It is generally professed that the process of Christianisation of the Germanic
peoples was completed by the middle of the eleventh century through three main
ways or methods : by diffusion, that is, by missionary work ;
caeasaropapistically ; and by the sword. To define Christianisation is another
matter, over which Academia is increasingly divided, especially since the
preliminary definition of a Christian, which, prior to or even instead of the
definition of Christianity, is required to examine this process on solid grounds
is not easy to arrive at.
What characterises a Christian, beyond faith, worship, the belonging to this or
that denomination, the more or less sentimental, the more or less intellectual,
adherence to dogmas, is a forma mentis, which is immediately and distinctly
recognisable, whose features could already be found in pre-Christian human types
and can still be felt in the increasingly undifferentiated man of the
post-Christian era – a forma mentis which is reflected both in thought and
action.
Of course, conversion does not mean an instant and complete switch to this forma
mentis in the convert, even less so in the forced convert, who may not even have
mental, intellectual, racial and spiritual predispositions for it, whereas there
are chances that the one who voluntarily converts is predisposed for it.
By definition, the conversion of a people whose ethos was so different from the
Christian's turn of mind as that of the Germanic tribes was could not be but a
long process, as it seems more and more medievalists have come to realise from a
closer study of primary sources (1), giving further credit to the view that "For
all practical purposes, Christianity `converted' Western man only superficially
; it constituted his `faith' in the most abstract sense while his real
life continued to obey the more or less material forms of the opposite tradition
of action, and later on, during the Middle Ages, an ethos that was essentially
shaped by the Northern-Aryan spirit. In theory, the Western world accepted
Christianity but for all practical purposes it remained pagan." (2) This is so
true that, when a Christian died and his heir was attached to the old ways, it
was habitual for a whole tribe to leave the Christian faith and to return to its
gods, a pattern which, incidentally, could also support the concomitant and less
fashionable view that the various Germanic groups accepted Christianity as
externally and abstractly as they had come to experience their own gods, the
sacred. It cannot be overemphasised that conversion was by no means individual,
interior. Rather, it proceeded from a group action. Leaders played a pivotal
role in most cases. Missionaries approached a king and, if he converted, the
people followed suit, on the basis of the tight bonds between the former and the
latter – Christian queens were also powerful agents of conversion. Their
acceptance of Christianity was thus determined by their allegiance to their
ruler. With the exception of Frisia and Saxony, where the observance of
Christianity was enforced by Franks through their military conquest, this
religion spread in Northern Europe through various means of coercion without any
substantial resistance from the ruler, the overking, to the aristocracy, down to
the freemen, the freedmen, the commoners and the slaves.(3). It cannot be
overemphasised that the conversion of rulers "did not entail the
Christianization of the population even in an institutional sense, let alone in
the sense of an internalization of beliefs." (4)
In fact, the acceptance of Christianity was far less external and abstract in
the elite than in the other classes. "Christianity was part of the very identity
of elite Franks, who increasingly came to see themselves as a people chosen by
God, and thus to define themselves in distinction to the non- and imperfectly
Christian peoples that surrounded them." (5) ; this also applies to the
Ottonians and to the Hohenstaufens, to an even greater extent ; the more
powerful the ruler, the more faithful, the more attached, no matter his more or
less fluctuating relations with the papacy, to Christian values ; the more he
felt responsible for saving the souls of his subjects.
Whatever the more or less complex motivations behind their conversion - be they
political or psychological -, on which there has been much speculation, which
lets one with a sensation of incompletion and which it is not our aim to fuel
here, the action of the law of chemical affinities in the whole thing has been
overlooked, let alone a factor closely linked to this law : the racial one.
Similis simili gaudet. Various recent scientific researches in the fields of
archaeology and genetic have proved conclusively that the stocks believed by J.
Evola and most raciologists of his time, and, actually, by most historians until
recently, on the strength of Tac., Germ. 4, not to have "suffered the
miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had
abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier" (6) were instead, at least for some of
them, no longer stocks of pure breed (especially on the maternal lineage),
stocks which, during the Voelkerwanderung, interbred in turn, still for some of
them, with mixed or even non Aryan populations.
Among the Eastern Germans, the Ostrogoths, it seems that most tribes preserved
their original Nordic racial characteristics, while the Gepidae show clear
traces of mongoloid mixture, due to their blending with the Huns, to whom they
were subject for decades, and the western branch of Germanic-speaking peoples,
namely, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, of the Frisians, and of the Germans
proper, among whom the Franks, the Alemanni, the Bavarians, the Thuringians, and
the proto-Hessians, deviate in various physical respects from the typically
Nordic type, as a mixed variety of central European Nordic combined with old
north-western European or/and Celtic and Mongoloid elements ; traces of
Mongoloid mixture are clearly visible in the Lombards, who, on the other hand,
appear to have been reached by strains of Armenoid and Dinaric blood ; the
Franks soon succumbed to Keltic mixture (7) Generally speaking, the first
admixture among the Germanic tribes of our era is Mongoloid (8). The second
admixture of races in early Germany, the Slavic, must have had an even more
corroding impact on their Nordic blood, insofar as the Slavic tribes were
already significantly affected by an admixture of Mongolian genes.
No account will be deliberately taken of these data in the examination it has
occurred to us to conduct of one the very few tenuous points of contact between
the Nordic ethos and the Christian pathos whereby the early Germans may have
been slowly but surely lured into identifying themselves more or less coercively
with the dominant assumptions of the Judeo-Christian sect. For the sake of
exposition, it is necessary to pretend that the Germanic peoples that entered
history at the beginning of our era were all purebred.
(1) See Costamberys, M., Innes, M., MacLean, S., The Carolingian World,
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1970 ; especially the chapter called
`The Problem of Christianisation'.
(2) Evola, J., Revolt against the Modern World, p. 287. (many readers have
surely noted that the claim that "Conversion to the Christian faith, more than
altering the Germanic stocks'strength, often purified it and prepared it for a
revival of the imperial Roman idea" (p. 294) is hardly reconcilable with the
assertion that "Even in its attenuated and Romanized Catholic version, the
Christian faith represented an obstacle that deprived Western man of the
possibility of integrating his authentic and irrepressible way of being through
a concept and in relationship with the Sacred what was most congenial to him"
(p. 287)).
(3) Carver, M., The Cross Goes North : Processes of Conversion in Northern
Europe, Ad 300-1300, York, 2003, p. 551-52.
(4)
http://www.scribd.com/joanne_loader/d/61387464-Berend-Nora-Ed-Christianization-a\
nd-the-Rise-of-Christian-via-Central-Europe-and-Rus-c-900-1200-Reup, p. 2.
(incidentally, the cases of conversion analysed in this work show that the
almost universal assumption that conversion was a necessary step toward building
strong power is not "unproblematic" in various respects : "Many men sought to
establish their power over society or against rivals by conversion to
Christianity, often in the hope of military assistance from a Christian power,
usually the Franks/Germans. This was by no means a foolproof method… Conversion
(…) was not necessarily a road to power… however, rulers who succeeded in
promoting Christianity also further consolidated their power." p. 14)
(5) Costamberys, M., Innes, M., MacLean, S., op. cit., p. 80.
(6) Evola, J. op. cit., p. 291 (bearing in mind the Hindu tradition of
cosmology, and, more particularly, that of the four evolutionary Yuga cycles, it
is interesting to note that the working of iron, which had been going on for
times immemorial in Asia, was absolutely prohibited in ancient Scandinavia until
the Christian era. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k61148652/f167.image, p.
150).
(7)
http://www.proto-germanic.com/p/abridged-version-of-races-of-europe-by_09.html.
(8) Archaeological findings "strongly suggests that the Hunnish impact on the
peoples with whom they were in contact was much more pervasive than any literary
sources of the fourth/fifth centuries indicate. Some of these skulls are
Germanic, other show Mongol traits, which implies Hunnish wives or hostages
among the Thuringians or slaves taken following the defeat of the Huns. Since
the ornaments, especially the brooches, conform to tribal characteristics and
were personal property, it is possible to speculate about tribal intermarriages
from the grave inventories during the migration period (Schutz, H., Tools,
Weapons and Ornaments : Germanic Material Culture in Pre-Carolingian Central
Europe, 400-750, Leiden- Boston-Koeln : Brill, 2001, p. 34-35 – available at
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=115942992)
In this respect, it is not uninteresting that Clovis was the son of a Thuringian
mother. According to Johannes, the Gepid Mundus, an East Roman general during
the reign of Justinian I, was of Attilanic descent ; Balamber, a Hunnic king,
married a Gothic princess. The Mongoloid strain in some Alans shows that
Alanno-Hunnic marriages were quite common. The paleoanthropological evidence
indicates that the Huns were racially mixed (Maenchen Helfen, O. J., The World
of the Huns : Studies in Their History and Culture, Berkeley : University of
California Press, 1973 - specifically the chapter called `Race'). The
description which ancient writers give us of the Huns tends to prove that they
belonged to the Mongoloid type, which is in turn far from being a pure breed ;
the description of Attila by Priscus as being "Short of stature, with a broad
chest and a large head ; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with
grey ; and he had a flat nose and a swarthy complexion, showing the evidences of
his origin" points out at a Negroid strain – skulls with Negro-Australoid
features have been unearthed lately in China
(http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-KGXB197601005.htm). A Negroid
presence in Eeastern Asia, and, more particularly, in China, was established
beyond doubt (http://www.china.org.cn/china/2009-11/24/content_18944317_3.htm) ;
see also http://www.oocities.org/ekwesi.geo/Southchina1.htm