Ferdinand Gregorovius and Meso-History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 19 January 2024 is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Ferdinand Gregorovius (19 January 1821–01 May 1891), who was born in Neidenburg, East Prussia (now part of Poland) on this date in 1821.
Gregorovius was the author of a multi-volume work on the history of Rome during the middle ages, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (1859–1872), translated into English as The History of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894–1902), which is not widely read today but was a landmark of scholarship in its time. The inspiration for the work was described by K. F. Morrison in an abridgement and translation of Gregorovius:
“Standing on the Ponte Fabricio early in the autumn of 1854 he suddenly saw in the buildings and ruins of Rome more than vestiges of one city’s aspirations and failures. He saw Rome as a point of intersection for the great forces whose conflicts had generated European civilization. The bridge on which he stood witnessed to the heritage of classical Rome. Originally built by the Emperor Otto III, the Church of Santo Bartolomeo, at the foot of the bridge, represented the Germanic empire. Behind him, on the Capitoline, stood the Campidoglio, the stronghold of Roman republicanism in the Middle Ages. Up the Tiber rose Saint Peter’s, an enduring moment of papal monarchy.
“For Gregorovius, these buildings were relics, not simply of men, but of the spirit that had moved men, of ideas that had dominated the world. Beyond the plane of local politics, concerning the short-range fates of immediate issues and great men, Gregorovius detected a second level — that of universal history, the drama of mankind’s advancement through increasingly complete stages of spiritual freedom. “In a flash,” he grasped the inspiration for the history in these two aspects as “something great, something that will lend a purpose to my life.” (Rome and Medieval Culture, editor’s Introduction by K. F. Morrison, p. xi)
Gregorovius kept a journal in which he recorded this moment, later published as The Roman Journals of Ferdinand Gregorovius, with this entry for 03 October 1854:
“I propose to write the history of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages. For this work, it seems to me that I require a special gift, or better, a commission from Jupiter Capitolinus himself. I conceived the thought, struck by the view of the city as seen from the bridge leading to the island of S. Bartholomew. I must undertake something great, something that will lend a purpose to my life.” (p. 16)
I assume he was implicitly making reference to Edward Gibbon in this description of the moment in which he realized his historiographical mission, as Gibbon wrote of a similar moment of inspiration in a now famous passage from his autobiography:
“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire: and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work.”
Gregorovius certainly knew he was working in Gibbon’s shadow, and indeed he saw himself not as Gibbon’s continuator, but as recovering Gibbon’s original mission. In a letter to Sigmund Münz he said that he had returned to Gibbon’s original project:
“This conception of medieval Rome as a city originated with me. I gave it a literary form and carried out Gibbon’s first idea; for it is well known that he had originally intended to write the history of the city of Rome during the middle ages.”
Everyone who has been to Rome understands the power of the place and has experienced its genius loci. I first traveled to Rome in 1989 and, like many, I was enchanted by the Eternal City. (Rome was already called the Eternal City — Urbs Aeterna — in classical antiquity by the Roman poet Tibullus.) I returned in 1997 to focus on Rome. I stayed for two weeks and took no taxis or public transportation during my stay in the city, only walking; staying very close to Vatican City, I wandered the ancient streets of Rome and visited as many of the oldest churches that I could reach by foot. It was a memorable experience.
As Gregorovius knew and sought to communicate, Rome embodies human history in a way that only cities can. Sometimes men, and sometimes cities, are bearers of the great ideas that have shaped human history. Gregorovius focused on a city, while Thomas Carlyle focused on men with his “great man theory of history” in his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:
“…as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”
Carlyle and the great man theory of history have few friends today. The archaeologist John Romer called Carlyle the “barmiest” of the Victorians, and this describes as well as anything could the state of Carlyle’s reputation today. Yet Wilhelm Windleband, who originated the distinction between the nomothetic (lawlike) and the idiographic (particularistic) had an interesting take on Carlyle’s great man theory of history:
“Carlyle, who worked himself free from the philosophy of enlightenment by the assistance of the German idealism… laboured unweariedly for the recognition of the archetypal and creative personalities of history… on the one hand the life of the masses with the changes taking place conformably to general law — on the other hand the independent value of that which presents itself but once, and is determined within itself.” (A History of Philosophy: with especial Reference to the Formation and Development of its Problems and Conceptions, p. 654)
This interpretation assimilates Carlyle’s conception of the role of great men in history to the nomothetic/idiographic distinction, so that the masses are the nomothetic background to the archetypal individual who embodies the idiographic. All that Carlyle and Windleband said of individual persons can be said of individual cities. The urban parallel to Carlyle is the great city theory of history: paraphrasing Carlyle we can say that universal History, the history of what humanity has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Cities which have evolved here.
A great city is the idiographic exception to the nomothetic rule, an archetype with a personality of its own. Gregorovious seemed to have seen other cities as similarly distinctive and archetypal. At the beginning of The History of Rome in the Middle Ages he identified three cities that had a disproportionate role in human history:
“Three cities shine conspicuous in the history of mankind, by reason of the universal influence which they exercised upon it — Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. In the course of the life of the world, all three are factors working with and through each other for human civilisation.” (Vol. I, p. 3)
There are a few others whom we can count in the tradition of the great city theory of history, such as Philotheus of Pskov, who made this remarkable claim:
“And now, I say unto thee: take care and take heed, pious tsar; all the empires of Christendom are united in thine, for two Romes have fallen and the third exists and there will not be a fourth; thy Christian empire, according to the great theologian, will not pass to others…” (Strémooukhoff, D. 1953. Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine. Speculum, 28(1), 84–101. doi:10.2307/2847182)
For Gregorovius, the conspicuous cities of history were Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome; for Philotheus of Pskov the cities of destiny were Rome, Constantinople, and Moscow. Rome, we note, appears on both lists, and Rome was also the crucial city for Saint Augustine; it was, after all, the Sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 24 August 410 AD that was the occasion of the first philosophy of history, Augustine’s City of God. For Augustine, Rome was the stand-in for all other cities; Rome was the City of Man, and so to be contrasted to the Heavenly City.
This idiographic exception to ordinary urbanism contrasts to the nomothetic urbanism of, say, Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City, which gives the law-like processes by which ancient cities appeared and then were institutionally transformed; or Henri Pirenne in his Medieval Cities, which recounts the recovery of cities after the Roman collapse; or V. Gordon Childe on the “urban revolution” which was the ultimate origin of civilization. These historians were concerned not with one archetypal city, but with the city as such, understood as part of the nomothetic historical process, which can be studied scientifically.
Fustel de Coulanges, Pirenne, and Childe give us the nomothetic background to the singular archetypal cities, and this nomothetic background of urbanism is the basis for the existence of any exemplary city, which latter is the idiographic exception among cities, and the vision of an urban ideal of sorts. The urban ideal has deep roots in Western thought. Plato described the ideal government of a polis in his Republic when a republic was a polis and its hinterlands (not the nation-state of today), and Aristotle prescribed details of city planning in his Politics. In Robert Redfield’s anthropology, cities are centers of the Great Tradition which is the foundation of a civilization, which Great Tradition appears in the literary and cultural milieu of a city, with a written language and a priesthood to preserve the tradition. For Gregorovius, Rome uniquely embodied many of these ideals of urbanism:
“All great spiritual and worldly powers received their consecration in Rome; the sources of the priestly power, the power to bind and to loose, the fount of Imperial Majesty, finally, civilisation itself, seemed to spring from the hills of Rome, and, like the streams of Paradise, flow to fertilise the four quarters of the world. All the institutions of mankind had originally sprung from this majestic city.”
Though we often think of medieval Rome as a city depopulated and a mere shadow of its former imperial sense, speaking of medieval Rome Gregorovius is scarcely less effusive:
“There were long centuries in the Middle Ages in which Rome was truly the law-giver, the instructress and the mother of nations, encircling her children with a threefold ring of unity — spiritual in the Papacy, temporal in the Empire, the crown of which German kings came to receive in S. Peter’s, and the unity of that general civilisation which was the bequest of Rome to all the world.”
But even the ideal, archetypal city has its dark underbelly. Cities have not only represented human ideals, but have also represented the worst in us, often seen as flesh pots, as dens of vice and iniquity. Everyone will recall the scene in Star Wars in which Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking out over Mos Eisley, says to Luke, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” — no such wicked temptations were to be found among the simple, honest farming folk in the countryside of Tatooine, just as the wicked temptations of Rome were far from the simple, stoic farmers of the Italian countryside; any honest Roman visiting the Rome would have been shocked at the decadence, as indeed a thousand years later Christian pilgrims arriving at Rome were shocked at the decadence of the “Princes of the Church” at St. Peter’s.
In the Book of Revelation it is said of Babylon the Great that it is, “the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” (Revelation 18:2) It is likely that this slur was intended for Rome, as Rome was the “Babylon the Great” for the author of Revelation. And so it was the Rome was not only archetypal as a vision of urban ideals, but also as a vision of urban dystopia. An archetypal city, then, extends across the full range of human experience, from the highest to the lowest.
These contrasting visions of urban ideals and urban malevolence tell us something important about ourselves, albeit indirectly, through the proxy of a city, which makes it a little less painful for us and therefore a bit easier to bear. In this way a city, especially an archetypal city, can provide a lens by which to see the universe entire, and, historiographically, cities may be taken as the middle ground between little big history and big history properly speaking. Let me try to explain what I mean by this latter claim.
Big history tells the story of the universe entire from the big bang through the present and into the future as far as we can see; by contrast, Esther Quaedackers has pioneered what she calls “little big histories,” in which some feature of the world, or some object in the world, is seen in the light of the history of the universe entire. In “A case for little big histories,” included in The Routledge Companion to Big History, she uses the example of a brick as an object to illustrate big history. As diminutive and unpromising as a brick may sound as the focus of a history, it turns out that bricks are pregnant with meaning and filled with possibility.
Between big history proper, and little big histories, we could identify a middle ground that we might call meso-history. All traditional history has been meso-history, choosing as its object of historical exposition something greater than a brick yet lesser than the universe. The history of states, empires, wars, religions, languages, and political movements are all meso-histories. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, despite its vast scope and reach, is a meso-history that we could not reasonably call either a big history properly speaking or a little big history. Some meso-histories tend toward the large and could be effortlessly extended to be big histories. We could re-write Gibbon as a big history, further expanding and extending its scope. Other meso-histories tend toward the small, and could be reduced to little big histories. There remains, nevertheless, a meso-scale that can receive a big history exposition distinct from big history sensu stricto and little big history.
At the level of meso-history, we have a story like that of Rome. Rome is a city built of a great many bricks (we recall Augustus said that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble), each of which has its little big history, but the history of the city is greater than any one brick. At the same time, the history of Rome is not the history of the universe. Between the little big history of a brick and the big history of the universe entire lies the meso-history of an exemplary city like Rome.
Gregorovius gives us a meso-history focused on Rome, but a meso-history in the sense that all traditional history is meso-history; he does not give us a meso-history in the sense that I am describing here, though we can see the possibility for such a meso-history implicit in Gregorovius, and we could take the next step ourselves. If we can see history through the lens of a single city, we could just as well see a single city through the lens of history, or, as the case may be, through the lens of big history. Let us, then, indulge in a thought experiment — the thought experiment of a meso-history of Rome.
Carl Sagan said in his Cosmos that, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” The same is true for a city: if you wish to build a city, you must fist invent a universe. For this we require the entirety of cosmological history, insofar as we know it and we can understand it. As we all know, Rome was not built in a day, and, from the perspective of big history, Rome was indeed built in something over thirteen billion years, in all that has transpired since the big bang.
Big history simpliciter begins and ends with the universe that encompasses us all. Perhaps when our cosmology reaches that degree of development at which we understand our big bang to be our local big bang, and one among many (as our galaxy is part of the local cluster, one among many such clusters), then we will begin and end with something that encompasses the universe. Until such time, we “limit” ourselves to the universe we can observe, and which we can therefore know after a fashion. Within these limits, we find the origins of Rome in the big bang, the formation of stars and galaxies, and building up of more complex elements and minerals, like the building up of a city over the longue durée. Every atom that constitutes the brick and marble of Rome ultimately derives from the matter than precipitated out of the big bang once it expanded and cooled.
In our thought experiment we witness the formation of the Sun, and then the formation of Earth from the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young Sun. As Earth coalesces and cools, like the universe entire before it, the forces of a complex planet composed of many minerals gives rise to geomorphological processes, shaping continents and ocean basins. These continents and oceans arrange and rearrange themselves over geological time, until the present arrangement of landmasses as a consequence of supercontinent cycles begins to take shape before us. Slowly but certainly we begin to recognize the forms of the landmasses, which more closely approximate the planet as we know it today.
In our meso-history of Rome we witness the formation of the Mediterranean Basin between Europe and Africa, repeatedly filled with sea water, and the waters repeatedly cut off at the Pillars of Hercules when geomorphological forces cause them to close, with the Mediterranean dying out for tens of thousands of years, only to be filled again, both from the outpouring of the Nile and when the Pillars of Hercules again open to the sea. Eventually, a familiar pattern comes into view. A coastline we recognize forms, and we see the boot of the Italian peninsula. All the while the seven hills of Rome have been slowly forming from volcanoes.
Human beings appear in the landscape. A settlement appears, and the land is farmed. A network of roads grows out of Rome, like arteries carrying the lifeblood of the Republic and then the Empire. The Romans venerate their own history in the preservation of the hut of Romulus (Casa Romuli), where their founder is said to have made his home. The city is built from the stone of the region, with the sanpietrini cobblestones of Trastevere made of local volcanic rock that we saw form earlier in the volcanic history of the region.
In the imaginary view from above of our thought experiment, we see ancient Rome at its height, a million strong, and then, in the blink of an eye of historical time, we see Rome sacked, humiliated, depopulated, and nearly abandoned. Then comes the long road back to prosperity and influence, repeatedly sacked and built again over the centuries. And all through the centuries the remains of Rome at its imperial grandeur are being unearthed, and are being unearthed still today. Many artifacts, even many treasures, still wait to be found, excavated, and eventually displayed in museums to future sightseers who will know of a past Rome not yet known to us. But the city will yet retain many of its secrets. Some treasures will never be found, remaining safe and secure within the layer upon layers built up by millennia of human habitation.
These artifacts unknown to us — perhaps even described in ancient books, but since lost and never rediscovered — will be conveyed into the unknown future, and then into the far future of Rome, an unimaginable future when the city is eventually abandoned, nature takes over, the parks become forests, and the roads become wildlife trails. The Tiber alternatively floods and dries up many times over, and changes its course many times, now flooding one section of what was Rome, and then another section. The modern buildings crumble to nothing even while the ancient ruins remain, to be covered over in turn after having been briefly exposed again to the light of sun by archaeologists, as volcanoes come back to life in the Alban Hills and the Sabatini volcanic complex, covering the remnants of the city in volcanic ash and lava flows.
Still watching from above, we see the city broken apart by geomorphological forces that originally formed the region. Parts of Rome are destroyed, other parts are encased in sedimentary rock and preserved for millions of years, and then tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years in the crust of the Earth. Five billion years or more pass, the sun becomes a red giant, and then shrinks into a mere white dwarf, cool, very dense, and almost invisible to the rest of the cosmos but for the occasional flare.
The ancient planets of our ancient solar system eventually begin to break up after the death of the sun, and as they break apart pieces of these once familiar worlds fall into the white dwarf Sun and impact on its surface — the source of the occasional flares — making of our sun a polluted white dwarf. Many billions of years from now, if some extraterrestrial intelligence peers at our former sun with a telescope, they will be able to spectroscopically analyze the light from these impacts on our polluted white dwarf sun and determine the non-starlike elements that are polluting its surface, which are nothing other than the fragments of the planets of our solar system. If bits and pieces of Rome, still encased in Earth’s crust, are among the planetary remnants that fall in to our white dwarf sun and impact the surface, any observer will literally see final immolation of some small part of the Eternal City as it is absorbed into the compact matter of what was the Sun which once shone upon the pines and fountains of Rome.
About when the sun was passing through its death throes, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies were colliding and becoming one enormous and chaotic galaxy, which will eventually include all the bodies of the local cluster, gravitationally bound into an amorphous elliptical galaxy, increasingly alone in the universe as all other galaxies and clusters pass over the cosmological horizon and are lost to sight. Ours is now an island universe stranded in emptiness. The gravitational forces of the melding of entire galaxies disrupt elegant spiral arms and planetary systems alike, throwing stars and planets into unlikely trajectories and multi-billion year orbits that compass the entirety of what remains of the universe for us.
We, still the observers in the thought experiment, suspended above and beyond this cosmological chaos, have our eye yet trained on Earth. Perhaps parts of the disintegrating Earth impact on our polluted white dwarf sun, while other remnants of our once proud planet are thrown into an eccentric orbit, and still the remnants of Rome, preserved in the geologically inert rocky crust, go on to become the eternal city on a cosmic scale. The cosmological eschatology of Rome might disperse in many directions, with parts of the city returned to the mantle and melted until the supercontinent cycle grinds to a halt, while parts of the city remain locked in sedimentary rock, and when Earth ultimately breaks up, those parts of Earth that do not fall into the Sun, in floating chunks of Earth’s crust that drift through the local cluster, portions of the entombed eternal city might survive.
We can imagine an artifact of ancient Rome, preserved in a shroud of stone, falling into a supermassive black hole, thereby attaining the physical equivalent of eternity as the gravitational forces slow time to an imperceptible crawl and some fragment of the eternal city is thereby conveyed into the far distant cosmological future of the universe, an almost eternal history for the Eternal City. Gregorovius doesn’t quite take us so far, but, like Virgil conducting Dante through Hell and Purgatory, he can take us on our initial steps of the journey, as we wait for Beatrice.
