The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 1 of 2)
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Title: The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 1 of 2)
Author: Henry Osborn Taylor
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MEDIAEVAL MIND (VOLUME 1 OF 2) ***
THE MEDIAEVAL MIND
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE MEDIAEVAL MIND
A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT
OF THOUGHT AND EMOTION
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
BY HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1911
TO J. I. T.
PREFACE
The Middle Ages! They seem so far away; intellectually so preposterous,
spiritually so strange. Bits of them may touch our sympathy, please our
taste; their window-glass, their sculpture, certain of their stories,
their romances,--as if those straitened ages really were the time of
romance, which they were not, God knows, in the sense commonly taken. Yet
perhaps they were such intellectually, or at least spiritually. Their
_terra_--not for them _incognita_, though full of mystery and pall and
vaguer glory--was not the earth. It was the land of metaphysical
construction and the land of spiritual passion. There lay their romance,
thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning.
Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a
common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb: in full voice speaks the
noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of
the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone
craftsmen. Why it moves us, we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps,
of the building’s formative and earnestly intended meaning. Do we care to
get at that? There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths,
penetrating to the _rationale_ of the Middle Ages, learning the
_doctrinale_, or _emotionale_, of the modes in which they still present
themselves so persuasively.
But if the pageant of those centuries charm our eyes with forms that seem
so full of meaning, why should we stand indifferent to the harnessed
processes of mediaeval thinking and the passion surging through the
thought? Thought marshalled the great mediaeval procession, which moved to
measures of pulsating and glorifying emotion. Shall we not press on,
through knowledge, and search out its efficient causes, so that we too may
feel the reality of the mediaeval argumentation, with the possible
validity of mediaeval conclusions, and tread those channels of mediaeval
passion which were cleared and deepened by the thought? This would be to
reach human comradeship with mediaeval motives, no longer found too remote
for our sympathy, or too fantastic or shallow for our understanding.
But where is the path through these footless mazes? Obviously, if we would
attain, perhaps, no unified, but at least an orderly presentation of
mediaeval intellectual and emotional development, we must avoid
entanglements with manifold and not always relevant detail. We must not
drift too far with studies of daily life, habits and dress, wars and
raiding, crimes and brutalities, or trade and craft and agriculture. Nor
will it be wise to keep too close to theology or within the lines of
growth of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. Let the student be
mindful of his purpose (which is my purpose in this book) to follow
through the Middle Ages the development of intellectual energy and the
growth of emotion. Holding this end in view, we, students all, shall not
stray from our quest after those human qualities which impelled the
strivings of mediaeval men and women, informed their imaginations, and
moved them to love and tears and pity.
The plan and method by which I have endeavoured to realize this purpose in
my book may be gathered from the Table of Contents and the First Chapter,
which is introductory. These will obviate the need of sketching here the
order of presentation of the successive or co-ordinated topics forming the
subject-matter.
Yet one word as to the standpoint from which the book is written. An
historian explains by the standards and limitations of the times to which
his people belong. He judges--for he must also judge--by his own best
wisdom. His sympathy cannot but reach out to those who lived up to their
best understanding of life; for who can do more? Yet woe unto that man
whose mind is closed, whose standards are material and base.
Not only shalt thou do what seems well to thee; but thou shalt do right,
with wisdom. History has laid some thousands of years of emphasis on this.
Thou shalt not only be sincere, but thou shalt be righteous, and not
iniquitous; beneficent, and not malignant; loving and lovable, and not
hating and hateful. Thou shalt be a promoter of light, and not of
darkness; an illuminator, and not an obscurer. Not only shalt thou seek to
choose aright, but at thy peril thou shalt so choose. “Unto him that hath
shall be given”--nothing is said about sincerity. The fool, the maniac, is
sincere; the mainsprings of the good which we may commend lie deeper.
So, and at _his_ peril likewise, must the historian judge. He cannot state
the facts and sit aloof, impartial between good and ill, between success
and failure, progress and retrogression, the soul’s health and loveliness,
and spiritual foulness and disease. He must love and hate, and at his
peril love aright and hate what is truly hateful. And although his
sympathies quiver to understand and feel as the man and woman before him,
his sympathies must be controlled by wisdom.
Whatever may be one’s beliefs, a realization of the power and import of
the Christian Faith is needed for an understanding of the thoughts and
feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages, and for a just
appreciation of their aspirations and ideals. Perhaps the fittest standard
to apply to them is one’s own broadest conception of the Christian scheme,
the Christian scheme whole and entire with the full life of Christ’s
Gospel. Every age has offered an interpretation of that Gospel and an
attempt at fulfilment. Neither the interpretation of the Church Fathers,
nor that of the Middle Ages satisfies us now. And by our further
understanding of life and the Gospel of life, we criticize the judgment of
mediaeval men. We have to sympathize with their best, and understand their
lives out of their lives and the conditions in which they were passed. But
we must judge according to our own best wisdom, and out of ourselves offer
our comment and contribution.
HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR.
Many translations from mediaeval (chiefly Latin) writings will be found in
this work, which seeks to make the Middle Ages speak for themselves. With
a very few exceptions, mentioned in the foot-notes, these translations are
my own. I have tried to keep them literal, and at all events free from the
intrusion of thoughts and suggestions not in the originals.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BOOK I
THE GROUNDWORK
CHAPTER I
GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 3
CHAPTER II
THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST 23
CHAPTER III
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC
APPREHENSION OF FACT 33
CHAPTER IV
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE LATIN FATHERS 61
CHAPTER V
LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT 88
CHAPTER VI
THE BARBARIC DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE 110
CHAPTER VII
THE CELTIC STRAIN IN GAUL AND IRELAND 124
CHAPTER VIII
TEUTON QUALITIES: ANGLO-SAXON, GERMAN, NORSE 138
CHAPTER IX
THE BRINGING OF CHRISTIANITY AND ANTIQUE KNOWLEDGE TO THE
NORTHERN PEOPLES 169
I. Irish Activities; Columbanus of Luxeuil.
II. Conversion of the English; the learning of Bede and Alfred.
III. Gaul and Germany; from Clovis to St. Winifried-Boniface.
BOOK II
THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
CHAPTER X
CAROLINGIAN PERIOD: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE APPROPRIATION OF
THE PATRISTIC AND ANTIQUE 207
CHAPTER XI
MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY 238
I. From Charlemagne to Hildebrand.
II. The Human Situation.
III. The Italian Continuity of Antique Culture.
IV. Italy’s Intellectual Piety: Peter Damiani and St. Anselm.
CHAPTER XII
MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: FRANCE 280
I. Gerbert.
II. Odilo of Cluny.
III. Fulbert and the School of Chartres; Trivium and Quadrivium.
IV. Berengar of Tours, Roscellin, and the coming time.
CHAPTER XIII
MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND 307
I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture.
II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict.
III. England; Closing Comparisons.
CHAPTER XIV
THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION 330
I. The Patristic Chart of Passion.
II. Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity.
BOOK III
THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: THE SAINTS
CHAPTER XV
THE REFORMS OF MONASTICISM 353
Mediaeval Extremes; Benedict of Aniane; Cluny; Citeaux’s
_Charta Charitatis_; the _vita contemplativa_ accepts the
_vita activa_.
CHAPTER XVI
THE HERMIT TEMPER 368
Peter Damiani; Romuald; Dominicus Loricatus; Bruno and Guigo,
Carthusians.
CHAPTER XVII
THE QUALITY OF LOVE IN ST. BERNARD 392
CHAPTER XVIII
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 415
CHAPTER XIX
MYSTIC VISIONS OF ASCETIC WOMEN 442
Elizabeth of Schönau; Hildegard of Bingen; Mary of Ognies;
Liutgard of Tongern; Mechthild of Magdeburg.
CHAPTER XX
THE SPOTTED ACTUALITY 471
The Testimony of Invective and Satire; Archbishop Rigaud’s
_Register_; Engelbert of Cologne; Popular Credences.
CHAPTER XXI
THE WORLD OF SALIMBENE 494
BOOK IV
THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY
CHAPTER XXII
FEUDALISM AND KNIGHTHOOD 521
Feudal and Christian Origin of Knightly Virtue; the Order of
the Temple; Godfrey of Bouillon; St. Louis; Froissart’s
_Chronicles_.
CHAPTER XXIII
ROMANTIC CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE 558
From Roland to Tristan and Lancelot.
CHAPTER XXIV
PARZIVAL, THE BRAVE MAN SLOWLY WISE 588
BOOK I
THE GROUNDWORK
CHAPTER I
GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS
The antique civilization of the Roman Empire was followed by that
depression of decadence and barbarization which separates antiquity from
the Middle Ages. Out of the confusion of this intervening period emerged
the mediaeval peoples of western Europe. These, as knowledge increased
with them, began to manifest spiritual traits having no clear counterpart
in the ancient sources from which they drew the matter of their thought
and contemplation.
The past which furnished the content of mediaeval thought was twofold,
very dual, even carrying within itself the elements of irreconcilable
conflict; and yet with its opposing fronts seemingly confederated, if not
made into one. Sprung from such warring elements, fashioned by all the
interests of life in heaven as well as life on earth, the traits and
faculties of mediaeval humanity were to make a motley company. Clearly
each mediaeval century will offer a manifold of disparity and
irrelationship, not to be brought to unity, any more than can be followed
to the breast of one mighty wind-god the blasts that blow from every
quarter over the waters of our own time. Nevertheless, each mediaeval
century, and if one will, the entire Middle Ages, seen in distant
perspective, presents a consistent picture, in which dominant mediaeval
traits, retaining their due pre-eminence, may afford a just conception of
the mediaeval genius.[1]
I
While complex in themselves, and intricate in their interaction, the
elements that were to form the spiritual constituency of the Middle Ages
of western Europe may be disentangled and regarded separately. There was
first the element of the antique, which was descended from the thought and
knowledge current in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire,
where Latin was the common language. In those Roman times, this fund of
thought and knowledge consisted of Greek metaphysics, physical science,
and ethics, and also of much that the Latins had themselves evolved,
especially in private law and political institutions.
Rome had borrowed her philosophy and the motives of her literature and art
from Greece. At first, quite provincially, she drew as from a foreign
source; but as the great Republic extended her boundaries around the
Mediterranean world, and brought under her levelling power the Hellenized
or still Asiatic East, and Africa and Spain and Gaul as well, Greek
thought, as the informing principle of knowledge, was diffused throughout
all this Roman Empire, and ceased to be alien to the Latin West. Yet the
peoples of the West did not become Hellenized, or change their speech for
Greek. Latin held its own against its subtle rival, and continued to
advance with power through the lands which had spoken other tongues before
their Roman subjugation; and it was the soul of Latium, and not the soul
of Hellas, that imbued these lands with a new homogeneity of civic order.
The Greek knowledge which spread through them was transmuted in Latin
speech or writings; while the great Latin authors who modelled Latin
literature upon the Greek, and did so much to fill the Latin mind with
Greek thoughts, recast their borrowings in their own style as well as
language, and re-tempered the matter to accord with the Roman natures of
themselves and their countrymen. Hence only through Latin paraphrase, and
through transformation in the Latin classics, Greek thought reached the
mediaeval peoples; until the thirteenth century, when a better
acquaintance was opened with the Greek sources, yet still through closer
Latin translations, as will be seen.
Thus it was with the pagan antique as an element of mediaeval culture. Nor
was it very different with the patristic, or Christian antique, element.
For in the fourth and fifth centuries, the influence of pagan Greece on
pagan Rome tended to repeat itself in the relations between the Greek and
the Latin Fathers of the Church. The dogmatic formulation of Christianity
was mainly the work of the former. Tertullian, a Latin, had indeed been an
early and important contributor to the process. But, in general, the Latin
Fathers were to approve and confirm the work of Athanasius and of his
coadjutors and predecessors, who thought and wrote in Greek. Nevertheless,
Augustine and other Latin Fathers ordered and made anew what had come from
their elder brethren in the East, Latinizing it in form and temper as well
as language. At the same time, they supplemented it with matter drawn from
their own thinking. And so, the thoughts of the Greek Fathers having been
well transmuted in the writings of Ambrose, Hilary, and Augustine,
patristic theology and the entire mass of Christianized knowledge and
opinion came to the Middle Ages in a Latin medium.
A third and vaguest factor in the evolution of the mediaeval genius
consisted in the diverse and manifold capacities of the mediaeval peoples:
Italians whose ancestors had been very part of the antique; inhabitants of
Spain and Gaul who were descended from once Latinized provincials; and
lastly that widespread Teuton folk, whose forbears had barbarized and
broken the Roman Empire in those centuries when a decadent civilization
could no longer make Romans of barbarians. Moreover, the way in which
Christianity was brought to the Teuton peoples and accepted by them, and
the manner of their introduction to the pagan culture, reduced at last to
following in the Christian train, did not cease for centuries to react
upon the course of mediaeval development.
The distinguishing characteristics which make the Middle Ages a period in
the history of western Europe were the result of the interaction of the
elements of mediaeval development working together, and did not spring
from the singular nature of any one of them. Accordingly, the proper
beginning of the Middle Ages, so far as one may speak of a beginning,
should lie in the time of the conjunction of these elements in a joint
activity. That could not be before the barbaric disturbers of the Roman
peace had settled down to life and progress under the action of Latin
Christianity and the surviving antique culture. Nor may this beginning be
placed before the time when Gregory the Great (died 604) had refashioned
Augustine, and much that was earlier, to the measure of the coming
centuries; nor before Boëthius (died 523), Cassiodorus (died 575), and
Isidore of Seville (died 636), had prepared the antique pabulum for the
mediaeval stomach. All these men were intermediaries or transmitters, and
belong to the epoch of transition from the antique and the patristic to
the properly inceptive time, when new learners were beginning, in
typically mediaeval ways, to rehandle the patristic material and what
remained of the antique. Contemporary with those intermediaries, or
following hard upon them, were the great missionaries or converters, who
laboured to introduce Christianity, with antique thought incorporated in
it, and the squalid survival of antique education sheltered in its train,
to Teuton peoples in Gaul, England, and Rhenish Germany. Among these was
the truculent Irishman, St. Columbanus (died 615), founder of Luxeuil and
Bobbio, whose disciple was St. Gall, and whose contemporary was St.
Augustine of Canterbury, whom Gregory the Great sent to convert the
Anglo-Saxons. A good century later, St. Winifried-Boniface is working to
establish Christianity in Germany.[2] Thus it will not be easy to find a
large and catholic beginning for the Middle Ages until the eighth century
is reached, and we are come on what is called the Carolingian period.
Let us approach a little nearer, and consider the situation of western
Europe, with respect to antique culture and Latin Christianity, in the
centuries following the disruption of the Roman Empire. The broadest
distinction is to be drawn between Italy and the lands north of the Alps.
Under the Empire, there was an Italian people. However diverse may have
been its ancient stocks, this people had long since become Latin in
language, culture, sentiment and tradition. They were the heirs of the
Greek, and the creators of the Roman literature, art, philosophy, and law.
They were never to become barbarians, although they suffered decadence.
Like all great peoples, they had shown a power to assimilate foreigners,
which was not lost, but only degraded and diminished, in the fourth and
fifth centuries, when Teutonic slaves, immigrants, invaders, seemed to be
barbarizing the Latin order quite as much as it was Latinizing them. In
these and the following times the culture of Italy sank lamentably low.
Yet there was no break of civilization, but only a deep decline and then a
re-emergence, in the course of which the Latin civilization had become
Italian. For a lowered form of classical education had survived, and the
better classes continued to be educated people according to the degraded
standard and lessened intellectual energies of those times.[3]
Undoubtedly, in its decline this Latin civilization of Italy could no
longer raise barbarians to the level of the Augustan age. Yet it still was
making them over into the likeness of its own weakened children. The
Visigoths broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern
France; other confused barbarians came and went, and then the Ostrogoths,
with Theodoric at their head, an excellent but not very numerous folk.
They stayed in Italy, and fought and died, or lived on, changing into
indistinguishable Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and
reappearing where the Goths had lived. And then the Lombards, crueller
than the Goths, but better able to maintain their energies effective.
Their numbers also were not great, compared with the Italians. And
thereafter, in spite of their fierceness and the tenacity of their
Germanic customs, the succeeding Lombard generations became imbued with
the culture of Italy. They became North Italians, gravitating to the towns
of Lombardy, or perhaps, farther to the south, holding together in
settlements of their own, or forming the nucleus of a hill-dwelling
country nobility.
The Italian stock remained predominant over all the incomers of northern
blood. It certainly needed no introduction to what had largely been its
own creation, the Latin civilization. With weakened hands, it still held
to the education, the culture, of its own past; it still read its ancient
literature, and imitated it in miserable verse. The incoming barbarians
had hastened the land’s intellectual downfall. But all the plagues of
inroad and pestilence and famine, which intermittently devastated Italy
from the fifth to the tenth century, left some squalid continuity of
education. And those barbarian stocks which stayed in that home of the
classics, became imbued with whatever culture existed around them, and
tended gradually to coalesce with the Italians.
Evidently in its old home, where it merely had become decadent, this
ancient culture would fill a rôle quite different from any specific
influence which it might exert in a country where the Latin education was
freshly introduced. In Italy, a general survival of Roman law and
institution, custom and tradition, endured so far as these various
elements of the Italian civilization had not been lost or dispossessed, or
left high and dry above the receding tide of culture and intelligence.
Christianity had been superimposed upon paganism; and the Christian faith
held thoughts incompatible with antique views of life. Teutonic customs
were brought in, and the Lombard codes were enacted, working some specific
supersession of the Roman law. The tone, the sentiment, the mind of the
Italian people had altered from the patterns presented by Cicero, or
Virgil, or Horace, or Tacitus. Nevertheless, the antique remained as the
soil from which things grew, or as the somewhat turgid atmosphere breathed
by living beings. It was not merely a form of education or vehicle of
edifying knowledge, nor solely a literary standard. The common modes of
the antique were there as well, its daily habits, its urbanity and its
dross.
The relationship toward the antique held by the peoples of the Iberian
peninsula and the lands which eventually were to make France, was not
quite the same as that held by the Italians. Spain, save in intractable
mountain regions, had become a domicile of Latin culture before its
people were converted to Christianity. Then it became a stronghold of
early Catholicism. Latin and Catholic Spain absorbed its Visigothic
invaders, who in a few generations had appropriated the antique culture,
and had turned from Arianism to the orthodoxy of their new home. Under
Visigothic rule, the Spanish Church became exceptionally authoritative,
and its Latin and Catholic learning flourished at the beginning of the
seventh century. These conditions gave way before the Moorish conquest,
which was most complete in the most thoroughly Romanized portions of the
land. Yet the permanent Latinization of the territory where Christianity
continued, is borne witness to by the languages growing from the vulgar
Latin dialects. The endurance of Latin culture is shown by the polished
Latinity of Theodulphus, a Spanish Goth, who left his home at the
invitation of Charlemagne, and died, the best Latin verse-maker of his
time, as Bishop of Orleans in 821. Thus the education, culture, and
languages of Spain were all from the antique. Yet the genius of the land
was to be specifically Spanish rather than assimilated to any such
deep-soiled paganism as underlay the ecclesiastical Christianization of
Italy.
As for France, in the southern part which had been Provincia, the antique
endured in laws and institutions, in architecture and in ways of life, to
a degree second only to its dynamic continuity in Italy. And this in spite
of the crude masses of Teutondom which poured into Provincia to be
leavened by its culture. In northern France there were more barbarian folk
and a less universally diffused Latinity. The Merovingian period swept
most of the last away, leaving a fair field to be sown afresh with the
Latin education of the Carolingian revival. Yet the inherited discipline
of obedience to the Roman order was not obliterated from the Gallic stock,
and the lasting Latinization of Gaul endured in the Romance tongues, which
were also to be impressed upon all German invaders. Franks, Burgundians,
or Alemanni, who came in contact with the provincials, began to be
affected by their language, their religion, their ways of living, and by
whatever survival of letters there was among them. The Romance dialects
were to triumph, were to become French; and in the earliest extant pieces
of this vernacular poetry, the effect of Latin verse-forms appears. Yet
Franks and Burgundians were not Latinized in spirit; and, in truth, the
Gauls before them had only become good imitation Latins. At all events,
from these mixed and intermediate conditions, a people were to emerge who
were not German, nor altogether Latin, in spite of their Romance speech.
Latin culture was not quite as a foreign influence upon these Gallo-Roman,
Teutonically re-inspirited, incipient, French. Nor were they born and bred
to it, like the Italians. The antique was not to dominate the French
genius; it was not to stem the growth of what was, so to speak, Gothic or
northern or Teutonic. The glass-painting, the sculpture, the architecture
of northern France were to become their own great French selves; and while
the literature was to hold to forms derived from the antique and the
Romanesque, the spirit and the contents did not come from Italy.
The office of Latin culture in Germany and England was to be more definite
and limited. Germany had never been subdued to the Roman order; in
Anglo-Saxon England, Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon
conquest, which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most complete in
those parts of the land where the Roman influence had been strongest. In
neither of these lands was there any antique atmosphere, or antique pagan
substratum--save as the universal human soul is pagan! Latinity came to
Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was not to pertain to
all men’s daily living. It was matter for the educated, for the clergy.
Its vehicle was a formal language, having no connection with the
vernacular. And when the antique culture had obtained certain
resting-places in England and Germany, the first benign labours of those
Germans or Anglo-Saxons who had mastered the language consisted in the
translation of edifying Latin matter into their own tongues. So Latinity
in England and Germany was likely to remain a distinguishable influence.
The Anglo-Saxons and the rest in England were to become Englishmen, the
Germans were to remain Germans; nor was either race ever to become
Latinized, however deeply the educated people of these countries might
imbibe Latinity, and exercise their intellects upon all that was contained
in the antique metaphysics and natural science, literature and law.
Thus diverse were the situations of the young mediaeval peoples with
respect to the antique store. There were like differences of situation in
regard to Latin Christianity. It had been formed (from some points of view
one might say, created) by the civilized peoples of the Roman Empire who
had been converted in the course of the original diffusion of the Faith.
It was, in fact, the product of the conversion of the Roman Empire, and,
in Italy and the Latin provinces received its final fashioning and temper
from the Latin Fathers. Thus within the Latin-speaking portions of the
Empire was formed the system which was to be presented to the Teutonic
heathen peoples of the north. They had neither made it nor grown up with
it. It was brought to the Franks, to the Anglo-Saxons, and to the Germans
east of the Rhine, as a new and foreign faith. And the import of the fact
that it was introduced to them as an authoritative religion brought from
afar, did not lessen as Christianity became a formative element in their
natures.
One may say that an attitude of humble inferiority before Christianity and
Latin culture was an initial condition of mediaeval development, having
much to do with setting its future lines. In Italy, men looked back to
what seemed even as a greater ancestral self, while in the minds of the
northern peoples the ancient Empire represented all knowledge and the
summit of human greatness. The formulated and ordered Latin Christianity
evoked even deeper homage. Well it might, since besides the resistless
Gospel (its source of life) it held the intelligence and the organizing
power of Rome, which had passed into its own last creation, the Catholic
Church. And when this Christianity, so mighty in itself and august through
the prestige of Rome, was presented as under authority, its new converts
might well be struck with awe.[4] It was such awe as this that
acknowledged the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman
and Catholic Church--the most potent unifying influence of the Middle
Ages.
Still more was the character of mediaeval progress set by the action and
effect of these two forces. The Latin culture provided the means and
method of elementary education, as well as the material for study; while
Latin Christianity, with transforming power, worked itself into the souls
of the young mediaeval peoples. The two were assuredly the moulding forces
of all mediaeval development; and whatever sprang to life beyond the range
of their action was not, properly speaking, mediaeval, even though seeing
the light in the twelfth century.[5] Yet one should not think of these two
great influences as entities, unchanging and utterly distinct from what
must be called for simplicity’s sake the native traits of the mediaeval
peoples. The antique culture had never ceased to form part of the nature
and faculties of Italians, and to some extent still made the inherited
equipment of the Latinized or Latin-descended people of Spain and France.
In the same lands also, Latin Christianity had attained its form. And even
in England and Germany, Christianity and Latin culture would be distinct
from the Teuton folk only at the first moment of presentation and
acceptance. Thereupon the two would begin to enter into and affect their
new disciples, and would themselves change under the process of their own
assimilation by these Teutonic natures.
Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and the antique fund
of sentiment and knowledge, through their self-conserving strength,
affected men in constant ways. Under their action the peoples of western
Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a
homogeneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other
period of history--a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine
and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse
of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed
self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked
for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church
beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly joys discerned the devil’s lures;
which lived in the unreconciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory
of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life’s terror and its
pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete
infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment
Day.
II
Under the action of Latin Christianity and the antique culture the
mediaeval genius developed, as it fused the constituents of its growth
into temperament and power. Its energies were neither to produce an
extension of knowledge, nor originate substantial novelties either of
thought or imaginative conception. They were rather to expend themselves
in the creation of new forms--forms of apprehending and presenting what
was (or might be) known from the old books, and all that from century to
century was ever more plastically felt. This principle is most important
for the true appreciation of the intellectual and emotional phenomena of
the Middle Ages.
When a sublime religion is presented to capable but half-civilized
peoples, and at the same time an acquaintance is opened to them with the
education, the knowledge, the literature of a great civilization, they
cannot create new forms or presentations of what they have received, until
the same has been assimilated, and has become plastic in their minds, as
it were, part of their faculty and feeling. Manifestly the northern
peoples could not at once transmute the lofty and superabundant matter of
Latin Christianity and its accompanying Latin culture, and present the
same in new forms. Nor in truth could Italy, involved as she was in a
disturbed decadence, wherein she seemed to be receding from an
understanding of the nobler portions of her antique and Christian
heritage, rather than progressing toward a vital use of one or the other.
In Spain and France there was some decadence among Latinized provincials;
and the Teutonic conquerors were novices in both Christianity and
Latinity. In these lands neither decadence nor the novelty of the matter
was the sole embarrassment, but both combined to hinder creativeness,
although the decadence was less obvious than in Italy, and the newness of
the matter less utter than in Germany.
The ancient material was appropriated, and then re-expressed in new forms,
through two general ways of transmutation, the intellectual and the
emotional. Although patently distinguishable, these would usually work
together, with one or the other dominating the joint progress.
Of the two, the intellectual is the easier to analyze. Thinking is
necessarily dependent on the thinker, although it appear less intimately
part of him than his emotions, and less expressive of his character.
Accordingly, the mediaeval genius shows somewhat more palely in its
intellectual productions, than in the more emotional phases of literature
and art. Yet the former exemplify not only mediaeval capacities, but also
the mediaeval intellectual temperament, or, as it were, the synthetic
predisposition of the mediaeval mind. This temperament, this intellectual
predisposition, became in general more marked through the centuries from
the ninth to the twelfth. People could not go on generation after
generation occupied with like topics of intellectual interest, reasoning
upon them along certain lines of religious and ethical suggestion, without
developing or intensifying some general type of intellectual temper.
From the Carolingian period onward, the men interested in knowledge
learned the patristic theology, and, in gradually expanding compass,
acquired antique logic and metaphysics, mathematics, natural science and
jurisprudence. What they learned, they laboured to restate or expound.
With each succeeding generation, the subjects of mediaeval study were made
more closely part of the intelligence occupied with them; because the
matter had been considered for a longer time, and had been constantly
restated and restudied in terms more nearly adapted to the comprehension
of the men who were learning and restating it. At length mediaeval men
made the antique and patristic material, or rather their understanding of
it, dynamically their own. Their comprehension of it became part of their
intellectual faculties, they could think for themselves in its terms,
think almost originally and creatively, and could present as their own the
matter of their thoughts in restatements, that is in forms, essentially
new.
From century to century may be traced the process of restatement of
patristic Christianity, with the antique material contained in it. The
Christianity of the fifth century contained an amplitude of thought and
learning. To the creative work of earlier and chiefly eastern men, the
Latin intellect finally incorporate in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine had
added its further great accomplishment and ordering. The sum of dogma was
well-nigh made up; the Trinity was established; Christian learning had
reached a compass beyond which it was not to pass for the next thousand
years; the doctrines as to the “sacred mysteries,” as to the functions of
the Church and its spiritual authority, existed in substance; the
principles of symbolism and allegory had been set; the great mass of
allegorical Scriptural interpretations had been devised; the spiritual
relationship of man to God’s ordainment, to wit, the part to be played by
the human will in man’s salvation or damnation, had been reasoned out; and
man’s need and love of God, his nothingness apart from the Source and King
and End of Life, had been uttered in words which men still use. Evidently
succeeding generations of less illumination could not add to this vast
intellectual creation; much indeed had to be done before they could
comprehend and make it theirs, so as to use it as an element of their own
thinking, or possess it as an inspiration of passionate, imaginative
reverie.
At the darkening close of the patristic period, Gregory the Great was
still partially creative in his barbarizing handling of patristic
themes.[6] After his death, for some three centuries, theologians were to
devote themselves to mastering the great heritage from the Church Fathers.
It was still a time of racial antipathy and conflict. The disparate
elements of the mediaeval personality were as yet unblended. How could the
unformed intellect of such a period grasp the patristic store of thought
in its integrity? Still less might this wavering human spirit, uncertain
of itself and unadjusted to novel and great conceptions, transform, and so
renew, them with fresh life. Scarcely any proper recasting of patristic
doctrine will be found in the Carolingian period, but merely a shuffling
of the matter. There were some exceptions, arising, as in the case of
Eriugena, from the extraordinary genius of this thinker; or again from the
narrow controversial treatment of a matter argued with rupturing
detachment of patristic opinions from their setting and balancing
qualifications.[7] But the typical works of the eighth and ninth centuries
were commentaries upon Scripture, consisting chiefly of excerpts from the
Fathers. The flower of them all was the compendious _Glossa Ordinaria_ of
Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of the voluminous commentator Rabanus Maurus.[8]
Through the tenth and eleventh centuries, one finds no great advance in
the systematic restatement of Christian doctrine.[9] Nevertheless, two
hundred years of devotion have been put upon it; and statements of parts
of it occur, showing that the eleventh century has made progress over the
ninth in its thoughtful and vital appropriation of Latin Christianity. A
man like German Othloh has thought for himself within its lines;[10]
Anselm of Canterbury has set forth pieces of it with a depth of reflection
and intimacy of understanding which make his works creative;[11] Peter
Damiani through intensity of feeling has become the embodiment of
Christian asceticism and the grace of Christian tears;[12] and Hildebrand
has established the mediaeval papal church. Of a truth, the mediaeval man
was adjusting himself, and reaching his understanding of what the past had
given him.
The twelfth century presents a universal progress in philosophic and
theological thinking. It is the century of Abaelard, of Hugo of St.
Victor, and St. Bernard, and of Peter Lombard. The first of these
penetrates into the logical premises of systematic thought as no mediaeval
man had done before him; St. Bernard moves the world through his emotional
and political comprehension of the Faith; Hugo of St. Victor offers a
sacramental explanation of the universe and man, based upon symbolism as
the working principle of creation; and Peter Lombard makes or, at least,
typifies, the systematic advance, from the _Commentary_ to the _Books of
Sentences_, in which he presents patristic doctrine arranged according to
the cardinal topics of the Christian scheme. Here Abaelard’s _Sic et non_
had been a precursor rather carping in its excessive clear-sightedness.
Thus, as a rule, each successive mediaeval period shows a more organic
restatement of the old material. Yet this principle may be impeded or
deflected, in its exemplifications, by social turmoil and disaster, or
even by the use of further antique matter, demanding assimilation. For
example, upon the introduction of the complete works of Aristotle in the
thirteenth century, an enormous intellectual effort was required for the
mastery of their contents. They were not mastered at once, or by all
people who studied the philosopher. So the works of Hugo of St. Victor, of
the first half of the twelfth century, are more original in their organic
restatement of less vast material than are the works of Albertus Magnus,
Aristotle’s prodigious expounder, one hundred years later. But Thomas
Aquinas accomplishes a final Catholic presentation of the whole enlarged
material, patristic and antique.[13]
One may perceive three stages in this chief phase of mediaeval
intellectual progress, consisting in the appropriation of Latin
Christianity: its first conning, its more vital appropriation, its
re-expression, with added elements of thought. There were also three
stages in the evolution of the outer forms of this same catholic mastery
and re-expression of doctrine: first, the Scriptural _Commentary_;
secondly, the _Books of Sentences_; and thirdly, the _Summa Theologiae_,
of which Thomas Aquinas is the final definitive creator. The philosophical
material used in its making was the substantial philosophy of Aristotle,
mastered at length by this Christian Titan of the thirteenth century. In
the _Summa_, both visibly as well as more inwardly and essentially
considered, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers received an organically
new form.
Quite as impressive, more moving, and possibly more creative, than the
intellectual recasting of the ancient patristic matter, were its emotional
transformations. The sequence and character of mediaeval development is
clearly seen in the evolution of new forms of emotional, and especially of
poetic and plastic, expression. The intellectual transformation of the
antique and more especially the patristic matter, was accompanied by
currents of desire and aversion, running with increasing definiteness and
power. As patristic thought became more organically mediaeval, more
intrinsically part of the intellectual faculties of men, it constituted
with increasing incisiveness the suggestion and the rationale of emotional
experiences, and set the lines accordingly of impassioned expression in
devotional prose and verse, and in the more serious forms of art.
Patristic theology, the authoritative statement of the Christian faith,
contained men’s furthest hopes and deepest fears, set forth together with
the divine Means by which those might be realized and these allayed. As
generation after generation clung to this system as to the stay of their
salvation, the intellectual consideration of it became instinct with the
emotions of desire and aversion, and with love and gratitude toward the
suffering means and instruments which made salvation possible--the
Crucified, the Weeping Mother, and the martyred or self-torturing saints.
All these had suffered; they were sublime objects for human compassion.
Who could think upon them without tears? Thus mediaeval religious thought
became a well of emotion.
Emotion breaks its way to expression; it feeds itself upon its expression,
thereby increasing in resistlessness; it even becomes identical with its
expression. Surely it creates the modes of its expression, seeking
continually the more facile, the more unimpeded, which is to say, the
adequate and perfect form. Typical mediaeval emotion, which was religious,
cast itself around the Gospel of Christ and the theology of the Fathers as
studied and pondered on in the mediaeval centuries. Seeking fitting forms
of expression, which are at once modes of relief and forms of added power,
the passionate energy of the mediaeval genius constrained the intellectual
faculties to unite with it in the production of these forms. They were to
become more personal and original than any mere scholastic restatement of
the patristic and antique thought. Yet the perfect form of the emotional
expression was not quickly reached. It could not outrun the intelligent
appropriation of Latin Christianity. Its media, moreover, as in the case
of sculpture, might present retarding difficulties, to be overcome before
that means of presentation could be mastered. A sequence may be observed
in the evolution of the mediaeval emotional expression of patristic
Christianity. One of the first attained was impassioned devotional Latin
prose, like that of Peter Damiani or St. Anselm of Canterbury.[14] But
prose is a halting means of emotional expression. It is too circumstantial
and too slow. Only in the chanted strophe, winged with the power of
rhythm, can emotion pour out its unimpeded strength. But before the
thought can be fused in verse, it must be plastic, molten indeed. Even
then, the finished verse is not produced at once. The perfected mediaeval
Latin strophe was a final form of religious emotional expression, which
was not attained until the twelfth century.[15]
Impassioned prose may be art; the loftier forms of verse are surely art.
And art is not spontaneous, but carefully intended; no babbling of a
child, but a mutual fitting of form and content, in which efficient unison
the artist’s intellect has worked. Such intellectual, such artistic
endeavour, was evinced in the long development of mediaeval plastic art.
The sculpture and the painted glass, which tell the Christian story in
Chartres Cathedral, set forth the patristic and antique matter in forms
expressive of the feeling and emotion which had gathered around the scheme
of Latin Christianity. They were forms never to be outdone for
appropriateness and power. Several centuries not only of spiritual growth,
but of mechanical and artistic endeavour, had been needed for their
perfecting.
In these and like emotional recastings, or indeed creations, patristic and
antique elements were transformed and transfigured. And again, in fields
non-religious and non-philosophical, through a combined evolution of the
mediaeval mind and heart, novelties of sentiment and situation were
introduced into antique themes of fiction; new forms of romance, new
phases of human love and devotion were evolved, in which (witness the
poetry of chivalric love in Provençal and Old French) the energies of
intellect and passion were curiously blended.[16] These represented a side
of human growth not unrelated to the supreme mediaeval achievement, the
vital appropriation and emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity.
For that carried an impassioning of its teachings with love and tears, a
fostering of them with devotion, an adorning of them with quivering
fantasies, a translation of them into art, into poetry, into romance. With
what wealth of love and terror, with what grandeur of imagination, with
what power of mystery and symbolism, did the Middle Ages glorify their
heritage, turning its precepts into spirit.
Of a surety the emotional is not to be separated from the intellectual
recasting of Christianity. The greatest exponents of the one had their
share in the other. Hugo of St. Victor as well as St. Bernard were mighty
agents of this spiritually passionate mode of apprehending Latin
Christianity, and transfusing it with emotion, or reviving the Gospel
elements in it. Here work, knowingly or instinctively, many men and women,
Peter Damiani and St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegard of Bingen and
Mechthild of Magdeburg, who, according to their diverse temperaments,
overmasteringly and burningly loved Christ. With them the intellectual
appropriation of dogmatic Christianity was subordinate.
Such men and women were poets and artists, even when they wrote no poetry,
and did not carve or paint. For their lives were poems, unisons of
overmastering thoughts and the emotions inspired by them. The life of
Francis was a living poem. It was kin to the _Dies Irae_, the _Stabat
Mater_, the hymns of Adam of St. Victor, and in a later time, the _Divina
Commedia_. For all these poems, in their different ways, using Christian
thought and feeling as symbols, created imaginative presentations of
universal human moods, even as the lives of Francis and many a cloistered
soul presented like moods in visible embodiment.
Such lives likewise close in with art. They poured themselves around the
symbols of the human person of Christ and its sacrificial presence in the
Eucharist; they grasped the infinite and universal through these
tangibilities. But the poems also sprang into being through a concrete
realizing in mood, and a visualizing in narrative, of such symbols. And
the same need of grasping the infinite and universal through symbols was
the inspiration of mediaeval art: it built the cathedrals, painted their
windows, filled their niches with statues, carving prophet types, carving
the times and seasons of God’s providence, carving the vices and virtues
of the soul and its eternal destiny, and at the same time augmenting the
Liturgy with symbolic words and acts. So saint and poet and
artist-craftsman join in that appropriation of Christianity which was
putting life into whatever had come from the Latin Fathers, by pondering
upon it, loving it, living it, imagining it, and making it into poetry and
art.
It is better not to generalize further, or attempt more specifically to
characterize the mediaeval genius. As its manifestations pass before our
consideration, we shall see the complexity of thought and life within the
interplay of the moulding forces of mediaeval development, as they strove
with each other or wrought in harmony, as they were displayed in frightful
contrasts between the brutalities of life, and the lofty, but not less
real, strainings of the spirit, or again in the opposition between
inchoately variant ideals and the endeavour for their more inclusive
reconcilement. Various phases of the mediaeval spirit were to unfold only
too diversely with popes, kings and knights, monks, nuns, and heretics,
satirists, troubadours and minnesingers; in emotional yearnings and
intellectual ideals; in the literature of love and the literature of its
suppression; in mistress-worship, and the worship of the Virgin and the
passion-flooded Christ of Canticles. Sublimely will this spirit show
itself in the resistless apotheosis of symbolism, and in art and poetry
giving utterance to the mediaeval conceptions of order and beauty. Other
of its phases will be evinced in the striving of earnest souls for
spiritual certitude; in the scholastic structure and accomplishment; in
the ways in which men felt the spell of the Classics; and everywhere and
universally in the mediaeval conflict between life’s fulness and the
insistency of the soul’s salvation.
CHAPTER II
THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST
The intellectual and spiritual life of the partly Hellenized and, at last,
Christianized, Roman Empire furnished the contents of the intellectual and
spiritual development of the Middle Ages.[17] In Latin forms the Christian
and antique elements passed to the mediaeval period. Their Latinization,
their continuance, and their passing on, were due to the existence of the
Empire as a political and social fact. Rome’s equal government facilitated
the transmission of Greek thought through the Mediterranean west; Roman
arms, Roman qualities conquered Spain and Gaul, subdued them to the Roman
order, opened them to Graeco-Latin influences, also to Christianity.
Indelibly Latinized in language and temper, Spain, Gaul, and Italy present
first a homogeneity of culture and civic order, and then a common
decadence and confusion. But decadence and confusion did not obliterate
the ancient elements; which painfully endured, passing down disfigured and
bedimmed, to form the basis of mediaeval culture.
The all-important Latinization of western Europe began with the
unification of Italy under Rome. This took five centuries of war. In
central Italy, Marsians, Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans, were slowly
conquered; and in the south Rome stood forth at last triumphant after the
war against Tarentum and Pyrrhus of Epirus. With Rome’s political
domination, the Latin language also won its way to supremacy throughout
the peninsula, being drastically forced, along with Roman civic
institutions, upon Tarentum and the other Greek communities of Magna
Graecia.[18] Yet in revenge, from this time on, Greek medicine and
manners, mythology, art, poetry, philosophy--Greek thought in every
guise--entered the Latin pale.
At the time of which we speak, the third century before Christ, the
northern boundaries of Italy were still the rivers Arno and, to the east,
the Aesis, which flows into the Adriatic, near Ancona. North-west of the
Arno, Ligurian highlanders held the mountain lands as far as Nice. North
of the Aesis lay the valley of the Po. That great plain may have been
occupied at an early time by Etruscan communities scattered through a
Celtic population gradually settling to an agricultural life. Whatever may
be the facts as to the existence of these earlier Celts, other and ruder
Celtic tribes swarmed down from the Alps[19] about 400 B.C., spread
through the Po Valley, pushing the Etruscans back into Etruria, and
following them there to carry on the war. After this comes the well-known
story of Roman interference, leading to Roman overthrow at the river Allia
in 390, and the capture of the city by these “Gauls.” The latter then
retired northward, to occupy the Po Valley; though bands of them settled
as far south as the Aesis.
Time and again, Rome was to be reminded of the Celtic peril. Between the
first and second Punic wars, the Celts, reinforced from beyond the Alps,
attacked Etruria and threatened Rome. Defeating them, the Consuls pushed
north to subdue the Po Valley (222 B.C.). South of the river the Celts
were expelled, and their place was filled by Roman colonists. The fortress
cities of Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona were founded on the right and
left banks of the Po, and south-east of them Mutina (Modena). The
Flaminian road was extended across the Apennines to Fanum, and thence to
Ariminum (Rimini), thus connecting the two Italian seas.
Hannibal’s invasion of Italy brought fresh disturbance, and when the war
with him was over, Rome set herself to the final subjugation of the Celts
north of the Po. Upon their submission the Latinization of the whole
valley began, and advanced apace; but the evidence is scanty. Statius
Caecilius, a comic Latin poet, was a manumitted Insubrian Celt who had
been brought to Rome probably as a prisoner of war. He died in 168 B.C.
Some generations after him, Cornelius Nepos was born in upper Italy, and
Catullus at Verona; Celtic blood may have flowed in their veins. In the
meanwhile the whole region had been organized as Gallia Cisalpina, with
its southern boundary fixed at the Rubicon, which flows near Rimini.
The Celts of northern Italy were the first palpably non-Italian people to
adopt the Latin language. Second in time and thoroughness to their
Latinization was that of Spain. Military reasons led to its conquest.
Hamilcar’s genius had created there a Carthaginian power, as a base for
the invasion of Italy. This project, accomplished by Hamilcar’s son,
brought home to the Roman Senate the need to control the Spanish
peninsula. The expulsion of the Carthaginians, which followed, did not
give mastery over the land; and two centuries of Roman persistence were
required to subdue the indomitable Iberians.
So, in the end, Spain was conquered, and became a Latin country. Its
tribal cantons were replaced with urban communities, and many Roman
colonies were founded, to grow to prosperous cities. These were
strongholds of Latin. Cordova became a very famous home of education and
letters. Apparently the southern Spaniards had fully adopted the ways and
speech of Rome before Strabo wrote his _Geography_, about A.D. 20. The
change was slower in the mountains of Asturia, but quite rapid in the
north-eastern region known as Nearer Spain, Hispania Citerior, as it was
called. There, at the town of Osca (Huesca), Sertorius eighty years before
Christ had established the first Latin school for the native Spanish
youth.
The reign of Augustus, and especially his two years’ sojourn in Spain (26
and 25 B.C.) brought quiet to the peninsula, and thereafter no part of the
Empire enjoyed such unbroken peace. Of all lands outside of Italy, with
the possible exception of Provincia, Spain became most completely Roman in
its institutions, and most unequivocally Latin in its culture. It was the
most populous of the European provinces;[20] and no other held so many
Roman citizens, or so many cities early endowed with Roman civic
rights.[21] The great Augustan literature was the work of natives of
Italy.[22] But in the Silver Age that followed, many of the chief Latin
authors--the elder and younger Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian--were Spaniards.
They were unquestioned representatives of Latin literature, with no
provincial twang in their writings. Then, of Rome’s emperors, Trajan was
born in Spain, and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were of Spanish blood.
Perhaps even more completely Latinized was Narbonensis, commonly called
Provincia. Its official name was drawn from the ancient town of Narbo
(Narbonne), which in 118 B.C. was refounded as a Roman colony in partial
accomplishment of the plans of Caius Gracchus. The boundaries of this
colony touched those of the Greek city-state Massilia (Marseilles), whose
rights were respected until it sided against Caesar in the Civil War. Save
for the Massilian territory, which it later included, Provincia stretched
from the eastern Pyrenees by the way of Nemausus (Nîmes) and the Arelate
(Arles) north-easterly through the Rhone Valley, taking in Vienne and
Valence in the country of the Allobroges, and then onward to the edge of
Lake Geneva; thence southerly along the Maritime Alps to the sea. Many of
its towns owed their prosperity to Caesar. In his time the country west of
the Rhone was already half Latin, and was filling up with men from
Italy.[23] Two or three generations later, Pliny dubbed it _Italia verius
quam provincia_. At all events, like northern Italy and Spain, Provincia,
throughout its length and breadth, had appropriated the Latin civilization
of Rome; that civilization city-born and city-reared, solvent of cantonal
organization and tribal custom, destructive of former ways of living and
standards of conduct; a civilization which was commercial as well as
military in its means, and urban in its ends; which loved the life of the
forum, the theatre, the circus, the public bath, and seemed to gain its
finest essence from the instruction of the grammarian and rhetorician. The
language and literature of this civilization were those of an imperial
city, and were to be the language and literature of the Latin city
universal, in whatever western land its walls might rise.
North of Provincia stretched the great territory reaching from the
Atlantic to the Rhine, and with its edges following that river northerly,
and again westerly to the sea. This was Caesar’s conquest, his _omnis
Gallia_. The resistlessness of Rome, her civic and military superiority
over the western peoples whom she conquered, may be grasped from the
record of Gallic subjugation by one in whom great Roman qualities were
united. Perhaps the deepest impression received by the reader of those
_Commentaries_ is of the man behind the book, Caesar himself. The Gallic
War passes before us as a presentation, or medium of realization, of that
all-compelling personality, with whom to consider was to plan, and to
resolve was to accomplish, without hesitation or fear, by the force of
mind. It is in the mirror of this man’s contempt for restless
irresolution, for unsteadiness and impotence, that Gallic qualities are
shown, the reflection undisturbed either by intolerance or sympathy. The
Gauls were always anxious for change, _mobiliter celeriterque_ inflamed to
war or revolution, says Caesar in his memorable words; and, like all men,
they were by nature zealous for liberty, hating the servile state--so it
behoved Caesar to distribute his legions with foresight in a certain
crisis.[24] Thus, without shrug or smile, writes the greatest of
revolutionists who for himself was also seeking liberty of action, freely
and devisingly, not hurried by impatience or any such planless
restlessness as, for example, drove Dumnorix the Aeduan to plot feebly,
futilely, without plan or policy, against fate, to wit Caesar--so he met
his death.[25]
Instability appears as peculiarly characteristic of the Gauls. They were
not barbarians, but an ingenious folk, quick-witted and loquacious.[26]
Their domestic customs were reasonable; they had taxes and judicial
tribunals; their religion held belief in immortality, and in other
respects was not below the paganism of Italy. It was directed by the
priestly caste of Druids, who possessed considerable knowledge, and used
the Greek alphabet in writing. They also presided at trials, and
excommunicated suitors who would not obey their judicial decrees.[27]
The country was divided into about ninety states (_civitates_). Monarchies
appear among them, but the greater number were aristocracies torn with
jealousy, and always in alarm lest some noble’s overweening influence
upset the government. The common people and poor debtors seem scarcely to
have counted. Factions existed in every state, village, and even
household, says Caesar,[28] headed by the rival states of the Aedui and
Sequani. Espousing, as he professed to, the Aeduan cause, Caesar could
always appear as an ally of one faction. At the last a general confederacy
took up arms against him under the noble Auvernian, Vercingetorix.[29] But
the instability of his authority forced the hand of this brilliant leader.
In fine, it would seem that the Gallic peoples had progressed in
civilization as far as their limited political capacity and self-control
would allow. These were the limitations set by the Gallic character. It is
a Gallic custom, says Caesar, to stop travellers, and insist upon their
telling what they know or have heard. In the towns the crowd will throng
around a merchant and make him tell where he has come from and give them
the news. Upon such hearsay the Gauls enter upon measures of the gravest
importance. The states which are deemed the best governed, he adds, have a
law that whenever any one has heard a report or rumour of public moment,
he shall communicate it to a magistrate and to none else. The magistrates
conceal or divulge such news in their discretion. It is not permitted to
discuss public affairs save in an assembly.[30]
Apparently Caesar is not joking in these passages, which speak of a
statecraft based on gossip gathered in the streets, carried straight to a
magistrate, and neither discussed nor divulged on the way! Quite otherwise
were Roman officials to govern, when Caesar’s great campaigns had subdued
these mercurial Gauls. It was after his death that Augustus established
the Roman order through the land. In those famous _partes tres_ of the
_Commentaries_ he settled it: Iberian and Celtic Aquitania, Celtic
Lugdunensis, and Celtic-Teuton Belgica, making together the three Gauls.
It is significant that the emperor kept them as imperial provinces, still
needing military administration, while he handed over Provincia to the
Senate.
Provincia had been Romanized in law and government as the “Three Gauls”
never were to be. Augustus followed Caesar in respecting the tribal and
cantonal divisions of the latter, making only such changes as were
necessary. Gallic cities under the Empire show no great uniformity. Each
appears as the continuance of the local tribe, whose life and politics
were focused in the town. The city (_civitas_) did not end with the town
walls, but included the surrounding country and perhaps many villages. A
number of these cities preserved their ancient constitutions; others
conformed to the type of Roman colonies, whose constitutions were modelled
on those of Italian cities. Colonia Claudia Agrippina (Cologne) is an
example. But all the cities of the “Three Gauls” as well as those of
Provincia, whatever their form of government, conducted their affairs with
senate, magistrates and police of their choosing, had their municipal
property, and controlled their internal finances. A diet was established
for the “Three Gauls” at Lyons, to which the cities sent delegates.
Whatever were its powers, its existence tended to foster a sense of common
Gallic nationality. The Roman franchise, however, was but sparingly
bestowed on individuals, and was not granted to any Gallic city (except
Lyons) until the time of Claudius, himself born at Lyons. He refounded
Cologne as a colony, granted the franchise to Trèves, and abolished the
provisions forbidding Gauls to hold the imperial magistracies. With the
reorganization of the Empire under Diocletian, Trèves became the capital
not only of Gaul, but of Spain and Britain also.
Although there was thus no violent Romanization of Gaul, Roman
civilization rapidly progressed under imperial fostering, and by virtue of
its own energy. Roman roads traversed the country; bridges spanned the
rivers; aqueducts were constructed; cities grew, trade increased,
agriculture improved, and the vine was introduced. At the time of Caesar’s
conquest, the quick-minded Gauls were prepared to profit from a superior
civilization; and under the mighty peace of Rome, men settled down to the
blessings of safe living and law regularly enforced.
The spread of the Latin tongue and the finer elements of Latin culture
followed the establishment of the Roman order. One Gallic city and then
another adopted the new language according to its circumstances and
situation. Of course the cities of Provincia took the lead, largely
Italian as they were in population. On the other hand, Latin made slow
progress among the hills of Auvergne. But farther north, the Roman city of
Lyons was Latin-tongued from its foundation. Thence to the remoter north
and west and east, Latin spread by cities, the foci of affairs and
provincial administration. The imperial government did not demand of its
subjects that they should abandon their native speech, but required in
Gaul, as elsewhere, the use of Latin in the transaction of official
business. This compelled all to study Latin who had affairs in law courts
or with officials, or hoped to become magistrates. Undoubtedly the rich
and noble, especially in the towns, learned Latin quickly, and it soon
became the vehicle of polite, as well as official, intercourse. It was
also the language of the schools attended by the noble Gallic youth. But
among the rural population, the native tongues continued indefinitely.
Obviously one cannot assign any specific time for the popular and general
change from Celtic; but it appears to have very generally taken place
before the Frankish conquest.[31]
By that time, too, those who would naturally constitute the educated
classes, possessed a Latin education. First in the cities of Provincia,
Nîmes, Arles, Vienne, Fréjus, Aix in Provence, then of course at Lyons and
in Aquitaine, and later through the cities of the north-east, Trèves,
Mainz, Cologne, and most laggingly through the north-west Belgic lands
lying over against the channel and the North Sea, Latin education spread.
Grammar and rhetoric were taught, and the great Classics were explained
and read, till the Gauls doubtless felt themselves Roman in spirit as in
tongue.
Of course they were mistaken. To be sure the Gaul was a citizen of the
Empire, which not only represented safety and civilization, but in fact
was the entire civilized world. He had no thought of revolting from that,
any more than from his daily habits or his daily food. Often he felt
himself sentimentally affected toward this universal symbol of his
welfare. He had Latin speech; he had Roman fashions; he took his warm
baths and his cold, enjoyed the sports of the amphitheatre, studied Roman
literature, and talked of the _Respublica_ and _Aurea Roma_. Yet he was,
after all, merely a Romanized inhabitant of Gaul. Roman law and
government, Latin education, and the colour of the Roman spirit had been
imparted; but the inworking, creative genius of Rome was not within her
gift or his capacity. The Gauls, however, are the chief example of a
mediating people. Romanized and not made Roman, their epoch, their
geographical situation, and their modified faculties, all made them
intermediaries between the Roman and the Teuton.
If the Romanization of the “Three Gauls” was least thorough in Belgica,
there was even less of it across the channel. Britain, as far north as the
Clyde and Firth of Forth, was a Roman province for three or four hundred
years. Latin was the language of the towns; but probably never supplanted
the Celtic in the country. The Romanization of the Britons however,
whether thorough or superficial, affected a people who were to be
apparently submerged. They seem to have transmitted none of their Latin
civilization to their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. Yet even the latter when
they came to Britain were not quite untouched by Rome. They were familiar
with Roman wares, if not with Roman ways; and certain Latin words which
are found in all Teutonic languages had doubtless entered Anglo-Saxon.[32]
But this early Roman influence was slight, compared with that which
afterwards came with Christianity. Nor did the Roman culture, before the
introduction of Christianity, exert a deep effect on Germany, at least
beyond the neighbourhood of the large Roman or Romanized towns like
Cologne and Mainz. In many ways, indeed, the Germans were touched by Rome.
Roman diplomacy, exciting tribe against tribe, was decimating them. Roman
influence, and sojourn at Rome, had taught much to many German princes.
Roman weapons, Roman utensils and wares of all kinds were used from the
Danube to the Baltic. But all this did not Romanize the Germans, any more
than a number of Latin words, which had crept in, Latinized their
language.[33]
CHAPTER III
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC APPREHENSION OF FACT
The Latin West afforded the _milieu_ in which the thoughts and sentiments
of the antique and partly Christian world were held in Latin forms and
preserved from obliteration during the fifth and succeeding centuries,
until taken up by the currents of mingled decrepitude and callowness which
marked the coming of the mediaeval time. Latin Christianity survived, and
made its way across those stormy centuries, to its mediaeval harbourage.
The antique also was carried over, either in the ship of Latin
Christianity, or in tenders freighted by certain Latin Christians who
dealt in secular learning, though not in “unbroken packages.” Those
unbroken packages, to wit, the Latin classics, and after many centuries
the Greek, also floated over. But in the early mediaeval times, men
preferred the pagan matter rehashed, as in the _Etymologies_ of Isidore.
The great ship of Christian doctrine not only bore bits of the pagan
antique stowed here and there, but itself was built with many a plank of
antique timber, and there was antique adulteration in its Christian
freight; or, in other words, the theology of the Church Fathers was partly
made of Greek philosophy, and was put together in modes of Greek
philosophic reasoning. The Fathers lived in the Roman Empire, or in what
was left of it in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Many of
them were born of pagan parents, and all received the common education in
grammar, rhetoric, and literature, which were pagan and permeated with
pagan philosophy. For philosophy did not then stand apart from life and
education; but had become a source of principles of conduct and “daily
thoughts for daily needs.” Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least
unsanctified youth, had deeply studied it.
Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the
concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the _Latin_ Fathers, who
were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through
conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless,
in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy
was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge
and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian
theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins
reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren
had evolved.[34]
Obviously, for our purpose, which is to appreciate the spiritual endowment
of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic
thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers,
their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must
consider their intellectual environment; which was, of course, made up of
the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman
Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world,
first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge
and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its
accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of
the Church.
* * * * *
What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and
of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung
from open and unprejudiced observation of the visible world. They were
physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from
fact to truth, to a consideration of the validity of human understanding.
Thereupon the Greek mind became entranced with its own creations. Man was
the measure of all things, for the Sophists. More irrefragably and
pregnantly, man became the measure of all things for Socrates and Plato.
The aphorism might be discarded; but its transcendental import was
established in an imaginative dialectic whose correspondence to the
divinest splendours of the human mind warranted its truth. With
Platonists--and the world was always to be filled with them--perceptions
of physical facts and the data of human life and history, were henceforth
to constitute the outer actuality of a creation within the mind. Every
observed fact is an apparent tangibility; but its reality consists in its
unison with the ultimate realities of rational conception. The
apprehension of the fact must be made to conform to these. For this reason
every fact has a secondary, nay, primary, because spiritual, meaning. Its
true interpretation lies in that significance which accords with the
mind’s consistent system of conceptions, which present the fact as it must
be thought, and therefore as it is; it is the fact brought into right
relationship with spiritual and ethical verity. Of course, methods of
apprehending terrestrial and celestial phenomena as illustrations of
ideally conceived principles, were unlikely to foster habits of close
observation. The apparent facts of sense would probably be imaginatively
treated if not transformed in the process of their apprehension. Nor, with
respect to human story, would such methods draw fixed lines between the
narration of what men are pleased to call the actual occurrence, and the
shaping of a tale to meet the exigencies of argument or illustration.
All this is obvious in Plato. The _Timaeus_ was his vision of the
universe, in which physical facts became plastic material for the spirit’s
power to mould into the likeness of ideal conceptions. The creation of the
universe is conformed to the structure of Platonic dialectic. If any
meaning be certain through the words and imagery of this dialogue, it is
that the world and all creatures which it contains derive such reality as
they have from conformity to the thoughts or ideal patterns in the divine
mind. Visible things are real only so far as they conform to those
perfect conceptions. Moreover, the visible creation has another value,
that of its ethical significance. Physical phenomena symbolize the
conformity of humanity to its best ideal of conduct. Man may learn to
regulate the lawless movements of his soul from the courses of the stars,
the noblest of created gods.
Thus as to natural phenomena; and likewise as to the human story, fact or
fiction. The myth of the shadow-seers in the cave, with which the seventh
book of the _Republic_ opens, is just as illustratively and ideally true
as that opening tale in the _Timaeus_ of the ancient Athenian state, which
fought for its own and others’ freedom against the people of
Atlantis--till the earthquake ended the old Athenian race, and the
Atlantean continent was swallowed in the sea. This story has piqued
curiosity for two thousand years. Was it tradition, or the creation of an
artist dialectician? In either case its ideal and edifying truth stood or
fell, not by reason of conformity to any basic antecedent fact, but
according to its harmony with the beautiful and good.
Plato’s method of conceiving fact might be applied to man’s thoughts of
God, of the origin of the world and the courses of the stars; also to the
artistic manipulation of illustrative or edifying story. Matters, large,
remote, and mysterious, admit of idealizing ways of apprehension. But it
might seem idiocy, rather than idealism, to apply this method to the plain
facts of common life, which may be handled and looked at all around--to
which there is no mysterious other side, like the moon’s, for ever turned
away. Nevertheless the method and its motives drew men from careful
observation of nature, and would invest biography and history with
interests promoting the ingenious application, rather than the close
scrutiny, of fact.
Thus Platonism and its way of treating narrative could not but foster the
allegorical interpretation of ancient tradition and literature, which was
already in vogue in Plato’s time. It mattered not that he would have
nothing to do with the current allegories through which men moralized or
rationalized the old tales of the doings of the gods. He was himself a
weaver of the loveliest allegories when it served his purpose. And after
him the allegorical habit entered into the interpretation of all ancient
story. In the course of time allegory will be applied by the Jew Philo of
Alexandria to the Pentateuch; and one or two centuries later it will play
a great rôle in Christian polemics against Jew and then against Manichean.
It will become _par excellence_ the chief mode of patristic exegesis, and
pass on as a legacy of spiritual truth to the mediaeval church.
Aristotle strikes us as a man of different type from Plato. Whether his
intellectual interests were broader than his teacher’s is hardly for
ordinary people to say. He certainly was more actively interested in the
investigation of nature. Head of an actual school (as Plato had been), and
assisted by the co-operation of able men, he presents himself, with what
he accomplished, at least in threefold guise: as a metaphysician and the
perfecter, if not creator, of formal logic; as an observer of the facts of
nature and the institutions and arts of men; as a man of encyclopaedic
learning. These three phases of intellectual effort proportioned each
other in a mind of universal power and appetition. Yet it has been thought
that there was more metaphysics and formal logic in Aristotle than was
good for his natural science.
The lost and extant writings which have been ascribed to him, embraced a
hundred and fifty titles and amounted to four hundred books. Those which
have been of universal influence upon human inquiry suffice to illustrate
the scope of his labours. There were the treatises upon Logic and first
among them the _Categories_ or classes of propositions, and the _De
interpretatione_ on the constituent parts and kinds of sentences. These
two elementary treatises (the authorship of which has been questioned)
were the only Aristotelian writings generally used through the West until
the latter half of the twelfth century, when the remainder of the logical
treatises became known, to wit, the _Prior Analytics_, upon the syllogism;
the _Posterior Analytics_ upon logical demonstration; the _Topics_, or
demonstrations having probability; and the _Sophistical Elenchi_, upon
false conclusions and their refutation. Together these constitute the
_Organon_ or complete logical instrument, as it became known to the
latter half of the twelfth century, and as we possess it to-day.
The _Rhetoric_ follows, not disconnected with the logical treatises. Then
may be named the _Metaphysics_, and then the writings devoted to Nature,
to wit, the _Physics_, _Concerning the Heavens_, _Concerning Genesis and
Decay_, the _Meteorology_, the _Mechanical Problems_, the _History of
Animals_, the _Anatomical descriptions_, the _Psychology_, the _Parts of
Animals_, the _Generation of Animals_. There was a Botany, which is lost.
Finally, one names the great works on Ethics, Politics, and Poetry.
Every one is overwhelmed by the compass of the achievement of this
intellect. As to the transcendent value of the works on Logic,
Metaphysics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, and Poetry, the world
of scholarship has long been practically at one. There is a difference of
opinion as to the quantity and quality of actual investigation represented
by the writings on Natural History. But Aristotle is commonly regarded as
the founder of systematic Zoology. On the whole, perhaps one will not err
in repeating what has been said hundreds of times, that the works ascribed
to Aristotle, and which undoubtedly were produced by him or his
co-labourers under his direction, represent the most prodigious
intellectual achievement ever connected with any single name.
In the school of Aristotle, one phase or another of the master’s activity
would be likely to absorb the student’s energy and fasten his entire
attention. Aristotle’s own pupil and successor was the admirable
Theophrastus, a man of comprehensive attainment, who nevertheless devoted
himself principally to carrying on his master’s labours in botany, and
other branches of natural science. A History of Physics was one of the
most important of his works. Another pupil of Aristotle was Eudemus of
Rhodes, who became a physicist and a historian of the three sciences of
Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. He exhibits the learned activities
thenceforth to characterize the Peripatetics. It would have been difficult
to carry further the logic or metaphysics of the master. But his work in
natural science might be supplemented, while the body of his writings
offered a vast field for the labours of the commentator. And so, in fact,
Peripatetic energies in the succeeding generations were divided between
science and learning, the latter centring chiefly in historical and
grammatical labours and the exposition of the master’s writing.[35]
Aristotelianism was not to be the philosophy of the closing pre-Christian
centuries, any more than it was to be the philosophy of the thousand years
and more following the Crucifixion. During all that time, its logic held
its own, and a number of its metaphysical principles were absorbed in
other systems. But Aristotelianism as a system soon ceased to be in vogue,
and by the sixth century was no longer known.
Yet one might find an echo of its, or some like, spirit in all men who
were seeking knowledge from the world of nature, from history and humane
learning. There were always such; and some famous examples may be drawn
even from among the practical-minded Romans. One thinks at once of
Cicero’s splendid breadth of humane and literary interest. His friend
Terentius Varro was a more encyclopaedic personality, and an eager student
in all fields of knowledge. Although not an investigator of nature he
wrote on agriculture, on navigation, on geometry, as well as the Latin
tongue, and on Antiquities, divine and human, even on philosophy.[36]
Another lover of knowledge was the elder Pliny, who died from venturing
too near to observe the eruption which destroyed Pompeii. He was an
important functionary under the emperor Vespasian, just as Varro had held
offices of authority in the time of the Republic. Pliny’s _Historia
naturalis_ was an astounding compilation, intended to cover the whole
plain of common and uncommon knowledge. The compiler neither observed for
himself nor weighed the statements of others. His compilation is a happy
harbourage for the preposterous as well as reasonable, where the
traveller’s tale of far-off wonders takes its place beside the testimony
of Aristotle. All is fish that comes to the net of the good Pliny, though
it be that wonderful _piscis_, the _Echinus_, which though but a cubit
long has such tenacity of grip and purpose that it holds fast the largest
galley, and with the resistance of its fins, renders impotent the efforts
of a hundred rowers. Fish for Pliny also are all the stories of antiquity,
of dog-headed, one-legged, big-footed men, of the Pigmies and the Cranes,
of the Phoenix and the Basilisk. He delights in the more intricate
causality of nature’s phenomena, and tells how the bowels of the
field-mouse increase in number with the days of the moon, and the energy
of the ant decreases as the orb of Venus wanes.[37] But this credulous
person was a marvel of curiosity and diligence, and we are all his debtors
for an acquaintance with the hearsay opinions current in the antique
world.
Varro and Pliny were encyclopaedists. Yet before, as well as after them,
the men possessed by the passion for knowledge of the natural world, were
frequently devoted to some branch of inquiry, rather than encyclopaedic
gleaners, or universal philosophers. Hippocrates, Socrates’s contemporary,
had left a name rightly enduring as the greatest of physicians. In the
third century before Christ Euclid is a great mathematician, and
Hipparchus and Archimedes have place for ever, the one among the great
astronomers, the other among the great terrestrial physicists. All these
men represent reflection and theory, as well as investigation and
experiment. Leaping forward to the second century A.D., we find among
others two great lovers of science. Galen of Pergamos was a worthy
follower, if not a peer, of the great physician of classic Greece; and
Ptolemy of Alexandria emulated the Alexandrian Hipparchus, whose fame he
revered, and whose labours (with his own) he transmitted to posterity.
Each of these men may be regarded as advancing some portion of the
universal plan of Aristotle.
Another philosophy, Stoicism, had already reached a wide acceptance. As
for the causes of this, doubtless the decline of Greek civic freedom
before the third century B.C., had tended to throw thoughtful men back
upon their inner life; and those who had lost their taste for the popular
religion, needed a philosophy to live by. Stoicism became especially
popular among the Romans. It was ethics, a philosophy of practice rather
than of knowledge. The Stoic looked out upon the world from the inner
fortress of the human will. That guarded or rather constituted his
well-being. He cared for such knowledge, call it instruction rather, as
would make good the principle that human well-being lay in the rightly
self-directing will. He did not seriously care for metaphysics, or for
knowledge of the natural world, save as one or the other subserved the
ends of his philosophy as a guide of life. Thus the Stoic physics, so
important a part in the Stoic system, was inspired by utilitarian motives
and deflected from unprejudiced observation by teleological considerations
and reflections on the dispensations of Providence. Of course, some of the
Stoics show a further range of intellectual interest; Seneca, for example,
who was a fine moralist and wrote beautiful essays upon the conduct of
life. He, like a number of other people, composed a book of _Quaestiones
naturales_, which was chiefly devoted to the weather, a subject always
very close to man. But he was not a serious meteorologist. For him the
interest of the fact lay rather in its use or in its moral bearing. After
Seneca the Stoic interest in fact narrows still further, as with Epictetus
and Marcus Aurelius.
Like things might be said of the school of Epicurus, a child of different
colour, yet birthmate of the Stoa. For in that philosophy as in Stoicism,
all knowledge beyond ethics had a subordinate rôle. As a Stoic or
Epicurean, a man was not likely to contribute to the advance of any branch
of science. Yet habits of eclectic thought and common curiosity, or call
it love of knowledge, made many nominal members of these schools eager
students and compilers from the works of others.
We have yet to speak of the system most representative of latter-day
paganism, and of enormous import for the first thousand years of Christian
thought. Neo-Platonism was the last great creation of Greek philosophy.
More specifically, it was the noblest product of that latter-day paganism
which was yearning somewhat distractedly, impelled by cravings which
paganism could neither quench nor satisfy.
Spirit is; it is the Real. It makes the body, thereby presenting itself in
sensible form; it is not confined by body or dependent on body as its
cause or necessary ground. In many ways men have expressed, and will
express hereafter, the creative or causal antecedence of the spiritual
principle. In many ways they have striven to establish this principle in
God who is Spirit, or in the Absolute One. Many also have been the
processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through
which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this
principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an
intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a
beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo-Platonism a
very palpable although darkening statement of the same.
All men, except fools, have their irrational sides. Who does not believe
what his reason shall labour in vain to justify? Such belief may have its
roots spread through generalizations broader than any specific rational
processes of which the man is conscious. And a man is marked by the
character of his supra-rational convictions, or beliefs or credulous
conjectures. One thinks how Plato wove and coloured his dialectic, and
angled with it, after those transcendencies that he well knew could never
be so hooked and taken. His conviction--non-dialectical--of the supreme
and beautiful reality of spirit led him on through all his arguments, some
of which appear as playful, while others are very earnest.
Less elusive than Plato’s was the supra-rationality of his distant
disciple, the Egyptian Plotinus (died 270), creator of Neo-Platonism. With
him the supra-rational represented an _élan_, a reaching beyond the
clearly seen or clearly known, to the Spirit itself. He had a disciple
Porphyry, like himself a sage--and yet a different sage. Porphyry’s
supra-rationalities hungered for many things from which his rational
nature turned askance. But he has a disciple, Iamblicus by name, whose
rational nature not only ceases to protest, but of its free will
prostitutes itself in the service of unreason.
The synthetic genius of Plotinus enabled him to weave into his system
valuable elements from Aristotle and the Stoics. But he was above all a
Platonist. He presents the spiritual triad: the One, the Mind, the Soul.
From the One comes the Mind, that is, the Nous, which embraces the
totality of the knowable or intelligible, to wit, the Cosmos of Ideas.
From that, come the Soul of the World and the souls of men. Matter, which
is no-thing, gains form and partial reality when _informed_ with soul.
Plotinus’s attitude toward knowledge of the concrete natural or historic
fact, displays a transcendental indifference exceeding that of Plato.
Perceptible facts with him are but half-real manifestations of the
informing spirit. They were quite plastic, malleable, reducible. Moreover,
thoughts of the evil of the multiple world of sense held for Plotinus and
his followers a bitterness of ethical unreality which Plato was too great
an Athenian to feel.
Dualistic ethics which find in matter the principle of unreality or evil,
diminish the human interest in physical fact. The ethics of Plotinus
consisted in purification and detachment from things of sense. This is
asceticism. And Plotinus was an ascetic, not through endeavour, but from
contempt. He did not struggle to renounce the world, but despised it with
the spontaneity of a sublimated temperament. He seemed like a man ashamed
of being in the body, Porphyry says of him. Nor did he wish to cure any
contemptible bodily ailments, or wash his wretched body.
Plotinus’s Absolute, the First or One, might not be grasped by reason. Yet
to approach and contemplate It was the best for man. Life’s crown was the
ecstasy of the supra-rational and supra-intelligible vision of It. This
Plotinean irrationality was lofty; but it was too transcendent, too
difficult, and too unrelated to the human heart, to satisfy other men. No
fear but that his followers would bring it down to the level of _their_
irrational tendencies.
The borrowed materials of this philosophy were made by its founder into a
veritable system. It included, potentially at least, the popular beliefs,
which, however, interested this metaphysical Copt very little. But in
those superstitious centuries, before as well as after him, these cruder
elements were gathered and made much of by men of note. There was a
tendency to contrast the spiritual and real with the manifold of material
nonentity, and a cognate tendency to emphasize the opposition between the
spiritual and good, and the material and evil, or between opposing
spiritual principles. With less metaphysical people such opposition would
take more entrancing shapes in the battles of gods and demons. Probably it
would cause ascetic repression of the physical passions. Both tendencies
had shown themselves before Plotinus came to build them into his system.
Friend Plutarch, for instance, of Chaeroneia, was a man of pleasant temper
and catholic curiosity. His philosophy was no great matter. He was gently
credulous, and interested in anything marvellous and every imaginable god
and demon. This good Greek was no ascetic, and yet had much to say of the
strife between the good and evil principle. Like thoughts begat asceticism
in men of a different temperament; for instance in the once famous
Apollonius of Tyana and others, who were called Neo-Pythagoreans, whatever
that meant. Such men had also their irrationalities, which perhaps made up
the major part of their natures. They did indeed belong to those centuries
when Astrology flourished at the imperial Court,[38] and every mode of
magic mystery drew its gaping votaries; when men were ravenously drawing
toward everything, except the plain concrete fact steadily viewed and
quietly reasoned on.
But it was within the schools of Neo-Platonism, in the generations after
Plotinus, that these tendencies flourished, beneath the shelter of his
elastic principles. Here three kindred currents made a resistless stream:
a transcendental, fact-compelling dialectic; unveiled recognition of the
supreme virtue of supra-rational convictions and experiences; and an
asceticism which contemned matter and abhorred the things of sense. What
more was needed to close the faculties of observation, befool the reason,
and destroy knowledge in the end?
Porphyry and Iamblicus show the turning of the tide. The first of these
was a Tyrian, learned, intelligent, austere. His life extends from about
the year 232 to the year 300. His famous _Introduction_ to the
_Categories_ of Aristotle was a corner-stone of the early mediaeval
knowledge of logic. He wrote a keenly rational work against the
Christians, in which his critical acumen pointed out that the Book of
Daniel was not composed before the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. He did
much to render intelligible the writings of his master Plotinus, and made
a compend of Neo-Platonism in the form of _Sentences_. These survive, as
well as his work on _Abstinence from Eating Flesh_, and other treatises,
allegorical and philosophic.
He was to Plotinus as Soul, in the Neo-Platonic system, was to Mind--Soul
which somehow was darkly, passionately tangled in the body of which it was
the living principle. The individual soul of Porphyry wrestled with all
the matters which the mind of Plotinus made slight account of. Plotinus
lived aloof in a region of metaphysics warmed with occasional ecstasy.
Porphyry, willy nilly, was drawn down to life, and suffered all the pain
of keen mentality when limed and netted with the anxieties of common
superstitions. He was forever groping in a murky atmosphere. He could not
clear himself of credulity, deny and argue as he might. Nor could
asceticism pacify his mind. Philosophically he followed Plotinus’s
teachings, and understood them too, which was a marvel. Many of his own,
or possibly reflected, thoughts are excellent. No Christian could hold a
more spiritual conception of sacrifice than Porphyry when thinking of the
worship of the Mind--the Nous or Second God. Offer to it silence and
chaste thought, which will unite us to it, and make us like itself. The
perfect sacrifice is to disengage the soul from passions.[39] What could
be finer? And again says Porphyry: The body is the soul’s garment, to be
laid aside; the wise man needs only God; evil spirits have no power over a
pure soul. But, but, but--at his last statement Porphyry’s confidence
breaks. He is worried because it is so hard to know the good from evil
demons; and the latter throng the temples, and must be exorcised before
the true God will appear. This same man had said that God’s true temple
was the wise man’s soul! Alas! Porphyry’s nature reeks with
contradictions. His letter to the Egyptian priest, Anebo, consists of
sharply-put questions as to the validity of any kind of theurgy or
divination. How can men know anything as to these things? What reason to
suppose that this, that, or the other rite--all anxiously enumerated--is
rightly directed or has effect? None! none! none! such is the answer
expected by the questions.
But Porphyry’s own soul answers otherwise. His works--the _De abstinentia_
for example--teem with detailed and believing discussion of every kind of
theurgic practice and magic rite, whereby the divine and demonic natures
may be moved. He believed in oracles and sorcery. Vainly did the more
keenly intellectual side of his nature seek to hold such matters at arm’s
length; his other instincts hungered for them, craved to touch and taste
and handle, as the child hankers for what is forbidden. There is
angel-lore, but far more devil-lore, in Porphyry, and below the earth the
demons have their realm, and at their head a demon-king. Thus organized,
these malformed devil-shapes torment the lives of men, malignant
deceivers, spiteful trippers-up, as they are.
Such a man beset by demons (which his intelligence declares to have no
power over him!), such a man, austere and grim, would practise fanatically
the asceticism recognized so calmly by the system of Plotinus. With
Porphyry, strenuously, anxiously, the upper grades of virtue become
violent purification and detachment from things of sense. Here he is in
grim earnest.
It is wonderful that this man should have had a critical sense of historic
fact, as when he saw the comparatively late date of the Book of Daniel. He
could see the holes in others’ garments. But save for some such polemic
purpose, the bare, crude fact interests him little. He is an elaborate
fashioner of allegory, and would so interpret the fictions of the poets.
Plotinus, when it suited him, had played with myths, like Plato. No such
light hand, and scarcely concealed smile, has Porphyry. As for physical
investigations, they interest him no more seriously than they did his
master, and when he touches upon natural fact he is as credulous as Pliny.
“The Arabians,” says he, “understand the speech of crows, and the
Tyrrhenians that of eagles; and perhaps we and all men would understand
all living beings if a dragon licked our ears.”[40]
These inner conflicts darkened Porphyry’s life, and doubtless made some of
the motives which were turning his thoughts to suicide, when Plotinus
showed him that this was not the true way of detachment. There was no
conflict, but complete surrender, and happy abandonment in Iamblicus the
Divine (θεῖος) who when he prayed might be lifted ten cubits from the
ground--so thought his disciples--and around whose theurgic fingers,
dabbling in a magic basin of water, Cupids played and kissed each other.
His life, told by the Neo-Platonic biographer, Eunapius, is as full of
miracle as the contemporary Life of St. Antony by Athanasius. Iamblicus
floats before us a beautiful and marvellously garbed priest, a dweller in
the recesses of temples. He frankly gave himself to theurgy, convinced
that the Soul needs the aid of every superhuman being--hero, god, demon,
angel.[41] He was credulous on principle. It is of first importance, he
writes, that the devotee should not let the marvellous character of an
occurrence arouse incredulity within him. He needs above all a “science”
(ἐπιστήμη) which shall teach him to disbelieve nothing as to the gods.[42]
For the divine principle is essentially miraculous, and magic is the open
door, yes, and the way up to it, the anagogic path.
All this and more besides is set forth in the _De mysteriis_, the chief
composition of his school. It was the answer to that doubting letter of
Porphyry to Anebo, and contains full proof and exposition of the occult
art of moving god or demon. We all have an inborn knowledge (ἔμφυτος
γνῶσις)[43] of the gods. But it is not thought or contemplation that
unites us to them; it is the power of the theurgic rite or cabalistic
word, understood only by the gods. We cannot understand the reason of
these acts and their effects.[44]
There is no lower depth. Plotinus’s reason-surpassing vision of the One
(which represents in him the principle of irrationality) is at last
brought down to the irrational act, the occult magic deed or word. Truly
the worshipper needs his best credulity--which is bespoken by Iamblicus
and by this book. The work seems to argue, somewhat obscurely, that the
prayer or invocation or rite, does not actually draw the god to us, but
draws us toward the god, making our wills fit to share in his. The writer
of such a work is likely to be confused in his statement of principles;
but will expand more genially when expounding the natures of demons,
heroes, angels, and gods, and the effect of them upon humanity. Perhaps
the matter still seems dark; but the picturesque details are bright
enough. For the writer describes the manifestations and apparitions of
these beings--their ἐπιφανείαι and φάσματα. The apparitions of the gods
are μονοειδῆ, simple and uniform: those of the demons are ποικίλα, that
is, various and manifold; those of the angels are more simple than those
of the demons, but inferior to those of the gods. The archangels in their
apparitions are more like the gods; while the ἄρχοντες, the “governors,”
have variety and yet order. The gods as they appear to men, are radiant
with divine effulgence, the archangels terrible yet kind; the demons are
frightful, producing perturbation and terror--on all of which the work
enlarges. Speaking more specifically of the effect of these apparitions on
the thaumaturgist, the writer says that visions of the gods bring a mighty
power, and divine love and joy ineffable; the archangels bring
steadfastness and power of will and intellectual contemplation; the angels
bring rational wisdom and truth and virtue. But the vision of demons
brings the desires of sense and the vigour to fulfil them.
So low sank Neo-Platonism in pagan circles. Of course it did not create
this mass of superstitious fantasy. It merely fell in cordially, and over
every superstition flung the justification of its principles. In the
process it changed from a philosophy to a system of theurgic practice. The
common superstitions of the time, or their like, were old enough. But
now--and here was the portentous fact--they had wound themselves into the
natures of intellectual people; and Neo-Platonism represents the chief
formal facilitation of this result.
A contemporary phenomenon, and perhaps the most popular of pagan cults in
the third and fourth centuries, was the worship of Mithra, around which
Neo-Platonism could throw its cloak as well as around any other form of
pagan worship. Mithraism, a partially Hellenized growth from the old
Mazdaean (even Indo-Iranian) faith, had been carried from one boundary of
the Empire to the other, by soldiers or by merchants who had imbibed its
doctrines in the East. It shot over the Empire like a flame. A warrior
cult, the late pagan emperors gave it their adhesion. It was, in fine, the
pagan Antaeus destined to succumb in the grasp of the Christian Hercules.
With it, or after it, came Manicheism, also from the East. This was quite
as good a philosophy as the Neo-Platonism of Iamblicus. The system called
after Manes was a crass dualism, containing fantastic and largely borrowed
speculation as to the world and man. Satan was there and all his devils.
He was the begetter of mankind, in Adam. But Satan himself, in previous
struggles with good angels, had gained some elements of light; and these
passed into Adam’s nature. Eve, however, is sensuality. After man’s
engendering, the strife begins between the good and evil spirits to
control his lot. In ethics, of course, Manicheism was dualistic and
ascetic, like Neo-Platonism, and also like the Christianity of the Eastern
and Western Empire. Manicheism, unlike Mithraism, was not to succumb, but
merely to retreat before Christianity. Again and again from the East,
through the lower confines of the present Russia, through Hungary, it made
advance. The Bogomiles were its children; likewise the Cathari in the
north of Italy, and the Albigenses of Provence.[45]
Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, and Manicheism, these
names, taken for simplicity’s sake, serve to indicate the mind and temper
of the educated world in which Christianity was spreading. Obviously the
Christian Fathers’ ways of thinking were given by all that made up their
environment, their education, their second natures. They were men of
their period, and as Christians their intellectual standards did not rise
nor their understanding of fact alter, although their approvals and
disapprovals might be changed. Their natures might be stimulated and
uplifted by the Faith and its polemic ardours, and yet their manner of
approaching and apprehending facts, _its_ facts, for example, might
continue substantially those of their pagan contemporaries or
predecessors.
In the fourth century the leaders of the Church both in the East and West
were greater men than contemporary pagan priests or philosophers or
rhetoricians. For the strongest minds had enlisted on the Christian side,
and a great cause inspired their highest energies with an efficient
purpose. There is no comparison between Athanasius, Basil, Gregory
Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom in the East; Ambrose, Jerome,
and Augustine in the West; and pagans, like Libanius, the favourite of the
Emperor Julian, or even Julian himself, or Symmachus, the opponent of St.
Ambrose in the cause of the pagan Altar of Victory. That was a lost cause,
and the cause of paganism was becoming more and more broken, dissipated,
uninspiring. Nevertheless, in spite of the superiority of the Christian
doctors, in spite also of the mighty cause which marshalled their
endeavours so efficiently, they present, both in their higher intelligence
and their lower irrationalities, abundant likeness to the pagans.
It has appeared that metaphysical interests absorbed the attention of
Plotinus, who has nevertheless his supreme irrationality atop of all.
Porphyry also possessed a strong reasoning nature, but was drawn
irresistibly to all the things, gods, demons, divination and theurgy, of
which one half of him disapproved. Plotinus, quite in accordance with his
philosophic principles, has an easy contempt for physical life. With
Porphyry this has become ardent asceticism. It was also remarked that
Plotinus’s system was a synthesis of much antecedent thought; and that its
receptivity was rendered extremely elastic by the Neo-Platonic principle
that man’s ultimate approach to God lay through ecstasy and not through
reason. Herein, rather latent and not yet sorely taxed, was a broad
justification of common beliefs and practices. To all these Iamblicus
gladly opened the door. Rather than a philosopher, he was a priest, a
thaumaturgist and magician. Finally, it is obvious that neither Iamblicus
nor Porphyry nor Plotinus was primarily or even seriously interested in
any clear objective knowledge of material facts. Plotinus merely noticed
them casually in order to illustrate his principles, while Iamblicus
looked to them for miracles.
Christianity as well as Neo-Platonism was an expression of the principle
that life’s primordial reality is spirit. And likewise with Christians, as
with Neo-Platonists, phases of irrationality may be observed in ascending
and descending order. At the summit the sublimest Christian
supra-rationality, the love of God, uplifts itself. From that height the
irrational conviction grades down to credulity preoccupied with the
demoniacal and miraculous. Fruitful comparisons may be drawn between
Neo-Platonists and Christian doctors.[46]
Origen (died 253), like Plotinus, of Coptic descent, and the most
brilliant genius of the Eastern Church, was by some fifteen years the
senior of the Neo-Platonist. It is not certain that either of them
directly influenced the other. In intellectual power the two were peers.
Both were absorbed in the higher phases of their thought, but neither
excluded the more popular beliefs from the system which he was occupied in
constructing. Plotinus had no mind to shut the door against the beliefs of
polytheism; and Origen accepted on his part the demons and angels of
current Christian credence.[47] In fact, he occupied himself with them
more than Plotinus did with the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. Of course
Origen, like every other Christian doctor, had his fundamental and saving
irrationality in his acceptance of the Christian revelation and the risen
Christ. This had already taken its most drastic form in the _credo quia
absurdum_ of Tertullian the Latin Father, who was twenty-five years his
senior. Herein one observes the acceptance of the miraculous on principle.
That the great facts of the Christian creed were beyond the proof or
disproof of reason was a principle definitely accepted by all the Fathers.
Further, since all Catholic Christians accepted the Scriptures as revealed
truth, they were obliged to accept many things which their reason,
unaided, might struggle with in vain. Here was a large opportunity, as to
which Christians would act according to their tempers, in emphasizing and
amplifying the authoritative or miraculous, _i.e._ irrational, element.
And besides, outside even of these Scriptural matters and their
interpretations, there would be the general question of the educated
Christian’s interest in the miraculous. Great mental power and devotion to
the construction of dogma by no means precluded a lively interest in this,
as may be seen in that very miraculous life of St. Anthony, written
probably by Athanasius himself. This biography is more preoccupied with
the demoniacal and miraculous than Porphyry’s _Life of Plotinus_; indeed
in this respect it is not outdone by Eunapius’s _Life of Iamblicus_.
Turning to the Latin West, one may compare with them that charming
prototypal Vita Sancti, the _Life of St. Martin_ by Sulpicius Severus.[48]
A glance at these writings shows a similarity of interest with Christian
and Neo-Platonist, and in both is found the same unquestioning acceptance
of the miraculous.
Thus one observes how the supernatural manifestation, the miraculous
event, was admitted and justified on principle in both the Neo-Platonic
and the Christian system. In both, moreover, metaphysical or symbolizing
tendencies had withdrawn attention from a close scrutiny of any fact,
observed, imagined, or reported. With both, the primary value of
historical or physical fact lay in its illumination of general convictions
or accepted principles. And with both, the supernatural fact was the fact
_par excellence_, in that it was the direct manifestation of the divine or
spiritual power.
Iamblicus had announced that man must not be incredulous as to superhuman
beings and their supernatural doings. On the Christian side, there was no
bit of popular credence in miracle or magic mystery, or any notion as to
devils, angels, and departed saints, for which justification could not be
found in the writings of the great Doctors of the Church. These learned
and intellectual men evince different degrees of interest in such matters;
but none stands altogether aloof, or denies _in toto_. No evidence is
needed here. A broad illustration, however, lies in the fact that before
the fourth century the chief Christian rites had become sacramental
mysteries, necessarily miraculous in their nature and their efficacy. This
was true of Baptism; it was more stupendously true of the Eucharist.
Mystically, but none the less really, and above all inevitably, the bread
and wine have miraculously become the body and the blood. The process, one
may say, began with Origen; with Cyril of Jerusalem it is completed;
Gregory of Nyssa regards it as a continuation of the verity of the
Incarnation, and Chrysostom is with him.[49] One pauses to remark that the
relationship between the pagan and Christian mysteries was not one of
causal antecedence so much as one of analogous growth. A pollen of terms
and concepts blew hither and thither, and effected a cross-fertilization
of vigorously growing plants. The life-sap of the Christian mysteries, as
with those of Mithra, was the passion for a symbolism of the unknown and
the inexpressible.
But one must not stop here. The whole Christian Church, as well as
Porphyry and Iamblicus, accepted angels and devils, and recognized their
intervention or interference in human affairs. Then displacing the local
pagan divinities come the saints, and Mary above all. They are honoured,
they are worshipped. Only an Augustine has some gentle warning to utter
against carrying these matters to excess.
In connection with all this, one may notice an illuminating point, or
rather motive. In the third and fourth centuries the common yearning of
the Graeco-Roman world was for an approach to God; it was looking for the
anagogic path, the way up from man and multiplicity to unity and God. An
absorbing interest was taken in the means. Neo-Platonism, the creature of
this time, whatever else it was, was mediatorial, a system of mediation
between man and the Absolute First Principle. Passing halfway over from
paganism to Christianity, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius is
also essentially a system of mediation, which has many affinities (as well
it might!) with the system of Plotinus.[50] Within Catholic Christianity
the great work of Athanasius was to establish Christ’s sole and
all-sufficient mediation. Catholicism was permanently set upon the
mediatorship of Christ, God and man, the one God-man reconciling the
nature which He had veritably, and not seemingly, assumed, to the divine
substance which He had never ceased to be. Athanasius’s struggle for this
principle was bitter and hard-pressed, because within Christianity as well
as without, men were demanding easier and more tangible stages and means
of mediation.
Of such, Catholic Christianity was to recognize a vast multitude, perhaps
not dogmatically as a necessary part of itself; but practically and
universally. Angels, saints, the Virgin over all, are mediators between
man and God. This began to be true at an early period, and was established
before the fourth century.[51] Moreover, every bit of rite and mystery and
miracle, as in paganism, so in Catholicism, was essentially a means of
mediation, a way of bringing the divine principle to bear on man and his
affairs, and so of bringing man within the sphere of the divine
efficiency.
Let us make some further Christian comparisons with our Neo-Platonic
friends Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblicus. As we have adduced Origen, it
would also be easy to find other parallels from the Eastern Church. But as
the purpose is to mark the origin of the intellectual tendencies of the
Western Middle Ages, we may at once draw examples from the Latin Fathers.
For their views set the forms of mediaeval intellectual interests, and for
centuries directed and even limited the mediaeval capacity for
apprehending whatever it was given to the Middle Ages to set themselves to
know. To pass thus from the East to the West is permissible, since the
same pagan cults and modes of thought passed from one boundary of the
Empire to the other. Plotinus himself lived and taught in Rome for the
last twenty-five years of his life, and there wrote his _Enneads_ in
Greek. So on the Christian side, the Catholic Church throughout the East
and West presents a solidarity of development, both as to dogma and
organization, and also as to popular acceptances.
Let us train our attention upon some points of likeness between Plotinus
and St. Augustine. The latter’s teachings contain much Platonism; and with
this greatest of Latin Fathers, who did not read much Greek, Platonism was
inextricably mingled with Neo-Platonism. It is possible to search the
works of Augustine and discover this, that, or the other statement
reflecting Plato or Plotinus.[52] Yet their most interesting effect on
Augustine will not be found in Platonic theorems consciously followed or
abjured by the latter. Platonism was “in the air,” at least was in the air
breathed by an Augustine. Our specific bishop of Hippo knew little of
Plato’s writings. But Plato had lived: his thoughts had influenced many
generations, and in their diffusion had been modified, and had lost many a
specific feature. Thereafter Plotinus had constructed Neo-Platonism; that
too had permeated the minds of many, itself loosened in the process. These
views, these phases of thought and mood, were held or felt by many men,
who may not have known their source. And Augustine was not only part of
all this, but in mind and temper was Platonically inclined. Thus the most
important elements of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in Augustine were his
cognate spiritual mood and his attitude toward the world of physical fact.
Note the personal affinity between Augustine and Plotinus. Both are
absorbed in the higher pointings of their thought; neither is much
occupied with its left-handed relationships, which, however, are by no
means to be disowned. The minds and souls of both are set upon God the
Spirit; the minds and eyes of both are closed to the knowledge of the
natural world. Thus neither Plotinus nor Augustine was much affected by
the popular beliefs of Christianity or paganism. The former cared little
for demon-lore or divination, and was not seriously touched by polytheism.
No more was the latter affected by the worship of saints and relics, or by
other elements of Christian credulity, which when brought to his attention
pass from his mind as quickly as his duties of Christian bishop will
permit.
But it was _half_ otherwise with Porphyry, and altogether otherwise with
Iamblicus. The first of these was drawn, repelled, and tortured by the
common superstitions, especially the magic and theurgy which made men
gape; but Iamblicus gladly sported in these mottled currents. On the
Christian side, Jerome might be compared with them, or a later man, the
last of the Latin Fathers, Gregory the Great. Clear as was the temporal
wisdom of this great pope, and heavy as were his duties during the
troubled times of his pontificate (590-604), still his mind was busy with
the miraculous and diabolic. His mind and temperament have absorbed at
least the fruitage of prior superstitions, whether Christian or pagan need
not be decided. He certainly was not influenced by Iamblicus. Nor need one
look upon these phases of his nature as specifically the result of the
absorption of pagan elements. He and his forebears had but gone the path
of credulity and mortal blindness, thronged by both pagans and Christians.
And so in Gregory the tendencies making for intellectual obliquity do
their perfect work. His religious dualism is strident; his resultant
ascetism is extreme; and finally the symbolical, the allegorical, habit
has shut his mind to the perception of the literal (shall we say, actual)
meaning, when engaged with Scripture, as his great Commentary on Job bears
witness. The same tendencies, but usually in milder type, had shown
themselves with Augustine, who, in these respects, stands to Gregory as
Plotinus to Iamblicus. Augustine can push allegory to absurdity; he can
be ascetic; he is dualistic. But all these things have not barbarized his
mind, as they have Gregory’s.[53] Similarly the elements, which in
Plotinus’s personality were held in innocuous abeyance, dominated the
entire personality of Iamblicus, and made him a high priest of folly.
Thus we have observed the phases of thought which set the intellectual
conditions of the later pagan times, and affected the mental processes of
the Latin Fathers. The matter may be summarized briefly in conclusion.
Platonism had created an intellectual and intelligible world, wherein a
dissolving dialectic turned the cognition of material phenomena into a
reflection of the mind’s ideals. This was more palpable in Neo-Platonism
than it had been in Plato’s system. Stoicism on the other hand represented
a rule of life, the sanction of which was inner peace. Its working
principle was the rightly directed action of the self-controlling will.
Fundamentally ethical, it set itself to frame a corresponding conception
of the universe. Platonism and Neo-Platonism found in material facts
illustrations or symbols of ideal truths and principles of human life.
Stoicism was interested in them as affording a foundation for ethics. None
of these systems was seriously interested in facts apart from their
symbolical exemplification of truth, or their bearing on the conduct of
life; and the same principles that affected the observation of nature were
applied to the interpretation of myth, tradition, and history.
In the opening centuries of the Christian Era the world was becoming less
self-reliant. It was tending to look to authority for its peace of mind.
In religion men not only sought, as formerly, for superhuman aid, but were
reaching outward for what their own rational self-control no longer gave.
They needed not merely to be helped by the gods, but to be sustained and
saved. Consequently, prodigious interest was taken in the means of
bringing man to the divine, and obtaining the saving support which the
gods alone could give. The philosophic thought of the time became palpably
mediatorial. Neo-Platonism was a system of mediation between man and the
Absolute First Principle; and soon its lower phases became occupied with
such palpable means as divination and oracles, magic and theurgy.
The human reason has always proved unable to effect this mediation between
man and God. The higher Neo-Platonism presented as the furthest goal a
supra-rational and ecstatic vision. This was its union with the divine.
The lower Neo-Platonism turned this lofty supra-rationality into a
principle of credulity more and more agape for fascinating or helpful
miracles. Thus a constant looking for divine or demonic action became
characteristic of the pagan intelligence.
The Gospel of Christ, in spreading throughout the pagan world, was certain
to gather to itself the incidents of its apprehension by pagans, and take
various forms, one of which was to become the dominant or Catholic.
Conversely, Christians (and we have in mind the educated people) would
retain their methods of thinking in spite of change in the contents of
their thought. This would be true even of the great and learned Christian
leaders, the Fathers of the Church. At the same time the Faith reinspired
and redirected their energies. Yet (be it repeated for the sake of
emphasis) their mental processes, their ways of apprehending and
appreciating facts, would continue those of that paganism which in them
had changed to Christianity.
Every phase of intellectual tendency just summarized as characteristic of
the pagan world, entered the modes in which the Fathers of the Latin
Church apprehended and built out their new religion. First of all, the
attitude toward knowledge. No pagan philosophy, not Platonism or any
system that came after it, had afforded an incentive for concentration of
desire equal to that presented in the person and the precepts of Jesus.
The desire of the Kingdom of Heaven was a master-motive such as no
previous idealism had offered. It would bring into conformity with itself
not only all the practical considerations of life, but verily the whole
human desire to know. First it mastered the mind of Tertullian; and in
spite of variance and deviation it endured through the Middle Ages as the
controlling principle of intellectual effort. Its decree was this: the
knowledge which men need and should desire is that which will help them
to save and perfect their souls for the Kingdom of God. Some would
interpret this broadly, others narrowly; some would actually be
constrained by it, and others merely do it a polite obeisance. But
acknowledged it was by well-nigh all men, according to their individual
tempers and the varying times in which they lived.
Platonism was an idealistic cosmos; Stoicism a cosmos of subjective ethics
and teleological conceptions of the physical world. The furthest outcome
of both might be represented by Augustine’s cosmos of the soul and God. As
for reasoning processes, inwardly inspired and then applied to the world
of nature and history, Christianity combined the idealizing,
fact-compelling ways of Platonic dialectic with the Stoical interest in
moral edification. And, more utterly than either Platonist or Stoic, the
Christian Father lacked interest in knowledge of the concrete fact for its
own sake. His mental glance was even more oblique than theirs, fixed as it
was upon the moral or spiritual--the anagogic--inference. Of course he
carried symbolism and allegory further than Stoic and Platonist had done,
one reason being that he was impelled by the specific motive of
harmonizing the Old Testament with the Gospel, and thereby proving the
divine mission of Jesus.
Idealism might tend toward dualistic ethics, and issue in asceticism, as
was the tendency in Stoicism and the open result with Plotinus and his
disciples. Such, with mightier power and firmer motive, was the outcome of
Christian ethics, in monasticism. Christianity was not a dualistic
philosophy; but neither was Stoicism nor Neo-Platonism. Yet, like them, it
was burningly dualistic in its warfare against the world, the flesh, and
the devil.
We turn to other but connected matters: salvation, mediatorship, theory
and practice. The need of salvation made men Christians; the God-man was
the one and sufficient mediator between man and God. Such was the high
dogma, established with toil and pain. And the practice graded downward to
mediatorial persons, acts, and things, marvellous, manifold, and utterly
analogous to their pagan kin. The mediatorial persons were the Virgin and
the saints; the sacraments were the magic mediatorial acts; the relic was
the magic mediatorial thing. And, as with Neo-Platonism, there was in
Christianity a principle of supra-rational belief in all these matters. At
the top the revelation of Christ, and the high love of God which He
inspired. This was not set on reason, but above it. And, as with
Neo-Platonism, the supra-rational principle of Christianity was led down
through conduits of credulity, resembling those we have become familiar
with in our descent from Plotinus to Iamblicus.
CHAPTER IV
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE LATIN FATHERS
So it was that the intellectual conditions of the Roman Empire affected
the attitude of the Church Fathers toward knowledge, and determined their
ways of apprehending fact. There was, indeed, scarcely a spiritual
tendency or way of thinking, in the surrounding paganism, that did not
enter their mental processes and make part of their understanding of
Christianity. On the other hand, the militant and polemic position of the
Church in the Empire furnished new interests, opened new fields of effort,
and produced new modes of intellectual energy. And every element emanating
from the pagan environment was, on entering the Christian pale, reinspired
by Christian necessities and brought into a working concord with the
master-motive of the Faith.
Salvation was the master Christian motive. The Gospel of Christ was a
gospel of salvation unto eternal life. It presented itself in the
self-sacrifice of divine love, not without warnings touching its
rejection. It was understood and accepted according to the capacities of
those to whom it was offered, capacities which it should reinspire and
direct anew, and yet not change essentially. The young Christian
communities had to adjust their tempers to the new Faith. They also fell
under the unconscious need of defining it, in order to satisfy their own
intelligence and present it in a valid form to the minds of men as yet
unconverted. Consequently, the new Gospel of Salvation drew the energies
of Christian communities to the work of defining that which they had
accepted, and of establishing its religious and rational validity. The
intellectual interests of these communities were first unified by the
master-motive of salvation, and then ordered and redirected according to
the doctrinal and polemic exigencies of this new Faith precipitated into
the Graeco-Roman world.
The intellectual interests of the Christian Fathers are not to be
classified under categories of desire to know, for the sake of knowledge,
but under categories of desire to be saved, and to that end possess
knowledge in its saving forms. Their desire was less to know, than to know
how--how to be saved and contribute to the salvation of others. Their need
rightly to understand the Faith, define it and maintain it, was of such
drastic power as to force into ancillary rôles every line of inquiry and
intellectual effort. This need inspired those central intellectual labours
of the Fathers which directly made for the Faith’s dogmatic substantiation
and ecclesiastical supremacy; and then it mastered all provinces of
education and inquiry which might seem to possess independent intellectual
interest. They were either to be drawn to its support or discredited as
irrelevant distractions.
This compelling Christian need did not, in fact, impress into its service
the total sum of intellectual interests among Christians. Mortal curiosity
survived, and the love of _belles lettres_. Yet its dominance was real.
The Church Fathers were absorbed in the building up of Christian doctrine
and ecclesiastical authority. The productions of Christian authorship
through the first four centuries were entirely religious, so far as the
extant works bear witness. This is true of both the Greek and the Latin
Fathers, and affords a prodigious proof that the inspiration and the
exigencies of the new religion had drawn into one spiritual vortex the
energies and interests of Christian communities.
Some of the Fathers have left statements of their principles, coupled with
more or less intimate accounts of their own spiritual attitude. Among the
Eastern Christians Origen has already been referred to. With him
Christianity was the sum of knowledge; and his life’s endeavour was to
realize this view by co-ordinating all worthy forms of knowledge within
the scheme of salvation through Christ. His mind was imbued with a vast
desire to know. This he did not derive from Christianity. But his
understanding of Christianity gave him the schematic principle guiding
his inquiries. His aim was to direct his labours with Christianity as an
end--τελικῶς εἰς χριστιανισμόν, as he says so pregnantly. He would use
Greek philosophy as a propaedeutic for Christianity; he would seek from
geometry and astronomy what might serve to explain Scripture; and so with
all branches of learning.[54]
This was the expression of a mind of prodigious energy. For more personal
disclosures we may turn at once to the Latin Fathers. Hilary, Bishop of
Poictiers (d. 367), was a foremost Latin polemicist against the Arians in
the middle of the fourth century. He was born a pagan; and in the
introductory book to his chief work, the _De Trinitate_, he tells how he
turned, with all his intellect and higher aspirations, to the Faith.
Taking a noble view of human nature, he makes bold to say that men usually
spurn the sensual and material, and yearn for a more worthy life. Thus
they have reached patience, temperance, and other virtues, believing that
death is not the end of all. He himself, however, did not rest satisfied
with the pagan religion or the teachings of pagan philosophers; but he
found doctrines to his liking in the books of Moses, and then in the
Gospel of John. It was clear to him that prophecy led up to the revelation
of Jesus Christ, and in that at length he gained a safe harbour. Thus
Hilary explains that his better aspirations had led him on and upward to
the Gospel; and when he had reached that end and unification of spiritual
yearning, it was but natural that it should thenceforth hold the sum of
his intellectual interests.
A like result appears with greater power in Augustine. His _Confessions_
give the mode in which his spiritual progress presented itself to him some
time after he had become a Catholic Christian.[55] His whole life sets
forth the same theme, presenting the religious passion of the man drawing
into itself his energies and interests. God and the Soul--these two would
he know, and these alone. But these alone indeed! As if they did not
embrace all life pointed and updrawn toward its salvation. God was the
overmastering object of intellectual interest and of passionate love. All
knowledge should direct itself toward knowing Him. By grace, within God’s
light and love, was the Soul, knower and lover, expectant of eternal life.
Nothing that was transient could be its chief good, or its good at all
except so far as leading on to its chief good of salvation, life eternal,
in and through the Trinity. One may read Augustine’s self-disclosures or
the passages containing statements of the ultimate religious principles
whereby he and all men should live, or one may proceed to examine his long
life and the vast entire product of his labour. The result will be the
same. His whole strength will be found devoted to the cause of Catholic
Church and Faith; and all his intellectual interests will be seen
converging to that end. He writes nothing save with Catholic religious
purpose; and nothing in any of his writings had interest for the writer
save as it bore upon that central aim. He may be engaged in a great work
of ultimate Christian doctrine, as in his _De Trinitate_; he may be
involved in controversy with Manichean, with Donatist or Pelagian; he may
be offering pastoral instruction, as in his many letters; he may survey,
as in the _Civitas Dei_, the whole range of human life and human
knowledge; but never does his mind really bear away from its
master-motive.
The justification for this centering of human interests and energies lay
in the nature of the _summum bonum_ for man. According to the principles
of the _City of God_, eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death
the supreme evil. Evidently no temporal satisfaction or happiness compares
with the eternal. This is good logic; but it is enforced with arguments
drawn from the Christian temper, which viewed earth as a vale of tears.
The deep Catholic pessimism toward mortal life is Augustine’s in full
measure: “Quis enim sufficit quantovis eloquentiae flumine, vitae hujus
miserias explicare?” Virtue itself, the best of mortal goods, does nothing
here on earth but wage perpetual war with vices. Though man’s life is and
must be social, how filled is it with distress! The saints are blessed
with hope. And mortal good which has not that hope is a false joy and a
great misery. For it lacks the real blessedness of the soul, which is the
true wisdom that directs itself to the end where God shall be all in all
in eternal certitude and perfect peace. Here our peace is with God through
faith; and yet is rather a _solatium miseriae_ than a _gaudium
beatitudinis_, as it will be hereafter. But the end of those who do not
belong to the City of God will be _miseria sempiterna_, which is also
called the second death, since the soul alienated from God cannot be said
to live, nor that body be said to live which is enduring eternal
pains.[56] Augustine devotes a whole book, the twenty-first, to an
exposition of the sempiternal, non-purgatorial, punishment of the damned,
whom the compassionate intercession of the saints will not save, nor many
other considerations which have been deemed eventually saving by the
fondly lenient opinions of men. His views were as dark as those of Gregory
the Great. Only imaginative elaboration was needed to expand them to the
full compass of mediaeval fear.
Augustine brought all intellectual interests into the closure of the
Christian Faith, or discredited whatever stubbornly remained without. He
did the same with ethics. For he transformed the virtues into accord with
his Catholic conception of man’s chief good. That must consist in cleaving
to what is most blessed to cleave to, which is God. To Him we can cleave
only through _dilectio_, _amor_, and _charitas_. Virtue which leads us to
the _vita beata_ is nothing but _summus amor Dei_. So he defines the four
cardinal virtues anew. Temperance is love keeping itself whole and
incorrupt for God; fortitude is love easily bearing all things for God’s
sake; justice is love serving God only, and for that reason rightly ruling
in the other matters, which are subject to man; and prudence is love well
discriminating between what helps and what impedes as to God (_in
deum_).[57] Conversely, the heathen virtues, as the heathen had in fact
conceived them, were vices rather than virtues to Augustine. For they
lacked knowledge of the true God, and therefore were affected with
fundamental ignorance, and were also tainted with pride.[58] Through his
unique power of religious perception, Augustine discerned the
inconsistency between pagan ethics, and the Christian thoughts of divine
grace moving the humbly and lovingly acceptant soul.
The treatise on Christian Doctrine clearly expresses Augustine’s views as
to the value of knowledge. He starts, in his usual way, from a fundamental
principle, which is here the distinction between the use of something for
a purpose and the enjoyment of something in and for itself. “To enjoy is
to cleave fast in the love of a thing for its own sake. But to use is to
employ a thing in obtaining what one loves.” For an illustration he draws
upon that Christian sentiment which from the first had made the Christian
feel as a sojourner on earth.[59]
“It is as if we were sojourners unable to live happily away from our
own country, and we wished to use the means of journeying by land and
sea to end our misery and return to our fatherland, which is to be
enjoyed. But the charm of the journey or the very movement of the
vehicle delighting us, we are taken by a froward sweetness and become
careless of reaching our own country whose sweetness would make us
happy. Now if, journeying through this world, away from God, we wish
to return to our own land where we may be happy, this world must be
used, not enjoyed; that the invisible things of God may be apprehended
through those created things before our eyes, and we may gain the
eternal and spiritual from the corporeal and temporal.”
From this illustration Augustine leaps at once to his final inference that
only the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is to be enjoyed.[60] It
follows as a corollary that the important knowledge for man is that which
will bring him to God surely and for eternity. Such is knowledge of Holy
Writ and its teachings. Other knowledge is valuable as it aids us to this.
Proceeding from this point of view, Augustine speaks more specifically. To
understand Scripture one needs to know the words and also the things
referred to. Knowledge of the latter is useful, because it sheds light on
their figurative significance. For example, to know the serpent’s habit of
presenting its whole body to the assailant, in order to protect its head,
helps to understand our Lord’s command to be wise as serpents, and for the
sake of our Head, which is Christ, present our whole bodies to the
persecutors. Again, the statement that the serpent rids itself of its skin
by squeezing through a narrow hole, accords with the Scriptural injunction
to imitate the serpent’s wisdom, and put off the old man that we may put
on the new, and in a narrow place--Enter ye in at the strait gate, says
the Lord.[61] The writer gives a rule for deciding whether in any instance
a literal or figurative interpretation of Scripture should be employed, a
rule representing a phase of the idealizing way of treating facts which
began with Plato or before him, and through many channels entered the
practice of Christian doctors. “Whatever in the divine word cannot
properly be referred to _morum honestas_ or _fidei veritas_ is to be taken
figuratively. The first pertains to love of God and one’s neighbour; the
second to knowing God and one’s neighbour.”[62]
Augustine then refers to matters of human invention, like the letters of
the alphabet, which are useful to know. History also is well, as it helps
us to understand Scripture; and a knowledge of physical objects will help
us to understand the Scriptural references. Likewise a moderate knowledge
of rhetoric and dialectic enables one the better to understand and expound
Scripture. Some men have made useful vocabularies of the Scriptural Hebrew
and Syriac words and compends of history, which throw light on Scriptural
questions. So, to save Christians from needless labour, I think it would
be well if some one would make a general description of unknown places,
animals, plants and minerals, and other things mentioned in Scripture; and
the same might be done as to the _numbers_ which Scripture uses. These
suggestions were curiously prophetic. Christians were soon to produce just
such compends, as will be seen when noticing the labours of Isidore of
Seville.[63] Augustine speaks sometimes in scorn and sometimes in sorrow
of those who remain ignorant of God, and learn philosophies, or deem that
they achieve something great by curiously examining into that universal
mass of matter which we call the world.[64]
Augustine’s word and his example sufficiently attest the fact that the
Christian Faith constituted the primary intellectual interest with the
Fathers. While not annihilating other activities of the mind, this
dominant interest lowered their dignity by forcing them into a common
subservience. Exerting its manifold energies in defining and building out
the Faith, in protecting it from open attack or insidious corruption, it
drew to its exigencies the whole strength of its votaries. There resulted
the perfected organization of the Catholic Church and the production of a
vast doctrinal literature. The latter may be characterized as constructive
of dogma, theoretically interpretative of Scripture, and polemically
directed against pagans, Jews, heretics or schismatics, as the case might
be.
It was constructive of dogma through the intellectual necessity of
apprehending the Faith in concepts and modes of reasoning accepted as
valid by the Graeco-Roman world. In the dogmatic treatises emanating from
the Hellenic East, the concepts and modes of reasoning were those of the
later phases of Greek philosophy. Prominent examples are the _De
principiis_ of Origen or the _Orationes_ of Athanasius against the Arians.
For the Latin West, Tertullian’s _Adversus Marcionem_ or the treatises of
Hilary and Augustine upon the Trinity serve for examples. The Western
writings are distinguished from their Eastern kin by the entry of the
juristic element, filling them with a mass of conceptions from the Roman
Law.[65] They also develop a more searching psychology. In both of these
respects, Tertullian and Augustine were the great creators.
Secondly, this literature, at least in theory, was interpretative or
expository of Scripture. Undoubtedly Origen and Athanasius and Augustine
approached the Faith with ideas formed from philosophical study and their
own reflections; and their metaphysical and allegorical treatment of
Scripture texts elicited a significance different from the meaning which
we now should draw. Yet Christianity was an authoritatively revealed
religion, and the letter of that revelation was Holy Scripture, to wit,
the gradually formed canon of the Old and New Testaments. If the reasoning
or conclusions which resulted in the Nicene Creed were not just what
Scripture would seem to suggest, at all events they had to be and were
confirmed by Scripture, interpreted, to be sure, under the stress of
controversy and the influence of all that had gone into the intellectual
natures of the Greek and Latin Fathers. And the patristic faculty of
doctrinal exposition, that is, of reasoning constructively along the lines
of Scriptural interpretation, was marvellous. Such a writing as
Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian _De spiritu et littera_ is a striking example.
Moreover, the Faith, which is to say, the Scriptures rightly interpreted,
contained the sum of knowledge needful for salvation, and indeed
everything that men should seek to know. Therefore there was no question
possessing valid claim upon human curiosity which the Scriptures, through
their interpreters, might not be called upon to answer. For example,
Augustine feels obliged to solve through Scriptural interpretation and
inference such an apparently obscure question as that of the different
degrees of knowledge of God possessed by demons and angels.[66] Indeed,
many an unanswerable question had beset the ways by which Augustine
himself and other doctors had reached their spiritual harbourage in
Catholic Christianity. They sought to confirm from Scripture _their_
solutions of their own doubts. At all events, from Scripture they were
obliged to answer other questioners seeking instruction or needing
refutation.[67]
Thirdly, it is too well known to require more than a mere reminder, that
dogmatic treatises commonly were controversial or polemic, directed as
might be against pagans or Jews, or Gnostics or Manicheans, or against
Arians or Montanists or Donatists. Practically all Christian doctrine was
of militant growth, advancing by argumentative denial and then by
counter-formulation.
As already noticed at some length, the later phases of pagan philosophic
inquiry had other motives besides the wish for knowledge. These motives
were connected with man’s social welfare or his relations with
supernatural powers. The Stoical and Epicurean interest in knowledge had a
practical incentive. And Neo-Platonism was a philosophy of saving union
with the divine, rather than an open-minded search for ultimate knowledge.
But no Hellenic or quasi-Romanized philosophy so drastically drew all
subjects of speculation and inquiry within the purview and dominance of a
single motive at once intellectual and emotional as the Christian Faith.
Naturally the surviving intellectual ardour of the Graeco-Roman world
passed into the literature of Christian doctrine. For example, the Faith,
with its master-motive of salvation, drew within its work of militant
formulation and pertinent discussion that round of intellectual interest
and energy which had issued in Neo-Platonism. Likewise such ethical
earnestness as had come down through Stoicism was drawn within the master
Christian energy. And so far as any interest survived in zoology or
physics or astronomy, it also was absorbed in curious Christian endeavours
to educe an edifying conformity between the statements or references of
Scripture and the round of phenomena of the natural world. Then history
likewise passed from heathenism to the service of the Church, and became
polemic narrative, or filled itself with edifying tales, mostly of
miracles.
In fine, no branch of human inquiry or intellectual interest was left
unsubjugated by the dominant motives of the Faith. First of all,
philosophy itself--the general inquiry for final knowledge--no longer had
an independent existence. It had none with Hilary, none with Ambrose, and
none whatsoever with Augustine after he became a Catholic Christian.
Patristic philosophy consisted in the formulation of Christian doctrine,
which in theory was an eliciting of the truth of Scripture. It embodied
the substantial results, or survivals if one will, of Greek philosophy, so
far as it did not controvert and discard them. As for the reasoning
process, the dialectic whereby such results were reached, as
distinguished from the results themselves, that also passed into doctrinal
writings. The great Christian Fathers were masters of it. Augustine
recognized it as a proper tool; but like other tools its value was not in
itself but in its usefulness. As a tool, dialectic, or logic as it has
commonly been called, was to preserve a distinct, if not independent,
existence. Aristotle had devoted to it a group of special treatises.[68]
No one had anything to add to this Organon, or Aristotelian tool, which
was to be preserved in Latin by the Boëthian translations.[69] No attempt
was made to supplant them with Christian treatises.
So it was with elementary education. The grammarians, Servius, Priscianus,
and probably Donatus, were pagans. As far as concerned grammatical and
rhetorical studies, the Fathers had to admit that the best theory and
examples were in pagan writings. It also happened that the book which was
to become the common text-book of the Seven Arts was by a pagan, of
Neo-Platonic views. This was the _De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_, by
Martianus Capella.[70] Possibly some good Christian of the time could have
composed a worse book, or at least one somewhat more deflected from the
natural objects of primary education. But the _De nuptiis_ is
astonishingly poor and dry. The writer was an unintelligent compiler, who
took his matter not from the original sources, but from compilers before
him, Varro above all. Capella talks of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Euclid,
Ptolemy; but if he had ever read them, it was to little profit. Book VI.,
for example, is occupied with “Geometria.” The first part of it is simply
geography; then come nine pages[71] of geometry, consisting of
definitions, with a few axioms; and then, instead of following with
theorems, the maid, who personifies “Geometria,” presents as a bridal
offering the books of Euclid, amid great applause. Had she ever opened
them, one queries. Book VII., “Arithmetica,” is even worse. It begins with
the current foolishness regarding the virtues and interesting qualities of
the first ten numbers: “How shall I commemorate thee, O Seven, always to
be revered, neither begotten like the other numbers, nor procreative, a
virgin even as Minerva?” Capella never is original. From Pythagoras on,
the curiosities of numbers had interested the pagan mind.[72] These
fantasies gained new power and application in the writings of the Fathers.
For them, the numbers used in Scripture had prefigurative significance.
Such notions came to Christianity from its environment, and then took on a
new apologetic purpose. Here an intellect like Augustine’s is no whit
above its fellows. In arguing from Scripture numbers he is at his very
obvious worst.[73] Fortunately the coming time was to have better
treatises, like the _De arithmetica_ of Boëthius, which was quite free
from mysticism. But in Boëthius’s time, as well as before and after him,
it was the allegorical significance of numbers apologetically pointed that
aroused deepest interest.
Astronomy makes one of Capella’s seven _Artes_. His eighth book, a rather
abject compilation, is devoted to it. His matter, of course, is not yet
Christianized. But Christianity was to draw Astronomy into its service;
and the determination of the date of Easter and other Church festivals
became the chief end of what survived of astronomical knowledge.
The patristic attitude toward cosmogony and natural science plainly
appears in the _Hexaëmeron_ of St. Ambrose.[74] This was a commentary on
the first chapters of Genesis, or rather an argumentative exposition of
the Scriptural account of the Creation, primarily directed against those
who asserted that the world was uncreated and eternal. As one turns the
leaves of this writing, it becomes clear that the interest of Ambrose is
always religious, and that his soul is gazing beyond the works of the
Creation to another world. He has no interest in physical phenomena,
which have no laws for him except the will of God.
“To discuss the nature and position of the earth,” says he, “does not
help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what
Scripture states, ‘that He hung up the earth upon nothing’ (Job xxvi.
7). Why then argue whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and
raise a controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or
why, if upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the
bottom?... Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on
even balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law
of His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void.”
The archbishop then explains that God did not fix the earth’s stability as
an artisan would, with compass and level, but as the Omnipotent, by the
might of His command. If we would understand why the earth is unmoved, we
must not try to measure creation as with a compass, but must look to the
will of God: “voluntate Dei immobilis manet et stat in saeculum terra.”
And again Ambrose asks, Why argue as to the elements which make the
heaven? Why trouble oneself with these physical inquiries? “Sufficeth for
our salvation, not such disputation, but the verity of the precepts, not
the acuteness of argument, but the mind’s faith, so that rather than the
creature, we may serve the Creator, who is God blessed forever.”[75]
Thus with Ambrose, the whole creation springs from the immediate working
of God’s inscrutable will. It is all essentially a miracle, like those
which He wrought in after times to aid or save men: they also were but
operations of His will. God said _Fiat lux_, and there was light. Thus His
will creates; and nature is His work (_opus Dei natura est_). And God
said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters; and it was so. “Hear the word, Fiat.
His will is the measure of things; His word ends the work.” The division
of the waters above and beneath the firmament was a work of His will; just
as He divided the waters of the Red Sea before the eyes of the Jews in
order that those things might be believed which the Jews had not seen. He
could have saved them by another means. The fiat of God is nature’s
strength (_virtus_) and the substance of its endurance (_diurnitatis
substantia_) so long as He wishes it to continue where He has appointed
it.[76]
According to this reasoning, the miracle, except for its infrequency, is
in the same category with other occurrences. Here Ambrose is fully
supported by Augustine. With the latter, God is the source of all
causation: He is the cause of usual as well as of extraordinary
occurrences, _i.e._ miracles. The exceptional or extraordinary character
of certain occurrences is what makes them miracles.[77]
Here are fundamental principles of patristic faith. The will of God is the
one cause of all things. It is unsearchable. But we have been taught much
regarding God’s love and compassionateness, and of His desire to edify and
save His people. These qualities prompt His actions toward them. Therefore
we may expect His acts to evince edifying and saving purpose. All the
narratives of Scripture are for our edification. How many mighty saving
acts do they record, from the Creation, onward through the story of
Israel, to the birth and resurrection of Christ! And surely God still
cares for His people. Nor is there any reason to suppose that He has
ceased to edify and save them through signs and wonders. Shall we not
still look for miracles from His grace?
Thus in the nature of Christianity, as a miraculously founded and revealed
religion, lay the ground for expecting miracles, or, at least, for not
deeming them unlikely to occur. And to the same result from all sides
conspired the influences which had been obscuring natural knowledge. We
have followed those influences in pagan circles from Plato on through
Neo-Platonism and other systems current in the first centuries of the
Christian era. We have seen them obliterate rational conceptions of
nature’s processes and destroy the interest that impels to unbiassed
investigation. The character and exigencies of the Faith intensified the
operation of like tendencies among Christians. Their eyes were lifted from
the earth. They were not concerned with its transitory things, soon to be
consumed. Their hope was fixed in the assurance of their Faith; their
minds were set upon its confirmation. They and their Faith seemed to have
no use for a knowledge of earth’s phenomena save as bearing illustrative
or confirmatory testimony to the truth of Scripture. Moreover, the
militant exigencies of their situation made them set excessive store on
the miraculous foundation and continuing confirmation of their religion.
For these reasons the eyes of the Fathers were closed to the natural
world, or at least their vision was affected with an obliquity parallel to
the needs of doctrine. Any veritable physical or natural knowledge rapidly
dwindled among them. What remained continued to exist because explanatory
of Scripture and illustrative of spiritual allegories. To such an
intellectual temper nothing seems impossible, provided it accord, or can
be interpreted to accord, with doctrines elicited from Scripture. Soon
there will cease to exist any natural knowledge sufficient to distinguish
the normal and possible from the impossible and miraculous. One may recall
how little knowledge of the physiology and habits of animals was shown in
Pliny’s _Natural History_.[78] He had not even a rough idea of what was
physiologically possible. Personally, he may or may not have believed that
the bowels of the field-mouse increase in number with the waxing of the
moon; but he had no sufficiently clear appreciation of the causes and
relations of natural phenomena to know that such an idea was absurd. It
was almost an accident, whether he believed it or not. It is safe to say
that neither Ambrose nor Jerome nor Augustine had any clearer
understanding of such things than Pliny. They had read far less about
them, and knew less than he. Pliny, at all events, had no motive for
understanding or presenting natural facts in any other way than as he had
read or been told about them, or perhaps had noticed for himself.
Augustine and Ambrose had a motive. Their sole interest in natural fact
lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth. They were constantly
impelled to understand facts in conformity with their understanding of
Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly. Thus Augustine denies the
existence of Antipodes, men on the opposite side of the earth, who walk
with their feet opposite to our own.[79] That did not harmonize with his
general conception of Scriptural cosmogony.
For the result, one can point to a concrete instance which is typical of
much. In patristic circles the knowledge of the animal kingdom came to be
represented by the curious book called the _Physiologus_. It was a series
of descriptions of animals, probably based on stories current in
Alexandria, and appears to have been put together in Greek early in the
second century. Internal evidence has led to the supposition that it
emanated from Gnostic circles. It soon came into common use among the
Greek and Latin Fathers. Origen draws from it by name. In the West, to
refer only to the fourth and fifth centuries, Ambrose seems to use it
constantly, Jerome occasionally, and also Augustine.
Well known as these stories are, one or two examples may be given to
recall their character: The Lion has three characteristics; as he walks or
runs he brushes his footprints with his tail, so that the hunters may not
track him. This signifies the secrecy of the Incarnation--of the Lion of
the tribe of Judah. Secondly, the Lion sleeps with his eyes open; so slept
the body of Christ upon the Cross, while His Godhead watched at the right
hand of the Father. Thirdly, the Lioness brings forth her cub dead; on the
third day the father comes and roars in its face, and wakes it to life.
This signifies our Lord’s resurrection on the third day.
The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these begin to
grow they strike at their parents’ faces, and the parents strike back and
kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the third day the mother
comes and opens her side and lets the blood flow on the dead young ones,
and they become alive again. Thus God cast off mankind after the Fall, and
delivered them over to death; but He took pity on us, as a mother, for by
the Crucifixion He awoke us with His blood to eternal life.
The _Unicorn_ cannot be taken by hunters, because of his great strength,
but lets himself be captured by a pure virgin. So Christ, mightier than
the heavenly powers, took on humanity in a virgin’s womb.
The Phoenix lives in India, and when five hundred years old fills his
wings with fragrant herbs and flies to Heliopolis, where he commits
himself to the flames in the Temple of the Sun. From his ashes comes a
worm, which the second day becomes a fledgling, and on the third a
full-grown phoenix, who flies away to his old dwelling-place. The Phoenix
is the symbol of Christ; the two wings filled with sweet-smelling herbs
are the Old and New Testaments, full of divine teaching.[80]
These examples illustrate the two general characteristics of the accounts
in the _Physiologus_: they have the same legendary quality whether the
animal is real or fabulous; the subjects are chosen, and the accounts are
shaped, by doctrinal considerations. Indeed, from the first the
_Physiologus_ seems to have been a selection of those animal stories which
lent themselves most readily to theological application. It would be
pointless to distinguish between the actual and fabulous in such a book;
nor did the minds of the readers make any such distinction. For Ambrose or
Augustine the importance of the story lay in its doctrinal significance,
or moral, which was quite careless of the truth of facts of which it was
the “point.” The facts were told as introductory argument.
The interest of the Fathers in physics and natural history bears analogy
to their interest in history and biography. Looking back to classical
times, one finds that historians were led by other motives than the mere
endeavour to ascertain and state the facts. The Homeric Epos was the
literary forerunner of the history which Herodotus wrote of the Persian
Wars; and the latter often was less interested in the closeness of his
facts than in their aptness and rhetorical probability. Doubtless he
followed legends when telling how Greek and Persian spoke or acted. But
had not legend already sifted the chaff of irrelevancy from the story,
leaving the grain of convincing fitness, which is also rhetorical
probability? Likewise, Thucydides, in composing the _History of the
Peloponnesian War_, that masterpiece of reasoned statement, was not
over-anxious as to accuracy of actual word and fact reported. He carefully
inquired regarding the events, in some of which he had been an actor.
Often he knew or ascertained what the chief speakers said in those
dramatic situations which kept arising in this war of neighbours. Yet,
instead of reporting actual words, he gives the sentiments which,
according to the laws of rhetorical probability, they must have uttered.
So he presents the psychology and turning-point of the matter.
This was true historical rhetoric; the historian’s art of setting forth a
situation veritably, by presenting its intrinsic necessities. Xenophon’s
_Cyropaedia_ went a step farther; it was a historical romance, which
neither followed fact nor proceeded according to the necessities of the
actual situation. But it did proceed according to moral proprieties, and
so was edifying and plausible.
The classical Latin practice accorded with the Greek. Cicero speaks of
history as _opus oratorium_, that is, a work having rhetorical and
literary qualities. It should set forth the events and situations
according to their inherent necessities which constitute their rhetorical
truth. Then it should possess the civic and social qualities of good
oratory: morals and public utility. These are, in fact, the
characteristics of the works of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. None of them
troubled himself much over an accuracy of detail irrelevant to his larger
purpose. Tacitus is interested in memorable facts; he would relate them in
such form that they might carry their lesson, and bear their part in the
education of the citizen, for whom it is salutary to study the past. He
condemns, indeed, the historians of the Empire who, under an evil emperor,
lie from fear, and, upon his death, lie from hate. But such condemnation
of immoral lying does not forbid the shaping of a story according to
artistic probability and moral ends. Some shaping and adorning of fact
might be allowed the historian, acting with motives of public policy, or
seeking to glorify or defend his country.[81] This quite accords with the
view of Varro and Cicero, that good policy should sometimes outweigh
truth: whether or not the accounts of the gods were true, it was well for
the people to believe.
Thus the Fathers of the Church were accustomed to a historical tradition
and practice in which facts were presented so as to conduce to worthy
ends. Various motives lie back of human interest in truth. A knowledge of
the world’s origin, of man’s creation, destiny, and relationship to God,
may be sought for its own sake as the highest human good; and yet it may
be also sought for the sake of some ulterior and, to the seeker, more
important end. With the Christian Fathers that more important end was
salvation. To obtain a saving knowledge was the object of their most
strenuous inquiries. Doubtless all men take some pleasure simply in
knowing; and, on the other hand, there are few among wisdom’s most
disinterested lovers that have not some thought of the connection between
knowledge and the other goods of human life, to which it may conduce. Yet
if seekers after knowledge be roughly divided into two classes, those who
wish to know for the sake of knowing, and those who look to another end to
which true knowledge is a means, then the Fathers of the Church fall in
the latter class.
If truth be sought for the sake of something else, why may it not also be
sacrificed? A work of art is achieved by shaping the story for the drama’s
sake, and if we weave fiction to suit the end, why not weave fiction with
fact, or, still better, _see_ the fact in such guise as to suit the
requirements of our purpose? Many are the aspects and relationships of any
fact; its _actuality_ is exhaustless.[82] In how many ways does a human
life present itself? What narrative could exhaust the actuality and
significance of the assassination of Julius Caesar? Indeed, no fact has
such narrow or compelling singleness of significance or actuality that all
its truth can be put in any statement! And again, who is it that can draw
the line between reality and conviction?
It is clear that the limited and special interest taken by the Church
Fathers in physical and historic facts would affect their apprehension of
them. One may ask what was real to Plato in the world of physical
phenomena. At all events, Christian Platonists, like Origen or Gregory of
Nyssa,[83] saw the paramount reality of such phenomena in the spiritual
ideas implicated and evinced by them. The world’s reality would thus be
resolved into the world’s moral or spiritual significance, and in that
case its truth might be educed through moral and allegorical
interpretation. Of course, such an understanding of reality involves hosts
of assumptions which were valid in the fourth century, but are not
commonly accepted now; and chief among them is this very assumption that
the deepest meaning of ancient poets, and the Scriptures above all, is
allegorical.
This is but a central illustration of what would determine the Fathers’
conception of the truth of physical events. Again: the Creation was a
great miracle; its cause, the will of God. The Cause of the Creation was
spiritual, and spiritual was its purpose, to wit, the edification and
salvation of God’s people; the building, preservation, and final
consummation of the City of God. Did not the deepest truth of the matter
lie in this spiritual cause and purpose? And afterwards to what other end
tended all human history? It was one long exemplification of the purpose
of God through the ways of providence. The conception of what constituted
a fitting exemplification of that purpose would control the choice of
facts and shape their presentation. Then what was more natural than that
events should exhibit this purpose, that it might be perceived by the
people of God? It would clearly appear in saving interpositions or
remarkable chronological coincidences. Such, even more palpably than the
other links in the providential chain, were direct manifestations of the
will of God, and were miraculous because of their extraordinary character.
History, made anew through these convictions, became a demonstration of
the truth of Christian doctrine--in other words, _apologetic_.
The most universal and comprehensive example of this was Augustine’s _City
of God_, already adverted to. Its subject was the ways of God with men. It
embraced history, philosophy, and religion. It was the final Christian
apology, and the conclusive proof of Christian doctrine, _adversum
paganos_. To this end Augustine unites the manifold topics which he
discusses; and to this end his apparent digressions eventually return,
bearing their sheaves of corroborative evidence. In no province of inquiry
does his apologetic purpose appear with clearer power than in his
treatment of history, profane and sacred.[84] Through the centuries the
currents of divine purpose are seen to draw into their dual course the
otherwise pointless eddyings of human affairs. Beneath the Providence of
God, a revolving succession of kingdoms fill out the destinies of the
earthly Commonwealth of war and rapine, until the red torrents are pressed
together into the terrestrial greatness of imperial Rome. No power of
heathen gods effected this result, nor all the falsities of pagan
philosophy: but the will of the one true Christian God. The fortunes of
the heavenly City are traced through the prefigurative stories of
antediluvian and patriarchal times, and then on through the prophetic
history of the chosen people, until the end of prophecy appears--Christ
and the Catholic Church.
The _Civitas Dei_ is the crowning example of the drastic power with which
the Church Fathers conformed the data of human understanding into a
substantiation of Catholic Christianity.[85] At the time of its
composition, the Faith needed advocacy in the world. Alaric entered Rome
in 410; and it was to meet the cry of those who would lay that catastrophe
at the Church’s doors that Augustine began the _Civitas Dei_. Soon after,
an ardent young Spaniard named Orosius came on pilgrimage to the great
doctor at Hippo, and finding favour in his eyes, was asked to write a
profane history proving the abundance of calamities which had afflicted
mankind before the time of Christ. So Orosius devoted some years (417-418)
to the compilation of a universal chronicle, using Latin sources, and
calling his work _Seven Books of Histories “adversum paganos.”_[86]
Addressing Augustine in his prologue, he says:
“Thou hast commanded me that as against the vain rhetoric of those
who, aliens to God’s Commonwealth, coming from country cross-roads and
villages are called pagans, because they know earthly things, who seek
not unto the future and ignore the past, yet cry down the present time
as filled with evil, just because Christ is believed and God is
worshipped;--thou hast commanded that I should gather from histories
and annals whatever mighty ills and miseries and terrors there have
been from wars and pestilence, from famine, earthquake, and floods,
from volcanic eruptions, from lightning or from hail, and also from
monstrous crimes in the past centuries; and that I should arrange and
set forth the matter briefly in a book.”
Orosius’s story of the four great Empires--Babylonian, Macedonian,
African, and Roman--makes a red tale of carnage. He deemed “that such
things should be commemorated, in order that with the secret of God’s
ineffable judgments partly laid open, those stupid murmurers at our
Christian times should understand that the one God ordained the fortunes
of Babylon in the beginning, and at the end those of Rome; understand also
that it is through His clemency that we live, although wretchedly because
of our intemperance. Like was the origin of Babylon and Rome, and like
their power, greatness, and their fortunes good and ill; but unlike their
destinies, since Babylon lost her kingdom and Rome keeps hers”; and
Orosius refers to the clemency of the barbarian victors who as Christians
spared Christians.[87]
At the opening of his seventh book he again presents his purpose and
conclusions:
“I think enough evidence has been brought together, to prove that the
one and true God, made known by the Christian Faith, created the world
and His creature as He wished, and that He has ordered and directed it
through many things, of which it has not seen the purpose, and has
ordained it for one event, declared through One; and likewise has made
manifest His power and patience by arguments manifold. Whereat, I
perceive, straitened and anxious minds have stumbled, to think of so
much patience joined to so great power. For, if He was able to create
the world, and establish its peace, and impart to it a knowledge of
His worship and Himself, what was the need of so great and (as they
say) so hurtful patience, exerted to the end that at last, through the
errors, slaughters and the toils of men, there should result what
might rather have arisen in the beginning by His virtue, which you
preach? To whom I can truly reply: the human race from the beginning
was so created and appointed that living under religion with peace
without labour, by the fruit of obedience it might merit eternity; but
it abused the Creator’s goodness, turned liberty into wilful licence,
and through disdain fell into forgetfulness; now the patience of God
is just and doubly just, operating that this disdain might not wholly
ruin those whom He wished to spare, but might be reduced through
labours; and also so that He might always hold out guidance although
to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would mercifully
restore the means of grace.”
Such was the point of view and such the motives of this book, which was to
be _par excellence_ the source of ancient history for the Middle Ages.
But, concerned chiefly with the Gentile nations, Orosius has few palpable
miracles to tell. The miracle lies in God’s _ineffabilis ordinatio_ of
events, and especially in marvellous chronological parallels shown in the
histories of nations, for our edification. Likewise for mediaeval men
these ineffable chronological correspondences (which never existed in
fact) were to be evidence of God’s providential guidance of the world.
Some thirty years after Orosius wrote, a priest of Marseilles, Salvian by
name, composed a different sort of treatise, with a like object of
demonstrating the righteous validity of God’s providential ordering of
affairs, especially in those troubled times of barbarian invasion through
which the Empire then was passing. The book declared its purpose in its
title--_De gubernatione Dei_.[88] Its tenor is further elucidated by the
title bestowed upon it by a contemporary: _De praesenti_ (_Dei_)
_judicio_. It is famous for the pictures (doubtless overwrought) which it
gives of the low state of morals among the Roman provincials, and of the
comparative decency of the barbarians.
These examples sufficiently indicate the broad apologetic purpose in the
patristic writing of history. There was another class of composition,
biographical rather than historical, the object of which was to give
edifying examples of the grace of God working in holy men. The reference,
of course, is to the _Vitae sanctorum_ whose number from the fourth
century onward becomes legion. They set forth the marvellous virtues of
anchorites and their miracles. In the East, the prime example is the
Athanasian Life of Anthony; Jerome also wrote, in Latin, the lives of
Anthony’s forerunner Paulus and of other saints. But for the Latin West
the typical example was the _Life_ of St. Martin of Tours, most popular of
saints, by Sulpicius Severus.
To dub this class of compositions (and there are classes within classes
here) uncritical, credulous, intentionally untruthful, is not warranted
without a preliminary consideration of their purpose. That in general was
to edify; the writer is telling a moral tale, illustrative of God’s grace
in the instances of holy men. But the divine grace is the real matter; the
saint’s life is but the example. God’s grace exists; it operates in this
way. As to the illustrative details of its operation, why be over-anxious
as to their correctness? Only the _vita_ must be interesting, to fix the
reader’s attention, and must be edifying, to improve him. These principles
exerted sometimes a less, sometimes a greater influence; and accordingly,
while perhaps none of the _vitae_ is without pious colouring, as a class
they range from fairly trustworthy biographies to vehicles of edifying
myth.[89]
Miracles are never lacking. The _vita_ commonly was drawn less from
personal knowledge than from report or tradition. Report grows passing
from mouth to mouth, and is enlarged with illustrative incidents. Since no
disbelief blocked the acceptance of miracles, their growth outstripped
that of the other elements of the story, because they interested the most
people. Yet there was little originality, and the _vitae_ constantly
reproduced like incidents. Especially, Biblical prototypes were followed,
as one sees in the _Dialogi_ of Gregory the Great, telling of the career
of St. Benedict of Nursia. The Pope finds that the great founder of
western monasticism performed many of the miracles ascribed to Scriptural
characters.[90] Herein we see the working of suggestion and imitation upon
a “legend”; but Gregory found rather an additional wonder-striking
feature, that God not only had wrought miracles through Benedict, but in
His ineffable wisdom had chosen to conform the saint’s deeds to the
pattern of Scriptural prototypes. And so, in the _Vitae sanctorum_, the
joinder of suggestion and the will to believe literally worked marvels.
Usually the Fathers of the Church were as interested in miracles as the
uneducated laity. Ambrose, the great Archbishop of Milan, writes a long
letter to his sister Marcellina upon finding the relics of certain
martyrs, and the miracles wrought by this treasure-trove.[91] As for
Jerome, of course, he is very open-minded, and none too careful in his own
accounts. His passion for the relics of the saints appears in his polemic
_Contra Vigilantium_. What interest, either in the writing or the hearing,
would men have taken in a hermit desert life that was bare of miracles?
The desert and the forest solitude have always been full of wonders. In
Jerome’s Lives of Paulus and Hilarion, the romantic and picturesque
elements consist exclusively in the miraculous. And again, how could any
one devote himself to the cult of an almost contemporary saint or the
worship of a martyr, and not find abundant miracles? Sulpicius Severus
wrote the _Vita_ of St. Martin while the saint was still alive; and there
would have been no reason for the worship of St. Felix, carried on through
years by Paulinus of Nola, if Felix’s relics had not had saving power. It
was to this charming tender of the dead, afterwards beatified as St.
Paulinus of Nola,[92] that Augustine addressed his moderating treatise on
these matters, entitled _De cura pro mortuis_. He can see no advantage in
burying a body close to a martyr’s tomb unless in order to stimulate the
prayers of the living. How the martyrs help us surpasses my understanding,
says the writer; but it is known that they do help. Very few were as
critical as the Bishop of Hippo; and all men recognized the efficacy of
prayers to the martyred saints, and the magic power of their relics.
Having said so much of the intellectual obliquities of the Church Fathers,
it were well to dwell a moment on their power. Their inspiration was the
Christian Faith, working within them and bending their strength to its
call. Their mental energies conformed to their understanding of the Faith
and their interpretation of its Scriptural presentation. Their achievement
was Catholic Christianity consisting in the union of two complements,
ecclesiastical organization and the complete and consistent organism of
doctrine. Here, in fact, two living organisms were united as body and
soul. Each was fitted to the other, and neither could have existed alone.
In their union they were to prove unequalled in history for coherence and
efficiency. Great then was the energy and intellectual power of the men
who constructed Church and doctrine. Great was Paul; great was Tertullian;
great were Origen, Athanasius, and the Greek Gregories. Great also were
those Latin Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine their
last and greatest, who finally completed Church and doctrine for
transmission to the Middle Ages--the doctrine, however, destined to be
re-adjusted as to emphasis, and barbarized in character by him whose mind
at least is patristically recreative, but whose soul is mediaeval,
Gregorius Magnus.[93]
CHAPTER V
LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT
For the Latin West the creative patristic epoch closes with the death of
Augustine. There follows a period marked by the cessation of intellectual
originality. Men are engaged upon translations from the Greek; they are
busy commenting upon older writings, or are expounding with a change of
emphasis the systematic constructions of their predecessors. Epitomes and
compendia appear, simplified and mechanical abstracts of the bare elements
of inherited knowledge and current education. Compilations are made, put
together of excerpts taken unshriven and unshorn into the compiler’s
writing. Knowledge is brought down to a more barbaric level. Yet
temperament lingers for a while, and still appears in the results.
The representatives of this post-patristic period of translation, comment,
and compendium, and of re-expression with temperamental change of
emphasis, are the two contemporaries, Boëthius and Cassiodorus; then
Gregory the Great, who became pope soon after Cassiodorus closed his eyes
at the age of ninety or more; and, lastly, Isidore, Archbishop of Seville,
who died in 636, twenty-two years after Gregory. All these were Latin
bred, and belonged to the Roman world rather than to those new peoples
whose barbarism was hastening the disruption of a decadent order, but
whose recently converted zeal was soon to help on the further diffusion of
Latin Christianity. They appear as transmitters of antique and patristic
thought; because, originating little, they put together matter congenial
to their own lowering intellectual predilections, and therefore suitable
mental pabulum for times of mingled decadence and barbarism, and also for
the following periods of mediaeval re-emergence which continued to hark
back to the obvious and the easy.
Instead of _transmitters_, a word indicating function, one might call
these men _intermediaries_, and so indicate their position as well as
rôle. Both words, however, should be taken relatively. For all the Fathers
heretofore considered were in some sense transmitters or intermediaries,
even though creative in their work of systematizing, adding to, or
otherwise transforming their matter. Yet one would not dub Augustine a
transmitter, because he was far more of a remaker or creator. But a dark
refashioner indeed will Gregory the Great appear; while Boëthius,
Cassiodorus, Isidore are rather sheer transmitters, or intermediaries, the
last-named worthy destined to be the most popular of them all, through his
unerring faculty of selecting for his compilations the foolish and the
flat.
Among them, Boëthius alone was attached to the antique by affinity of
sentiment and temper. Although doubtless a professing Christian, his
sentiments were those of pagan philosophy. The _De consolatione
philosophiae_, which comes to us as his very self, is a work of eclectic
pagan moralizing, fused to a personal unity by the author’s artistic and
emotional nature, then deeply stirred by his imprisonment and peril. He
had enjoyed the favour of the great Ostrogoth, Theodoric, ruler of Italy,
but now was fallen under suspicion, and had been put in prison, where he
was executed in the year 525 at the age of forty-three. His book moves all
readers by its controlled and noble pathos, rendered more appealing
through the romantic interest surrounding its composition. It became _par
excellence_ the mediaeval source of such ethical precept and consolation
as might be drawn from rational self-control and acquiescence in the ways
of Providence. But at present we are concerned with the range of
Boëthius’s intellectual interests and his labours for the transmission of
learning. He was an antique-minded man, whose love of knowledge did not
revolve around “salvation,” the patristic focus of intellectual effort.
Rather he was moved by an ardent wish to place before his Latin
contemporaries what was best in the classic education and philosophy. He
is first of all a translator from Greek to Latin, and, secondly, a helpful
commentator on the works which he translates.
He was little over twenty years of age when he wrote his first work, the
_De arithmetica_.[94] It was a free translation of the _Arithmetic_ of
Nichomachus, a Neo-Pythagorean who flourished about the year 100.
Boëthius’s work opens with a dedicatory _Praefatio_ to his father-in-law
Symmachus. In that and in the first chapter he evinces a broad conception
of education, and shows that lovers of wisdom should not despise
arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the fourfold path or
_quadrivium_, a word which he may have been the first to use in this
sense.[95] With him arithmetic treats of quantity in and by itself; music,
of quantity related to measure; geometry, of moveless, and astronomy, of
moving, quantity. He was a better Greek scholar than mathematician; and
his free translation ignores some of the finer points of Nichomachus’s
work, which would have impressed one better versed in mathematics.[96]
The young scholar followed up his maiden work with a treatise on Music,
showing a knowledge of Greek harmonics. Then came a _De geometria_, in
which the writer draws from Euclid as well as from the practical knowledge
of Roman surveyors.[97] He composed or translated other works on
elementary branches of education, as appears from a royal letter written
by Cassiodorus in the name of Theodoric: “In your translations Pythagoras
the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nichomachus the arithmetician,
Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and
Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the
mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.”[98] Making all
allowance for politeness, this letter indicates the large accomplishment
of Boëthius, who was but twenty-five years old when it was written. We
turn to the commentated Aristotelian translations which he now
undertook.[99] “Although the duties of the consular office[100] prevent
the bestowal of our time upon these studies, it still seems a proper part
of our care for the Republic to instruct its citizens in the learning
which is gained by the labours of the lamp. Since the valour of a bygone
time brought dominion over other cities to this one Republic, I shall not
merit ill of my countrymen if I shall have instructed the manners of our
State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”[101] These sentences open the second
book of Boëthius’s translation of the _Categories_ of Aristotle. His plan
of work enlarged, apparently, and grew more definite, as the years passed,
each adding its quota of accomplishment. At all events, some time
afterwards, when he may have been not far from thirty-five, he speaks in
the flush of an intellectual anticipation which the many years of labour
still to be counted on seemed to justify:
“Labour ennobles the human race and completes it with the fruits of
genius; but idleness deadens the mind. Not experience, but ignorance,
of labour turns us from it. For what man who has made trial of labour
has ever forsaken it? And the power of the mind lies in keeping the
mind tense; to unstring it is to ruin it. My fixed intention, if the
potent favour of the deity will so grant, is (although others have
laboured in this field, yet not with satisfactory method) to translate
into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes to my hand, and furnish
it with a Latin commentary. Thus I may present, well ordered and
illustrated with the light of comment, whatever subtilty of logic’s
art, whatever weight of moral experience, and whatever insight into
natural truth, may be gathered from Aristotle. And I mean to translate
all the dialogues of Plato, or reduce them in my commentary to a Latin
form. Having accomplished this, I shall not have despised the opinions
of Aristotle and Plato if I evoke a certain concord between them and
show in how many things of importance for philosophy they agree--if
only life and leisure last. But now let us return to our
subject.”[102]
One sees a veritable love of intellectual labour and a love of the
resulting mental increment. It is distinctly the antique, not the
patristic, attitude towards interests of the mind. In spite of his unhappy
sixth century way of writing, and the mental fallings away indicated by
it, Boëthius possessed the old pagan spirit, and shows indeed how tastes
might differ in the sixth century. He never translated the whole of
Aristotle and Plato; and his idea of reconciling the two evinces the
shallow eclectic spirit of the closing pagan times. Nevertheless, he
carried out his purpose to the extent of rendering into Latin, with
abundant comment, the entire _Organon_, that is, all the logical writings
of Aristotle. First of all, and with elaborate explanation, he rendered
Porphyry’s famous Introduction to the _Categories_ of the Master. Then the
_Categories_ themselves, likewise with abundant explanation. Then
Aristotle’s _De interpretatione_, in two editions, the first with simple
comment suited to beginners, the second with the best elaboration of
formal logic that he could devise or compile.[103] These elementary
portions of the _Organon_, as transmitted in the Boëthian translations,
made the logical discipline of the mediaeval schools until the latter part
of the twelfth century. He translated also Aristotle’s _Prior_ and
_Posterior Analytics_, the _Topics_, and the _Sophistical Elenchi_. But
such advanced treatises were beyond the requirements of the early
mediaeval centuries. With the lessening of intellectual energy they passed
into oblivion, to re-emerge only when called for by the livelier mental
activities of a later time.
The list of Boëthius’s works is not yet exhausted, for he wrote some minor
logical treatises, and a voluminous commentary on Cicero’s _Topica_. He
was probably the author of certain Christian theological tracts,
themselves less famous than the controversy which long has raged as to
their authorship.[104] If he wrote them, he did but make polite obeisance
to the ruling intellectual preoccupations of the time.
Boëthius’s commentaries reproduced the comments of other
commentators,[105] and he presents merely the logical processes of
thought. But these, analyzed and tabulated, were just the parts of
philosophy to be seized by a period whose lack of mental originality was
rapidly lowering to a barbaric frame of mind. The logical works of
Boëthius were formal, pedantic, even mechanical. They necessarily
presented the method rather than the substance of philosophic truth. But
their study would exercise the mind, and they were peculiarly adapted to
serve as discipline for the coming centuries, which could not become
progressive until they had mastered their antique inheritance, including
this chief method of presenting the elemental forms of truth.
The “life and leisure” of Boëthius were cut off by his untimely death.
Cassiodorus, although a year or two older, outlived him by half a century.
He was born at Squillace, a Calabrian town which looks out south-easterly
over the little gulf bearing the same name. His father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather had been generals and high officials. He himself served
for forty years under Theodoric and his successors, and at last became
praetorian praefect, the chief office in the Gothic Roman kingdom.[106]
Through his birth, his education, his long official career, and perhaps
his pliancy, he belonged to both Goths and Romans, and like the great king
whom he first served, stood for a policy of reconcilement and assimilation
of the two peoples, and also for tolerance as between Arian and Catholic.
Some years after Theodoric’s death, when the Gothic kingdom had passed
through internecine struggles and seemed at last to have fallen before the
skill of Belisarius, Cassiodorus forsook the troubles of the world. He
retired to his birthplace Squillace, and there in propitious situations
founded a pleasant cloister for coenobites and an austerer hermitage for
those who would lead lives of arduous seclusion. For himself, he chose the
former. It was the year of grace 540, three years before the death of
Benedict of Nursia. Cassiodorus was past sixty. In retiring from the world
he followed the instinct of his time, yet temperately and with an
increment of wisdom. For he was the first influential man to recognize the
fitness of the cloister for the labours of the pious student and copyist.
It is not too much to regard him as the inaugurator of the learned,
compiling, commenting and transcribing functions of monasticism. Not only
as a patron, but through his own works, he was here a leader. His writings
composed after his retirement represent the intellectual interests of
western monasticism in the last half of the sixth century. They indicate
the round of study proper for monks; just the grammar, the orthography,
and other elementary branches which they might know; just the history with
which it behoved them to be acquainted; and then, outbulking all the rest,
those Scriptural studies to which they might well devote their lives for
the sake of their own and others’ souls.
In passing these writings in review, it is unnecessary to pause over the
interesting collection of letters--_Variae epistolae_--which were the
fruit of Cassiodorus’s official life, before he shut the convent’s outer
door against the toils of office. He “edited” them near the close of his
public career. Before that ended he had made a wretched _Chronicon_,
carelessly and none too honestly compiled. He had also written his Gothic
History, a far better work. It survives only in the compend of the
ignorant Jordanes, a fact the like of which will be found repeatedly
recurring in the sixth and following centuries, when a barbaric mentality
continually prefers
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