Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity

Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity by Thomas Fleming • November 19, 2009 • Printer-friendly

Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries

The title of James C. Russell’s The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis’ apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book as proof that whatever virility existed in Medieval Christianity comes from the German element.

I have not read Dr. Francis’s review and do not intend to. This is a field in which he had so little knowledge that his opinion—so valuable in American politics and British history—is ideological and irrelevant, rather like my own opinions on Chinese philosophy or the political situation in India. In such cases, we are forced to fall back on preconceptions and paradigms that may be entirely off the point. (I sympathize, for example, with the Hindus because their religion is Indo-European and they have been persecuted by Muslims, but in any historical case I am hopelessly ill-equipped to assess claims of guilt or innocence.)

Before examining Russell’s argument, we should try to have an overall understanding of his book. First, anyone looking, however briefly, at Germanization will realize that it is a revised version of a dissertation. This means, basically, that it has been written as a series of footnotes in search of a text. This does not mean that Russell has not made a a valuable contribution to Medieval studies, only that his work is technical, difficult, and a trap for non-scholars.

Second, like too many dissertation writers, he has bitten off more than he can chew. The subject of the German’s “reception” of Christianity is too vast for a young scholar to tackle, especially when he has approached it from a broadly theoretical point of view that presumes to find overarching patterns in the development of all religions. At the very least, a writer should be well-grounded not just in the Germanic Middle Ages but also in classical antiquity and in early Christian history and theology before undertaking a study of the changes Christianity underwent in moving from the Mediterranean world to Northern Europe.

Germanization

I had hoped that Russell would nail his argument in the last chapter. Unfortunately, this chapter suffers from the same defects and limitations as its predecessors. In applying a “big theory” to secondary academic monographs and studies, without serious consideration of primary texts and sources, he is free to pick and choose what ideas or even quotations that fit his thesis. He spends a good deal of time on Gregory the Great’s approach to the Anglo-Saxon mission he sent out. Gregory, however, gives conflicting advice. To an AS ruler, he advises toughness in putting down the relics of paganism, while to his missionary he advises a slower and more accommodating approach. Inevitably, Russell relies on Markus’ life of Gregory and sees a significant evolution in Pope Gregory’s thinking, from asperity to accommodation. But Markus does not have to be right about everything, and he certainly is not. We simply have too little evidence on which to judge. Gregory, one needs to remember, had been a major diplomat, and it is quite natural for him to advise discretion to a missionary while instructing a ruler with power to crack down. Thus one cannot go on to construct an account according to which the Church in Germany learned to accept important elements of Germanic paganism.

This is only one instance of many that can be cited. JCR’s more general thesis is not without merit, though it would require a good deal of nuancing and a thorough-going comparative study of the Church in Southern Italy and in the Byzantine East. The general idea is that the world-denying individualistic and otherworldly Christianity ran headlong into a magical, king-revering, collectivist German mentality that it was forced to accept. But, as I have pointed out in this discussion, this world-denying business has been rather overstated. Remember Christ at the wedding and all the homely parables of everyday life, His sense of humor, and His acceptance of publicans and sinners. There has always been an other-wordly mysticism in some important Christians and a tendency to contemn the authorities of this world, but St. Paul tells us that obedience to the powers-that-be is required of Christians; St. Justin writes with great respect to the Antonines; the Apology of Aristides and the Epistle to Diognetus both emphasize how normal Christianity was and is.

The idea that Germans made their rulers semi-divine would not seem terribly strange either to Constantine or to 1000 years of Byzantine Emperors. Surely, these sacred majesties were not influenced by Germans. A similar point would have to be made about Christianity’s hostility toward German paganism’s sacred places. Exactly the same thing happened in the Greek and Slavic world, so whatever took place is not exclusively or even primarily Germanic. In the case of Northern Europe, where some sacred places were identified with human sacrifice, the missionaries were quite naturally suspicious.

What JCR does not seem to understand is Christianity’s complex relationship to this world. The veneration of relics goes to the beginning of our faith, to the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment, to Peter’s wrong-headed desire to build three tabernacles to commemorate the Transfiguration, to the pious Christians of Smyrna who gathered up the relics of their martyr Polycarp. Much like Plotinus, Christians are caught between two poles, between the recognition that God is greater than all his creations and the recognition that what God has created is good.

Stripped of its grand sociological theory and reinforced by a comparative study of Eastern Europe, JCR’s argument might be corrected to the point it could be accepted, but the what would it mean? That some harmless elements were Christened and adopted more or less permanently by Northern European Christians, just as Southern Europeans kept many Greco-Roman customs. That, at the other end of the scale, some bad medicine was also incorporated and this was only diminished after a long time—magical practices, fortune-telling, witch-craft, trial by ordeal. A similar story, again, can be told in the Balkans and in Italy. Finally, some customs and attitudes, neither good nor bad in themselves, perhaps, but risky were accepted into Christian practice and have to be looked at from time to time. At what point does the Germanic sense of courage and honor turn into a justification for murder and mayhem?

The best that I can say of The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is that it has a pretty good bibliography from which JCR is able to provide a broad overview of what major scholars have said on this subject. In the end, the verdict must be the Scottish verdict of “not proven,” though in this case, I should add, “not even close.” Even the title puts the reader on a false track. It is not Christianity that might have suffered from Germanization but Christendom, the way of life of the Christian West. Even his title, then, illustrates what he himself has called a “subjectivist” and “relativistic” definition of Christianity.

Unfortunately, Russell relies far too much on secondary sources of unequal value, and where they are wrong or misleading, he can only aggravate their mistakes. Even important scholars like Nilsson and Guthrie had their fair share of foibles and made many mistakes that can only be corrected for by someone who knows the primary sources, and, when it comes to anti-Christian ideologues like Elaine Pagels, a scholar who knows the material would simply discard her entirely. To say that his bibliography and notes relating to early Christianity are deficient would be a reckless understatement. The entire chapter on the religion of the Roman Empire would not past muster in a decent seminar. So, starting off with the wrong base-line, it will be very difficult for Russell to understand what sort of religion was carried northward.

Third, one can fault him for a sociological approach that is largely borrowed from Robert Bellah. Now, Bellah did some good work on the rise and fall of Christianity in Japan, but his broad-brushed theories about types of religion and evolutionary patterns one can either accept, reject, or ignore. That is the trouble with all sociological theories: They cannot be proved and therefore cannot be made the basis, as Russell makes the approach of Bellah and other theoreticians, of evaluations of real-world events. Bellah, it should be said, is one of those reds who turned green, that is, he was a communist who turned communitarian. His approach seems to assume that religions are sociological phenomena, and while some of them might be more useful than others, there is no truth, either unique or common. A unique truth would be the Christian teaching of Christ’s Incarnation, death, and resurrection, while a more generalized insight would be the belief in a dying god or the notion of an intermediate logos or intermediate divine power between god(s) and man. Naturally, Bellah and Russell would claim to be skeptical scholars, but true religious skepticism or agnosticism would require the thinker to “bracket” all questions of the divine and leave questions of God’s existence unsettled. But that is exactly what they do not do, and in deciding in advance that religion is bunk (though they never put it quite that bluntly or that clearly), they take a party line that makes them anything but objective.

To conclude the preliminaries, Germanization is the work of a neophyte scholar, who has accepted, apparently without much reflection, a sociological methodology whose validity cannot be demonstrated and an anti-Christian perspective that makes anything like a comprehensive understanding impossible. At best, such a man would be capable of relaying borrowed truths, much as a celibate marital advisor can tell the couple what his Church teaches about sex without knowing much about the subject personally. But, in the example I have chosen, the priest may have many true and significant things to say about sex and marriage, and in Russell’s case, when he gets down to historical business (as opposed to the posturings of sociology) he has a good deal to contribute, though his treatment needs to be stripped of his naive faith in modernism.

The Basic Thesis

In his third chapter, with the ghastly title “Sociohistorical Aspects of Religious Transformation,” Russell develop’s Bellah’s argument with some modifications. Folk religions are either supplanted by universalist religions or transformed by a universalizing prophet (like Zoroaster or the Hebrew prophets). However, the process can be reversed: “It seems that the tendency of folk religions to be supplanted by universal religions occasionally may be reversed by the imposition of a folk-religious world-view which, in turn, reinterprets the universal religion in a folk-religious mode.” This happens, he argues, when the religion expands–whether Buddhism into China and Japan or Christianity into Germany–“into areas where folk-religious attitudes are solidly entrenched.” This is true, though hardly startling. Historians were well aware of these tendencies long before Bellah drew up his turgid sociological categories.

Russell’s problem, just to anticipate a bit, is that he has no way of knowing what, exactly, can have been included in the early Christian approach to society, a subject he has only studied at second hand in the writings of liberals. As if he wished to demonstrate his incompetence, Russell invoke the Dead Sea scrolls (p.77), albeit with an academic caveat, to suggest that the Essenes influenced Christ in world-denying asceticism. But since he is wrong both about Christ and about the connection with the Scrolls, his grasping at straws indicates the weakness of his argument–and his knowledge. Similarly, his second-hand treatment of Gnosticism is both warped and irrelevant to this thesis. What is interesting is the frequency with which he cites Mankind Quarterly, a journal that has some merits but can rarely be trusted because of its tendentious biological reductionism, eugenics, and edgy racialism. I have no quarrel with its editors and their policies: Let them write what they will. But Russell does reveal some of the roots of his own ideology in his citations. That is certainly a plus, however, for his Neopagan fans.

I am going to skip chapter four “Psychosocial Aspects of Religious Transformation,” not only because it is more boring even than chapter three, but because he bases his argument on the silly Wayne Meeks, whose attempts to go beyond liberals and conservatives and beyond the Jesus of history have given him a lucrative career at Yale. The same chapter cites Talcott Parsons, Eliade, a book about Moonies, another about Southern blacks–none of which subjects does Russell himself know anything about.

Chapter 4 also begins on a dangerous note. Since we don’t have good sources on German “religiosity,” we can fall back on Georges Dumézil’s comparative studies of Indo-European religion. Hunh??! Dumézil is a brilliant man, but to take his conjectural reconstructions and read them into a real historical people is a little like an article I once read on an ode of Horace by one of my former professors. Reading through the ode, he tried to imagine what had been on Horace’s mind, and, armed with that conjectural reconstruction, he proceeded to interpret the ode. I asked him if he did not think his thinking was a bit circular–to say nothing of putting the hermeneutic cart before the textual horse–and he took an instantaneous dislike to the student. This is simply not scholarship, not even bad scholarship.

In reviewing the sources for Germanic religion, he relies on Snorri Sturlson, the great Icelandic writer of sagas. Using a 13th century Icelandic writer as evidence for Germanic religion in the sixth century is a real act of legerdemain. A real Germanicist, armed with every text and comparative tool, might supplement his evidence from Snorri, but Russell is not a real Germanicist and he is out of his depth–as any young non-specialist would be.

Russell follows closely in the footsteps of Georges Dumézil, the trail-blazing Indo-Europeanist who tried to draw up a composite picture of IE society and religion and culture. Dumézil’s work emphasizes the hierarchical nature of IE cultures, their structures of authority that are found in an ossified form in the Indian caste system. IE society, according to him, was based on a hierarchy of priests, warriors, and, at the bottom, the farmers and herdsmen who produce food. (I am grotesquely oversimplifying.) Inevitably he was accused of fascist/Nazi tendencies, especially by Arnaldo Momigliano, a Jewish-Italian classicist of considerable reputation, and by Bruce Lincon, a Russian scholar of conservative/moderate liberal tendency, who wrote for Chronicles on one or two occasions. What Lincoln could possibly have to say about a comparative philologist is beyond me. It is true that neopagans like Benoist and wackos like Foucault considered themselves his disciples. Russell’s rather blind attachment to Dumezil is one more sign of his orientation. Now, again, I have no objection to his orientation, but it is important to note that he appears to be writing as an anti-Christian racialist, not out of a serenely skeptical indifference to ideology.

JCR quotes (112) Dumézil’s summation of Icelandic/Germanic mythology as a starting point for his analysis: “the central motif of I-E ideology , the conception according to which the world and society can live only through the harmonious collaboration of the three stratified functions of sovereignty, force, and fecundity.” Maybe so, but then, maybe not, and even if so, maybe irrelevant to the subject at hand, since the Christianity introduced into Northern Europe had been undergoing a transformation at the hands of IE peoples for 5 centuries. The use of a term like ‘ideology” is itself deeply disturbing. Yes, I believe only means the collection of basic notions, but it is, nonetheless, a dangerous word that might imply there is some kind of IE world view implanted in our genes. This is not only bad science, but it is evidence of the sort of mysticism that afflicts German literature and all too much writing about IE cultures.

This themes of the alternation of religious sovereignty with martial force certainly occurs in diverse IE cultures, but it is not clear to me that it is absent from non-IE cultures. You see, in an experiment like this, one has to have controls. I certainly see something like this in Sumerian and Egyptian history. It has long been noted that there is an alternation in Livy between warrior kings like Romulus and Tullus Hostilius and peaceful religious kings like Numa. But there might be many explanations. Romulus and Numa might actually have existed and had these qualities. Or it might be a useful literary device, or the Romans might themselves have developed this tendency themselves. It is interesting that we find an alternation or contrast between soldier-emperors (Julius, Tiberius, Vespasian, Trajan) and the men of peace and religion: Augustus, Nerva, Hadrian. Is this a residue of IE mythology.

To cut this discussion of the chapter, let me just say that Russell repeats all the cliches about later Roman history–the family declines, patriotism is on the wane, German mercenaries are hired because of lack of solidarity, and while there is truth in the traditional analysis, it is true only insofar as it can be nuanced by reference to specific events and documents. Otherwise, it is pure rubbish. Much of the problems of the later Empire were caused by the increased barbarian threat that becomes apparent in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. To fight off all those bloody Germans and Iranians, the Romans did what they always did–hire foreign auxiliaries. In retrospect we can see they went too far, but a good many well-intentioned and hardworking rulers and commanders did their best down to the mid-fifth century. Majorian made a super attempt, but even in the reign of Theoderic we can witness a Roman elite class that does its duty and tries to salvage Romanitas. This project does not come to an end until after Justinian’s reconquest and the subsequent Lombard invasions. For every eminent scholar Russell borrows from, there is an equally eminent scholar who would say either the opposite or offer a useful nuance.

It is not, I repeat NOT Christianity that changed the social life of the Empire’s peoples but the facts of living in a vast, bureaucratic, multi-ethnic empire with diminishing financial resources. Pagans and Christians were no different, and if one studies the response made by Christian communities to invasions, we can find many instances of robust resistance. In conclusion to this part of the argument, whatever Russell may prove in his two historical chapters, the foundations he has laid in the theories of Bellah and Dumezil and in broad overviews of late Roman history are far too shaky to make any conclusive case on.

Chapter Six: “Germanization and Christianity: 376-678”

Up to this point I have been a bit hard on Dr. Russell, though if someone like me had been on his dissertation committee, he would have avoided many pitfalls. Someone should have sent it over to my old friend and former fellow-student Harry Evans in the Fordham classics department. But, enough cavils about ancient history and the flawed methodology of sociology! Let us turn to his historical treatment.

His general account of the Germans’ reception of Christianity in this period is basically sound. Once he is on firm ground, his writing–and thinking–become clearer and more forceful. He accepts the views (probable but not provable) of Peter Heather and EP Thompson that the Goths were drawn to Arianism precisely because it was not the religion of the Empire. Unfortunately, he goes still further and seems to endorse the argument that Germanic leaders were generally opposed to Roman culture. Even the much-cited case of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, who did not want his people to adopt Roman customs, can have other explanations: He may not have wanted too much fraternization with possible enemies; he may have believed, as he said, that his warriors would grow weak if they turned Roman. Other Germans like Stilicho’s father did not have any trouble in marrying a Roman or raising their children, whether in Italy or Constantinople, as good Romans. Besides, a GErman would not need to have a firm anti-Roman conviction to feel some reluctance about an alien people. The Franks, as Russell acknowledges, adopted a rather pro-Roman stance, which probably had something to do with the fact that Clovis adopted the Catholic religion. This in itself did not drive them into the arms of Rome, but Catholic Italians and Catholic Franks shared a similar enemies’ list of Arian Germanic peoples.

The Frankish situation is complex, and JCR does his best to do justice to the complexity. Early Franks, though he does not make this clear, had been rather on the fringes of the Roman area of influence, and this may partly explain their sluggish progress in Romanization. The interaction between Franks and the Roman remnant in Gaul was a two-way street, and JCR adopts the view that Clovis, after baptism, began interfering in the hitherto Gallo-Roman Church, which he filled with his less-than-qualified stooges–a problem that plagued the Church in France down to Napoleon’s day, at least.

He has a good deal of less than satisfying discussion of the supposed group identity of the Franks from a Weberian point of view, combined with speculation about the attraction of Germanic warriors for heroic Irish monks. This is the context in which he takes up the failure of Merovingian kings to do much in the way of religious education, but the Franks were, after all, a crude lot, a far cry from the Goths who had been civilizing themselves for a fair amount of time. He accepts the argument that the popularity of votive masses, in the Early Middle Ages, implies a radically different understanding of the mass as a good work, but he does not offer much more than the argument from authority, that is, some important scholars have said so. I simply don’t know how Augustine or Ambrose or Gregory viewed the mass, and thus it seems difficult to draw such broad conclusions from such a dearth of evidence. That, indeed, is the major problem of even the best parts of his study: the lack of a firm foundation in actual documents. What is seriously lacking, in this chapter, is any treatment of Christian evolution in non-Germanic Christendom, particularly in Rome and Ravenna. Even if the changes he thinks were taking place did in fact take place, Germanization is only one possible explanation.

Nonetheless, this chapter was well worth reading, and JCR picks his way among the conflicting theories with a far surer foot than in earlier parts of his book. Does he nail his case in these early centuries? I don’t think so. Everything changes, as Heraclitus observed long ago, but sometimes what we regard as dynamic change or progress is simply decay. We may learn to like the flavor of “aged” game and rotten cheese, but it is still rotten. It naturally took a long time to civilize the Germans. Carolingian and Capetian kings and aristocrats had a terrible problem with Christian monogamy. One interpretation might be that they were Germanizing Christianity, but it seems simpler to suppose that they had not yet got the hang of Christian marriage or even that they were not even trying. Our barbarian ancestors only made a stab at being civilized after the Church had been doing a job on them for five centuries. And, I suppose it is worth noting, that as soon as the Northern West began pulling away both from the Church and from the civilization(s) of the oikoumene, we started acting once again like beasts. I have noted many times before that the post-Christian Germans and Scandinavians are far more repulsive than post-Christian Italians, Greeks, and French.

Conclusion

I had hoped that Russell would cinch l his argument in the last chapter on Germanization post 678. Unfortunately, this chapter suffers from the same defects and limitations as its predecessors. In applying a “big theory” to secondary academic monographs and studies, without serious consideration of primary texts and sources, he is free to pick and choose what ideas or even quotations that fit his thesis but without ever really going deep enough into any event or situation to establish a solid basis for the argument. He spends, for example, a good deal of time on Gregory the Great’s approach to the Anglo-Saxon mission he sent out and its possible indications of a softening of Rome toward Germanic paganism. Gregory, however, gives conflicting advice. To an AS ruler, he advises toughness in putting down the relics of paganism, while to his missionary he advises a slower and more accommodating approach. Inevitably, Russell relies on R.A. Markus’ Gregory the Great and His World, from which he derives evidence of a significant evolution in Pope Gregory’s thinking, from asperity to accommodation. But Russell pushes the argument well beyond anything Markus has suggested, and Markus, though a fine scholar, does not have to be right about everything, and he certainly is not. (I find him particularly weak, for example, on Gregory’s moral theology.) We simply have too little evidence on which to judge this case. Gregory, one needs to remember, had been a major diplomat, and it is quite natural for him to advise discretion to a missionary while instructing a powerful converted ruler to crack down. To go from Gregory to Boniface is thus not entirely legitimate, especially given the spotty evidence, though Boniface certainly read Gregory’s letters. It is simply a conjecture that Boniface, influenced by Gregory, decided to go easy on pagan practices. Thus one cannot go on to construct an account according to which the Church in Germany learned to accept important elements of Germanic paganism. It may well be true, but the historical case is shaky

The idea that Germans made their rulers semi-divine would not seem terribly strange either to Constantine or to 1000 years of Byzantine Emperors. The Hellenistic kings had been divine or semi-divine, and in the East Augustus was worshipped even in his lifetime. Later emperors were less modest than Augustus. Even Constantine, after accepting Christianity, actually enhanced and magnified the religious reverence due to the emperor. The word sacred, for example, was more or less used in bureaucratic circles as term to denote what belonged to the emperor. Surely, these sacred majesties were not influenced by Germans. A similar point would have to be made about Christianity’s hostility toward German paganism’s sacred places. Exactly the same thing happened in the Greek and Slavic world, so whatever took place is not exclusively or even primarily Germanic. In the case of Northern Europe, where some sacred places were identified with human sacrifice, the missionaries were quite naturally suspicious.

What JCR does not seem to understand is Christianity’s complex relationship to this world. It is both word-denyint and world-accepting from the beginning. In the ancient Church, a distinction gradually developed between the strict expectations of the clergy, especially monastic clergy, and the requirements for ordinary men and women. Celibacy and communism turned out to be impractical, and, indeed, neither is actually taught by Christ Himself. On the magical elements in Christianity, we should remember that Christ worked miracles and passed on this power to his apostles. The veneration of relics goes to the beginning of our faith, to the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment, to Peter’s wrong-headed desire to build three tabernacles to commemorate the Transfiguration, to the pious Christians of Smyrna who gathered up the relics of their martyr Polycarp. Much like Plotinus, Christians are caught between two poles, between the recognition that God is greater than all his creations and the recognition that what God has created is good.

Stripped of its grand sociological theory and reinforced by a comparative study of Eastern Europe, JCR’s argument might be corrected to the point it could be accepted, but the what would it mean? That some harmless elements in paganism were Christened and adopted more or less permanently by Northern European Christians, just as Southern Europeans kept many Greco-Roman customs. That, at the other end of the scale, some bad medicine was also incorporated and this was only diminished after a long time—magical practices, fortune-telling, witch-craft, trial by ordeal, polygamy. A similar story, again, can be told in the Balkans and in Italy. Finally, some customs and attitudes, neither good nor bad in themselves, perhaps, but risky were accepted into Christian practice and have to be looked at from time to time. At what point does the Germanic sense of courage and honor turn into a justification for murder and mayhem?

The best that I can say of The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is that it has a pretty good bibliography from which JCR is able to provide a broad overview of what major (and not so major) scholars have said on this subject. In the end, the verdict must be the Scottish verdict of “not proven,” though in this case, I should add, “not even close.” Even the title puts the reader on a false track. It is not Christianity that might have suffered from Germanization but Christendom, the way of life of the Christian West. Even his title, then, illustrates what he himself has called a “subjectivist” and “relativistic” definition of Christianity.

In conclusion, Neopagans who trot out The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity as proof that whatever manly elements there are in Medieval Christianity derive from Germanization are, first, misapplying Russell’s book, because that is not his argument, and two, even if they were correctly interpreting the book, Germanization is not one of those magisterial books that closes and argument.

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