Broadly speaking, what we call the West began as a conglomeration of societies which came together in Northwestern Europe. These lands have been inhabited for tens of thousands of years by uncounted waves of unknown hunter-gatherer societies, and for thousands of years by yet more waves of settlers which displaced them. Pretty much everything we know about these peoples we have inferred from what archaeologists call “material culture” — that is, the artifacts, tools, human and prey-animal skeletons, and especially the garbage that the people left behind. A few caves in France have some art, and there are a few megaliths scattered about, but otherwise we have no hints at all how these human beings lived their lives. Their thoughts, hopes, dreams, imaginations, machinations, dramas, and understandings of their world and their places in it are all entirely lost to us.
It is exceedingly difficult, verging on impossible, to say which aspects of the modern West come from all but the last couple of these endless waves of human societies. If anything at all of them survives, it is deeply hidden and subtle — maybe, just maybe, a few echoes in some old Celtic folktales and place names which still linger dimly in the liminal spaces of the continent. Nothing more than that can be discerned.
The first identifiable culture from which the West was formed, then, is that of the Romans. But no Roman ever considered themselves “Western” in the way that we mean the term today. They considered themselves…well, Roman, and theirs was a thoroughly Mediterranean culture, taking its pedigree from Athens — and maybe Phoenicia and Babylon and beyond, perhaps even to Troy and Jericho and Göbekli Tepe. Nevertheless, the Romans conquered and assimilated many of the lands upon which Western civilisation would be born (along with many other lands besides), and the legacy of their laws, their politics, and their culture provided a great deal of the raw material from which Western civilisation was eventually constructed.
An exhaustive look into proverbial rise and fall of Roman civilisation is far too ponderous for us to consider here, unless and until I really do write an entire book, but I would be remiss if I did not briefly survey a few of the ways in which Rome is relevant to the birth of the West beyond the mere fact that it was the first literate culture to take over Western Europe.
Rome’s foundational myth, more deeply-held and in some ways more fantastic than the story of Romulus and Remus being raised by a wolf, was that it had freed itself from the tyranny of kings and established a republic. The word republic itself comes from the Latin res publica, “public thing”. Incidentally our notions of “citizenship” and even “civilisation” itself come from the Roman notion of civitas, relating to the city, specifically the city of Rome. Thus, in a very real way, we would have no Western civilisation to speak of without the city and attendant civilisation of Rome.
Roman civilisation was highly legalistic, pious, and patriarchal. It was an evolution of European (specifically Italic, and more specifically Latin) tribal society, and many of its laws were designed to formalise and abstract the rules of tribal life to work in an urban environment. We know this because Roman law, especially for its first few centuries, is quite clear about tribes being a fundamental unit of political and social life. Around this tribal heritage, Rome developed state institutions and public offices, a permanently-staffed civil service, and a legislative body to debate and codify all of those laws it became so fond of making. It developed the seed of representative democracy, in which its public officers were elected by a very limited number of men who lived in the city, following complicated tribal and class formulae, the details of which are fascinating but beyond the scope of our purpose here.
The elites of Rome used these institutions and offices and laws and elections to tell themselves, and the world, that it was a civilisation in which the state existed for the benefit of the citizen rather than the other way around. Of course, who Rome counted as a citizen was quite limited and contentious; Roman society practiced slavery as both a spoil of war and a punishment for debts or certain crimes, and non-slave denizens of Rome (both the city and the broader empire) were afforded very different rights and privileges depending upon their families, tribes, wealth, and experience in the civil and military structures of the state. Men were legally superior to women, with a designated pater familias who was the official head family and thus responsible in all senses for that family’s standing and wellbeing. But being a citizen of Rome was a marked upgrade from being the personal property of a tribal leader or a king, which was largely the fate of nearly everyone else in the vicinity at the time.
Eventually, however, these vaunted state institutions were almost entirely consumed by the corrupt enrichment of the elite officeholders and their families, and Roman social organisation led fairly regularly to civil wars and other crises which these elite Romans solved by appointing “temporary” dictators who were given absolute power to solve the pressing social ills of the day with the expectation that they would retire with the gratitude of the city once the crisis had passed. This state of affairs ultimately led to the practical breakdown of these institutions, which resulted in so much chaos and dysfunction that a permanent extralegal dictatorship arose.
It must be noted that Roman elites never at any point stopped considering Rome a republic. To us, it is perhaps the most famous example of a continent-spanning multigenerational dictatorship outside of China, but this dictatorship indulged the elites’ image of Rome as a kingless city at the center of an enormous civilisation of the same name, with civil offices to which prominent citizens were elected (at first) or appointed (once elections to all but the lowest municipal offices became superfluous) to do the people’s business.
This image persisted from Rome’s days as a city-state, through its ascendant conquests, its brutal civil wars, its temporary and then not-so-temporary dictatorships, its bifurcation into East and West, its Christianisation, its barbarian invasions and resettlements, and finally to when the Roman Senate finally decided to stop convening in AD 603, literally a hundred and twenty-seven years after the final Western Roman Emperor had been deposed and the Eastern Roman Empire had long since given up the dream of regaining pan-Mediterranean hegemony.
In other words, Romans considered themselves free from tyranny for a thousand years, even once there was a strongman in charge who would have you killed if you had the temerity to point out that he was a tyrant. Roman elites insisted their civic institutions operated for the general public welfare even as anyone could see that they were little more than sophisticated robbery, out of which the aristocracy provided bread and circuses to distract and mollify the people they were robbing. And they continued to pantomime their sham of a republic for hundreds of years after their empire in the west had been overrun by Germanic tribes and most of the people who lived in the Western Mediterranean had forgotten that there ever was a Rome to pay homage to.
Rome was thus not, or at least not just, a city, or an empire, or a culture. It was a system of ideas, and a rather schizophrenic system for most of its history. And the ideas of Rome did not simply fall; they were not obliterated or cast out in one dramatic event. Rather, those ideas became too divorced from the reality of life in the real world, and they faded and one day disappeared as the people who held them died out and were replaced by people who no longer saw any merit in remembering.
The fact that Roman society operated for centuries under these blatant, obvious self-delusions, and slowly withered away to nothing as the world around it evolved and ultimately subsumed it, is something we should keep in mind when considering the durability and veracity of our own society and its values. But that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
In a major way, the Western Roman Empire never actually went away…or, to continue the above metaphor, the ideas that were Rome did not die out entirely. Indeed, a few of those ideas survived as the state institutions were largely displaced by Germanic kingdoms —and these Germanic kingdoms all adopted the last Roman institution, the one whose ideas survived, and still survive to this day.
That institution, if you haven’t already guessed, was the Roman Church. The fact that the Church survived the death of Rome is in some sense random; the fact that Christianity became the Roman state religion at all is an event so unlikely that its mere fact is held by certain believers to be a miracle which confirms the truth of Christianity. For the record, I am sceptical of this claim.
Pre-Christian Roman religion, from the city’s founding, was an integral part of the state. In the Republican period and for most of the Imperial period, Rome’s state religion was a version of indigenous Proto-Indo-European polytheism, related closely to that of the Greeks and Illyrians, more distantly with the Celts and the Germans, and yet more distantly with Iranian and Indian religions. And this indigenous Roman religion is quite distinct from Christianity, not only in matters of theology and doctrine but in how its adherents practiced it, in ways which are worth considering in order to understand the fundamental role that Christianity played in forming the West as we know it today.
In Pagan Rome, public religious ceremonies were considered vitally important civic duties, and every citizen was expected to participate in them to pay homage to Rome’s deities. There was thus no separation of church and state; rather, religious offices were simply a subset of state offices, and religious functions were run by politicians elected or appointed to those offices. Non-Roman religious observances were not banned, however; over the course of Roman expansion, foreign religious figures were often adopted into Rome’s pantheon — either directly or by claiming an extant Roman god was the equivalent of a foreigner’s god, which was often quite easy to do, especially for the other PIE religions Rome encountered. And even when this did not occur, a citizen’s private beliefs were not considered a concern of the state as long as that citizen practiced Roman rituals in public.
In this way, Roman religion was almost entirely transactional, its practice something like a legal obligation rather than a philosophical or even a spiritual exercise. The gods were not seen as moral or spiritual beings so much as forces of nature, and “believing” in them in one’s private life was not strictly required so long as one made material sacrifices and performed the requisite public duties to assuage their vanity and aver their wrath.
Rome in pagan times therefore usually only suppressed those religious movements which discouraged participation in Rome’s religious rites, with Christianity being the most famous example of such a movement. Of course, Rome’s efforts to suppress Christianity proved ultimately unsuccessful, and eventually it was widespread enough to become adopted as the state religion itself in the waning days of the Western Empire. Those interested in the details may wish to check out Not the Impossible Faith by Richard Carrier; the ins and outs of precisely how Christianity came to suffuse the Roman state and dominate Roman society matter to our purposes here much less than the consequences of this turn of events.
When the Roman Empire embraced Christianity, both Christianity itself and Roman civilisation were indelibly changed. The Roman state religious offices were assumed by Christians, the state became intimately concerned with the private beliefs of its citizens as well as their public participation in religious rites, and internecine Christian disputes over doctrine and theology were settled through once-pagan political channels. Christianity became in some ways just as much Roman as Rome became Christian, with a quasi-polytheistic emphasis on saints and angels and demons, an often assimilationist attitude toward Christianising local populations, and the perverting influence of temporal political power all influencing the direction of Christianity once it became the religion of Rome.
But, while Roman ideas of republicanism and civitas proved all too fragile to endure as material realities even at the height of Rome’s existence, Christianity survived the dissolution of the Western (and, a thousand years thence, the Eastern) Roman Empire. Indeed, the offices of the Roman Church from Pontifex Maximus on down were fully-fledged political offices of the Roman state before that state faded away, and yet these offices still exist in Rome — and the world over — to this very day. As an idea, Christianity proved both durable and irresistible to the Germanic tribes which took power across what had been the Western Roman Empire, and Roman religious offices simply kept functioning in Rome’s successor kingdoms once Rome was otherwise gone.
In this way the Roman Church separated itself from the Roman state, and where once the state had predominated its religion, the Church came to predominate the successor states of Rome. Now, you may be asking yourself why I have so scrupulously referred to the “Roman” Church, when we all know that is not how this church is known today.
The answer to that, I believe, coincides with the proximate origins of the West as a cohesive civilisation.
If pressed, I would say the West was born as a result of the Great Schism of 1054, after which the word “catholic” stopped meaning “universal” and started meaning “the distinct religion led by the Pope of Rome”. (By the by, at present the Roman Pope is one of at least four Popes, and arguably more, depending on how you count your Popes. I wonder if any of them would tell you that Poping ain’t easy? But anyway, I digress.)
Before this event, Christianity had spread across all of the former Roman Empire and was penetrating lands no Roman soldier had ever set a sword upon. And, much like Pagan Rome before it, Christian Rome went right on suppressing Christian sects that disagreed with the official religion of the state. Christianity also violently suppressed any other religion that did not capitulate to the state-sanctioned version of Christianity. In this way, the Roman Church had quite a reasonable claim to being “catholic” in the centuries leading up to the Great Schism.
But no empire is permanent, not even an empire of the mind. Islam rose as a geopolitical challenger and theological successor to Christianity, and swept through Arabia, Central Asia, North Africa, and across the Iberian Peninsula before it reached the limits of its political power. This rent the Christian world in half, and all but extinguished Christianity in the places Islam came to dominate. To be sure, there are still Christians scattered throughout the Levant, and perhaps a few in North Africa, but they were cleaved irreparably from Roman Christendom by the Islamic conquest of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, and they have been utterly powerless in geopolitical or cultural terms ever since. Christianity thereafter lost its centre of gravity in the Mediterranean, and, unable to mount a lasting counterattack on the Muslims, became focused on spreading the faith northward into Europe. It would eventually displace and destroy the indigenous European religions, and “Christendom” became synonymous with “civilised Europe” during this period.
Underlying cultural and political differences between the then-still-extant Eastern Roman Empire, which we today call the Byzantine Empire to distinguish it from the one that actually controlled the city of Rome, and the no-longer-Roman-but-still-Christian West began asserting themselves not long after the rise of Islam. The specific doctrinal disputes are incredibly boring unless you are even nerdier than I am, but the main problem at issue was that the Bishop of Rome claimed supremacy over the Roman Church, while the Roman Empire no longer had control of that city or indeed any lands to the west of Dalmatia. The Roman Church, so argued the (Eastern) Romans, should be headquartered in the capital of the Roman Empire, and its doctrine and political power should therefore be set by the Bishop of Constantinople.
The Bishop of Rome, naturally, was disinclined to acquiesce to this line of reasoning. Things ultimately came to a head in the aforementioned Great Schism, which split the Roman Church in twain, much as the Roman Empire itself had been divided. The Eastern Roman Church called itself “Orthodox”, insisting that it had the one true doctrine; the Western Roman Church called itself “Catholic”, insisting it spoke for all Christians.
Western civilisation was thus born as a quasi-theocratic patchwork of kingdoms built upon the ruins of the Western Roman Empire and dominated by priests who took their orders from Rome. Literacy was almost nonexistent outside of the Catholic Church, almost everyone was a subsistence farmer who had pledged their fealty to a Germanic sword-wielding sociopath in return for that sociopath’s protection from other sociopaths, and those Germanic sociopaths claimed dominion over everything with the Church’s blessing as long as said sociopaths became Christian and insisted their subsistence farmer subjects were Christian too.
Eventually the Germanic ruling classes would be culturally assimilated into the underlying societies, such that one hardly recalls that Germanic tribes once dominated France and Italy and Iberia and North Africa (especially since the latter two were subsequently conquered by Arabic-speaking Muslims), but these Germanic tribes nevertheless left their marks upon all of Western Europe, and they formed the post-Roman substrate upon which Western civilisation was built.
The major societies which constituted this putative West were the English and French and the (not-holy, not-Roman, and definitively not-an-empire) Holy Roman Empire. Everyone else, from Scandinavia to the Pyrenees to the Italian Peninsula, was gathered into petty kingdoms or fiefs who quarrelled amongst themselves or served as battlegrounds for the big guys. Notably, a small handful of tiny kingdoms in northern Iberia bordered on the much more advanced and very not-Western Muslims who’d spilled over the Pillars of Hercules a few hundred years before, and those petty kingdoms spent hundreds of years driving the Muslims off of the peninsula in an uncountable series of opportunistic skirmishes. This will become important in the next installment.
To be fair, abject poverty and sword-wielding sociopaths were a common feature of every civilisation for which we have evidence (yes, John Green, even Mohenjo-Daro). Even so, the West was notably poorer and arguably less free than the Byzantine Orthodox civilisation which still considered itself Roman, and considerably poorer and in many ways much less free than the Islamic civilisation that had sprung up in the Middle East and spread (with its own swords) along the paths already laid out above.
Anyway, things ground along in this manner for a few hundred years — with Catholic warrior-kings bringing their swords and their priests further North and East until all the pagans of Germany and the Baltics and Scandinavia were brought to heel, while the peasantry lived and died at the plough and a paltry sliver of the population had the luck and the means to engage in anything resembling culture. Usually this culture happened in filthy disease-ridden cities that were also constantly in danger of burning down or being sacked by yet more of the sword-wielding sociopaths everyone had to publicly affirm God had put in charge.
Citizens of this newborn West were not merely expected to placate the Christian God in transactional rituals as a civic duty; they were expected to adhere to Christian spiritual doctrine to the smallest detail, every hour of their lives. Every single event was ordained by, and every single action undertaken was in service to, the Will of God. Marriages in the upper classes was often arranged, and divorce and premarital intercourse were both strictly forbidden (though the punishment for the latter was much more severe for women than for men). Homosexuality was considered a grievous insult to the natural order. People had to profess unshakeable belief in absurdities, or if they had doubts, they must only address them with priests in order to reframe and refocus their faith. The priests enjoyed the final word on every subject, and exercised the unquestionable authority of the Creator of the Universe, against whom the citizen had no hope of recourse. The priests decided right from wrong, and demanded every joule of energy be expended doing what they insisted was right or punishing what they determined was wrong.
The vast majority of these citizens could not read at all, and did not speak Latin; the liturgy and doctrine were delivered in that language, and the faith’s texts were written in it. The only way to exercise any kind of curiosity was to join the priestly class and couch one’s thoughts and musings in the trappings of Catholic doctrine, and this path was open only to a very few incredibly lucky people. And if anyone said anything about any of this, if anyone tried to point out how horrendously backward and unfair this state of affairs was — if anyone even possessed a Bible written in their own language — they did so at the risk of being tortured to death for their trouble.
In our own time, every single country where the Catholic Church is present has been riven by scandals of the sexual abuse of children (boys and girls alike) by priests, or of orphanages with mass graves, or of unwed mothers pressed into slavery after having their children taken away from them in childbirth, or any number of sickening breaches of trust and hypocritical violations of their own self-anointed moral authority. One wonders what sorts of debauchery and abuses the priests got up to when their word was law and their pens were the only ones recording history.
…anyway, back to the topic at hand. A vanishingly small number of people — we’re talking a few thousand, maybe a few tens of thousands — maintained cultural and economic links to the Byzantines and the Muslims and, in a mainly abstract way, the Chinese. The Byzantines and the Muslims generally traded and fought amongst themselves and mostly left the nascent West to its poverty and turmoil. Occasionally some of the sword-wielding sociopaths from the West would get together and go fight the Muslims in the Levant and, on one notable occasion, the Byzantines in Constantinople. (Many of these sociopaths came from France, incidentally, and in our own time Americans found out to their befuddlement that “Frenk” is still a general Arabic term for a Westerner, especially a Westerner who’s come to the Middle East at the behest of a self-styled crusader king.)
But, for the most part, the Byzantines and the Muslims and the far-off Chinese were happy to treat the West as a backwater and an inconsequential terminus of a trade network that spanned from Venice to Zanzibar to Beijing. For a long time, the ports of India and East Africa were much more important to Eastern Europe and the Muslims and the Chinese than whatever was happening in Paris or London or Cologne or Toledo. And this putative West had lost nearly everything it had known of Rome, or of Athens; the politics and philosophy and science and engineering that the Romans had used to build their civilisation were almost entirely forgotten by the Roman Church in the West (and also largely in the East), who used their scarce resources almost exclusively to preserve and advance Christian theology.
It was Muslim scholars, incidentally, who we have to thank for archiving and extending so much of this knowledge. So much of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and history was preserved and advanced upon by the Islamic civilisation of the post-Roman era that it is hardly an exaggeration to suppose that without Islamic civilisation, Western civilisation would have had precious little chance of maturing or advancing beyond its tyranny of priests and petty warlords. For example, the words “algorithm” and “algebra” are Arabic words reflecting Arabic innovations, and the great majority of stars for which we have names were given those names by Arabic astronomers — usually hilarious transliterations of earlier Greek names, whose context was lost in translation. To be sure, the Muslims did not undertake this work for the express purpose of maintaining a reservoir of Mediterranean wisdom for the West to one day rediscover; Islamic scholars were motivated by their own curiosity and by the project of building their own civilisation, until Islamic doctrine changed and Islamic scholarship became as focused on theoretical and applied theology as early medieval Christian scholarship was.
In any case, enough of that paltry number of Westerners who remained in contact with the broader world were wise and curious enough to reintroduce this collective knowledge into the vanishingly small stratum of Western society which had the capacity to understand it. The process was slow, occurring mostly in Italy and France for the first few centuries of this reintroduction. In fits and starts, people began remembering and reinventing and reinterpreting certain parts of Roman civilisation as a cultural ideal, reflected in art and literature, filtered through a Christian lens. As Christ was reborn, so too would the best parts of Rome be reborn, culturally if not politically and religiously. We call this movement the Renaissance, and while such a revival didn’t leave the Byzantines entirely untouched, recall that they still thought of themselves as Romans and thus didn’t see any point in trying to revive the Roman civilisation they were still embodying.
Therefore what began with the Great Schism became much more entrenched, and the West began to truly cohere as the Catholic cultural inheritor of the (Western) Roman Empire. Then a few developments came to a head, about four hundred years after the Great Schism, which set the West on course to take over the world and, ultimately, to build a proper civil society on a small portion of it which we are lucky enough to have today.
We’ll take a look at these developments and chart the West’s course to world domination — which will not necessarily make the West a more attractive place to live — in the next chapter.