Savage Anxieties by Robert A. Williams Jr

Author:Robert A. Williams, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

We can now begin to get a better sense of the role of the Classical idea of the savage in the medieval Christian era. If a myth, legend, or stereotype could be used to support Christian doctrine, it was allowed to survive. As we have seen, some Classically derived stereotypes and cultural markers, such as those applied by the African Madman Tertullian to the nomadic barbarian tribes on the far frontiers of European Christendom, flourished and perpetuated themselves throughout the Middle Ages. But pagan notions like the Legend of the Golden Age and myths of noble savages directly contradicted the biblical story of the Fall of Adam and Eve and Christ’s redemption on the cross for all humankind. They simply could not be allowed to flourish or propagate. The dank intellectual soil of the Christian medieval era killed off their growth and development, except where they survived in the form of bawdy roadhouse lyrics sung by drunken Goliard monks or in subtle and sublime Virgilian echoes buried deep within the verses of the Bible.

As it did with other aspects of the Classical system of ideas that ran counter to or challenged in the slightest Christian teachings and doctrine, the Church declared holy war on those aspects of the idea of the savage that it did not like. Pagan nonsense like the Legend of the Golden Age and a golden race of godless savages living it up at the beginnings of time in a place that looked just like the Garden of Eden simply could not be tolerated. Christianity’s dogmatic view on what it meant to be a happy and virtuous human being required obliterating the full scope of the Classical idea of the savage. It was replaced with something much different and far less nuanced. Church theologians wanted to show what a human being untouched by the grace of God and cast out in the wilderness from Christian civilization really looked like. And so they invented the biblical Wild Man.

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