Original subtitles

(MUSIC) FRANCK: Organ Chorale No.3 in A Minor

Ruskin said: Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts.

The book of their deeds; the book of their words; and the book of their art.

Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others.

But, of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

On the whole, l think this is true.

Looking at those great works of Western man,

and remembering all that he has achieved in philosophy, poetry, science, law-making,

it does seem hard to believe that European civilisation can ever vanish.

And yet, you know, it has happened once.

All the life-giving human activities that we lump together under the word "civilisation"

have been obliterated once in Western Europe.

When the barbarians ran over the Roman Empire.

For two centuries, the heart of European civilisation almost stopped beating.

We got through by the skin of our teeth.

In the last few years, we've developed an uneasy feeling that this could happen again.

And advanced thinkers

who, even in Roman times, thought it fine to gang up with the barbarians,

have begun to question if civilisation is worth preserving.

This is why it seems to me a good moment to look at some of the ways in which

man has shown himself to be an intelligent, creative, orderly and compassionate animal.

The time to begin looking is the time when the old world of Greece and Rome had collapsed

and the new world of Western Europe

had not produced anything that one could call civilisation.

What is civilisation?

l don't know. l can't define it in abstract terms yet.

But l think l can recognise it when l see it.

And I'm looking at it now.

If l had to say which was telling the truth about society,

a speech by a Minister of Housing, or the actual buildings put up in his time,

l should believe the buildings.

But this doesn't mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art.

Far from it.

Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.

In fact, the very narrowness of primitive society

gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality.

At some time in the 9th century,

monks would have looked down into the River Seine

and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river.

Looked at today, it's a powerful work of art.

But to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut,

it would have seemed less agreeable.

As menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

A powerful work of art.

More moving, to most of us, than this Graeco-Roman head.

And yet this is from the figure that was once the most admired piece of sculpture in the world.

The Apollo of the Belvedere.

Well, whatever its merits as a work of art

the Apollo surely embodies a higher state of civilisation than the Viking prow.

The Northern imagination takes shape in an image offear and darkness.

The Hellenistic imagination in an image of harmonised proportion and human reason.

At certain moments, man has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling

so that they might approach, as nearly as possible, to an ideal of perfection.

He's managed to satisfy this need in various ways through myths,

through dance and song, through systems of philosophy,

and through the order that he has imposed on the visible world.

The children of his imagination are also the expressions of an ideal.

Western Europe inherited such an ideal.

It had been invented in Greece in the 5th century before Christ

and was, without doubt, the most extraordinary creation in the whole of history.

So complete, so convincing,

so satisfying to the mind and the eye that it lasted practically unchanged for over 600 years.

Of course, its art became very, stereotyped and conventional

but there it was.

The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres,

the same temples.

At any time for 500 years, you could have found them all round the Mediterranean -

in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, North Africa,

or in the South of France, where l am now.

This building, the so-called Maison Carre at Nimes

is a little Greek temple that might have been anywhere in the Graeco-Roman world.

That world must have seemed absolutely indestructible.

And, of course, some of it was never destroyed.

This aqueduct, not far from Nimes,

was materially beyond the destructive powers of the barbarians.

What happened?

Well, it took Gibbon nine volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,

and l shall not embark on that.

But thinking about this almost-incredible episode

does tell one something about the nature of civilisation.

It shows that however co,complex and solid it seems

it's actually quite fragile.

It can be destroyed.

What are its enemies?

First of all, fear. Fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague.

Fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things

or planting trees, or even planning next year's crops.

And fear of the supernatural,

which means that you daren't question anything or change anything.

The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions,

that destroyed self-confidence.

And then...boredom.

A feeling of hopelessness,

which can overtake people with a high degree of material prosperity.

There's a poem by a modern Greek called Cavafy.

A poem in which he imagines the people of some late antique city,

waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack it.

And then, finally, the barbarians move off somewhere else

and the city is saved.

But the people are disappointed.

It would have been better than nothing.

Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity.

Enough to provide a little leisure.

But far more, it requires confidence.

Confidence in the society in which one lives,

belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws,

confidence in one's own mental powers.

The way the stones of that bridge are laid

is not only a triumph of technical skill,

but it shows a vigorous belief in discipline and law.

Energy, vitality - all the great civilisations or civilising epochs,

have had a weight of energy behind them.

People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities

and good conversation, and all that.

These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation

but they are not what makes a civilisation.

And a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

So, if one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed,

the real answer is that it was exhausted.

The barbarians

who'd hammered at the borders of the Roman Empire throughout its whole history,

finally crossed the Danube and the Rhine.

At first they were half-Romanised,

and helped to carry on the administration of the Empire,

but gradually the great system broke down.

Into Italy there poured successive waves of invaders

who were destructively hostile to what they couldn't understand.

l don't suppose they bothered to destroy the great buildings

that were scattered all over the Roman world.

But the idea of keeping them up never entered their heads.

They preferred to live in prefabs,

and to let the old places fall down.

Of course, here and there life must have gone on in an apparently normal way

for very much longer than one would expect.

It always does.

Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time.

But in the middle of the 7th century,

there appeared from the south a new agent of destruction: Islam.

"There is one god and Mohammed is his prophet."

The simplest doctrine that has ever gained acceptance.

It gave to the prophet's followers

the invincible solidarity that had once directed the legions of Rome.

In a miraculously short time - about fifty years -

the classical world was overrun.

Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky.

The old source of civilisation was sealed off

and, if a new civilisation was to be born

it would have to face the Atlantic.

What a hope.

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation.

l doubt if they've given it a long enough trial.

Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation.

But all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

Quite apart from the discomforts, the privations,

there was no escape from it.

Very restricted company, no books,

no light after dark,

no hope.

On one side the sea, battering away.

On the other, infinite stretches of bog and forest, and rocky waste.

A most melancholy existence.

And the Anglo-Saxon poets had no illusions about it.

"A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be

When all this world's wealth standeth waste

Even as now, in many places over the earth

Walls stand, wind-beaten

Heavy with hoarfrost, ruined habitations

The maker of men hath so marred this dwelling

That human laughter is not heard about it

And idle stand those old giant works."

Well, it was probably better to live on the very edge of the world

than in the shadow of one of those old giant works,

where, at any moment, you might be attacked by a new wave of marauders.

Such, at least was the view of the first 'Christians.

They struggled on in search of the most inaccessible fringes

of Cornwall, Ireland, or the Hebrides

and what places they found.

Eighteen miles from the Irish coast is the island of Skellig Michael,

a pinnacle of rock rising 7OO feet from the sea.

Even today it's impossible to land except in fair weather.

Yet, for 400 years, Christians found it a place of refuge.

They made this stone causeway up its steep slopes.

An extraordinary achievement of courage and tenacity.

Looking back from the great civilisations of 12th-century France or 1th-century Rome,

it is hard to believe that for quite a long time - over a hundred years -

Western Christianity survived by clinging to places like this.

Just below the summit on the only habitable fragment' of land,

they built their dry-stone huts.

There are stones of white crystal on the island

and they've been used to make this rough cross above the doorway.

Of course, there was a pope in the ruined, beleaguered city of Rome.

But the Celtic church owed no allegiance to him.

Here these devoted transmitters of Christianity

lived their uncomfortable, inward-turning lives,

while the tides of barbarians ebbed and flowed across Europe.

The Christian few sought remote places of enduring sanctuary.

But the pagan tribes were not interested in permanence.

Like the Irish tinkers of today, they preferred drifting as the mood took them.

All through the early Dark Ages, great masses of people were on the move,

taking their animals and their possessions with them.

What did the early wanderers care about?

The answer comes out in the poems.

Gold.

Whenever an Anglo-Saxon poet wants to put into words his ideal of a good society,

he speaks of gold.

"There once many a man

Mood-glad, gold bright, of gleams garnished

Flushed with wine-pride, flashing war gear

Gazed on wrought gemstones, on gold, on silver,

On wealth held and hoarded on light-filled amber."

(Crows caw)

Struggling through the forest, battling with the waves

conscious chiefly of thee animals and the birds that hung in the tangled branches,

the barbarians were not interested in human beings.

The wanderers had never been without craftsmen.

All their pent-up need to give some permanent shape to the flux of experience,

to make something perfect out of their singularly imperfect existence

was concentrated in these marvellous objects.

This love of gold and wrought gemstones,

this feeling that they reflected an ideal world and had some kind of enduring magic

went on right up to the time when the dark struggles for survival were over.

It's arguable that Western civilisation was saved by its craftsmen.

The wanderers could take their craftsmen with them.

Since the smiths made princely,weapons, as well as ornaments

they were as necessary to a chieftain's status

as were the bards whose calypsos celebrated his courage.

But, even while these splendid objects were being made,

Christianity was gaining ground in the West.

And two or three of the British Isles offered, for a short time, relative security.

One of them was Iona.

The Celtic missionaries are said to have preached to the seals.

And the seals, with their usual curiosity, no doubt came up to listen.

Secure and sacred.

l never come to Iona - and l used to come here almost every year

because, when l was young my home was nearby -

without the feeling:. Some god is in this place.

It's not as awe-inspiring as some other holy places - Delphi or Assisi,

but Iona gives one, more than anywhere else l know,

a sense of peace and inner freedom.

What does it?

The light?

Or the lie of the land?

Which, coming after the solemn hills of Mull, seems strangely like Greece,

like Delos, even.

Or is it the memory of those holy men who kept Western civilisation alive?

Iona was founded by St Columba

who came here from Ireland in the middle of the 6th century.

It seems to have been a sacred spot before he came

and for four centuries it was the centre of Celtic Christianity.

There's said to have been 360 crosses like the one behind me

nearly all of them thrown into the sea during the Reformation.

No-one knows which of the surviving Celtic manuscripts were produced here,

and which in the Northumbrian island, of Lindisfarne, and it doesn't matter

because they're all in what we rightly consider an Irish style.

The strange thing about these books

is that the monks who decorated them seem to have had so little consciousness

of any form of classical or Christian culture.

(PLAINSONG)

They're all gospel books

but they're almost devoid of Christian symbols,

except for the fierce oriental-looking beasts who symbolise the four Evangelists.

When a man appears, he cuts a very poor figure.

In this case the scribe has thought it b' est to write in

imago hominis - the image of a man.

But the pages of pure ornament

are almost the richest pieces of abstract decoration ever produced.

More refined and elaborate than anything in Islamic art.

We look at them for ten seconds

then we pass on to something that we can interpret, or read.

But imagine if one couldn't read

and had nothing else to look at for weeks at a time.

Then these pages would have an almost hypnotic effect.

The last work to be decorated in Iona has become the most famous.

The Book Of Kells.

Soon after these fabulous pages were completed,

when the book itself was unfinished

the abbot of Iona was forced to flee to Ireland.

The sea had become more menacing than the land.

The Norsemen were on the move.

(Screaming)

"if there were a hundred tongues in each head,"

said a contemporary Irish writer,

"they could not recount or narrate

or enumerate, or tell what all the Irish suffered of hardships and of injuring

and of oppression in every house

from those valiant, wrathful purely pagan people."

The Celts haven't changed much. Purely pagan.

Unlike the earlier wanderers the Vikings had a rather splendid mythology,

romanticised for us by Wagner.

Their runic stones have an almost magical power.

They were the last people of Europe to resist Christianity.

There are Viking gravestones from quite late in the Middle Ages

that have symbols of Wotan on one side and Christian symbols on the other.

What's called hedging your bets.

This is how they portrayed themselves on an engraved stone,

sailing off in their ships, landing,

fighting, looting.

Off course they were brutal and rapacious.

All the same, they have a place in the story of European civilisation

because these pirates were not merely destructive.

If one wants a symbol of Atlantic man,

as opposed to Mediterranean man,

a symbol to set against the Greek temple,

then it must be the Viking ship.

The Greek temple is solid, static, crystalline.

The Viking ship is light, mobile, buoyant, floating like a water lily.

The one beside me is 72 feet long.

It has a very shallow draught - only three foot.

It belongs to the early period of Viking navigation, when they still hugged the shore.

Hence the shallow draught.

This is the ocean-going type.

By the time it was built - it's about 50 years later than the first one we saw -

the Vikings were quartering the world.

They set out from a base and, with unbelievable courage and ingenuity,

they got as far as Persia via the Volga and the Caspian Sea.

And then they returned home with all their loot in these open ships,

including coins from Samarkand and even a Chinese Buddha.

The sheer technical skill of their journeys was a new achievement.

And their spirit did contribute something very important to the Western world

because, in the end it was the spirit of Columbus.

They were also considerable artists.

The ornament of the prow, which as you see is highly sophisticated,

is a pattern of movement, of endless flux,

with a rhythm that was still to underlie the great ornamental art we call Romanesque.

When one also considers the Icelandic sagas, which are among the great books of the world,

one must admit that the Norsemen produced a culture.

But was it a civilisation?

Well, the monks of Lindisfarne wouldn't have said so.

Nor would Alfred the Great.

Nor the poor mother trying to settle down with her family on the banks of the Seine,

whom l mentioned earlier.

Civilisation means something more than energy and will, and creative power.

Something the early Norsemen hadn't got

but which, even in their time was beginning to reappear in Western Europe.

How can l define it?

Very shortly, a sense of permanence.

The wanderers and the invaders were in a continual state of flux.

They didn't feel the need to Look forward beyond the next march

or the next voyage or the next battle.

And for that reason it didn't occur to them to build stone houses

nor to write books.

This is almost the only stone building

that has survived from the three, centuries after the fall of Rome

the Baptistry at Poitiers.

And as you see, it's pitifully crude.

The builders, who have tried to use some elements of Roman architecture

capitals and pilasters and so forth,

have no idea of their original intention.

But at least this miserable construction was meant to last.

It isn't just a wigwam.

Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time,

that he consciously Looks forward and looks back.

And for this he needs a minimum of stability.

Which was, in Western Europe, first achieved here in France.

Or, as it then was, the Kingdom of the Franks.

It was achieved by fighting.

All the great civilisations in their early stages are based on success in war.

And so it was with the Franks.

Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies

but maintained themselves

by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last 30 years.

Fighting, fighting, fighting.

These 9th-century drawings make it look less beastly than it was.

Incidentally, they show, almost for the first time, that the horsemen have stirrups.

And people who like mechanical explanations for historical events

maintained that this was the reason why the Frankish cavalry was victorious.

One sometimes feels that the 7th and 8th centuries were like a prolonged Western.

And the resemblance is made more vivid by the presence, already in the 8th century,

of our old friends the sheriff and the marshal.

But it was really far more horrible,

because unredeemed by any trace of sentiment or chivalry.

But fighting was necessary.

Without Charles Martel's victory over the Moors, here at Poitiers in 732

Western civilisation might never have existed.

And without Charlemagne's tireless campaigning,

we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.

We got through by the skin of our teeth.

Charlemagne is the first great man of action

to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world.

He became a subject of myth and legend.

This magnificent reliquary made about 500 years after his death to hold a piece of his skull

expresses what the Gothic Middle Ages felt about him

in terms that he himself would have appreciated.

Gold and jewels and antique cameos.

But the real man wasn't so far from that myth.

He was a commanding figure,

over six feet tall with piercing blue eyes.

Only, he had a small, squeaky voice and a walrus moustache instead of the beard.

He was a tireless administrator.

The lands he conquered, Bavaria, Saxony, Lombardy,

were organised beyond the capacities of a barbarous people.

His empire was an artificial creation.

Yet the old idea that he saved civilisation isn't so far wrong.

Because it was through him that the Atlantic world re-established contact

with the ancient culture of the Mediterranean world.

There were great disorders after his death, but no more skin of our teeth.

Civilisation had come through.

How did he do it?

Well, first of all, with the help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York

he collected books and had them copied.

People don't always realise

that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence.

Our whole knowledge of ancient literature

is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.

This is the more extraordinary

when one remembers that for over 500 years

practically no lay person, from kings and emperors downwards, could read or write.

Charlemagne learnt to read.

But he never could write.

He said he couldn't get the hang of it.

Alfred the Great who was an exceptionally clever man,

seems to have taught himself to read at the age of 4O

and was the author of several books

although they were probably dictated in a kind of seminar.

Great men, even ecclesiastics, normally dictated to their secretaries, as they do today,

and as you may see one of them doing in this 10th-century illustration.

Of course, most of the higher clergy could read.

And the pictures of the Evangelists,

which are the favourite, often the only illustrations in early manuscripts,

become in the 10th century a kind of assertion of this almost divine accomplishment.

This ivory is a glorification of writing,

with its inspired concentration of St Gregory

and its three smug little scribes below.

In copying these manuscripts,

Charlemagne's scribes arrived at the most beautiful lettering ever invented.

Also the most practical.

So when the Renaissance humanists

wanted to find a clearer and more elegant substitute for the crabbed Gothic script,

they revived the Carolingian.

And so it has survived, in more or less the same form, until the present day.

Charlemagne's adoption of the imperial idea led him to look not only at antique civilisation

but at its strange posthumous existence in what we call the Byzantine Empire.

(Chanting)

For 400 years, Constantinople had been the greatest city in the world

and the only one in which life had gone on more or less untouched by the wanderers.

It was a civilisation all right.

It produced some of the most nearly perfect buildings and works of art ever made.

But it was entirely sealed off from Western Europe,

partly by the Greek language, partly by religious differences,

chiefly because it didn't want to involve itself with the bloody feuds of the Western barbarians.

It had its own Eastern barbarians to deal with.

(Chanting)

l am in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna

which for a part of the 5th and 6th centuries was the seat of the Byzantine court.

(Chanting continues)

Charlemagne came here on his way back from Rome.

No emperor had visited Rome for almost 500 years.

And when Charlemagne, the great conqueror, went there in the year 800,

the Pope crowned him as the head of a new Holy Roman Empire,

brushing aside the fact that there was another emperor in Constantinople.

Charlemagne was afterwards heard to say that this famous episode was a mistake.

He advised his son to crown himself.

Perhaps he was right.

By crowning Charlemagne, the Pope could claim a supremacy over the Emperor,

which was the cause or pretext of war for three centuries.

But historical judgements are very tricky.

Maybe the tension between the spiritual and worldly powers throughout the Middle Ages

was precisely what kept European civilisation alive.

If either had achieved absolute power,

society might have grown as static as the civilisation of Egypt or of Byzantium itself.

Anyway, Charlemagne saw these mosaics of Justinian and Theodore...

and realised how magnificent an emperor could be.

l may add that he himself never wore anything but a plain Frankish cloak.

And when Charlemagne returned to his residence at Aix-la-Chapelle -

he settled there because he liked swimming in the hot springs -

he determined to build a replica of San Vitale as his parish chapel.

(Plainsong)

Those mosaics are a reconstruction done in the 19th century.

And we can see that by comparison with Ravenna,

the octagon at Aix is rather stiff and monotonous.

But those magnificent iron grilles, which were made locally,

are an impressive technical achievement.

(Plainsong)

And when one thinks that nearly all the buildings in northern Europe,

including the greater part of Charlemagne's palace, were of wood,

and that such stone buildings as existed were the converted husks of Roman remains

it is the most extraordinary feat.

Charlemagne's throne.

Of course, the craftsmen who made those grilles may have come from the East,

because under Charlemagne Europe was once more in touch with the outside world.

He even received a present from Harun al-Rashid, caliph of the 1001 nights.

An elephant called Abul-Abbas.

It died on campaign in Saxony.

Its tusks were made into chessmen which still exist.

As ruler of an empire stretching from Denmark to the Adriatic,

he amassed treasures from all over the known world.

But in the end, it was the books that mattered.

There have never been more splendid books than those illuminated for the court library

and sent as presents all over Western Europe.

In their own day these books were so precious

that the practice arose of giving them the richest, most elaborate bindings conceivable.

Usually they took the form of an ivory plaque surrounded by beaten gold and gems.

And these small pieces of sculpture

are in some ways our best indication of the intellectual life of Europe

for almost 200 years.

Only Charlemagne could hold the Empire together.

After his death it broke up

and Europe entered a phase which historians usually consider

almost as dark and barbarous as the century before him.

Well, that's because they look at it from the point of view of political history and the written word.

If we read what Ruskin called the book of its art we get a very different impression.

Because, contrary to all expectation,

the 10th century produced work as splendid,

and as technically skillful, and even as delicate, as any other age.

To me, this cross of Lothair

is one of the most moving objects that has come down to us from the distant past.

On the front there's a beautiful assertion of imperial status.

At the centre of these gems and gold filigree is a cameo of the Emperor Augustus,

an image of political imperium at its most civilised.

On the back, there's a flat piece of silver.

But on it is engraved an outline drawing of the crucifixion,

a drawing of such poignant beauty as to make the front of the cross look worldly.

It's the experience of a great artist simplified to its essence.

What Matisse wanted to do in his chapel at Vence.

But more concentrated and, of course, the work of a believer.

We've grown so used to the idea that the crucifixion is the supreme symbol of Christianity

that it's a shock to realise how late in the history of Christian art its power was recognised.

In the first six centuries, the crucifixion is practically never represented.

And the earliest example,

on the doors of Santa Sabina in Rome...

it's stuck away in a corner, almost out of sight.

It's not only obscure, but unmoving.

The simple fact is that the early Church needed converts.

And from this point of view, the crucifixion was not an encouraging subject.

So early Christian art is concerned with miracles -

healings, water into wine.

And with hopeful aspects of the faith such as the Ascension and the Resurrection.

The few surviving crucifixions of the early Church

make no attempt to touch our emotions.

It was the 10th century, that despised and rejected epoch of European history,

which made the crucifixion into a moving symbol of the Christian faith.

In such a figure as this,

made for Archbishop Gero of Cologne 1000 years ago,

one sees the figure of the crucified Christ as it has been almost ever since.

The upstretched arms,

the sunken head

the poignant twist of the body.

(Plainsong)

The men of the 10th century

not only recognised the meaning of Christ's sacrifice in physical terms,

they were able to sublimate it into ritual.

The evidence of book illustrations and ivories

shows for the first time a consciousness of the symbolic power of the Mass.

(Plainsong continues)

Look at these solemn, columnar characters celebrating and chanting the Mass.

Are they not almost literally pillars of a great new establishment?

And what about this enamelled pulpit at Aix-la-Chapelle

from which the word of God could be preached to the Emperor and his court?

These grand, authoritative works show that at the end of the 10th century

there was a new power in Europe, greater than any king or empire -

the Church.

And the Church at this date was a humanising influence.

I'm reminded of the most famous lines of Virgil -

Virgil who loomed so large in the medieval imagination.

They come when Virgil's hero Aeneas

has been shipwrecked in a country that he fears will be inhabited by barbarians.

Then as he looks around, he sees some figures carved in relief and he says,

"These men know the pathos of life, and mortal things touched their hearts."

Man is no longer imago hominis, the image of a man,

but is a human being with humanity's impulses and fears.

Also humanity's moral sense and belief in the authority of a higher power.

By the year 1000,

the year in which many timid people feared that the world would come to an end

the long dominance of the barbarous wanderers was over

and Western Europe was prepared for its first great age of civilisation.

(Plainsong)