The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman ... - Historia Antigua

1. INTRODUCTION 11
and at last it found its highest manifestation in the great review of
history which Dante called his Comedy.
THE MIDDLE AGES
The Dark Ages in western Europe were scarcely civilized at all.
Here and there, there were great men, noble institutions, beautiful
and learned works; but the mass of people were helpless both
against nature and against their oppressors, the raiding savages,
the roaming criminals, and the domineering nobles. The very
physical aspect of Europe was repellent: a continent of ruins and
jungles, dotted with rude forts, miserable villages, and tiny
scattered towns which were joined by a few atrocious roads, and
between which lay huge backwoods areas where the land and
natives were nearly as savage as in central Africa. In contrast to
that gloomy and almost static barbarism, the Middle Ages represent
the gradual, steady, laborious progress of civilization; and the
Renaissance a sudden explosive expansion, in which the frontiers
of space and time and thought were broken down or pushed outwards
with bewildering and intoxicating speed.
Much of the progress of the Middle Ages was educational
progress; and one of its chief marks was that the knowledge of
classical thought, language, and literature expanded and deepened.
Organizations were founded or reoriented in order to study the
classics. The universities appeared, like street-lights going on one
by one after a blackout: Salerno, the earliest, and Bologna, Paris,
Oxford, Cambridge, Montpellier, Salamanca, Prague, Cracow,
Vienna, Heidelberg, St. Andrews; and then schools, like Eton and
Winchester. These universities, although their staff and most of
their students were churchmen, were not clerical institutions.
They were advanced schools rather than religious seminaries; and
from their inception they had students who ranged more widely
than divinity. They were devoted, not to language and literature
as we understand the terms, but to philosophy: and philosophy
meant the Greek philosophy of Aristotle, however deviously
acquired and strangely transformed.
At the same time, the standard of scholarship rose within
certain of the monastic orders. The Benedictines in particular
built up a tradition of learning and aesthetic sensibility which still
survives: many of our finest medieval manuscripts of the classics
were written for or preserved in Benedictine libraries.