THE BARBARIAN CIVILIZATION

As a freshman in college I learned about the so-called pillars of western civilization. Those pillars were said to be Greek, Roman and Hebrew. Sometime later I realized that that litany leaves out a couple of vital elements: the Celtic and the Germanic.

The Germanic influence is particularly important to Americans, since (1) we speak a Germanic language, and (2) a very large proportion of us are descended from Germanic peoples.

The extent of Celtic influence is not easy to determine since the Celts left no written history, but they undeniably shaped the growth of the lands they occupied before the Roman conquests: Gaul, the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula. They left an incredible body of folklore that continues to echo in our imagination, and the cultures that grew in their lands centuries later became (coincidentally?) the most important and powerful countries in the early Modern Age.

In some ways, it is still not easy to talk about Germanic influence without conjuring up images of hatred and genocide. Indeed, violence may be a non-detachable element of our Germanic heritage. There is an undeniable strain of violence detectible in American history since the arrival of the first settlers. Violence also leaps off the page in the annals of the exploits of medieval kings, Renaissance despots and modern day nationalists. We may have painted ourselves with the hues and dressed ourselves in the clothes of civilization, but to what extent is our violent blood still waiting just below the surface, eager to exercise itself?

And it is not just the Germans, after all. The first great work of literature of our civilization is a story of a war that occurred back in the Bronze Age. There are detailed descriptions in the Illiad of how individual warriors died in battle: what body parts are cut or crushed and how. Although it is beautifully done and tempered with many fine elements, it is a story of valor, heroism, war and violence. It comes out of the barbarian past of the Greeks, our most ancient civilized antecedents.

And in a passage that occurs early in the next book, the Odyssey, Ulysses relates that as the Greeks, fresh from sacking Troy, set out on their return voyage home, they came upon a minor city along their way. And Ulysses says, “We sacked the city and put the people to the sword.” And that was all that was ever said about that city and the people in it. No remorse, no reason to ever think about it again. Never mind that in the present day, that would be considered the worst kind of atrocity.

The Celts, too, were warriors, once feared all over Europe. When Rome was just a little city on its own, Celts descended from the north and sacked it. The Celts were called barbarians by the Romans, who in turn had been called barbarians by the Greeks.

The death of the Roman Empire was caused by internal decay and by migrations of Germanic tribes. Mighty Rome had never been able to conquer Germania, though there had been many wars between Romans and Germans. Tacitus observed, even before the great invasions that spelled Rome’s doom, that more Romans had probably been killed by Germans than by any other people.

The invasions and migrations of those northern peoples swept in waves all across Europe, covering thousands of miles, down to the boot of Italy, to the far western shore of Iberia and into Britain. Germanic peoples and Germanic customs became the people and the customs of all of Europe.

Not completely, of course. In most places, the invaders became the ruling class, and the people who were there before were still there. In time, the language and customs of the invaders blended with and were to greater and lesser degrees absorbed by those of the native peoples.

Not so in England, where the indigenous peoples were pushed out, killed off and dominated sufficiently that English remained predominantly a Germanic language and the people were mainly Anglo Saxon. But that was true only in England, which occupies the largest part of the isles of Britain, not all of it. In Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Celtic peoples remained. The new Germanic peoples occupied most of the area where Rome had ruled. In the other places what remained was Celtic (while in Wales some ancient Britons remained).

Centuries later, new migrations came out of Europe, going across oceans to places all around the world. They poured across the Atlantic and pushed across the North American continent in a vast migration somewhat reminiscent of that earlier migration that overran Rome. As we read descriptions of people pushing west in their primitive wagons, with all their livestock around them and with a few simple implements, we could easily wonder how far removed they really were from the migrating barbarians of long ago.


But the point of using a phrase like “barbarian civilization” is to point up not only the barbarian but also the civilization.

To some historians, civilization as we know it in the West is essentially an Eastern phenomenon that has been learned by us. Many of the basic elements of civilization were developed first in the East. But the word civilization also connotes simply the culture and ways of a particular people or place. The ways of the West, while different from the ways of the East, have roots that are deep and strong. There is much that we have learned form the East, and in that process of learning we have struggled with differences in culture that have been difficult for us. The spread of more advanced cultural forms from the East to the West set up deep and lasting conflicts within Western culture. But Western culture demonstrated a strength and depth of its own, and in the modern age it has been the West that has made incursions into the cultures of the East.

Similarly, within the West, the northern, Germanic areas of Europe were at first far less culturally advanced than the southern areas. The southern areas, during the latter stages of the Roman Empire, began to take on some forms of Eastern civilizations. The Emperor had become an Eastern-style dynastic despot.

The collapse of the empire did not prevent the ideas of universal rule and the power of the Emperor from spreading to the conquerors. The Holy Roman Empire continued for centuries in northern and central Europe. Around the time of the Renaissance, power was consolidating more and more in the hands of kings whose governments tended to look curiously like Eastern despotisms. But the resistance to centralized rule continued in Germany, which remained fragmented into numerous principalities, and in some other northern areas of Europe, where traditions derived from old native ways carried on and gained a tenacious hold in the cultures of their peoples.

In England, Switzerland, the Netherlands and others, city councils and other representative bodies continued to have power despite the encroaching cultural force of the divine-right kings. The Magna Carta in England, rather than representing something new in the world, was a conservative document. It preserved time-honored traditions that tended to regard the king as a first among equals rather than a divinely ordained ruler.

The evolution of the divine-right king was something that was relatively new in that area of the world. It was something that began in Rome more than a millennium earlier, when Emperors began to demand that they be worshiped in the style of Oriental despots. It was a culturally powerful idea, one that had been slowly growing and spreading in the West, adapted slightly to Western style, but still basically very different from ancient Western ways.

In the end, the institution of the divine-right king could not overcome the native western cultural resistance to it, and it was mainly the strongholds of northern Europe, and the migration of people from there to America, that turned the tide. And once the tide was turned, kings were turned out of power not only all across Europe, but eventually all around the world.

And part of the point of all this is that in Britain and in some other areas of Europe there was a tradition of sufficient strength and maturity to resist the powerful cultural influences distilled in southern Europe from older sources in Asia. There was something sufficiently developed to remain unbroken—-though, true enough, it was a near thing. There was, in short, a barbarian civilization—-or, to be more precise, there was a culture that existed that was both barbaric, in the sense of its violence, and advanced in the sense of its distinct cultural formulation.