Gregory of Tours as the Herodotus of Barbarism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 30 November 2024 is the 1,486th anniversary of the birth of Gregory of Tours (30 November 538–17 November 594), who was born in Clermont in Auvergne (at the time, part of Austrasia in the Empire of the Franks) on this date in 538 AD — or thereabouts. There are some sources that give the year of his birth as 539, which would make this the 1,485th anniversary of his birth. The sixth century in Western Europe was a time of turmoil and few written records are available, making it difficult to establish an unambiguous historical chronology, and it is remarkable to some extent that we have any date at all for the birth of Gregory of Tours.
The sixth century was, in fact, such a time of turmoil that Gregory of Tours, by being an historian of his own times, has been called the “Herodotus of Barbarism.” This is one of the most evocative phrases I’ve encountered in history. Walter Goffart attributes the origins of this to French historian Jean-Jacques Ampère, but when he does so he uses the formulation, “the Herodotus of his time,” which means something different from “the Herodotus of barbarism.” I found a book from 1883 that already uses the phrase “Herodotus of barbarism” in scare quotes, implying that it has earlier origins. The 1911 Cambridge Medieval History repeats the formula: “He has the real gift of story-telling and has justly been called the barbarian Herodotus. After his day all culture disappeared.”
Whatever the source, what does it mean to be the Herodotus of barbarism? We call Herodotus the “Father of History” because he was the first person in the Western tradition to systematically research the past and to give an account of it, and the Histories of Herodotus is one of the great classics of the Western tradition. If you’ve seen the film The English Patient you’ll remember that Count Laszlo von Almasy always carries a copy of Herodotus with him that has been his constant companion. The Greek word that has become our word for history — ἱστορία (historía) — means “inquiries” or “researches,” so it was understood from the beginning that history requires an effort on the part of the historian, who doesn’t merely write down what he hears, but who makes a critical inquiry into the stories he writes down. Herodotus himself passed on a lot of dubious stories, but history rapidly became more sophisticated, and another ancient Greek after Herodotus, Thucydides, wrote a monumental yet unfinished history of the Peloponnesian War that is probably the greatest history written to date. So Herodotus stands at the head of Western history, and in calling Gregory of Tours the Herodotus of Barbarism, we’re saying that Gregory of Tours stands at the head of a new historical tradition. Civilization in Gregory’s time had been reduced to barbarism, and history had to be re-founded as civilization had to be re-founded, and this is Gregory’s contribution: a refounding of history in the midst of the barbarous conditions of Europe in the aftermath of Roman institutional failure.
Gregory of Tours provides us with a window onto a world that is in many ways more distant from our world, more difficult to understand, than the cosmopolitan Roman world that preceded it, and the collapse of which produced the conditions of barbarism that Gregory recounted. This was a world not yet a hundred fifty years after the Sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths, which was the inspiration for St. Augustine to write his City of God. Despite the disaster of the sack of Rome, when you read Augustine you can sense the still intact classical world in the background. This classical world is in the process of being transformed into Christendom, but the institutions and intentions and expectations were all those of late antiquity, being the inheritors of an ancient civilization still partially functioning, but rapidly unraveling.
The birth of Gregory of Tours followed the death of Augustine by only 108 years. That’s less time than between the present, which as of now is the year 2024 AD, and when my Grandmother was born in 1896–128 years ago. For any individual this is a long period of time, but in historical terms it isn’t long at all. Nevertheless, the gulf between the world of Augustine and the world of Gregory of Tours, separated by only a century, is palpable. This is what happens when a civilization collapses and enters into a dark age. I’ve said previously that contemporary historians don’t like the idea of a dark age and now avoid the term, but it’s helpful in trying to understand the vast gulf that separated Gregory of Tours from Augustine. In the century that separates them, the world had changed, and that meant the world had changed relatively rapidly by historical standards. When you read Gregory of Tours, you are thrust into the midst of a world that is seemingly innocent of the classical civilization that preceded it. There’s been a rupture in history, with almost all that went before lost, and the new world coming into being had not yet fully formed.
It was 154 years from the death of Gregory of Tours to the birth of Charlemagne, but despite Charlemagne being slightly more historically distant from Gregory than Augustine, I think Gregory of Tours would have recognized the world of Charlemagne had he time traveled into the future, but he would not have recognized the world of Augustine, had he time traveled into the past. Gregory of Tours appeared about mid-way between Augustine and Charlemagne, so he knew neither the comfortable stability of the ancient world that still was the social framework for Augustine, nor the Carolingen renaissance that was the first attempt in Western Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to re-establish some kind of overarching civil order. Trade and commerce had collapsed; cities were mostly depopulated; ports dwindled into irrelevance as what remained of the economy moved inland and took place in large monasteries and manorial estates where the feudal lord was master of his domain and no other law was known. This is what is meant by the reduction of civilization to barbarism, and this was the world that Gregory chronicled.
Gregory was the author of The History of the Franks, which begins with a Biblical chronology of the world, but which eventually comes to focus on Gregory’s own time, which involved the earliest events of what we now call French history, and more generally European history. In his book on Gregory, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, Martin Heinzelmann implicitly attributes a philosophy of history to Gregory:
“Miracles and saints, or ‘miracles and slaughters,’ not only represent a key part of Gregory’s philosophy of history, but could also be used to organize a society and its history. Mitchell appreciated this and therefore recognized and described this role of the saints as both exponents and instruments of Gregory’s social ideas. While, for Goffart, Gregory’s central theme was the contrast between human failings and the exemplary existence of the saints, Mitchell has rightly argued for the presence of an ‘overarching message of redemption and reformation’ as a factor in the unity and arrangement of this historical work.”
Later in the book, Heinzelmann says, “Bishop Gregory has also been accused of being a ‘realist’… who neither valued nor practised abstract thought,” and he footnotes this comment with comments on two other scholars:
“In this sense, even Goffart 1988: 142: ‘he repudiated philosophy in all its systematizing manifestations’ (also ibid.: 143, for perjorative judgements on Gregory’s theology); also de Nie 1987: 209: ‘his handling of metaphors shows that Gregory prefers thinking in visual units to thinking in abstract categories’. De Nie forwards the same explanation for Gregory’s lack of interest in ‘concrete causal connections’ and the absence of a structure to the Histories.”
The reference in the above is to Walter Goffart, whom I mentioned earlier, and whose chapter on Gregory in his book The Narrators of Barbarian History: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon is titled, “Gregory of Tours and ‘The Triumph of Superstition’.” I take this triumph to be an implicit reference to Gibbon. Gibbon had famously stated near the end of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion…” Gregory seems to embody the Triumph of Superstition, and Gibbon its antithesis. But Goffart sees something more in Gregory:
“Gregory’s concept of the past, though partly Orosian, strikes an unexpectedly original note. Its irony foreshadows the Voltairian idea that history depicts only crimes and calamities, but Gregory, not stopping there, found room for the countervailing virtutes sanctorum: the mad world castigated by the holy prophet also contained its critic and what he stood for. Though nourished by the Bible, Gregory’s idea of history as a mixture of opposites could hardly have arisen independently of the literary genre in which it found expression.” (p. 229)
Goffart also says of Gregory:
“…he spoke for something new, different, and assertive. He forces us to confront the possibility that the ‘triumph of superstition’ had a positive face, whose existence and worth in the history of thought deserves acknowledgment even, perhaps especially, outside a confessional context. For the future of European intellectual development did not hinge only on successive ‘renaissances’ of the classical tradition. Something other than a profitless detour in the history of thought was involved in such non-Hellenic improbabilities as an omnipotent and incarnate God, creation out of nothing, and daily miracles.” (p. 232)
Goffart discusses how other historians have viewed Gregory as the “Herodotus of Barbarism” and consigned him a place in the history of thought as representing the lowest nadir of civilization after the collapse of the Roman Empire. No one disputes that the world that Gregory chronicled was one of violence, brutality, and superstition, but Goffart urges us to see the role of non-Hellenic influences in the ferment of rapidly changing European society.
If this world seems strange to us, it can also be weirdly wonderful. In the weirdly wonderful world of Gregory, nature is as treacherous as human beings — as likely to be maleficent as beneficent. Ellen F. Arnold’s paper, “Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings,” examines Gregory’s depiction of rivers and flooding, in which, “the waters have agency, or at the very least are the means of the saints asserting their agency within the natural world. Rivers respond, judge, and even, occasionally, appear to speak.” Arnold further observes:
“Waters wash, punish, threaten, cleanse, and thwart. Giselle de Nie asserts that ‘in Gregory’s works, water is sometimes experienced as the treacherous life in this world, and sometimes as the manifestation of something holy, as a symbol of divine renewal and in man.’ Yet we must also remember that waters were real environmental forces that acted upon landscapes, cityscapes, and human lives. As active ecosystem forces, rivers did work; they scoured channels, added nutrients to fields (enriching a Christian harvest literally, not only metaphorically), and supported fish life and human economies.”
In such a world, with not only rivers but all of nature imbued with supernatural meaning, and thus rightly viewed with superstitious awe, one might reasonably be fearful. Ancient writers like Lucretius warned of the dangers of superstition inspiring fear — a naturalistic view that we largely accept today. However, supernatural fear might also inspire us to a greater effort to attain virtue. The PhD thesis of Catherine-Rose Hailstone, Fear in the Mind and Works of Gregory of Tours, suggests that Gregory was a link between Roman paideia and a new Christian context of character formation:
“…demonically-inspired fear exists in connection with — while simultaneously being the counterpart to — his concept of the fear of God. This is significant because it explicitly shows that Gregory’s works, which are foundational to our knowledge of the sixth-century world, are an excellent, yet unrealised, source for early Christian attitudes about the self, its formation, and the place of the self within the order of the world and divine cosmos. In continuing and preserving the Classical tradition of writing discourse on the self, Gregory’s works give historians new opportunities to study Merovingian notions of the self, the formationof the good Christian, and how the Merovingians developed Roman paideia.”
Is Gregory’s implicit philosophy of history to be understood as a Providential conception, following St. Augustine? Earlier I quoted Goffart as calling Gregory, “partly Orosian.” Paulus Orosius (c. 375–420) was a contemporary and a student of Augustine, who is said to have written his Historiae Adversus Paganos (The Seven Books of History against the Pagans: The Apology of Paulus Orosius) at the behest of Augustine. Karl Löwith, in his Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, which I mention with some regularity, says of both Augustine and Orosius:
“To a Christian believer like Augustine or Orosius secular history is not meaningful in itself but is a fragmentary reflection of its supra-historical substance, the story of salvation, which is determined by a sacred beginning, center, and end.”
Löwith also makes an interesting comparison between Orosius and Burckhardt:
“It is only in Burckhardt’s Reflections on History, in particular in the essay ‘On Fortune and Misfortune in History,’ that we find a similar insight into the fallacy of our comparative judgments and into the correlation of action and suffering as the general pattern of all human history. The difference in their analyses is, however, that Burckhardt was confronted with modern optimism and the belief in progress, Orosius with ancient pessimism and the idea of decay. Consequently, Burckhardt had to emphasize the ultimate insignificance of our claims to happiness, while Orosius, as an apologist, had to insist on a relative betterment of Christian times, separating them on account of ‘the more present grace of Christ’ from ‘the former confusion of unbelief’…”
I have called Löwith’s work a non-philosophy of history, as Löwith maintains that philosophy of history as we know it today is a mere secularization of Christian providential views of history, and therefore inherently illegitimate as an intellectual enterprise. However, we can approach this rather differently, observing, as I have many times noted, that Western philosophy of history begins with Augustine’s City of God, so that we should not be surprised that philosophy of history grows out of Augustine (and Orosius) as this scholarship is incrementally secularized and incrementally transformed from a providential theology into a philosophy properly speaking. In this way, Gregory of Tours is a link in the chain that selects, modifies, and augments the tradition transmitted from classical antiquity and adapts that tradition to radically changed circumstances.
