Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was equally spurious.  The Church was averse to natural research, for the only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting damnation.  Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as godless.  “What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?” asked Lactantius.  And, “Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing?  How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?” Here one is reminded of a remark made in “Phaedros” by the wisest of all Greeks, who refused to leave town because “what could Socrates learn from trees and grass?” And Julius Caesar wrote an account of his wars to while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.

Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians.  In the case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and unassailable form of dogmatics with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible system.  The traditions of these peoples were far too foreign to Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil.  And the new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely unproductive in their adolescence.  The achievement of this fatal first millenary might be formulated as follows:  “The civilised world of Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man’s soul, and that the Church alone could save him.  All these facts were as unalterable as the return of the seasons.”

The fundamental sources of antiquity had been sensuality and asceticism, the elements of the Middle Ages abstract thought and historical faith; now emotion was to become the principal factor.  It welled up in the soul and soon dominated all life.  The fountain which had been dried up since the dawn of the Christian era, began to flow again in a small country in the south of France.  The civilising centre had again shifted westwards, as in the past it had shifted from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to Rome.  In the course of the first thousand years Greece and Asia Minor had separated themselves from Europe, and founded a distinct culture, the Byzantine, which exerted no influence on the development of Europe.  But not