Essays in Idleness

That triad of triads — the Nine Worthies of medieval antiquity, from Hector and Alexander to Godfrey of Bouillon (three pagans, three Jews, and three Christians, to whom Falstaff was added by Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare) — are not taken in understanding today. We will have to relearn that without historical characters who are much larger than life, our own little lives are much smaller.

Charlemagne, who presided over the Carolingian Renaissance in the VIIIth and IXth centuries, is among the transformative hinges by which the ancient, or classical, was turned into the mediaeval and modern order of Europe. He is the knife edge between ancient and modern: the great conqueror of his age, but too, among the great teachers in the formation of Christendom. The monasteries were already being founded and equipped, the prayers being said, but as Charles told Abbot Baugulfus, they would have to become secular training centres, too. For while his bureaucrats might have the odd clever idea, their Latin was appalling and they could not think temporally on parchment. They were not elegant. Nor could they adequately read Scripture, in this ignorance, until elegant literacy filled their souls.

The revival of art, and especially of literary art, underpinned the Emperor’s new order. For another feature or aspect of this rekindled beauty was escape, from the fanaticism of the East — from the war between iconoclasts and iconodules that raged there. Charles realized that both extremes were wrong. It was from this wisdom that the achievements of Romanesque and Gothic could be built; and Orthodoxy could return to the East, in time to dampen the psychotic claims of Islam.

One might look upon our Catholic heritage as uncommonly lucky. In fact, it was so because of the intervention of God. But one must see how terribly unlucky we will be as the barbaric (raping and slaughtering) immigrant hordes arrive to behead the Carolingian West.