The gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away

In early medieval France, men could not help but notice that all around them lay the ruins of a great civilisation.

Temples and theatres, great bridges and roads had crumbled and fallen into disrepair through neglect. Yet what remained spoke of a glorious past, of a society whose organisational and technological capabilities were far beyond those of the present time.

And yet in the early twelfth century a monk, abbot of a northern French monastery wrote criticising those who praised the achievements of the ancients over those of his own day. In doing so he revealed an attitude prevalent in his day. Men believed that their world was quite literally growing old, that its period of greatness was now in the long distant past and that the Roman Empire had constituted a golden age.

What lay ahead was the Apocalypse and the task of society was to prepare the way for the inevitable: “Although pure strength was pre-eminent among the ancients, yet among us, though the end of time has come upon us, the gifts of nature have not entirely rotted away”, so wrote the abbot.


“Certain mortals” he continued, ”have developed the foul habit of praising previous times and attacking what modern men do ... However, no discerning individual could prefer in any way the temporal prosperity of the ancients to any of the strengths of our own day.”

By this the abbot, Guibert de Nogent, meant that the spiritual strengths of his day were of greater value than the material wealth of the past. As society moved inexorably towards the End Times a mutually supporting division developed, a caste system imported from the East. This was the Tripartite division: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. In other words, the monks, the knights and the feudal serfs. Each performed a vital service towards the greater good in a mutually interdependent sctructure.

Those who worked the land provided the necessary food, the knightly aristocracy protected the other two divisions and fought to defend Christendom. It was the monks and clerics however who provided the most vital function: prayer.

For it was considered that humanity was too sinful to be redeemed without constant prayer and so around the relics of saints an ever more elaborate liturgical ritual evolved. And so the monasteries were reformed, they received great donations from kings and the wealthy aristocracy for the provision of foundations and endowments. By the eleventh century European Christendom contained a network of thousands of abbeys and priories.