Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Skin of Our Teeth - full transcript

(# CESAR FRANCK: Organ Chorale No 3
in A-minor)

Ruskin said, "Great nations write their
autobiographies in three manuscripts,

"the book of their deeds, the book
of their words, and the book of their art.

"Not one of these books can be understood
unless we read the two others,

"but of all of the three,
the only trustworthy one is the last.”

On the whole, I think this is true.

Looking at those great works
of Western man,

and remembering all that he's achieved

in philosophy, poetry,
science, law-making,

it does seem hard to believe that
European civilisation can ever vanish.

And yet, you know, it has happened once.



All the life-giving human activities

that we lump together
under the word "civilisation"

have been obliterated once
in Western Europe,

when the barbarians ran over
the Roman Empire.

For two centuries, the heart of European
civilisation almost stopped beating.

We got through by the skin of our teeth.

In the last few years,

we've developed an uneasy feeling
that this could happen again.

And advanced thinkers,

who even in Roman times thought it fine
to gang up with the barbarians,

have begun to question
if civilisation is worth preserving.

Well, this is why it seems to me a good
moment to look at some of the ways

in which man has shown himself
to be an intelligent, creative,

orderly and compassionate animal.



And the time to begin looking

is the time when the old world
of Greece and Rome had collapsed,

and the new world of Western Europe

had not produced anything
that one could call civilisation.

What is civilisation?

I don't know. I can't define it
in abstract terms...yet.

But I think I can recognise it
when I see it, and I'm looking at it now.

If I had to say which was telling
the truth about society,

a speech by a minister of housing,

or the actual buildings
put up in his time,

I should believe the buildings.

But this doesn't mean that the history
of civilisation is the history of art.

Far from it.

Great works of art can be produced
in barbarous societies.

In fact, the very narrowness
of primitive society

gives their ornamental art
a peculiar concentration and vitality.

At some time in the ninth century,

one could have looked down
into the River Seine,

and seen the prow of a Viking ship
coming up the river.

Looked at today,
it's a powerful work of art.

But to the mother of a family
trying to settle down in her little hut,

it would have seemed less agreeable,

as menacing to her civilisation
as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

A powerful work of art

and more moving, to most of us,
than this Graeco-Roman head.

Yet this is from the figure

that was once the most admired
piece of sculpture in the world -

the Apollo of the Belvedere.

Well, whatever its merits
as a work of art,

the Apollo surely embodies a higher state
of civilisation than the Viking prow.

The northern imagination takes shape
in an image of fear and darkness,

the Hellenistic imagination in an image of
harmonised proportion and human reason.

At certain moments,
man has felt the need

to develop these qualities
of thought and feeling

so that they might approach, as nearly
as possible, to an ideal of perfection.

He's managed to satisfy this need
in various ways,

through myths, through dance and song,
through systems of philosophy,

and through the order
that he has imposed on the visible world.

The children of his imagination are
also the expressions of an ideal.

Western Europe inherited such an ideal.

It had been invented in Greece
in the fifth century before Christ.

And was, without doubt,

the most extraordinary creation
in the whole of history,

so complete, so convincing,
so satisfying to the mind and the eye,

that it lasted, practically unchanged,
for over 600 years.

Of course, its art became
very stereotyped and conventional.

But there it was, the same architectural
language, the same imagery,

the same theatres, the same temples.

At any time for 500 years you could have
found them all round the Mediterranean.

In Greece, Italy,
Asia Minor, North Africa,

or in the South of France, where I am now.

This building, the so-called Maison Carrée
at Nîmes, is a little Greek temple

that might have been anywhere
in the Graeco-Roman world.

That world must have seemed
absolutely indestructible.

And, of course,
some of it was never destroyed.

This aqueduct not far from Nîmes

was materially beyond
the destructive powers of the barbarians.

What happened?

Well, it took Gibbon nine volumes

to describe the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire,

and I shall not embark on that.

But thinking about
this almost incredible episode

does tell one something
about the nature of civilisation.

It shows that however complex and solid
it seems, it's actually quite fragile.

It can be destroyed.

What are its enemies? First of all, fear.

Fear of war,
fear of invasion, fear of plague,

fears that make it simply not worthwhile
constructing things,

or planting trees
or even planning next year's crops.

And fear of the supernatural,

which means that you daren't question
anything or change anything.

The late antique world
was full of meaningless rituals,

mystery religions,
that destroyed self-confidence.

And then boredom.

The feeling of hopelessness

which can overtake people
with a high degree of material prosperity.

There's a poem
by a modern Greek called Cavafy,

a poem in which he imagines
the people of some late antique city

waiting every day for the barbarians
to come and sack it.

And then, finally, the barbarians
move off somewhere else,

and the city's saved,
but the people are disappointed.

It would have been better than nothing.

Of course, civilisation requires
a modicum of material prosperity,

enough to provide a little leisure.

But far more, it requires confidence,

confidence in the society
in which one lives,

belief in its philosophy,
belief in its laws,

confidence in one's own mental powers.

The way the stones of that bridge are laid
is not only a triumph of technical skill,

but it shows a vigorous belief
in discipline and law, energy, vitality.

All the great civilisations,
or civilising epochs,

have had a weight of energy behind them.

People sometimes think that civilisation
consists in fine sensibilities

and good conversation and all that.

Well, these can be among
the agreeable results of civilisation,

but they are not
what makes a civilisation,

and a society can have these amenities
and yet be dead and rigid.

So, if one asks why the civilisation
of Greece and Rome collapsed,

the real answer is that it was exhausted.

The barbarians,

who had been hammering
at the borders of the Roman Empire

throughout its whole history,

finally crossed the Danube and the Rhine.

At first, they were half-Romanised

and helped to carry on
the administration of the Empire.

But gradually the great system broke down,

and into Italy there poured
successive waves of invaders

who were destructively hostile
to what they couldn't understand.

I don't suppose they bothered
to destroy the great buildings

that were scattered
all over the Roman world.

But the idea of keeping them up
never entered their heads.

They preferred to live in prefabs
and to let the old places fall down.

Of course, here and there, life must have
gone on in an apparently normal way

for very much longer
than one would expect.

It always does.

Civilisation might have drifted
downstream for a long time.

But in the middle of the seventh century

there appeared from the south
a new agent of destruction, Islam.

"There is one God,
and Mohammed is His prophet.”

The simplest doctrine
that has ever gained acceptance,

and it gave to the prophet's followers

the invincible solidarity that had once
directed the legions of Rome.

In a miraculously short time, about 50
years, the classical world was overrun.

Only its bleached bones stood out
against the Mediterranean sky.

The old source of civilisation
was sealed off,

and if a new civilisation was to be born,
it would have to face the Atlantic.

What a hope!

People sometimes tell me that
they prefer barbarism to civilisation.

I doubt if they have given it
a long enough trial.

Like the people of Alexandria,
they are bored by civilisation,

but all the evidence suggests

that the boredom of barbarism
is infinitely greater.

Quite apart from the discomforts
and privations,

there was no escape from it.

Very restricted company, no books,
no light after dark, no hope.

On one side, the sea battering away,

and on the other, infinite stretches
of bog and forest and rocky waste.

A most melancholy existence,

and the Anglo-Saxon poets
had no illusions about it.

"A wise man may grasp
how ghastly it shall be

"When all this world's wealth
standeth waste,

"Even as now,
in many places, over the earth

"Walls stand, wind-beaten

"Heavy with hoar frost;
ruined habitations.

"The maker of men
hath so marred this dwelling

"That human laughter
is not heard about it

"And idle stand those old giant-works."

Well, it was probably better to live
on the very edge of the world

than in the shadow
of one of those old giant-works,

where, at any moment, you might be
attacked by a new wave of marauders.

Such, at least, was the view
of the first Christians.

They struggled on in search of the most
inaccessible fringes of Cornwall,

Ireland or the Hebrides.

And what places they found.

(SEAGULLS CRY)

18 miles from the Irish coast
is the island of Skellig Michael,

a pinnacle of rock
rising 700 feet from the sea.

Even today, it's impossible to land
except in fair weather.

Yet, for 400 years,
Christians found it a place of refuge.

They made this stone causeway
up its steep slopes,

an extraordinary achievement
of courage and tenacity.

Looking back from the great civilisations
of 12th-century France

or 17th-century Rome,

it is hard to believe that
for quite a long time, over 100 years,

Western Christianity survived
by clinging to places like this.

Just below the summit,
on the only habitable fragment of land,

they built their dry-stone huts.

There are stones of white crystal
on the island,

and they have been used to make
this rough cross above the doorway.

Of course, there was a pope
in the ruined, beleaguered city of Rome.

But the Celtic church
owed no allegiance to him.

Here, these devoted
transmitters of Christianity

lived their uncomfortable,
inward-turning lives,

while the tides of barbarians
ebbed and flowed across Europe.

The Christian few sought
remote places of enduring sanctuary.

But the pagan tribes were not
interested in permanence.

Like the Irish tinkers of today, they
preferred drifting as the mood took them.

All through the early Dark Ages,
great masses of people were on the move,

taking their animals
and their possessions with them.

What did the early wanderers care about?

The answer comes out in the poems.

Gold.

Whenever an Anglo-Saxon poet wants to put
into words his ideal of a good society,

he speaks of gold.

"There once many a man

"Mood-glad, gold bright,
of gleams garnished,

"Flushed with wine-pride,
flashing war-gear

"Gazed on wrought gemstones,
on gold, on silver,

"On wealth held and hoarded,
on light-filled amber."”

(CROWS CAWING)

Struggling through the forest,
battling with the waves,

conscious chiefly of the animals and the
birds that hung in the tangled branches,

the barbarians were not interested
in human beings.

(ANIMAL HOWLS)

The wanderers had never been
without craftsmen,

and all their pent-up need to give some
permanent shape to the flux of experience,

to make something perfect out of
their singularly imperfect existence,

was concentrated
in these marvellous objects.

This love of gold and wrought gemstones,

this feeling that they reflected
an ideal world

and had some kind of enduring magic,

went on right up to the time when
the dark struggles for survival were over.

It's arguable that Western civilisation
was saved by its craftsmen.

The wanderers could take
their craftsmen with them.

Since the smiths made princely weapons
as well as ornaments,

they were as necessary
to a chieftain's status

as were the bards
whose calypsos celebrated his courage.

But, even while these splendid objects
were being made,

Christianity was gaining ground
in the West.

And two or three parts
of the British Isles

offered, for a short time,
relative security.

One of them was Iona.

(SEALS SINGING)

The Celtic missionaries are said
to have preached to the seals,

and the seals, with their usual curiosity,
no doubt came up to listen.

Secure and sacred.

I never come to Iona - and I used
to come here almost every year

because when I was young
my home was nearby -

without the feeling
some god is in this place.

It is not as awe-inspiring as some other
holy places, in Delphi or Assisi,

but Iona gives one,
more than anywhere else I know,

a sense of peace and inner freedom.

What does it?

The light?

Or the lie of the land which,
coming after the solemn hills of Mull,

seems strangely like Greece,
like Delos, even.

Or is it the memory of those holy men
who kept Western civilisation alive?

Iona was founded by St Columba,

who came here from Ireland
in the middle of the sixth century.

It seems to have been
a sacred spot before he came,

and, for four centuries,
it was the centre of Celtic Christianity.

There are said to have been
360 crosses like the one behind me,

nearly all of them thrown into the sea
during the Reformation.

No-one knows which of the surviving
Celtic manuscripts were produced here,

and which in the Northumbrian island
of Lindisfarne,

and it doesn't really matter,

because they are all, in what
we rightly consider, an Irish style.

The strange thing about these books
is that the monks who decorated them

seem to have had so little consciousness

of any form of classical
or Christian culture.

(PLAINSONG)

They're all gospel books, but they're
almost devoid of Christian symbols,

except for the fierce,
oriental-looking beasts

who symbolise the four Evangelists.

When a man appears,
he cuts a very poor figure.

In this case, the scribe has thought it
best to write in "imago hominis",

the image of a man.

But the pages of pure ornament

are almost the richest pieces
of abstract decoration ever produced,

more refined and elaborate
than anything in Islamic art.

We look at them for ten seconds,

then we pass on to something
that we can interpret or read.

But imagine if one couldn't read

and had nothing else to look at
for weeks at a time.

Then these pages would have
an almost hypnotic effect.

The last work to be decorated in Iona has
become the most famous, the Book Of Kelts.

Soon after these fabulous pages
were completed,

when the book itself was unfinished,

the Abbot of Iona was forced
to flee to Ireland.

The sea had become
more menacing than the land.

The Norsemen were on the move.

"If there were a hundred tongues in each
head," said a contemporary Irish writer,

"they could not recount
or narrate or enumerate or tell

"what all the Irish suffered of hardships
and of injuring and of oppression

"in every house from those valiant,
wrathful, purely pagan people.”

The Celts haven't changed much.

Purely pagan.

Unlike the earlier wanderers, the Vikings
had a rather splendid mythology,

romanticised for us by Wagner.

Their runic stones have
an almost magical power.

They were the last people of Europe
to resist Christianity.

There are Viking gravestones
from quite late in the Middle Ages

that have symbols of Wotan on one side
and Christian symbols on the other.

What's called hedging your bets.

This is how they portrayed themselves
on an engraved stone,

sailing off in their ships,
landing, fighting, looting.

Of course they were brutal
and rapacious.

All the same, they have a place
in the story of European civilisation

because these pirates
were not merely destructive.

If one wants a symbol of Atlantic man,
as opposed to Mediterranean man,

a symbol to set against the Greek temple,

then it must be the Viking ship.

The Greek temple is solid,

static, crystalline.

The Viking ship is light, mobile,

buoyant, floating like a water lily.

The one beside me is 72 feet long,

has a very shallow draught,

only three foot.

It belongs to the early period
of Viking navigation,

when they still hugged the shore,

hence the shallow draught.

This is the ocean-going type.

By the time it was built, and it's about
50 years later than the first one we saw,

the Vikings were quartering the world.

They set out from a base

and, with unbelievable courage
and ingenuity, they got as far as Persia,

via the Volga and the Caspian Sea,

and then they returned home
with all their loot, in these open ships,

including coins from Samarkand
and even a Chinese Buddha.

The sheer technical skill
of their journeys was a new achievement

and their spirit did contribute something
very important to the Western world

because, in the end,
it was the spirit of Columbus.

They were also considerable artists.

The ornament of the prow, which
as you see, is highly sophisticated,

is a pattern of movement,
of endless flux, with a rhythm

that was still to underlie the great
ornamental art we call Romanesque.

When one also considers
the Icelandic sagas,

which are among
the great books of the world,

one must admit that
the Norsemen produced a culture.

But was it a civilisation?

Well, the monks of Lindisfarne
wouldn't have said so,

nor would Alfred the Great,

nor the poor mother trying to settle down
with her family on the banks of the Seine,

whom I mentioned earlier.

Civilisation means something more
than energy and will and creative power,

something the early Norsemen hadn't got,

but which, even in their time, was
beginning to reappear in Western Europe.

How can I define it?

Very shortly, a sense of permanence.

The wanderers and the invaders
were in a continual state of flux.

They didn't feel the need to look forward
beyond the next march

or the next voyage, or the next battle.

And for that reason
it didn't occur to them

to build stone houses,
nor to write books.

This is almost the only stone building

that has survived from the three centuries
after the fall of Rome,

the Baptistry at Poitiers.

And as you see, it's pitifully crude.

The builders, who have tried to use
some elements of Roman architecture,

capitals and pilasters, and so forth,

have no idea of their original intention.

But at least this miserable construction
was meant to last.

It isn't just a wigwam.

Civilised man, or so it seems to me,

must feel that he belongs
somewhere in space and time,

that he consciously looks forward
and looks back.

And for this he needs
a minimum of stability,

which was, in Western Europe,
first achieved here in France,

or, as it then was,
the kingdom of the Franks.

It was achieved by fighting.

All the great civilisations, in their
early stages, are based on success in war.

And so it was with the Franks.

Clovis and his successors
not only conquered their enemies,

but maintained themselves
by cruelties and tortures

remarkable even by the standards
of the last 30 years.

Fighting, fighting, fighting.

These ninth-century drawings
make it look less beastly than it was.

Incidentally, they show
almost for the first time

that the horsemen have stirrups.

And people who like mechanical
explanations for historical events

maintained that this was the reason
why the Frankish cavalry was victorious.

One sometimes feels

that the seventh and eighth centuries
were like a prolonged western

and the resemblance is made more vivid

by the presence already
in the eighth century

of our old friends
the sheriff and the marshal.

But it was really far more horrible,

because unredeemed
by any trace of sentiment or chivalry.

But fighting was necessary.

Without Charles Martel's victory
over the Moors, here at Poitiers in 732,

Western civilisation
might never have existed,

and without Charlemagne's
tireless campaigning

we should never have had
the notion of a united Europe.

We got through by the skin of our teeth.

Charlemagne is the first great man
of action to emerge from the darkness

since the collapse of the Roman world.

He became a subject of myth and legend.

This magnificent reliquary,

made about 500 years after his death
to hold a piece of his skull,

expresses what the Gothic Middle Ages
felt about him

in terms that he himself
would have appreciated -

gold and jewels and antique cameos.

But the real man wasn't
so far from that myth.

He was a commanding figure, over
six feet tall, with piercing blue eyes,

only he had a small, squeaky voice

and a walrus moustache
instead of the beard.

He was a tireless administrator.

The lands he conquered -
Bavaria, Saxony, Lombardy -

were organised beyond the capacities
of a barbarous people.

His empire was an artificial creation.

Yet the old idea that
he saved civilisation isn't so far wrong,

because it was through him that
the Atlantic world re-established contact

with the ancient culture
of the Mediterranean world.

There were great disorders after
his death, but no more skin of our teeth.

Civilisation had come through.

How did he do it?

Well, first of all,

with the help of an outstanding teacher
and librarian named Alcuin of York,

he collected books and had them copied.

People don't always realise

that only three or four antique
manuscripts of the Latin authors

are still in existence.

Our whole knowledge of ancient literature

is due to the collecting and copying
that began under Charlemagne.

This is the more extraordinary
when one remembers that for over 500 years

practically no lay person, from kings and
emperors downwards, could read or write.

Charlemagne learnt to read,
but he never could write.

He said he couldn't get the hang of it.

Alfred the Great, who was
an exceptionally clever man,

seems to have taught himself to read
at the age of 40,

and was the author of several books,

although they were probably dictated
in a kind of seminar.

Great men, even ecclesiastics,

normally dictated to their secretaries,
as they do today,

and as you may see one of them doing
in this tenth-century illustration.

Of course,
most of the higher clergy could read,

and the pictures of the Evangelists,
which are the favourite,

often the only illustrations,
in early manuscripts,

become in the tenth century

a kind of assertion
of this almost divine accomplishment.

This ivory is a glorification of writing,

with its inspired concentration
of St Gregory,

and its three smug little scribes below.

In copying these manuscripts,

Charlemagne's scribes arrived at the most
beautiful lettering ever invented.

Also the most practical,
so that when the Renaissance humanists

wanted to find a clearer and more elegant
substitute for the crabbed Gothic script,

they revived the Carolingian.

And so it has survived in more or less
the same form until the present day.

Charlemagne's adoption
of the imperial idea

led him to look
not only at antique civilisation

but at its strange posthumous existence
in what we call the Byzantine Empire.

(PLAINSONG)

For 400 years, Constantinople had
been the greatest city in the world,

and the only one in which life had gone on
more or less untouched by the wanderers.

It was a civilisation all right.

It produced some of
the most nearly perfect buildings

and works of art ever made.

But it was entirely sealed off
from Western Europe,

partly by the Greek language,
partly by religious differences,

chiefly because
it didn't want to involve itself

with the bloody feuds
of the Western barbarians.

It had its own Eastern barbarians
to deal with.

I am in the church of San Vitale
at Ravenna,

which, for a part of
the fifth and sixth centuries,

was the seat of the Byzantine court.

Charlemagne came here
on his way back from Rome.

No emperor had visited Rome
for almost 500 years,

and when Charlemagne, the great conqueror,
went there in the year 800,

the Pope crowned him as the head
of a new Holy Roman Empire,

brushing aside the fact that there was
another emperor in Constantinople.

Charlemagne was afterwards heard to say
that this famous episode was a mistake.

He advised his son to crown himself.
Perhaps he was right.

By crowning Charlemagne, the Pope
could claim a supremacy over the Emperor

which was the cause, or pretext,
of war for three centuries.

But historical judgments are very tricky.

Maybe the tension between
the spiritual and worldly powers

throughout the Middle Ages

was precisely what kept
European civilisation alive.

If either had achieved absolute power,

society might have grown as static
as the civilisation of Egypt

or of Byzantium itself.

Anyway, Charlemagne saw these mosaics
of Justinian and Theodora,

and realised how magnificent
an emperor could be.

I may add that he himself never wore
anything but a plain Frankish cloak.

And when Charlemagne returned
to his residence at Aix-la-Chapelle -

he settled there because he liked
swimming in the hot springs -

he determined to build a replica
of San Vitale as his palace chapel.

(PLAINSONG)

Those mosaics are a reconstruction
done in the 19th century,

and we can see
that, by comparison with Ravenna,

the octagon at Aix
is rather stiff and monotonous.

But those magnificent iron grilles,
which were made locally,

are an impressive technical achievement.

And when one thinks that nearly all
the buildings in northern Europe,

including the greater part
of Charlemagne's palace, were of wood,

and that such stone buildings as existed
were the converted husks of Roman remains,

it is the most extraordinary feat.

Charlemagne's throne.

Of course, the craftsmen who made
those grilles may have come from the East,

because under Charlemagne Europe was
once more in touch with the outside world.

He even received a present from Harun
al-Rashid, Caliph of the 1001 Nights,

an elephant called Abul-Abbas.

It died on campaign in Saxony.

Its tusks were made into chessmen
which still exist.

As ruler of an empire stretching
from Denmark to the Adriatic,

he amassed treasures
from all over the known world.

But in the end,
it was the books that mattered.

There have never been more splendid books

than those illuminated
for the court library

and sent as presents
all over Western Europe.

In their own day, these books were
so precious that the practice arose

of giving them the richest,
most elaborate bindings conceivable.

Usually they took the form
of an ivory plaque

surrounded by beaten gold and gems.

And these small pieces of sculpture

are in some ways our best indication
of the intellectual life of Europe

for almost 200 years.

Only Charlemagne
could hold the empire together.

After his death it broke up
and Europe entered a phase

which historians usually consider

almost as dark and barbarous
as the century before him.

That's because they look at it from
the point of view of political history

and the written word.

If we read what Ruskin called
the book of its art,

we get a very different impression,

because, contrary to all expectation,

the tenth century produced work
as splendid and as technically skilful,

and even as delicate as any other age.

To me, this Cross of Lothair
is one of the most moving objects

that has come down to us
from the distant past.

On the front, there's
a beautiful assertion of imperial status.

At the centre of these gems
and gold filigree

is a cameo of the Emperor Augustus,

an image of political imperium
at its most civilised.

On the back,
there's a flat piece of silver.

But on it is engraved
an outline drawing of the crucifixion,

a drawing of such poignant beauty as to
make the front of the cross look worldly.

It's the experience of a great artist
simplified to its essence,

what Matisse wanted to do
in his chapel at Vence,

but more concentrated and,
of course, the work of a believer.

We have grown so used to the idea

that the crucifixion
is the supreme symbol of Christianity

that it's a shock to realise

how late in the history of Christian art
its power was recognised.

In the first six centuries the crucifixion
is practically never represented.

And the earliest example,
on the doors of Santa Sabina in Rome,

it's stuck away in a corner,
almost out of sight.

It's not only obscure, but unmoving.

The simple fact is
that the early church needed converts,

and from this point of view

the crucifixion was not
an encouraging subject.

So, early Christian art is concerned
with miracles, healings, water into wine,

and with hopeful aspects of the faith,

such as the Ascension
and the Resurrection.

The few surviving crucifixions
of the early church

make no attempt to touch our emotions.

It was the tenth century, that despised
and rejected epoch of European history,

which made the crucifixion into
a moving symbol of the Christian faith.

In such a figure as this,

made for Archbishop Gero of Cologne
a thousand years ago,

one sees the figure
of the crucified Christ

as it has been almost ever since -

the upstretched arms,

the sunken head,

the poignant twist of the body.

(PLAINSONG)

The men of the tenth century

not only recognised the meaning
of Christ's sacrifice in physical terms,

they were able to sublimate it
into ritual.

The evidence of book illustrations
and ivories shows for the first time

a consciousness
of the symbolic power of the Mass.

Look at these solemn columnar characters
celebrating and chanting the Mass.

Are they not almost literally pillars
of a great new establishment?

And what about this enamelled
pulpit at Aix-la-Chapelle,

from which the word of God could be
preached to the Emperor and his court?

These grand, authoritative works showed
that at the end of the tenth century

there was a new power in Europe

greater than any king or empire,

the Church.

And the Church at this date
was a humanising influence.

I am reminded
of the most famous lines of Virgil,

Virgil, who loomed so large
in the medieval imagination.

They come when Virgil's hero, Aeneas,

has been shipwrecked in a country that
he fears will be inhabited by barbarians.

Then, as he looks around,
he sees some figures carved in relief,

and he says,
"These men know the pathos of life

"and mortal things touched their hearts".

Man is no longer "imago hominis"”,
the image of a man,

but is a human being,
with humanity's impulses and fears,

also humanity's moral sense

and belief in the authority
of a higher power.

By the year 1000, the year in which
many timid people had feared

that the world would come to an end,

the long dominance
of the barbarous wanderers was over

and Western Europe was prepared
for its first great age of civilisation.

(PLAINSONG)