CHAPTER X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE APPROPRIATION OF THE PATRISTIC AND ANTIQUE With the conversion of Teuton peoples and their introduction to the Latin culture accompanying the new religion, the factors of mediaeval development came at last into conjunction. The mediaeval development was to issue from their combined action, rather than from the singular nature of any one of them.[237] Taking up the introductory theme concerning the meeting of these forces, we followed the Latinizing of the West resulting from the expansion of the Roman Republic, which represents the political and social preparation of the field. Then we considered the antique pagan gospel of philosophy and letters, which had quickened this Latin civilization and was to form the spiritual environment of patristic Christianity. Next in order we observed the intellectual interests of the Latin Fathers, and then turned to the great Latin transmitters of the somewhat amalgamated antique and patristic material—BoËthius, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville—who gathered what they might, and did much to reduce the same to decadent forms, suited to the barbaric understanding. Then the course of the barbaric disruption of the Empire was reviewed; and this led to a consideration of the qualities and circumstances of the Celts and Teutons, both those who to all appearances had been Latinized, and those who took active part in the barbarization and disruption of the Roman order. And finally we closed these introductory, though essential, chapters by tracing the ways in which Christianity, with the now humbled and degraded antique culture, was presented to this renewed and largely Teutonic barbarism. Having now reached the epoch of conjunction of the various elements of the mediaeval evolution, it lies before us to consider the first stage in the action of true mediaeval conditions upon the two chief spiritual forces, the first stage, in other words, of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The period is what is called Carlovingian or Carolingian, after the great ruler Charlemagne. Intellectually considered, it may be said to have begun when Charles palpably evinced his interest in sacred and liberal studies by calling Alcuin and other scholars to his Court about the year 781. Let us note the political and social situation. The Merovingian kingdom created by Clovis and his house has been spoken of.[238] One may properly refer to it in the singular, although frequently, instead of one, there were several kingdoms, since upon the death of a Merovingian monarch his realm was divided among his sons. But no true son of the house could leave the others unconquered or unmurdered; and therefore if the Merovingian kingdom constantly was divided, it also tended to coalesce again, coerced to unity. Constituted both of Roman and Teutonic elements, it operated as a mediating power between Latin Christendom and barbaric heathendom. Its energies were great, and were not waning when its royal house was passing into insignificance before the power of the nobles and the chief personage among them who had become the major domus (“Mayor of the palace”) and virtual ruler. Moreover, experience, contact with Latin civilization, membership in the Roman Catholic Church, were informing the Merovingian energies. They were becoming just a little less barbarous and a little more instructed; in fine, were changing from Merovingian to Carolingian. In the latter part of the seventh century, Pippin, called “of Heristal,” ruled as major domus (as one or more of his ancestors before him) in Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. Many were his wars, especially with the Neustrian or western Frankish kingdom, under its major domus, Ebroin. This somewhat unconquerable man at last was murdered, and one of the two Merovingian kings being murdered likewise, Pippin about the year 688 became princeps regiminis ac major domus for the now united realm. From this date the Merovingians are but shadow kings, whose names are not worth recording. Pippin’s rule marks the advent of his house to virtual sovereignty, and also the passing of the preponderance of power from Neustria to Austrasia. These two facts became clear after Pippin’s death (714), when his redoubtable son Charles in a five years’ struggle against great odds made himself sole major domus, and with his Austrasians overwhelmed the Neustrian army. Thenceforth this Charles, called Martell the Hammer, mightily prevailed, smiting Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemanni, and, after much warfare in the south with Saracens, at last vindicated the Cross against the Crescent at Tours in 732. Nine years longer he was to reign, increasing his power to the end, and supporting the establishment of Catholicism in Frisia, by the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, and in heathen German lands by St. Boniface.[239] He died in 741, dividing what virtually was his realm between his sons Carloman and Pippin: the former receiving Austrasia, Alemannia, Thuringia; the latter, Neustria, Burgundy, Provence. These two sons valiantly took up their task, reforming the Church under the inspiration of Boniface, and ruling their domains without conflict with each other until 747, when Carloman retired and became a monk, leaving the entire realm to Pippin. The latter in 751 at Soissons, with universal approval and the consent of the Pope, was crowned king, and anointed by the hand of Boniface. This able and energetic sovereign pursued the course of his father and grandfather, but on still larger scale; aiding the popes and reducing the Lombard power in Italy, carrying on wars around the borders of his realm, bringing Aquitania to full submission, and expelling the Saracens from Narbonne and other fortress towns. In 768 he died, again dividing his vast realm between his two sons Carloman and Charles.These bore each other little love; but fortunately the former died (771) before an open breach occurred. So Charles was left to rule alone, and prove himself, all things considered, the greatest of mediaeval sovereigns. Having fought his many wars of conquest and subjugation against Saracens, Saxons, Avars, Bavarians, Slavs, Danes, Lombards; having conquered much of Italy and freed the Pope from neighbouring domination; having been crowned and anointed emperor in the year 800; having restored letters, uplifted the Church, issued much wise legislation, and Christianized with iron hand the stubborn heathen; and above all, having administered his vast realm with never-failing energy, he died in 814—just one hundred years after the time when his grandfather Charles was left to fight so doughtily for life and power. Poetry and history have conspired to raise the fame of Charlemagne. In more than one chanson de geste, the old French ÉpopÉe has put his name where that of Pippin, Charles Martell, or perhaps that of some Merovingian should have been.[240] Sober history has not thus falsified its matter, and yet has over-dramatized the incidents of its hero’s reign. For example, every schoolboy has been told of the embassy to Charlemagne from Harun al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. But not so many schoolboys know that Pippin had sent an embassy to a previous caliph, which was courteously entertained for three years in Bagdad;[241] and Pippin, like his son, received embassies from the Greek emperor. The careers of Charles Martell and Pippin have not been ignored; and yet historical convention has focused its attention and its phrases upon “the age of Charlemagne.” One should not forget that this exceedingly great man stood upon the shoulders of the great men to whose achievement he succeeded. Neither politically, socially, intellectually, nor geographically[242] was there discontinuity or break or sudden change between the Merovingian and the Carolingian periods.[243] The character of the monarchy was scarcely affected by the substitution of the house of Pippin of Heristal for the house of Clovis. The baleful custom of dividing the realm upon a monarch’s death survived; but Fortune rendered it innocuous through one strong century, during which (719-814) the realm was free from internecine war, while the tossing streams of humanity were driven onward by three great successive rulers. The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government throughout the realm was administered by Counts. Likewise the famous missi dominici, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and, finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. He elaborately defined their functions in a famous Capitulary of the year 802. It was set forth that the emperor had chosen these legates from among his best and greatest (ex optimatibus suis), and had authorized them to receive the new oaths of allegiance, and supervise the observance of the laws, the execution of justice, the maintenance of the military and fiscal rights of the emperor. They were given power to see that the permanent functionaries (the counts and their subordinates) duly administered the law as written or recognized. The missi had jurisdiction over ecclesiastical as well as lay officials; and many of them were entrusted with special powers and duties in the particular instance. Thus Charlemagne developed the functions of these ancient officers. Likewise his Court and royal council, the synods and assemblies of his reign, the military service, modes of holding land, methods of collecting revenue, were not greatly changed from Merovingian prototypes. Yet the old institutions had been renewed and bettered. A vast misjoined and unrelated realm was galvanized into temporary unity. And, most impressive and portentous thing of all, an Empire—the Holy Roman Empire—was resurrected for a time in fact and verity: the same was destined to endure in endeavour and contemplation. So there was no break politically or socially between the Carolingian Empire and its antecedents, which had made it possible. Likewise there was no discontinuity spiritually and intellectually between the earlier time and that epoch which begins with Charlemagne’s first endeavours to restore knowledge, and extends through the ninth and, if one will, even the tenth century.[244] Western Europe (except Scandinavia) had become nominally Christian, and had been made acquainted with Latin education to the extent indicated in the preceding chapter, the purpose of which was to tell how Christianity and the antique culture were brought to the northern peoples. The present chapter, on the other hand, seeks to describe how the eighth and ninth centuries proceeded to learn and consider and react upon this newly introduced Christianity and antique culture, out of which the spiritual destinies of the Middle Ages were to be forged. The task of Carolingian scholars was to learn what had been brought to them. They scarcely excelled even the later intermediaries through whom this knowledge had been transmitted. One need not look among them for better scholarship than was possessed by Bede, who died in 735, the birth year of Alcuin who drew so much from him, and was to be the chief luminary of the palace school of Charlemagne. Undoubtedly, Charlemagne’s exertions caused a revival of sacred and profane studies through the region of the present France and Rhenish Germany. His primary motive was the purification and extension of Catholic Christianity. Here Charles Martell and Pippin (with his brother Carloman) had done much, as their support of Boniface bears witness to. But Charlemagne’s efforts went beyond those of his predecessors. More clearly than they he understood the need of education, and he was himself intensely interested in knowledge. Hence his endeavours, primarily to uplift the Faith, brought a revival of learning and a literary productivity, consisting mostly in reproduction or rearrangement of old material, doctrinal or profane.[245] Another preliminary consideration may help us to appreciate the intellectual qualities of the period before us. Charlemagne was primarily a ruler in the largest sense, conqueror, statesman, law-giver, one who realized the needs of the time, and met or forestalled them. His monarchy, with its powers inherited, as well as radiating from his own personality, provided an imperial government for western Europe. The chief activities of this ruler and his epoch were practical, to wit, political and military. In laws, in institutions, and in deeds, he and his Empire represent creativeness and progress; although, to be sure, that conglomerate empire of his had itself to fall in pieces before there could take place a more lasting and national evolution of States. And, of course, Carolingian political creativeness included the conservation of existing social, political, and, above all, ecclesiastical, institutions. In fine, this period was creative and progressive in its practical energies. The factors were the pressing needs and palpable opportunities, which were met or availed of. And to the same effective treatment of problems ecclesiastical and doctrinal was due the modicum of originality in the Carolingian literature. Aside from this, the period’s intellectual accomplishment, in religious as well as secular studies, shows merely a diligent learning and imitation of pagan letters, and a rehandling and arrangement of the work of the Church Fathers and their immediate successors. Its efforts were exhausted in rearranging the heritage of Christian teaching coming from the Church Fathers, or in endeavours to acquire the transmitted antique culture and imitate the antique in phrase and metre. The combined task, or occupation, absorbed the minds of men. The whole period was at school, where it needed to be: at school to the Church Fathers, at school to the transmitters of antique culture. Its task was one of adjustment of its materials to itself, and of itself to its materials. The reinvigoration of studies marking the life-time of Charlemagne did not extend to Italy, where letters, although decayed, had never ceased, nor to Anglo-Saxon England, where Bede had taught and whence Alcuin had come. The revival radiated, one may say, from the palace school attached to the Court, which had its least intermittent domicile at Aix-la-Chapelle. It extended to the chief monastic centres of Gaul and Germany, and to cathedral schools where such existed. From many lands scholars were drawn by that great hand so generous in giving, so mighty to protect. Some came on invitation more or less compelling, and many of their own free will. The first and most famous of them all was the Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin of York. Charles first saw him at Parma in the year 781, and ever after kept him in his service as his most trusted teacher and director of studies. Love of home drew Alcuin back, once at least, to England. In 796 Charles permitted him to leave the Court, and entrusted him with the re-establishment of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours and its schools. There he lived and laboured till his death in 804. Another scholar was Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, who seems to have shared with Alcuin the honourable task of instructing the king. Of greater note was Paulus Diaconus, who, like Alcuin himself, was to sigh for the pious or scholarly quiet which the seething, half-barbarous, and loose-mannered Court did not afford. Paulus at last gained Charles’s consent to retire to Monte Cassino. He was of the Lombard race, like another favourite of Charles, Paulinus of Aquileia. From Spain, apparently, came Theodulphus, by descent a Goth, and reputed the most elegant Latin versifier of his time. Charles made him Bishop of Orleans. A little later, Einhart the Frank appears, who was to be the emperor’s secretary and biographer. Likewise came certain sons of Erin, among them such a problematic poet as he who styled himself “Hibernicus Exul”—not the first or last of his line! These belonged to the generation about the emperor. Belonging to the next generation, and for the most part pupils of the older men, were Abbot Smaragdus, grammarian and didactic writer; the German, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and, against his will, Archbishop of Mainz, an encyclopaedic excerpter and educator, primus praeceptor Germaniae; his pupil was Walafrid Strabo, the cleverest putter-together of the excerpt commentary, and a pleasing poet. In Lorraine at the same time flourished the Irishman, Sedulius Scotus, and in the West that ardent classical scholar, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of FerriÈres, and Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, a man practical and hard-headed, with whom one may couple Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the opponent of relic-worship. One might also mention those theological controversialists, Radbertus Paschasius and Ratramnus, Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, and Gottschalk, the unhappy monk, ever recalcitrant; at the end John Scotus Eriugena should stand, the somewhat too intellectual Neo-Platonic Irishman, translator of Pseudo-Dionysius, and announcer of various rationalizing propositions for which men were to look on him askance. There will be occasion to speak more particularly of a number of these men. They were all scholars, and interested in the maintenance of elementary Latin education as well as in theology. They wished to write good Latin, and sometimes tried for a classical standard, as Einhart did in his Vita Caroli. Few of them refrained from verse, for they were addicted to metrical compositions made of borrowed classic phrase and often of reflected classic sentiment, sometimes prettily composed, but usually insipid, and in the mass, which was great, exceptionally uninspired. Such metrical effort, quite as much as Einhart’s consciously classicizing Latin prose, represents a survival of the antique excited to recrudescence in forms which, if they were not classical, at least had not become anything else. Stylistically, and perhaps temperamentally, it represented the ending of what had nearly passed away, rather than the beginning of the more organic development which was to come.[246] Among these men, Alcuin and Rabanus broadly represent at once the intellectual interests of the period and the first stage in the process of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The affectionate and sympathetic personality of the former[247] appears throughout his voluminous correspondence with Charles and others, which shows, among other matters, the interest of the time in elementary points of Latinity, and the alertness of the mind of the great king, who put so many questions to his genial instructor upon grammar, astronomy, and such like knowledge. An examination of the works of Alcuin will indicate the range and character of the educational and more usual intellectual interests of the epoch. In fact, they are outlined in a simple fashion suited to youthful minds in his treatise upon Grammar.[248] Its opening colloquy presents a sort of programme and justification of elementary secular studies. “We have heard you saying,” begins Discipulus, “that philosophy is the teacher (magistra) of all virtues, and that she alone of secular riches has never left the possessor miserable. Lend a hand, good Master,”—and the pupil becomes self-deprecatory. “Flint has fire within, which comes out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out.”“It is easy,” responds the Master, “to show you wisdom’s path, if only you will pursue it for the sake of God, for the sake of the soul’s purity and to learn the truth, and also for its own sake, and not for human praise and honour.” We confess, answers little Discipulus, that we love happiness, but know not whether it can exist in this world. And the dialogue rambles on in discursive comment upon the superiority of the lasting over the transitory, with some feeble echoing of notes from BoËthius’s De consolatione. There is talk to show that man, a rational animal, the image of his Creator, and immortal in his better part, should seek what is truly of himself, and not what is alien, the abiding and not the fugitive. In fine, one should adorn the soul, which is eternal, with wisdom, the soul’s true lasting dignity. There is some coy demurring over the steepness of the way; but the pupil is ardent, and the Master confident that with the aid of Divine Grace they will ascend the seven grades of philosophy, by which philosophers have gained honour brighter than that of kings, and the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs. “Through these paths, dearest son, let your youth run its daily course, until its completed years and strengthened mind shall attain to the heights of the Holy Scriptures upon which you and your like shall become armed defenders of the Faith and invincible assertors of its truth.” This means, of course, that the Liberal Arts are the proper preparation for the study of Scripture, that is, theology. But Alcuin’s discourse seems to tarry with those studies as if detained by some love of them for their own sake. The body of this treatise is in form a disputation between two youthful pupils, a Frank and a Saxon. A Magister makes a third interlocutor, and sets the subject of the argument. These personae discuss letters and syllables in definitions taken from Donatus, Priscian, or Isidore; and whenever Alcuin permits any one of them to stray from the words of those authorities, the language shows at once his own confused ideas regarding the parts of speech. He uses terms without adequately comprehending them, and thus affords one of the myriad examples of how, under decadent or barbarized conditions, phrases may outlive an intelligent understanding of their meaning. “Grammar,” says the Magister, when solicited to define it, “is the science of letters, and the guardian of correct speech and writing. It rests on nature, reason, authority, and custom.” “In how many species is it divided?” “In twenty-six: words, letters, syllables, clauses, dictions, speeches, definitions, feet, accent, punctuation, signs, spelling, analogies, etymologies, glosses, differences, barbarism, solecism, faults, metaplasm, schemata, tropes, prose, metre, fables and histories.”[249] The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called Etymology. Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony, some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters, contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education or philosophy. And if that higher culture to which such pupils are introduced be in part decadent, it will itself contain disparities between the stronger thinking held in the surviving writings of a prior time and the later degeneracies which are declining to the level, it may be, of these new learners. There would naturally be disparities in the mental processes of an Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin introduced to the debris of Latin education and the writings of the Fathers; and his state would typify the character of the studies at the palace school of Charlemagne and at monastic schools through his northern realm. This newly stimulated scholarship held the same disparities that appear in the writings of Alcuin. He may seem to be adapting his teaching to barbaric needs, but it is evident that his matter accords with his own intellectual tastes, as, for example, when he introduces into his educational writings the habit of riddling in metaphors, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon.[250] The sound but very elementary portions of his teaching were needed by the ignorance of his scholars. For instance, no information regarding Latin orthography could come amiss in the eighth century. And Alcuin in his treatise on that subject[251] took many words commonly misspelled and contrasted them with those which sounded like them, but were quite different in meaning and derivation. One should not, for example, confuse habeo with abeo; or bibo and vivo. Such warnings were valuable. The use of the vulgar Romance-forms of Latin spoken through a large part of Charles’s dominions implied no knowledge of correct Latinity. Even among the clergy, there was almost universal ignorance of Latin orthography and grammar. As a companion to his Grammar and Orthography, Alcuin composed a De rhetorica et virtutibus,[252] in the form of a dialogue between Charles and himself. The king desired such instruction to equip him for the civil disputes (civiles quaestiones) which were brought before him from all parts of his realm. And Alcuin proceeded to furnish him with a compend of the scientia bene dicendi, which is Rhetoric. This crude epitome was based chiefly on Cicero’s De inventione, but indicates a use of other of his oratorical writings, and has bits here and there which apparently have filtered through from the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Some illustrations are taken from Scripture. The work is most successful in showing the difference between Cicero and Alcuin. The genius, the spirit, the art of the great orator’s treatises are lost; a naked skeleton of statement remains. We have words, terms, definitions, even rules; and Alcuin is not conscious that beyond them there is the living spirit of discourse. A more complete descent from substance to a clatter of words and definitions is exhibited by Alcuin’s De dialectica.[253] In logical studies facilis descensus! Others had illustrated this before him. His treatise is again a dialogue, with Charlemagne for questioner. Opening with the stock definitions and divisions of philosophy, it arrives at logic, which is composed (as Isidore and Cassiodorus said) of dialectic and rhetoric, “the shut and open fist,” a simile which had come down from Varro. Says Charles: “What are the species of dialectic?” Answers Alcuin: “Five principal ones: Isagogae, categories, forms of syllogisms and definitions, topics, periermeniae.” What a classification! Introductions, categories, syllogisms, topics, De interpretatione-s! It is not a classification but in reality an enumeration of the treatises which had served as sources for those men from whom Alcuin drew! Evidently this excerpter is not really thinking in the terms and categories of his subject. His work shows no intelligence beyond Isidore’s, from whose Etymologies it is largely taken. And the genius of our author for metaphysics may be perceived from the definition which he offers Charles of substance—substantia or usia (i.e. ??s?a): it is that which is discerned by corporeal sense; while accidens is that which changes frequently and is apprehended by the mind. Substantia is the underlying, the subjacens, in which the accidentia are said to be.[254] One observes the crassness and inconsistency of these statements. There are illustrations of the knowledge and methods shown in the educational writings of the man who, next to Charles himself, was the guiding spirit of the intellectual revival. No mention has been made of those of his works that were representative of the chief intellectual labour of the period—that of exploiting the Patristic material. Here Alcuin contributed a compend of Augustine’s doctrines on the Trinity,[255] and a book on the Vices and Virtues, drawn chiefly from Augustine’s sermons.[256] Like most of his learned contemporaries, he also compiled Commentaries upon Scripture, the method of which is prettily told in a prefatory epistle placed by him before his Commentary on the Gospel of John, and addressed to two pious women: “Devoutly searching the pantries of the holy Fathers, I let you taste whatever I have been able to find in them. Nor did I deem it fitting to cull the blossoms from any meadow of my own, but with humble heart and head bowed low, to search through the flowering fields of many Fathers, and thus safely satisfy your pious pleasure. First of all I seek the suffrage of Saint Augustine, who laboured with such zeal upon this Gospel; then I draw something from the tracts of the most holy doctor Saint Ambrose; nor have I neglected the homilies of Father Gregory the pope, or those of the blessed Bede, nor, in fact, the works of others of the holy Fathers. I have cited their interpretations, as I found them, preferring to use their meanings and their words, than trust to my own presumption.”[257] In the next generation, a most industrious compiler of such Commentaries was Alcuin’s pupil, Rabanus Maurus.[258] More deeply learned than his master, his conception of the purposes of study has not changed essentially. Like Alcuin, he sets forth a proper intellectual programme for the instruction of the clergy: “The foundation, the state, and the perfection, of wisdom is knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.” The Seven Arts are the ancillary disciplinae; the first three constitute that grammatical, rhetorical, and logical training which is needed for an understanding of the holy texts and their interpretation. Likewise arithmetic and the rest of the quadrivium have place in the cleric’s education. A knowledge of pagan philosophy need not be avoided: “The philosophers, especially the Platonists, if perchance they have spoken truths accordant with our faith, are not to be shunned, but their truths appropriated, as from unjust possessors.”[259] And Rabanus continues with the never-failing metaphor of Moses despoiling the Egyptians. Raban, however, had somewhat larger thoughts of education than his master. For example, he takes a broader view of grammar, which he regards as the scientia of interpreting the poets and historians, and the ratio of correct speech and writing.[260] Likewise he treats Dialectica more seriously. With him it is the “disciplina of rational investigation, of defining and discussing, and distinguishing the true from the false. It is therefore the disciplina disciplinarum. It teaches how to teach and how to learn; in this same study, reason itself demonstrates what it is and what it wills. This art alone knows how to know, and is willing and able to make knowers. Reasoning in it, we learn what we are, and whence, and also to know Creator and creature; through it we trace truth and detect falsity, we argue and discover what is consequent and what inconsequent, what is contrary to the nature of things, what is true, what is probable, and what is intrinsically false in disputations. Wherefore the clergy ought to know this noble art, and have its laws in constant meditation, so that subtly they may discern the wiles of heretics, and confute their poisoned sayings with the conclusions of the syllogism.”[261] This somewhat extravagant but not novel view of logic’s function was prophetic of the coming scholastic reliance upon it as the means and instrument of truth. Rabanus had no hesitancy in commending this edged tool to his pupils. But the operations of his mind were predominantly Carolingian, which is to say that ninety-nine per cent of the contents of his opera consist of material extracted from prior writers. His Commentaries upon Scripture outbulk all his other works taken together, and are compiled in this manner. So is his encyclopaedic compilation, De universo libri XXII.,[262] two books more than those of Isidore’s Etymologies, from which he chiefly drew; but he changed the arrangement, and devoted a larger part of his parchment to religious topics; and he added further matter gleaned from the Church Fathers, from whom he had drawn his Commentaries. This further matter consisted of the mystical interpretations of things, which he subjoined to their “natural” explanations. He says, in his Praefatio, addressed to King Louis: “Much is set forth in this work concerning the natures of things and the meanings of words, and also as to the mystical signification of things. Accordingly I have arranged my matter so that the reader may find the historical and mystical explanations of each thing set together—continuatim positam; and may be able to satisfy his desire to know both significations.” These allegorical elaborations accorded with the habits of this compiler of allegorical comment upon Scripture.[263] Rabanus was a full Teutonic personality, a massive scholar for his time, untiring in labour and intrinsically honest. Except when involved in the foolishness of the mystic qualities of numbers, or following the will-o’-wisps of allegory, he evinces much sound wisdom. He abhors the pretence of teaching what one has not first diligently learned; and his good sense is shown in his admonition to teachers to use words which their pupils or audience will understand. His views upon profane knowledge were liberal: one should use the treasured experience and accumulated wisdom of the ancients, for that is still the mainstay of human society; but one should shun their vain as well as pernicious idolatries and superstitions.[264] Let us by all means preserve their sound educational learning and the elements of their philosophy which accord with the verities of Christian doctrine. Raban also realized the sublimity of the study of Astronomy, which he deemed “a worthy argument for the religious and a torment for the curious. If pursued with chaste and sober mind, it floods our thoughts with immense love. How admirable to mount the heavens in spirit, and with inquiring reason consider that whole celestial fabric, and from every side gather in the mind’s reflective heights what those vast recesses veil.”[265] He then rebukes the folly of those who vainly would draw auguries from the stars.[266] Raban’s mental activities were commonly constrained by the need felt by him and his pious contemporaries to master the works of the Latin Fathers. Perhaps more than any other one man (though here his pupil Walafrid Strabo made a skilful second) he contributed to what necessarily was the first stage in this mediaeval achievement of appropriating patristic Christianity, to wit, the preliminary task of rearranging the doctrinal expositions of the Fathers conveniently, and for the most part in Commentaries following verse and chapter of the canonical books of Scripture. But, like many of his contemporaries, Raban, when compelled by controversial exigencies, would think for himself if the situation could not be met with matter taken from a Father. Accordingly, individual and personal views are vigorously put in some of his writings, as in his Liber de oblatione puerorum,[267] directed against the attempt of the interesting Saxon, Gottschalk, to free himself from the vows made by those who dedicated him in boyhood as an oblatus at the monastery of Fulda, of which Raban was abbot. Raban’s tract maintained that the monastic vows made upon such dedication of children could not be broken by the latter on reaching years of discretion. This same Gottschalk was the centre of the storm, which he indeed blew up, over Predestination; and again Raban was his fierce opponent. This controversy, with that relating to the Eucharist, will serve to illustrate the doctrinal interests of the time, and also to exemplify the quasi-originality of its controversial productions. Of course Predestination and the Eucharist had been exhaustively discussed by the Latin Fathers. No man of the ninth century could really add anything to the arguments touching the former set forth in the works of Augustine and his Pelagian adversaries. And the substance of the discussion as to the eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ had permeated countless tomes, both Greek and Latin, from the time of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. 202); and yet neither as to the impossible topic of Predestination, nor as to the distinctly Christian mystery of the Eucharist, had the Latin Church authoritatively and finally fixed doctrine in dogma or put together the arguments. The ninth century with its lack of elastic thinking, and its greater need of tangible authority, was compelled by its mental limitations to attempt in each of these matters to drag a definite conclusion from out of its entourage of argument, and strip it of its decently veiling obscurities. Thereupon, and with its justifying and balanced foundation of reasons and considerations knocked from under, the conclusion had to sustain itself in mid air, just at the level of the common eye. Such, obviously, was the result of the Eucharistic or Paschal controversy. The symbol, all indecision brushed away, hardened into the tangible miraculous reality. Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, who was so rightly named Paschasius, was the chief agent in the process. His method of procedure, just as the result which he obtained, was what the time required. The method was almost a bit of creation in itself: he put the matter in a separate monograph, De corpore et sanguine Domini,[268] the first work exclusively devoted to the subject. This was needed as a matter of arrangement and presentation. Men could not endure to look here and thither among many books on many subjects, for arguments one way and the other. That was too distraught. There was call for a compendium, a manual of the matter; and in providing it Paschasius was a master mechanic for his time. Inevitably the discussion and the conclusion took on a new definiteness. It is impossible to glean and gather arguments and matter from all sides, and bring them together into a single composition, without making the thesis more organic, tangible, definite. Thus Paschasius presented the scattered, wavering discussion—the victorious side of it—as a clear dogma reached at last. And whatever qualification of counter-doctrine there was in his grouped arguments, there was none in the conclusion; and the definite conclusion was what men wanted. And practically for the whole western Church, clergy and laity, the conclusion was but one, and accorded with what was already the current acceptance of the matter. Radbert’s arguments embraced the spiritual realism of Augustine, according to which the ultra reality of the eucharistic elements consisted in the virtus sacramenti, that is in their miraculous and real, but invisible, transformation into the veritable substance of Christ’s veritable body. This took place through priestly consecration, and existed only for believers. For the brute to eat the elements was nothing more than to consume other similar natural substances. For the misbeliever it was not so simple. He indeed ate not Christ’s body, but his own judicium, his own deeper damnation. Here lay the terror, which made more anxious, more poignant, the believer’s hope, that he was faithful and humbled, and was eating the veritable Christ-body to his sure salvation. For the Eucharist could not fail, though the partaker might. Out of all of this emerged the one clear thing, the point, the practical conclusion, which was transubstantiation, though the word was not yet made. Here it is in Paschasius; says he: “That body and blood veritably come into existence (fiat) by the consecration of the Mystery, no one doubts who believes the divine words; hence Truth says, ‘For my flesh verily is food, and my blood verily is drink’ (John vi. 55). And that it should be clearer to the disciples who did not rightly understand of what flesh He spoke, or of what blood, He added, to make this plain, ‘Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me and I in him’ (ibid. 56). Therefore, if it is veritably food, it is veritable flesh; and if it is veritably drink, it also is veritable blood. Otherwise how could He have said, ‘The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world’ (ibid. 52)?” Could anything be more positive and simplified? At first sight it is a marvel how Paschasius, even though treading in the steps of so many who had gone before, could give a literal interpretation to words which Christ seems to have used as figuratively as when He said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” A marvel indeed, when we think that Paschasius and all of his generation, as well as those who went before, had abandoned themselves to the most wonderful and far-fetched allegorical interpretations of every historical and literal statement in the Scriptures. And this same Paschasius, and all the rest too, do not hesitate to interpret and explain by allegory the significance of every accompanying act and circumstance of the mass. This might seem the climax of the marvel, but it is a step toward explaining it. For the literal interpretation of the phrases which Paschasius quotes was followed for the sake of the more absolute miracle, the deeper mystery, the fuller florescence of encompassing allegorical meaning. Only thus could be brought about the transformation of the palpable symbol into the miraculous reality; and only then could that bread and wine be what Cyril of Alexandria and others, five hundred years before Paschasius, had called it: “the drug of immortality.” Only through the miraculous and real identity of the elements of the Eucharist with the body and blood of Christ could they save the souls of the partakers. In partial disagreement with these hard and fast conclusions, Ratramnus, also of Corbie,[269] and others might still try to veil the matter, with utterances capable of more equivocal meaning; might try to make it all more dim, and therefore more possibly reasonable. That was not what the Carolingian time, or the centuries to come, wanted; but rather the definite tangible statement, which they could grasp as readily as they could see and touch the elements before their eyes. In disenveloping the question and conclusion from every wavering consideration and veiling ambiguity, the Carolingian period was creative in this Paschal controversy. New propositions were not devised; but the old, such of them as fitted, were put together and given the unity and force of a projectile. It was the same and yet different with the Predestination strife. Gottschalk, who raised the storm, stated doctrines of Augustine. But he set them out naked and alone, with nothing else as counterpoise, as Augustine had not done. Thus to draw a single doctrine out from the totality of a man’s work and the demonstrative suggestiveness of all the rest of his teachings, whether that man be Paul or Augustine, is to present it so as to make it something else. For thereby it is left naked and alone, and unadjusted with the connected and mitigating considerations yielded by the rest of the man’s opinions. Such a procedure is a garbling, at least in spirit. It is almost like quoting the first half of a sentence and leaving off everything following the author’s “but” in the middle of it. At all events the hard and fast, complete and twin (gemina), divine predestination, unto hell as well as heaven, was too unmitigated for the Carolingian Church. This doctrine, and his own intractible temper, immured the unhappy announcer of it in a monastic dungeon till he died. It was monstrous, as monstrous as transubstantiation, for example! But transubstantiation saved; and while the Church could stand the doctrine of the election of the Elect to salvation, it revolted from the counter-inference, of the election of the damned to hell, which contradicted too drastically the sweet and lovely teaching that Christ died for all. The theologians of one and more generations were drawn into the strife, which was to have a less definitive result than the Paschal controversy. Even to-day the adjustment of human free-will with omnipotent foreknowledge has not been made quite clear.[270] There was one man who was drawn into the Predestination strife, although for him it lacked cardinal import. For the Neo-Platonic principles of John Scotus Eriugena scarcely permitted him to see in evil more than non-existence, and led him to trace all phases of reality downward from the primal Source. His intellectual attitude, interests, and faculties were exceptional, and yet nevertheless partook of the characteristics of his time, out of which not even an Eriugena could lift himself. He was an Irishman, who came to the Court of Charles the Bald on invitation, and for many years, until his orthodoxy became too suspect, was the head of the palace school. He may have died about the year 877. Eriugena was in the first place a man of learning, widely read in the works of the Greek Fathers. From the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius and other sources, he had absorbed huge draughts of Neo-Platonism. One must not think of him always as an original thinker. A large part of his literary labours correspond with those of contemporaries. He was a translator of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, for he knew Greek. Then he composed or compiled Commentaries upon those writings. He cared supremely for the fruits of those faculties with which he was pre-eminently endowed. He, the man of acquisitive powers, loved learning; and he, the man with a faculty of constructive reason, loved rational truth and the labour of its systematic and syllogistic presentation. He ascribed primal validity to what was true by force of logic, and in his soul set reason above authority. Certain of his contemporaries, with a discernment springing from repugnance, perceived his self-reliant intellectual mood. The same ground underlay their detestation, which centuries after underlay St. Bernard’s, for Abaelard. That Abaelard should deem himself to be something! here was the root of the saint’s abhorrence. And, similarly, good Deacon Florus of Lyons wrote a vituperative polemic quite as much against the man Eriugena as against his detestable views of Predestination. Eriugena, forsooth, would be disputing with human argument, which he draws from philosophy, and for which he would be accountable to none. He proffers no authority from the Fathers, “as if daring to define with his own presumption what should be held and followed.”[271] Such was not the way that Carolingian Churchmen liked to argue, but rather with attested sentences from Augustine or Gregory. Manifestly Eriugena was not one of them. Had his works been earlier understood, they would have been earlier condemned. But people did not realize what sort of Neo-Platonic, pantheistic and emanational, principles this Irishman from over the sea was setting forth. St. Denis, the great saint who was becoming St. Denis of France, had been authoritatively (and most preposterously) identified with Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, and, according to the growing legend, won a martyr’s crown not far from Paris. This was set forth in his Life by Abbot Hilduin;[272] this was confirmed by Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, who said, closing his discussion of the matter: “veritas saepius agitata magis splendescit in lucem!”[273] Eriugena seemed to be a translator of his holy writings, and might be regarded as a setter forth of his exceptionally resplendent truths. He could use the Fathers’ language too. So in his book on Predestination he quotes Augustine as saying, Philosophy, which is the study of wisdom, is not other than religion.[274] But he was not going to keep meaning what Augustine meant. He slowly extends his talons in the following sentences which do not stand at the beginning of his great work De divisione naturae. Says the Magister, for the work is in dialogue form: “You are aware, I suppose, that what is prior by nature is of greater dignity than what is prior in time.” Answers Discipulus: “This is known to almost all.” Continues Magister: “We learn that reason is prior by nature, but authority prior in time. For although nature was created at the same moment with time, authority did not begin with the beginning of time and nature. But reason sprang with nature and time from the beginning of things.” Discipulus clenches the matter: “Reason itself teaches this. Authority sometimes proceeds from reason; but reason never from authority. For all authority which is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it is stablished in its own strength, needs to be strengthened by the assent of no authority.”[275] No doubt of the talons here! Reason superior to authority—is it not also prior to faith? Eriugena does not press that reversal of the Christian position. But his De divisione naturae was a reasoned construction, although of course the materials were not his own. It was no loosely compiled encyclopaedia, such as Isidore or Bede or Rabanus would have presented under such a title. It did not describe every object in nature known to the writer; but it discussed Nature metaphysically, and presented its lengthy exposition as a long argument in linked syllogistic form. Yet it respected its borrowed materials, and preserved their characteristics—with the exception of Scripture, which Eriugena recognized as supreme authority! That he interpreted figuratively of course; so had every one else done. But he differed from other commentators and from the Church Fathers, in degree if not in kind. For his interpretation was a systematic moulding of Scriptural phrase to suit his system. He transformed the meaning with as clear a purpose as once Philo of Alexandria had done. The pre-Christian Jew changed the Pentateuch—holding fast, of course, to its authority!—into a Platonic philosophy; and so, likewise by figurative interpretations, Eriugena turned Scripture into a semi-Christianized Neo-Platonic scheme.[276] The logical nature of the man was strong within him, so strong, indeed, that in its working it could not but present all topics as component parts of a syllogistic and systematized philosophy.[277] If he borrowed his materials, he also made them his own with power. He appears as the one man of his time that really could build with the material received from the past. Even beyond the range of such acute theological polemics as we have been considering, the pressing exigencies of political or ecclesiastical controversy might cause a capable man to think for himself even in the ninth century. Such a man was Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the foe of image and relic-worship, and of other superstitions too crass for one who was a follower of Augustine.[278] And another such a one even more palpably was Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (d. 840), a brave and energetic man, clear-seeing and enlightened, and incessantly occupied with questions of living interest, to which his nature responded more quickly than to theologic lore. Absorbed in the affairs of his diocese, of the Church at large, and of the Empire, he expresses views which he has made his own. Practical issues, operating upon his mind, evoked a personal originality of treatment. His writings are clear illustrations of the originality which actual issues aroused in the Carolingian epoch. They were directed against common superstitions and degraded religious opinion, or against the Jews whose aggressive prosperity in the south of France disturbed him; or they were political. In fine, they were the fruit of the living issue. For example, his so often-cited pamphlet, “Against the silly opinion of the crowd as to hail and thunder,”[279] was doubtless called forth by the intolerable conditions stated in the first sentence: “In these parts almost all men, noble and common, city folk and country folk, old and young, think that hail storms and thunder can be brought about at the pleasure of men. People say when they hear thunder and see lightning ‘Aura levatitia est.’ When asked what aura levatitia may be, some are ashamed or conscience-stricken, while others, with the boldness of ignorance, assert that the air is raised (levata) by the incantations of men called Tempestarii, and so is called ‘raised air.’” Agobard does not marshal physical explanations against this folly, but texts of Scripture showing that God alone can raise and lay the storms. Perhaps he thought such texts the best arguments for those who needed any. The manner of the writing is reasonable, and the reader perceives that the clear-headed archbishop, apart from his Scriptural arguments, deemed these notions ridiculous, as well as harmful.[280] In like spirit Agobard argued against trials by combat and ordeal. Undoubtedly, God might thus announce His righteous judgment, but one should not expect to elicit it in modes so opposed to justice and Scripture; again, he cites many texts while also considering the matter rationally.[281] On the other hand, his book against image-worship is made up of extracts from Augustine and other Church authorities. There was no call for originality here, when the subject seemed to have been so exhaustively and authoritatively treated.[282] One cannot follow Agobard so comfortably in his rancorous tracts against the Jews. Doubtless this subject also presented itself to him as an exigency requiring handling, and he was just in his contention that heathen slaves belonging to Jews might be converted and baptized, and then should not be given back to their former masters, but a money equivalent be made instead. The question was important from its frequency. Yet one would be loath to approve his arguments, unoriginal as they are. He gives currency to the common slanders against the Jews, and then at great length cites passages from the Church Fathers, to show in what detestation they held that people. Then he sets forth the abominable opinions of the hated race, and ransacks Scripture to prove that the Jews are therein authoritatively and incontestably condemned.[283] The years of Agobard’s maturity belong to the troubled time which came with the accession of the incompetent Louis, in 814, to the throne of his father Charlemagne. In the contentions and wars that followed, Agobard proved himself an apt political partisan and writer. His political tracts, notwithstanding their constant citation of Scripture, are his own, and evince an originality evoked by the situation which they were written to influence.Something of the originality which the pressing political exigency imparted to these tracts of Agobard might be transmitted to such history as was occupied with contemporary events. As long as the historian was a mere excerpting chronicler extracting his dry summaries from the writings of former men, his work would not rouse him to independence of conception or presentation. That would have come with criticism upon the old authorities. But criticism had scarcely begun to murmur among the Carolingians, too absorbed with the task of grasping their inherited material to weigh it, and too overawed by the authority of the past to question the truth of its transmitted statements. Excerpts, however, could not be made to tell the stirring events of the period in which the Carolingian historian lived. He would have to set forth his own perception and understanding of them, and in manner and language which to a less or greater extent were his own: to a less extent with those feebly beginning Annals, or Year-books, which set down the occurrences of cloister life or the larger happenings of which the report penetrated from the outer world;[284] to a greater extent, however, with a more veritable history of some topic of living and coherent interest. In the latter case the writer must present his conception of events, and therewith something of himself.[285] An example of this necessitated originality in the writing of contemporary history is the work of Count Nithard. He was the son of Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha and of Angilbert, the emperor’s counsellor and lifelong friend. His parents were not man and wife, because Charles would not let his daughters marry, from reasons of policy; but the relationship between them was open, and apparently approved by the lady’s sire. Angilbert studied in the palace school with Charlemagne, and became himself a writer of Latin verse. He was often his sovereign’s ambassador, and continued active in affairs until his closing years, when he became the lay-abbot of a rich monastery in Picardy, and received his emperor and virtual father-in-law as his guest. He died the same year with Charles. Like his father, Nithard was educated at the palace school, perhaps with his cousin who was to become Charles the Bald. His loyalty continued staunch to that king, whose tried confidant he became. He was a diplomatist and a military leader in the wars following the death of Louis the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his side the story of the strife among the sons of Louis, in “four books of histories” as they grew to be.[286] Involved with his king in that same hurricane (eodem turbine) he describes those stormy times which they were fighting out together even while he was writing. This man of action could not but present himself, his views, his temperament, in narrating the events he moved in. Throughout, one perceives the pen of the participant, in this case an honest partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous narrative of this noble Frank partakes of the originality which inheres in the writings of men of action when their literary faculty is sufficient to enable them to put themselves into their compositions. Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or scholarly interests of the Carolingian period, we should not forget how slender in numbers were the men who promoted them, and how few were the places where they throve. There was the central group of open-minded laymen and Churchmen about the palace school, or following the Court in its journeyings, which were far and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centres of education as at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst that period’s vast encompassing ignorance. To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests according to topics would have been misleading, since that would have introduced a fictitious element of individual preference and aptitude, as if the Carolingian scholar of his spontaneous volition occupied himself with mathematical studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and learning from such books as Isidore’s Origines, which handled all topics indiscriminately, or from Bede, or from the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every topic did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the relationship between the soul and God, and the soul’s way to salvation. What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of all, for the elements of their primary education, their studies in the Seven Arts. They did what they might with Grammar and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which sometimes was Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important mental discipline. The four branches of the quadrivium were pursued more casually. Knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (one may throw in medicine as a fifth) was as it might be in the individual instance—always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more. All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation, if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include. It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on the better pagan philosophy for illustration and rational corroboration, so far as that did corroborate. When it did not, it was pernicious falsity. So Christian piety viewed the matter. But the pious commonly have their temporal fancies, sweet as stolen fruit. These Carolingian scholars, the man in orders and the man without, studied the Latin poets, historians, and orators. And in their imaginative or poetic moods, as they followed classic metre, so they reproduced classic phrase and sentiment in their verses. The men who made such—it might be Alcuin, or Theodulphus, or Walafrid Strabo—chose what they would as the subject of their poems; but the presentation took form and phrase from Virgil and other old poets. The antique influence so strong in the Carolingian period, included much more than matters of elegant culture, like poetry and art, or even rhetoric and grammar. It held the accumulated experience in law and institution, which still made part of the basis of civic life. Rabanus Maurus recognized it thus broadly. And, thus largely taken, the antique survives in the Carolingian time as a co-ordinate dominant, with Latin Christianity. Neither, as yet, was affected by the solvent processes of transmutation into new human faculty and power. None the less, this same antique survival was destined to pass into modes and forms belonging quite as much to the Middle Ages as to antiquity; and, thus recast, it was to become a broadening and informing element in the mediaeval personality. Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been transmitted to the Carolingian time, to be then and there not only conned and studied, but also rearranged by these painful students, so that they and their successors might the better comprehend it. It was not for them to change the patristic forms organically, by converting them into the modes of mediaeval understanding of the same. These would be devised, or rather achieved, by later men, living in centuries when the patristic heritage of doctrine, long held and cherished, had permeated the whole spiritual natures of mediaeval men and women, and had been itself transmuted in what it had transformed.
CHAPTER XI MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY 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. I The Empire of Charlemagne could not last. Two obvious causes, among others, were enough to prevent it. No single government (save when temporarily energized by some extraordinary ruler) could control such enormous and widely separated regions, which included much of the present Germany and Austria, the greater part of Italy, France, and the Low Countries. Large portions of this Empire were almost trackless, and nowhere were there good roads and means of transportation. Then, as the second cause, within these diverse and ununited lands dwelt or moved many peoples differing from each other in blood and language, in conditions of life and degrees of civilization or barbarism. No power existed that could either hold them in subjection or make them into proper constituents of an Empire.[287] There were other, more particular, causes of dissolution: the Frankish custom of partitioning the realm brought war between Louis the Pious and his sons, and then among the latter; no scion of the Carolingian house was equal to the situation; under the ensuing turbulence, the royal power weakened, and local protection, or oppression, took its place; constant war exhausted the strength of the Empire, and particularly of Austrasia, while from without Norsemen, Slavs, and Saracens were attacking, invading, plundering everywhere. These marauders still were heathen, or obstinate followers of the Prophet; while Christianity was the bond of unity and empire. Charlemagne and his strong predecessors had been able thus to view and use the Church; but the weaker successors, beginning with Louis the Pious, too eager for the Church’s aid and condonation, found their subservience as a reed that broke and pierced the hand. These causes quickly brought about the Empire’s actual dissolution. On the other hand, a potent conception had been revived in western Europe. Louis the Pious, himself made emperor in Charlemagne’s lifetime, associated his eldest son with him as co-emperor, and made his two younger sons kings, hoping thus to preserve the Empire’s unity. If that unity forthwith became a name, it was a name to conjure with; and the corresponding imperial fact was to be again made actual by the first Saxon Otto, a man worthy to reach back across the years and clasp the hand of the great Charles. That intervening century and a half preceding the year 962 when Otto was crowned emperor, carried political and social changes. To the West, in the old Neustrian kingdom which was to form the nucleus of mediaeval France, the Carolingian line ran out in degenerates surnamed the Pious, the Bald, the Stammerer, the Simple, and the Fat. The Counts of Paris, Odo, Robert, Hugh the Great, and, finally, Hugh Capet, playing something like the old rÔle of the palace mayors, were becoming the actual rulers, although not till 987 was the last-named Hugh formally elected and anointed king. Other great houses also had arisen through the land of France, which was very far from being under the power of the last Carolingians or the first Capetians. The year 911 saw the treaty between Norman Rollo and Charles the Simple, and may be taken to symbolize the settling down of Norsemen from freebooters to denizens, with a change of faith. Rollo received the land between the Epte and the sea, to the borders of Brittany, along with temporary privileges, granted by the same Simple Charles, of sack and plunder over the latter. But a generation later the valiant Count Alan of the Twisted Beard drove out the plunderers, and established the feudal duchy long to bear the name of Brittany. Likewise, aided by the need of protection against invading plunderers, feudal principalities were formed in Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc. At the time when Hugh Capet drew near his royal destiny, his brother was Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were his brothers-in-law, and Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, was his partisan. As a king elected by his peers, his royal rights were only such as sprang from the feudal homage and fidelity which they tendered him. Yet he, with the clergy, deemed that his consecration by the Church gave him the prerogatives of Frankish sovereigns, which were patterned on those of Roman emperors and Old Testament kings. It was to be the long endeavour of the Capetian line to make good these higher claims against the counter-assumptions of feudal vassals, who individually might be stronger than the king.[288] Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom, formed the centre of those portions of the Carolingian Empire which were to remain German. Throughout these lands, as in the West, feudal disintegration was progressing. The great territorial divisions were set by differences of race or stamm. Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, had never been one people. In the tenth century each of these stamms, with the land it dwelt in, made a dukedom; and there were besides marks or frontier lordships, each under its markgrave, upon whom lay the duty of repelling outer foes. These divisions, fixed in differences of law, language, and blood, were destined to prevent the formation of a strong kingdom like that of France. Yet what was to prove a veritable German royalty sprang from the ducal Saxon house. Upon the failure of the German Carolingian branch in 911, Conrad, Duke of Franconia, was elected king, the Saxons and Suabians consenting. After struggling a few years, mainly against the power of the Saxon duke Henry, Conrad at his death in 918 pronounced in favour of his stronger rival. Thereupon Henry, called by later legend “The Fowler,” became king, and having maintained his royal authority against recalcitrants, and fought successfully with Hungarians and Bohemians, he died in 936, naming his son Otto as his successor. The latter’s reign was to be a long and great one. He was consecrated at Aix-la-Chapelle in Charlemagne’s basilica, thus at the outset showing what and whom he had in mind. Then and thereafter all manner of internal opposition had to be suppressed. His own competing brothers were, first of all, to be put down; and with them the Dukes of Bavaria, Franconia, and Lorraine, whom Otto conquered and replaced with men connected with him by ties of blood or marriage. Far to the West he made his power felt, settling affairs between Louis and Hugh the Great. Hungarians and Slavs attacked his realm in vain. New marks were established to hold them in check, and new bishoprics were founded, fonts of missionary Christianity and fortresses of defence. Thereupon Otto looked southward, over the Alps. To say that Italy was sick with turmoil and corruption, and exposed to the attack of every foe, is to give but the negative and least interesting side. She held more of civilized life and of education than any northern land; she differed from the north in her politics and institutions. Feudalism did not fix itself widely there, although the Roman barons, who made and unmade popes, represented it; and in many regions, as later among the Normans in the south, there was to be a feudal land-holding nobility. But in Italy, it was the city, whether under civic or episcopal government, or in a despot’s grip, that took the lead, and was to keep the life of the peninsula predominantly urban, as it had been in the Roman time.Tenth-century Italy contained enough claimants to the royal, even the imperial, title. Rome reeked with faction; and the papal power was nearly snuffed out. Pope followed pope, to reign or be dragged from his throne—eight of them between 896 and 904. Then began at Rome the domination of the notorious, but virile, Theodora and her daughter Marozia, makers and perhaps mistresses of popes, and leaders in feudal violence. Marozia married a certain valiant Alberic, “markgrave of Camerino” and forerunner of many a later Italian soldier and tyrant of fortune. When he fell, she married again, and overthrew Pope John X., who had got the better of her first husband. In 931 she made her son pope as John XI. For yet a third husband she took a certain King Hugo, a Burgundian; but another son of hers, a second Alberic, roused the city, drove him out, and proclaimed himself “Prince and Senator of all the Romans.” It was in this Italy that Otto intervened, in 951, drawn perhaps by the wrongs of Queen Adelaide, widow of Hugo’s son, Lothaire, a landless king, since Markgrave Berengar had ousted him from his Italian holdings. This Berengar now persecuted and imprisoned the queen-widow. She escaped; Otto descended from the Alps, and married her; Lombardy submitted; Berengar fled. This time Otto did not advance to Rome, being impeded by many things—Alberic’s refusal to admit him, and behind his back in Germany the rebellion of his own son Liudolf aided by the Archbishop of Mainz, and later by those whom Otto left in Italy to represent him as he hurried north. These were straitened times for the king, and the Hungarians poured over the boundaries to take advantage of the confusion. But Otto’s star triumphed over both rebels and Hungarians—a bloody star for the latter, as the plains of Lech might testify, where they were so handled that they never ravaged German lands again. Otto’s power now reached its zenith. He reordered the German dukedoms, filled the archbishoprics with faithful servants, bound the German clergy to himself with gifts and new foundations, and ruled them like another Charlemagne. It was his time to become emperor, an emperor like Charlemagne, and not like later weaklings. In 961 he again entered Italy, to be greeted with universal acclaim as by men longing for a deliverer. He was crowned king in Pavia; the levies of the once more hostile Berengar dispersed before him. In February 962 he was anointed emperor at Rome by John XII., son of that second Alberic who had refused to open the gates, but whose debauched son had called for aid upon the mighty German. Once more the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans was refounded to endure a while with power, and continue a titular existence for eight centuries. The power of the first Otto was so overwhelming that the papacy could not escape the temporary subjection which its vile state deserved. And the Empire was its honest patron, for the good of both. So on through the reigns of Otto II., who died in 983, aged twenty-eight, and his son Otto III., who died in 1002, at the age of twenty-two, a dreamer and would-be universal potentate. Then came the practical-minded rule of the second Henry (1002-1024), who still aided and humbly ruled the Church. Conrad II., of Franconia, followed, faithful to the imperial tradition.[289] He was succeeded in 1039 by his son Henry III., beneficent and prosperous, if not far-seeing, who again cared for both Church and State, and imperially constrained the papacy, itself impotent in the grip of the Roman barons and the Counts of Tusculum. Henry did not hesitate to clear away at once three rival popes (1046) and name a German, Clement II. It was this worthy man, but still more another German, his successor, Leo IX. (1049-1054), who lifted the papacy from its Italian mire, and launched it full on its course toward an absolute spiritual supremacy that was to carry the temporal control of kings and princes. But the man already at the helm was a certain deacon Hildebrand, who was destined to guide the papal policy through the reigns of successive popes until he himself was hailed as Gregory VII. (1073-1085).[290]With Hildebrand’s pontificate, which in truth began before he sat in Peter’s chair, the reforming spirits among the clergy, aroused to his keen policy, set themselves to the uplifting of their order. In all countries the Church, heavy with its possessions, seemed about to become feudal and secular. Bishops and abbots were appointed by kings and the great feudatories, and were by them invested with their lands as fiefs, for which the clerical appointee did homage, and undertook to perform feudal duties. Church fiefs failed to become hereditary only because bishops and abbots could not marry; yet in fact great numbers of the lower clergy lived in a state of marriage or “concubinage.” Evidently the celibacy of the clergy was a vital issue in Church reform; and so were investitures and the matter of simony. Under mediaeval conditions, the most open form of this “heresy” called after Simon Magus, was the large gift from the new incumbent to his feudal lord who had invested him with abbey or bishopric. Such simony was not wrong from the feudal point of view, and might properly represent the duty of bishop or abbot to his lord. Obviously, for the reform and emancipation of the Church, and in order that it should become a world-power, and not remain a semi-secular local institution in each land, it was necessary that the three closely connected corruptions of simony, lay investitures, and clerical concubinage should be destroyed. To this enormous task the papacy addressed itself under the leadership of Hildebrand.[291] In his pontificate the struggle with the supreme representative of secular power, to wit, the Empire, came to a head touching investitures. Gregory’s secular opponent was Henry IV., of tragic and unseemly fame; for whom the conflict proved to be the road by which he reached Canossa, dragged by the Pope’s anathema, and also driven to this shame by a rebellious Germany (1076, 1077). Henry was conquered, although a revulsion of the long-swaying war drove Gregory from Rome, to die an exile for the cause which he deemed that of righteousness. Between the papacy and the secular power represented in this struggle by the Empire, a peaceful co-equality could not exist. The superiority of the spiritual and eternal over the carnal and temporal had to be vindicated; and in terms admitting neither limit nor condition, Hildebrand maintained the Church’s universal jurisdiction upon earth. The authority granted by Christ to Peter and his successors, the popes, was absolute for eternity. Should it not include the passing moment of mortal life, important only because determining man’s eternal lot? The divine grant was made without qualification or exception in saeculo as well as for the life to come. If spiritual men are under the Pope’s jurisdiction, shall he not also constrain secular folk from their wickedness?[292] Were kings excepted when the Lord said, Thou art Peter?[293] Nay; the salvation of souls demands that the Pope shall have full authority in terra to suppress the waves of pride with the arms of humility. The dictatus papae of the year 1075 make the Pope the head of the Christian world: the Roman Church was founded by God alone; the Roman pontiff alone by right is called universal; he alone may use the imperial insignia; his feet alone shall be kissed by all princes; he may depose emperors and release subjects from fealty; and he can be judged by no man.[294] In the century and a half following Gregory’s reign the papacy well-nigh attained the realization of the claims made by this great upbuilder of its power.[295] Constantine’s forged donation was outdone, in fact; and the furthest hopes of Leo I. and the first, second, and third Gregories were more than realized.
II One might liken the Carolingian period to a vessel at her dock, taking on her cargo, casks of antique culture and huge crates of patristic theology. Then western Europe in the eleventh century would be the same vessel getting under way, well started on the mediaeval ocean. This would be one way of putting the matter. A closer simile already used is the likening of the Carolingian period to the lusty schoolboy learning his lessons, thinking very little for himself. By the eleventh century he will have left school, though still impressionable, still with much to learn; but he has begun to turn his conned lessons over in his mind, and to think a little, in the terms, of what he has acquired—has even begun to select therefrom tentatively, and still under the mastery of the whole. He perceives the charm of the antique culture, of the humanly inspiring literature, so exhaustless in its profane fascinations; he is realizing the spiritual import of the patristic share of his instruction, and already feels the power of emotion which lay implicit in the Latin formulation of the Christian Faith. Withal he is beginning to evolve an individuality of his own. Speaking more explicitly, it should be said that instead of one such hopeful youth there are several, or rather groups of them, differing widely from each other. The forefathers of certain of these groups were civilized and educated men, at home in the antique and patristic curriculum with which our youths are supposed to have been busy. The forefathers of other groups were rustics, or rude herdsmen and hunters, hard-hitting warriors, who once had served, but more latterly had rather lorded it over, the cultivated forbears of the others. Still, again, the forefathers of other numerous groups had been partly cultivated and partly rude. Evidently these groups of youths are diverse in blood and in ancestral traits; evidently also the antique and patristic curriculum is quite a new thing to some of them, while others had it at their fathers’ knees. Our different youthful groups represent Italians, Germans, and the inhabitants of France and the British Isles. One may safely speak of the ninth-century Germans as schoolboys just brought face to face with Christianity and the antique culture. So with the Saxon stock in England. The propriety is not so clear as to the Italians; for they are not newly introduced to these matters. Yet their household affairs have been disturbed, and they themselves have slackened in their study. So they too have much to learn anew, and may be regarded as truants, dirtied and muddied, and perhaps refreshed, by the scrambles of their time of truancy, and now returning to lessons which they have pretty well forgotten. Obviously, in considering the intellectual condition of western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it will be convenient to regard each country in turn: and, besides, a geographical is more appropriate than a topical arrangement, because there was still little choice of one branch of discipline rather than another. The majority still were conning indiscriminately what had come from the past, studying heterogeneous matters in the same books, the same forlorn compendia. They read the Etymologies of Isidore or the corresponding works of Bede, and followed as of course the Trivium and Quadrivium. In sacred learning they might read the Scriptural Commentaries of Rabanus Maurus or Walafrid Strabo, or study the works of Augustine. This was still the supreme study, and all else, properly viewed, was ancillary to it. Nevertheless, as between sacred study and profane literature, an even violent divergence of choice existed. Everywhere there were men who loved the profanities in themselves, and some who felt that for their souls’ sake they must abjure them. For further diverging lines of preference, one should wait for the twelfth century. Many men will then be found absorbed in religious study, while others cultivate logic and metaphysics, with the desire to know more active in them than the fear of hell. Still others will study “grammar” and the classics, or, again, with conscious specializing choice, devote their energies to the civil or the canon law. In later chapters, and mainly with reference to this culminating mediaeval time which includes the twelfth, the thirteenth, and at least, for Dante’s sake, the first part of the fourteenth, century, we shall review these various branches of intellectual endeavour in topical order. But for the earlier time which still enshrouds us, we pass from land to land as on a tour of intellectual inspection. III We start with Italy. There was no break between her antique civilization and her mediaeval development, but only a period of depression and decay. Notwithstanding the change from paganism to Christianity and the influx of barbarians, both a race-continuity and a continuity of culture persisted. The Italian stock maintained its numerical preponderance, as well as the power of transforming newcomers to the likeness of itself. The natural qualities of the country, and the existence of cities and antique constructions, assisted in the Italianizing of Goth, Lombard, German, Norman. Latin civic reminiscence, tradition, custom, permeated society, and prevented the growth of feudalism. Italy remained urban, and continued to reflect the ancient time. “Consuls” and “tribunes” long survived the passing of their antique functions, and the fame endured of antique heroes, mythical and historical. Florence honoured Mars and Caesar; Padua had Antenor, Cremona Hercules. Such names remained veritably eponymous. Other cities claimed the birthplace of Pliny, of Ovid, of Virgil. An altar might no longer be dedicated to a pagan hero, yet the town would preserve his name upon monuments, would adorn his fancied tomb, stamp his effigy on coins or keep it in the communal seal. Of course the figments of the Trojan Saga were current through the land, which, however divided, was conscious of itself as Italy. Te Italia plorabit writes an eleventh-century Pisan poet of a young Pisan noble fallen in Africa. In Italy, as in no other country, the currents of antique education, disturbed yet unbroken, carried clear across that long period of invasions, catastrophes, and reconstructions, which began with the time of Alaric. Under the later pagan emperors, and under Constantine and his successors, the private schools of grammar and rhetoric had tended to decline. There were fewer pupils with inclination and ability to pay. So the emperors established municipal schools in the towns of Italy and the provinces. The towns tried to shirk the burden, and the teachers, whose pay came tardily, had to look to private pupils for support. In Italy there was always some demand for instruction in grammar and law. The supply rose and fell with the happier or the more devastated condition of the land. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, re-established municipal schools through his dominion. After him further troubles came, for example from the Lombards, until they too became gentled by Italian conditions, and their kings and nobles sought to encourage and acquire the education and culture which their coming had disturbed. In the seventh and eighth centuries the grade of instruction was very low; but there is evidence of the unintermitted existence of lay schools, private or municipal, in all the important towns, from the eighth century to the tenth, the eleventh, and so on and on. These did not give religious instruction, but taught grammar and the classic literature, law and the art of drawing documents and writing letters. The former branches of study appear singularly profane in Italy. The literature exemplifying the principles of grammar was pagan and classical, and the fictitious themes on which the pupils exercised their eloquence continued such as might have been orated on in the time of Quintilian. Intellectually the instruction was poverty-stricken, but the point to note is, that in Italy there never ceased to be schools conducted by laymen for laymen, where instruction in matters profane and secular was imparted and received for the sake of its profane and secular value, without regard to its utility for the saving of souls. There was no barbaric contempt for letters, nor did the laity fear them as a spiritual peril. Gerbert before the year 1000 had found Italy the field for the purchase of books;[296] and about 1028 Wipo, a native of Burgundy and chaplain of the emperor Conrad II., contrasts the ignorance of Germany with Italy, where “the entire youth (tota juventus) is sent to sweat in the schools”;[297] and about the middle of the twelfth century, Otto of Freising suggests a like contrast between the Italy and Germany of his time.[298] In Italy the study of grammar, with all that it included, was established in tradition, and also was regarded as a necessary preparation for the study both of law and medicine. Even in the eleventh century these professions were followed by men who were “grammarians,” a term to be taken to mean for the early Middle Ages the profession of letters. In the eleventh century, a lawyer or notary in Italy (where there were always such, and some study of law and legal forms) needed education in a Latinity different from the vulgar Latin which was turning into Italian. A little later, Irnerius, the founder of the Bologna school, was a teacher of “grammar” before he became a teacher of law.[299] As for medicine, that appears always to have been cultivated at least in southern Italy; and a knowledge of grammar, even of logic, was required for its study.[300] The survival of medical knowledge in Italy did not, in means and manner, differ from the survival of the rest of the antique culture. Some acquaintance had continued with the works of Galen and other ancient physicians; but more use was made of compendia, the matter of which may have been taken from Galen, but was larded with current superstitions regarding disease. Such compendia began to appear in the fifth century, and through these and other channels a considerable medical knowledge found its way to a congenial home in Salerno. There are references to this town as a medical community as early as the ninth century. By the eleventh, it was famous for its medicine. About the year 1060 a certain Constantine seems to have brought there novel and stimulating medical knowledge which he had gained in Africa from Arabian (ultimately Greek) sources. Nevertheless, translations from the Arabic seem scarcely to have exerted much influence upon medicine for yet another hundred years.[301] Thus in Italy the antique education never stopped, antique reminiscence and tradition never passed away, and the literary matter of the pagan past never faded from the consciousness of the more educated among the laity and clergy. Some understanding of the classic literature, as well as a daily absorption of the antique from its survival in habits, laws, and institutions, made part of the capacities and temperament of Italians. Grammarians, lawyers, doctors, monks even, might think and produce under the influence of that which never had quite fallen from the life of Italy. And just as the ancient ways of civic life and styles of building became rude and impoverished, and yet passed on without any abrupt break into the tenth and the eleventh centuries, so was it with the literature of Italy, or at least with those productions which were sheer literature, and not deflected from traditional modes of expression by any definite business or by the distorting sentiments of Christian asceticism. This literature proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre. We have an example of the former in those often-cited tenth-century verses exhorting the watchers on the walls of Modena: “O tu qui servas armis ista moenia,
Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila.
Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia,
Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia.
“Vigili voce avis anser candida
Fugavit Gallos ex arce Romulea.” The antique reminiscence fills this jingle, as it does the sensuous “O admirabile Veneris ydolum
Cuius materiae nichil est frivolum:
Archos te protegat, qui stellas et polum
Fecit et maria condidit et solum.”[302] And so on from century to century. At the beginning of the twelfth, a Pisan poet celebrates Pisa’s conquest of the Balearic Isles: “Inclytorum Pisanorum scripturus historiam,
Antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam,
Nam ostendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem,
Quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem.” For an eleventh-century example of more literary verse, one may turn to the metres of Alphanus, a noble Salernian, lover of letters, pilgrim traveller, archbishop of his native town, and monk of Monte Cassino, the parent Benedictine monastery, which had been the cultured retreat of Paulus Diaconus in the time of Charlemagne. It was destroyed by the Saracens in 884. Learning languished in the calamitous decades which followed. But the convent was rebuilt, and some care for learning recommences there under the abbot Theobald (1022-1035). The monastery’s troubles were not over; but it re-entered upon prosperity under the energetic rule of the German Richer (1038-1055).[303] Shortly after his death two close friends were received among its monks, Alphanus and Desiderius. The latter was of princely Lombard stock, from Beneventum. He met Alphanus at Salerno, and there they became friends. Afterwards both saw something of the world and experienced its perils. Desiderius was born to be monk, abbot, and at last pope (Victor III.) against his will. Alphanus, always a man of letters, was drawn by his friend to monastic life. Long after, when Archbishop of Salerno, he gave a refuge and a tomb to the outworn Hildebrand. The rebuilding and adorning of Monte Cassino by Desiderius with the aid of Greek artists is a notable episode in the history of art.[304] Under the long rule of this great abbot (1058-1087) the monastery reached the summit of its repute and influence. It was the home of theology and ecclesiastical policy. There law and medicine were studied. Likewise “grammar” and classic literature, the latter not too broadly, as would appear from the list of manuscripts copied under Desiderius—Virgil, Ovid, Terence, Seneca, Cicero’s De natura deorum. But then there was the whole host of early Christian poets, historians, and theologians. Naturally, Christian studies were dominant within those walls. Alphanus did not spend many of his years there. But his loyalty to the great monastery never failed, nor his intercourse with its abbot and monks. He has left an enthusiastic poem descriptive of the place and the splendour of its building.[305] A general and interesting feature of his poetry is the naturalness of its classical reminiscence and its feeling for the past, which is even translated into the poet’s sentiments toward his contemporaries and toward life. In his metrical verses ad Hildebrandum archidiaconum Romanum, his stirring praise of that statesman is imbued with pagan sentiment. “How great the glory which so often comes to those defending the republic, has not escaped thy knowledge, Hildebrand. The Via Sacra and the Via Latina recall the same, and the lofty crown of the Capitol, that mighty seat of empire.... The hidden poison of envy implants its infirmity in wretched affairs, and brings overthrow only to such. That thou shouldst be envied, and not envy, beseems thy skill.... How great the power of the anathema! Whatever Marius and Julius wrought with the slaughter of soldiers, thou dost with thy small voice.... What more does Rome owe to the Scipios and the other Quirites than to thee?” Perhaps the glyconic metre of this poem was too much for Alphanus. His awkward constructions, however, constantly reflect classic phrases. And how naturally his mind reproduced the old pagan—or fundamental human—views of life, appears again in his admiring sapphics to Romuald, chief among Salerno’s lawyers: “Dulcis orator, vehemens gravisque,
Inter omnes causidicos perennem
Gloriam juris tibi, Romoalde,
Prestitit usus.” Further stanzas follow on Romuald’s wealth, station, and mundane felicity. Then comes the sudden turn, and Romuald is praised for having spurned them all: “Cumque sic felix, ut in orbe sidus
Fulseris, mundum roseo jacentem
Flore sprevisti....” Apparently Romuald had become a monk: “Rite fecisti, potiore vita
Perfruiturus.”[306] This turn of sentiment curiously accorded with the poet’s own fortune and way of life; for Alphanus, with all his love of antique letters, was also a monk and an ascetic, of whom a contemporary chronicler tells that in Lent he ate but twice a week and never slept on a bed. Yet monk, and occasional ascetic, as he was, the ordinary antique-descended education and inherited strains of antique feeling made the substratum of his nature, and this although he could inveigh against the philosophic and grammatical studies flourishing in a neighbouring monastery, and advise one of its studious youths to turn from such: “Si, Transmunde, mihi credis, amice,
His uti studiis desine tandem;
Fac cures monachi scire professum,
Ut vere sapiens esse puteris.”[307] Eleventh-century Italian “versificatores” were interested in a variety of things. Some of them gave the story of a saint’s or bishop’s life, or were occupied with an ecclesiastic theme. Others sang the fierce struggle between rival cities, or some victory over Saracens, or made an idyl of very human love with mythological appurtenances. The verse-forms either followed the antique metres or were accentual deflections from them with the new added element of rhyme; the ways of expression copied antique phrase and simile, except when the matter and sentiment of the poem compelled another choice. In that case the Latin becomes freer, more mediaeval, ruder, if one will; and still antique turns of expression and bits of sentences show how naturally it came to these men to construct their verses out of ancient phrases. Yet borrowed phrases and the constraint of metre impeded spontaneity, and these feeble versifiers could hardly create in modes of the antique. A fresher spirit breathes in certain anonymous poems, which have broken with metre, while they give voice to sentiments quite after the feeling of the old Italian paganism. In one of these, from Ivrea, the poet meets a nymph by the banks of the Po, and in leonine elegiacs bespeaks her love, with all the paraphernalia of antique reference, assuring her that his verse shall make her immortal, a perfectly pagan sentiment—or affectation: “Sum sum sum vates, musarum servo penates,
Subpeditante Clio queque futura scio.
Me minus extollo, quamvis mihi cedit Apollo,
Invidet et cedit, scire Minerva dedit.
Laude mea vivit mihi se dare queque cupivit,
Immortalis erit, ni mea Musa perit.”[308] It is obvious that in the tenth and eleventh centuries there were Italians whose sentiments and intellectual interests were profane, humanistic in a word. These men might even be high ecclesiastics, like Liutprand, Bishop of Cremona (d. 972).[309] He was of Lombard stock, and yet a genuine Italian, bred in an atmosphere of classical reminiscence and contemporary gossip and misdeed. Politically, at least, the Italy of John XII. was not so much better than its pope; and the Antapodosis of Liutprand goes along in its easy, and often dramatic way, telling of crime and perfidy, and showing scant horror. It was a general history of the historian’s times, written while in exile in Germany; for Liutprand had been driven out of Italy by King Berengar, whom he had once served. He hated Berengar and his wife, and although well received at the Court of the great Otto, he did not love his place of exile.[310] In exile Liutprand wrote his book to requite Berengar. The work had also a broader purpose, yet one just as consolatory to the writer. It should acknowledge and show the justice of the divine judgments exemplified in history. Herein lay a fuller, although less Italian, consolation for his exile than in Berengar’s requital. Liutprand keeps in mind BoËthius and his De consolatione, and regards his own work as a Consolation of History, as that of BoËthius was a Consolation of Philosophy. The paths of Liutprand’s Consolation are as broad as the justice and power of the Trinity, “which casts down these for their wicked deeds and raises up those for their merits’ sake.”[311] Quite explicitly he explains the title and reason of his work at the opening of its third book: “Since it will show the deeds of famous men, why call it Antapodosis? I reply: Its object is to set forth and cry aloud the acts of this Berengar who at this moment does not reign but tyrannize in Italy, and of his wife Willa, who for the boundlessness of her tyranny should be called a second Jezebel, and Lamia for her insatiate rapines. Me and my house, my family and kin, have they harassed with so many javelins of lies, so many spoliations, so many essays of wickedness, that neither tongue nor pen can avail to set them forth. May then these pages be to them an antapodosis, that is retribution, to make their wickedness naked before men living and unborn. None the less may it prove an antapodosis for the benefits conferred on me by holy and happy men.”[312] Liutprand’s narrative is breezy and interspersed with ribald tales. The writer meant to amuse his readers and himself. These literary qualities give picturesqueness to his well-known Embassy to Constantinople, where he was sent by Otto the Great, for purposes of peace and to ask the hand of the Byzantine princess for Otto II. The highly coloured ceremonial life of the Greek Court, the chicane and contemptuous treatment met with, the spirited words of Liutprand, and the rancour of this same thwarted envoy, all appear vividly in his report.[313] There were also many laymen occupied with Latin studies. Such a one was Gunzo of Novara, a curiously vain grammarian of the second half of the tenth century. According to his own story, the fame of his learning incited Otto the Great to implore his presence in Germany. So he condescended to cross the Alps, with all his books, perhaps in the year 965. On his way he stopped with the monks of St. Gall, themselves proud of their learning, and perhaps jealous of the southern scholar. As the weary Gunzo was lifted, half frozen, from his horse at the convent door, and the brethren stood about, a young monk caught at a slip in grammar, and made a skit on him—because, forsooth, he had used an accusative when it should have been an ablative. Gunzo neither forgave nor forgot. Passing on to the rival congregation of Reichenau, he composed a long and angry epistle of pedantic excuse and satirical invective, addressed to his former hosts.[314] In it he parades his wide knowledge of classic authors, justifies what the monks of St. Gall had presumed to mock as a ridiculous barbarism, and closes with a prayer for them in hexameters. His letter contains the interesting avowal, that, although the monk of St. Gall had wrongly deemed him ignorant of grammar, his Latin sometimes was impeded by the “usu nostrae vulgaris linguae, quae latinitati vicina est.” So a slip would be due not to unfamiliarity with Latin, but to an excessive colloquial familiarity with the vulgar tongue which had scarcely ceased to be Latin—an excuse no German monk could have given. It is amusing to see an Italian grammarian of this early period enter the lists to defend his reputation and assuage his wounded vanity. Later, such learned battles became frequent.[315] Gunzo died as the tenth century closed. Other Italians of his time and after him crossed the Alps to learn and teach and play the orator. From the early eleventh century comes a satirical sketch of one. The subject was a certain Benedict, Prior of the Abbey of St. Michael of Chiusa, and nephew of its abbot—therefore doubtless born to wealth and position. At all events as a youth he had moved about for nine years “per multa loca in Longobardia et Francia propter grammaticam,” spending the huge sum of two thousand gold soldi. His pride was unmeasured. “I have two houses full of books; there is no book on the earth that I do not possess. I study them every day. I can discourse on letters. There is no instruction to be had in Aquitaine, and but little in Francia. Lombardy, where I learned most, is the cradle of knowledge.” So the satire makes Benedict speak of himself. Then it makes a monk sketch Benedict’s sojourn at a convent in AngoulÊme: “He knows more than any man I ever saw. We have heard his chatter the whole day. O quam loquax est! He is never tired. Wherever he may be, standing, sitting, walking, lying, words pour from his mouth like water from the Tigris. He orders the whole convent about as if he were Abbot. Monks, laity, clergy, do nothing without his nod. A multitude of the people, knights too, were always hastening to hear him, as the goal of their desires. Untired, hurling words the entire day, he sends them off worn out. And they depart, saying: Never have we seen sic eloquentem grammaticum.”[316] Another of these early wandering Italian humanists won kinder notice, a certain Lombard Guido, who died where he was teaching in Auxerre, in 1095, and was lamented in leonine hexameters: “Alas, famous man, so abounding, so diligent, so praised, so venerated through many lands— “Filius Italiae, sed alumnus Philosophiae. Let Gaul grieve, and thou Philosophy who nourished him: Grieve Grammar, thou. With his death the words of Plato died, the work of Cicero is blotted out, Maro is silent and the muse of Naso stops her song.”[317] A final instance to close our examples. In the middle of the eleventh century flourished Anselm the Peripatetic, a rhetorician and humanist of Besate (near Milan). In his Rhetorimachia he tells of a dream in which he finds himself in Heaven, surrounded and embraced by saintly souls. Their spiritual kisses were still on his lips when three virgins of another ilk appear, to reproach him with forsaking them. These are Dialectic and Rhetoric and Grammar—we have met them before! Now the embraces of the saints seem cold! and to the protests of the blessed throng that Anselm is theirs, the virgins make reply that he is altogether their own fosterling. Anselm gives up the saints and departs with the three.[318] This was his humanistic choice. This rather pleasant dream discloses the conflict between Letters and the call of piety, which might harass the learned and the holy in Italy. Distrust of the enticements of pagan letters might transform itself to diabolic visions. Such a tale comes from the neighbourhood of Ravenna, in the late tenth century. It is of one Vilgard, a grammarian, who became infatuated with the great pagan poets, till their figures waved through his dreams and he heard their thanks and assurances that he should participate in their glory. He foolishly began to teach matters contrary to the Faith, and in the end was condemned as a heretic. Others were infected with his opinions, and perished by the sword and fire.[319]Evidently Vilgard’s profane studies made him a heretic. But, ordinarily, the Italians with their antique descended temperament were not troubled in the observance and the expression of their Faith by the paganism of their intellectual tastes. Such tastes did not produce open heretics in Italy in the eleventh century any more than in the fifteenth. A pagan disposition seldom prevented an Italian from being a good Catholic. Yet the monastic spirit in Italy, as elsewhere, in the eleventh century defied and condemned the pagan literature, and in fact all Latin studies beyond the elements of grammar. The protest of the monk or hermit might represent his individual ignorance of classic literature; or, as in the case of Peter Damiani, the ascetic soul is horrified at the seductive nature of the pagan sweets which it knows too well. Peter indeed could say in his sonorous Latin: “Olim mihi Tullius dulcescebat, blandiebantur carmina poetarum, philosophi verbis aureis insplendebant, et Sirenes usque in exitium dulces meum incantaverunt intellectum.”[320] So a few decades after Peter’s death, Rangerius, Bishop of Lucca, writes the life of an episcopal predecessor in elegiacs which show considerable knowledge of grammar and prosody; and yet he protests against liberal studies—philosophy, astronomy, grammar—with pithy commonplace: “Et nos ergo scholas non spectamus inanes
········
Scire Deum satis est, quo nulla scientia maior.”[321] So with the Italians the antique never was an influence brought from without, but always an element of their temperament and faculties. We have not seen that they recast it into novel and interesting forms in the eleventh century; yet they used it familiarly as something of their own, being quite at home with it. As one may imagine some grand old Roman garden, planned and constructed by rich and talented ancestors, and still remaining as a home and heritage to descendants whose wealth and capacities have shrunken. The garden is somewhat ruinous, and fallen to decay; yet these sons are still at home in it, their daily steps pursue its ancient avenues; they still recline upon the marble seats by the fountains where perhaps scant water runs. Fauns and satyrs—ears gone and noses broken—with even an occasional god, still haunt the courts and sylvan paths, while everywhere, above and about these lazy sons, the lights still chase the shadows, and anon the shadows darken the green and yellow flashes. Perhaps nothing in the garden has become so subtly in and of the race as this play of light and shade. And when the Italian genius shall revive again, and children’s children find themselves with power, still within this ancient garden the great vernacular poems will be composed; great paintings will be painted in its light and shade and under the influence of its formal beauties; and Italian buildings will never escape the power of the ruined structures found therein. IV In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as remarked already, studiously inclined people made no particular selection of one study rather than another. But men discriminated sharply between religious devotion and all profane pursuits. Energies which were regarded as religious might have a political-ecclesiastical character, and be devoted to the purification and upbuilding of the Church; or they might be intellectual and aloof; or ascetic and emotional. All three modes might exist together in religious-minded men; but usually one form would dominate, and mark the man’s individuality. Hildebrand, for example, was a monk, fervent and ascetic; but his strength was devoted to the discipline of the clergy and the elevation of the papal power. In the great Hildebrandine Church which was his more than any other man’s achievement, the organizing and political genius of Rome re-emerges, and Rome becomes again the seat of Empire.[322]Eminent examples of Italians who illustrate the ascetic-emotional and the intellectual mode of religious devotion are the two very different saints, Peter Damiani and Anselm. The former, to whom we shall again refer when considering the ideals of the hermit life, was born in Ravenna not long after the year 1000. His parents, who were poor, seem to have thought him an unwelcome addition to their already burdensome family. His was a hard lot until he reached the age of ten, when his elder brother Damianus was made an archpresbyter in Ravenna and took Peter to live with him, to educate the gifted boy. From his brother’s house the youth proceeded in search of further instruction, first to Faenza, then to Parma. He became proficient in the secular knowledge comprised in the Seven Liberal Arts, and soon began to teach. A growing reputation brought many pupils, who paid such fees that Peter had amassed considerable property when he decided upon a change of life. For some years he had been fearful of the world, and he now turned from secular to religious studies. He put on haircloth underneath the gentler garb in which he was seen of men, and became earnest in vigils, fasts, and prayers. In the night-time he quelled the lusts of the flesh by immersing himself in flowing water; he overcame the temptations of avarice and pride by lavishly giving to the poor, and tending them at his own table. Still he felt unsafe, and yearned to escape the dangers of worldly living. A number of hermits dwelt in a community known as the Hermitage of the Holy Cross of Fonte Avellana, near Faenza; Peter became one of them shortly before his thirtieth year. They lived ascetically, two in a cell together, spending their time in watching, fasting, and prayer: thus they fought the Evil One. Damiani was not satisfied merely with following the austerities practised at Fonte Avellana. Quickly he surpassed all his fellows, except a certain mail-clad Dominic, whose scourgings he could not equal. His chief asceticism lay in the temper of his soul. From this congenial community (the hermits had made him their prior) Damiani was drawn forth to serve the Church more actively, sorely against his will, and was made Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia by Pope Stephen IX. in 1058. It was indeed the hand of Hildebrand, already directing the papal policy, that had fastened on this unwilling yet serviceable tool. Peter feared and also looked askance upon the relentless spirit, whom he called Sanctus Satanas, not deeming him to be altogether of the kingdom of heaven. He deprecates his censure upon one occasion: “I humbly beg that my Saint Satan may not rage so cruelly against me, and that his worshipful pride may not destroy me with long-reaching rods; rather, may it, appeased, quiet to a calm around his servant.” In this same letter, which is addressed to the two conspiring souls, Pope Alexander II. and Archdeacon Hildebrand, he sarcastically likens them to the Wind and the Sun of Aesop’s fable, who contended as to which could the sooner strip the Traveller of his cloak.[323] Peter’s tongue was sharp enough, and apt to indulge in epigram: “Wilt thou live in Rome, cry aloud:
The Pope’s lord more than the Pope I obey.” And another squib he writes on Hildebrand: “Papam rite colo, sed te prostratus adoro;
Tu facis hunc dominum, te facit iste deum.”[324] It was, however, for his own soul that Damiani feared, while in the service of the Curia. To Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino, he exclaims: “He errs, Father, errs indeed, who imagines he can be a monk and at the same time serve the Curia. Ill he bargains, who presumes to desert the cloister, that he may take up the warfare of the world.”[325] Albeit against his will, Damiani became a soldier of the Church in the fields of her secular militancy against the world. He was sent on more than one important mission—to Milan, to crush the married priests and establish the Pope’s authority, or to Mainz, there to quell a rebellious archbishop and a youthful German king. Such missions and others he might accomplish with holy strenuousness; his more spontaneous zeal, however, was set upon the task of cleansing the immoralities of monks and clergy. In spite of his enforced relations with the powers of the world, he was a fiery reforming ascetic, a scourge of his time’s wickedness, rather than a statesman of the Church. His writings were a vent for the outcries of his horror-stricken soul. The corruption of the clergy filled his nostrils: they were rotten, like the loin-cloth of Jeremiah, hidden by the Euphrates; their bellies were full of drunkenness and lust.[326] As for the apostolic see: “Heu! sedes apostolica,
Orbis olim gloria,
Nunc, proh dolor! efficeris
Officina Simonis.”[327] These, with other verses written in tears, relate to schisms of pope and antipope which so often rent the papacy in Peter’s lifetime.[328] He never ceased to cry out against monks and clergy, denouncing their simony and avarice, their luxury, intemperance and vile unchastity, their viciousness of every kind. Such denunciations fill his letters, while many of his other writings chiefly consist of them.[329] They culminate in his horrible Liber Gomorrhianus, which was issued with the approval of one pope, to be suppressed by another as too unspeakable. Naturally over so foul a world, flame and lower the terrors of the Day of Judgment. For Damiani it was near at hand. He writes to a certain judge: “Therefore, most dear brother now while the world smiles for thee, while thy body glows in health, while the prosperity of earth is sweet and fair, think upon those things which are to come. Deem whatever is transitory to be but as the illusion of a dream. And that terrible day of the last Judgment keep ever present to thy sight, and brood with quaking bowels over the sudden coming of such majesty—nor think it to be far off!”[330] Beware of penitence postponed! “O how full of grief and dole is that late unfruitful repentance, when the sinful soul, about to be loosed from its dungeon of flesh, looks behind it, and then directs its gaze into the future. It sees behind it that little stadium of mortal life, already traversed; it sees before it the range of endless aeons. That flown moment which it has lived it perceives to be an instant; it contemplates the infinite length of time to come.”[331] From Damiani’s stricken thoughts upon the wickedness of the age, we may turn to the more personal disclosures of one who wrote himself Petrus peccator monachus. There is one tell-tale letter of confession to his brother Damianus, whom he loved and revered: “To my lord Damianus, my best loved brother, Peter, sinner and monk, his servant and son. “I would not have it hid from thee, my sweetest father and lord in Christ, that my mind is cast down with sadness while it contemplates its own exit which is so near. For I count now many long years that I wait to be thrown to dogs; and I notice that in whatever monastery I come nearly all are younger than myself. When I consider this, I ponder upon death alone, I meditate upon my tomb; I do not withdraw the eyes of my mind from my tomb. Nor is my mind content to limit its fear and its consideration to the death of the body; for it is at once haled to judgment, and meditates with terror upon what might be its plea and defence. Wretched me! with what fountains of tears must I lament! I who have done every evil, and through my long life have fulfilled scarce one commandment of the divine law. For what evil have not I, miserable man, committed? Where are the vices, where are the crimes in which I am not implicated; I confess my life has fallen in a lake of misery; my soul is taken in its iniquities. Pride, lust, anger, impatience, malice, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, concupiscence, robbery, lying, perjury, idle talking, scurrility, ignorance, negligence, and other pests have overthrown me, and all the vices like ravening beasts have devoured my soul. My heart and my lips are defiled. I am contaminate in sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. And in every way, in cogitation, in speech or action, I am lost. All these evils have I done; and alas! alas! I have brought forth no fruit meet for repentance. “One pernicious fault, among others, I acknowledge: scurrility has been my besetting sin; it has never really left me. For howsoever I have fought against this monster, and broken its wicked teeth with the hammer of austerity, and at times repelled it, I have never won the full victory. When, in the ways of spiritual gladness, I wish to show myself cheerful to the brethren, I drop into words of vanity; and when as it were discreetly for the sake of brotherly love, I think to throw off my severity, then indiscreetly my tongue unbridled utters foolishness. If the Lord said: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,’ what judgment hangs over those who not only are slack at weeping, but act like buffoons with laughter and vain giggling. Consolation is due to those who weep, not to those who rejoice; what consolation may be expected from that future Judge by those who now are given to foolish mirth and vain jocularity? If the Truth says: ‘Woe unto ye who laugh, for ye shall weep,’ what fearful judgment shall be theirs who not only laugh themselves, but with scurrilities drag laughter from their listeners?” The penitent saint then shows from Scripture how that our hearts ought to be vessels of tears, and concludes with casting himself at the feet of his beloved “father” in entreaty that he would interpose the shield of his holy prayers between his petitioner and that monster, and exorcise its serpentine poison, and also that he would ever pour forth prayers to God, and beseech the divine mercy in behalf of all the other vices confessed in this letter.[332] A strange confession this—or, indeed, is it strange? This cowled Peter Damiani who passes from community to community, seeing more keenly than others may, denouncing, execrating every vice existent or imagined, who wears haircloth, goes barefoot, lives on bread and water, scourges himself with daily flagellations, urging others to do likewise,—this Peter Damiani is yet unable quite to scourge out the human nature from him, and evidently cannot always refrain from that jocularity and inepta laetitia for which the Abbess Hildegard also saw sundry souls in hell.[333] Perhaps, with Peter, revulsions from the strain of austerity took the form of sudden laughter. His imagination was fine, his wit too quick for his soul’s safety. His confession was no matter of mock humility, nor did he deem laughter vulgar or in bad taste. He feared to imperil his soul through it. Of course, in accusing himself of other, and as we should think more serious crimes—drunkenness, robbery, perjury—Peter was merely carrying to an extreme the monkish conventions of self-vilification. If it appears from this letter that Damiani had been unable quite to scourge his wit out of him, another letter, to a young countess, will show more touchingly that he had been unable quite to fast out of him his human heart. “To Guilla, most illustrious countess, Peter, monk and sinner, [sends] the instancy of prayer. “Since of a thing out of which will issue conflict it is better to have ignorance without cost, than with dear-bought forgetting wage hard war, we prudently accord to young women, whose aspect we fear, audience by letter. Certainly I, who now am an old man, may safely look upon the seared and wrinkled visage of a blear-eyed crone. Yet from sight of the more comely and adorned I guard my eyes as boys from fire. Alas my wretched heart which cannot hold Scriptural mysteries read through a hundred times, and will not lose the memory of a form seen but once! There where the divine law remains not, no oblivion blurs vanity’s image. But of this another time. Here I have not to write of what is hurtful to me but of what may be salutary for thee.” Peter then continues with excellent advice for the young noblewoman, exhorting her to deeds of mercy and kindness, and warning her against the enjoyment of revenues wrung from the poor.[334] Indeed Damiani’s writings contain much that still is wise. His advice to the great and noble of the world was admirable,[335] and though couched in austere phrase, it demanded what many men feel bound to fulfil in the twentieth century. His little work on Almsgiving[336] contains sentences which might be spoken to-day. He has been pointing out that no one can be exercising the ascetic virtues all the time: no one can be always praying and fasting, washing feet and subjecting the body to pain. Some people, moreover, shun such self-castigation. But one can always be benevolent; and, though fearing to afflict the body, can stretch forth his hand in charity: “Those then who are rich should seek to be dispensers rather than possessors. They ought not to regard what they have as their own: for they did not receive this transitory wealth in order to revel in luxury, but that they should administer it so long as they continue in their stewardship. Whoever gives to the poor does not distribute his own but restores another’s.”[337] This sounds modern—it also sounds like Seneca.[338] Yet Damiani was no modern man, nor was he antique, but very fearful of the classics. Having been a rhetorician and grammarian, when he became a hermit-monk he made Christ his grammar (mea grammatica Christus est).[339] Horror-stricken at the world, and writhing under his own contamination, he cast body and soul into the ascetic life. That was the harbour of escape from the carnal temptations which threatened the soul’s hope of pardon from the Judge at the Last Day. Therefore Peter is fierce in execration of all lapses from the hermit-life, so rapturously praised with its contrition, its penitence, and tears. His ascetic rhapsodies, with which, as a poet might, he delighted or relieved his soul, are eloquent illustrations of the monastic ideal.[340] Other men in Italy less intelligent than Damiani, but equally picturesque, were held by like ascetic and emotional obsession. Intellectual interest, however, in theology was less prominent, because the Italian concern with religion was either emotional or ecclesiastical, which is to say, political. The philosophic or dialectical treatment of the Faith was to run its course north of the Alps; and those men of Italian birth—Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventura, and Aquinas—who contributed to Christian thought, early left their native land, and accomplished their careers under intellectual conditions which did not obtain in Italy. Nevertheless, Anselm and Bonaventura at least did not lose their Italian qualities; and it is as representative of what might come out of Italy in the eleventh century that the former may detain us here. The story of Anselm is told well and lovingly by his companion Eadmer.[341] His life, although it was drawn within the currents of affairs, remained intellectual and aloof, a meditation upon God. It opens with a dream of climbing the mountain to God’s palace-seat. For Anselm’s boyhood was passed at Aosta, within the shadows of the Graian Alps.[342] Surely the heaven rested upon them. Might he not then go up to the hall where God, above in the heaven, as the boy’s mother taught, ruled and held all? “So one night it seemed he must ascend to the summit of the mountains, and go to the hall of the great King. In the plain at the first slopes, he saw women, the servants of the King, reaping grain carelessly and idly. He would accuse them to their Lord. He went up across the summit and came to the King’s hall. He found Him there alone with His seneschal, for it was autumn and He had sent His servants to gather the harvest. The Lord called the boy as he entered; and he went and sat at His feet. The Lord asked kindly (jucunda affabilitate) whence he came and what he wished. He replied just as he knew the thing to be (juxta quod rem esse sciebat). Then, at the Lord’s command, the Seneschal brought him bread of the whitest, and he was there refreshed in His presence. In the morning he verily believed that he had been in Heaven and had been refreshed with the bread of the Lord.” A pious mother had been the boy’s first teacher. Others taught him Letters, till he became proficient, and beloved by those who knew him. He wished to be made a monk, but a neighbouring abbot refused his request, fearing the displeasure of Anselm’s father, of whom the biographer has nothing good to say. The youth fell sick, but with returning health the joy of living drew his mind from study and his pious purpose. Love for his mother held him from over-indulgence in pastimes. She died, and with this sheet-anchor lost, Anselm’s ship was near to drifting out on the world’s slippery flood. But here the impossible temper of the father wrought as God’s providence, and Anselm, unable to stay with him, left his home, and set out across Mount Senis attended by one clericus. For three years he moved through Burgundy and Francia, till Lanfranc’s repute drew him to Bec. Day and night he studied beneath that master, and also taught. The desire to be a monk returned; and he began to direct his purpose toward pleasing God and spurning the world. But where? At either Cluny or Bec he feared to lose the fruit of his studies; for at Cluny there was the strictness of the rule,[343] and at Bec Lanfranc’s eminent learning would “make mine of little value.” Anselm says that he was not yet subdued, nor had the contempt of the world become strong in him. Then the thought came: “Is this to be a monk to wish to be set before others and magnified above them? Nay,—become a monk where, for the sake of God, you will be put after all and be held viler than all. And where can this be? Surely at Bec. I shall be of no weight while he is here, whose wisdom and repute are enough for all. Here then is my rest, here God alone will be my purpose, here the single love of Him will be my thought, and here the constant remembrance of Him will be a happy consolation.” Scripture bade him: Do all things with counsel. Whom but Lanfranc should he consult? So he laid three plans before him—to become a monk, a hermit, or (his father being dead) for the sake of God administer his patrimony for the poor. Lanfranc persuaded Anselm to refer the decision to the venerable Archbishop of Rouen. Together they went to him, and such, says the biographer, was Anselm’s reverence for Lanfranc, that on the way, passing through the wood near Bec, had Lanfranc bade him stay in that wood, he would not have left it all his days. The archbishop decided for the monastic life. So Anslem took the vows of a monk at Bec, being twenty-seven years of age. Lanfranc was then Prior, but soon left to become Abbot of St. Stephen’s at Caen.[344] Made Prior in his place, Anselm devoted himself in gentleness and wisdom to the care of the monks and to meditation upon God and the divine truths. He was especially considerate of the younger monks, whose waywardness he guided and whose love he won. The envy of cavillers was stilled. Yet the business of office harassed one whose thoughts dwelled more gladly in the blue heaven with God. Again he sought the counsel of the archbishop; for Herluin, the first Abbot and founder of Bec, still lived on, old and unlettered, and apparently no great fount of wisdom. The archbishop commanded him per sanctam obedientiam not to renounce his office, nor refuse if called to a higher one. So, sad but resolute, he returned to the convent, and resumed his burdens in such wise as to be held by all as a loved father. It was at this period that he wrote several treatises upon the high doctrinal themes which filled his thoughts. Gradually his mind settled to the search after some single proof of that which is believed concerning God—that He exists, and is eternal, unchanging, omnipotent, just, and pitying, and is truth and goodness. This thing caused him great difficulty. Not only it kept him from food and drink and sleep, but what weighed upon him more, it interfered with his devotion to God’s service. Reflecting thus, and unable to reach a valid conclusion, he decided that such speculation was a temptation of the devil, and tried to drive it from his thoughts. But the more he struggled, the more it beset him. And one night, at the time of the nocturnal vigils, the grace of God shed light in his heart, and the argument was clear to his mind, and filled his inmost being with an immense jubilation. All the more now was he confirmed in the love of God and the contempt of the world, of which one night he had a vision as of a torrent filled with obscene filth, and carrying in its flood the countless host of people of the world, while apart and aloof from its slime rose the sweet cloister, with its walls of silver, surrounded by silvery herbage, all delectable beyond conception. In the year 1078 old Herluin died. Anselm long had guided the convent, and with one voice the brethren chose him Abbot. He reasoned and argued, but could not dissuade them, and in his anxiety he knew not what to do. Some days passed. He had recourse to entreaties; with tears he flung himself prostrate before them all, praying and protesting in the name of God, and beseeching them, if they had any bowels of compassion, to permit him to remain free from this great burden. But they only cast themselves upon the earth, and prayed that he would rather commiserate them, and not disregard the convent’s good. At length he yielded, for the command of the archbishop came to his mind. Such a scene occurs often in monastic history. None the less is it moving when the participants are in earnest, as Anselm was, and his monks. So Anselm’s life opened; so it sought counsel, gathered strength, and centred to its purpose, pursuing as its goal the thought of God. Anselm had love and gentleness for his fellows; he drew their love and reverence. Yet, aloof, he lived within his spirit. Did he open its hidden places even to Lanfranc? Although one who in his humility always desired counsel, perhaps neither Lanfranc nor Eadmer, the friend whom the Pope gave him for an adviser, knew the meditations of his heart. We at all events should discern little of them by following the outer story of his life. It might even be fruitless to sail with him across the channel to visit Lanfranc, now Primate of England. The biographer has nothing to tell of the converse between the two, although quite rightly impressed at the meeting between him who was pre-eminent in auctoritas and scientia and him who excelled in sanctitas and sapientia Dei. Nor would it enlighten us to follow Anselm’s archiepiscopal career, save so far as to realize that he who lives in the thought of God will fear no brutal earthly majesty, such as that of William Rufus, to admonish whom Anselm once more crossed the Channel after Lanfranc’s death. Whatever this despoiler of bishoprics then thought, he fell sick afterwards, and, being terrified, named Anselm archbishop, this being in the year 1093. One may imagine the unison between them! and how little the Red King’s ways would turn the enskied steadfastness of Anselm’s soul. But the king had the power, and could keep the archbishop in trouble and in peril. Anselm asked and asked again for leave to go to Rome, and the king refused. After more than one stormy scene—the storm being always on the Red King’s part—Anselm made it plain that he would obey God rather than man in the matter. At the very last he went in to the king and his Court, and seating himself quietly at the king’s right he said: “I, my lord, shall go, as I have determined. But first, if you do not decline it, I will give you my blessing.” So the king acquiesced. The archbishop went first to Canterbury, to comfort and strengthen his monks, and spoke to them assembled together: “Dearly beloved brothers and sons, I am, as you know, about to leave this kingdom. The contention with our lord the king as to Christian discipline, has reached this pass that I must either do what is contrary to God and my own honour, or leave the realm. Gladly I go, hoping through the mercy of God that my journey may advance the Church’s liberty hereafter. I am moved to pity you, upon whom greater tribulations will come in my absence. Even with me here you have not been unoppressed, yet I think I have given you more peace than you have had since the death of our Father Lanfranc. I think those who molest you will rage the more with me away. You, however, are not undisciplined in the school of the Lord. Nevertheless I will say something, because, since you have come together within the close of this monastery to fight for God, you should always have before your eyes how you should fight. “All retainers do not fight in the same way either for an earthly prince, or for God whose are all things that are. The angels established in eternal beatitude wait upon Him. He has also men who serve Him for earthly benefits, like hired knights. He has also some who, cleaving to His will, contend to reach the kingdom of heaven, which they have forfeited through Adam’s fault. Observe the knights who are in God’s pay. Many you see leading a secular life and cleaving to the household of God for the good things which they gain in His service. But when, by God’s judgment, trial comes to them, and disaster, they fly from His love and accuse Him of injustice. We monks—would that we were such as not to be like them! For those who cannot stand to their professed purpose unless they have all things comfortable, and do not wish to suffer destitution for God, how shall they not be held like to these? And shall such be heirs of the kingdom of heaven? Faithfully I say, No, never, unless they repent. “He who truly contends toward recovering the kingdom of life, strives to cleave to God through all; no adversity draws him from God’s service, no pleasure lures him from the love of Him. Per dura et aspera he treads the way of His commands, and from hope of the reward to come, his heart is aflame with the ardour of love, and sings with the Psalmist, Great is the glory of the Lord. Which glory he tastes in this pilgrimage, and tasting, he desires, and desiring, salutes as from afar. Supported by the hope of attaining, he is consoled amid the perils of the world and gladly sings, Great is the glory of the Lord. Know that this one will in no way be defrauded of that glory of the Lord, since all that is in him serves the Lord, and is directed to winning this reward. But I see that there is no need to say to you another word. My brothers, since we are separated now in grief, I beseech you so to strive that hereafter we may be united joyfully before God. Be ye those who truly wish to be made heirs of God.” The clarity and gentle love of this high argument is Anselm. Now the story follows of Anselm and Eadmer and another monk travelling on, sometimes unknown, sometimes acclaimed, through France to Italy and Rome. Anselm’s face inspired reverence in those who did not know him, and the peace of his countenance attracted even Saracens. Had he been born and bred in England, he might have managed better with the Red King. He never got an English point of view, but remained a Churchman with Italian-Hildebrandine convictions. Of course, two policies were clashing then in England, where it happened that there was on one side an able and rapacious tyrant, while the other was represented by a man with the countenance and temperament of an angel. But we may leave Anselm now in Italy, where he is beyond the Red King’s molestation, and turn to his writings. Their choice and treatment of subject was partly guided by the needs of his pupils and friends at Bec and elsewhere in Normandy or Francia or England. For he wrote much at their solicitation; and the theological problems of which solutions were requested, suggest the intellectual temper of those regions, rather than of Italy. In a way Anselm’s works, treating of separate and selected Christian questions, are a proper continuation of those composed by northern theologians in the ninth century on Predestination and the Eucharist.[345] Only Anselm’s were not evoked by the exigency of actual controversy as much as by the insistency of the eleventh-century mind, and the need it felt of some adjustment regarding certain problems. Anselm’s theological and philosophic consciousness is clear and confident. His faculties are formative and creative, quite different from the compiling instincts of Alcuin or Rabanus. The matter of his argument has become his own; it has been remade in his thinking, and is presented as from himself—and God. He no longer conceives himself as one searching through the “pantries” of the Fathers or culling the choice flowers of their “meadows.” He will set forth the matter as God has deigned to disclose it to him. In the Cur Deus homo he begins by saying that he has been urged by many, verbally and by letter, to consider the reasons why God became man and suffered, and then, assenting, says: “Although, from the holy Fathers on, what should suffice has been said, yet concerning this question I will endeavour to set forth for my inquirers what God shall deign to disclose to me.”[346] Certain works of Anselm, the Monologion, for instance, present the dry and the formal method of reasoning which was to make its chief home in France; others, like the Proslogion, seem to be Italian in a certain beautiful emotionalism. The feeling is very lofty, even lifted out of the human, very skyey, even. The Proslogion, the Meditationes, do not throb with the red blood of Augustine’s Confessions, the writing which influenced them most. The quality of their feeling suggests rather Dante’s Paradiso; and sometimes with Anselm a sense of formal beauty and perfection seems to disclose the mind of Italy. Moreover, Anselm’s Latin style appears Italian. It is elastic, even apparently idiomatic, and varies with the temper and character of his different works. Throughout, it shows in Latin the fluency and simple word-order natural to an author whose vulgaris eloquentia was even closer to Latin in the time of Anselm than when Dante wrote. So Anselm’s writings were intimately part of their author, and very part of his life-long meditation upon God. Led by the solicitations of others, as well as impelled by the needs of his own faculties and nature, he takes up one Christian problem after another, and sets forth his understanding of it with his conclusion. He is devout, an absolute believer; and he is wonderfully metaphysical. He is a beautiful, a sublimated, and idealizing reasoner, convinced that a divine reality must exist in correspondence with his thought, which projects itself aloft to evoke from the blue an answering reality. The inspiration, the radiating point of Anselm’s intellectual interest, is clearly given—to understand that which he first believes. It is a spontaneous intellectual interest, not altogether springing from a desire to know how to be saved. It does not seek to understand in order to believe; but seeks the happiness of knowing and understanding that which it believes and loves. Listen to some sentences from the opening of the Proslogion: “Come now, mannikin, flee thy occupations for a little, and hide from the confusion of thy cares. Be vacant a little while for God, and for a little rest in Him.... Now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek thee, where and how to find thee. Lord, Lord, illuminate us; show us thyself. Pity us labouring toward thee, impotent without thee.... Teach me to seek thee, and show thyself to my search; for I cannot seek thee unless thou dost teach, nor find thee unless thou dost show thyself.... I make no attempt, Lord, to penetrate thy depths, for my intellect has no such reach; but I desire to understand some measure of thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. I do not seek to know in order that I may believe; but I believe, that I may know. For I believe this also, that unless I shall have believed, I shall not understand.”[347] So Anselm is first a believer, then a theologian; and his reason devotes itself to the elucidation of his faith. Faith prescribes his intellectual interests, and sets their bounds. His thought does not occupy itself with matters beyond. But it takes a pure intellectual delight in reasoning upon the God which his faith presents and his heart cleaves to. The motive is the intellectual and loving delight which his mind takes in this pursuit. His faith was sure and undisturbed, and ample for his salvation. His intellect, affected by no motive beyond its own strength and joy, delights in reasoning upon the matter of his faith.[348] We may still linger for a moment to observe how closely part of Anselm’s nature was his proof of the existence of God.[349] It sprang directly from his saintly soul and the compelling idealism of his reason. In the Monologion Anselm ranged his many arguments concerning the nature and attributes of the summum bonum which is God. Its chain of inductions failed to satisfy him and his pupils. So he set his mind to seek a sole and unconditioned proof (as Eadmer states in the Vita) of God’s existence and the attributes which faith ascribes to Him. Anselm says the same in the Preface to the Proslogion: “Considering that the prior work was woven out of a concatenation of many arguments, I set to seek within myself (mecum) whether I might not discover one argument which needed nothing else than itself alone for its proof; and which by itself might suffice to show that God truly exists, and that He is the summum bonum needing nothing else, but needed by all things in order that they may exist and have well-being (ut sint et bene sint); and whatever we believe concerning the divine substance.” The famous proof which at length flashed upon him is substantially this: By very definition the word God means the greatest conceivable being. This conception exists even in the atheist’s mind, for he knows what is meant by the words, the absolutely greatest. But the greatest cannot be in the intellect alone, for then conceivably there would be a greater which would exist in reality as well. And since, by definition, God is the absolutely greatest, He must exist in reality as well as in the mind.[350] Carrying out the scholia to this argument, Anselm then proves that God possesses the various attributes ascribed to Him by the Christian Faith. That from a definition one may not infer the existence of the thing defined, was pointed out by a certain monk Gaunilo almost as soon as the Proslogion appeared. Anselm answered him that the argument applied only to the greatest conceivable being. Since that time Anselm’s proof has been upheld and disproved many times. It was at all events a great dialectic leap; but likely one may not with such a bound cross the chasm from definition to existence—at least one will be less bold to try when he realizes that this chasm is there. Temperamentally, at least, this proof was the summit of Anselm’s idealism: he could not but conceive things to exist in correspondence to the demands of his conceptions. He never made another so palpable leap from conception to conviction as in this proof of God’s existence; yet his theology proceeded through like processes of thought. For example, he is sure of God’s omnipotence, and also sure that God can do nothing which would detract from the perfection of His nature: God cannot lie: “For it does not follow, if God wills to lie that it is just to lie; but rather that He is not God. For only that will can will to lie in which truth is corrupted, or rather which is corrupted by forsaking truth. Therefore when one says ‘if God wills to lie,’ he says in substance, ‘if God is of such a nature as to will to lie.’”[351] Anselm’s other famous work was the Cur Deus homo, upon the problem why God became man to redeem mankind. It was connected with his view of sin, and the fall of the angels, as set forth chiefly in his dialogue De casu Diaboli. One may note certain cardinal points in his exposition: Man could be redeemed only by God; for he would have been the bond-servant of whoever redeemed him, and to have been the servant of any one except God would not have restored him to the dignity which would have been his had he not sinned.[352] Or again: The devil had no rights over man, which he lost by unjustly slaying God. For man was not the devil’s, nor does the devil belong to himself but to God.[353] Evidently Anselm frees himself from the conception of any ransom paid to the devil, or any trickery put on him—thoughts which had lowered current views of the Atonement. Anselm’s arguments (which are too large, and too interwoven with his views upon connected subjects, to be done justice to by any casual statement) are free from degrading foolishness. His reasonings were deeply felt, as one may see in his Meditationes, where thought and feeling mutually support and enhance each other. So he recalls Augustine, the great model and predecessor whom he followed and revered. And still the feeling in Anselm’s Meditationes, as in the Proslogion, is somewhat sublimated and lifted above human heart-throbs. Perhaps it may seem rhetorical, and intentionally stimulated in order to edify. Even in the Meditationes upon the humanity and passion of Jesus, Anselm is not very close to the quivering tenderness of St. Bernard, and very far from the impulsive and passionate love of Francis of Assisi. One thinks that his feelings rarely distorted his countenance or wet it with tears.[354]
CHAPTER XII MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: FRANCE 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. I It appeared in the last chapter that Anselm’s choice of topic was not uninfluenced by his northern domicile at Bec in Normandy, from which, one may add, it was no far cry to the monastery (Marmoutier) of Anselm’s sharp critic Gaunilo. These places lay within the confines of central and northern France, the home of the most originative mediaeval development. For this region, the renewed studies of the Carolingian period were the proper antecedents of the efforts of the eleventh century. The topics of study still remained substantially the same; yet the later time represents a further stage in the appropriation of the antique and patristic material, and its productions show the genius of the authors more clearly than Carolingian writings, which were taken piecemeal from patristic sources or made of borrowed antique phrase. The difference is seen in the personality and writings of Gerbert of Aurillac,[355] the man who with such intellectual catholicity opens the story of this period. One will be struck with the apparently arid crudity of his intellectual processes. Crude they were, and of necessity; arid they were not, being an unavoidable stage in the progress of mediaeval thinking. Yet it is a touch of fate’s irony that such an interesting personality should have been afflicted with them. For Gerbert was the redeeming intellect of the last part of the tenth century. The cravings of his mind compassed the intellectual predilections of his contemporaries in their entirety. Secular and by no means priestly they appear in him; and it is clear that religious motives did not dominate this extraordinary individual who was reared among monks, became Abbot of Bobbio, Archbishop of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna, and pope at last. He appears to have been born shortly before the year 950. From the ignorance in which we are left as to his parents and the exact place of his birth in Aquitaine, it may be inferred that his origin was humble. While still a boy he was received into the Benedictine monastery of St. Geraldus at Aurillac in Auvergne. There he studied grammar (in the extended mediaeval sense), under a monk named Raymund, and grew to love the classics. A loyal affectionateness was a life-long trait of Gerbert, and more than one letter in after life bears witness to the love which he never ceased to feel for the monks of Aurillac among whom his youthful years were passed, and especially for this brother Raymund from whom he received his first instruction. Raymund afterwards became abbot of the convent. But it was his predecessor, Gerald, who had received the boy Gerbert, and was still to do something of moment in directing his career. A certain duke of the Spanish March came on a pilgrimage to Aurillac; and Gerald besought him to take Gerbert back with him to Spain for such further instruction as the convent did not afford. The duke departed, taking Gerbert, and placed him under the tuition of the Bishop of Vich, a town near Barcelona. Here he studied mathematics. The tradition that he travelled through Spain and learned from the Arabs lacks probability. But in the course of time the duke and bishop set forth to pray for sundry material objects at the fountainhead of Catholicism, and took their protÉgÉ with them to Rome. In Rome, Gerbert’s destiny advanced apace. His patrons, doubtless proud of their young scholar, introduced him to the Pope, John XIII., who also was impressed by Gerbert’s personality and learning. John told his own protector, the great Otto, and informed him of Gerbert’s ability to teach mathematics; and the two kept Gerbert in Rome, when the Spanish duke and bishop returned to their country. Gerbert began to teach, and either at this time or later had among his pupils the young Augustus, Otto II. But he was more anxious to study logic than to teach mathematics, even under imperial favour. He persuaded the old emperor to let him go to Rheims with a certain archdeacon from that place, who was skilled in the science which he lacked. The emperor dismissed him, with a liberal hand. In his new home Gerbert rapidly mastered logic, and impressed all with his genius. He won the love of the archbishop, Adalberon, who shortly set the now triply accomplished scholar at the head of the episcopal school. Gerbert’s education was complete, in letters, in mathematics including music, and in logic. Thenceforth for ten years (972-982), the happiest of his life, he studied and also taught the whole range of academic knowledge. Fortune, not altogether kind, bestowed on Gerbert the favour of three emperors. The graciousness of the first Otto had enabled him to proceed to Rheims. The second Otto listened to his teaching, admired the teacher, and early in the year 983 made him Abbot and Count of Bobbio. Long afterwards the third Otto made him Archbishop of Ravenna, and then pope. Bobbio, the chief foundation of Columbanus, situated not far from Genoa, was powerful and rich; but its vast possessions, scattered throughout Italy, had been squandered by worthless abbots or seized by lawless nobles. The new count-abbot, eager to fulfil the ecclesiastical and feudal functions of his position, strove to reclaim the monastery’s property and bring back its monks to decency and learning. In vain. Now, as more than once in Gerbert’s later life, brute circumstances proved too strong. Otto died. Gerbert was unsupported. He struggled and wrote many letters which serve to set forth the situation for us, though they did not win the battle for their writer: “According to the largeness of my mind, my lord (Otto II.) has enriched me with most ample honours. For what part of Italy does not hold the possessions of the blessed Columbanus? So should this be, from the generosity and benevolence of our Caesar. Fortune, indeed, ordains it otherwise. Forsooth according to the largeness of my mind she has loaded me with most ample stores of enemies. For what part of Italy has not my enemies? My strength is unequal to the strength of Italy! There is peace on this condition: if I, despoiled, submit, they cease to strike; intractable in my vested rights, they attack with the sword. When they do not strike with the sword, they thrust with javelins of words.”[356] Within a year Gerbert gave up the struggle at Bobbio, and returned to Rheims to resume his duties as head of the school, and secretary and intimate adviser of Adalberon. Politically the time was one of uncertainty and turmoil. The Carolingian house was crumbling, and the house of Capet was scheming and struggling on to a royalty scarcely more considerable. In Germany intrigue and revolt threatened the rights of the child Otto III. Archbishop Adalberon, guided by Gerbert, was a powerful factor in the dynastic change in France; and the two were zealous for Otto. Throughout these troubles Gerbert constantly appears, directing projected measures and divining courses of events, yet somehow, in spite of his unmatched intelligence, failing to control them. Time passed, and Adalberon died at the beginning of the year 989. His successor, Arnulf, a scion of the falling Carolingian house, was subsequently unseated for treason to the new-sprung house of Capet. In 991 Gerbert himself was made archbishop. But although seeming to reach his longed-for goal, troubles redoubled on his head. There was rage at the choice of one so lowly born for the princely dignity. The storm gathered around the new archbishop, and the See of Rome was moved to interfere, which it did gladly, since at Rome Gerbert was hated for the reproaches cast upon its ignorance and corruption by bishops at the council which elected him and deposed his predecessor. In that deposition and election Rome had not acquiesced; and we read the words of the papal legate: “The acts of your synod against Arnulf, or rather against the Roman Church, astound me with their insults and blasphemies. Truly is the word of the Gospel fulfilled in you, ‘There shall be many anti-Christs.’... Your anti-Christs say that Rome is as a temple of idols, an image of stone. Because the vicars of Peter and their disciples will not have as master Plato, Virgil, Terence or the rest of the herd of Philosophers, ye say they are not worthy to be door-keepers—because they have no part in such song.”[357] The battle went against Gerbert. Interdicted from his archiepiscopal functions, he left France for the Court of Otto III., where his intellect at once dominated the aspirations of the young monarch. Otto and Gerbert went together to Italy, and the emperor made his friend Archbishop of Ravenna. The next year, 999, Gregory V. died, and the archbishop became Pope Sylvester II. For three short years the glorious young imperial dreamer and his peerless counsellor planned and wrought for a great united Empire and Papacy on earth. Then death took first the emperor and soon afterwards the pope-philosopher. Gerbert was the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most eager learner, and most universal scholar. His pregnant letters reflect a finished man who has mastered his acquired knowledge and transformed it into power. They also evince the authorship of one who had uniquely profited from the power and spirit of the great minds of the pagan past, had imbibed their sense of form and pertinency, and with them had become self-contained and self-controlled, master of himself and of all that had entered in and made him what he was. Notice how the personality of the writer, with his capacities, tastes, and temperament, is unfolded before us in a letter to a close friend, abbot of a monastery at Tours: “Since you hold my memory in honour, and in virtue of relationship declare great friendship, I deem that I shall be happy for your opinion, if only I am one who in the judgment of so great a man is found worthy to be loved. But since I am not one who, with Panetius, would sometimes separate the good from the useful, but rather with Tully would mingle it with everything useful, I wish these best and holiest friendships never to be void of reciprocal utility. And as morality and the art of speech are not to be severed from philosophy, I have always joined the study of speaking well with the study of living well. For although by itself living well may be nobler than speaking well, and may suffice without its fellow for one absolved from the direction of affairs; yet for us, busied with the State, both are needed. For it is of the greatest utility to speak appositely when persuading, and with mild discourse check the fury of angry men. In preparing for such business, I am eagerly collecting a library; and as formerly at Rome and elsewhere in Italy, so likewise in Germany and Belgium, I have obtained copyists and manuscripts with a mass of money, and the help of friends in those parts. Permit me likewise to beg of you also to promote this end. We will append at the end of this letter a list of those writers we wish copied. We have sent for your disposal parchment for the scribes and money to defray the cost, not unmindful of your goodness. Finally, lest by saying more we should abuse epistolary convenances, the cause of so much trouble is contempt of faithless fortune; a contempt which not nature alone has given to us—as to many men—but careful study. Consequently when at leisure and when busied in affairs, we teach what we know, and learn where we are ignorant.”[358] Gerbert’s letters are concise, even elliptical to the verge of obscurity. He discloses himself in a few words to his old friend Raymund at the monastery of Aurillac: “With what love we are bound to you, the Latins know and also the barbarians,[359] who share the fruit of our studies. Their vows demand your presence. Amid public cares philosophy is the sole solace; and from her study we have often been the gainer, when in this stormy time we have thus broken the attack of fortune raging grievously against others or ourselves....”[360] Save for the language, one might fancy Cicero speaking to some friend, and not the future pope of the year 1000 to a monk. The sentiment is quite antique. And Gerbert not only uses antique phrase but is touched, like many a mediaeval man, with the antique spirit. In another letter he writes of friendship, and queries whether the divinity has given anything better to mortals. He refers to his prospects, and remarks: “sed involvit mundum caeca fortuna,” and he is not certain whither it will cast him.[361] Doubtless such antique sentiments were a matter of mood with Gerbert; he can readily express others of a Christian colour, and turn again to still other topics very readily, as in the following letter—a curious one. It is to a monk: “Think not, sweetest brother, that it is through my fault I lack my brethren’s society. After leaving thee, I had to undertake many journeys in the business of my father Columbanus.[362] The ambitions of the powers, the hard and wretched times, turn right to wrong. No one keeps faith. Yet since I know that all things hang on the decree of God, who changes both hearts and the kingdoms of the sons of men, I patiently await the end of things. I admonish and exhort thee, brother, to do the same. In the meanwhile one thing I beg, which may be accomplished without danger or loss to thee, and will make me thy friend forever. Thou knowest with what zeal I gather books everywhere, and thou knowest how many scribes there are in Italy, in town and country. Come then, quietly procure me copies of Manlius’s (BoËthius) De astrologia, Victorinus’s Rhetoric, Demosthenes’s Optalmicus.[363] I promise thee, brother, and will keep my word, to preserve a sacred silence as to thy praiseworthy compliance, and will remit twofold whatever thou dost demand. Let this much be known to the man, and the pay too, and cheer us more frequently with a letter; and have no fear that knowledge will come to any one of any matter thou mayest confide to our good faith.”[364] When he wrote this letter, about the year 988, Gerbert was dangerously deep in politics, and great was the power of this low-born titular Abbot of Bobbio, head of the school at Rheims and secretary to the archbishop. The tortuous statecraft and startling many-sidedness of this “scholar in politics” must have disturbed his contemporaries, and may have roused the suspicions from which grew the stories, told by future men, that this scholar, statesman, and philosopher-pope was a magician who had learned from forbidden sources much that should be veiled. Withal, however, one may deem that the most veritable inner bit of Gerbert was his love of knowledge and of antique literature, and that the letters disclosing this are the subtlest revelation of the man who was ever transmuting his well-guarded knowledge into himself and his most personal moods. “For there is nothing more noble for us in human affairs than a knowledge of the most distinguished men; and may it be displayed in volumes upon volumes multiplied. Go on then, as you have begun, and bring the streams of Cicero to one who thirsts. Let M. Tullius thrust himself into the midst of the anxieties which have enveloped us since the betrayal of our city, so that in the happy eyes of men we are held unhappy through our sentence. What things are of the world we have sought, we have found, we have accomplished, and, as I will say, we have become chief among the wicked. Lend aid, father, in order that divinity, expelled by the multitude of sinners, bent by thy prayers, may return, may visit us, may dwell with us—and if possible, may we who mourn the absence of the blessed father Adalberon, be rejoiced by thy presence.”[365] So Gerbert wrote from Rheims, himself a chief intriguer in a city full of treason. Gerbert was a power making for letters. The best scholars sat at his feet; he was an inspiration at the Courts of the second and third Ottos, who loved learning and died so young; and the great school of Chartres, under the headship of his pupil Fulbert, was the direct heir to his instruction. At Rheims, where he taught so many years, he left to others the elementary instruction in Latin. A pupil, Richer, who wrote his history, speaks of courses in rhetoric and literature, to which he introduced his pupils after instructing them in logic: “When he wished to lead them on from such studies to rhetoric, he put in practice his opinion that one cannot attain the art of oratory without a previous knowledge of the modes of diction which are to be learned from the poets. So he brought forward those with whom he thought his pupils should be conversant. He read and explained the poets Virgil, Statius, and Terence, the satirists Juvenal and Persius and Horace, also Lucan the historiographer. Familiarized with these, and practised in their locutions, he taught his pupils rhetoric. After they were instructed in this art, he brought up a sophist, to practise them in disputation, so that practised in this art as well, they might seem to argue artlessly, which he deemed the height of oratory.”[366] So Gerbert used the classic poets in teaching rhetoric, and doubtless the great prose writers too, with whom he was familiar. Following Cicero’s precept that the orator should be a proficient reasoner, he prepared his young rhetoricians by a course in logic, and completed their discipline with exercises in disputation. Richer also speaks of Gerbert’s epoch-making mathematical knowledge.[367] In arithmetic he improved the current methods of computation; in geometry he taught the traditional methods of measurement descended from the Roman surveyors, and compiled a work from BoËthius and other sources. For astronomy he made spheres and other instruments, and in music his teaching was the best obtainable. In none of these provinces was he an original inventor; nor did he exhaust the knowledge had by men before him. He was, however, the embodiment of mediaeval progress, in that he drew intelligently upon the sources within his reach, and then taught with understanding and enthusiasm. Richer’s praise is unstinted: “He began with arithmetic; then taught music, of which there had long been ignorance in Gaul.... With what pains he set forth the method of astronomy, it may be well to state, so that the reader may perceive the sagacity and skill of this great man. This difficult subject he explained by means of admirable instruments. First he illustrated the world’s sphere by one of solid wood, the greater by the less. He fixed it obliquely as to the horizon with two poles, and near the upper pole set the northern constellations, and by the lower one those of the south. He determined its position by means of the circle called by the Greeks orizon and by the Latins limitans, because it divides the constellations which are seen from those which are not. By his sphere thus fixed, he demonstrated the rising and setting of the stars, and taught his disciples to recognize them. And at night he followed their courses and marked the place of their rising and setting upon the different regions of his model.” The historian passes on to tell how Gerbert with ingenious devices showed on his sphere the imaginary circles called parallels, and on another the movements of the planets, and on still another marked the constellations of the heavens, so that even a beginner, upon having one constellation pointed out, could find the others.[368] In the province of philosophy, Gerbert’s labours extended little beyond formal logic, philosophy’s instrument. He could do no more than understand and apply as much of BoËthius’s rendering of the Aristotelian Organon as he was acquainted with. Yet he appears to have used more of the BoËthian writings than any man before him, or for a hundred and fifty years after his death. Richer gives the list. Beyond this evidence, curious testimony is borne to the nature of Gerbert’s dialectic by Richer’s account of a notable debate. The year was 980, when the fame of the brilliant young scholasticus of Rheims had spread through Gaul and penetrated Germany. A certain master of repute at Magdeburg, named Otric, sent one of his pupils to report on Gerbert’s teaching, and especially as to his method of laying out the divisions of philosophy as “the science of things divine and human.” The pupil returned with notes of Gerbert’s classification, in which, by error or intention, it was made to appear that he subordinated physics to mathematics, as species to genus, whereas, in truth, he made them of equal rank. Otric thought to catch him tripping, and so managed that a disputation was held between them at a time when Adalberon and Gerbert were in Italy with the Emperor Otto II. It took place in Ravenna. The emperor, then nineteen years of age, presided, there being present many masters and dignitaries of the Church. Holding in his hand a tablet of Gerbert’s alleged division of the sciences, His Majesty opened the debate: “Meditation and discussion, as I think, make for the betterment of human knowledge, and questions from the wise rouse our thoughtfulness. Thus knowledge of things is drawn forth by the learned, or discovered by them and committed to books, which remain to our great good. We also may be incited by certain objects which draw the mind to a surer understanding. Observe now, that I am turning over this tablet inscribed with the divisions of philosophy. Let all consider it carefully, and each say what he thinks. If it be complete, let it be confirmed by your approbation. If imperfect, let it be rejected or corrected. “Then Otric, taking it before them all, said that it was arranged by Gerbert, and had been taken down from his lectures. He handed it to the Lord Augustus, who read it through, and presented it to Gerbert. The latter, carefully examining it, approved in part, and in part condemned, asserting that the scheme had not been arranged thus by him. Asked by Augustus to correct it, he said: ‘Since, O great Caesar Augustus, I see thee more potent than all these, I will, as is fitting, obey thy behest. Nor shall I be concerned at the spite of the malevolent, by whose instigation the very correct division of philosophy recently set forth so lucidly by me, has been vitiated by the substitution of a species. I say then, that mathematics, physics, and theology are to be placed as equals under one genus. The genus likewise has equal share in them. Nor is it possible that one and the same species, in one and the same respect, should be co-ordinate with another species and also be put under it as species under a genus.’” Then in answer to a demand from Otric for a more explicit statement of his classification, he said there could be no objection to dividing philosophy according to Vitruvius (Victorinus) and BoËthius; “for philosophy is the genus, of which the species are the practical and the theoretical: under the practical, as species again, come dispensativa, distributiva and civilis; under the theoretical fall phisica naturalis, mathematica intelligibilis, and theologia intellectibilis.” Otric then wonders that Gerbert put mathematics immediately after physics, omitting physiology. To which Gerbert replies that physiology stands to physics as philology to philosophy, of which it is part. Otric changes his attack to a flank movement, and asks Gerbert what is the causa of philosophy. Gerbert asks whether he means the cause by which, or the cause for which, it is devised (inventa). Otric replies the latter. “Then,” says Gerbert, “since you make your question clear, I say that philosophy was devised that from it we might understand things divine and human.” “But why use so many words,” says Otric, “to designate the cause of one thing?” “Because one word may not suffice to designate a cause. Plato uses three to designate the cause of the creation of the world, to wit, the bona Dei voluntas. He could not have said voluntas simply.” “But,” says Otric, “he could have said more concisely Dei voluntas, for God’s will is always good, which he would not deny.” “Here I do not contradict you,” says Gerbert, “but consider: since God alone is good in himself, and every creature is good only by participation, the word bona is added to express the quality peculiar to His nature alone. However this may be, still one word will not always designate a cause. What is the cause of shadow? Can you put that in one word? I say, the cause of shadow is a body interposed to light. It is not ‘body’ nor even ‘body interposed.’ I don’t deny that the causes of many things can be stated in one word, as the genera of substance, quantity, or quality, which are the causes of species. Others cannot so simply be expressed, as rationale ad mortale.” This enigmatic phrase electrifies Otric, who cries: “You put the mortal under the rational? Who does not know that the rational is confined to God, angels, and mankind, while the mortal embraces everything mortal, a limitless mass?” “To which Gerbert: ‘If, following Porphyry and BoËthius, you make a careful division of substance, carrying it down to individuals, you will have the rational broader than the mortal as may readily be shown. Since substance, admittedly the most general genus, may be divided into subordinate genera and species down to individuals, it is to be seen whether all these subordinates may be expressed by a single word. Clearly, some are designated with one word, as corpus, others with several, as animatum sensibile. With like reason, the subordinate, which is animal rationale, may be predicated of the subject that is animal rationale mortale. Not that rationale may be predicated of what is mortal simply; but rationale, I say, joined to animal is predicated of mortale joined to animal rationale.’ “At this, Augustus with a nod ended the argument, since it had lasted nearly the whole day, and the audience were fatigued with the prolix and unbroken disputation. He splendidly rewarded Gerbert, who set out for Gaul with Adalberon.”[369] Evidently Richer’s account gives merely the captions of this disputation. There was not the slightest originality in any of the propositions stated by the disputants; everything is taken from Porphyry and BoËthius and the current Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus. Yet the whole affair, the selection of the questions, the nature of the answers, the limitation of the matter to the bare poles of logical palestrics, is most illustrative of the mentality and intellectual interests of the late tenth century. The growth of the mediaeval intellect lay unavoidably through such courses of discipline. And just as early mediaeval Latin had to save itself from barbarism by cleaving to grammar, so the best intellect of this early period grasped at logic not only as the most obviously needed discipline and guide, but also with imperfect consciousness that this discipline and means did not contain the goal and plenitude of substantial knowledge. Grammar was then not simply a means but an end in the study of letters, and so was logic unconsciously. In the one case and the other, the palpable need of the disciplina and its difficulties kept the student from realizing that the instrument was but an instrument. Moreover, upon Gerbert’s time pressed the specific need to consider just such questions as the disputation affords a sample of. An enormous mass of theology, philosophy, and science awaited mastering, the heritage from a greater past, antique and patristic. Perhaps a true instinct guided Gerbert and his contemporaries to problems of classification and method as a primary essential task. Had the Middle Ages been a period when knowledge, however crude, was perforce advancing through experience, investigation, and discovery, the problems of classification and method would not have presented themselves as preliminary. But mediaeval development lay through the study of what former men had won from nature or received from God. This was preserved in books which had to be studied and mastered. Hence classifications of knowledge were essential aids or sorely needed guides. With a true instinct the Middle Ages first of all looked within this mass of knowledge for guides to its mazes, seeking a plan or scheme by the aid of which universal knowledge might be unravelled, and then reconstructed in forms corresponding to even larger verities.[370]
II The decades on either side of the year 1000 were cramped and dull. In Burgundy, to be sure, the energies of Cluny,[371] under its great abbots, were rousing the monastic world to a sense of religious and disciplinary decency. This reform, however, took little interest in culture. The monks of Cluny were commonly instructed in the rudiments of the Seven Arts. They had a little mathematics; bits of crude physical knowledge had unavoidably come to them; and just as unavoidably had they made use of extracts from the pagan poets in studying Latinity.[372] But they did not follow letters for their own sake, nor knowledge because they loved it and felt that love a holy one. Monastic principles hardly justified such a love, and Cluny’s abbots had enough to do in bringing the monastic world to decency, without dallying with inapplicable knowledge or the charms of pagan poetry. Religious reforms in the ninth century had helped letters in the cathedral and monastic schools of Gaul. The latter soon fell back to ignorance; but among the cathedral schools, Chartres and Rheims continued to flourish. A moral ordering of life increases thoughtfulness and may stimulate study. Hence, in the latter part of the tenth century, the Cluniac reforms, like the earlier reforming movements, affected letters favourably in the monasteries. Here and there an exceptional man created an exceptional situation. Such a one was Abbo, Abbot of St. Benedict’s at Fleury on the Loire, who died the year after Gerbert. He was fortunate in his excellent pupil and biographer, Aimoin, who ascribes to him as liberal sentiments toward study as were consistent with a stern monasticism: “He admonished his hearers that having cast out the thorns of sin, they should sow the little gardens of their hearts with the spices of the divine virtues. The battle lay against the vices of the flesh, and it was for them to consider what arms they should oppose to its delights. To complete their armament, after the vows of prayer, and the manly strife of fastings, he deemed that the study of letters would advantage them, and especially the exercise of composition. Indeed he himself, the studious man, scarcely let pass a moment when he was not reading, writing, or dictating.”[373] It is curious to observe the unavoidable influence of a crude Latin education upon the most strenuous of these reforming monks. In 994 Odilo became Abbot of Cluny. After a most notable and effective rule of more than half a century, he died just as the year 1049 began. The closing scenes are typically illustrative of the passing of an early mediaeval saint. The dying abbot preaches and comforts his monks, gives his blessing, adores the Cross, repels the devil: “I warn thee, enemy of the human race, turn from me thy plots and hidden wiles, for by me is the Cross of the Lord, which I always adore: the Cross my refuge, my way and virtue; the Cross, unconquerable banner, the invincible weapon. The Cross repels every evil, and puts darkness to flight. Through this divine Cross I approach my journey; the Cross is my life—death to thee, Enemy!” The next day, “in the presence of all, the Creed is read for a shield of faith against the deceptions of malignant spirits and the attacks of evil thoughts; Augustine is brought in to expound, intently listened to, and discussed.”[374] For Odilo, the Cross is a divine, not to say magic, safeguard. His prayer and imprecation have something of the nature of an uttered spell. No antique zephyrs seem to blow in this atmosphere of faith and fear, in which he passed his life, and performed his miracles before and after death. Nevertheless the antique might mould his phrases, and perhaps unconsciously affect his ethical conceptions. He wrote a Life of a former abbot of Cluny, ascribing to him the four cardinales disciplinas, in which he strove to perfect himself “in order that through prudentia he might assure the welfare of himself and those in his charge; that through temperantia (which by another name is called modestia), by a proper measure of a just discretion, he might modestly discharge the spiritual business entrusted to him; that through fortitudo he might resist and conquer the devil and his vices; and that through justitia, which permeates all virtues and seasons them, he might live soberly and piously and justly, fight the good fight and finish his course.”[375] Thus the antique virtues shape Odilo’s thoughts, as seven hundred years before him the point of view and reasoning of Ambrose’s De officiis ministrorum were set by Cicero’s De officiis.[376] The same classically touched phrases, if not conceptions, pass on to Odilo’s pupil and biographer, the monk Jotsaldus, to whom we owe our description of Odilo’s last moments. He ascribes the four cardinal virtues to his hero, and then defines them from the antique standpoint, but with Christian turns of thought: “The philosophers define Prudence as the search for truth and the thirst for fuller knowledge. In which virtue Odilo was so distinguished that neither by day nor night did he cease from the search for truth. The Book of the divine contemplation was always in his hands, and ceaselessly he spoke of Scripture for the edification of all, and prayer ever followed reading. “Justice, as the philosophers say, is that which renders each his due, lays no claim to what is another’s, and neglects self-advantage, so as to maintain what is equitable for all.” [To illustrate this virtue in Odilo, the biographer gives instances of his charity, by which one observes the Christian turn taken by the conception.] “Fortitude is to hold the mind above the dread of danger, to fear nothing save the base, and bravely bear adversity and prosperity. Supported by this virtue, it is difficult to say how brave he was in repelling the plots of enemies and how patient in enduring them. You might observe in him this very privilege of patience; to those who injured him, as another David he repaid the grace of benefit, and toward those who hated him, he preserved a stronger benevolence.” [Again the Christian turn of thought.] “Temperance, last in the catalogue of the aforesaid virtues, according to its definition maintains moderation and order in whatever is to be said or done. Here he was so mighty as to hold to moderation and observe propriety (ordinem) in all his actions and commands, and show a wonderful discretion. Following the blessed Jerome, he tempered fasting to the golden mean, according to the weakness or strength of the body, thus avoiding fanaticism and preserving continency. Neither elegance nor squalor was noticeable in his dress. He tempered gravity of conduct with gaiety of countenance. He was severe in the correction of vice as the occasion demanded, gracious in pardoning, in both balancing an impartial scale.”[377] III A friend of Odilo was Gerbert’s pupil Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres from 1006 to 1028. His name is joined forever with that chief cathedral school of early mediaeval France, which he so firmly and so broadly re-established as to earn a founder’s fame. It will be interesting to notice its range of studies. Chartres was an ancient home of letters. Caesar[378] speaks of the land of the Carnuti as the centre of Druidism in Gaul; and under the Empire, liberal studies quickly sprang up in the Gallo-Roman city. They did not quite cease even in Merovingian times, and revived with the Carolingian revival. Thenceforth they were pursued continuously at the convent school of St. Peter, if not at the school attached to the cathedral. For some years before he was made bishop, the grave and kindly Fulbert had been the head of this cathedral school, where he did not cease to teach until his death. As bishop, widely esteemed and influential, he rebuilt the cathedral, aided by the kings of France and Denmark, the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, the counts of Champagne and Blois. His vast crypt still endures, a shadowy goal for thousands of pilgrim knees, and an ample support for the great edifice above it. Admiring tradition has ascribed to him even this glory of a later time. From near and far, pious students came to benefit by the instruction of the school, of which Fulbert was the head and inspiration. Close was their intercourse with their “Venerable Socrates” in the small school buildings near the cathedral. From the accounts, we can almost see him moving among them, stopping to correct one here, or looking over the shoulder of another engaged upon a geometric figure, and putting some new problem. Among the pupils there might be rivalry, quarrels, breaches of decorum; but there was the master, ever grave and steadfast, always ready to encourage with his sympathy, but prepared also to reprove, either silently by withdrawing his confidence, or in words, as when he forbade an instructor to joke when explaining Donatus: “spectaculum factus es omnibus; cave.” Some of these scholars became men of sanctity and renown—Berengar of Tours gained an unhappy fame. A fellow-student wrote to him in later years addressing him as foster-brother: “I have called thee foster-brother because of that sweetest common life led by us while youths in the Academy of Chartres under our venerable Socrates. Well we proved his saving doctrine and holy living, and now that he is with God we should hope to be aided by his prayers. Surely he is mindful of us, cherishing us even more than when he moved a pilgrim in the body of this death, and drew us to him by vows and tacit prayer, entreating us in those evening colloquies (vespertina colloquia) in the garden by the chapel, that we should tread the royal way, and cleave to the footprints of the holy fathers.”[379] The cathedral school included youths receiving their first lessons, as well as older scholars and instructors. They lived together under rules, and together celebrated the services of the cathedral, chanting the matins, the hours, and the mass. The Trivium and Quadrivium made the basis of their studies. Text-books and courses were already some centuries old. The first branch of the Trivium was Grammar, which included literature by way of illustration; and he who held the chair had the title of grammaticus. For the beginners, Donatus was the text-book, and Priscianus for the more advanced.[380] Nor was Martianus Capella neglected. The student annotated these works with citations from the Etymologies of Isidore. Divers mnemotechnic processes assisted him to commit the contents to memory. The grammatical course included the writing of compositions in prose and verse, according to rule, and the reading of classic authors. For their school verses in metre the pupils used Bede’s De arte metrica, an encyclopaedia of metrical forms. They also wrote accentual and rhymed Latin verse. Of profane authors the Library appears to have contained Livy, Valerius Maximus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius, Servius the commentator on Virgil; and of writers who were Christian Classics in the Middle Ages, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus, Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, and BoËthius, the last named being the most important single source of early mediaeval education. Rhetoric, the second branch of the Trivium, bore that vague relationship to grammar which it bears in modern parlance. The rules of the rhetoricians were learned; the works of profane or Christian orators were read and imitated. This study left its mark on mediaeval sermons and Vitae Sanctorum. As for the third branch, Dialectic, Fulbert’s pupils studied the logical treatises in general use in the earlier Middle Ages: to wit, the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle, and Porphyry’s Introduction, all in the Latin of BoËthius. For works which might be regarded as commentaries upon these, the school had at its disposal the Categories ascribed to Augustine and Apuleius’s De interpretatione, Cicero’s Topica, and BoËthius’s discussion of definition, division, and categorical and hypothetical syllogisms—the logical writings expounded by Gerbert at Rheims. The school had likewise Gerbert’s own Libellus de ratione uti and BoËthius’s De consolatione, that chief ethical compend for the early Middle Ages; also the writings of Eriugena, and Dionysius the Areopagite in Eriugena’s translation. Whether or not it possessed the current Latin version of Plato’s Timaeus, Fulbert and Berengar at all events refer to Plato in terms of eulogy. Passing to the Quadrivium, we find that Fulbert had studied its four branches under Gerbert. In Arithmetic the students used the treatise of BoËthius, and also the Abacus, a table of vertical columns, with Roman numerals at the top to indicate the order of units, tens, and hundreds according to the decimal system. In Geometry the students likewise fell back upon BoËthius. Astronomy, the third branch of the Quadrivium, had for its practical object the computation of the Church’s calendar. The pupils learned the signs of the Zodiac and were instructed in the method of finding the stars by the Astrolabius, a sphere (such as Gerbert had constructed) representing the constellations, and turning upon a tube as an axis, which served to fix the polar star. Music, the fourth branch of the Quadrivium, was zealously cultivated. For its theory, the treatise of BoËthius was studied; and Fulbert and his scholars did much to advance the music of the liturgy, composing texts and airs for organ chanting. In addition to the Quadrivium, medicine was taught. The students learned receipts and processes handed down by tradition and commonly ascribed to Hippocrates. For more convenient memorizing, Fulbert cast them into verse. Such “medicine” was not founded on observation; and a mediaeval scholar-copyist would as naturally transcribe a medical receipt-book as any other work coming within the range of his stylus. One may remember that in the early Middle Ages the relic was the common means of cure. The seven Artes of the Trivium and Quadrivium were the handmaids of Theology; and Fulbert gave elaborate instruction in this Christian queen of the sciences, expounding the Scriptures, explaining the Liturgy, and taking up the controversies of the time. As a part of this sacred science, the students apparently were taught something of Canon and Roman law and of Charlemagne’s Capitularies.[381] IV The Chartres Quadrivium represents the extreme compass of mathematical and physical studies in France in the eleventh century, when slight interest was taken in physical science—a phrase far too grand to designate the crass traditional views of nature which prevailed. Indifference to natural knowledge was the most palpable intellectual defect of Ambrose and Augustine, and the most portentous. The coming centuries, which were to look upon their writings as universal guides to living and knowing, found therein no incentive to observe or study the natural world. Of course the Carolingian period evolved out of itself no such desire; nor did the eleventh century. At the best, the general understanding of physical fact remained that which had been handed down. It was gleaned from the books commonly read, the Physiologus or the edifying stories of miracles in the myriad Vitae Sanctorum, quite as much as from the scant information given in Isidore’s Origines, Bede’s Liber de temporibus, or the De universo of Rabanus Maurus. So much for natural science. In historical writing the quality of composition rarely rose above that of the tenth century.[382] No sign of critical acumen had appeared, and the writers of the period show but a narrow local interest. There was no France, but everywhere a parcelling of the land into small sections of misrule, between which travel was difficult and dangerous. The chroniclers confine their attention, as doubtless their knowledge also was confined, to the region where they lived. To lift history over these narrow barriers, there was needed the renewal of the royal power, which came with the century’s close, and the stimulus to curiosity springing from the Crusades.[383] In fine, the eleventh century was crude and inchoate, preparatory to the intellectual activity and the unleashed energies of life which mark the opening of the twelfth. Yet the mediaeval mind was assimilating and appropriating dynamically its lessons from the Fathers, as well as those portions of the antique heritage of thought which, so far, it had felt a need of. Difficult problems were stated, but in ways presenting, as it were, the apices of alternatives too narrow to hold truth, which lies less frequently in warring opposites than in an inclusive and discriminating conciliation. This century, especially when we fix our attention upon France, appears as the threshold of mediaeval thinking, the immediate antecedent to mediaeval formulations of philosophic and theological conviction. The controversies and the different mental tendencies which thereafter were to move through such large and often diverging courses, drew their origin from still prior times. With the coming of the eleventh century they had been sturdily cradled, and seemed safe from the danger of dying in infancy. Thence on through the twelfth century, through the thirteenth, the climacteric of mediaeval thought, opinions and convictions are set in multitudes of propositions, relating to many provinces of human meditation. These masses of propositions, convictions, opinions, philosophic and religious, constitute the religious philosophy of the Middle Ages—scholasticism as it commonly is called. Hereafter[384] it will be necessary to consider that large matter in its continuity of development, with its roots or antecedents stretching back through the eleventh century to the Carolingian period, and beyond. Mediaeval thinkers will then be seen to fall into two classes, very roughly speaking, the one tending to set authority above reason, and the other tending to set reason above authority. Both classes appear in the ninth century, represented respectively by Rabanus Maurus and Eriugena. In the eleventh they are also evident. St. Anselm, who came from Italy, is the most admirable representative of the first class, being in heart and mind a theologian whose philosophy revolved entire around his faith. Of him we have spoken; and here may mention in contrast with him two Frenchmen, Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. In place and time they come within the scope of the present chapter; nor were their mental processes such as to attach them to a later period. By temperament, and in somewhat confused expression, they set reason above authority, save that of Scripture as they understood it. Berengar was born, apparently at Tours, and of wealthy parents, just as the tenth century closed. After studying under his uncle, the Treasurer of St. Martin, he came to Chartres, where Fulbert was bishop. Judging from a general consensus of expression from men who became his opponents, but had been his fellow-pupils, he quickly aroused attention by his talents, and anxiety or enmity by his pride and the self-confident assertion of his opinions. He would neither accept with good grace the admonitions of those about him, nor follow the authority of the Fathers. He was said to have despised even the great grammarians and logicians, Priscian, Donatus, and BoËthius. Why err with everybody if everybody errs, he asked. He appears as a vain man eager for admiration. The report comes down that he imitated Fulbert’s manner in lecturing, first covering his visage with a hood so as to seem in deep meditation, and then speaking in a gentle, plaintive voice. From Chartres he passed to Angers, where he filled the office of archdeacon, and thence he returned to Tours, was placed over the Church schools of St. Martin’s, and in the course of time began to lecture on the Eucharist. This was between the years 1030 and 1040. That a man’s fortunes and fame are linked to a certain doctrine or controversy may be an accident of environment. Berengar chose to adduce and partly follow the teachings of Eriugena, whose fame was great, but whose orthodoxy was tainted. The nature of the Eucharist leant itself to dispute, and from the time of Ratramnus, Radbertus, and Eriugena, it was common for theologians to try their hand on it, if only in order to demonstrate their adherence to the extreme doctrines accepted by the Church. These were not the doctrines of Eriugena, nor were they held by Berengar, who would not bring himself to admit an absolute substantial change in the bread and wine. Possibly his convictions were less irrational than the dominant doctrine. Yet he appears to have asserted them, not because he had a clearer mind than others, but by reason of his more self-assertive and combative temperament. He was not an original thinker, but a controversial and turgid reasoner, who naturally enough was forced into all kinds of tergiversation in order to escape condemnation as a heretic. His self-assertiveness settled on the most obvious theological dispute of the time, and his self-esteem maintained the superiority of his own reason over the authorities adduced by his adversaries. Of course he never impugned the authority of Scripture, but relied on it to substantiate his views, merely asserting that a reasonable interpretation was better than a foolish one. Throughout the controversy, one may observe that Berengar’s understanding of fact kept somewhat closer than that of his opponents’ to the tangible realities of sense. But a difference of intellectual temperament lay at the bottom of his dissent; and had not the Eucharist presented itself as the readiest topic of dispute, he would doubtless have fallen upon some other question. As it was, his arguments gained adherents, the dominant view being repellent to independent minds. Still, it won the day, and Berengar was condemned by more than one council, and forced into all manner of equivocal retractions, by which at least he saved his life, and died in extreme old age. It may be that a larger relative import attributed by Berengar and also Roscellin to the tangibilities of sense-perception, led the latter at the close of the century to put forth views on the nature of universals which have given him a shadowy repute as the father of nominalism. The Eucharistic controversy pertained primarily to Christian dogmatics. That regarding universals, or general ideas, pertains to philosophy, and, from the standpoint of formal logic, lies at the foundations of consistent thinking. So closely does it make part of the development of scholasticism, that its discussion had best be postponed; merely assuming for the present that Roscellin’s thinking upon the topic to which his name is attached was not superior in method and analysis to Berengar’s upon the Eucharist. One cannot escape the conclusion that intellectually the eleventh century in France was crude. The mediaeval intellect was still but imperfectly developed; its manifestations had not reached the zenith of their energy. Yet doubtless the mental development of mankind proceeds at a more uniform rate than would appear from the brilliant phenomena which crowd the eras of apparent culmination, in contrast with the previous dulness. The profounder constancy of growth may be discerned by scrutinizing those dumb courses of gestation, from which spring the marvels of the great epoch. The opening of the twelfth century was to inaugurate a brilliant intellectual era in France. The efficient preparation stretched back into the latter half of the eleventh, whose Catholic progress heralded a period of awakening. The Church already was striving to accomplish its own reordering and regeneration, free itself from things that drag and hinder, from lay investiture and simony, abominations through which feudal depotentiating principles had intruded into the ecclesiastic body; free itself likewise from clerical marriage and concubinage, which kept the clergy from being altogether clergy, and weighted the Church with the claims of half-spurious priests’ offspring. In France the reform of the monks comes first, impelled by Cluny; and when Cluny herself becomes less zealous, because too great and rich, the spirit of soldiery against sin reincarnates itself in the Grand-Chartreuse, in Citeaux and Clairvaux. The reform of the secular clergy follows, with Hildebrand the veritable master; for the Church was passing from prelacy to papacy, and the Pope was becoming a true monarch, instead of nominal head of an episcopal aristocracy. The perfected organization and unceasing purification of the Church made one part of the general progress of the period. Another consisted in the disengaging of the greater powers from out the indiscriminate anarchy of feudalism, and the advance of the French monarchy, under Louis the Sixth,[385] toward effective sovereignty, all making for a surer law and order throughout France. Then through the eleventh and twelfth centuries came the struggle of the people, out of serfdom into some control over their own persons and fortunes. The serfs were affranchised and became peasants; the huddled dwellers in the squalid towns tended to become burghers with actual strength and chartered power to protect themselves against signorial tyranny. Their rights limited and fixed the exactions of their lords. Everywhere the population increased; old cities grew apace, and a multitude of new ones came into existence. Economic evolution progressed, advancing with the affranchisement of industry, the organization of guilds, the growth of trade, the opening of new markets, fairs, and freer avenues of commerce: thus more wealth was diffused among the many. Architecture with new civic resources was pushing on through Romanesque toward Gothic, while the affiliated arts of sculpture and painting were becoming more expressive. Then the Crusades began, and did their work of spreading knowledge through the Occident, carrying foreign ideas and institutions across provincial barriers. The Crusades could not have taken place had it not been for the freeing of social forces during the half century preceding their inception in the year 1099. They were led up to and made possible by the advance of the papacy to domination, by the growth of chivalry, and the habit of making far pilgrimages to holy places, and by the wealth coming with more active trade and industry. Thus humanity was universally bestirring itself throughout the land we know as France. Such a bestirring could not fail to crown itself with a mightier winging of the spirit through the higher provinces of thought. This was to show itself among saints and doctors of the Church in their philosophies and theologies of the mind and heart; with like power it was to show itself among those hardier rationalists who with difficulty and misgivings, or under hard compulsion, still kept themselves within the Church’s pale. It showed itself too with heretics who let themselves be burned rather than surrender their outlawed convictions. It was also to show itself through things beautiful, in the strivings of art toward the perfect symbolical presentation of what the soul cherished or abhorred; and show itself too in the literature of the common tongues as well as the literature of the time-honoured Latin. In fine, it was to show itself, through every heightened faculty and appetition of the universally striving and desirous soul of man, in a larger, bolder understanding and appreciation of life.
CHAPTER XIII MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND; CONCLUSION I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture.
II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict.
III. England; Closing Comparisons. I In the Germans of the eleventh century one notes a strong sense of German selfhood, supplemented by a consciousness that Latin culture is a foreign matter, introduced as a thing of great value which it were exceeding well for them to make their own. They are even conscious of having been converted to Latin Christianity, which on their part they are imbuing with German thoughts and feeling. They are not Romance people; they have never spoken Latin; it has never been and will never be their speech. They will master what they can of the antique education which has been brought to them. But even as it was no part of their forefathers’ lives, so it will never penetrate their own personalities, so as to make them the spiritual descendants of any antique Latin or Latinized people. They have never been and never will be Latinized; but will remain forever Germans. Consequently the appropriation of the Latin culture in Germany is a labour of translation: first a palpable labour of translation from the Latin language into the German tongue, and secondly, and for always, a more subtle kind of translation of the antique influence into a German understanding of the same, and gradually into informing principles made use of by a strong and advancing racial genius. The German genius will be enlarged and developed through these foreign elements, but it will never cease to use the Latin culture as a means of informing and developing itself. No need to say that these strong statements apply to the Germans in their home north of the Alps and east of the Rhine; not to those who left the Fatherland, and in the course of generations became Italians, for example. Moreover, general phrases must always be taken subject to qualification and rounding of the corners. No people can absorb a foreign influence without in some degree being made over into the likeness of what they are receiving, and to that extent ceasing to be their unmitigated selves. In general, however, while Latin Christianity and the antique culture both were brought to Germany from abroad, the Germans were converted or transformed only by the former, and merely took and used the latter—a true statement this, so far as one may separate these two great mingled factors of mediaeval progress. Evidently those Germans of the opening mediaeval centuries who did most to advance the civilization of their people were essentially introducers of foreign culture. This was manifestly true of the missionaries (chief among whom was the Anglo-Saxon Boniface) who brought Christianity to Germany. It was true both as to the Christian and the secular learning of Rabanus Maurus, who was born at Mainz, a very German.[386] With all his Latin learning he kept his interest in his mother tongue, and always realized that his people spoke German and not Latin. He encouraged preaching in German; and with the aid of his favourite pupil, Walafrid, he prepared German glosses and Latin-German glossaries for Scripture. Before Rabanus’s death popular translations of the Gospels had appeared, imbued with the Germanic spirit. The Heliand and Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch are the best known of these.[387] Then, extending through the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh century we note the labours of that most diligent of translators, Notker the German, a monk of St. Gall, and member of the Ekkehart family, which gave so many excellent abbots to that cloister. He died in 1022. Like Bede, Rabanus, and many other Teutonic scholars, he was an encyclopaedia of the knowledge afforded by his time. He was the head of a school of German translators. His own translations covered part of BoËthius’s De consolatione, Virgil’s Bucolics, Terence’s Andria, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, an arithmetic, a rhetoric, Job, and the Psalms. He was a teacher all his life, and a German always, loving his mother tongue, and occupying himself with its grammar and word forms. His method of translation was to give the Latin sentence, with a close German rendering, accompanied by an occasional explanation of the matter, also in German.[388] All the while, this foreign learning was being mastered gallantly in the leading cloisters, Fulda, St. Gall, Reichenau, Hersfeld, and others. Within their walls this Latin culture was studied and mastered, as one with resolve and perseverance masters that to which he is not born. Besides those who laboured as translators, other earnest fosterers of learning in Germany appear as introducers of the same. Bruno, youngest brother of Otto I., is distinguished in this rÔle. He promoted letters in his archiepiscopal diocese of Cologne. From many lands learned men came to him, Liutprand and Ratherius among others. Otto himself loved learning, and drew foreign scholars to his Court, one of whom was that conceited Gunzo, already spoken of.[389] Schools moved with the emperor (scholae translatitiae) also with Bruno, who though archbishop, duke, and burdened with affairs, took the time to teach. A passage in his Life by Ruotger shows the education and accomplishments of this most worthy prince of the Church and land: “Then as soon as he learned the first rudiments of the grammatic art, as we have heard from himself, often pondering upon this in the glory of the omnipotent God, he began to read the poet Prudentius, at the instance of his master. This one, as he is catholic in faith and argument, eminent for eloquence and truth, and most elegant in the variety of his works and metres, with so great sweetness quickly pleased the palate of his heart, that at once, with greater avidity than can be expressed, he drank up not only the knowledge of the foreign words, but even the marrow of the innermost meaning and most liquid nectar, if I may so say. Afterwards there was almost no branch of liberal study in all Greek or Latin eloquence, that escaped the quickness of his genius. Nor indeed, as often happens, did the multitude of riches, or the insistency of clamouring crowds, nor any disgust otherwise coming over him, ever turn his mind from this noble employment of leisure.... Often he seated himself as a learned arbiter in the midst of the most learned Greek and Latin doctors, when they argued on the sublimity of philosophy or upon some subtility of her glistening discipline, and gave satisfaction to the disputants, amid universal plaudits, than which he cared for nothing less.”[390] One may read between these awkward lines that all this learning was something to which Bruno had been introduced at school. Another short passage shows how new and strange this Latin culture seemed, and how he approached it with a timorous seriousness natural to one who did not well understand what it all meant: “The buffoonery and mimic talk in comedies and tragedies, which cause such laughter when recited by a number of people, he would always read seriously; he took small count of the matter, but chiefly of authority, in literary compositions.”[391] Such an attitude would have been impossible for an Italian cradled amid Latin or quasi-Latin speech and reminiscence. The most curious if not original literary phenomenon of the time of Bruno and his great brother was the nun Hrotsvitha, of Gandersheim, a Saxon cloister supported by the royal Saxon house. A niece of Otto’s was the Abbess, and she it was who introduced Hrotsvitha to the Latin Classics, after the completion of her elementary studies under another magistra, likewise an inmate of the convent. The account bears witness to the taste for Latin reading among this group of noble Saxon dames. Hrotsvitha soon surpassed the rest, at least in productivity, and became a prolific authoress. She composed a number of sacred legendae, in leonine or rhymed hexameters.[392] One of them gave the legend of the Virgin, as drawn from the Apocryphal Gospel of Matthew. She also wrote several Passiones or accounts of the martyrdoms of saints, and the story of the Fall and Repentance of Theophilus, the oldest poetic version of a compact with the devil. Quite different in topic was the Deeds of Otto I. (De gestis Oddonis I. imperatoris) written between 962 and 967, likewise in leonine hexameters. It told the fortunes of the Saxon house as well as the career of its greatest member. Possibly more interesting were six moral dramas written in formal imitation of the Comedies of Terence. As an antidote to the poison of the latter, they were to celebrate the virtue of holy virgins in this same kind of composition which had flaunted the adulteries of lascivious women—so the preface explains. Again, Hrotsvitha’s sources were legenda, in which Christian chastity, martyred though it be, triumphs with no uncertain note of victory.[393] These pious imitations of the impious Terence do not appear to have been imitated by other mediaeval writers: they exerted no influence upon the later development of the Mystery Play. They remain as evidence of the writer’s courage, and of the studies of certain denizens of the cloister at Gandersheim. Besides this convent for high-born women, and such monasteries as Fulda and St. Gall, an interesting centre of introduced learning was Hildesheim, fortunate in its bishops, who made it an oasis of culture in the north. Otwin, bishop in 954, supplied its school with books from Italy. Some years after him came that great hearty man, Bernward, of princely birth, who began his clerical career at an early age, and was made bishop in 992. For thirty years he ruled his see with admirable piety, energy, and judgment; qualities which he likewise showed in affairs of State. He was a diligent student of Latin letters, one “who conned not only the books in the monastery, but others in divers places, from which he formed a goodly library of codices of the divines and also the philosophers.”[394] His was a master’s faculty and a master-hand, itself skilfully fashioning; for not only did he build the beautiful cloister church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, and cause it to be sumptuously adorned, but he himself carved and painted, and set gems. Some of the excellent works of his hand remain to-day. His biographer tells of that munificence and untiring zeal which rendered Hildesheim beautiful, as one still may see. Yet, throughout, Bernward appears as consciously studying and gathering and bringing to his beloved church an art from afar and a learning which was not of his own people. The bronze work on the Bernward column in Hildesheim is thought to suggest an influence of Trajan’s column, while the doors of Bernward’s church unquestionably follow those of St. Sabina on the Aventine. This shows how Bernward noticed and learned and copied during his stay at Rome in the year 1001, when Otto III. was imperator and Gerbert was pope. Bernward’s successor, Godehard, continued the good work. One of his letters closes with a quick appeal for books: “Mittite nobis librum Horatii et epistolas Tullii.”[395] Belonging to the same generation was Froumundus (fl. cir. 1040), a monk of Tegernsee, where Godehard had been abbot before becoming bishop of Hildesheim. He was a sturdy German lover of the classics—very German. At one time he writes for a copy of Horace, apparently to complete his own, and at another for a copy of Statius; other letters refer to Juvenal and Persius.[396] His ardour for study is as apparent as the fact that he is learning a literature to which he was not born. His turgid hexameters sweat with effort to master the foreign language and metre. People would have made a priest of him; not he: “Cogere me certant, fatear, quod sim sapiens vir,” and a good grin seems to escape him: “Discere decrevi libros, aliosque docere: from such work no difficulty shall repel me; be it my reward to be co-operator (synergus) with what almighty God grants to flourish in this time of Christ, or in the time of yore.”[397] The spirit is grand, the literary result awful. With diligence, the studious Élite of Germany applied themselves to Latin letters. And in the course of time tremendous scholars were to rise among them. But the Latin culture remained a thing of study; its foreign tongue was never as their own; and in the eleventh century, at least, they used it with a painful effort that is apparent in their writings and the Germanisms abounding in them. There may come one like Lambert of Hersfeld, the famous annalist of the Hildebrandine epoch, who with exceptional gifts gains a good mastery of Latin, and writes with a conscious approach to quasi-classical correctness. The place of his birth and the sources of his education are unknown. He was thirty years old, and doubtless had obtained his excellent training in Latin, when he took the cowl in the cloister of Hersfeld in 1058. But the next year he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and afterwards other journeys. He wrote his Annals[398] in his later years, laying down his pen in 1077, when he had brought the Emperor to Canossa. His was a practised hand, and his style the evident result of much study of the classics. His work remains the best piece of Latin from an eleventh-century German. Among German scholars of the period, one can find no more charming creature than Hermann Contractus, the lame or paralytic. His father, a Suabian count, brought the little cripple to the convent of Reichenau. It was in the year 1020. Hermann was seven years old. There he studied and taught, and loved his fellows, till his death thirty-four years later. His mind was as strong as his body was weak. He could not rise from the movable seat on which his attendant placed him, and could scarcely sit up. He enunciated with difficulty; his words were scarcely intelligible. But his learning was encyclopaedic, his sympathies were broad: “Homo revera sine querela nihil humani a se alienum putavit,” says a loving pupil who sketched his life. Evil was foreign to his nature. Affectionate, cheerful, happy, his sweet and engaging personality drew all men’s love, while his learning attracted pupils from afar. “At length, after he had been labouring for ten days in a grievous pleurisy, God’s mercy saw fit to free his holy soul from prison. I who was his familiar above the rest,” says the biographer, “came to his couch at dawn of day, and asked him whether he was not feeling a little better. ‘Do not ask me,’ he replied, ‘but rather listen to what I have to tell you. I shall die very soon and shall not recover: so to thee and all my friends I commend my sinful soul. This whole night I have been rapt in ecstasy. With such complete memory as we have for the Lord’s Prayer, I seemed to be reading over and over Cicero’s Hortensius, and likewise to be scanning the substance and very written pages of what I intended to write Concerning the Vices—just as if I had it already written. I am so stirred and lifted by this reading, that the earth and all pertaining to it and this mortal life are despicable and tedious; while the future everlasting world and the eternal life have become such an unspeakable desire and joy, that all these transitory circumstances are inane—nothing at all. It wearies me to live.’”[399] Was not this a scholar’s vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the Hortensius even as Augustine, from whose Confessions doubtless came the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the Vita is so uncouth and unformed as to convey no certain grammatical meaning. One can only sense it. The biographer cannot write Latin correctly, nor write it glibly and ungrammatically, like a man born to a Latinesque speech. Hermann’s own Latin is but little better. It approaches neither fluency nor style. But the scholar ardour was his, and his works remain—a long chronicle, a treatise on the Astrolabe, and one on Music; also, perhaps, a poem in leonine elegiacs, “The Dispute of the Sheep and the Flax,” which goes on for several hundred lines till one comes to a welcome caetera desunt.[400] Thus, with a heavy-footed Teutonic diligence, the Germans studied the Trivium and Quadrivium. They sweated at Latin grammar, reading also the literature or the stock passages. Their ignorance of natural science was no denser than that of peoples west of the Rhine or south of the Alps. Many of them went to learn at Chartres or Paris. Within the mapped-out scheme of knowledge, there was too much for them to master to admit of their devising new provinces of study. They could not but continue for many decades translators of the foreign matter into their German tongue or German selves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they will be translators of the French and ProvenÇal literatures. Even before the eleventh century Germans were at work at Logic—one recalls Gerbert’s opponent Otric;[401] and some of them were engaged with dialectic and philosophy. William, Abbot of Hirschau, crudely anticipated Anselm in attempting a syllogistic proof of God’s existence.[402] He died in 1091, and once had been a monk in the convent of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon in Bavaria, where he may have known a certain monk named Othloh, who has left a unique disclosure of himself. One is sufficiently informed as to what the Germans and other people studied in the eleventh century; but this man has revealed the spiritual conflict out of which he hardly brought his soul’s peace.
II Nothing is so fascinating in the life of a holy man as the struggle and crisis through which his convictions are established and his peace attained. How diverse has been this strife—with Buddha, with Augustine, with Luther, or Ignatius Loyola. Its heroes fall into two companies: in one of them the man attains through his own thought and resolution; in the other he casts himself on God, and it may be that devils and angels carry on the fight, of which his soul is the battle-ground and prize. Nevertheless, the man himself holds the scales of victory; the choice is his, and it is he who at last goes over to the devil or accepts the grace of God. This conflict, in which God is felt to aid, is still for men; only its forms and setting change. Therefore the struggle and the tears, through which souls have won their wisdom and their peace, never cease to move us. Othloh, like many another mediaeval scholar, was disturbed over the sinful pleasure derived from Tully and Virgil, Maro and Lucan. But his soul’s chief turmoil came from the doubts that sprang from his human sympathies and from moral grounds—can the Bible be true and God omnipotent when sin and misery abound? The struggle through which he became assured was the supreme experience of his life: it fixed his thoughts; his writings were its fruit; they reflect the struggle and the struggler, and present a psychological tableau of a mediaeval German soul. He was born in the bishopric of Freising in Bavaria not long after the year 1000, and spent his youth in the monastic schools of Tegernsee and Hersfeld. His scholarship was made evident to men about him through his skill in copying texts in a beautiful script, ornamented with illuminations. In the year 1032 he took the monk’s vows in the monastery of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon, which had been founded long before in honour of this sainted Frankish missionary bishop, who had met a martyr’s death in Bavaria in the late Merovingian period. The annals of the monastery are extant. When the Ottos were emperors, grammatical and theological studies flourished there, especially under a certain capable Wolfgang, who died as Bishop of Ratisbon in 994, and whose life Othloh wrote. The latter, on becoming a monk, received charge of the monastery school, which he continued to direct for thirty years.[403] Then he left, because some of the young monks had turned the Abbot against him; but after some years spent mainly at the monastery of Fulda, he returned to St Emmeram’s in 1063, where he died an old man ten or fifteen years later. From his youth he had been subject to illness, even to fits of swooning, and, writing in the evening of his days, he speaks of his many bodily infirmities. As Othloh looked back over his life, his soul’s crisis seemed to have been reached soon after he was made a monk. The wisdom brought through it came as the answer to those questionings which made up the diabolic side of that great experience. Othloh describes it in his Book concerning the Temptations of a certain Monk. “There was a sinful clerk, who, having often been corrected by the Lord, at length turned to monastic life. In the monastery where he was made a monk he found many sorts of men, some of whom were given over to the reading of secular works, while some read Holy Scripture. He resolved to imitate the latter. The more earnest he was in this, the more was he molested by temptations of the devil; but committing himself to the grace of God, he persevered; and when, after a long while, he was delivered, and thought over what he had suffered, it seemed that others might be edified by his temptations, as well as by the passages of Holy Scripture which had come to him through divine inspiration. So he began to write as follows: I wish to tell the delusions of Satan which I endured sleeping and waking. His deceits first confounded me with doubt as to whether I was not rash in taking the vow perilous of the monastic life, without consulting parents or friends, when Scripture bids us ‘do all things with counsel.’ Diabolic illusion, as if sympathizing and counselling with me, brought these and like thoughts. When, the grace of God resisting him, the Tempter failed to have his way with me here, he tried to make me despair because of my many sins. ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘that such a wretch can expect mercy from God the Judge, when it is written, Scarcely shall a righteous man be saved?’ So he overwhelmed me, till I could do nothing but weep, and tears were my bread day and night. I protest, from my innermost heart, that save through the grace of God alone, no one can overcome such delusions. “When the Weaver of wiles failed to cause me utterly to despair, he tried with other arguments of guile to lead me to blaspheme the divine justice, suggesting thoughts, as if condoling with my misery: ‘O most unhappy youth, whose grief no man deigns to consider—but men are not to blame, for they do not know your trouble. God alone knows, and since He can do all things, why does He not aid you in tribulation, when for love of Him you have surrendered the world and now endure this agony? Have done with impossible prayers and foolish grief. The injustice of that Potentate will not permit all to perish.’ These delusions were connected with what I now wish to mention: Often I was awakened by some imaginary signal, and would hasten to the oratory before the time of morning prayer; also, and for a number of years, though I slept at night as a man sound in body, when the hour came to rise, my limbs were numb, and only with uncertain trembling step could I reach the Church. “One delusion and temptation must be spoken of, which I hardly know how to describe, as I never read or heard of anything like it. By the stress of my many temptations I was driven—though by God’s grace I was never utterly torn from faith and hope of heavenly aid—to doubt as to Holy Scripture and the essence of God himself. In the struggle with the other temptations there was some respite, and a refuge of hope remained. In this I knew no alleviation, and when formerly I had been strengthened by the sacred book and had fought against the darts of death with the arms of faith and hope, now, shut round with doubt and mental blindness, I doubted whether there was truth in Holy Scripture and whether God was omnipotent. This broke over me with such violence as to leave me neither strength of body nor strength of mind, and I could not see or hear. Then sometimes it was as if a voice was whispering close to my ear: ‘Why such vain labourings? Can you not, most foolish of mortals, prove by your own experience that the testimony of Scripture is without sense or reason? Do you not see that what the divine book says is the reverse of what the lives and habits of mankind approve? Those many thousands who neither know nor care to know its doctrine, do you think they err?’ Troubled, I would urge, as if against some one questioning and objecting: ‘How then is there such agreement among all the divinely inspired writings when they speak of God the Founder and of obedience to His commands?’ Then words of this kind would be suggested in reply: ‘Fool, the Scriptures on which you rely for knowledge of God and religion speak double words; for the men who wrote them lived as men live now. You know how all men speak well and piously, and act otherwise, as advantage or frailty prompts. From which you may learn how the authors of the ancient writings wrote good and religious sayings, and did not live accordingly. Understand then, that all the books of the divine law were so written that they have an outer surface of piety and virtue, but quite another inner meaning. All of which is proved by Paul’s saying, The letter killeth; the spirit, that is the meaning, maketh to live. So you see how perilous it is to follow the precepts of these books. Likewise should one think concerning the essence of God. And besides, if there existed any person or power of an omnipotent God there would not be this apparent confusion in everything,—nor would you yourself have had all these doubts which trouble you.’” The last diabolically insidious suggestion was just the one to bring despair to the unaided reason seeking faith. Othloh’s soul was passing through the depths; but the path now ascends, and rapidly: “I was assaulted with an incredible number of these delusions, and so strange and unheard of were they that I feared to speak of them to any of the brothers. At last I threw myself upon the ground groaning in bitterness, and, collecting the forces of my mind, I cried with my lips and from my heart: ‘O if thou art some one, Almighty, and if thou art everywhere, as I have read so often in so many books, now, I pray, show me whom thou art and what thou canst do, delivering me quickly from these perils; I can bear this strife no more.’ I did not have to wait; the grace of God scattered the whole cloud of doubt, and such a light of knowledge poured into my heart that I have never since had to endure the darkness of deadly doubt. I began to understand what I had scarcely perceived before. Then the grace of knowledge was so increased that I could no longer hide it. I was urged by ineffable impulse to undertake some work of gratitude for the glory of God, and it seemed that this new ardour should be devoted to composition. So I wrote what I have written concerning those diabolic delusions which sprang from my sins, and then it seemed reasonable to tell of the divine inspiration by which my mind was enabled to repel them; so that he who reads these delusions may at the same time know the workings of the divine aid, and not ascribe to me a victory which was never mine, or, thinking that aid was lacking in my temptation, fear lest it fail in his. I remember how often, especially on rising in the mornings, it was as if there was some one rising with me and walking with me, who mutely warned, or gently persuaded me to amend faults which it may be only the day before I was ignorantly committing and deeming of no consequence.“When surrounded by such inspirations I would enter the Church and bow down in prayer—God knows that I do not lie—it seemed as if some one besought me with like earnestness of prayer, saying: ‘As that has been granted which you asked of me, it will be precious to me if you will obey my entreaties. Do you not continue in those vices which I have often begged you to abandon? are you not proud and carnal, neglectful of God’s service, hating whom you should not hate, although the Scripture says, Every one who hates his brother is a murderer? Where now is the patience and constancy and that perfection which you promised God, if He would deliver you from perils and make you a monk? God has done as you asked, why do you delay to pay your vow? You have asked Him to set you in a place where you would have a store of books. Lo, you have been heard; you have books—from which you may learn of life eternal. Why do you dissipate your mind in vanities and do not hasten to take the desired gift? You have also asked to be tried, and tried you have been in temptation, and delivered. Yet you are still a man unfit for peace or war, since when the battle is far off you are ready for it, and when it approaches you flee. Which of the holy fathers that you have read of in the Old or New Testament was so dear to me that I did not seek to try him in the furnace of tribulation? Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake. Steep and narrow is the way; no one is crowned who has not striven lawfully. When you have read these, and many more passages of Scripture, why if you desire a crown of life eternal, do you wish to suffer no tribulation for your sins?’” Then the Spirit of God, with many admonishings, shows Othloh how easy had been his lot and how needful to him were his temptations, even the very carnal temptations of the flesh, which Othloh suffered in common with all monks. And he is bid to consider their reason and order: “First you were tried with lighter trials, that gradually you might gain strength for the weightier; as you progressed you ascribed to your own strength what was wrought by my grace. Wherefore I subjected you to the final temptation, from which you will emerge the more certain of my grace the less you trust in your merits.” The “warring opposites” of Othloh’s spiritual struggle were, on the one side, evil thoughts and delusions from the devil, and, on the other, the strength and enlightenment imparted by the grace of God. The nearer the crisis comes, the clearer are the devil’s whisperings and the warnings of the instructing voice. Othloh’s part in it was his choice and acceptance of the divine counsellor. This conflict never faded from his mind. He has much to say of the visions[404] in which parts of his enlightenment had come. Once reading Lucan in the monastery, he swooned, and in his swoon was beaten with many stripes by a man of terrible and threatening countenance. By this he was led to abandon profane reading and other worldly vanities. These visionary floggings left him feeble and ill in body. They were the approaches to his great spiritual conflict. His “fourth vision” is in and of the crisis. This monk, immersed in spiritual struggles, had also his opinions regarding the government of the monastery, and for a time refused obedience to the abbot’s irregular rulings, and spoke harshly of him: “For this I did penance before the abbot but not before God, against whom I had greatly sinned; and after a few days I fell sick. This sickness was from God, since I have always begged of His mercy, that for any sin committed I might suffer sickness or tribulation, and so it has come to me. On this occasion, when weakness had for some days kept me in the infirmary, one evening as it was growing dark I thought I should feel better if I rose and sat by my cot. Immediately the house appeared to be filled with flame and smoke. Horror-stricken, my wonted trust in God all scattered, I started, tottering, towards the cot of the lay brother in charge, but, ashamed, I turned back and went to the cot of a brother who was sick; he was asleep. Then I sank exhausted on my cot, thinking how to escape the horror of that vision of smoke. I had no doubt that the smoke was the work of evil spirits, who, from its midst, would try to torment me. As I gradually saw that it was not physical, but of the spirit, and that there was no one to help me, as all were asleep, I began to sing certain psalms, and, singing, went out and entered the nearest church, of St. Gallus, and fell down before the altar. At once, for my sins, strength of mind and body left me, and I perceived that my lips were held together by evil spirits, so that I could not move them, to sing a psalm. I tried till I was weary to open them with my hands. “Leaving that church, crawling rather than walking I gained the great church of St. Emmeram, where I hoped for some alleviation of my agony. But it was as before; I could barely utter a few words of prayer. So I painfully made my way back to my bed, hoping, from sheer weariness, to get some sleep. But none came, and, turn as I would, still I saw the vision of smoke. Suddenly—was I asleep or awake?—I seemed to be in a field well known to me, surrounded by a crowd of demons mocking me with shrieks of laughter. The louder they laughed, the sadder I was, seeing them gathered to destroy me. When they saw that I would not laugh, they became enraged, crying, ‘So! you won’t laugh and be merry with us! Since you choose melancholy you shall have enough.’ Then flying about me, with blows from all sides, they whirled me round and round with them over vast spaces of earth, till I thought to die. Suffering unspeakably, I was at length set down on the top of a peak which scarcely held me; no eye could fathom its abyss. Vainly I looked for a descent, and the demons kept flying about me, saying: ‘Where now is your hope in God! And where is that God of yours! Don’t you know that neither God is, as men say, nor is there any power in Him which can prevail against us? One proof of this is that you have no help, and there is no one who can deliver you from our hands. Choose now; for unless you join with us you shall be cast into the abyss.’ In this strait, scarcely consenting or resisting, I faintly remembered that I had once believed and read that God was everywhere, and so I looked around to see whether He would not send some aid. Now when the demons kept insisting that I should choose, and when I was well-nigh put to it to promise what they wished, a man suddenly appeared, and, standing by me, said: ‘Do not do it; all that these cheats say is false. Abide firm in that faith which you had in God. He knows all that you suffer, and permits it for your good.’ Then he vanished, and the demons returned, flying about me, and saying: ‘Miserable man, would you trust one who came to deceive you? Why, he dared not wait till we came! Come now, yield yourself to our power.’ “Uttering these words with fury, they snatched me up, and whirled me, sorely beaten, across plains and deserts, over heights and precipices, and set me on a yet more dreadful peak, hurling at me abuse and threats, to make me do their will. And, as before, I was near succumbing, and was looking around for some aid from God, when that same man again stood near, and heartened me. ‘Do not yield; let your heart be comforted against its besiegers.’ And I replied: ‘Lord, I can no longer bear these perils. Stay with me, and aid, lest when you go away they torment me still more grievously.’ To which he said: ‘Their threats cannot prevail so long as you persevere in faith and hope in the Lord. Be comforted; the sharper the strife, the quicker will it end. If with constancy you wage the Lord’s battles, you shall have eternal rewards in the future, and in this world you shall be famous.’ “Then he vanished the second time, and the demons, who dared do nothing in his presence, raged and mocked more savagely, and kept me in anguish, until, the divine grace effecting it, the convent bell rang for early prayer. I heard it as I lay in bed, and gradually gaining my senses, I was conscious that I was living, and I no longer saw the vision of smoke. With gratitude I remembered what the man in my vision told me that my trial would soon be over. After this, though for many days I lay sick in body and soul, my spiritual temptations began to lessen; and I have learned that without the Grace of God I am, and always shall be, a thing of naught.” The struggle through which faith and peace came to Othloh became the fountain-head of his wisdom; it fixed the point of view from which he judged life, and set the categories in which he ordered his knowledge; it directed his thoughts and imparted purpose and unity to his writings. His gratitude to God incited him to write in order that others might share in the light and wisdom which God’s grace had granted him; and his writings chiefly enlarge upon those questions which the victory in his spiritual conflict had solved. I will refrain from drawing further from them, although they seem to me the most interesting works of a pious and doctrinal nature emanating from any German of this still crude and inchoate intellectual period.[405] III From the point of view of the development of mediaeval intellectual interests in the eleventh century, England has little that is distinctive to offer. The firm rule of Canute (1016-1035) brought some reinstatement of order, after the times of struggle between Dane and Saxon. But his son, Hardicanute, was a savage. The reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066) followed. It wears a halo because it was the end of the old order, which henceforth was to be a memory. Then came the revolution of the Norman Conquest. Letters did not thrive amid these storms. At the beginning of the period, Dunstan is the sole name of note, as one who fostered letters in the monasteries where his energies were bringing discipline. English piety and learning looked then, as it had looked before and was for centuries to look, to the Continent. And Dunstan promoted letters by calling to his assistance Abbo of St. Fleury, of whom something has been said.[406] In Dunstan’s time Saxon men were still translating Scripture into their tongue—paraphrasing it rather, with a change of spirit. Such translations were needed in Anglo-Saxon England, as in Germany. But after the Conquest the introduction of Norman-French tended to lessen at least the consciousness of such a need. That language, as compared with Anglo-Saxon, came so much nearer to Latin as to reduce the chasm between the learned tongue and the vernacular. The Normans had (at least in speech) been Gallicized, and yet had kept many Norse traits. England likewise took on a Gallic veneering as Norman-French became the language of the Court and the new nobility. But the people continued to speak English. The degree of foreign influence upon their thought and manners may be gauged by the proportion of foreign idiom penetrating the English language; and the fact that English remained essentially and structurally English proves the same for England racially. In spite of the introduction of foreign elements, people and language endured and became more and more progressively English. In the island before the Conquest, the round of studies had been the same as on the Continent; and that event brought no change. The studies might improve, but would have no novel source to draw upon. And in this period of racial turmoil and revolution, it was unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon temperament would present itself as clearly as aforetime in the Saxon poem of Beowulf or the personality of the Saxon Alfred, or in the Saxon Genesis and the writings of Cynewulf.[407] In a word, the eleventh century in England was specifically the period when the old traits were becoming obscure, and no distinct modifications had been evolved in correspondence with the new conditions. Consequently, for presentations of the intellectual genius of the English people, one has to wait until the next century, the time of John of Salisbury and other English minds. Even such will be found receiving their training and their knowledge in France and Italy. England was still intellectually as well as politically under foreign domination.
In every way it has been borne in upon us how radically the conditions and faculties of men differed in England, Germany, France, and Italy in the eleventh century. Very different were their intellectual qualities, and different also was the measure of their attainment to a palpable mediaeval character, which in Italy was not that of the ancient Latins, in France was not that of the Gallic provincials, and in England and Germany was not altogether that of the original Celtic and Teutonic stocks. Neither in the eleventh century nor afterwards was there an obliteration of race traits; yet the mediaeval modification tended constantly to evoke a general uniformity of intellectual interest and accepted view. There exists a certain ancient Chronicon Venetum written by a Venetian diplomat and man of affairs called John the Deacon, who died apparently soon after 1008.[408] He was the chaplain of the Doge, Peter Urseolus, and the doge’s ambassador to the emperors Otto III. and Henry II. The earlier parts of his Chronicon were taken from Paulus Diaconus and others; the later are his own, and form a facile narrative, which makes no pretence to philosophic insight and has nothing to say either of miracles or God’s Christian providence. Its interests are quite secular. John writes his Latin, glib, clear, and unclassical, just as he might talk his Venetian speech, his vulgaris eloquentia. There is no effort, no struggle with the medium of expression, but a pervasive quality of familiarity with his story and with the language he tells it in. These characteristics, it is safe to say, are not to be found, to a like degree, in the work of any contemporary writer north of the Alps. The man and his story, in fine, however mediocre they may be, have arrived: they are not struggling or apparently tending anywhither. The writing suggests no capacity in the writer as yet unreached, nor any imperfect blending of disparate elements in his education. One should not generalize too broadly from the qualities exemplified in this work; yet they indicate that the people to which the writer belonged were possessed of a certain entirety of development, in which the component elements of culture and antecedent human growth and decadence were blended in accord. This old Chronicon affords an illustration of the fact that the transition and early mediaeval centuries had brought nothing to Italy that was new or foreign, nothing that was not in the blood, nothing to deeply disturb the continuity of Italian culture and character which moved along without break, whether in ascending or descending curves. Yet evidently the eleventh-century Italian is no longer a Latin of the Empire. For one thing, he is more individualistic. Formerly the prodigious power of Roman government united citizens and subject peoples, and impressed a human uniformity upon them. The surplus energies of the Latin race were then absorbed in the functions of the Respublica, or were at least directed along common channels. That great unification had long been broken; and the smaller units had reasserted themselves—the civic units of town or district, and the individual units of human beings upon whom no longer pressed the conforming influence of one great government. In imperial times cities formed the subordinate units of the Respublica; the Roman, like the Greek civilization, was essentially urban. This condition remained. The civilization of Italy in the eleventh century was still urban, but was now more distinctly the civilization of small closely compacted bodies, which were no longer united. For the most part, the life, the thought, of Italy was in the towns; it remained predominantly humanistic, taken up with men and their mortal affairs, their joys and hates, and all that is developed by much daily intercourse with fellows. Thus the intellect of Italy continued secular, interesting itself in mortal life, and not so much occupied with theology and the life beyond the grave. This is as true of the intellectual energies of the Roman papacy as it is of the mental activities of the towns which served or opposed it, according to their politics.On the other hand, the intense emotional nature of the Italians was apt to be religious, and given to despair and tears and ecstasy; its love welled up and flung itself around its object, without the mediating offices of reason. If reflection came, it was love’s ardent musing, rather than religious ratiocination. One does not forget that the Italians who became scholastic theologians or philosophers left Italy, and subjected themselves to northern spiritual influences at Paris or elsewhere. Their greatest were Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. None of these remained through life altogether Italian. Thus, with Italians, religion meant either the papal government and the daily conventions of observance and minor mental habits, all very secular; or it meant that which was a thing of ecstasy and not of thought—generally speaking, of course. The mediaeval Italian (in the eleventh century only to a slightly less degree than in the twelfth or thirteenth) is, typically speaking, a man of urban human interests and affairs, a politician, a trader, a doctor, a man of law or letters, an artist, or a poet. If really religious, his religion is an emotion, and is not occupied with dogma, nor interested in doctrinal correctness or reform. Such a religious character may, according to individual temper, result in a Romuald[409] or a Peter Damiani; its perfected ideal is Francis of Assisi. Things were already different in the country now called France. No need to repeat what has been said as to the lesser strength and somewhat broken continuity of the antique there, as compared with Italy. Yet there was a sufficient power of antique influence and descent to keep the language Romanesque, and the forms of its literature partly set by antique tradition. But the spirit was not Latin. Perhaps it had but seemed such with the Gallic provincials. At all events, the incoming Franks and other Germans brought a Teutonic infusion and reinspiration that forever kept France from being or becoming a northern Italy. Neither was the spirit urban. To be sure, much of the energy of French thought awoke and did its work in towns; and Paris was to become the intellectual centre. But the stress of French life was not so surely in the towns, nor men’s minds so characteristically urban as in Italy, and by no means so predominantly humanistic. Even in the eleventh century the lofty range of French thought, of French intellectual interests, is apparent; for it embraces the problems of philosophy and theology, and does not find its boundary and limit in phenomenal or mortal life. Gerbert is almost too universal an intellect to offer as a fair example. Yet all that he cared for is more than represented by other men taken together; for Gerbert did not fully represent the interests of religious thought in France. His was the humanism and the thirst for all the round of knowledge included in the Seven Arts. But he scarcely reached out beyond logic to philosophy; and theology seems not to have troubled him. Both philosophy and theology, however, made part of the intellectual interests of France; for there was Berengar and Roscellinus, Gaunilo and St. Anselm, and the wrangling of many disputatious, although overwhelmingly orthodox, councils of French Churchmen. Paris also, with its great schools of theology and philosophy, looms on the horizon. The intellectual matter is but inchoate, yet universally germinating, in the eleventh century. Thus intellectual qualities of mediaeval France appear inceptively. The French mediaeval temperament needs perhaps another century for its clear development. Both as to temperament and intellectual interests, a line will have to be drawn between the south and north; between the land of the langue d’oc, the Roman law, the troubadour, and the easy, irreligious, gay society which jumped the life to come; and the land of the various old French dialects (among which that of the Isle de France will win to dominance), the land of philosophy and theology, the land of Gothic architecture and religion, the hearth of the crusades against the Saracen or the Albigensian heretic; the land of the most distinctive mediaeval thought and strongest intellectual development. In the Germany and the England of the eleventh century there is less of interest from this point of view. England had scarcely become her mediaeval self; the time was one of desperate struggle, or, at most, of tumultuous settling down and shaking together. As for Germany, it was surely German then, and not a medley of Saxon, Dane, and Norman-French. The people were talking in their German tongues. German song and German epos were already heard in forms which were not to be cast aside, but retained and developed; of course the influence of the French poetry was not yet. The Germans were still living their own sturdy and half-barbarous life. Those who loved knowledge had turned with earnest purpose to the Latin culture; they were studying Latin and logic, and, as we have said, translating it into their German tongue or temperament. But the lessons were not fully mastered—not yet transformed into German mediaeval intellectual capacity. And in this respect, at least, the German will become more entirely his Germanic mediaeval self in another century, when he has more faculty of using the store of foreign knowledge in combination with his strongly felt and honestly considered Christianity.
CHAPTER XIV THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION I. The Patristic Chart of Passion.
II. Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity. The characteristic passions of a period represent the emotionalized thoughts of multitudes of men and women. Mediaeval emotional development followed prevailing ideas, opinions, convictions, especially those of mediaeval Christianity. Its most impressive phases conformed to the tenets of the system which the Middle Ages had received from the Church Fathers, and represented the complement of passion arising from the long acceptance of the same. One may observe, first, the process of exclusion, inclusion, and enhancement, through which the Fathers formed a certain synthesis of emotion from the matter of their faith and the circumstances of their environment; and, secondly, the further growth of emotion in the Middle Ages. I In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era there took place a remarkable growth of the pathetic or emotional element in Greek and Roman literature. Yet during the same period Stoicism, the most respected system of philosophy, kept its face as stone, and would not recognize the ethical value of emotion in human life.[410] But the emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like the shades by Acheron, were not to be restrained by philosophic admonition, or Virgilian Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando. And though the Stoic could not consent to Juvenal’s avowal that the sense of tears is the best part of us, Neo-Platonism soon was to uphold the sublimated emotion of a vision transcending reason as the highest good for man. Rational self-control was disintegrating in the Neo-Platonic dialectic which pointed beyond reason to ecstasy. That ecstasy, however, was to be super-sensual, and indeed came only to those who had long suppressed all cravings of the flesh. This ascetic emotionalism of the Neo-Platonic summum bonum was strikingly analogous to the ideal of Christian living pressing to domination in the patristic period. No need to say that the Gospel of Jesus was addressed to the heart as well as to the mind; and for times to come the Saviour on the Cross and at its foot the weeping Mother were to rouse floods of tears over human sin, which caused the divine sacrifice. The words Jesus wept heralded a new dispensation under which the heart should quicken and the mind should guide through reaches of humanity unknown to paganism. This Christian expansion of the spirit did not, however, address itself to human relationships, but uplifted itself to God, its upward impulse spurning mortal loves. In its mortal bearings the Christian spirit was more ascetic than Neo-Platonism, and its Élan of emotion might have been as sublimated in quality as the Neo-Platonic, but for the greater reality of love and terror in the God toward whom it yearned with tears of contrition, love, and fear. Another strain very different from Neo-Platonism contributed to the sum of Christian emotion. This was Judaism, which recently had shown the fury of its energy in defence of Jerusalem against the legions of Titus. Christians imbibed its force of feeling from the books of the Old Testament. The passion of those writings was not as the humanly directed passions of the Greeks. Israel’s desire and aversion, her scorn and hatred, her devotion and her love, hung on Jehovah. “Do I not hate them, O Jehovah, that hate thee?” This cry of the Psalmist is echoed in Elijah’s “Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” Jewish wrath was a righteous intolerance, which would neither endure idolatrous Gentiles nor suffer idolaters in Israel. Moses is enraged by the sight of the people dancing before the golden calf; and Isaiah’s scorn hisses over those daughters of Israel who have turned from Jehovah’s ways of decorum: “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet; therefore Jehovah will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret parts.” Did a like scorn and anger find harbourage in Him who likened the Pharisees to whitened sepulchres, and with a scourge of small cords drove the money-changers from His Father’s house? At all events a kindred hate found an enduring home in the religion of Tertullian and Athanasius, and in the great Church that persecuted the Montanists at Augustine’s entreaty, and thereafter poured its fury upon Jew and Saracen and heretic for a thousand years. Jehovah was also a great heart of love, loving His people along the ways of every sweet relationship understood by man. “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and out of Egypt called my son hither.” “Can a woman forget her sucking child, so as not to yearn upon the son of her womb? Yea, these may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Again, Jehovah is the husband, and Israel the sinning wife whom He will not put away.[411] Israel’s responding love answers: “My soul waits on God—My heart and flesh cry aloud to the living God—Like as the hart panteth for the water-brooks”! Such passages throb obedience to Deuteronomy’s great command, which Jesus said was the sum of the Law and the Prophets. No need to say that the Christian’s love of God had its emotional antecedent in Psalmist and Prophet. Jehovah’s purifying wrath of love also passed over to the Christian words, “As many as I love, I reprove and chasten.” And “the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom,” found its climax in the Christian terror of the Judgment Day. The Old Testament has its instances of human love: Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel. There is Jacob’s love of Joseph and Benjamin, and Joseph’s love, which yearned upon his brethren who had sold him to the Egyptians. The most loving man of all is David, with his love of Jonathan, “wonderful and passing the love of women,” unforgotten in the king’s old age, when he asks, “Is there yet any living of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” To a later time belongs the Song of Songs. Beautiful, orientally sensuous, too glowing perhaps for western taste, is this utterance of unchecked passion. And its fortune has been the most wonderful that ever fell to a love poem. It became the epithalamion of the Christian soul married to Christ, an epithalamion which was to be enlarged with passionate thought by doctor, monk, and saint, through the Christian centuries. The first to construe it as the bridal of the Soul was one who, by an act more irrevocable than a monastic vow, put from him mortal bridals—Origen, the greatest thinker of the Eastern Church. Thus the passion of the Hebrew woman for the lover that was to her as a bundle of myrrh lying between her breasts, was lifted, still full of desire, to the love of the God-man, by those of sterile flesh and fruitful souls. Christianity was not eclecticism, which, for lack of principles of its own, borrows whatever may seem good. But it made a synthetic adoption of what could be included under the dominance of its own motives, that is, could be made to accord with its criterion of Salvation. What sort of synthesis could it make of the passions and emotions of the Graeco-Roman-Oriental-Jewish world? That which was achieved by the close of the patristic period, and was to be passionately approved by the Middle Ages, proceeded partly in the way of exclusion, and partly by adding a quality of boundlessness to the emotional elements admitted. With the first conversions to the new religion, arose the problem: What human feelings, what loves and interests of this world, shall the believer recognize as according with his faith, and as offering no obstacle to the love of God and the attainment of eternal life? A practical answer was given by the growth of an indeterminate asceticism within the Christian communities, which in the fourth century went forth with power, and peopled the desert with anchorites and monks. Ascetic suggestions came from many sources to the early Christians. Stoicism was ascetic in tendency; Neo-Platonism ascetic in principle, holding that the soul should be purged from contamination with things of sense. Throughout Egypt asceticism was rife in circles interested in the conflict of Set and his evil host with Horus seeking vengeance for Osiris slain; and we know that some of the earliest Christian hermits had been recluses devoted to the cult of Serapis. In Syria dwelt communities of Jewish Essenes, living continently like monks. Nevertheless, whatever may have been the effects of such examples, monasticism developed from within Christianity, and was not the fruit of influences from without. The Lord had said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; and soon enough there came antagonism between the early Churches and the Roman Empire. The Church was in a state of conflict. It behoved the Christian to keep his loins girded: why should he hamper himself with ephemeral domestic ties, when the coming of the Lord was at hand? Moreover, the Christian warfare to the death was not merely with political tyranny, but against fleshly lusts. Such convictions, in men and women desirous of purifying the soul from the cravings of sense, might bring the thought that even lawful marriage was not as holy as the virgin state. The Christian’s ascetic abnegation had as a further motive the love of Christ and the desire to help on His kingdom and attain to it, the motive of sacrifice for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven; for which one man must be burned, another must give up his goods, and a third renounce his heart’s love. Ascetic acts are also a natural accompaniment of penitence: the sinner, with fear of hell before him, seeks to undergo temporal in order to avoid eternal pain; or, better, stung by love of the Crucified, his heart cries for flagellation. When St. Martin came to die he would lie only upon ashes: “I have sinned if I leave you a different example.”[412] A similar strain of religious conviction is rendered in Jerome’s “You are too pleasure-loving, brother, if you wish to rejoice in this world and hereafter to reign with Christ.”[413] So currents of ascetic living early began in Christian circles; and before long the difficulty of leading lives of self-mortification within the community was manifest. It was easier to withdraw: ascetics must become anchorites, “they who have withdrawn.” Here was reason why the movement should betake itself to the desert. But the solitary life is so difficult, that association for mutual aid will soon ensue; and then regulations will be needed for these newly-formed ascetic groups. So anchorites tended to become coenobites; monasticism has begun. In both its hermit and coenobitic phases, monasticism began in the East, in Syria and the Thebaid. It was accepted by the Latin West, and there became impressed with Roman qualities of order, regularity, and obedience. The precepts of the eastern monks were collected and arranged by Cassian, a native of Gaul, in his Institutes and Conlocations between the years 419 and 428. And about a century afterwards, western monasticism received its typeform in the Regula of St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 543), which was approved by the authority of Gregory the Great (d. 604).[414] By the close of the patristic period, monasticism had become the most highly applauded practical interpretation of Christianity. Its precepts represented the requirements of the Christian criterion of Salvation applied to earthly life. Like all great systems which have widely prevailed and long endured, it was not negation, but substitution. If it condemned usual modes of pleasure, this was because of their incompatibility with the life it inculcated. The Regula of Benedict set forth a manner of life replete with positive demands. Its purpose was to prescribe for those who had taken monastic vows that way of living, that daily round of occupation, that constant mode of thought and temper, which should make a perfected Christian, that is, a perfect monk. And so broad and spiritually interwoven were its precepts that one of them could hardly be obeyed without fulfilling all. Read, for example, the beautiful seventh chapter upon the twelve grades of humility, and it will become evident that whoever achieves this virtue will gain all the rest: he will always have the fear of God before his eyes, the terror of hell and the hope of heaven; he will cut off the desires of the flesh; he will do, not his own will, but the Lord’s; since Christ obeyed His Father unto death, he will render absolute obedience to his superior, obeying readily and cheerfully even when unjustly blamed; in confession he will conceal no evil thought; he will deem himself vilest of all, and will do nothing save what the regula of the monastery or the example of the elders prescribes; he will keep from laughter and from speech, except when questioned, and then he will speak gently and humbly, and with gravity, in few words; he will stand and walk with inclined head and looks bent on the ground, feeling himself unworthy to lift up his eyes to heaven: through these stairs of humility he will reach that perfect love of God which banishes fear, and will no longer need the fear of hell, as he will do right from habit and through the love of Christ. Having thus pointed out the way of righteousness, Benedict’s regula gives minute precepts for the monk’s conduct and occupation through each hour of the day and night. No time, no circumstance shall be left unguarded, or unoccupied with those acts which lead to God. Wise was this great prototypal regula in that its abundance of positive precepts kept the monk busy with righteousness, so that he might have no leisure for sin. Its prohibitions are comparatively unemphatic, and the monk is guided along the paths of righteousness rather than forbidden to go astray. Thus monk and nun were consecrated to a calling which should contain their whole desire, as it certainly demanded their whole strength. Was the monk a celibate because carnal marriage was denied him? Rather he was wedded to Christ. If this is allegory, it is also close to literal truth. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Is not love the better part of marriage? And how if the Lord thy God has been a gracious loving figure here on earth, who loved thee humanly as well as divinely, and died for thee at last? Will not the complete love required by the commandment become very ardent, very heart-filling? Shalt thou not always yearn to see Him, fall at His feet, confess thy unworthiness, and touch His garment? Is there any end to the compass of thy loving Him, and musing upon Him, and dwelling in His presence? Dost thou not live with Him in a closer communion than the sunderances of mortality permit among men, or between men and women? And if it be thou art a nun, art thou not as close to Him in tears and washing of those blessed feet, as ever was that other woman, who had been a sinner? Thou shalt keep thy virginity for Him as for a bridegroom.[415] But the great commandment to love the Lord thy God has an adjunct—“and thy neighbour as thyself.” As thyself—how does the monk love himself? why, unto Christ and his own salvation. He does not love his sinful pleasures, nor those matters of earth which might not be sins, had he not realized how they conflicted with his scheme of life. His love for a fellow could not recognize those pleasures which he himself had cast away. He must love his fellow, like himself, unto the saving, not the undoing, of him—be his true lover, not his enemy. This vital principle of Christian love had to recast pagan passion and direct the affections to an immortal goal. Under it these reached a new absoluteness. The Christian lover should always be ready to give his life for his friend’s salvation, as for his own. So love’s offices gained enlargement and an infinity of new relationship, because directed toward eternal life.[416] Unquestionably in the monk’s eyes passionate love between the sexes was mainly lust. Within the bonds of marriage it was not mortal sin; but the virgin state was the best. Here, as we shall see, life was to claim its own and free its currents. Monasticism did not stop the human race, or keep men from loving women. Such love would assert itself; and ardent natures who felt its power were to find in themselves a love and passion somewhat novel, somewhat raised, somewhat enlarged. In the end the love between man and woman drew new inspiration and energy from the enhancement of all the rest of love, which came with Christianity. Evidently the great office of Christian love in a heathen period was to convert idolaters to the Faith. So it had been from the days of Paul. Rapidly Christianity spread through all parts of the Roman Empire. Then the Faith pressed beyond those crumbling boundaries into the barbarian world. Hereupon, with Gregory the Great and his successors, it became clear that the great pope is always a missionary pope, sending out such Christian embassies as Gregory sent to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. If conversion was a chief office of Christian love, the great object of Christian wrath was unbelief. That existed within and without Christendom: within in forms of heresy, without in the practices of heathenism. Christian wrath was moved by whatever opposed the true faith. The Christian should discriminate: hate the sin, and love the sinner unto his betterment. But it was so easy, so human, from hating the sin to hate the obdurate sinner who could not be saved and could but harm the Church. One need not recount how the disputes of the Athanasian time regarding the nature of Christ came to express themselves in curses; nor how the Christian sword began its slaughter of heretic and heathen. Persecution seemed justified in reason; it was very logical; broad reasons of Christian statecraft seemed to make for it; and often a righteous zeal wielded the weapon. It had moreover its apparent sanction in Jehovah’s destroying wrath against idolaters within and without the tribes of Israel. So the two opposites of love and wrath laid aside somewhat of grossness, and gained new height and compass in the Christian soul. A like change came over other emotions. As life lifted itself to further heights of holiness, and hitherto unseen depths of evil yawned, there came a new power of pity and novel revulsions of aversion. The pagan pity for life’s mortality, which filled Virgil’s heart, could not but take on change. There was no more mortality, but eternal joy and pain. Souls which had so unavailingly stretched forth their hands to fate, had now been given wings of faith. Yet death gained blacker terror from the Christian Hell, the newly-assured alternative of the Christian Heaven. The great Christian pity did not touch the mortal ebbing of the breath; that should be a triumphant birth. But an enormous and terror-stricken pity was evoked by sin, and the thought of the immortal soul hanging over an eternal hell. And since all human actions were connected with the man’s eternal lot, they became invested with a new import. So the Christian’s compassion would deepen, his sympathy become more intense, although no longer stirred by everything that had moved his pagan self. With him fear was raised to a new intensity by other terrors than had driven the blood from pagan cheeks. His sense of joy was deepened also; for a joy hitherto unrealized came from his new love of God and the God-man, from the assurance of his salvation, and the thought of loved human relationships never to end. So Christian joy might have an absoluteness which it never had under the pause-giving mortal limitations of paganism. Within the compass of pagan joyfulness there had been no deeper passion than the love of beauty. That had its sensuous phases, and its far blue heights, where Plato saw the beauty of order, justice, and proportion. For the Christian, the beauty of the flesh became a veil through which he looked for the beauty of the soul. If a face testified to the beauty of holiness within, it was fair. Better the pale, drawn visages of monk and nun than the red lip too quickly smiling. Feeling as well as thought should be adjusted to these sentiments. Yet Plato’s realization of intellectual beauty found home within the Christian thoughts of God and holiness, indeed helped to construct them. This is clear with the Fathers. In the East, Gregory of Nyssa’s passion for divine beauty was Platonism set in Christian phrase; in the West, Augustine reached his thoughts of beauty through considerations which came to him from Greek philosophy.[417] “Love is of the beautiful,” said Plato; “Do we love ought else?” says Augustine. Both men shape their thoughts of beauty after their best ideals of perfection. Augustine’s burn upward to the beauty of a God as loving as He is omnipotent; Plato’s had been more abstract. Augustine’s Platonism shows the highest Greek thoughts of beauty and goodness changed into attributes of a personal God, who could be loved because He was loving. In these ways the loftier Christian souls suppressed, or transformed and greatened, the emotions of their natures. It was thus with those possessed of a faith that brought the whole of life within its dominance. There were many such. Yet the multitude of Christians ranged downward from such great obsession, through all stages of human half-heartedness and frailty, to the state of those whose Christianity was but a name, or but a magic rite. Always preponderant in numbers, and often in influence and power, these nominal and fetichistic Christians would keep alive the loves and hates, the interests and tastes, the approvals and disapprovals, of paganism or barbaric heathenism, as the case might be. II The patristic synthesis of emotion passed on entire and authoritative to the Middle Ages. It exercised enormous influence (usually in the way of compulsion, but sometimes in the way of repulsion) upon emotional phenomena both of a religious and a secular nature. Yet it was merely the foundation, or the first stage, of mediaeval emotional development. The subsequent stages were dependent on the conditions under which mediaeval attitudes of mind arose, very dependent upon the maturing and blending of the native traits of inchoate mediaeval peoples and upon their appropriation of Latin Christianity and the antique education. The northern races had been introduced to a novel religion and to modes of thought considerably above them. Their old conceptions were discredited, their feelings somewhat distraught. Emotionally as well as intellectually they were confused. Turbid feelings, arising from ideas not fully mastered, had to clarify and adjust themselves. From the sixth to the eleventh century the crude mediaeval stocks, tangled but not blended, strange to the religion and culture which held their destinies, were not possessed of clear and dominant emotions that could create their own forms of expression. They could not think and feel as they would when their new acquirements had mellowed into faculty and temperament, and unities of character had once more emerged. Christianity and Latin culture were operative everywhere, and everywhere tended to produce a uniform development. Yet the peoples affected by these common influences were kept unlike each other through varieties of environment and a diversity of racial traits which still showed clearly as the centuries passed. In consequence, the emotional development of these different peoples remained marked by racial characteristics, while also becoming mediaeval under the action of common influences. It proceeded in two parallel and partially mingling streams: the one of the religious life, the other of earth’s desires. They may be observed in turn. Augustine represents the sum of doctrine and emotion contained in the Latin Christianity of the fifth century. However imperfectly others might comprehend his thought or feel the power of his grandly reasoned love of God, he established this love for time to come as the centre and the bound of Christian righteousness: “Virtus non est nisi diligere quod diligendum est.”[418] He drew within this principle the array of dogma and precept constituting Latin Christianity. On the other hand, the practical embodiment of the patristic synthesis of human interests and emotions was monasticism, with its lines set by the Rule of Benedict. Pope Gregory the Great[419] refashioned Augustine’s teachings, and placed the seal of his approval upon Benedictine monasticism as the perfect way of Christian living. His mind was darkened with the new ignorance and intellectual debasement which had come in the century and a half separating him from Augustine; and his soul was filled with the fantastic terrors which were to constitute so large a part of the religion of the Middle Ages. Devil lore, relic worship, miracles, permeate his consciousness of life. The soul’s ceaseless business is so to keep itself that it may at last escape the sentence of the awful Judge. Love and terror struggle fearfully in Gregory. Christ’s death had shown God’s love; and yet the Dies Irae impends. No delict is wiped out without penitence and punishment, in this life or afterwards—let it be in Purgatory and not in Hell! The centuries following Gregory’s death rearranged the contents of Latin Christianity, including Gregory’s teachings, to suit their own intellectual capacities. This (Carolingian) period of rearrangement and painful learning, as it was unoriginative intellectually, was likewise unproductive of Christian emotion. Occasionally from far-off converts, who are not troubled overmuch with learning, come utterances of simple feeling for the Faith (one thinks of Bede’s story of CÆdmon); and the Teuton spirit, warlike as well as intimate and sentimental, enters the vernacular interpretation of Christianity.[420] The Christian message could not be understood at all without a stirring of the convert’s nature; some quickening of emotion would ensue. This did not imply a development of emotion corresponding to the credences of Latin Christianity, to which so many people had been newly introduced. That system had to be more vitally appropriated before it could arouse the emotional counterpart of its tenets, and run its course in modes of mediaeval religious passion. Accordingly one will look in vain among the Carolingian scholars for that torrential feeling which becomes articulate in the eleventh century. They were excerpting and rearranging patristic Christianity to suit their own capacities. They could not use it as a basis for further thinking; nor, on the other hand, had it become for them the ground of religious feeling. Undoubtedly, Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo were pious Christians, taking their Faith devoutly. But such religious emotion as was theirs, was reflected rather than spontaneous. Alcuin, as well as Gregory the Great, realizes the opposition between heaven and the vana delectibilia[421] of this world. But Alcuin’s words have lost the horror-stricken quality of Gregory; neither do they carry the floods of tears which like thoughts bring to Peter Damiani in the eleventh century. Odo, Abbot of Cluny in the middle of the tenth century, has something of Gregory’s heavy horror; but even in him the gift of tears is not yet loosed.[422] From the eleventh century onward, the gathering religious feeling pours itself out in passionate utterances; and in this new emotionalizing of Latin Christianity lay the chief religious office of the Middle Ages, wherein they went far beyond the patristic authors of their faith. The Fathers of the Latin Church from Tertullian to Gregory the Great had been occupied with doctrine and ecclesiastical organization. This dual achievement was the work of the constructive mind of the Latin West, following, of course, what had been accomplished by the Greek Fathers. It stood forth mainly as the creation of those human faculties which are grouped under the name of intellect. Patristic Latin Christianity hardly presents itself as the product of the whole man. Its principles were not as yet fully humanized, made matter of the heart, and imbued with love and fear and pity: this creature of the intellect had yet to receive a soul. It is true that Augustine had an enormous love of God. It was fervently felt; it was powerfully reasoned; it impassioned his thought. Yet it did not contain that tender love of the divinely human Christ which trembles in the words of Bernard and makes the life of Francis a lyric poem. St. Jerome also had even an hysterically emotional nature; Tertullian at the beginning of the patristic period was no placid soul, nor Gregory the Great at its close. But it does not follow that Latin Christianity was as yet emotionalized, or that it had become a matter of the heart because it was accepted by the mind. Its dogmas and constructive principles were still too new; the energies of men had been spent in devising and establishing them. Not yet had they been pondered over for generation after generation, and hallowed through time; they had not yet become part of human life, cherished in men’s hopes, fondled in their affections, frozen in their fears, trembled before and loved. What was absent from the formation of Latin Christianity constituted the conditions of its gradual appropriation by the Middle Ages. It had come to them from a greater past, sanctioned by the saints who now reigned above. Through the centuries, men had come to understand it, and had made it their own with power. Through generations its commands and promises, its threats and rewards, had been feared and loved. Its persons, symbols, and sacraments had become animate with human quality and were endeared with intimate incident and association. Every one had been born to it, had been suckled upon it, had adored it in childhood, youth, and age: it filled all life; with hope or menace it overhung the closing hour.The Middle Ages have been given credit for dry theologies and sublimated metaphysics. Less frequently have they been credited with their great achievement, the imbuing of patristic Christianity with the human elements of love and fear and pity. Yet their religious phenomena display this emotionalizing of transmitted theological elements. Chapters which are to follow will illustrate it from the lives of many saints of different temperaments. As wide apart as life will be the phases of its manifestations. The tears of Peter Damiani are not like the love of the God-man in St. Bernard; St. Francis’s love of Christ and love of man is again different and new; and the mystic thought-shot visions of a Hildegard of Bingen are as blue to crimson when compared with the sense-passion for the Bridegroom of a Mechthild of Magdeburg. Even as illustrated in these so different natures, it will still appear that the emotional humanizing of Latin Christianity in the Middle Ages shaped itself to the tenets of the system formulated by the Church Fathers. It was an emotionalizing of that system, quite as much as a direct appropriation of the Gospel-heart of Christ. Christ and the heart of Christ were with the mediaeval saints; and yet the emotions as well as thoughts through which they turned to Him received their form from patristic Christianity. Religious art plainly tells the story. Let one call to mind the character of its achievements in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. That was the period following the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. Everywhere basilicas arose.[423] Some of them may be seen in Rome, in Ravenna, in Constantinople. They still contain many of the mural mosaics which were their glory. Numberless artists laboured in the composition of those stately church decorations. There was a need, unprecedented and never afterwards paralleled, of creative composition. Spacious surfaces were to be covered with prefigurative scenes from the Old Testament, with scenes from the life of Christ on earth, and representations of His apocalyptic triumph in the Resurrection. They had all to be composed without aid from previous designs, for there were none. The artists had need to be as constructive as the Church Fathers, who through the same period were perfecting the formulation of the Faith. They succeeded grandly, setting forth the subjects they were told to execute, in noble, balanced, and decorative compositions, which presented the facts and tenets of the Faith strikingly and correctly. Stylistically, these great church mosaics belonged to antique art. What did they lack? Merely the human, veritably tragic, qualities of love and fear and pity, which had not yet come. Like the dogmatic system, this mosaic presentation was too recently composed. Its subjects were not yet humanized through centuries of contemplation, reverence, and love.[424] Many of the early compositions, repeated from century to century, in time were humanized and transformed with feeling. But this was not in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when art was but a decadent and barbarized survival of the antique Christian manner, nor in the tenth and eleventh. One may note also that the mediaeval expression of Christian emotion was beginning in religious literature. This came with fulness in the twelfth century, and along with it the emotionalizing, the veritable humanizing, of religious art began. Yet the artists of western Europe still lacked the skill requisite for delicate execution. A marked advance came in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That was the great period of Gothic architecture; and in the sculpture on the French cathedrals, stone seems to live and feel. The prophetic figures from the Old Testament, the scenes of man’s redemption and final judgment, are humanized with love and terror. Moreover, the sculptor surrounds them with the myriad subsidiary detail of mortal life and changing beauty, showing how closely they are knit to every human love and interest. In Italy a like story is told in a different manner. There is sculpture, but there also is mosaic, and above all there is and will be fresco. Before the end of the thirteenth century, Giotto was busy with his new dramatic art; no need to tell what power of human feeling filled the works of that chief of painters and his school. The hard materials of the mosaicist were also made to render emotion. If one will note the mosaics along the nave in Santa Maria Maggiore, belonging to the fifth century, and then turn to the mosaics of the Coronation of the Virgin in the apse, or cross the Tiber and look at those in the lower zone of the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which tell the Virgin’s story, he will see the change which was bringing love and sweetness into the stiff mosaic medium. Torriti executed the former in 1295; and the latter with their gentler feeling were made by Giotto’s pupil, Cavallini, in 1351. The art is still as correct and true and orthodox as in the fifth century. It conforms to Latin Christianity in the choice of topics and the manner of presenting them, and drapes its human emotions around conceptions which the patristic period formed and delivered to the Middle Ages. Thus, in full measure, it has taken to itself the emotional qualities of the mediaeval transformation of Latin Christianity, and is filled with a love and tears and pity, which were not in the old Christian mosaics. Quite analogous to the emotionalizing of Christian art is the example afforded by the evolution of the Latin hymn. The earliest extant Latin hymns are those of St. Ambrose, written in iambic dimeters. Antique in phrase as in metre, they are also trenchantly correct in doctrine, as behoved the compositions of the great Archbishop of Milan who commanded the forces of orthodoxy in the Arian conflict. They were sung in anxious seasons. Yet these dignified and noble hymns are no emotional outpour either of anxiety or adoration. Such feeling as they carry lies in their strength of trust in God and in the power of conviction of their stately orthodoxy. Between the death of Ambrose and the tenth century, Latin hymns gradually substituted accent in the place of metrical quantity, as the dominant principle of their rhythm. With this partial change there seems to come increase of feeling. The “Jesu nostra redemptio,
Amor et desiderium.” of the seventh century is different from the “Te diligat castus amor,
Te mens adoret sobria” of Ambrose.[425] And the famous pilgrim chant of the tenth century, “O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,” has the strength of long-deepening emotion.[426] These hymns have but dropped the constraint of metre. Religious passion had not yet proved its creative power, and the new verse-forms with their mighty rhyme, fit to voice the accumulated emotions of the Liturgy, were not in existence. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the strophic evolution of the Latin hymn, in which feeling, joined with art, at last perfected line and stanza and the passionate phrases filling them.[427] Yet nothing could be more orthodox than the Latin hymn throughout its course of development. Its function was liturgical. It was correct in doctrinal expressions, and followed in every way the authoritative teachings of the Church; its symbolism was derived from the works of learned doctors; and its feeling took form from the tenets of Latin Christianity. The Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater yield evidence of this.[428] From the religious phases of mediaeval emotion, one may pass to modes of feeling which were secular and human. The antecedents were again the racial traits of the peoples who were to become mediaeval; the formative influences still are Christianity and the profane antique culture. The racial traits show clearest in vernacular compositions, some of which may carry fervent feeling, such as enkindles the Crusader’s song of Hartmann von Aue: “Min froÜde wart nie sorgelos
Unz an die tage
Daz ich mir Kristes bluomen kos
Die ich hie trage.
Die kundent eine sumerzÌt,
Die alsÔ gar
In suezer augenweide lit;
Got helfe uns dar.
“Mich hÂt diu werlt also gewent (gewÖhnt),
Daz mir der muot
Sich z’einer mÂze nÂch ir sent:
DÊst mir nu guot.
Got hat vil wol ze mir getÂn,
Als ez nu stÂt,
Daz ich der sorgen bin erlÂn
Diu manegen hÂt
Gebunden an den fuoz,
Daz er belÎben muoz
Swenn’ ich in Kristes schar
Mit frÖuden wÜnneclichen var.”[429] The secular emotional development was connected with the religious. It was stimulated by the deepening of emotional capacity caused by Christianity, and was not unrelated to the Christian love of God, the place of which was taken, in secular mediaeval passion, by an idealizing, but carnal, love of woman; and instead of the terror-stricken piety which accompanied the Christian’s love for his Maker and his Judge, the heart was glad and the temper open to every joy, while also subject to the fears and hates which spring up among men of mortal passions. In the romantic and utter abandonment required of its votaries, this earthly love may well have drawn suggestion from that boundless love of God which had superseded the Greek precept of “nothing in excess,” teaching instead that no limit should be set on what was absolutely good. The principle of love unrestrained was thus inaugurated, and did not always turn to God. Ardent natures who felt love’s power, might hold it as the supreme arbiter and law of life, and the giver of strength and virtue. These thoughts will shape the tale of Lancelot and myriad poems besides. They also may be found incarnate in the living instance: the heart of HeloÏse held a passion for her human master which she recognized as her highest law. It was such a passion as she would hardly have conceived but for the existence of like categories of devotion to the Christian God. Not in her nature alone, but through many Christian generations whereof she was the fruit, there had gone on a continual enhancement of capacities of feeling, for which she was a greater woman when she grew to womanhood and felt its passion. Through such heightening of her powers of loving, and through the suggestiveness of the Christian love of God, she could conceive and feel a like absolute devotion to a man.[430] There were, moreover, partially humanized stages in which the love of God was affiliated with loves of mortal hue. Many a mediaeval woman felt a passionate love for the spiritual Bridegroom. Its expression, its suggestions, its training, might transmit power and passion to the love of very mortal men: while from the worship of the Blessed Virgin expressions of passionate devotion might pass over into poems telling man’s love of woman. And what reaches of passion might not the Song of Songs suggest, although that imagined bridal of the Soul was never deemed a song of human love?[431]
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