The Undivided Past (36 page)

Yet despite the immeasurable superiority of
Rome, neither its vast empire nor its remarkable achievements were lastingly established, for according to Gibbon, their imperium was overwhelmed not only by “Christianity,” which vanquished “paganism,” but also by “barbarism,” which triumphed over “civilization.” During the late fourth century, he argued, external pressure on Rome’s distant frontiers, which was itself in response to the invasive force exerted farther east by the
Huns, became irresistible, as the Goths crossed the Danube in 376 CE, and defeated the imperial legions at Adrianople two years later. But this was only the beginning: in the first decade of the fifth century, the Vandals forded the Rhine into the empire, and subsequently advanced over the Pyrenees into
Spain, and the Goths invaded
Italy, sacking Rome in 410. There was worse to come: the Vandals captured Carthage in 439, they pillaged Rome sixteen years later, and the last emperor in the west,
Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476. Within scarcely a hundred years, according to Gibbon, “the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of barbarians”; new kingdoms were established by the Visigoths in Spain and southern Gaul, by the Franks in northern Gaul, by the Ostrogoths in Italy, and by the Vandals in North Africa; the once-great city of Rome was left a shattered and wasted ruin; and “the barriers which had so long separated the savage and the civilized nations of the earth were … leveled to the ground.”
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For Gibbon, the outcome of this titanic but unequal struggle between the opposed identities of civilization and barbarism was a huge regression in the course of human history, as the western Roman Empire fell victim to the “vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.” The crude, brutal Germanic tribes had obliterated the hard-won gains of Graeco-Latin civilization, and their devastating intrusions and destructive conquests had ushered in a dark age of ruin and decay, from which it took Europe centuries to recover. For Gibbon, these terrible times were characterized in the West by the “lowest ebb of primitive
barbarism” among the empire’s successor kingdoms, while in the East the wounded, beleaguered empire of Byzantium somehow survived, even though Gibbon regarded it as being incorrigibly moribund, parochial, and corrupt—so much so that its later history presented “a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery.” There might be occasional revivals and reconquests, as under the emperor
Justinian, but its long-term trajectory was toward oblivion, as its dominions were eroded by successive waves of eastern barbarians: by the Persians, the Slavs, the Arabs, by Seljuk Turks, and eventually by the
Ottoman Turks, who vanquished the “second Rome” when they sacked
Constantinople in 1453.
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Yet for all its apparent heroic simplicities, Gibbon’s dichotomy of civilized and barbarian was (like his polarity of pagan and Christian) hedged with many caveats and qualifications that have often been overlooked. To begin with, and as befitted someone of his ironic disposition, he never believed that the Romans were unreservedly virtuous and that the barbarians were utterly without redeeming qualities. As he saw it, the high point of Roman civilization had come in the earlier time of the republic, whereas the later eras of imperial despotism were characterized by “immoderate greatness,” when corruption, luxury, excess, and enervation weakened resolve, sapped liberty, and subverted freedom.
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Not surprisingly, Gibbon sometimes conceded that decayed and degenerate Rome both needed and deserved to be vanquished then reinvigorated by the hordes pressing inexorably on the empire’s borders, which might be savage and warlike, but which were also brave, energetic, and, in their own fashion, believers in the sort of freedom on which Rome had long since given up. Thus understood, the central paradox of
The Decline and Fall
was that the barbarians invaded and conquered a great empire only to find that they in turn were overwhelmed by the idea of a civilization that they had seemingly vanquished, but that they eventually reenergized and renewed and liberated.
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The result was a gradual evolution from “primitive barbarism” to “the full tide of modern civilization,” which meant the Europe of Gibbon’s time was “secure from any future irruption of barbarism,”
and that the threat it had represented was over—at least on his own continent, although not necessarily elsewhere.
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Moreover, while Rome may for a time have embodied “civilization,” Gibbon recognized that it was neither
monolithic nor unchanging, and he preferred the republic’s spirited freedom to the “immoderate greatness” of the empire or the decayed lethargy of
Byzantium.
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Nor did the coherence of his other and opposing category of “barbarian” hold up to closer scrutiny, for the external forces that assailed and eventually destroyed the empire came in varied and distinct guises, in terms of their origins, aims, behavior, and beliefs. There were those emanating from Asia, successively the
Huns under Attila, the Mongols under
Genghis Khan, and the Timurids under
Tamerlane, whose westward expansion put powerful indirect pressure on the boundaries of the empire. There were the Vandals, the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Ostrogoths, who in retreating before Attila’s Asiatic hordes smashed their way through the borders of the Western Empire, bringing chaos and ruin, even though eventually followed by freedom and liberty. Finally, there were the Persians, the
Arabs, and the Turks, who assailed the Roman Empire on its eastern frontiers: they were more inclined to enervation, corruption, and oriental despotism than their vigorous northern counterparts, and in the case of the Arabs, they were also powerfully motivated by a crusading religion. From this more nuanced Gibbonian perspective, “barbarian” was too simplistic a collective category to encompass all Rome’s many enemies across a thousand years, for as their varied histories and attributes suggested, they possessed no shared sense of unity, identity, mission, or purpose.
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On closer inspection, then, Gibbon’s celebrated dichotomy between the collective identities of “civilization” and “barbarism” was less clear-cut than a cursory reading of
The Decline and Fall
might suggest, yet since his day, the same polarities and warring antagonisms have been projected in many times and places. For the
Comte de Ségur, the French ambassador to the court of
Catherine the Great, the identities Gibbon had discerned in the world of late antiquity were still in being, but they were now to be found in
Russia, where the westward-facing capital of St. Petersburg was
a confused amalgam of “the age of barbarism and that of civilization, the tenth and the eighteenth centuries, the manners of Asia and those of Europe.”
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But for the
Chinese emperor Qianlong, receiving a
British delegation led by Lord
Macartney in 1793, it was the Europeans who were the barbarians, whereas the Asiatics were civilized. He was unimpressed by the gifts and gadgets Macartney brought as an indication of his nation’s technological superiority, and he dismissed
George III’s “humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilization.” Macartney’s delegation thought the Chinese arrogant, xenophobic, authoritarian, and backward, but the Chinese remained convinced they were the civilized ones and that the Europeans (like everyone else beyond their own borders) were the savages. Six decades later, in the aftermath of the destruction by the British and the French of the Old Summer Palace in
imperial Peking, an outraged and embarrassed
Victor Hugo offered another variant: “We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.”
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But Gibbon’s resonant, if oversimplified, dichotomy was not only extended, adapted, and even reversed during the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it was also stripped of its adversarial aspects by those who insisted that barbarism and civilization were not antagonistic identities locked in a mortal Manichean conflict, but were the extreme positions on a continuous and continuing spectrum of political, social, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic
development. They were not Gibbon’s clashing aggregations, doomed to primordial and perpetual confrontation; rather, they were the beginning and end points of the long journey of human evolution. Reformulated in this way, civilization was not a collective and embattled entity, always at war with the barbarians, but a continuing
process
, which had reached its zenith with the advanced nations of nineteenth-century Europe. It was this view that underlay such works as François
Guizot’s
Histoire de la civilisation en Europe
and his
Histoire de la civilisation en France
,
Jacob Burckhardt’s
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
, and
H. T. Buckle’s
Introduction to the History of Civilization in England.
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It was this sense of ultimate attainment on the part of some Europeans that also inspired the “civilizing mission” of
nineteenth-century
imperialism, where the avowed aim was to lift up those peoples at a lower stage of human development.
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And this view achieved its fullest articulation in the work of the émigré sociologist
Norbert Elias, who published
The Civilizing Process
in German in 1939, the very year when it seemed to many that that process had come to a terrible halt.
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Because of the strong claims made to it by
France and Britain, and sometimes by
Italy, European
“civilization” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not necessarily encompass the whole continent, and the relations of the German-speaking peoples to the concept and the collectivity remained in question. From one perspective, deriving from a careful reading of
The Decline and Fall
, there were Germans who took pride in not being “civilized” at all. For
Johann Gottfried von Herder, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and developing an argument Gibbon had made only en passant, it was the Teutonic “barbarians” who had been brave, energetic, and freedom-loving: they were “northern giants, to whom the enervated Romans appeared as dwarfs; they ravaged
Rome, and infused new life into expiring Italy.”
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Thereafter, many German writers and politicians followed Herder, insisting it was the so-called barbarians who had always been the
morally superior peoples, plucking the lamp of civilization away from decadent and declining Rome; and this inverted dichotomy was widely embraced by late-nineteenth-century German scholars, who saw the
Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic race as the great energizing and reforming force in Western history, sweeping away Latin degeneracy and corruption. The same interpretation was advanced in Britain by
Thomas Hodgkin, a Quaker banker and historian, whose
Italy and Her Invaders
appeared a century after
The Decline and Fall.
Hodgkin was more sympathetic to German language and culture than Gibbon, and he urged that Gibbon had underestimated the achievements of the “barbarians” in transforming a decaying empire into thriving and vigorous kingdoms.
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From another perspective, however, the collective German superiority over western European civilization in the nineteenth century did not derive from the greater vigor of “barbarism” in opposition to “civilization,” but from the greater refinement of
“Kultur,” which articulated identities in intellectual, artistic, and
spiritual terms, compared to Anglo-French “Zivilisation,” which was deemed to be more concerned with (baser) political, social, and economic matters. For
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing a commentary revealingly entitled
Kultur contra Zivilisation
, “Civilisation is altogether something different than Culture will allow: it is perhaps its inverse.” And
civilization was also its inferior: as
Thomas Mann later put it, “culture equals true spirituality, while civilization means mechanization.”
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Thus regarded, German “Kultur” was greatly superior to European (which meant essentially Anglo-French-Italian) “civilization.” Not surprisingly, those who were placed on the far side of this divide did not agree, even when certain military and political events seemed to justify such an ordering. When
Victor Hugo, who was not unaware of the ambiguities of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism,” addressed the French National Assembly in 1871, following his nation’s recent crushing defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War, he insisted on contrasting the “barbarism” of German “Kultur” with the “light” that was French civilization, which meant for Hugo that despite France’s military humbling and humiliation, it was still the superior nation.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, the European categories and identities relating to civilization were thus so varied and inconsistent as to be far beyond Gibbon’s initial, resonant, and easily vulgarized identities and antitheses of civilized or barbarian. And yet these basic terms were frequently resorted to and constantly reworked by the belligerents during the
First World War, which would see a multiplication of identity rhetoric, behavioral
stereotyping, and opposing groups, but all of them founded on the same simple dichotomy.
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The leaders and propagandists of the Anglo-French Entente insisted they were fighting to defend
Christian European “civilization” from the aggression, pillage, and ruin of the
Austrian and German “barbarians,” who were, after all, descended from the
Goths and the
Huns, and from whom decency and chivalry could thus not be expected. When Britain and France were (belatedly) joined by Italy, the argument was further strengthened that the Entente was the embodiment and defender of European civilization. As their governments put it in a note of January 1917 addressed to President
Woodrow
Wilson, among their war aims was “the expulsion from Europe of the
Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilization.” But this was only an incoherent formulation, since for much of the war, the
British, French, and Italians were also allied with the Russians, and the Slavs had often been regarded by inhabitants of western Europe as “barbarians,” not least by
Queen Victoria herself.
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