Barbarians

BARBARIANS. - The word, Greek in origin, at first meant the stammerers, that is, those who spoke a language different from Greek, and was accordingly applied even to peoples of ancient civilization such as the Carians, the Persians, the Egyptians. With the later growth of a Hellenic national consciousness and of a proud sense of superiority, the word came to designate peoples of an inferior civilization, uncultured and uneducated. The word passed into Latin, at first with its original linguistic meaning, so much so that one could say Plautus vortit barbare, meaning he translated from Greek into Latin. Then in the usage of the imperial period the word designated the populations not subject to Roman dominion and living with forms of civilization different from the Greco-Roman one, and generally more primitive and immature. More especially, moreover, when one speaks of b., one thinks of those who gave the Roman government the greatest worries, of the neighbors to the north and northeast, that is, of the populations beyond the Rhine and beyond the Danube.

According to the precept of Jesus: «euntes, docete omnes gentes», the preaching of the Gospel was not to know boundaries, and the principle of the equality of all men before God was bound to tend to make the concept of b. disappear. In any case, material reasons (the impossibility of penetrating into uncivilized countries without cities and without roads, the state of hostility with the empire) brought it about that Christianity penetrated with some delay among the b. and, if anything, first beyond the eastern frontiers rather than beyond the northern frontiers of the empire. A passage of Tertullian, that the Getuli, Sarmatians, Dacians, Germans and Scythians already believe in Christ (Adversus Iudaeos, 7, 7) and one of Justin (Dialog. cum Tryphone, 117) that Christianity has reached even the nomadic ἀμαξόβιοι, cannot be taken in the full breadth of their meaning.

A region of Upper Mesopotamia, Osroene with its capital Edessa, having remained outside the frontiers of the Roman province of Syria, and governed by its own royal dynasty, bound to Rome by ties of clientship, boasted very remote Christian origins. One of its kings, Abgar, was even said to have had an epistolary correspondence with Jesus, and to have invited him to his country to be healed of an illness of his. The pious legend, which had wide diffusion in the Eastern world, was formed especially in consequence of the conversion of King Abgar IX (v.) who governed from 179 to 214, a conversion which must have been followed by that of a good part of his people.

In Persia Christianity found solid and venerated religions, with priestly castes of ancient and battle-hardened traditions, such as Mazdeism and Mithraism, but perhaps precisely through mentalities accustomed to religious speculation it was possible to introduce new ideas, as the rise in this time in the same region of Manichaeism (v.) can prove. Not only that, but it is not to be forgotten that within the frontiers of the kingdom of Persia and especially in the provinces of Mesopotamia there had been settled since the time of the second Babylonian empire strong nuclei of Jewish population, easily approachable by the preachers of the Gospel. Therefore in Persia too Christianity was able to enter fairly early; Dionysius of Alexandria around the middle of the 3rd century knows of Churches of Mesopotamia, and knows of their relations with Churches of other countries, and the dialogue of Bardesanes on the Laws of the countries (3rd century) presupposes a notable propagation of Christianity even into Bactria and the other more eastern regions of the Persian State (v. PERSIA).

Armenia, which looms with its high mountains over Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, was closely watched by the Parthians and the Romans who, while leaving it independent, aimed to have in the Armenian sovereign a person loyal to their interests. For Armenia too there are traditions that would trace the evangelization of the country back to the apostolic age, but more reliable reports place the first Christian teachings around the 3rd century through Cappadocia. The true founder of the Armenian Church was Gregory the Illuminator (v.) who, educated in the Christian faith in Caesarea of Cappadocia, succeeded at the end of the 3rd century in converting the Armenian king Tiridates and with him a good part of the population. Not too well prepared, also because of the immaturity of their language (only in the 5th century did the bishop Sahag introduce among them a script with its own alphabet), for the subtleties of theological disputes, the Armenians adhered to the Monophysite heresy, in which a good part of them remain (v. ARMENIA).

Also in the semidesert region to the east of the Giordan, which had been annexed to the empire by Trajan and was inhabited by semi-nomadic populations (Arabs, Nabataeans), Christian preaching had promptly arrived. Origen, who from Egypt visited the country several times, had much to do there as an apologist and defender of right Christian doctrines. And the archaeological remains of churches and of Christian floor mosaics attest to a very notable Christian flourishing (v. ARABIA).

A mission more remote than any other from the frontiers of the Roman empire is that of India, which tradition entrusted to the apostle St. Bartholomew. The Sicilian Pantaenus, a teacher in the Didaskaleion of Alexandria, having set out in the second half of the 2nd century to bring the good news to India as well (should this name be understood as properly the Indian peninsula, or southern Arabia?), would have found there copies of the Aramaic Gospel of St. Matthew brought by St. Bartholomew (v.). There are no difficulties in admitting that Pantaenus may have gone to India. In the period in which he lived, every year an Egyptian-Roman merchant fleet departed regularly from the port of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea for the seas of the Levant, and shortly before, that Periplus Maris Erythraei which has been preserved for us had been compiled by an unknown author. Naturally less certain is what is said about the discovery of the Aramaic Gospels (v. INDIA).

On a return voyage from India, the holy brothers Frumentius and Edesius (v.) would have landed in Ethiopia (4th century), the first preachers of Christianity in the region. Their story is told to us by Rufinus (d. 410), and in agreement with this date it is known that the king of Aksum, Ezana, was in contact with Constantius II and embraced Christianity. Later, through the work of Egyptian missionaries, the Ethiopians became Monophysites (v. ETHIOPIA).

On the northern coasts of the Black Sea it is possible that some group of Christians lived, but their existence is not proven, as instead it appears on the western coasts of the same sea in the so-called Scythia Minor, where Greek colonies existed and which was annexed to the Roman province of Moesia Inferior, and in the Chersonesus Taurica (Crimea), where colonies from Miletus had likewise arrived and where the Bosporan kingdom had been constituted.

It is well now to consider the activity of Christian propaganda among those peoples who were more properly known at that time by the name of b., and who were later those who invaded and shattered the empire of the West, and who still constitute the most compact nucleus of Christian peoples.

It is possible that Christianity penetrated very early even among those b., but it can well be understood how, in the absence in their countries of origin of a social organization of the Greco-Roman type, in the absence of cities, the preaching of the Good News remained entrusted to the zeal of wandering missionaries, and how centers of gathering, hierarchies, and buildings of worship were lacking, and how the primitive traces have therefore disappeared. Still in the 5th century some bishops of Gaul note with some regret that in the tractus Armoricanus, where Britons driven out by the Angles and Saxons had taken refuge, itinerant priests celebrate the sacred mysteries on portable tabulae (cf. L. Duchesne, in Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée, 7 [1885], p. 4).

To the usual difficulties of the lack of roads, of the hostility of semi-savage populations, suspicious and ill-disposed toward every foreigner, there is also to be added the very frequent state of internal wars among the various tribes and external wars against the empire. And when, then, little by little, barbarian populations came to settle within the frontiers of the empire, it cannot be said that their conditions for Christian preaching immediately improved greatly.

The b. began their existence within the frontiers of the empire with every sort of violence and brutality. And the Christians, who had never been rebels against the empire, who accepted and admired its institutions, who appreciated its benefits, and believed the pax romana to be willed by Divine Providence, who finally had not long before had the immense joy of seeing the empire become Christian, could not immediately strip themselves of the inveterate, centuries-old feeling of contempt and repugnance proper to civilized populations toward the b., a feeling that was now to be embittered by the arrogance and ferocity of the newcomers. The belief that the collapse of Rome was to mean the end of the world made these invaders be regarded as ministers of evil, to be left to divine punishment. This feeling of horror manifested itself especially when the incursions of the Huns occurred. Time was needed for prejudices so deeply rooted to be attenuated, and for their scarcely Christian spirit to be recognized.

On the other hand, the presence of the b. within the frontiers was a reality that could not be disregarded; not only that, but it extended and consolidated itself more and more, while the impotence of the empire to defend itself became ever more evident. De Labriolle therefore writes rightly: "Were the churches to shut themselves up in regret for the past, and to admit that, bound to a civilization in evident ruin, Christianity must perish with it?" (A. Fliche and V. Martin, op. cit., bibl., IV, p. 356). There thus began that inescapable evolution which was to bring Christianity closer to the invaders, an evolution singularly facilitated by the cultural and moral superiority of the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchies. De Labriolle writes further: "The Catholic hierarchy could not fail to notice that its position was steadily improving, that its social function was becoming preponderant. It felt itself much freer and more powerful in the face of the divided, scattered, incoherent forces of the b. than it had been within the powerful organism of the Roman State. With its regular structure, its solidarity, its dominion over souls, the Catholic hierarchy represented that order of which everyone confusedly felt the need; it represented indeed something more authoritative than order itself: the right to speak in the name of God and to invoke, when necessary, heavenly vengeance upon whoever disregarded its authority" (ibid., p. 358).

In the regions beyond the Danube and beyond the Rhine there are no certain records of Christian communities and bishoprics before the 4th century, not even in that province of Dacia which for more than a century and a half (107-274) was annexed to the Roman empire.

The testimony of Irenaeus concerning the "churches founded in the Germanies" (Adversus haereses, I, 10, 2) must refer to the two cisrhenane Germanies and principally to the more markedly Roman cities of Trier, Cologne, and Mogontiacum, for which bishops are known to us already from the 3rd century. The great masses of the barbarian populations beyond the Rhine and beyond the Danube had remained pagan, and of a paganism known only imperfectly from legends of the late Middle Ages.

But when they constituted themselves into more solid and stable groupings, and when they entered Roman territory and established kingdoms there, then Christian propaganda unfolded among them more easily and with greater success. Not rarely the conversions were en masse: the baptism of the chief brought about that of the entire tribe. Toward the middle of the 4th century, among the Goths, who for many years had been governed by a firm monarchy, there occurred the first general conversion and the constitution of a church. The Goth Ulfilas (v.), consecrated bishop for his people by Eusebius of Nicomedia, having returned to his homeland, devoted himself with great zeal to preaching and to the civilizing of his people. Having introduced an alphabetic system of writing in place of the old runic characters, he translated a good part of the sacred books into Gothic. He then exercised his apostolate more particularly among that part of the Visigoths who, driven out by the Huns, had had fled toward the Roman frontier, and had been received by the emperor Valens within the territory of the empire. The Christianity received and propagated by Ulfilas was, however, distinctly Arian, that is, as he had received it from the consecrating bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, and as it was practiced and favored in the eastern half of the empire by Constantius II and by Valens. And Arianism was long observed by the Goths and by other barbarian peoples who, little by little, especially through the influence of the Goths—the best organized and most civilized of them all—passed over to Christianity, in such a way that when the faith of the Council of Nicaea, through the work of the emperors Gratian and Theodosius, again became the faith of the empire, Arianism remained until the 6th and 7th centuries as the national religion of the barbarians, at times practiced with fanatical intolerance. In this the Vandals were especially distinguished: having taken possession of Africa, they established against the Catholics a regime of persecution that from time to time reached extreme severity. Arians too were—though without reaching fanatical persecution of Catholics—the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Burgundians in the Rhône valleys, the Suevi, the Alans, and the Visigoths settled in Gaul and later moved into Spain. Even the Lombards, who more than other Germanic peoples had preserved a roughness of customs, when they arrived in Italy were partly still pagans, and partly had received Arianism from other Germans, and at first were not well disposed toward the Catholics, until St. Gregory the Great, with the help of the pious queen Theodelinda, succeeded in beginning their conversion to Catholicism. Later than other barbarians, the Franks passed over to Christianity, that is, when they had already, with King Clovis, established a Frankish state in northern Gaul; since, however, their Christianity developed in contact with and through the influence of the Catholic Gallo-Roman populations, there was among them no passage through the Arian stage.

Britain, though so remote from the classical world and only under Claudius having become part of the Roman empire, nevertheless gave its adherence to Christianity more promptly than almost all the Germanic peoples.

At the Synod of Arles in 316 three British bishops were present, and in Britain was born, around the middle of the 4th century, Pelagius, against whose doctrines St. Augustine had to fight.

Ireland, having always remained outside the boundaries of the empire, received Christian missionaries sent by Pope Celestine I (422-32), but its conversion is due especially to the Briton St. Patrick, who, prepared for ecclesiastical learning by Germanus of Auxerre, landed there in 432 and carried on intense apostolic work there until 461.

Roberto Paribeni

CANON LAW

The term "barbarians" here designates in particular the Germanic peoples who settled on the frontiers of the empire.

The traces of the most ancient Germanic law, which are found in Caesar (De Bello gallico) and in Tacitus (Germania, Agricola), attest to us, along with the primitiveness of this law, the absence of that sense of justice and equity which characterized Roman law, even in its initial phase. In the very era in which Tacitus depicts the Germans for us, any penetration of Christian influence into their legal customs must be excluded.

In the territory of Germany properly so called, only with the 8th century, through the work of Winfrid, who later became St. Boniface, can one speak of a true and proper movement toward the Catholic faith.

Different, however, was the situation of the Germans living outside their own land. When the barbarians, especially those forming part of the militiae foederatae, took possession of the provinces of the Roman Empire and progressively established their dominion there (beginning in the 5th century), most of them had abandoned their own idolatrous beliefs in order to receive the Christianity of Arius. But slowly they felt the contact of Roman civilization, by then informed by Christian principles.

It is well known that imperial legislation, beginning with Constantine, had developed predominantly under the influence of the Church and its doctrine.

On the other hand, also for this reason, the Church had adopted much of Roman law as its own and used it in its external relations. Through the two convergences mentioned above, namely Roman-Christian civilization and the direct work of the Church, the Germans imperceptibly changed their own norms, receiving ever greater Roman and canonical legal elements into the body of their own laws.

Thus when the lex Ribuaria adopts, through Roman law, the institution of manumissio in ecclesiis and on its own part emphasizes, in a Christian sense, its spiritual motive and external formalities, it then insists on declaring openly that the Church herself lives according to Roman law, thereby revealing the two sides of the new spiritual orientation of the people to whom that law is addressed: Christian Romanness and the law of the Church.

Here is the relevant text: "Hoc etiam iubemus, qualiscumque Francus Ribuarius seu tabularius servum suum pro animae suae remedium seo pro precio secundum legem Romanam liberare voluerit, ut (eum) in ecclesia coram presbyteris, diaconibus, seo cuncto clero et plebe, in manu episcopi servo cum tabulas tradat, et episcopus archidiacono iubeat, ut ei tabulas secundum legem Romanam, quam ecclesia vivit, scribere faciunt" (ed. Sohm, in MGH, Leges, V, p. 242).

The Church herself, on the other hand, makes herself a propagator of Roman laws among the barbarian populations, seeing in these laws a suitable instrument for the easier diffusion of her moral principles, without however neglecting to revise these laws and adapt them to her equity and her spiritual doctrine, whenever she deems it necessary.

It was in fact Pope Gregory the Great who, toward the end of the 6th century, began sending texts of Roman law to Spain and England, after having suitably modified them, so that his legates might convey their new spirit and recommend their use. Sometimes the barbarian kings themselves directly accepted the norms of the Church, and this especially after the conversion of their peoples to Catholicism. The Franks were converted to it with Clovis in the 5th century and the Lombards in the 7th century, especially through the work of Queen Theodelinda. Lombard legislation was strongly influenced by Christianity, above all from the time of King Grimoald, but it was truly the subsequent Lombard legislator-king, Liutprand, who radically modified Lombard law in various points, drawing inspiration from the doctrine of the Church. He affirms that his purpose is to benefit "pro salute animae et gentis nostrae salvatione" (prologue of the edition of the year 728), "ut omnes in pace et gratia Dei vivere valeant" (ch. 35).

Part of this king's adoption of canonical institutions into Lombard legislation is the transformation of marriage, no longer understood as the purchase of the woman, according to the original Germanic concept, but as a "coniunctio quam Deus praecepit" (ch. 117); in which the man "cum solo anulo eam subharrat". It is the rite of the wedding ring (subharratio cum anulo), understood as a signum fidei. In receiving the ring the woman, no longer a passive object of the marriage transaction, expressed her consent and manifested it to the bridegroom and to the orator. Through the evident influence of the Church, Liutprand also adopts the institution of bequests for the soul, with his "donatio post obitum" (ch. 6), at the same time bending the law of his people to accept testamentary dispositions, unknown to genuine Germanic custom. The same king expressly adopts the canonical norm of matrimonial impediments on account of degrees of kinship, affirming "quia canones sic habent" (ch. 32), "quia Deo teste papa urbis Romae qui in omni mundo caput ecclesiarum et sacerdotum est, per suam epistolam nos adortavit (sic!), ut tale coniugium fieri nullatenus permitteremus" (ch. 33).

But where it is not possible to overcome Germanic custom, as in the case of the duel, the feud, and the ordeals, these institutions are turned, with the persuasion of the Church, to lesser harm. The use of the duel is sought to be limited by proposing in its place a regular but more streamlined judgment. An attempt is made to avoid the feud (family vendetta) by opposing to it ever more the remedy of equivalent compositiones (fines in money). The ordeals (judgments of God) are combated by demonstrating the emptiness of their probative efficacy and by instilling fear of divine punishment for the guilty party who dares impudently to defy divine wrath.

Certain institutions then appear to be introduced into later Lombard law through the effect of canonical principles, such as that of an obligation valid and perfect through mere consent (stantia), which is opposed to the Roman pactum nudum, incapable of generating a true obligation.

It must not be concealed, moreover, that the Church herself felt some influence in her law through her contact with Germanic law. This was due in part to the existence of ecclesiastical centers living according to Germanic law. A typical example in Italy is the monastery of Farfa, which followed Lombard law. Hence it came about that especially canonical procedure drew in several places on Germanic principles and forms, and that the juridical texture of certain relationships seems to recall the mechanism of corresponding Germanic institutions. On this last point one may observe the very correspondence between the ancient distinction of canonical marriage into coniugium initiatum and coniugium ratum (adopted by Gratian in his Decretum) and the Germanic distinction of desponsatio and traditio, indicating the two moments of Germanic marriage. The first phase of each of the two types of marriage represents a true stage, albeit initial and imperfect, of the matrimonial relationship.

Greater, however, was the influence that the Church succeeded in exercising under the Franks and especially beginning with the Carolingians, when the first of these, Charlemagne, was invested with the dignity of Roman emperor and assumed, among other powers, that preeminent one of the tuitio Ecclesiae.

But this, which was supposed to be a function of support and assistance to the Church in her spiritual mission, soon degenerated into immoderate interference in the affairs and even the discipline of the Church: whence that conflict of the two powers, which culminated in the harsh Investiture Controversy.

Nevertheless this conflict, far from diminishing it, increased religious spirit, and Christian morality made ever greater headway in the inspiration of secular law itself and in the improvement of customs.

It was in fact that Peter Crassus, a supporter of Henry IV in the struggle with Gregory VII, who repeated, from the 147th letter of Pope Leo I, the principle of the subordination of the civil norm to the canonical one, when he wrote in his famous libellus de lite: "in his quae vel dubia fuerint aut obscura, id novimus sequendum, quod nec praeceptis evangelicis contrarium, nec decretis sanctorum patrum inveniatur adversum" (Defensio Enrici IV regis, ch. 4).

The legislation of the Frankish emperors deserved, on the other hand, to be collected by ecclesiastics, as the collections of Ansegisus of Fontanelle (v.) and of Benedict the Levite (v.) attest, the latter of whom also introduced into his own collection the tripartite division into capitularia ecclesiastica, mundana and mixta. This reveals also formally the prevailing adherence of that civil legislation to Christian principles. On the other hand the profound religious sentiment of that era is revealed by reflecting on the innumerable series of donations made to the Churches to secure the salvation of the soul, on the frequency of entries into monasteries even by lay lords, as oblates, and on the spirit of widespread penance that preceded and followed the advent of the year 1000.

The very spirit of adventure and the combative nature of the Germanic population were turned to good by the Church, and from them were born the first pilgrimages to the Holy Land and the Crusades, with the institution of those orders of Christian knighthood, which accomplished so many glorious deeds and deeds of civilization in the name of the faith. In this way, with her slow but sure work of civilization and elevation among the barbarians, of preaching peace and of bringing victors and vanquished together, of elevating the humble classes, of mitigating personal and serf servitude, of intimate penetration of Christian principles into the rough consciences of the barbarians, the Church, relying in this also on the law and the superior civilization of the Roman population, matured that leaven of renewal which bore fruit in the Christian Middle Ages, all ardor of faith and dedication to the noblest ideals, so promising in civilization and so fervent in religious life. - See Pl. LII.

Antonio Rota