Page 200 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

because of human beings’ inclination to sin. And yet the City of the World was still necessary, for it was the duty of rulers to curb the depraved instincts of sinful humans and maintain the peace necessary for Chris- tians to live in the world. Hence, Augustine posited that secular government and authority were necessary for the pursuit of the true Christian life on earth; in doing so, he provided a justification for secular political authority that would play an important role in medie- val thought.
Another important intellectual of the early church was Jerome (345–420), who pur- sued literary studies in Rome and became a master of Latin prose. Jerome had mixed feelings about his love for classical studies, however, and like Augustine, he experienced a spiritual conversion after which he tried to dedicate himself more fully to Jesus. Ultimately, Jerome found a compromise by purifying the litera- ture of the pagan world and then using it to further the Christian faith. Jerome was a great scholar, and his extensive knowledge of both Hebrew and Greek enabled him to translate the Old and New Testaments into Latin. In the process, he created the so-called Latin Vulgate, or common text, of the Scriptures that became the standard edition for the Catholic Church
in the Middle Ages.
CASSIODORUS Although the Christian church came to accept classical culture, it was not easy to do so in the world of the new Germanic kingdoms. Nevertheless, some Christian scholars managed to keep learning alive. Most prominent was Cassiodorus (ca. 490–ca. 585), who wrote the work Divine and Human Readings, a compendium of the literature of both Christian and pagan antiquity. Cassiodorus accepted the advice of earlier Christian intellectuals to make use of classical works while treasuring the Scriptures above all else.
Cassiodorus continued the tradition of late antiquity of classifying knowledge according to certain subjects. In assembling his compendium of authors, he followed the practice of late ancient authors in placing all secu- lar knowledge into the categories of the seven liberal arts, which were divided into two major groups: the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic, and the quadrivium, consisting of the mathe- matical subjects of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The seven liberal arts would become the cornerstone of Western education until the seven- teenth century.
The Byzantine Empire
Q FOCUS QUESTION: How did the Byzantine Empire that had emerged by the eighth century differ from the empire of Justinian and from the Germanic kingdoms in the West?
As noted earlier, in the fourth century, the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire began to go their separate ways. As the Germans moved into the Western part of the empire and established various kingdoms over the course of the next hundred years, the Roman Empire in the East, centered on Constanti- nople, solidified and prospered.
The Reign of Justinian (527–565)
When he became emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Justinian was determined to reestablish the empire in the entire Mediterranean world. His army, commanded by Belisarius (bell-uh-SAH-ree-us), prob- ably the best general of the late Roman period, sailed to North Africa and quickly destroyed the Vandals in two major battles. From North Africa, Belisarius led his forces onto the Italian peninsula and defeated the Ostrogoths. By 552, Justinian appeared to have achieved his goal. His reconstituted empire included Italy, part of Spain, North Africa, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Syria (see Map 7.4). But his success proved fleeting. Only three years after Justinian’s death, the Lombards conquered much of Italy. Although the Eastern empire maintained the fiction of Italy as a province, its forces were limited to southern and central Italy, Sicily, and some coastal areas.
Justinian’s most important contribution was his codification of Roman law. The Eastern empire had inherited a vast quantity of legal materials connected to the development of Roman law, which Justinian wished to simplify. The result was the Corpus Iuris Civ- ilis (KOR-pus YOOR-iss SIV-i-liss) (Body of Civil Law), a codification of Roman law that remained in force in the Eastern Roman Empire until its end in 1453. And because it was written in Latin (it was in fact the last product of Eastern Roman culture to be written in Latin, which was soon replaced by Greek), the Corpus was also eventually used in the West and ultimately became the basis of the legal systems of all of continen- tal Europe.
JEROME AND THE BIBLE
162 Chapter 7 Late Antiquity and the Emergence of the Medieval World
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