Frank­ish West (Christos Yannaras)

We should recall again very briefly the far-reaching changes that had taken place in the territories of the Western Roman Empire from the end of the fourth to the sixth centuries AD. We usually call the influx of barbarian tribes and nations into the empire and their settlement there “the great migration of peoples.” Of a lower cul­tural level than the native inhabitants they displaced, they brought about in 475 the collapse of Roman rule.Franks, Goths, Huns, Burgundians, Vandals, and Lombards, they came to constitute the predominant element in the popula­tion of Western Europe. And by the late eighth/early ninth cen­tury, the military and political power of Charles, king of the Franks, surnamed the Great (Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne, 742-814), enabled him to subject all the other tribes to his rule and form a vast state stretching from the North Sea to the Pyrenees and from the Atlantic to the Elbe.The barbarian hordes that dissolved the Roman “order of things” in the West had hastened to adopt the Christian faith be­cause conversion to Christianity at that time was the path to civi­lization. The question naturally arises: What can “conversion to Christianity” mean in the case of large masses of people who could not possibly have understood what until then had been the Greek expression of (or witness to) ecclesial experience—the Greek philo­sophical wording of the conciliar “definitions” and the teaching of the Fathers, the incomparable language of Greek art?At any rate, the Christianized multiethnic kingdom of Char­lemagne came to aspire to imperial status, thanks to its geographi­cal extent and military power, on the model of the (unique until that time) Roman Empire. But it was taken for granted by everyone that the empire was an international “order of things”: more a com­mon culture than a form of state. It was also taken for granted that Christianity (the pax Christiana) was the only basis for a common culture in the international world of that time. Consequently, there was no real room or logical possibility for a second Christian empire so long as the Christian Imperium Romanum remained on the his­torical stage with its center in New Rome/Constantinople.Charlemagne saw clearly that his ambition to establish an em­pire presupposed a cultural basis for political unity that was neces­sarily different from that of the Roman oecumene. The new basis had to be founded on the Christian faith. It therefore had to come up with a different version of this faith on both the theoretical and the practical levels, a version that was more correct and more genu­ine than that of the Greeks, clearly differentiated and, above all, with a distinctive Western identity. Only with such a new starting point for a civilized collective life could a new Christian “order of things” be justified internationally with its center now in the Frank­ish West. It would appear to be for these reasons that there arose at tha time a polemical literature condemning the “errors” of the Greeks— at least ten works dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries bear the title Contra Errores Graecorum. At the same time Augus­tine was retrieved from the historical margins to become the vital ideological discovery and weapon of the Franks. - Artículo*: TonyPedroza - Más info en psico@mijasnatural.com / 607725547 MENADEL Psicología Clínica y Transpersonal Tradicional (Pneumatología) en Mijas y Fuengirola, MIJAS NATURAL *No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí enlazados
 

- Enlace a artículo -

Más info en psico@mijasnatural.com / 607725547 MENADEL Psicología Clínica y Transpersonal Tradicional (Pneumatología) en Mijas y Fuengirola, MIJAS NATURAL.

(No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí presentados)