Against the Counter-Thesis

Dad29 linked to a post on a longstanding historical debate on whether Islam, or internal dissolution, destroyed Western Roman civilization.  

With respect to the fact that the "counter-thesis" has been defended by some good historians over many years, I think we can say with some confidence that the counter-thesis is not correct.  Roman civilization in Britain, for example, was destroyed by pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes.  By the time of Charlemagne, they had been re-Christianized chiefly by Gaelic monks who came from Ireland to what is now Scotland, and from Scotland south into the Germanic lands.

These Gaelic monks were never part of Roman civilization:  although the Romans appeared poised to invade Ireland from Chester, where they built a fortress for a legion ("Deva Victrix"), they did not follow through; and of course what is now Scotland was at the time mostly held by another civilization, the now-extinct Picts, who were beyond Hadrian's wall.  The Gaels (called "Scotti" by the Romans) had only begun to establish some footholds in what is now Scotland; even Dal Riada was not established until after 500 AD.

The collapse of Roman civilization in Britain happened before Mohammed was born; by the time he was alive, in fact, it was all over.

Islam may have been responsible for a similar destruction in Spain especially.  If the Saxons did it elsewhere, though, there should be a unifying cause that permitted both effects.  That will be found (I think) in the period of the barracks emperors; the consequent gutting of the native Roman military, and the civic culture that had produced it; and the rise of Germanic mercenary forces to supplant native-Roman ones, out of which grew Charlemagne's war band (and the Anglo-Saxon ruling system as well).

To put this in Aristotelian terms, Islam can only claim to be the efficient cause of the destruction of part of the Western Roman world.  The formal cause was the internal dissolution, which is universal to the areas affected by the various invasions.  

The final cause?  If we still believe in final causes in history, it would have to be something like the divine plan:  a will that there should be a Charlemagne, or a King Arthur.  Most Western thinkers today, however, don't believe in final causes in history anymore:  the idea has been discredited by Marxism (which argued for the inevitable collapse of capitalism from something like a 'final cause in the arc of history').

14 comments:

E Hines said...

To niggle around the edges a bit, I have to wonder whether Roman civilization ever made it to Britain.

Certainly the trappings of Roman civ were present: Roman soldiers were there, Roman businessmen, and Roman law had been imposed.

But that law had been imposed; I don't recall that it ever had been accepted and internalized by the natives. The Brits never saw themselves as Roman, and their resistance to Roman rule was long-standing, and declining only because the resisters were being killed.

The central thesis of internal dissolution, though, I think is valid. By the time of the final Roman collapse in Britain in the 5th century, Roman internal failures had wrought their damage, and in the event, facilitated the Brits' resistance.

Eric Hines

Eric said...

Britian is a curious case, and since pretty much everybody reading this is a cultural descendant from British colonization of North America, it always seems to occupy everybody's imagination more, whether or not it is really relevant to the argument--the one here being concerned really with the Mediterranean rather than the edges of the Roman Empire.

But back to that, yes, the internal problems of the Romans did them in--particularly the inability to after the 2nd century AD to effect an orderly transfer of power. (Granted, there there were problems in the 1st and 2nd centuries, but the Empire was under much less outside pressure).

The Muslim conquests in the 7th century were the final blows that an earlier Eastern Roman Empire might have warded off. Certainly the Romano-Persian Wars of the 6th and 7th centuries weakened both powers such that they couldn't deal with the Arabs for a variety of reasons.

Anonymous said...

THe newest Oxford University history of Roman Britain suggests that Roman occupation left very little cultural trace in England, aside from resentment and a supply of building materials. The author is approaching the topic from subaltern studies, considering it an occupation a la the US in Iraq or the British in India, so that part of his thesis might be taken with a grain of salt.

Recent scholarship into the expansion of Arabic peoples into the [former ?] Roman Empire after 622 posits a power vacuum created by the defeat of the Persians and the temporary exhaustion of the Byzantines following a war that wrapped up in 622 AD. Islam, it more and more appears, did not exist until the 700s at least, when a rigidly monophysite western Syrian Christianity shifted into an Arab/ Syrian justification for conquest. All of which is rather later than most people date the "fall of the Roman Empire." Or earlier, if you accept the 1453 date. :) For more detail, see the essays in "The Hidden Origins of Islam," Ohlig and Puin eds.

LittleRed1

Tom said...

I don't think it was Marx who destroyed belief in final causes in history, at least, not in America. I think it was the secularization of science and the rise of science as a cultural power.

The secularization of science meant abandoning the search for final causes. This process was in general completed during the 19th century. Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer were some of the major proponents of this change.

As the cultural power of science rose across the 19th century, and the cultural power of religion in intellectual circles fell, historians increasingly followed the scientists and a number tried to do history as science, or at least paid lip-service to the idea, which meant abandoning final causes.

Or maybe it was this and Marx combined. I don't know as much about Marx's influence in the 19th century as I should.

Tom said...

The exception, as Grim notes, was progress. The whole age seems to have been concerned with progress, and many quite secular scientists and historians believed in some kind of inevitable progress, however it was explained. Marx was only one of many on that score.

Joseph W. said...

Tom - I think Grim's point was that the discrediting of Marx, rather than Marx himself, caused modern thinkers to lose interest in secular "final causes."

Tom said...

Joseph, That would make sense. With Grim's parenthetical comment, I should have seen that interpretation.

MikeD said...

It's not just in history or philosophy that folks look for final causes. One of my peeves about paleontology is that you will get perfectly rational men and women to lose their minds declaring this or that catastrophic event killed all the dinosaurs. Very few events in history have single causes. There is no "silver bullet" that killed the Roman Empire (but you'll still find people who swear it was the lead lined wine jugs), nor was there likely a single thing that caused the death of all the dinosaurs. An asteroid explains a lot of dinosaur extinctions, but not all of them were multi-ton predators and herbivores. People forget that there were turkey and house cat sized dinosaurs. If the mammals survived because they were small, why didn't the smallest dinosaurs?

No one explanation fits, but I think it's human nature to have one thing or person to pin the blame on for any catastrophic event.

MikeD said...

It's not just in history or philosophy that folks look for final causes. One of my peeves about paleontology is that you will get perfectly rational men and women to lose their minds declaring this or that catastrophic event killed all the dinosaurs. Very few events in history have single causes. There is no "silver bullet" that killed the Roman Empire (but you'll still find people who swear it was the lead lined wine jugs), nor was there likely a single thing that caused the death of all the dinosaurs. An asteroid explains a lot of dinosaur extinctions, but not all of them were multi-ton predators and herbivores. People forget that there were turkey and house cat sized dinosaurs. If the mammals survived because they were small, why didn't the smallest dinosaurs?

No one explanation fits, but I think it's human nature to have one thing or person to pin the blame on for any catastrophic event.

Grim said...

Joe is correct.

The other kind of 'final cause' argument in the modern period is Hegel's. Few people understand Hegel well enough to endorse him, and no one understands him well enough to reject him entirely; and for that reason, his position tends not to be spoken of much.

douglas said...

"If the Saxons did it elsewhere, though, there should be a unifying cause that permitted both effects. That will be found (I think) in the period of the barracks emperors; the consequent gutting of the native Roman military, and the civic culture that had produced it; and the rise of Germanic mercenary forces to supplant native-Roman ones, out of which grew Charlemagne's war band (and the Anglo-Saxon ruling system as well)."

Why do I have a nervous feeling that at this point in time, we're standing in a fork in the road, and one branch looks an awful lot like that description?

douglas said...

"The whole age seems to have been concerned with progress, and many quite secular scientists and historians believed in some kind of inevitable progress, however it was explained. Marx was only one of many on that score."

I've heard it put forth that you could look at any system of belief or world view and see a very similar trajectory outlining it that could be called 'progress' as one label. They all looked something like this- an initially 'perfect' state is then corrupted, and a 'fallen' state ensues. Here there is more divergence, but there's some sort of struggle for redemption, and ultimately, there is supposed to be some reinstatement of the initial perfect state. The Judeo-Christian model fits as well as Marxism does in that framework. (I think I've got it mostly correct).

Grim said...

Douglas,

As to your first point, I'd like to say that the American military culture is still very strong -- and it is, where it exists. Of course, as Ranger Up has been pointing out lately, only about 0.45% of Americans served in any military capacity during the long wars we have been fighting these last ten years. We aren't reliant on foreign mercenaries, at least (although apparently a lot of these PMCs that State likes to use hire Columbians and so forth, the truth is that State is just using them to preserve its independence from DOD. DOD is solidly American).

As for progress, you may have heard something similar from me. My argument has been that it's impossible to judge whether there is or ever has been any moral progress in human history. This is true because human values are usually passed by contact, and we have more contact with those closer to us than those farther away. Thus, of course it is the case that recent periods in time -- being closer to us -- are more likely to share our values than more distant periods; that's just what we should expect to be true. Whether or not it is progress is another question entirely.

douglas said...

Grim, it's not the military proper I worry about, it's the army of bureaucrats who continue to march forward and take over every aspect of our lives from the inside. We have one of the two parties in power willing to gut our loyal defenses and wishing to grow their internal power mechanism to control us. They also utilize foreign ideas and attempt to impose foreign laws on us. Things are indeed different, and history doesn't repeat but it does echo.

Point two, agreed- my example was an argument that it seems we always aspire to believe in progress (of some kind) but that it seems to be a myth. I think the Judeo-Christian model gets furthest away from this as it admits that human nature is unchanging, and progress is really achieved on the individual level only in terms of controlling and overcoming that fallen human nature. That implies that it's a temporally short and local event, rather than a universal trajectory, but a universal trajectory is the model that frames the individual struggle.