national Church”. Calvinism consequently “had perceptibly lost … its power of ascetic influence”.9 Returning to Puritan England:

  “The theatre was obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict exclusion of the erotic and of nudity from the realm of toleration, a radical view of either literature or art could not exist. The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus not ascetic, and especially not serving the glory of God, but of man, were always at hand to serve in deciding in favour of sober utility as against any artistic tendencies. This was especially true in the case of decoration of the person, for instance clothing”.10