





For American readers (I am one), Gouguenheim’s title will have a familiar resonance. Henry Adams called his study of medieval European civilization Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. Adams took Gothic Christianity, as typified in the discourses of Aquinas and Abelard and in the architecture of the Lady Churches, to have begun its flowering in the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel on the French Atlantic coast that also figures in Gouguenheim’s account. Adams thought of the High Middle Ages as a dynamic, spiritually adventurous, and, in its way, modern period, directly the precursor of our own technically accomplished and intellectually audacious modernity. Gouguenheim has something of Adams’ view of the medieval world’s clear-sightedness and vigor and he begins by addressing the prevalent méconnaissance of those vital centuries, which in his judgment indeed established the kernel, or rather the “roots,” of our own. If, “for a long time, the cultural history of Europe in the High Middle Ages was presented in negative terms,” and if “the fall of the Roman Empire associated with the Germanic conquests had, in the course of the Fifth Century of our era, made a brutal rather than a progressive end to antiquity” – or if that is what people thought, Gouguenheim asserts: yet “in reality, recent work in ancient and medieval history has shown that the period of the Fifth to the Eighth Centuries was not so catastrophic, the effects of dislocation while quite real being mitigated by elements of continuity.” Greek Christendom constituted one such continuity, as already mentioned. It stood in somewhat aloof reserve, but it had the character of a resource capable of responding to western queries.

Gouguenheim cites the fact that educated Latin-speaking westerners, even after Boethius, could command Greek as explaining in large part the dearth of Greek texts in Latin translation between 500 and 1100 AD. But Latin compendia of Platonist and Aristotelian teachings did circulate, as did medical handbooks in the tradition of Galen. The Latin-speaking Church Fathers thus undertook their reflections “with the help of the logical categories of Greek thought,” such that classical philosophy “impregnated” their arguments as a type of “intellectual matrix.” One could bolster Gouguenheim’s observations in this regard by a reference to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ recent study of The Fall of Rome (2005), in which he remarks that even among the Gothic usurpers of Roman sovereignty in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, civilized individuals emerged who prized classical learning and did their best to preserve it. Theodahad (he reigned as Ostrogothic king of Italy from 534 to 536) offers the outstanding case, having been “learned in Latin literature and Platonic philosophy,” even though he “kept his Gothic moustache.”


Gouguenheim makes clear the conscious and deliberate indebtedness of the Carolingian Renaissance to these sustained currents from the East; he emphasizes the importance of the Carolingian Hellenophile project to the preservation and recirculation of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought before the school of Aquinas. “From the court of the Carolingians to that of the Germanic emperors of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, one does not cease to encounter men who interested themselves in Greek knowledge and culture.” Gouguenheim mentions how Pépin le Bref (reigned 751 – 768) petitioned the Pope for Greek texts and how Paul I responded by committing to royal custodianship various “liturgical books, manuals of grammar and orthography, of geometry [and] works of Aristotle and pseudo-Dionysius” along with “men capable of translating them.” Charlemagne himself employed an Italian of Greek background, Paul Diacre (720 – 799), “to teach Greek to the clerics” at a moment when a marriage seemed possible between his daughter Rothrude and a Byzantine prince. Charles the Bald (reigned 840 – 877) “was fascinated by Greek culture, to the point that he asked the Irish savant Duns Scotus Eriugena to translate the work of [pseudo-Dionysius] towards 855.”

With respect to Aachen, Gouguenheim senses an “irresistible attraction for the Greek authors,” which carries over into the Ottonian period and even intensifies. “The reputedly obscure centuries of the Middle Ages were in reality animated by multiple intellectual rebirths.” Gothic Christianity, far from being averse to or irreconcilable with antique philosophy, “succeeded in the task of integrating antique culture within the Biblical framework of which [Christendom] was the issue.”




Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.



Perhaps the most stimulating of Gouguenheim’s chapters is the antepenultimate one, under the title of “Problems of Civilization.” “Medieval Islam,” Gouguenheim notes, “had not developed any real curiosity for societies exterior to it.” While the magnum opus of Persian literature, The Thousand Nights and a Night, saw its first European translation early in the Eighteenth Century, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey ever interested any Muslim translator. “This absence of curiosity explains in part why the Middle Ages seem to comprise a paralyzing confrontation of several centuries, more often violent than peaceful, which the shared monotheistic belief better sustained than it ameliorated.”

But the notion of a common monotheism, while hopeful, might be misleading:


Christianity was ready, moreover, to receive, not only the philosophy, but also certain basic political principles, of the ancient Greeks, particularly of the Athenians, such as “liberty, reason, and democracy.” Christian Europe in the medieval centuries was, indeed, in a position to admire from the ancient heritage – and to adopt critically – whatever might enhance its Gospel-based conviction of the free will of the individual. Thus the Attic achievement in particular lies at the elective root of a paradoxically self-identifying European culture. Islam knows only that it is Islam whereas Europe, when at its best, has always understood that it is itself and yet something else at the same time. A European sense of intellectual insufficiency and need gave unexpected strength to the progress and consolidation of the medieval mind. Europe would prove itself “permeable” in a way that Islam could not – convinced as it was of its own perfection ab origine. Thus, concludes Gouguenheim, “the Hellenization of medieval Europe was the fruit of Europeans,” who discovered, on their own, their affiliations with the ancient societies.

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most significant publications of the last few years. It is, I believe, destined to become a classic – not only in its original French, but also in the other European languages, once it has been translated. It dispels a myth, an invidious one that has long been central to the perverse palaver of western self-hatred. For those who, like me, command their French a bit uncertainly, Gouguenheim’s prose is a miracle of balanced sentences and clear meaning. I would say that Gouguenheim’s study has a potentially large audience outside the academy and could become something of a popular success in the Anglophone nations.

[This review first appeared in The Brussels Journal in 2008]

10 thoughts on “The West’s Cultural Continuity: Sylvain Gouguenheim’s Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne

  1. Pingback: The West’s Cultural Continuity: Sylvain Gouguenheim’s Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne | Neoreactive


    You know, I only learned this from a liberal Art History teacher, and she actually harped on the point quite a lot. Well, not only, but it’s the only time in my formal education I ran across it anyway. Even later when I attended a “conservative” university, they referred to this period as the Dark Ages. It’s maddening when you hear some e-Atheist or your neighborhood leftist harp about the evils of the Dark Ages that surely those Christian Rightists will force upon us. And they think I’m delusional for believing the Bible?

  3. Pingback: The West’s Cultural Continuity: Sylvain Gouguenheim’s Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne | Reaction Times

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  6. It is seven years later and I see that the Gouguenheim book is still not translated to English, although it has made it to German and Spanish, according to Amazon. I have read Emmett Scott’s Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited (2012), which takes many of the same themes. Scott puts forward that Europe suffered a social and economic setback as a result, not of the Germanic tribes, who eventually were integrated into European society, but of the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and Northern Africa and subsequent stranglehold on economic intercourse with those regions. Even the castle system was a result of withdrawing from coastal regions and heading for the interior, building structures capable of withstanding Islamic raiders. Also the timing of the “dark” period, the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, was more consistent with the Islamic incursions.

    Petrarch was using the term “dark ages” (did he not originate it?) long before the eighteenth century philosphes.

  7. “Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term “Dark Ages” insinuates ever existed”

    A clever lie to ensure nobody goes looking at how their ancestors actually lived and might seek to emulate them.The Dark Age has nothing to do with technology, nor profane science, but rather is a mark of cultural degeneration. Thus, the Dark Age, far from being characteristic of the Medieval Period, is the label we ought to apply to our current society.

    This was very informative and I must admit I had not heard of this text before, likely owing to its lack of Anglo-translation.

    I cannot really go any way to exalting the entire influence that the transmission of these texts and ideas had on Europe, for this would almost seem to be walking into the arms of Modernity. There is no doubt that ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers were greatly influence by this much older school of thought. I would probably have to consult Evola’s treatment of Greek philosophy and the periods of high Hellenic culture again, but he seemed to suggest that while much of this thought was benign, some of it was in fact degenerative and caused greater problems in the Greek culture eventually leading to its downfall, particular the pre-eminence of “Lunar” or feminine modes of organization and ritual. These may be the same elements that empowered the thinkers of the ‘Enlightenment’ in their quest to actually undo Tradition and usurp its kingship, something no Greek philosopher or political figure ever managed to do in spite of their civilization eventually coming to an end.

  8. A brilliant article. Thank you for writing it! I have a copy of the german translation, and of course there is a foreword that says something akin to the following: “of course arabs had a great influence on the west by rediscovering greek thought”. And there is a long “critique” at the end that basically says that Gouguenheim was selective in his sources and that his view does not hold up to reality, i.e. arabs did influence the west, and heavily (they cite arab words in the german language like “zucker” [sugar] as “evidence”). But the work itself has sitll been tranlsated at least, which is quite a lot given that Germany is a muslims-loving country.



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