At the close of his Gifford Lectures in 1932, the great historian of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilson, quoted the 12th century thinker Bernard of Chartres:
“We are like dwarfs,” said Bernard, “seated on the shoulders of giants. We see more things than the Ancients and things more distant, but it is due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of our stature, it is simply because they have lent us their own.”
Gilson lamented the loss of this “proud modesty”:
It is a sad old age that loses all its memories. It if were true, as some have said that St. Thomas was a child and Descartes a man, we, for our part, must be very near decrepitude.
I don’t mention this to ask whether we tread (or even trample) on the shoulders of dwarfs. Both Bernard and Gilson demonstrate the cognitive importance of narrative. These differing modes of relation to the past – Bernard’s modest pride in development and Gilson’s gibing lament over loss – are not simply glosses to the real business of understanding the past but are inextricable constituents of such understandings.
The Open Society starts with an altogether different image. For Popper, ours is a civilisation “still in its infancy…which continues to grow in spite of the fact that is has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind”, a civilisation still “in the shock of its birth” from, as one political philosopher has put it, “the cosy womb-like certainties of Gemeinschaft” [roughly, community where individuals’ association is, in important ways, directed to the greater whole rather than to self-interest]. This does not preclude possibilities for a developmental narrative; our society is “still in its infancy”. But this fledgling development occurs within the open society. The transition from closed to open society, by contrast, is difficult to grasp as a form of development or evolution given Popper’s broader scheme.
This scheme is well-known. History – in no pre-ordained way of course – testifies to the conflict between the closed and open society, between, on the one hand, a tribalism in thrall to magical forces and a primitive desire to live in solidarity and, on the other, a critical rationalism, which unfetters man’s capacity to reason. Notice two features. First – and I don’t wish to sound like an inquisitor – there is something Manichaean about the constellation of ideas associated with the closed and open societies. A series of binary opposites distinguish these ideal types: collectivism and individualism; passionate violence and rationality; taboo and law; ‘utopian’ and ‘piecemeal’ social engineering; liberation and slavishness; essentialism and nominalism; totalitarianism and democracy. We are invited to see something comprehensively coherent in these constellations.
Second, some attributes of these ideal types are far from unambiguous. Perhaps historicism – the idea that development laws govern history, laws on which historical prophecy can be grounded – is the classic example. In his critical review of The Poverty of Historicism, the philosopher Charles Taylor began, “It is not easy to see what kind of doctrine Professor Popper is trying to pillory under the title ‘historicism’”. (Taylor concluded that what the various thinkers whom Popper impugns as historicists share in common is that they are frequently the “whipping boys” for a certain kind of liberal thought). But even a more sympathetic reader of The Open Society, the medievalist-philosopher Peter Munz, a former pupil of Popper’s, was as baffled by the insistence on rooting the closed society in historicism as he was enthused by Popper’s sociological and ethical insights. My point here is to stress a curious tension in reading Popper. Despite his insistence, at least some of the ideas within the constellation of associations have confused rather than clarified his general scheme. Readers like Munz suggest that we can remove some of these associations without dealing a death-blow to the broader scheme. (This raises a question: how far can we go on abandoning parts before we have to abandon the whole?).
Incidentally, a curious feature of discussion of historicism – even in critiques of Popper’s interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Hegel as historicists – is the assumption that religious narratives yield far more obvious examples of historicism. Popper himself suggests that the conception of a chosen people was a tribalist precursor of modern collectivism. Of course, any student of medieval history will be familiar with the multiple ways in which Edenic aboriginality, salvation history and eschatological speculation served as nodal points in medieval thought. They are central to Augustinian thought, a notable absence in The Open Society. (The absence is glaring given the overwhelming importance of Augustine not only to medieval thought but also to Reformation thought). We may wish to question whether and precisely how these narratives might be understood as historicist in Popper’s terms.
How do the Middle Ages function in Popper’s scheme? Largely, it must be said, as an intermittent spectre. Sporadic invocations of medieval totalitarianism, especially the Inquisition, serve as a kind of apotropaic charm upon which the rationalist humanitarian can call without embarrassment. But he also advances a substantial historical thesis: the constellation apparent in Aristotelian and, especially, Platonic thought found their stifling fruition, we are told, in medieval societies. We read, at the end of volume one, that Plato ultimately failed to arrest social change: “Only much later, in the dark ages, was it arrested by the magic-spell of Platonic-Aristotelian essentialism”.
Popper does not develop this in detail. But at the beginning of the second volume, he briefly speculates upon the broader picture between Aristotle and Hegel – between ancient and modern – albeit in a different way. This period might be interpreted, he suggests, not simply as the consummation of totalitarianism, but as one of conflict between the open and the closed society, in which the latter ultimately prevailed. I do not wish to subject this self-consciously speculative passage to uncharitably exacting scrutiny – Popper was not writing as a historian and medieval history, especially early medieval history, has changed dramatically since he wrote – though, even with these concessions, there are some distinctly odd points of interpretation (e.g. the idea that late fourth century church structures – and Popper seems to have such things as social action for the poor in mind – were “after the model of Julian the Apostate’s Neo-Platonic Anti-Church” is odd: the direction of influence was almost certainly in the opposite direction, as Julian himself makes clear in some of his correspondence).
In broad outline, Popper couches the conflict in the following way. The anti-idealising spirit of the “Great Generation of Greeks” was embodied in the Cynics and, later, early Christians. Martyrs died, Popper writes, for the same cause as Socrates. But the fourth-century saw a dramatic shift, hinging around Constantine, one which Popper casts as an “ingenious political move” to break the “tremendous moral influence of an equalitarian religion”. Hereafter, “the Church followed in the wake of Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” from Justinian’s sixth-century persecutions right through to the Inquisition.
Popper intensifies this outline in his rejection of voguish, Romantic eulogising of the Middle Ages (he quotes – and pours scorn on – Toynbee for mounting a sort of rehabilitating argument from the beauty of medieval cathedrals). For Popper, such eulogies are premised upon historicist notions of “the essential Character of Western Civilisation”. That’s to say a Platonising way of doing history desensitises the historian to the baleful influence of Platonism in history. The rationalist interpretation of history, by contrast, connects this pre-Constantinian thread to the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into modern science. At this juncture, it is tempting to raise the question of the construction of the Middle Ages, the origins and repercussions of this inherently relational form of periodisation. But I’ll leave that for another day.
Instead, I’m interested in what happens to what this thread quickly passes over. At first glance, it is perfectly intelligible that medieval societies were, in Popper’s terms, closed societies. In fact, I don’t wish to argue otherwise. The question is: does his scheme offer sufficient conceptual resources for understanding them? (There are many things which could be said of medieval societies which are both far from false and far from illuminating). And does his scheme offer any conceptual resources for understanding how the closed society of medieval Christendom could have become the fledgling open society of modernity?
There are historical problems. To put it bluntly: we know Plato and Aristotle far more directly than a large number of the medieval purveyors of “Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” did. Engagement with Aristotle was limited until the re-entry of texts in translation from the 12thcentury or so. As for Plato, in practical terms, Western readership was mainly limited to the Timaeus until 15th century translations of his corpus. This does not altogether dismantle Popper’s outline. There were other conduits for Platonic and Aristotelian thought. But combined with a student of early medieval history’s admittedly slender grasp of later medieval philosophy, not least its self-conscious transcendence of ancient roots – dwarfs and giants – and the peculiar scholastic emphasis on observation (or, being wary of anachronism, peculiar empiricism), Popper’s narrative is decidedly shaky.
Far more importantly, Popper’s understanding of the closed society is, if anything, excessively coherent. Not only persecution, but even pestilence is taken to be the hallmark of medieval society; and, as hallmarks, both persecution and pestilence are rendered explicable by the confluence of ideas, by that constellation of associations inextricable from the closed society: magic and taboo – and theistic historicism (“Men believed God to rule the world”) – impeded responsibility; essentialism arrested the desire for social change; and so on. Terror, wretchedness, hardship, oppression, plagues, and even dancing manias all flowed from this cohesive ideological font, Popper declares.
Returning to my early medieval comfort zone, does Popper’s constellation of ideas help or hinder our reading of social change? Even to put the question in this way suggests a problem. Popper’s scheme appears to be largely uninterested in change within closed societies. The most notable exception is his hypothetical – and interesting – typology of changing configurations of natural and normative law, from tribal naïve monism (where nature and norms are not distinguished) to critical dualism (which separates nature and norms). But even these types are framed in terms of their relation to the critical rationalist’s demarcation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, of facts and decisions (or values): they are progressive, even if not historically inevitable. But, otherwise, there is little sense of how closed societies can change or develop, or of how medieval society did.
It is beyond my aim here to give an account of trends in early medieval historiography. But a brief foray may explain my fraught encounter with The Open Society. Post-Roman societies can no longer be viewed solely through the prism of decline and stasis, following the illumination of late antique and early medieval cultural innovation, most astoundingly and famously in the work of Peter Brown. One fundamental problem, of course, is that our material tempts us into thinking otherwise. The programme of reform attempted in a late eighth and ninth-century Carolingian context – and the morass of material produced – idealised traditionalism and corporate uniformity. But its products – from forged papal documents to John Scotus Eriugena’s dizzying onto-theology – are best read in the context of a series of innovative social changes. There was no question of attempting to arrest social change and, if anything, it was the messy realities of enactment which arrested change.
Likewise, the broader dynamics of ‘christianisation’ and the interplay between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religious practice problematise an overly static view of early medieval thought and social practice. Alongside the mutable constructions of ‘paganism’ as a strategy of distinction, with sometimes violent consequences, there were bursts of more self-conscious thought on the shifting boundaries of acculturation. That exceptionally influential early medieval pope, Gregory the Great, was not unusual in writing self-consciously about cultural adaptation and interchange in his widely read letter to Anglo-Saxon missionaries (which, incidentally, incorporated a discussion of prevailing taboos which was at once critical and sympathetic). For Gregory, some ‘pagan’ customs could be fruitfully absorbed or ‘baptised’ rather than eradicated. Indeed, from Augustine to Alcuin, thinking about both missionary and pastoral activity presupposed a certain awareness of the modalities of cultural exchange. As Alexander Murray once put it, “the entire history of medieval religion is a commentary on Gregory’s letter”.
In the encounter not just with Charlemagne’s violent expansion into Saxony, but also with the multiple responses of Saxon converts and Frankish churchmen in subsequent generations, the constellation of ideas associated with closed societies – and their coherence – begins to disintegrate. This impression is consolidated when one considers later medieval developments – for example, the rebirth of the state and an increasing centralisation of power, the development of a specialised – and sophisticated – political discourse and even the multi-faceted flourishing of scholasticism. The longue duree histories of hagiography, theology and even medicine or – to put it another way – the changing dynamics of utopianism, essentialism, tribalism, magicalism and so on across this vast span all militate against the security of this constellation.
The fundamental issue here is not primarily with Popper’s historical outline, nor am I undertaking medievalist apologetics. The key point is that the developments and energies of medieval societies, whether seen in subtly complex cultural processes or inescapably horrific atrocities, cannot be adequately grasped in the ideological terms of the closed society.
Why should this be so? The intellectual and political context in which Popper was writing may offer some light: perhaps his work is most fruitfully read as a historical document. But another reason may stem from Popper’s philosophy of science. (At various points, Popper seems to identify the open society as a society which lives out falsification across the board: whether this is a strangely unPopperian form of utopian thinking – utopia, in the old pun, is also a no-where – is surely open to debate). I can only scratch the surface here. Popper’s justification and description of scientific practice focuses on the revolutions and ruptures wrought by falsification of theories. The famous Kuhnian response is to try to focus instead upon how the epistemological crises which lead to such revolutions might come about and also upon the stretches of theoretical stability between such crises. In terms of Kuhn’s critique, Popper’s thesis is ill-equipped to grasp how the epistemological crises which prompt such revolutions are experienced, and the nature of the relationship between a novel theory and the context from which it emerged. One consequent blind-spot is the nature of the context before theoretical revolution. And if I have understood Popper’s notion of the closed society correctly, it is perhaps for similar reasons that his historical perspectives and conceptual resources are ill-equipped to grasp medieval societies, and their relationship to modernity. This is, in part, the problem of identity. It is unclear how a closed society can turn into an open one and retain any identity given the characterisation of both. More concretely, the medieval can only relate to the modern through rupture and yet how such a rupture might have come about is difficult to comprehend on his terms.
Was Gilson completely mistaken in his lament over “a sad old age that loses all its memories”? This brings to light the possibility of a subtle omission in terms of Popper’s explicit notion of the ‘open society’. After all, are modes of relation to the past, are narratives not central to the self-understanding of ‘open societies’? Does the open society, as Popper understands it, necessitate a narrative of rupture, revolution and emancipation from the closed? Or, to adapt Gilson’s terms, does it require a kind of historical forgetting?
