Everyone reading this review, I expect, will be in some shape or form convinced that rationality is the way forward for, well, whatever one’s goals are. How to be rational, how to apply it to the world, how to prioritize and strategize towards goals, all are worthy subjects that have been explored in this community. However, why our reason is the only acceptable tool for these tasks is a different question. In fact, it's something of a nonsensical one; to argue for why we should use our reason must necessarily rely on arguments based on it, forcing us into circular reasoning. While I, and the work I review, don’t pretend to answer this already well-chewed over philosophical problem, we do nevertheless offer an explanation for why we all do all agree on reason. A tacit agreement among people is a social norm, and social norms have a human history entangled with belief, institutions, and power - one that we must examine, not as philosophers, but as historians. This, then, is the value of Alexander Murray’s 1978 Reason and Society in the Middle Ages.
Murray begins by pointing out that problems in society, we rational moderns have assumed, arise from a lack of understanding of those problems. The solution to social problems is the solution that has served so well in other arenas since the Enlightenment, more study, more analysis, more science. The institutions responsible for social problems have failed? Study them, then. Once the core of the problem has been located, understood, and made obvious to everyone, no one will be able to disagree, and the problem is solved. Murray’s point is that this is a historical mentality, something that has not always been true, and emerged at an identifiable time and place among identifiable people. Murray dubs this mentality the “Greek” mentality: social problems, as well as any other problem, are problems of ignorance, and they can be solved through rational inquiry and education.
Forming the other side, then is what Murray calls the “Hebrew” mentality. The problem is not one of not knowing what to do, the problem is whether men have the will to do it. Men know perfectly well what the ultimate solution is; social problems originate in men’s moral “perversity”, the refusal to do what one should despite knowing it. He quotes Genesis 3:17 to illustrate the point:
Because you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the ground because of you.
A Greek would ask why eating the fruit would cause the ground to be cursed, a Hebrew recognizes himself when Adam chose to do wrong despite already knowing it would curse humanity. According to Murray, this is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Ok, then, but wasn’t this supposed to be about history? This kind of Continental philosophizing is really outside what historians are supposed to be doing, even for 1978. So, Murray proposes that the Judeo-Christian synthesis with Hellenistic culture in the dying days of the Roman Empire would lead to an unresolved tension in Medieval thought; one that wouldn’t be escaped until the Protestant Reformation. After the Reformation, neither “camp” embraced one or the other mentality, rather, this was simply lost in the more politically relevant question of Catholic vs. Protestant. Before this, though, there was no room for thought that completely discarded one or the other mentality, Medieval scholastics, if they were to explain the world’s problems and guide us to solutions, had to accept both “Greek” and “Hebrew” mentality and synthesize them. Absent the ideological fragmentation of the Reformation, the tension is played out in the social history of intellectuals and institutions.
Before Murray launches into this history itself, he explains his method. “Mentalities” are not something that you can directly assign to individuals or works, nor do historical actors nominate themselves to them. Historiographers will recognize the term, from the 20th century French Annales school, the “histoire des mentalités”. Instead of looking at particular people, events, or trends, the histoire des mentalités looks at people’s way of thinking about the world around them by how they tried to interact with it. In our local lingo, a mentality is people’s “mental model” of the world, their worldview as expressed through action. We can avoid sticky questions that come from fragmentary evidence of particular persons, and instead try to fill in the gaps by making explicit the tacit implications of what they do say and do.
Murray, as a social historian in the 1970s, is also quite clearly avoiding of a Marxist view of classed society. (In passing, he diagnoses Marxism as a modern synthesis of Greek and Hebrew, a putatively scientific analysis of capitalism with a moral exhortation to end it). Murray instead wants to look at “classes” that track our two mentalities, not either side of a particular economic relationship. He instead points to the medieval metaphor of the “Wheel of Fortune”. (Readers may remember a mangled reference to this in Game of Thrones’ “breaking the wheel”). Murray wants to look at, during the Medieval tensions between Greek and Hebrew, which social groups (and the mentalities they hold) are on the way up, to the heights of power, and which are on the other side of the wheel, on the way down. It should be clear, by Murray’s view, which mentality rode what side of the wheel.
All of that is the introduction, but its necessary to understand why this isn't just a work of history. Nevertheless, the remainder is history, split into 4 major sections. The first is on the economic and power structures of the western world as it emerged from the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire, the second tracks the ascending social status of mathematics and mathematical skill, the third, the same for “literate” skill, and the fourth, the descent of nobility and religion on the far side of the wheel. Being medieval though, the history defies this easy categorization for an interlaced and self-reinforcing tangle. Strap in.
Despite what you may of heard, the Western Roman Empire really did fall, at least when it came to its economy. Money, as a concept, had to be slowly re-introduced to Europe from the Islamic caliphates to the south and east. At first it was usually a way of evening out a barter, pre-divided bullion to make a trade in goods balance out. Real wealth was in land, and the power to command loyal followers to take more, as Charlemagne did in the years around 800.
Around 950 to 1100, though, Europeans came to see money itself as an object of desire, and a route to power. Liquidity in wealth could mean social liquidity, abstraction of wealth could mean abstraction of power. Pecunia stops being a word for “treasure”, a reserve of non-fungible valuables, and returns to its classical connotation of “cash”.
This new mobility was disturbing to a previously static society; in Christian polemic, avarice replaced pride as the root of all evil. Simony (the sin of buying and selling positions in the Church) suddenly became the number 1 priority for Church reformers, whereas previously, it was hard to distinguish from standard political favor trading. Widespread persecution of Jews was largely absent until Europe's re-monetization; being exempt from the Christian disquiet over the new liquidity, they became a conspicuous target, despite being only roughly 2% of Europe's financiers around 1200. Money, and its new ability to overturn social order, rapidly became a favorite target for satirists. Murray translates Petrus Pictor’s De denario:
A handsome lover visits his fair whore
But brings no money - and is shown the door
A monster follows, money in his wallet,
And finds a banquet ready for his palate…
Although condemnation is more ready from our sources, Murray really wants to talk about the opposite side of the point - ambition. At the same time wealth and power were growing beyond a coterie of warlords dominating land into a state, men were needed to run that state. Intermediary business men, those who could turn money into resources, suddenly found that they were needed by the state. Kings like Henry II of England read Vegitius’ De rei militari and decided they didn’t need loyal knights ready to assemble, but logisticians who could guarantee a well provisioned siege. Nobles needed to invent the concept of hereditary knighthood in order to justify their rule, when all it took was money to buy the horse and harness that backed their prior claim. The prior term for a knight, the Latin miles, merely indicated an armed man; the term prud'homme had to be coined to indicate that his place as a prudent man for the king is what set him apart.
A peculiar manuscript of the time, the Secretum Secretorum, was the handbook of the ambitious man. It wasn’t a book of moral exhortation, rather, the route to power was through the pseudo-virtue of prudence, knowing what to do. It purported to contain some of Aristotle’s advice to Alexander translated from Syriac to Arabic to Latin, more likely it was a 10th century Arabic “Mirror of Princes”, a handbook to courtiers. Although it is little remembered now, the Secretum was one of the most copied manuscripts in the central Middle Ages. Along with commentary on everything from anatomy to astrology, the Secretum presents a view of the state radically different from prior medieval thought. It presents this diagram:
Each item causes the one next to it, cyclically. The king relies on the army, the army on the state, etc. Each item is integral to the one opposite to it - notice what lies opposite of “king”. The supposed wisdom of the ancients was clear: if you wanted to run a successful state, you needed money. If you wanted to be a part of the newly growing state apparatus, a courtier with power, there was no better route than being a money man, a man who could count.
Fungible wealth, by definition, has a quality that wealth in land, treasure, and loyalty does not - countability. The monetization of Europe’s economy, and close behind, the state, meant that a money man was a man of arithmetic. Too bad, then, that the state of mathematics at the turn of the millennium was pathetic. The Venerable Bede, in 8th century England, wasn’t argued with when he calculated the proper date of Easter because there were no other clerics available that could understand the math. He popularized dating his histories by Anno Domini, dating from the birth of Christ instead of a local regnal year; basic mistakes in addition and subtraction by his scribes irritated him to no end. The Carolingian Renaissance, despite introducing the 1 librum (pound) = 20 solidus (shilling) = 240 denarius (penny), had few scholars who mastered the major computus, the sum total of mathematical knowledge of the West, monks instead relied on a complex system of hand contortions to calculate sums. The counting system from Alcuin’s “Propositions for Sharpening Youth” only functions up to 9000, and few saw the need to go further.
Gebert of Aurillac (946-1003) wrote a treatise on the abacus, which he himself learned as a young man in Catalonia on the border of Muslim Al-Andalus. Records of this improvement only exist by accident - his later election as Pope Sylvester II ensured that his correspondence with his students was preserved; most also record their bafflement by Gebert’s dalliance with arithmetic (he himself would later admit his skill only with embarrassment.) The medieval abacus was simply a table, or a cloth placed over a table with a grid on it. Each column of the grid was labeled, right to left, 1, 10, 100, and so on. To count, stones, coins, or other counters would be placed in a grid cell until they equaled the value of the next column; 1 would be slid over and the remaining 9 removed. It was the position of the counter along the rows that indicated a value, not merely their total. Each row would store a different number, and a simple set of operations could add, subtract, multiply and divide them; Gebert’s abacus could handle products of 1010. Soon after, rather than needing 10 counters in a cell before moving over, a set of specially made counters, each with a scribbled symbol derived from Arabic, 1-9, could serve. Once there, it was a short jump to move the counters in the head, and tracking the state of the abacus table on paper, drawing empty cells to the right to mark the value counters position - the “0”.
Murray points to the growing adoption of the abacus and Arabic numerals as a sign of the growth in numerate mentality. Leonardo Bonacci (Fibonacci) of Pisa’s 1202 Liber Abaci may get credit for the introduction of Arabic numerals among Florentine financers, but it is the halls of power that we see it grow first. Adelard of Bath, who learned the abacus in his travels to Norman Sicily (which still used the state apparatus left by its prior Muslim occupants) was personally excused by King Henry I from a fine in recognition of his service. The Dialogus de Scaccario (c. 1180), a handbook on how to run the Exchequer under Henry I’s grandson, Henry II, directly explains how the abacus is operated in front of the both the sheriff delivering the taxes and the king’s appointed accountants (a grid on a massive table is surrounded by bleachers is wonderfully legible). Where scholars of the day regularly exaggerated and rounded off numbers of men in armies and the tons of food provisioning them, Exchequer records provide exact numbers down to the last man and bushel. Artisans, architects and businessmen presumably had their own functional techniques to operate, but the growing state demanded accountable, legible mathematics and the men that could provide them. Just as the Secretorum recommended, inculcating the mentality of generalized arithmetical reasoning was a route to power.
Less obscure sources are needed to track the growth of literacy in this period, and scholarship has made more progress here; Murray focuses on the social drivers for adopting the mentality of literate rationality. Here too, the story begins with money, but for a different reason.
In the Gregorian Reforms efforts to stamp out simony, they needed an alternative standard for what qualifies a person for church office. The philosophers got their way on this one, the reformers concluded that bureaucratic accountability and legibility in the church was its defense against further corruption. What does it take to operate a bureaucracy? Literate reasoning.
Therefore, one’s education in the liberal arts is what qualified one for priesthood. The problem, then, was where to find enough educated people to fill all the offices. Benefices (effectively, endowments for the church) were set up to send bright but poor young men to study under prominent scholars. Eventually, there was enough demand for teaching that permanent education establishments were made - universities. Education became a career move.Although high church office was traditionally held by well connected nobility, poor young men began to work their way up the ladder. The Latin term clericus stretched to include not just what English calls a “cleric”, but began to mean “clerk” as well; the root is the same.
This production of elites was not without its anxieties. There were only so many benefices and offices to go around, newly minted intellectuals imitated nobles with catty boasts and sniping at each other, just at their writing, not their prowess in battle. Uneducated clerics, still holding the politically relevant bishoprics, were mocked as rusticae, bumpkins. The Biblical fact that the original founders of the Christian Church, the apostles, were illiterate, was regarded as a mystery. Other intellectualist reform movements like the Waldensians, Joachites, and Wyclifites were both an opportunity to drive out excess educated careerists as well as display literate skill. Wycliff criticized the growing intellectualism of the church, but himself had to do so on the intellectuals playing field - reasoned debate. French intellectuals denigrated Florence, and its scholars trained in Bologna, as too warm to generate sober reasoning, Italians retorted that Paris was too cold to have the right humors flow properly. The goalposts of what counted as “literate” moved from “being able to read and write” to “well versed in classical thought and able to write elegant Ciceronian prose”. The one thing that these new literati could agree on, though, was that non-intellectual elites had to go.
As the church struggled to accommodate these elites it was overproducing in universities, those educated young men turned to convincing kings that their skills at bureaucratic accountability would serve state power better than the military elite. And convince them they did. Royal household budgets (because they were now being recorded) show a consistent tenfold increase in expenditure on writing materials every century for the 11th through the 14th. Paper mills, producing a heretofore known but unneeded material, had to be built when parchment production stalled. Spectacles had to be made to keep aging clerks in the business. Where noble’s lawsuits based on half-remembered norms had to be adjudicated ceaselessly by monarchs, written law executed uniformly by clerks freed the monarch to turn his attention to more exciting tasks, like war. As the literates were happy to point out, the ancients agreed that virtue came from reason; surely the military elite could not inherit virtue. Literates combined with numerates not only to form the “Greek” mentality, they did everything they could to make sure it was the rising side of the wheel of fortune.
As one mentality rides the wheel to the top, that previously there must necessarily fall. The history of the “Hebrew” mentality, where the world is to be understood not through reason, but will, is less appreciated by scholarship, but a necessary counterpart to Murray’s history.
It is widely accepted history that the hereditary military aristocracy of Europe had installed itself in power through the pure, brutal necessity of the post-Roman and especially post-Carolingian chaos. Describing the military elite as miles, the Latin word that had simply meant “soldier”, implies the sad truth that aristocratic levels of wealth were required to arm a man with basic military necessities - a sword, harness, helmet, and horse. The ability to deploy these military basics elevated a man to military power that other Europeans simply couldn’t challenge. However, what started as simple economic disparity, had by the time of Murray’s interest, had crystallized into a mentality built on military virtue. What sustained a brotherhood of a noble and his retinue through the tribulations of battle and the chaos of shifting alliances wasn’t something one could find in a book, it was loyalty and sheer will to survive. The duty of a noble to his society was magnanimity, great and grand deeds only a great soul could produce. Mental (and moral) fortitude was how one changed the world, not clever reasoning. If a subordinate didn’t deliver the taxes on time, it wasn’t a problem of innumeracy or illiteracy, accountability and legibility, or institutional design, it was personal disloyalty and their moral failure.
However, as kings found that personal disloyalty and moral failure persisted as the state grew, but the numerate and literate clerks coming out of universities could deliver state capacity regardless, the nobility found their purpose in medieval society gradually diminishing. Murray points to genealogical studies that noble families that were not at the apex of power consistently died out over the later Middle Ages. Only 51% of 2,003 medieval German nobles studied married, 28% became ecclesastical celibates, and the remaining 21% simply dissapear from the record. Murray argues that literature celebrating unrequited love reveals a “soul sickness” among the nobility. Their still-privileged economic position served only to prove to them the emptiness of their lives. What was the point of having children and sustaining the noble family when they were increasingly unnecessary? Their military virtue, their cultivation of ferocious will was pointless. Deprived of purpose by their replacement by Greeks in the halls of power, the rank and file of medieval nobles suffered from a teleological ennui.
What was the solution? Monasticism. While the Greeks took over church offices on their mission to fix the world through empowered reason, nobles went to the cloister to exercise their Hebrew will in prayer. Monastic celibacy freed them from the obligation to reproduce their line. Military discipline became spiritual discipline, their ferocity in prayer would heal the world’s sins. Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi, both noble sons, had their formative spiritual crises and conversion on the way to battle. Bernard’s enthusiastic support of the Crusades and the Knights Templar was not a contradiction, nor a coincidence. Hagiographies of this period begin to report that St. Hubertus (yes, the Jägermeister guy) converted during that most noble of activities, hunting (itself a kind of training for war). Thomas Aquinas, although plenty Greek in his mentality, was kidnapped and imprisoned by his own (noble) family to keep him from joining the Dominicans. According to Murray, many such cases.
So while the Greek rationalists rode the wheel up, the Hebrew nobles rode it down, and bowed out of our records. Murray’s last move is his most obscure. As said at the beginning, Catholic medieval European society required a harmonious synthesis of these opposing mentalities. The solution was embodied by the most medieval of concepts, the saint.
Murray estimates that over 28,000 different saints are documented from the medieval period. Of his samples where the saint's social origins are recorded, 87% are noble, and most of the remainder are burghers (the emergent, town-based middle class). So saints are Hebrews? Not quite. Saints consistently reject their nobility through self-humiliation, in some cases literally shoveling shit. Their incompetence at the work (what does a military elite know about mucking out a pigsty?) only serves to reinforce their humility.
Purging themselves of their nobility through Hebrew will, they then turn to the Greeks. Saints are consistently praised for the virtue of parrhesia, frank speech. In this case, speaking truth to power. Unlike ambitious and clever courtiers, saints can be relied upon to provide arguments that are not just well reasoned, but exactly what the king needs to hear. Peter Chanter, a scholastic unusually attuned to the realities of power, praised parrhesia to no end; and it is no coincidence that his most famous student was Thomas Becket.
Beckett rose through Henry II’s court as a talented clerk. Because Beckett had never held church office, Henry assumed that Beckett would continue to put the royal government first when he had Becket made Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead, Beckett became such a thorn in Henry’s side that Henry famously asked “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” and Beckett was murdered by four of Henry’s knights. This was instantly understood by medievals to be a case of holy martyrdom, Becket was canonised in record time and the site of his murder became a poular pilgrimage.
Murray interprets this, and many other less-famous cases, as evidence that saints are social amphibians. Their nobility sets them up, practically, for success, but their rejection of its privileges makes them a friend of any economic class. More importantly, their personal example transcended the Greek / Hebrew divide. They exerted noble, military will to achieve personal holiness so great that they understood Scripture, and thereby the world, in ways that rationalists could only concede. Holiness made you think better. Saints were venerated by, as a Jew visiting a community founded by St. Norbert observed, the “educated and uneducated, healthy and sick, noble and ignoble.” Sainthood was the escape from the turn of the wheel of fortune.
What to make, then, of what is, in a very medieval way, something of a beautiful mess of a book. Murray concludes on the last page of the book, a little lamely to my mind, that our “scientifically triumphant but humanly restive century” could use a little more Hebrew mentality. I suppose it's the journey, not the destination. Murray’s ability to find examples in nearly every source available for the European Middle Ages is formidable, but it reflects the very density and messy interconnectedness of the medieval worldview that our rational, “Greek” mentality has since cleaned up. Its page count belies the richness of every page.
From what I’ve seen, Murray’s work, along with related work from Michael Clanchy and Georges Duby, has mostly fallen out of interest in academic history. Murray published a book on suicide in the Middle Ages much later in his career, and little else. The mentalités method can be both exacting and vague, it requires a torrent of examples that all must be interpreted just so, with a healthy dose of speculation filling the gaps. It’s better suited to microhistories of tiny French towns than the colossal subject of a centuries-long and continent-wide intellectual transformation. I don’t think it was printed more than once, judging by the slim pickings on Amazon. My copy was surplussed out of Carnegie-Mellon’s library, and judging by its condition, it wasn’t checked out much.
In fact, it’s a little strange that an obscure work from the late 70s resonates so much with what rationalists concern themselves with today. State power seeking legibility through rationalized administration for its own benefit over the objection of its subjects looms over this history. The book was actually recommended to me by my advisor, who had briefly been a student of James C. Scott, although it was prior to Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and the advisor had no awareness of the rationalist community or my interest in it. New money and new math’s strange ability to reorder the world around us. The hordes of ambitious young men graduating from universities only to find no place in the Church hierarchy they were trained for sounds like Peter Turchin’s theory, but the result is far weirder and more interesting than vague warnings of social disorder. Murray’s diagnosis of “soul sickness” and nobles’ turn to monasticism reminds me of nothing so much as Jordan Peterson’s “Make Your Bed” brand of self help - turn away from the world’s problems, and focus on your self-discipline.
Really, the value of this book, especially for readers in this community, is in making us aware of the conditionality of our present confidence in rationalism. Seeing scholastics torturously justify reason, inch by inch, only for its cause to be carried by the convenience of new European state power, is not just a pleasure to read but a useful reminder to partisans of rationality that men are not moved by argument alone.
