The Mediaeval Mind (Volume II of II), Henry Osborn Taylor

 

 

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THE MEDIAEVAL MIND

 

 

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

 

 

THE

MEDIAEVAL MIND

 

A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT
OF THOUGHT AND EMOTION
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

 

BY
HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR

 

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1911

 

 

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[Pg v]

CONTENTS

BOOK IV THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY (continued)
		PAGE
CHAPTER XXV
The Heart of Heloïse		3
CHAPTER XXVI
German Considerations: Walther von der Vogelweide		28
BOOK V SYMBOLISM
CHAPTER XXVII
Scriptural Allegories in the Early Middle Ages; Honorius of Autun		41
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Rationale of the Visible World: Hugo of St. Victor		60
[Pg vi]
CHAPTER XXIX
Cathedral and Mass; Hymn and Imaginative Poem		76
I.	Guilelmus Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais.
II.	The Hymns of Adam of St. Victor and the Anticlaudianus of Alanus of Lille.
BOOK VI LATINITY AND LAW
CHAPTER XXX
The Spell of the Classics		107
I.	Classical Reading.
II.	Grammar.
III.	The Effect upon the Mediaeval Man; Hildebert of Lavardin.
CHAPTER XXXI
Evolution of Mediaeval Latin Prose		148
CHAPTER XXXII
Evolution of Mediaeval Latin Verse		186
I.	Metrical Verse.
II.	Substitution of Accent for Quantity.
III.	Sequence-Hymn and Student-Song.
IV.	Passage of Themes into the Vernacular.
[Pg vii]
CHAPTER XXXIII
Mediaeval Appropriation of the Roman Law		231
I.	The Fontes Juris Civilis.
II.	Roman and Barbarian Codification.
III.	The Mediaeval Appropriation.
IV.	Church Law.
V.	Political Theorizing.
BOOK VII ULTIMATE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES
CHAPTER XXXIV
Scholasticism: Spirit, Scope, and Method		283
CHAPTER XXXV
Classification of Topics; Stages of Evolution		311
I.	Philosophic Classification of the Sciences; the Arrangement of Vincent’s Encyclopaedia, of the Lombard’s Sentences, of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.
II.	The Stages of Development: Grammar, Logic, Metalogics.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Twelfth-Century Scholasticism		338
I.	The Problem of Universals: Abaelard.
II.	The Mystic Strain: Hugo and Bernard.
III.	The Later Decades: Bernard Silvestris; Gilbert de la Porrée; William of Conches; John of Salisbury, and Alanus of Lille.
[Pg viii]
CHAPTER XXXVII
The Universities, Aristotle, and the Mendicants		378
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Bonaventura		402
CHAPTER XXXIX
Albertus Magnus		420
CHAPTER XL
Thomas Aquinas		433
I.	Thomas’s Conception of Human Beatitude.
II.	Man’s Capacity to know God.
III.	How God knows.
IV.	How the Angels know.
V.	How Men know.
VI.	Knowledge through Faith perfected in Love.
CHAPTER XLI
Roger Bacon		484
CHAPTER XLII
Duns Scotus and Occam		509
CHAPTER XLIII
The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante		525
INDEX		561

 

 

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BOOK IV
THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY

(Continued)

[Pg 2]

 

[Pg 3]

CHAPTER XXV

THE HEART OF HELOÏSE

The romantic growth and imaginative shaping of chivalric love having been followed in the fortunes of its great exemplars, Tristan, Iseult, Lancelot, Guinevere, Parzival, a different illustration of mediaeval passion may be had by turning from these creations of literature to an actual woman, whose love for a living man was thought out as keenly and as tragically felt as any heart-break of imagined lovers, and was impressed with as entire a self-surrender as ever ravished the soul of nun panting with love of the God-man.

There has never been a passion between a man and woman more famous than that which brought happiness and sorrow to the lives of Abaelard and Heloïse. Here fame is just. It was a great love, and its course was a perfect soul’s tragedy. Abaelard was a celebrity, the intellectual glory of an active-minded epoch. His love-story has done as much for his posthumous fame as all his intellectual activities. Heloïse became known in her time through her relations with Abaelard; in his songs her name was wafted far. She has come down to us as one of the world’s love-heroines. Yet few of those who have been touched by her story have known that Heloïse was a great woman, possessed of an admirable mind, a character which proved its strength through years, and, above all, a capacity for loving—for loving out to the full conclusions of love’s convictions, and for feeling in their full range and power whatever moods and emotions could arise from an unhappy situation and a passion as deeply felt as it was deeply thought upon.

[Pg 4]Abaelard was not a great character—aside from his intellect. He was vain and inconsiderate, a man who delighted in confounding and supplanting his teachers, and in being a thorn in the flesh of all opponents. But he became chastened through his misfortunes and through Heloïse’s high and self-sacrificing love. In the end, perhaps, his love was worthy of the love of Heloïse. Yet her love from the beginning was nobler and deeper than his love of her. Love was for him an incident in his experience, then an element in his life. Love made the life of Heloïse; it remained her all. Moreover, in the records of their passion, Heloïse’s love is unveiled as Abaelard’s is not. For all these reasons, the heart of Heloïse rather than the heart of Abaelard discloses the greatness of a love that wept itself out in the twelfth century, and it is her love rather than his that can teach us much regarding the mediaeval capacity for loving. Hers is a story of mediaeval womanhood, and sin, and repentance perhaps, with peace at last, or at least the lips shut close and further protest foregone.

Abaelard’s stormy intellectual career[1] and the story of the love between him and the canon’s niece are well known. Let us follow him in those parts of his narrative which disclose the depth and power of Heloïse’s love for him. We draw from his Historia calamitatum, written “to a friend,” apparently an open letter intended to circulate.

“There was,” writes he, referring to the time of his sojourn in Paris, when he was about thirty-six years old, and at the height of his fame as a lecturer in the schools—

Although Abaelard was moved at the plight of Heloïse, he bitterly felt his own discomfiture in the eyes of the once admiring world. But the sentence touching Heloïse is a first true note of her devoted love: what a storm of sorrow (moeroris aestus) came over her at my disgrace. Through this trouble and woe, Heloïse never thought of her own pain save as it pained her to be the source of grief to Abaelard.

Abaelard continues:

It will be remembered that Abaelard was a clerk, a clericus, in virtue of his profession of letters and theology. Never having taken orders, he could marry; but while a clerk’s slip could be forgotten, marriage might lead people to think he had slighted his vocation, and would certainly bar the ecclesiastical preferment which such a famous clericus might naturally look forward to. Nevertheless, he at once set out to fetch Heloïse from Brittany, to make her his wife.

The stand which she now took shows both her mind and heart:

Speaking thus, Heloïse fortified her argument with quotations from Seneca, and the examples of Jewish and Gentile worthies and Christian saints, and continued:

Heloïse’s reasonings show love great and true and her absolute devotion to Abaelard’s interests. None the less striking is her clear intelligence. She reasoned correctly; she was right, the marriage would do great harm to Abaelard and little good to her. We see this too, if we lay aside our sense of the ennobling purity of marriage—a sentiment not commonly felt in the twelfth century. Marriage was holy in the mind of Christ. But it did not preserve its holiness through the centuries which saw the rise of monasticism and priestly celibacy. A way of life is not pure and holy when another way is holier and purer; this is peculiarly true in Christianity, which demands the ideal best with such intensity as to cast reflection on whatever falls below the highest standard. From the time of the barbarian inroads, on through the Carolingian periods, and into the later Middle Ages, there was enough barbarism and brutality to prevent the preservation, or impede the development, of a high standard of marriage. Not monasticism, but his own half-barbarian, lustful heart led Charlemagne to marry and remarry at will, and have many mistresses besides. It was the same with the countless barons and mediaeval kings, rude and half civilized. This was barbarous lust, not due to the influence of monasticism. But, on the other hand, it was always the virgin or celibate state that the Church held before the eyes of all this semi-barbarous laity as the ideal for a Christian man or woman. The Church sanctioned marriage, but hardly lauded it or held it up as a condition in which lives of holiness and purity could be led. Such were the sentiments in which Heloïse was born and bred. They were subconscious factors in her thoughts regarding[Pg 9] herself and her lover. Devoted and unselfish was her love; undoubtedly Heloïse would have sacrificed herself for Abaelard under any social conditions. Nevertheless, with her, marriage added little to love; it was a mere formal and binding authorization; love was no purer for it. To her mind, for a man in Abaelard’s situation to be entangled in a temporary amour was better than to be chained to his passion, with his career irrevocably ruined, in marriage. In so far as her thoughts or Abaelard’s were influenced by the environment of priestly thinking, marriage would seem a rendering permanent of a passionate and sinful state, which it were best to cast off altogether. For herself, as she said truly, the marriage would bring obloquy rather than reinstatement. She had been mistress to a clerk; marriage would make her the partner of his abandonment of his vocation, the accomplice of broken purposes if not of broken vows. And finally, as there was then no line of disgrace as now between bastard and lawful issue, Heloïse had no thought that the interests of her son demanded that his mother should become his father’s wife.

Abaelard’s Historia calamitatum now turns to troubles having no connection with Heloïse: his difficulties with the monks of St. Denis, with other monks, with every one, in fact, except his scholars; his arraignment before the Council of Soissons, the public burning of his book, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, and various other troubles, till, seeking a retreat, he constructed an oratory on the bank of the Ardisson. He named it the Paraclete, and there he taught and lectured. He was afterwards elected abbot of a monastery in Brittany, where he discovered that those under him were savage beasts rather than monks. Here the Historia calamitatum was written.

The monks of St. Denis had never ceased to hate Abaelard for his assertion that their great Saint was not really Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach. Their abbot now brought forward and proved an ancient title to the land where stood the convent of Argenteuil, “in which,” to resume Abaelard’s account,

What were those meditations and those prayers uttered or unuttered in that cell? They did not always refer to the kingdom of heaven, judging from the abbess’s first letter to her former lover. After the installation of Heloïse and her nuns, Abaelard rarely visited the Paraclete, although his advice and instruction was desired there. His visits gave rise to too much scandal. In the course of time, however, the Historia calamitatum came into the hands of Heloïse, and occasioned this letter, which seems to issue forth out of a long silence; ten years had passed since she became a nun. The superscription is as follows:

Remarks upon this letter would seem to profane a shrine—had the man profaned that shrine? He had not always worshipped there. Heloïse knew this, for all her love. She said it too, writing in phraseology which had been brutalized through the denouncing spirit of Latin monasticism. How truly she puts the situation and how clearly she thinks withal, discerning as it were the beautiful and true in love and marriage. The whole letter is well arranged, and written in a style showing the writer’s training in Latin mediaeval rhetoric. It was not the less deeply felt because composed with care and skill. Evidently the writer is of the Middle Ages; her occasional prolixity was not of her sex but of her time; and she quotes the ancients so naturally; what they say should be convincing. How the letter bares the motives of her own conduct: not for God’s sake, or the kingdom of heaven’s sake, but for Abaelard’s sake she became a nun. She had no inclination thereto; her letters do not indicate that she ever became really and spontaneously devoted to her calling. Abaelard was her God, and as her God she held him to the end; though she applied herself to the consideration of religious topics, as we shall see. Moreover, her position as nun and abbess could not fail to force such topics on her consideration.

Is there another such love-letter, setting forth a situation so triple-barred and hopeless? And the love which fills the letter, which throbs and burns in it, which speaks and argues in it, how absolute is this love. It is love carried out to its full conclusions; it includes the whole woman and the whole of her life; whatever lies beyond its ken and care is scorned and rejected. This love is extreme in its humility, and yet realizes its own purity and worth; it is grieved at the thought of rousing a feeling baser than itself. Heloïse had been and still was Heloïse, devoted and self-sacrificing in her love. But the situation has become torture; her heart is filled with all manner of pain, old and new, till it is driven[Pg 16] to assert its right at least to consolation. Thus Heloïse’s love becomes insistent and requiring. Was it possibly burdensome to the man who now might wish to think no more of passion? who might wish no longer to be loved in that way? In his reply Abaelard does not unveil himself; he seems to take an attitude which may have been the most faithful expression that he could devise of his changed self.

This superscription was a gentle reminder of their present relationship—in Christ. The writer begins: his not having written since their conversion was to be ascribed not to his negligence, but to his confidence in her wisdom; he did not think that she who, so full of grace, had consoled her sister nuns when prioress, could as abbess need teaching or exhortation for the guidance of her daughters; but if, in her humility, she felt the need of his instruction in matters pertaining to God, she might write, and he would answer, as the Lord should grant. Thanks be to God who had filled their hearts—hers and her nuns—with solicitude for his perils, and had made them participators in his afflictions; through their prayers the divine pity had protected him. He had hastened to send the Psalter, requested by his sister, formerly dear to him in the world and now most dear in Christ, to assist their prayers. The potency of prayer, with God and the saints, and especially the prayer of women for those dear to them, is frequently declared in Scripture; he cites a number of passages to prove it. May these move her to pray for him. He refers with affectionate gratitude to the prayers which the nuns had been offering for him, and encloses a short prayer for his safety, which he begs and implores may be used in their daily canonical hours. If the Lord, however, delivers him into the hands of his enemies to kill him, or if he meet his death in any way, he begs that his body may be brought to the Paraclete for burial, so that the sight of his sepulchre may move his daughters and sisters in Christ to pray for him; no place could be so safe and salutary for the soul of one bitterly repenting of his sins, as that consecrated to the true Paraclete—the Comforter;[Pg 17] nor could fitter Christian burial be found than among women devoted by their vows to Christ. He begs that the great solicitude which they now have for his bodily safety, they will then have for the salvation of his soul, and by the suffrage of their prayer for the dead man show how they had loved him when alive. The letter closes, not with a personal word to Heloïse, but with this distich:

Thus as against Heloïse’s beseeching love, Abaelard lifted his hands, palms out, repelling it. His letter ignored all that filled the soul and the letter of Heloïse. His reply did not lack words of spiritual affection, and its tone was not as formal then as it now seems. When Abaelard asked for the prayers of Heloïse and her nuns, he meant it; he desired the efficacy of their prayers. Then he wished to be buried among them. We are touched by this; but, again, Abaelard meant it, as he said, for his soul’s welfare; it was no love sentiment. The letter stirred the heart of Heloïse to a rebellious outcry against the cruelty of God, if not of Abaelard, a soul’s cry against life and the calm attitude of one who no longer was—or at least meant to be no longer—what he had been to her.

This letter gives a view of Heloïse’s mind, its strong grasp and its capacity for reasoning, though its reasoning is here distraught with passion. Scathingly, half-blinded by her pain, she declares the perversities of Providence, as they glared upon her. Such a disclosure of the woman’s mind suggests how broadly based in thought and largely reared was that great love into which her whole soul had been poured, the mind as well as heart. Her love was great, unique, not only from its force of feeling, but from the power and scope of thought by which passion and feeling were carried out so far and fully to the last conclusions of devotion. The letter also shows a woman driven by stress of misery to utter cries[Pg 21] and clutch at remedies that her calmer self would have put by. It is not hypocrisy to conceal the desires or imaginings which one would never act upon. To tell these is not true disclosure of oneself, but slander. Torn by pain, Heloïse makes herself more vile and needy than in other moments she knew herself to be. Yet the letter also uncovers her, and in nakedness there is some truth. Doubtless her nun’s garb did clothe a hypocrite. Whatever she felt—and here we see the worst she felt—before the world she had to act the nun. We shall soon see how she forced herself to act, or be, the nun toward Abaelard.

Abaelard replied in a letter filled with religious argument and consolation. It was self-controlled, firm, authoritative, and strong in those arguments regarding God’s mercy which have stood the test of time. If they sometimes fail to satisfy the embittered soul, at least they are the best that man has known. And withal, the letter is calmly and nobly affectionate—what place was there for love’s protestations? They would have increased the evil, adding fuel to Heloïse’s passionate misery.

The master-note is struck in the address: “To the spouse of Christ, His servant.” The letter seeks to turn Heloïse’s thoughts to her nun’s calling and her soul’s salvation. It divides her expressions of complaint under four heads. First, he had put her name first, because she had become his superior from the moment of her bridal with his master Christ. Jerome writing to Eustochium called her Lady, when she had become the spouse of Jerome’s Lord. Abaelard shows, with citations from the Song of Songs, the glory of the spouse, and how her prayers should be sought by one who was the servant of her Husband. Second, as to the terrors roused in her by his mention of his peril and possible death, he points out that in her first letter she had bidden him write of those perils; if they brought him death, she should deem that a kind release. She should not wish to see his miseries drawn out, even for her sake. Third, he shows that his praise of her was justified even by her disclaimer of merit—as it is written, Who humbles himself shall be exalted. He warns her against false modesty which may be vanity.

[Pg 22]He turns at last to the old and ceaseless plaint which she makes against God for cruelty, when she should rather glorify Him; he had thought that that bitterness had departed, so dangerous for her, so painful to him. If she wished to please him, let her lay it aside; retaining it, she could not please him or advance with him to blessedness; let her have this much religion, not to separate herself from him hastening to God; let her take comfort in their journeying to the same goal. He then shows her that his punishment was just as well as merciful; he had deserved it from God and also from Fulbert. If she will consider, she will see in it God’s justice and His mercy; God had saved them from shipwreck; had raised a barrier against shame and lust. For himself the punishment was purification, not privation; will not she, as his inseparable comrade, participate in the workings of this grace, even as she shared the guilt and its pardon? Once he had thought of binding her to him in wedlock; but God found a means to turn them both to Him; and the Lord was continuing His mercy towards her, causing her to bring forth spiritual daughters, when otherwise she would only have borne children in the flesh; in her the curse of Eve is turned to the blessing of Mary. God had purified them both; whom God loveth He correcteth. Oh! let her thoughts dwell with the Son of God, seized, dragged, beaten, spit upon, crowned with thorns, hung on a vile cross. Let her think of Him as her spouse, and for Him let her make lament; He bought her with himself, He loved her. In comparison with His love, his own (Abaelard’s) was lust, seeking the pleasure it could get from her. If he, Abaelard, had suffered for her, it was not willingly nor for her sake, as Christ had suffered, and for her salvation. Let her weep for Him who made her whole, not for her corrupter; for her Redeemer, not for her defiler; for the Lord who died for her, not for the living servant, himself just freed from the death. Let his sister accept with patience what came to her in mercy from Him who wounded the body to save the soul.

In her next letter Heloïse obeys, and turns her pen if not her thoughts to the topics suggested by Abaelard’s admonitions. The short scholastically phrased address cannot be rendered in any modern fashion: “Domino specialiter sua singulariter.”

The rest of this long letter shows Heloïse putting her principles in practice. She is forcing her mind to consider and her pen to discourse upon topics which might properly occupy an abbess’s thoughts—topics, moreover, which would satisfy Abaelard and call forth long letters in reply. Whether she cared really for these matters or ever came[Pg 24] to care for them; or whether she turned to them to distract her mind and keep up some poor makeshift of intercourse with one who would and could no longer be her lover; or whether all these motives mingled, and in what proportion, perhaps may best be left to Him who tries the heart.

The abbess writes:

Heloïse, having set this task for Abaelard, proceeds to show how the various monastic regulae, from Benedict’s downward, failed to make suitable provision for the habits and requirements and weaknesses of women, the regulae hitherto having been concerned with the weaknesses of men. She enters upon matters of clothing and diet, and everything concerning the lives of nuns. She writes as one learned in Scripture and the writings of the Fathers, and sets the whole matter forth, in its details, with admirable understanding of its intricacies. She concludes, reminding Abaelard that it is for him in his lifetime to set a regula for them to follow forever; after God, he is their founder. They might thereafter have some teacher who would build in alien fashion; such a one might have less care and understanding, and might not be as readily obeyed as himself; it is for him to speak, and they will listen. Vale.

The first of Heloïse’s letters is a great expression of a great love; in the second, anguish drives the writer’s hand; in the third, she has gained self-control; she suppresses her heart, and writes a letter which is discursive and impersonal from the beginning to the little Vale at the end.

Abaelard returned a long epistle upon the Scriptural origin of the order of nuns, and soon followed it with another, still longer, containing instruction, advice, and rules[Pg 25] for the nuns of the Paraclete. He also wrote them a letter upon the study of Scripture. From this time forth he proved his devotion to Heloïse and her nuns by the large body of writings which he composed for their edification. Heloïse sent him a long list of questions upon obscure phrases and knotty points of Scripture, which he answered diligently in detail.[6] He then sent her a collection of hymns written or “rearranged” by himself for the use of the nuns, accompanied by a prefatory letter: “At thy prayers, my sister Heloïse, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ, I have composed what in Greek are called hymns, and in Hebrew tillim.” He then explains why, yielding to the requests of the nuns, he had written hymns, of which the Church had such a store.

Next he composed for them a large volume of sermons, which he also sent with a letter to Heloïse: “Having completed the book of hymns and sequences, revered in Christ and loved sister Heloïse, I have hastened to compose some sermons for your congregation; I have paid more attention to the meaning than the language. But perhaps an unstudied style is well suited to simple auditors. In composing and arranging these sermons I have followed the order of Church festivals. Farewell in the Lord, servant of His, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ: in the flesh then my wife, now my sister in the spirit and partner in our sacred calling.”

At a subsequent period, when his opinions were condemned by the Council of Sens, he sent to Heloïse a confession of faith. Shortly afterward his stormy life found a last refuge in the monastery of Cluny. His closing years (of peace?) are described in a letter to Heloïse from the good and revered abbot, Peter the Venerable. He writes that he had received with joy the letter which her affection had dictated,[7] and now took the first opportunity to express his recognition of her affection and his reverence for herself. He refers to her keenly prosecuted studies[Pg 26] (so rare for women) before taking the veil, and then to the glorious example of her sage and holy life in the nun’s sacred calling—her victory over the proud Prince of this World. His admiration for her was deep; his expression of it was extreme. A learned, wise, and holy woman could not be praised more ardently than Heloïse is praised by this good man. He had spoken of the advantages his monastery would have derived from her presence, and then continued:

The abbot afterwards visited the Paraclete, and on returning to Cluny received this letter from the abbess:

The good abbot replied with a kind and affectionate letter, confirming his gift of the Tricenarium, promising to do all he could for Astralabius, and sending with his letter the record of Abaelard’s absolution, as follows:

Abaelard died in the year 1142, aged sixty-three. Twenty-one years afterward Heloïse died at the same age, and was buried in the same tomb with him at the Paraclete:

 

 

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[Pg 28]

CHAPTER XXVI

GERMAN CONSIDERATIONS: WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE

A criticism of the world of feudalism, chivalry, and love may be had from the impressions and temperamental reactions of a certain thinking atom revolving in the same. The atom referred to was Walther von der Vogelweide, a German, a knight, a Minnesinger, and a national poet whose thoughts were moved by the instincts of his caste and race.

In language, temperament, and character, the Germans east of the Rhine were Germans still in the thirteenth century. They had accepted, and even vitally appropriated, Latin Christianity; those of them who were educated had received a Latin education. Yet their natures, though somewhat tempered, showed largely and distinctly German. Moreover, through the centuries, they had acquired—or rather they had never lost—a national antipathy toward those Roman papal well-springs of authority, which seemed to suck back German gold and lands in return for spiritual assurance and political betrayal.

A different and already mediaevalized element had also become part of German culture, to wit, the matter of the French Arthurian romances and the lyric fashions of Provence, which, working together, had captivated modish German circles from the Rhine to the Danube. Nevertheless the German character maintained itself in the Minnelieder which followed Provençal poetry, and in the höfisch (courtly) epics which were palpable translations from the French.[8] The distinguished group of German poets whose[Pg 29] lives fall around the year 1200, were as German as their language, although they borrowed from abroad the form and matter of their compositions.

There could be no better Germans than the two most thoughtful of this group, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. Most Germanically the former wrestled with that ancient theme, “from suffering, wisdom,” which he pressed into the tale of Parzival. His great poem, achieved with toil and sweat, was mighty in its climaxes, and fit to strengthen the hearts of those men who through sorrow and loneliness and despair’s temptations were growing “slowly wise.”

The virtues which Wolfram praised and embodied in his hero were those praised in the verses, and even, one may think, strugglingly exemplified in the conduct, of Walther von der Vogelweide,[9] most famous of Minnesingers, and a power in the German lands through his Sprüche, or verses personal and political. Less is known of his life than of his whole and manly views, his poetic fancies, his musings, his hopes, and great depressions. Many places have claimed the honour of his birth, which took place somewhat before 1170. He was poor, and through his youth and manhood moved about from castle to castle, and from court to court, seeking to win some recompense for his excellent verses and good company. Thus he learned much of men, “climbing another’s stairs,” with his fellows, at the Landgraf Hermann’s Wartburg, or at the Austrian ducal Court.

Walther’s Sprüche render his moods most surely, and reflect his outlook on the world. His charming Minnelieder bear more conventional evidence. The courtly German love-songs passing by this name were affected by the conceits and conventions of the Provençal poetry upon which they[Pg 30] were modelled. A strong nature might use such with power, or break with their influence. Walther made his own the high convention of trouvère and troubadour, that love uplifts the lover’s being. Besides this, and besides the lighter forms and phrases current in such poetry, his Lieder carry natural feeling, joy, and moral levity, according to the theme; they also may express Walther’s convictions.

To take examples: Walther’s Tagelied[10] imitates the Provençal alba (dawn), in which knight and truant lady bewail the coming of the light and the parting which it brings. Far more joyous, and as immoral as one pleases, is Unter der Linde, most famous of his songs. Marvellously it gives the mood of love’s joy remembered—and anticipated too. The immorality is complete (if we will be serious), and is rendered most alluring by the utter gladness of the girl’s song—no repentance, no regret; only joy and roguish laughter.

Walther was young, he was a knight and a Minnesinger; he had doubtless loved, in this way! His love-songs have plenty to say of the red mouth, good for kissing—I care not who knows it either. But he also realizes, and greatly sings, the height and breadth and worth of love the true and stable, the blessing and completion of two lives, which comes to a false heart never.[11] He seems to feel it necessary to defend love for itself, perhaps because marriage was taken more seriously in this imitative German literature than in the French and Provençal originals: “Who says that love is sin, let him consider well. Many an honour dwells with her, and troth and happiness. If one does ill to the other, love is grieved. I do not mean false love; that were better named un-love. No friend of that, am I.” But his thoughts turn quickly to love as a lasting union: “He happy man, she happy woman, whose hearts are to each other true; both lives increased in price and worth; blessed their years and all their days.”[12]

Giving play to his caustic temper, Walther puts scorn upon the light of love: “Fool he who cannot understand what joy and good, love brings. But the light man is ever[Pg 31] pleased with light things, as is fit!”[13] This Minnesinger applied most earnest standards to life; lofty his praise of the qualities of womanhood, which are better than beauty or riches: “woman” is a higher word than “lady”[14]—it took a German to say this. “He who carries hidden sorrow in his heart, let him think upon a good woman—he is freed.”[15] With a burst of patriotism, in one of his greatest poems Walther praises German women as the best in all the world.[16]

But even in the Minnelieder, Walther has his despondencies. One of the most definite, and possibly conventional, was regret for love’s labour lost, and the days of youth spent in service of an ungracious fair. The poet wonders how it is that he who has helped other men is tongue-tied before his lady. Again, his reflections broaden from thoughts of unresponsive fair ones to a conviction of life’s thanklessness. “I have well served the World (Frau Welt, Society), and gladly would serve her more, but for her evil thanks and her way of preferring fools to me.... Come, World, give me better greeting—the loss is not all mine.” He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. Still from the windy harbour comes one grand lament over art’s decline: “The worst songs please, frogs’ voices! Oh, I laugh from anger! Lady World, no score of mine is on your devil’s slate. Many a life of man and woman have I made glad—might I so have gladdened mine! Here, I make my Will, and bequeath my goods—to the envious my ill-luck, my sorrows to the liars, my follies to false lovers, and to the ladies my heart’s pain.”[17] He makes a solemn offering of his poems: “Good women, worthy men, a loving greeting is my due. Forty years have I sung fittingly of love; and now, take my songs which gladden, as my gift to you. Your favour be my return. And with my staff I will fare on, still wooing worth with[Pg 32] undisheartened work, as from my childhood. So shall I be, in lowly lot, one of the Noble—for me enough.”

To relish Walther’s love-songs, one need not know whether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened by some castle’s hearth, or in what German land that castle stood. Likewise in his Sprüche, which have other bearing, the roll of his protesting voice carries the universal human. To comprehend them it were well to know that life was then as now niggardly in rewarding virtue; beyond this, one needs to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papacy, those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistically, on the decree of God; both claiming the world’s headship; the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and temper German, and of this world decidedly. The other, Roman in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its subordination of the life below to the life to come, if not in the methods of establishing this consummation; Christian too, but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain for whatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two partial opposites were further antagonized, since the native resources recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggling patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a state within and above the state of duke and king and emperor.

In Walther’s time Innocent III. swayed the nations from Peter’s throne. Just before Innocent’s accession, Germany’s able emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (September 1197), leaving an heir not two years old. The queen-mother, dying the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederick, to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghostly lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted the Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily. In Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Philip Hohenstauffen, Henry’s brother and Duke of Suabia, claimed the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswick, of the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The Pope opposed the Hohenstauffen; but was obliged to acknowledge him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil war in Germany decided in his favour—whereupon, alack! Philip was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back to Otto; but the latter, after he had been crowned king and[Pg 33] emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the compulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto; and then the excommunicated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick’s favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.[18] In the meanwhile Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227.

Walther’s life extended through these events. Though apparently changing sides under the stress of his necessities, he was patriotically German to the end. First he clave to the Hohenstauffen, Philip, as the true upholder of German interests against Otto and the Pope. On Philip’s death, he turned to Otto; but with all the world left him at last for Frederick. It is known that Walther, an easily angered man, felt himself ill-used by Otto and justified in turning to the open-handed Frederick, who finally gave him a small fief. To the last, Walther upheld him as Germany’s sovereign. Probably the poet died in the year 1228, just as Gregory was succeeding Honorius, and the death-struggle of the Empire with the Papacy was opening.

With no light heart, as well may be imagined, had Walther looked about him on the death of the emperor Henry in 1197. “I sat upon a rock, crossed knee on knee, and with elbow so supported, chin on hand I leaned. Anxiously I pondered. I could see no way to win gain without loss. Honour and riches do not go hand in hand, both of less value than God’s favour. Would I have them all? Alas! riches and worldly honour and God’s favour come not within the closure of one heart’s wishes. The ways are barred; perfidy lurks in secret, and might walks the highroads. Peace and law are wounded.”[19]

[Pg 34]The personal dilemma of the poet with his fortune to make, but desirous of doing right, mirrors the desperate situation of the State: “Woe is thee, German tongue; ill stand thy order and thy honour!—I hear the lies of Rome betraying two kings!” And in verses of wrath Walther inveighs against the Pope. The sweeping nature of his denunciation raises the question whether he merely attacked the supposed treachery of the reigning pope, or was opposed to the papacy as an institution hostile to the German nation.

The answer is not clear. Mediaeval denunciations of the Church range from indictments of particular abuses, on through more general invectives, to the clear protests of heretics impugning the ecclesiastical system. It is not always easy to ascertain the speaker’s meaning. Usually the abuse and not the system is attacked. Hostility to the latter, however sweeping the language of satirist or preacher, is not lightly to be inferred. The invectives of St. Bernard and Damiani are very broad; but where had the Church more devoted sons? Even the satirists composing in Old French rarely intended an assault upon her spiritual authority. It would seem as if, at least in the Romance countries, one must look for such hostility to heretical circles, the Waldenses for example. And from the orthodox mediaeval standpoint, this was their most accursed heresy.

It would have been hard for any German to use broader language than some of the French satirists and Latin castigators. If there was a difference, it must be sought in the specific matter of the German disapproval viewed in connection with the political situation. Was a position ever taken incompatible with the Church’s absolute spiritual authority? or one intrinsically irreconcilable with the secular power of the papacy? At any time, in any country, papal claims might become irreconcilable with the royal prerogative—as William the Conqueror had held those of Gregory VII. in England, and as, two centuries afterwards, Philip the Fair was to hold those of Boniface VIII. in France. But in neither case was there such sheer and fundamental antagonism as men felt to exist between the Empire and the Papacy. Perhaps it was possible in the early thirteenth century for a German whose whole heart[Pg 35] was on the German side to dispute even the sacerdotal principle of papal authority. It is hard to judge otherwise of Freidank, the very German composer or collector of trenchant sayings in the early thirteenth century. Many of these sneer at Rome and the Pope, and some of them strike the gist of the matter: “Sunde nieman mac vergeben wan Got alein” (“God alone can forgive sins”). This is the direct statement; he gives its scornful converse: “Could the Pope absolve me from my oaths and duties, I’d let other sureties go and fasten to him alone.”[20] Such words mean denial of the Church’s authority to forgive, and the Pope’s to grant absolution from oaths of allegiance. Freidank is very near rejecting the principles of the ecclesiastical system.

Walther, Freidank’s contemporary, is more picturesque: “King Constantine, he gave so much—as I will tell you—to the Chair of Rome: spear, cross, and crown. At once the angels cried: ‘Alas! Alas! Alas! Christendom before stood crowned with righteousness. Now is poison fallen on her, and her honey turned to gall—sad for the world henceforth!’ To-day the princes all live in honour; only their highest languishes—so works the priest’s election. Be that denounced to thee, sweet God! The priests would upset laymen’s rights: true is the angels’ prophecy.”[21]

On Constantine’s apocryphal gift, symbolized by the emblems of Christ’s passion, rested the secular authority of the popes, which Walther laments with the angels. “The Chair of Rome was first set up by Sorcerer Gerbert! [Queer history this, but we see what he means.] He destroyed his own soul only; but this one would bring down Christendom with him to perdition. When will all tongues call Heaven to arms, and ask God how long He will sleep? They bring to nought His work, distort His Word. His steward steals His treasure; His judge robs here and murders there; His shepherd has become a wolf among His sheep.”[22] The clergy point their fingers heavenward while they travel fast to hell.[23] How laughs the Pope at us, when at home with his Italians, at the way he empties our German pockets into[Pg 36] his “poor boxes.”[24] Walther’s hatred of the foreign Pope is roused at every point. And at last, in a Spruch full of implied meaning, he declares that Christ’s word as to the tribute money meant that the emperor should receive his royal due.[25]

These utterances, considered in the light of the political and racial situation, seem to deny, at least implicitly, the secular power of the papacy. Yet in matters of religion Walther apparently was entirely orthodox, and a pious Christian. He has left a sweet prayer to Christ, with ample recognition of the angels and the saints, and a beautiful verse of penitent contrition, in which he confesses his sins to God very directly—how that he does the wrong, and leaves the right, and fails in love of neighbour. “Father, Son, may thy Spirit lighten mine; how may I love him who does me ill? Ever dear to me is he who treats me well!”[26] Walther’s questing spirit also pondered over God’s greatness and incomprehensibility.[27] His open mind is shown by the famous line: “Him (God) Christians, Jews, and heathen serve,”[28] a breadth of view shared by his friend Wolfram von Eschenbach, who speaks of the chaste virtue of a heathen lady as equal to baptism.[29]

The personal lot of this proud heart was not an easy one; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness of eating others’ bread. Too well had he learned of the world and all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the soul that follows them. Mortality is a trite sorrow; there are worse: “We all complain that the old die and pass away; rather let us lament taints of another hue, that troth and[Pg 37] seemliness and honour are dead.”[30] At the last Walther’s grey memory of life and his vainly yearning hope took form in a great elegy. After long years he seemed, with heavy steps, and leaning on his wanderer’s staff, to be returning to a home which was changed forever: “Alas! whither are they vanished, my many years! Did I dream my life, or is it real? what I once deemed it, was it that? And now I wake, and all the things and people once familiar, strange! My playmates, dull and old! And the fields changed; only that the streams still flow as then they flowed, my heart would break with thinking on the glad days, vanished in the sea. And the young people! slow and mirthless! and the knights go clad as peasants! Ah! Rome! thy ban! Our groans have stilled the song of birds. Fool I, to speak and so despair,—and the earth looks fair! Up knights again: your swords, your armour! would to God I might fare with your victor band, and gain my pay too—not in lands of earth! Oh! might I win the eternal crown from that sweet voyage beyond the sea, then would I sing O joy! and never more, alas—never more, alas.”[31]

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BOOK V
SYMBOLISM

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CHAPTER XXVII

SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES; HONORIUS OF AUTUN

Words, pictures, and other vehicles of expression are symbols of whatever they are intended to designate. A certain unavoidable symbolism also inheres in human mental processes; for the mind in knowing “turns itself to images,” as Aquinas says following Aristotle; and every statement or formulation is a casting together of data in some presentable and representative form. An example is the Apostles’ Creed, called also by this very name of Symbol, being a casting together, an elementary formula, of the essentials of the Christian Faith. In the same sense the “law of gravitation” or a moral precept is a deduction, induction, or gathering together into a representative symbol, of otherwise unassembled and uncorrelated experience. In the present and following chapters, however, the term symbol will be used in its common acceptation to indicate a thing, an act, or a word invested with an adventitious representative significance. All statements or expressions (through language or by means of pictures) which are intended to carry, besides their palpable meaning, another which is veiled and more spiritual, are symbolical or figurative, and more specifically are called allegories.[32]

[Pg 42]These devices of the mind have a history as old as humanity. From inscrutable beginnings, in time they become recognized as makeshifts; yet they remain prone to enter new stages of confusion. The mind seeking to express the transcendental, avails itself of symbols. All religions have teemed with them, in their primitive phases scarcely distinguishing between symbol and fact; then a difference becomes evident to clearer-minded men, while perhaps at the same time others are elaborately maintaining that the symbol magically is, or brings to pass, that which it represents. Such obscuring mysticism existed not merely in confused Egypt and Brahminical India, but everywhere—in antique Greece and Rome, and then afterwards through the times of the Christian Church Fathers and the entire Middle Ages. Fact and symbol are seen constantly closing together and becoming each other like the serpent-souls in the twenty-fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Allegory properly speaking, which involves a conscious and sustained effort to invest concrete or material statements with more general or spiritual meaning, played an interesting rôle in epochs antecedent to the patristic and mediaeval periods. Even before Plato’s time the personal myths of the gods shocked the Greek ethical intellect, which thereupon proceeded to convert them into allegories. Greek allegorical interpretation of ancient myth was apologetic to both the critical mind and the moral sense.

With Philo, the Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, whose philosophy revolted from the literal text of Genesis, the motive for allegorical interpretation was similar. But the document before him was most unlike the Iliad and Odyssey. Genesis contained no palpably immoral stories of Jehovah to be explained away. Its account of divine creation and human beginnings merely needed to be invested with further ethical meaning. So Philo made cardinal virtues of the four rivers of Eden, and through like allegorical conceits transformed the Book of Genesis into a system of Hellenistic[Pg 43] ethics. Not cosmogonic myths, but moral meanings, he had discovered in his document.

Advancing along the path which Philo found, Christian allegorical interpretation undertook to substantiate the validity of the Gospel. To this end it fixed special symbolical meanings upon the Old Testament narratives, so as to make them into prefigurative testimonies to the truth of Christian teachings.[33] Allegory was also called on to justify, as against educated pagans, certain acts of that heroic but peccant “type” of Christ, David, the son of Jesse. Such special apologetic needs hardly affected the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel itself, which began at an early day, and from the first was spiritual and anagogic, constantly straining on to educe further salutary meaning from the text.

The Greek and Latin Church Fathers created the mass of doctrine, including Scriptural interpretation,[34] upon which mediaeval theologians were to expend their systematizing and reconstructive labours. Through the Middle Ages, the course of allegory and symbolism strikingly illustrates the mediaeval way of using the patristic heritage—first painfully learning it, then making it their own, and at last creating by means of that which they had organically appropriated. Allegory and symbolism were to impress the Middle Ages as perhaps no other element of their inheritance. The mediaeval man thought and felt in symbols, and the sequence of his thought moved as frequently from symbol to symbol as from fact to fact.

The allegorical faculty with the Fathers was dogmatic and theological; ingenious in devising useful interpretations, but oblivious to all reasonable propriety in the meaning which it twisted into the text: controversial necessities readily overrode the rational and moral requirements of the “historical” or “literal” meaning. For the deeply realized allegorical significance was a law unto itself. These characteristics of patristic allegory passed over to the Middle Ages, which in the course of time were to impress human qualities upon the patristic material.

[Pg 44]The Bathsheba and Uriah episode in the life of David was of course taken allegorically, and affords a curious example of a patristic interpretation originating in the exigencies of controversy, and then becoming authoritative for later periods when the echoes of the old controversy had long been silent. Augustine was called upon to answer the book of the clever Manichaean, Faustus, the stress of whose attacks was directed against the Old Testament. Faustus declared that he did not blaspheme “the law and the prophets,” but rejected merely the special Hebrew customs and the vile calumnies of the Old Testament writers, imputing shameful acts to prophets and patriarchs. In his list of shocking narratives to be rejected, was the story “that David after having had such a number of wives, defiled the little woman of Uriah his soldier, and caused him to be slain in battle.”[35]

Augustine responds with a general exclamation at the Manichaean’s failure to understand the sacramental symbols (sacramenta) of the Law and the deeds of the prophets. He then speaks of certain Old Testament statements regarding God and His demands, and proceeds to consider the nature of sin and the questionable deeds of the prophets. Some of the reprehended deeds he justifies, as, for instance, Abraham’s intercourse with Hagar and his deceit in telling Abimelech that Sara was his sister when she was his wife. He also declares that Sara typifies the Church, which is the secret spouse of Christ. Proceeding further, he does not justify, but palliates, the conduct of Lot and his daughters, and then introduces its typological significance. At length he comes to David. First he gives a noble estimate of David’s character, his righteousness, his liability to sin, and his quick penitence.[36] Afterwards he considers, briefly as he says, what David’s sin with Bathsheba signifies prophetically.[37] The passage may be given to show what a mixture of banality and disregard of moral propriety in drawing analogies might emanate from the best mind among the[Pg 45] Latin Fathers, and be repeated by later transitional and mediaeval commentators.

[Pg 46]Augustine’s interpretation of the story of David and Bathsheba was embodied verbatim in a work upon the Old Testament by Isidore of Seville.[39] The voluminous commentator Rabanus Maurus took the same, also verbatim, either from Isidore or Augustine.[40] His pupil, Walafrid Strabo, in his famous Glossa ordinaria, cited, probably from Rabanus, the first part of the passage as far as the reference to the well of living water from John’s Gospel. He abridged the matter somewhat, thus showing the smoothing compiler’s art which was to bring his Glossa ordinaria into such general use. Walafrid omitted the lines declaring that Uriah signified the devil. He did cite, however, again probably from Rabanus, part of a long passage, taken by Rabanus from Gregory the Great, where Bathsheba is declared to be the letter of the Law, united to a carnal people, which David (Christ) joins to himself in a spiritual sense. Uriah is that carnal people, to wit, the Jews.[41]

Thus far as to the comments on the narrative from the eleventh chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, otherwise called the Second Book of Kings. When Rabanus came to explain the sixth verse of the first chapter of Matthew—“And David begat Solomon from her who was the wife of Uriah”—he said: “Uriah indeed, that is interpreted ‘My light of God,’ signifies the devil, who fashions himself into an angel of light, daring to say to God: ‘My light of God,’ and ‘I will be like unto the Most High’ (Isaiah xiv.).”[42] Here pupil Walafrid follows his master, but adds: “Whose bewedded Church Christ became enamoured of from the terrace of His paternal majesty and joined her, made beautiful, to himself in matrimony.”[43]

With Rabanus and Walafrid, as with Isidore and the Venerable Bede who were the links between these Carolingians[Pg 47] and the Fathers, the interest in Scripture relates to its allegorical significance. Unmindful of the obvious and literal meaning of the text, they were unabashed by the incongruity of their allegorical interpretations.[44] Rabanus, for instance, had unbounded enthusiasm for Exodus, because of its rich symbolism:

The same commentator compiled a dictionary of allegories[Pg 48] entitled Allegoriae in universam sacram scripturam,[46] saying in his lumbering Preface:

This work, alphabetically arranged, gave the allegorical significations of words used in the Vulgate, with examples; for instance:

Thus Rabanus dragged into his compilation every meaning that had ever been ascribed to the words defined. In him and his contemporaries, the allegorical material, apart[Pg 50] from its utility for salvation, seems void of human interest or poetic quality, as yet unstirred by a breath of life. That was to enter, as allegory and all manner of symbolism began to form the temper of mediaeval thought, and became a chosen vessel of the mediaeval spirit in poetry and art. The vital change had taken place before the twelfth century had turned its first quarter.[51]

There flourished at this time a worthy monk named Honorius of Autun, also called “the Solitary.” It has been argued, and vehemently contradicted, that he was of German birth. At all events, monk he was and teacher at Autun. Those about him sought his instruction, and also requested him to put his discourses into writing for their use; their request reads as if at that time Honorius had retired from among them.[52] This is all that is known of the man who composed the most popular handbook of sermons in the Middle Ages. It was called the Speculum ecclesiae. Honorius may never have preached these sermons; but still his book exists with sermons for Sundays, saints’ days, and other Church festivals; a sermon also to be preached at Church dedications, and one “sermo generalis,” very useful, since it touched up all orders of society in succession, and a preacher might take or omit according to his audience. Before beginning, the preacher is directed to make the sign of the cross and invoke the Holy Spirit: he is admonished first to pronounce his text of Scripture in the Latin tongue, and then expound it in the vernacular;[53] he is instructed as to what portions of certain sermons should be used under special circumstances, and what parts he may omit in winter when the church is cold, or when in summer it is too hot; or this is left quite to his discretion: “Here make an end if you wish; but if time permits, continue thus.”

[Pg 51]Most of these sermons are short, and contain much excellent moral advice put simply and directly. They also make constant use of allegory, and evidently Honorius’s chief care in their composition was to expound his text allegorically and point the allegory’s application to the needs of his supposed audience. Neither he nor any man of his time devised many novel allegorical interpretations; but the old ones had at length become part of the mediaeval spirit and the regular means of apprehending the force and meaning of Scripture. Consequently Honorius handles his allegories more easily, and makes a more natural human application of them, than Rabanus or Walafrid had done. Sometimes the allegory seems to ignore the moral lesson of the literal facts; but while a smile may escape us in reading Honorius, the allegories in his sermons are rarely strained and shocking, likewise rarely dull. A general point from which he regards the narratives and institutions of the Old Testament is summed up in his statement, that for us Christ turned all provisions of the law into spiritual sacraments.[54] The whole Old Testament has pre-figurative significance and spiritual meaning; and likewise every narrative in the Gospels is spiritual.

Two or three examples will illustrate Honorius’s edifying way of using allegory. His sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost is typical of his manner. The text is from the thirty-first[55] Psalm: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” Opening with an exhortation to penitence and tears and almsgiving, the preacher turns to the self-righteous “whose obstinacy the Lord curbs in the Gospel for the day, telling how two went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, to wit, one of the Jewish clergy, the other a Publican.” After proceeding for a while with sound and obvious comment on the situation, Honorius says:

Honorius lingers a moment with some further exhortations suggested by his parable, and then turns to the edification to be found in fables wisely composed by profane writers. Let not the congregation be scandalized; for the children of Israel despoiled the Egyptians of gold and gems and precious vesture, which they afterwards devoted to completing the tabernacle. Pious Christians spoil the Egyptians when they turn profane studies to spiritual account. The philosophers tell of a woman bound to a revolving wheel, her head now up now down. The wheel is this world’s glory, and the woman is that fortune which depends on it. Again, they tell of one who tries to roll a stone to the top of a mountain; but, near the top, it hurls the wretch prostrate with its weight and crashes back to the bottom; and again, of one whose liver is eaten by a vulture, and, when consumed, grows again. The man who pushes up the stone is he who toilsomely amasses dignities, to be plunged by them to hell; and he of the liver is the man upon whose heart lust feeds. From that pest, they say, Medusa sprang, with noble form exciting many to lust, but with her look turning them to stone. She is wantonness, who turns to stone the hearts of the lewd through their lustful pleasure. Perseus slew her, covering himself with his crystalline shield; for the strong man, gazing into virtue’s mirror, averts his heart’s countenance (i.e. from wantonness). The sword with which he kills her is the fear of everlasting fire.

Then, continues Honorius, we read of a boy brought up[Pg 53] by one of the Fathers in a hermitage; but as he grew to youth he was tickled with lust. The Father commanded him to go alone into the desert and pass forty days in fasting and prayer. When some twenty days had passed, there appeared a naked woman foul and stinking, who thrust herself upon him, and he, unable to endure her stench, began to repel her. At which she asked: “Why do you shudder at the sight of me for whom you burned? I am the image of lust, which appears sweet to men’s hearts. If you had not obeyed the Father, you would have been overthrown by me as others have been.” So he thanked God for snatching him from the spirit of fornication. Many other examples lead us to the path of life.

Honorius closes with the story of the “Three Fools,” observed by a certain Father: the first an Ethiopian who was unable to move a faggot of wood, which he would continually unbind and make still heavier by adding further sticks; the second, a man pouring water into a vase which had no bottom; and, thirdly, the two men who came bearing before them crosswise a beam of wood; as they neared the city gate neither would let the other precede him even a little, and so both remained without. The Ethiopian who adds to his insupportable faggot is he who continually increases his weight of sin, adding new sins to old ones unrepented of; he who pours water into the vase with no bottom is he who by his uncleanness loses the merit of his good acts; and the two who bear the beam crosswise are those bound by the yoke of Pride.[56]

Such are good examples of the queer stories to which preachers resorted. One notices that whatever be the source from which Honorius draws, his interest is always in the allegory found in the narratives. Another very apt example of his manner is his treatment of the story of the Good Samaritan, so often depicted on Gothic church windows. For us this parable carries an exhaustless wealth of direct application in human life; it was regarded very differently by Honorius and the glass painters, whose windows are a pictorial transcription of the first half of his sermon.[57]

[Pg 54]“Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly”—this is the text; and Honorius proceeds:

Here Honorius proceeds to expound the allegory contained in the healing of the dumb man and the ten lepers, and closes his sermon with two narratives, one of a poor idiot who sang the Gloria without ceasing, and was seen in glory after death; the other of a lay nun (conversa) around whose last hours were shed sweet odours and a miraculous light, while those present heard the chant of heavenly voices.

The parables of Christ present types which we may apply in life according to circumstances. In the concrete instance of the parable we find the universal, and we deem Christ meant it so. Thus we also view the parables as symbols, which they were. Honorius, with the vast company of mediaeval and patristic expounders, ordinarily directs the symbolism of the parables in a special mode, whereby—like the stories of the Old Testament—they become figurative of Christ and the needy soul of man, or figurative of the Christian dispensation with its historical antecedents and its Day of Judgment at the end.

The like may be said of Honorius’s allegorical interpretation of Greek legends. These ancient stories have the perennial youth of human charm and meaning ever new. They had been good old stories to the Greeks, and then acquired further intendment as later men discerned a broader symbolism in them. Even in classic times, Homer’s stories had been turned to allegories, philosophers and critics sometimes finding in them a spiritual significance not unlike that which the same tales may bear for us. But with this difference: the later Greeks usually were trying to explain away the somewhat untrammelled ways of the Homeric pantheon, and therefore maintained that Homer’s stories were composed as allegories, the wise and mystic poet choosing thus to veil his meaning. To-day we find the clarity of daybreak in Homer’s tales, and if we make symbols of them we know the symbolism is not his but ours. Honorius chooses to think that allegory had always lain in the old story; he will not deem it the invention of himself or other[Pg 57] Christian writers. Here his attitude is not unlike that of the apologetic Greek critics. But his interpretations are apt to differ from theirs as well as from our own. For his symbolism tends to abandon the broadly human, and to become, like the mediaeval Biblical interpretations, figurative of the tenets of the Christian Faith.

There is an interesting example of this in the sermon for Septuagesima Sunday, which was written on a somewhat blind text from the twenty-eighth chapter of Job. Honorius proceeds expounding it through a number of strained allegories, which he doubtless drew from Gregory’s Moralia; for that great pope was the recognized expositor of Job, and the Book of Job was simply Gregory through all the Middle Ages. Perhaps Honorius felt that this sermon was rather soporific. At all events he stops in the middle to give a piece of advice to the supposed preacher: “Often put something of this kind in your sermon; for so you will relieve the tedium.” And he continues thus:

 

 

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[Pg 60]

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE RATIONALE OF THE VISIBLE WORLD: HUGO OF ST. VICTOR

Just as the Middle Ages followed the allegorical interpretation of Scripture elaborated by the Church Fathers, so they also accepted, and even made more precise, the patristic inculcation of the efficacy of such most potent symbols as the water of baptism and the bread and wine transubstantiated in the Eucharist.[60] Passing onward from these mighty bases of conviction, the mediaeval genius made fertile use of allegory in the polemics of Church and State, and exalted the symbolical principle into an ultimate explanation of the visible universe.

Notable was the career of allegory in politics. Throughout the long struggle of the Papacy with the Empire and other secular monarchies, arguments drawn from allegory never ceased to carry weight. A very shibboleth was the witness of the “two swords” (Luke xxii. 38), both of which, the temporal as well as spiritual, the Church held to have been entrusted to her keeping for the ordering of earthly affairs, to the end that men’s souls should be saved. Still more fluid was the argumentative nostrum of mankind conceived as an Organism, or animate body (unum corpus, corpus mysticum). This metaphor was found in more than one of the Latin classics; but patristic and mediaeval writers took it from the works of Paul.[61] The likeness of the human body to the body politic or ecclesiastic was carried out[Pg 61] in every imaginable detail, and used acutely or absurdly by politicians and schoolmen from the eleventh century onward.[62]

We turn to the symbolical explanation of the universe. In the first half of the twelfth century, a profoundly meditative soul, Hugo of St. Victor by name, attempted a systematic exposition of the symbolical or sacramental plan inhering in God’s scheme of creation. Of the man, as with so many monks and schoolmen whose names and works survive, little is known beyond the presentation of his personality afforded by his writings. He taught in the monastic school of St. Victor, a community that had a story, with which may be connected the scanty facts of the short and happy pilgrimage to God, which made Hugo’s life on earth.[63]

When William of Champeaux, according to Abaelard’s account, was routed from his logical positions in the cathedral school of Paris,[64] he withdrew from the school and from the city to the quiet of a secluded spot on the left bank of the Seine, not far distant from Notre-Dame. Here was an ancient chapel dedicated to Saint-Victor, and here William, with some companions, organized themselves into a monastic community according to the rule of the canons of St. Augustine. This was in 1108. If for a time William laid aside his studies and lecturing, he soon resumed them at the solicitations of his scholars, joined to those of his friend Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans.[65] And so the famous school of Saint-Victor began. William remained there only four years, being made Bishop of Chalons in 1112, and thereafter figuring prominently in Church councils, frequent in France at this epoch.

[Pg 62]Under William’s disciple and successor, Gilduin, the community flourished and increased. King Louis VI., whose confessor was Gilduin himself, endowed it liberally, and other donors were not lacking. Saint-Victor became rich, and its fame for learning and holiness spread far and wide.[66] Abbot Gilduin lived to see more than forty houses of monks or regular canons[67] flourishing as dependencies of Saint-Victor. He died in 1155, some years after the death of the young man whose scholarship and genius was the pride of the Victorine community.

Notwithstanding a statement in an old manuscript, that Hugo was born near Ypres in Flanders, the ancient tradition of Saint-Victor, confirmed by the records of the cathedral of Halberstadt, shows him to have been a son of the Count of Blankemberg, and born at Hartingam in Saxony.[68] His uncle Reinhard was Bishop of Halberstadt, where his great-uncle, named Hugo like himself, was archdeacon. Reinhard had been a pupil of William of Champeaux at Saint-Victor, and after becoming bishop continued to cherish a profound esteem for him. The young Hugo renounced his inheritance and entered a monastery not far from Halberstadt; but soon, in view of the disturbed affairs of Saxony, his uncle Reinhard urged him to go and pursue his studies at Saint-Victor. The young man persuaded his great-uncle Hugo to accompany him. By circuitous routes, visiting various places of pious interest on the way, the two reached Saint-Victor, where they were received with all honour by the abbot Gilduin. This was not far from the year 1115, and Hugo was about twenty at the time. He was already an accomplished scholar, and doubtless it is to his previous[Pg 63] studies that he refers when he speaks as follows in his book of elementary instruction, called the Didascalicon:

Not long after Hugo’s arrival at Saint-Victor he began to teach at the monastery school, and upon the death of its director, in 1133, succeeded to the office, which he held until his death in 1141.[70] Colourless and grey are the outer facts of a monk’s life, counting but little. The soul of a Hugo of Saint-Victor did not soil itself with any interest in the pleasures of the world: “He is not solitary with whom is God, nor is the power of joy extinguished because his appetite is kept from things abject and vile. He rather does himself an injustice who admits to the society of his joy what is disgraceful or unworthy of his love.”[71]

Hugo belonged to the aristocracy of contemplative piety, with its scorn of whatever lies without the pale of the soul’s[Pg 64] companionship with God. In his independent way he followed Augustine, and Augustine’s Platonism, which was so largely the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry. He also followed the real Plato speaking in the Timaeus, with which he was acquainted. Plato would have nothing to do with allegorical interpretation as a defence of Homer’s gods; but he could himself make very pretty allegories, and his theory of ideas as at once types and creative intelligences lent itself to Christian systems of symbolism. In this way he was a spiritual ancestor of Hugo, who found in God the type-ideas of all things that He created. Moreover, if not Plato, at least his spiritual children—Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Plotinus—recognized that the highest truths must be known in modes transcending reason and its syllogisms, although these were the necessary avenues of approach. Hugo likewise regarded rational knowledge as but the path by which the soul ascends to the plateau of contemplation. The general aspects of his philosophy will be considered in a later chapter. Here he is to be viewed as a mediaeval symbolist, upon whom pressed a sense of the symbolism of all visible things. An examination of his great De sacramentis Christianae fidei will disclose that with Hugo the material creation in its deepest verity is a symbol; that Scripture, besides its literal meaning, is allegory from Genesis to Revelation; that the means of salvation provided by the Church are sacramental, and thus essentially symbolical, consisting of perfected and potent symbols which have been shadowed forth in the unperfected sacramental character of all God’s works from the beginning.[72]

Hugo’s little Preface (praefatiuncula) mentions certain requests made to him to write a book on the Sacraments. In undertaking it, he proposes to present in better form many things dictated from time to time rather negligently. Whatever he has taken from his previous writings he has revised as seemed best. Should there appear any inconsistency between what he may have said elsewhere and the language of the present work, he begs the reader to regard the present as the better form of statement. His[Pg 65] method will be to treat his matter in the order of time; and to this end his work is divided into two Books. The first discusses the subject from the Beginning of the World until the Incarnation of the Word; the second continues it from the Incarnation to the final Consummation of all things. He explains that as he has elsewhere spoken at length upon the primary or historical meaning of Holy Writ,[73] he will devote himself here rather to its secondary or allegorical significance.

Hugo further explains the subject of his treatise in a Prologue:

In these first little chapters of his Prologue, Hugo has grouped his topics suggestively. The world was made for man, and therefore the account of its creation is needed in order to understand man. Moreover, that man’s body exists for his spirit’s sake, at once suggests that a significance beyond the literal meaning is likely to dwell in that account of the material creation which enables us to understand man. The soul needs instruction and guidance; and God in creating the world for man surely had in view his most important interests, which were not those of his mortal body, but those of his soul. So the creation of the world subserves man’s spiritual interests, and the divine account of it carries spiritual instruction. The allegorical significance of the world’s creation, which answers to man’s spiritual needs, is as veritable and real as the facts of the world’s material foundation, which answers to the needs of his body. Thus symbolism is rooted in the character and purpose of the material creation; it lies in the God-implanted nature of things; therefore the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures corresponds to their deepest meaning and the revealed plan of God.

These principles underlie Hugo’s exposition of the Christian sacraments, whose unperfected prototypes existed in the work of the Creation. No fact of sacred history, no single righteous pre-Christian observance, was unaffiliated with them. An adequate understanding of their nature involves a full knowledge not only of Christian doctrine, but of all other knowledge profitable to men—as Hugo clearly indicates in the remaining portion of his Prologue:

Hugo has now stated his position. The rationale of the world’s creation lies in the nature of man. The Seven Liberal Arts, and incidentally all human knowledge, in handmaidenly manner, promote an understanding of man as well as of the saving teaching contained in Scripture. This was the common mediaeval view; but Hugo proves it through application of the principles of symbolism and allegorical interpretation. By these instruments he orders the arts and sciences according to their value in his Christian system, and makes all human knowledge subserve the intellectual economy of the soul’s progress to God.

An exposition of the Work of the Six Days opens the body of Hugo’s treatise. God created all things from nothing, and at once. His creation was at first unformed; not absolutely formless, but in the form of confusion, out of which in the six days He wrought the form of ordered disposition. The first creation included the matter of corporeal[Pg 68] things and (in the angelic nature) the essence of things invisible; for the rational creature may be said to be unformed until it take form through turning unto its Creator, whereby it gains beauty and blessedness from Him through the conversion which is of love. Thus the matter of every corporeal thing which God afterwards made, existed from the time of His first creation, and likewise the image of everything invisible. For although new souls are still created every day, their image existed previously in the angelic spirits.

Then God made light, the unformed material of which He had created in the beginning.

The severance of light from darkness is the material example of how God executes judgment in dividing the good from the evil. In this visible work of God a “sacrament” is discernible, since every soul, so long as it is in sin, is in darkness and confusion. All the visible works of God offer spiritual lessons (spiritualia praeferunt documenta). They have sacramental qualities, and yet are not perfected and completed sacraments, as will hereafter appear from Hugo’s definition.

Following the order of creation, Hugo now speaks of the firmament which God set in the midst of the waters to divide them:

The rational and unseen are a world as well as the material and visible. The sacramental quality of the[Pg 69] material world lies in its correspondence to the unseen world. When Hugo speaks of the “sacramenta” in the creation of light and the waters divided by the firmament, he means that in addition to their material nature as light and water, they are essentially symbols. Their symbolism is as veritably part of their nature as the symbolical character of the Eucharist is part of the nature of the consecrated bread and wine. The sacraments are among the deepest verities of the Christian Faith. And the same representative verity that exists in them, exists, in less perfected mode, throughout God’s entire creation. So the argument carries out the principles of the sacraments and the principles of symbolism to a full explanation of the world; and Hugo’s work upon the Sacraments presents his theory of the universe.

It is unnecessary to follow Hugo through the discussion, upon which he now enters, of the will, knowledge, and power of the Trinity, or through his consideration of the knowledge which man may have of God. In Part V. of the first Book, he considers the creation of angels, their qualities and nature, and the reasons why a part of them fell. With Part VI. the creation of man is reached, which Hugo shows to have been causally prior, though later in time, to the creation of the world which God made for man. From love God created rational creatures, the angels purely spiritual, and man a spirit clothed with earth.[75] Hugo[Pg 70] considers the corporeal as well as the spiritual nature and qualities of man, and his condition before the Fall. The seventh Part is devoted to the Fall itself, and discusses its character and sinfulness.

At length, in the eighth Part, Hugo reaches the true subject of his treatise, the restoration of man. Man’s first sin of pride was followed by a triple punishment, consisting in a penalty, and two entailed defects, the penalty being bodily mortality, the defects carnal concupiscence and mental ignorance.

Hugo then sets forth the situation, the case in court as it were, to which God, the devil, and man, are the three parties. In this trial

Since the devil’s case against man was unjust, man might defeat his lordship; but he needed an advocate (patronus), which could be only God. God, angry at man’s sin, did not wish to undertake man’s cause. He must be placated; and man had no equivalent to offer for the injury he had done Him; for he had deserted God when rational and innocent, and could deliver himself back to God only as an irrational and sinful creature. Therefore, in order that[Pg 71] man might have wherewithal to placate God, God through mercy gave man a man whom man might give in place of him who had sinned. God became man for man and as man gave himself for man. Thus He who had been man’s Creator became also his Redeemer. God might have redeemed man in some other way, but took the way of human nature as best suited to man’s weakness.

After our first parent had been exiled from Paradise for his sin, the devil possessed him violently. But God’s providence tempered justice with mercy, and from the penalty itself prepared a remedy.

Hugo proceeds to show that the time of the institution of the sacraments began when our first parent, expelled from Paradise, was subjected to the exile of this mortal life, with all his posterity until the end.

[Pg 72]Having followed Hugo’s plan thus far, one sees why it is only at the commencement of the ninth Part of his first Book that he reaches the definition and discussion of those final and enduring sacraments which followed the Incarnation. He has hitherto been developing his theme, and now takes up its very essence. Laying out the matter scholastically, he says “there are four things to consider: first, what is a sacrament; second, why they were instituted; third, what may be the material of each sacrament, in which it is made and sanctified; and fourth, how many sacraments there are. This is the definition, cause, material, and classification.”

Proceeding to the definition, he says that the doctors have briefly described a sacrament as the token of the sacred substance (sacrae rei signum).

Having thus explained the old definition, Hugo objects to it on the ground that not every signum rei sacrae is a sacrament; the letters of the sacred text and the pictures of holy things are signa rei sacrae, and yet are not sacraments. He therefore offers the following definition as adequate:

This, he maintains, is a perfect definition, since all sacraments possess these three qualities, and whatever lacks them cannot properly be called a sacrament. As an example he instances the baptismal water:

Passing to the second consideration, Hugo finds that the sacraments were instituted with threefold purpose, for man’s humiliation, instruction, and discipline or exercise. The man contemning them cannot be saved. Yet God has saved many without them, as Jeremiah was sanctified in the womb, and John the Baptist, and those who were righteous under the natural law. “For those who under the natural law possessed the substance (res) of the sacrament in right faith and charity, did not to their damnation lack the sacrament.” And Hugo warns whoever might take a narrower view, to beware lest in honouring God’s sacraments, His power and goodness be made of no avail. “Dost thou tell me that he who has not the sacraments of God cannot be saved? I tell thee that he who has the virtue of the sacraments of God cannot perish. Which is greater, the sacrament or the virtue of the sacrament—water or faith? If thou wouldst speak truly, answer, ‘faith.’” One notes that the twelfth century had its broad-mindedness, as well as the twentieth.

While passing on discursively to consider the classification of the sacraments, Hugo considers many matters,[79] and then opens his treatment of the sacraments of the natural law with a recapitulation:

The sacraments of the natural law were as the umbra veritatis; those of the written law as the imago vel figura veritatis; but those under grace are the corpus veritatis.[81] The written law, though given fully only through Moses, began with Abraham, upon whom circumcision was enjoined as a sacrament and sign of separation from the heathen peoples. In obedience to its precepts lies the merit, in its promises lies the reward, while its sacraments aid men to fulfil its precepts and obtain its reward. Hugo discusses the sacraments of circumcision and burnt-offerings which were necessary for the remission of sins; then those which exercised the faithful people in devotion—the peace-offering is an example; and again those which aided the people to cultivate piety, as the tabernacle and its utensils.

Hugo’s second Book, which makes the second half of his work, is devoted to the “time of grace” inaugurated by the Incarnation. It treats in detail the Christian sacraments and other topics of the Faith, down to the Last Judgment, when the wicked are cast into hell, and the blessed enter upon eternal life, where God will be seen eternally, praised without weariness, and loved without satiety. This blessed lot flows from the grace of the salvation brought by Christ, and is dependent on the sacraments, the enduring means of grace. On their part, the sacraments, whatever more they are, are symbols, in essence and function connected with the[Pg 75] symbolical nature of God’s creation, with the prefigurative significance of the fortunes of God’s chosen people until the coming of Christ, with the import and symbolism of Christ’s life and teachings, and with the symbolism inherent in the organization and building up of Christ’s holy Church. Symbolism and allegory are made part of the constitution of the world and man; they connect man’s body and environment with his spirit, and link the life of this world with the life to come. Hugo has thus grounded and established symbolism in the purposes of God, in the universal scheme of things, and in the nature and destinies of man.[82]

 

 

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[Pg 76]

CHAPTER XXIX

CATHEDRAL AND MASS; HYMN AND IMAGINATIVE POEM

Under sanction of Scriptural interpretation and the sacraments, allegory and symbolism became accepted principles of spiritual verity, sources of political argument, and modes of transcendental truth. They penetrated the Liturgy, charging every sentence and ceremonial act with saving significance and power; and as plastic influences they imparted form and matter to religious art and poetry, where they had indeed been potent from the beginning.

 

I

In the early Church the office of the Mass, the ordination of priests, and the dedication of churches were not charged with the elaborate symbolism carried by these ceremonies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,[83] when the Liturgy, or speaking more specifically, the Mass, had become symbolical from the introit to the last benediction; and Gothic sculpture and glass painting, which were its visible illustration, had been impressed with corresponding allegory. Mediaeval liturgic lore is summed up by Guilelmus Durandus in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, which was composed in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and contains much that is mirrored in the art of the French cathedrals. It is[Pg 77] impossible to review the elaborate symbolical significance of the Mass as set forth in the authoritative work of one who was a bishop, theologian, jurist, and papal regent.[84] But a little of it may be given.

The office of the Mass, says Durandus, is devised with great forethought, so as to contain the major part of what was accomplished by and in Christ from the time when He descended from heaven to the time when He ascended into heaven. In the sacrifice of the Mass all the sacrifices of the Ancient Law are represented and superseded. It may be celebrated at the third hour, because then, according to Mark, Christ ascended the cross, and at that hour also the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles in tongues of fire; or at the sixth hour, when, according to Matthew, Christ was crucified; or at the ninth hour, when on the cross He gave up His spirit.

The first part of the Mass begins with the introit. Its antiphonal chanting signifies the aspirations and deeds, the prayers and praises of the patriarchs and prophets who were looking for the coming of the Son of God. The chorus of chanting clergy represents this yearning multitude of saints of the Ancient Law. The bishop, clad in his sacred vestments,[85] at the end of the procession, emerging from the sacristy and advancing to the altar, represents Christ, the expected of the nations, emerging from the Virgin’s womb and entering the world, even as the Spouse from His secret chamber. The seven lights borne before him on the chief festivals are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit descending upon the head of Christ. The two acolytes preceding him signify the Law and the Prophets, shown in Moses and Elias who appeared with Christ on Mount Tabor. The four who bear the canopy are the four evangelists, declaring the Gospel. The bishop takes his seat and lays aside his mitre. He is silent, as was Christ during His early[Pg 78] years. The Book of the Gospels lies closed before him. Around him in the company of clergy are represented the Magi and others.

The services proceed, every word and act filled with symbolic import. The reading of the Epistle is reached—that is the preaching of John the Baptist, who preaches only to the Jews; so the reader turns to the north, the region of the Ancient Law. The reading ended, he bows before the bishop, as the Baptist humbled himself before Christ.

After the Epistle comes the Gradual or responsorium, which relates to penitence and the works of the active life. The Baptist is still the main figure, until the solemn moment when the Gospel is read, which signifies the beginning of Christ’s preaching. The Creed follows the Gospel, as faith follows the preaching of the truth. Its twelve parts refer to the calling of the twelve apostles. Then the bishop begins his sermon; that is to say, after the calling of the Twelve, the Word of God is preached to the people, and it henceforth behoves the Church to hold fast to the Creed which has just been recited.[86]

The authoritative allegorizing of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries extended the symbolism of the Mass to the edifice in which it was celebrated; as the Rationale sets forth in its opening chapter entitled “De ecclesia et eius partibus.” There it is shown that the corporeal church is the edifice, while the Church, spiritually taken, signifies the faithful people drawn together from all sorts of men as the edifice is constructed of all sorts of stones. The various names ecclesia, synagogue, basilica, and tabernacle are explained; and then why the Church is called the Body of Christ, and also Virgin, also Spouse, Mother, Daughter, Widow, and indeed Meretrix, as it shuts its bosom against no one seeking it. The form of the church conforms to that of Solomon’s temple, in the anterior part of which the people heard and prayed, while the clergy prayed and preached, gave thanks and ministered, in the sanctuary or sacred place. Solomon’s temple in turn was modelled on the Tabernacle of the Exodus, which,[Pg 79] because it was constructed on a journey, is the type of the world which passes away and the lust thereof. It was made with the four colours of the arch of heaven, as the world consists of the four elements. Since God is in the world, He is in the tabernacle (which also means the Church militant) and in the midst of the faithful congregation. The anterior part of the tabernacle, where the people sacrificed, is also the Vita activa, in which the laity labour in neighbourly love; and the portion where the Levites ministered is the Vita contemplativa.

The church should be erected in the following manner: the place of its foundation should be made ready—well-founded is the house of the Lord upon a rock—and the bishop or licensed priest should sprinkle it with holy water to dispel the demons, and should lay the first stone, on which should be carved a cross. The head of the church, that is the chancel, should be set toward the rising sun at the time of the equinox. Now if the Jews were commanded to build walls for Jerusalem, how much more ought we to build the walls of our churches? The material church signifies the Holy Church built of living stones in heaven, with Christ the corner-stone, upon which are set the foundations of Apostles and Prophets. The walls above are the Jews and Gentiles, who believing come to Christ from the four quarters of the world. The faithful people predestined to life are the stones thereof.

The mortar in which the stones are set is made of lime, sand, and water. Lime is fervent love, which takes to itself the sand, that is, earthly toil; then water, which is the Spirit, unites the lime and sand. As the stones of the wall would have no stability without the mortar, so men cannot be set in the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem without love, which the Holy Spirit brings. The stones of the wall are hewn and squared, which means sanctified and made clean. Some stones are borne, but do not themselves bear any burden, and these are the feeble in the Church. Other stones are borne, yet also bear; while still others bear, but are not borne, save by Christ alone, the one foundation; and the last are the perfect.

The Jews were subject to hostile attack while building[Pg 80] the walls of Jerusalem,[87] so that with one hand they set stones, while they fought with the other. Likewise are we surrounded by hostile vices as we build the walls of the Church; but we oppose them with the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness, and the sword of the Word of God in our hands.

The church edifice is disposed like the human body. The chancel, where the altar is, represents the head, and the cross (transept) the arms and hands. The western portion (nave and aisles) is the rest of the body. But indeed Richard of St. Victor deems that the three parts of the edifice represent in order of sanctity, first the virgins, then the continent, and lastly married people.

Again, the Church is built with four walls; that is, by the teaching of the four evangelists it rises broad and high into the altitude of the virtues. Its length is the long-suffering with which it endures adversity; its breadth is love, with which it embraces its friends in God, and loves its enemies for His sake; its height is the hope of future reward. Again, in God’s temple the foundation is faith, which is as to what is not seen; the roof is charity, which covers a multitude of sins. The door is obedience—keep the commandments if thou wilt enter into life.[88] The pavement is humility. The four walls are the four virtues, righteousness, (justitia), fortitude, prudence, and temperance. The windows are glad hospitality and free-handed pity.

Some churches are cruciform, to teach us that we are crucified to the world, or should follow the Crucified. Some are circular, which signifies that the Church is spread through the circle of the world.

The apse signifies the faithful laity; the crypts, the hermits. The nave signifies Christ, through whom lies the way to the heavenly Jerusalem; the towers are the preachers and prelates, and the pinnacles represent the prelates’ minds which soar on high. Also a weather-cock on top of the church signifies the preachers, who rouse the sleeping from the night of sin, and turning ever to the wind, resist the rebellious. The iron rod upholding the cock is the preacher’s sermon; and because this rod is placed above the cross on[Pg 81] the church, it indicates the word of God finished and confirmed, as Christ said in His passion, “It is finished.” The lofty dome on which the cross is set, signifies how perfect and inviolate should be the preaching and observance of the Catholic Faith.

The glass windows of the church are the divine Scriptures, which repel the wind and rain, but admit the light of the true sun, to wit God, into the church, that is, into the hearts of the faithful. The windows also signify the five senses of the body.[89]

The door of the church (again) is Christ—“I am the Door”; the doors are also the Apostles. The pillars are the bishops and doctors; their bases are the apostolic bishops; their capitals are the minds of the doctors and bishops. The pavement is the foundation of faith, and also signifies the “poor in spirit,” also the common crowd by whose labours the church is upheld. The rafters are the princes and preachers in the world, who defend the church by deed and word. The seats in a church are the contemplative in whom God rests without offence. The panels in the ceiling are also preachers who adorn and strengthen.

The chancel, the head of the church, by being lower than the rest, indicates how great should be the humility of the clergy. The screens by which the altar is separated from the choir signify the separation of heavenly beings from things of earth. The choir stalls indicate the body’s need of recreation. The pulpit is the life of the perfect. The horologe signifies the diligence with which the priests should say the canonical hours. The tiles of the roof are the knights who protect the church from pagans. The spiral stairways concealed within the walls are the secret knowledge had only by those who ascend to the heavenly places. The sacristy, where the holy utensils are kept and the priest puts on his vestments, signifies the womb of the most holy Virgin, in which Christ put on His sacred garb of flesh. From thence the priest emerges before the public, as Christ went forth from the Virgin’s womb into the world. The lamp signifies Christ, who is the light of the world;[Pg 82] or the lamps signify the Apostles and other doctors, whose doctrine lights the church. Moses also made seven lights, which are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Durandus next devotes a whole chapter to the symbolism of the altar, and another to the significance and function of ornaments, pictures, and sculpture. The latter opens with the words: “The pictures and ornaments in a church are the texts and scriptures (lectiones et scripturae) of the laity.” This chapter is long; it explains how Christ and the angels, also saints, Apostles and others, should be represented, and describes the proper kinds of church ornament and utensils. Much of the detail is symbolical.

Thus Durandus devised or brought together meanings to fit each bit of the church edifice, its materials and furnishings. In the work of a contemporary are stored the allegorical meanings of the subjects of Gothic sculpture and painted glass. The thirteenth century had a weakness for the word “Speculum,” and the idea it carried of a mirror or compendium of all human knowledge. The chief of mediaeval encyclopaedists was Vincent of Beauvais, a protégé of the saintly King Louis IX. An analysis of his huge Speculum majus is given elsewhere.[90] It was made up of the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of human Knowledge and Ethics, and the Mirror of History. The compiler and his assistants laboured during the best period of Gothic art, and from their work, industry may draw an exhaustive commentary upon the series of topics presented by the sculpture and glass of a cathedral.[91]

The Mirror of Nature appears carved in the sculpture of Chartres or Bourges. In rendering the work of the Six Days, the Creator is shown (under the form of Christ)[92][Pg 83] contemplating His work, or resting from His toil; here and there a lion, sheep, or goat, suggests the animal creation, and a few trees the vegetable world. This is the necessary symbolism of the sculptor’s art. But Gothic animals and plants sometimes have other definite symbolic meanings, as in the instance of the well-known signs of the four Evangelists, the man, the lion, the ox, the eagle. The allegorical interpretations of Scripture were an exhaustless source of symbolism for Gothic sculptors; another was the Physiologus and its progeny of Bestiaries, with their symbolic explanations of the legendary attributes of animals. Intentional symbolism, however, did not inhere in all this carving, much of which is sheer fancy and decoration. Such was the character of the splendid Gothic flora, of the birds and beasts that move in it, and of the grotesque monsters. They were not out of place, since the Gothic cathedral was itself a Speculum or Summa, and should include the whole of God’s creation, not omitting even the devils who beset men’s souls.

Vincent may have drawn from Hugo of St Victor the current doctrine that the arts have part in the work of man’s restoration; a doctrine abundantly justifying the presence of the sciences and crafts (composing the Mirror of Knowledge) in the sculpture and painting of the cathedral. There the Seven Liberal Arts are rendered, through allegorical figures; and the months of the year are symbolized in the Zodiac and the labours of the field which make up man’s annual toil. Philosophy is shown and Fortune’s wheel; the Virtues and Vices are represented in personifications, and even their conflict, the Psychomachia, may be shown.

At last the Mirror of History is reached. This will teach in concrete examples what has been learned from the figures of the abstract Virtues and Vices. Its chief source is the Bible. Those Old Testament incidents were selected which for centuries had been interpreted as prefigurements of the life of Christ; and each was presented as a pendant to the Gospel scene which it typified. These make the chief subjects of the coloured glass of Chartres and Bourges and other cathedrals where the windows are preserved. Here may be seen the Passion of Christ, surrounded by[Pg 84] scenes from the Old Testament typifying it; likewise His Resurrection and its ancient types; and other significant incidents in the life of the Saviour and His virgin mother.[93] The latter is typified by the burning bush, by the fleece of Gideon, by the rod of Aaron, even as in the hymns of Adam of Saint-Victor.[94] Besides these incidents, leading personages of the Old Testament are presented as prefigurative of Christ, as in the great series of statues of Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, on the north portal of Chartres; while the four greater and twelve minor prophets are shown as types of the four Evangelists and the twelve Apostles. Christ himself is depicted on a window at St. Denis, between the allegorical figures of the Ancient Law and the Gospel,—figures which are allied to those of the uncrowned and blinded Synagogue and the triumphant Church, so frequently seen together upon cathedrals. Everywhere the tendency to symbolize is strong. Parts of the Crucifixion scene are rendered symbolically, and many of the parables. That of the Good Samaritan constantly appears upon the windows, and is always designed so as to convey the allegorical teaching drawn from it in Honorius’s sermon.[95]

Obviously this Mirror of History was chiefly sacred history. Pagan antiquity was scantily suggested by the Sibyls, who stand for the dumb pagan prophecy of Christ. Scenes from the history of Christian nations were more frequent; but they always told of some victory for Christ, like the baptism of Clovis, or the crusading deeds of Charlemagne, Roland or Godfrey of Bouillon. God’s drama closed with the Last Judgment, the damnation of the damned and the beatitude of the elect. The Last Judgments, usually over-arching the tympanums above cathedral doors, are known to all—as at Rheims, at Chartres, at Bourges. They are full of symbolism, and full of “historic” reality as well. The treatment becomes entirely allegorical when the sculptor enters Paradise with the redeemed, and portrays in lovely personifications the beatitudes of the blessed, as on the north portal of Chartres.

[Pg 85]Those bands of nameless men who carved the statues and designed the coloured glass which were to make Gothic cathedrals speak, faithfully presented the teachings of the Church. They rendered the sacred drama of mankind’s creation, fall, redemption, and final judgment unto hell or heaven: they rendered it in all its dogmatic symbolism, and with a plastic adequacy showing how completely they thought and felt in the allegorical medium in which they worked. They also created matchless ideals of symbolism in art. The statuary of the portals and façades of Rheims and Chartres are in their way comparable to the sculptures of the pediment of the Parthenon. But unlike those masterpieces of antique idealism, these Christian masterpieces do not seek to set forth mortal man in his natural strength and beauty and completeness. Rather they seek to show the working of the human spirit held within the power and grace of God. Theirs is not the strength and beauty of the flesh, or the excellence of the unconquerable mind of man; but in them man’s mind and spirit are palpably the devout creatures of God’s omnipotence, obedient to His will, sustained and redeemed by His power and grace. Attitude, form, feature, alike designed to express the sacred beauty of the soul, are not invested with physical excellence for its own sake; but every physical quality of these statues is a symbol of some holy and beautiful quality of spirit. These statues attain a symbolic, and not a natural, ideal in art. Yet many of them possess the physical beauty of form and feature, inasmuch as such may be the proper envelope for the chaste and eager soul.[96]

On the other hand, in the filling out of the illustrative detail of life on earth, of handicraft and art, the sculptor showed how he could carve these actualities, and present earth’s beauty in the cathedral’s wealth of vine and flower and leaf. The level commonplace of humanity is deftly rendered, the daily doings of the forge and field and market-place, the tugging labourer, the merchant with his stuffs, the[Pg 86] scholar with his scrolls. He knew life well, this artist, and had an eye for every catching scene, also for Nature’s subtle beauties. Sometimes a certain passing show was represented because a window was given by some drapers’ guild, desirous of seeing its craft shown in a place of honour; and the artist loved his scenes from busy life, as he loved his ornament from Nature. Such scenes (which rarely held specific allegory) were not unconnected with the rest of the drama of creation and redemption mirrored in the cathedral, nor was the exquisitely cut leaf and rose without its suggestion of the grace incarnate in the Virgin and her Son. Daily life and natural ornament had at least an illustrative pertinency to the whole, of which they were unobtrusive and lovely elements; and since that whole was primarily a visible symbol of the unseen and divine power, these humble elements had part in its unutterable mystery, and were likewise symbols.

Finally, have not these nameless artists—even as Dante and our English Bunyan—presented by their art a synthesis of life’s realities? Their feet were on the earth; with sympathy and knowledge their hands worked in the media of things seen and handled, and fashioned the little human matters which are bounded by the cradle and the grave. Such were the materials from which Dante formed his Commedia, and Bunyan drew the Progress of his Pilgrim soul to God. Yet as with Bunyan and Dante, so with these artists in stone and coloured light, the mortal and the tangible were but the elements through which the poem or story, or the carved or painted picture, was made the realizing symbol of the unseen and eternal Spirit.

 

II

Beneath the Abbey Church of Saint-Victor there was a crypt consecrated to the Mother of God. Here a certain monk was wont to retire and compose hymns in her honour. One day his lips uttered the lines:

Whereupon a flood of light filled the crypt, and the Virgin, appearing to him, inclined her head.

The monk’s name was Adam,[97] and he is deemed the best of Latin hymn-writers. Breton born, he entered Saint-Victor in his youth, about the year 1130. He was favoured with the instruction of Hugo till the master’s death in 1141. Adam must have been of nearly the same age as Richard of Saint-Victor, that other pupil of Hugo who makes the third member of the great Victorine trio. Their works have been the monastery’s fairest fame. Hugo was a Saxon; Adam a Breton; Richard was Scotch. So Saint-Victor drew her brilliant sons from many lands. Richard, whose writings worthily supplemented those of his master Hugo,[98] died in 1173; his friend Adam outlived him, and died an old man as the twelfth century was closing. He was buried in the cloister, and over him was placed an elegiac epitaph upon human vanity and sin, in part his own composition.

Adam’s hymns were Sequences[99] intended for church use. Their author was learned in Christian doctrine, skilled in the Liturgy, and saturated with the spirit of devotional symbolism. His symbolism, which his gift of verse made into imagery, was that of the mediaeval church and its understanding of the Liturgy; he also shows the special influence of Hugo. Adam’s hymns, with their powerful Latin rhymes, cannot be reproduced in English; but a translation may give the contents of their symbolism. The hymn for Easter, beginning “Zyma vetus expurgetur,”[100] is an epitome of the symbolic prefiguration of Christ in the Old Testament. Each familiar allegorical interpretation flashes in a phrase. Literally translated, or rather maltreated, it is as follows:

From the time of that old third-century hymn ascribed to Clement of Alexandria,[115] hymns to Christ had been filled with symbolism, the symbolism of loving personification of His attributes, as well as with the more formal symbolism of His Old Testament prefigurements. Adam’s symbolism is of both kinds. It has feeling even when dogmatic,[116] and throbs with devotion as its theme approaches the Gospel Christ. Prevailing modes of thought and feeling may prescribe topics for verse which a succeeding age will find curiously unpoetic. Yet if the later time have a sympathetic understanding for the past, it will recognize how fervid and how songful was that bygone verse—the verse of Adam’s hymns, for instance. In one for Christmas Day, beginning:

[Pg 90]a stanza touches on the reason why the Creator thus became creature. It would be impossible to render its feeling in English, and much circumlocution would be needed to express even its literal meaning in any language but mediaeval Latin. This stanza has twelve lines:

These lines are scholastic. In the next four, the feeling begins to rise, yet the phrases repel rather than attract us:

The feeling touches its climax with the four concluding lines, in which the parable of the Good Samaritan is invested with the special allegorical significance set forth in the sermon of Honorius:[118]

Two stanzas from another of Adam’s Christmas hymns[Pg 91] will show how curiously intricate could be his symbolism. Having spoken of the ineffable wonder of the Incarnation, he proceeds:

One observes that here the symbolism first touches Christ’s birth, the dry rod and the fleece representing the Virgin. Then the leafage, flower, nut and dew typify His qualities. The remaining stanzas of this hymn carry out in further detail the symbolism of the nut.

Besides the hymns devoted to the Saviour, the greater part of Adam’s hymns are symbolical throughout. Those written for the dedication of churches are among the most interesting. One beginning “Quam dilecta tabernacula”[123] sketches the Old Testament facts which prefigure Christ’s holy Church. The keynote is in the lines:

The shadow is the Old Testament, and these three lines sum up the teaching of Hugo as to the sacramental nature of the Old Testament narratives. Throughout this hymn Adam follows Hugo closely.[124] In another dedicatory hymn[125] Adam gives the prefigurative meaning of the parts of Solomon’s temple. There is likewise much symbolism in the grand hymns addressed to the Virgin. One for the festival of the Assumption[126] gives the figures of the Virgin in the Old Testament—the throne of Solomon, the fleece of Gideon, the burning bush. Then with more feeling the metaphorical epithets pour forth, voicing the heart’s gratitude to the Virgin’s saving aid to man. A still more splendid example of like symbolism and ardent metaphor is the great hymn beginning:

which won the Virgin’s greeting for the poet.[127]

The lives of Honorius, of Hugo, of Adam, from whose works we have been drawing illustrations of mediaeval symbolism, vie with each other in obscurity; and properly enough since they were monks, for whom self-effacement is becoming. This personal obscurity culminates with one last example to be drawn from monastic sources. The man himself was an impressive figure in his time; a sight of him was not to be forgotten: he was called magnus and doctor universalis. Nevertheless it has been questioned whether he lived in the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and whether one man or two bore the name of Alanus de Insulis.

There was in fact but one, and he belongs to the twelfth century, dying almost a centenarian, in the year 1202. The cognomen de Insulis has also been an enigma. From it he has been dubbed a Sicilian, and then a Scot, born on the island of Mona. But the name in reality refers to the chief town of Flanders, which is called Lisle; and Alanus doubtless was a Fleming.

[Pg 93]He became a learned man, and lectured at Paris. That he was possessed with no small opinion of his talents would appear from the legend told of him as well as of St. Augustine. He had announced that on a certain day in a single lecture he would set forth the complete doctrine of the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. The afternoon before the day appointed, he walked by the river, thinking how he should arrange his subject so as to include it all. He chanced upon a child who was dipping up the river water with a snail shell and dropping it into a little trench. Smiling, he asked what should be the object of this; and the child told him that he was putting the whole river into his trench. As the great scholar was explaining that this could not be done, he suddenly felt himself chidden and taught—how much less might he perform what he had set for the next morning. He stood speechless at his presumption, and burst into tears. The next day ascending the platform he said to the crowd of auditors, “Let it suffice you to have seen Alanus”;[128] and with that he left them all astonished, and himself hastily set out for Citeaux. On arrival he asked to be admitted as a conversus, and was given charge of the monastery’s sheep. Patient and unknown, he long plied this humble vocation. But at length it chanced that the abbot took him to a council at Rome, in the capacity of hostler. And there he beat down the arrogance of a heretic with such arguments that the latter cried out that he was disputing either with the devil or Alanus, and would say no more.

Such is one story. By another he is made to seek the monastery of Clairvaux, and there become a monk under St. Bernard. It is also written that he became an abbot, and then a bishop, but afterwards resigned his bishopric. However all this may have been, he died and was buried, and was subjected to many epitaphs. On what purports to be an old copy of his tomb at Citeaux, he is shown with St. Bernard, and called Alanus Magnus. The title Doctor universalis has always clung to his memory, which will not altogether fade. For if Adam of Saint-Victor was the[Pg 94] greatest of Latin mediaeval hymn-writers, Alanus has good claim to be called the greatest of mediaeval Latin poets in the field of didactic and narrative poetry.[129]

The many works ascribed to Alanus include an allegorical Commentary on Canticles, a treatise on the art of preaching, a book of sententiae, another of theologicae regulae, sundry sermons, and a lengthy work “contra haereticos”; also a large dictionary of Biblical allegorical interpretations, entitled Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium.[130] All these are prose. He composed besides his Liber de planctu naturae,[131] and his Anticlaudianus, a learned and profound, and likewise highly imaginative allegorical poem upon man.[132] Its Preface in prose casts a curious light upon the author’s enigmatical personality, which combined the wonted or conventional humility of a monk with the towering self-consciousness of a man of genius.

More sentences of turgid deprecation follow, and the author begs the reader not to approach his book with disgust and irritation, but with pleasant anticipations of novelty (not all a monk speaks here!).

This Preface of strained sentence and laboured metaphor, of forced humility and overweening self-consciousness, hardly augurs well for the poem of which it is the prelude. But prefaces are authors’ pitfalls, and, moreover, many writers have floundered in one medium of speech while in another they have moved with ease. From the ungainly prose of the Persones Tale, no one would expect the ease and force of Chaucer’s verse. And the reader of Alanus’s Preface need not be discouraged from entering upon his poem. Its subject is man; its philosophic or religious purpose is to expound the functions of God, of Nature, of Fortune, of Virtue and Vice, in making man and shaping his career. The poem is an allegory, original in its general scheme of composition, but in many of its parts following earlier allegorical writings.

The opening lines tell of Nature’s solicitude to bestow her gifts so that the finished work may present a fair harmony: as a patient workman she forges, trims and files, and fashions with reason’s chisel. But when she seeks to invest her work with qualities beyond her giving, she is[Pg 96] obliged to call on the Celestial Council of her Sisters. Responding, pilgrim-like the Crown of Heaven’s soldiery comes from on high, brightens the earth with its light, and clothes the ground with blessed footprints.

Leading this galaxy, Concord advances, foster-child of Peace; then Plenty comes, and Favour, and Youth with favour anointed, and Laughter, banisher of mental mists; then Shame and Modesty, and Reason the measure of good, and Honesty, Reason’s happy comrade; then Dignity (decus) and Prudence balancing her scales, and Piety and true Faith, and Virtue. Last of all Nobility (nobilitas), in grace not quite the others’ equal.[133]

In the midst of a great wood blessed with fountains and multitudinous bird-song, a cloud-kissing mountain rose with level top. Nature’s palace was erected here, gemmed and golden; and within was a great hall hung upon bronze columns. Here the painter’s art had rendered the ways of men, and inscriptions made plain the pictured story. “O new wonders of painting,” exclaims the poet; “what cannot be, comes into being; and painting, the ape of truth, deluding with novel art, turns shadows to realities, and transforms particular falsehood into (general) truth.”[134] There might be seen the power of logic pressing its arguments and conquering sophistry. There Aristotle was preparing his arms, and, more divinely, Plato mused on heaven’s secrets. There Seneca moralized, and Ptolemy explained the stars in their times and courses. There spoke the word of Tully, while Virgil’s muse painted many lies, and put truth’s garb on falsehood. There was also shown the might of Alcides and Ulysses’ wisdom, Turnus’s valour prodigal of life, and Hippolytus’s shame, undone by Venus’s reins.[135] Such and many[Pg 97] other tropes of things and dreams of truth, this royal art set forth.

Here, standing in the midst of her Council, Nature, with bowed head, spoke her solemn words: “Painfully I remake what my hand’s solicitude has wrought. But the hand’s penitence does not wipe out the flaws. The shortcomings of our works must be repaired by some perfect model, some man divine, not smelling of the earth and earthly, but whose mind shall hold to heaven while his body walks the earth. Let him be the mirror in which we may see what our faith, our potency, and virtue ought to be. As it is, our shame is over all the earth.”

When the Council had approved these words, Prudence arose in all her beauty.[136] She discoursed upon man’s dual nature, spirit and body. Nature and her helpers may be the artificers of his mortal body, but the soul demands its heavenly Artificer, and laughs at our rude arts. God’s wisdom alone can create the soul, as Prudence shows by an exposition of its qualities.

Now Reason raised his reverend form, holding his triple glass in which appear the causes and effects and qualities of things. He humbly disclaimed the power to instruct Minerva,[137] and applauded the plan by which a new Lucifer should sojourn in the world. May he unite all the gifts which they can bestow, and be their champion against the Vices. Now let their suppliant vows be sped to Him who alone can create the divine mind. A legate should be despatched above, bearing their request. For this office none is so fit as Prudence, to whom the secrets of Heaven are known, and whose energy and wisdom will surmount the difficulties of the way.

Prudence at first refuses; but Concordia rises, the inspirer of chaste loves, she who knit the souls of David and Jonathan, Pirithous and Theseus, Nisus and Euryalus, Orestes and Pylades. Persuasively she speaks, and points out all the ills the world had suffered by disobedience to her behests. Prudence is won over to the task, and now wills[Pg 98] only as her sisters will. She thinks upon the means and way. Wisdom orders a chariot to be made, in which the sea, the stars, the heavens may be traversed. Its artificers are her seven daughters, wise and fair, who unite the skill and knowledge of all those wise ancients who had excelled in any Art. First Grammar (her functions and great writers being told) forms the pole which goes before the axle-tree (temo praeambulus axis). Then Logic makes the axle-tree; and Rhetoric adorns the pole with gems and the axle with flowers. Arithmetic constructs one wheel of the chariot, and Music the second, Geometry the third, and the fourth wheel is made by Astronomy.[138]

Now Reason, at Nature’s nod, yokes to the chariot the five horses, to wit, the Senses disciplined and controlled, Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch. He himself mounts as charioteer, and bids Prudence follow. Amid the farewells and plaudits of all, the chariot soars aloft. As it speeds along, Prudence investigates atmospheric phenomena, and then the spirits of evil who wander through the air. They passed on through the upper ether, reached the citadel and fount of light, where the Sun holds sway; next was reached the region where Venus and the star of Mercury sing together and Lucifer exults, the herald of the day. Then to their rapid flight appeared Mars’ flaming palace, seething with fire and wrath. Onward they passed to the glad light and unhurtful flames of Jupiter, and then to Saturn’s sphere. At length they ascended the stellar region where the Pole stars contend in brightness, where are seen Hercules and Orion, Leda’s twins, the fiery Crab, the Lion, and the rest of the Zodiac’s constellations.[139]

Here at heaven’s entrance the chariot halted. Those five horses of the Senses, charioteered by Reason, could ascend no farther. But a damsel was seen, seated upon the summit of the Pole. She scrutinizes the hidden Cause and End of all things, holding scales in her right hand and in her left a sceptre. On her vestments a subtile point traces[Pg 99] God’s secrets, and the formless is figured in form. Reverently Phronesis, that is Prudence, saluted this Queen of the Pole, and set forth the purpose of her journey, telling of Nature’s desire and her limitations. In reply Theology, for it is she,[140] offered herself as a companion, and bade Prudence leave her chariot, but keep the second courser (Hearing) to bear her on. Prudence now surmounted the starry citadels, and marvelled at heaven’s nodes, where the four ways begin and the crystalline waters flow, shot with agreeing fires; for here, in universal harmony transcending Nature’s laws and Reason’s power, Concord unites those elements which war below. Onward leads the way among those joys celestial which know no tears, where there is peace without hate, and light above all brightness. Here dwell the angel bands, the Thunderer’s princes, regulators of the world; here glow the seraphim, and cherubim drain draughts from the mind of God; and here are the Thrones whereon God balances His weighed decrees, and with His band of Powers conquers the tyrants.[141] Here also rest the saints, freed from earth’s dross and passion, clothed in virgin white or martyr’s purple, or wearing the Doctor’s laurel. Joyful alike are they, yet diverse in merit, shining with unequal splendour.[142] Here finally, in honour surpassing all, is the Virgin Mother, clad in the garb of our salvation—Star of the Sea, Way of Life, Port of Salvation, Limit of Piety, Mother of Pity, Garden closed, Sealed Font, Fruitful Olive, Sweet Paradise, Rose without Thorn, Guiltless Grace, Way of the Wanderer, Light of the Blind, Rest of the Tired—untold, unnumbered, and unspeakable are her praises.[143]

Phronesis cannot bear the sight. Queen Theology calls to her sister Faith to aid the fainting one. Faith comes and holds her Mirror before the eyes of Phronesis; and in this glass her eyes can endure the shaded glory of the overpowering vision. She staggers on, her trembling steps[Pg 100] supported by Faith and Theology. In the glass she sees the eternal and divine, the enduring, moveless, sure; species unborn, celestial ideas, the forms of men and principles of things, causes of causes and the course of fate, the Thunderer’s mind; why God condemns some, predestines others, prepares that one for life and from this one withdraws His rewards; why poverty presses upon some and want is filled only with tears; why riches pour on others, why one is wise, another lacking, and why the worthies of the past have been endowed each with his several gifts.[144]

Marvelling at all these sights, Prudence, supported by the sisters, reached at last the palace of the King, and fell prostrate before God himself. He bade her rise, and speak. Humbly she set forth Nature’s plight and the evil upon earth, and presented her petition. God accedes benignantly. He will not destroy the earth again, but will send a human spirit endowed with heavenly gifts, a pilgrim to the earth, a medicine for the world. Prudence worships. God summons Mind, and orders him to fashion the type-form, the idea of the human mind. Mind searches among existing beings for the traces of this new idea or type.[145] His difficult search succeeds at last, and in the Mirror which he constructs, every grace takes its abode: Joseph’s form, the intelligence of Judith, the patience of righteous Job, the modesty of Moses, Jacob’s simplicity, Abraham’s faith, Tobias’s piety. He presents this pattern-type to God, who sets an accordant soul therein, and then entrusts the new-made being to Phronesis, while Mind anoints it with an unguent against the attacks of the Vices. Phronesis, with her prize, turned to the way by which she had ascended, regained her chariot and Reason her charioteer. Together they sped back to the congratulations of Nature and her Council.

For this perfect soul Nature now forms a beautiful body. Concord unites the two, and a new man is formed, perfect and free from flaw. Chastity and guardian Modesty endow him with their gifts; Reason adds his, and Honesty. These Logic follows, with her gift of skill in argument; Rhetoric brings her stores, then Arithmetic, next Music, next Geometry,[Pg 101] next Astronomy;[146] while Theology and Piety are not behind with theirs; and to these Faith joins her gifts of fidelity and truth. Last of all comes Nobility, Fortune’s daughter. But because she has nothing of her own to give, and must receive all from her mother, she betakes herself to Fortune’s house of splendid mutability. What will Fortune give? The two return to Nature’s palace, and Fortune’s magnificence is proffered by her daughter; but Reason, standing by, will allow only a measured acceptance.[147]

The report of this richly endowed creature reached Alecto. Raging she summoned her pests, the chiefs of Tartarus, doers of ill, masters of every sin—Injury, Fraud, Perjury, Theft, Rapine, Fury and Anger, Hate, Discord, Strife, Disease and Melancholy, Lust, Wantonness and Need, Fear and Old Age. She roused them with a harangue: their rule is threatened by this upstart Creature, whom Parent Nature has prepared for war; but what can his untried imbecility do against them in arms?

All clamour assent, and in a tumult of rage make ready for the strife. The hostile ranks approach. The first attack is made by Folly (Stultitia) and her comrades, Sloth, Gaming, Idle Jesting, Ease and Sleep. But faithful Virtues protect the constant youth against these foes. Next Discord leads its mutinous band, but only to defeat. Onslaughts follow from Poverty, next from Ill-Repute, from Old Age and Disease. Then Grieving advances, and is overthrown by Laughter. More deadly still are the attacks of Venus and Lust; then Excess and Wantonness take up the fray; and at the end Impiety and Fraud and Avarice. But still the man conquers with the aid of his Virtues ever true.

The fight is over. The Virtues triumph and receive their Kingdoms; Vice succumbs; Love reigns instead of Discord; the man is blessed; and the earth, adorned with flowers in a new spring of youth, brings forth abundance. The Poet sums up his poem’s teaching: From God must everything begin and in Him end. But our genius may not[Pg 102] stand inert; ours is the strife as well, according to our strength and faculty. Let the mind attach itself to the things which are and do not pass, even as Plato sings, from things of sense reaching on ever to the grades Angelic and Olympus’s steeps. Then it shall behold the universal praise of God and the true ascription of all good to Him. He in himself is perfect, Part and likewise Whole, and everywhere uncircumscribed. Nothing has power in itself, but all would fall to nothing, did He close the flux of hidden power.

Alanus, a good Christian Doctor, is also an eclectic in his thought. A consistent system is hardly to be drawn from his poem. It suggests Christ. But its hero is not the God-man of the Incarnation. Its figures are semi-pagan. The virtue Faith, for example, is the Fides, the Good Faith, of the antique Roman, though it is the Christian virtue Faith as well. In language the poem is antique; its verse has vigorous flow; its imagery lacks neither beauty nor sublimity. It is in fact a poem, a creation, having a scheme and unity of its own, although the author borrows continually. Martianus Capella is there and Dionysius the Areopagite; there also is the Psychomachia of Prudentius and its progeny of symbolic battles between the Virtues and the Vices.[148] Yet Alanus has achieved; for he has woven his material into a real poem and has reared his own lofty allegory. His work is another grand example of mediaeval symbolism.

Thus we see the ceaseless sweep of allegory through men’s minds. They felt and thought and dreamed in allegories; and also spent their dry ingenuity on allegorical constructions. It was reserved for one supreme poet to create, out of this atmosphere, a supreme poem which is as complete an allegory as the Anticlaudianus. But the[Pg 103] Divina Commedia has also the power of its human realities of actually experienced pain and joy, and hate and love. Compared with it, the Anticlaudianus betrays the vapourings of monk and doctor, imaginative indeed, but thin. The author’s feet were not planted on the earth of human life.

But the Middle Ages did not demand that allegory should have its feet planted on the earth, so long as its head nodded high among the clouds—or its sentiments wandered sweetly in fancy’s gardens. In one of these dwelt that lovely Rose, whose Roman once had vogue. In structure the Roman de la rose is an allegory from the beginning of the first part by De Lorris to the very end of that encyclopaedic sequel added by De Meun. The story is well known.[149] One may recall the fact that in De Lorris’s poem and De Meun’s sequel every quality and circumstance of Love’s sentiment and fortunes are figured in allegorical personifications—all the lover’s hopes and fears and the wavering chances of his quest.

In this respect the poem is the courtly and romantic counterpart of such a philosophical or religious allegory as the Anticlaudianus. Personifications of the arts and sciences, the vices and virtues, current since the time of Prudentius’s Psychomachia and Capella’s Nuptials of Philology, were all in the Anticlaudianus, while in the Roman de la rose figure their secular and romantic kin: in De Lorris’s part, Love, Fair-Welcome, Danger, Reason, Franchise, Pity, Courtesy, Shame, Fear, Idleness, Jealousy, Wicked-Tongue; then, with De Meun, others besides: Richesse, False-Seeming, Hypocrisy, Nature, and Genius.[150] The figures of the Roman de la rose have diverse antecedents[Pg 104] scattered through the entire store of knowledge and classic literature possessed by the Middle Ages; perhaps their immediate source of inspiration was the scheme of courtly love which the mediaeval imagination elaborated and revelled in.[151] The poem of De Lorris was a veritable romantic allegory. De Meun, in his sequel, rather plays with the allegorical form, which he continues; it has become a frame for his stores of learning, his knowledge of the world, his views of life, his wit and satire, and his great literary and poetic gifts. Yet it ends in a regular Psychomachia, in which Love’s barons are hard beset by all the foes of Love’s delight, though Love has its will at last.

 

 

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[Pg 105]

BOOK VI
LATINITY AND LAW

[Pg 106]

 

[Pg 107]

CHAPTER XXX

THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS

 

I

During all the mediaeval centuries, men approached the Classics expecting to learn from them. The usual attitude toward the classical heritage was that of docile pupils looking for instruction. One may recall the antecedent reasons of this, which have already been stated at length. In Italy, letters survived as the most impressive legacy from an overshadowing past. In the north, save where they lingered on from the antique time, they came in the train of Latin Christianity, and were offered to men under the same imposing conditions of a higher civilization authoritatively instructing ruder peoples. Moreover, between the ancient times which produced the classic literature and the Carolingian period there intervened centuries of degeneracy and transition, when the Classics were used pedagogically to teach grammar and rhetoric. Then grammars were composed or revised, and other handbooks of elementary instruction. The Classics still were loved; but how shall men love beyond their own natures? Gifted Jerome, great Augustine, loved them with an ardour bringing its own misgivings. Other lovers, like Ausonius and Apollinaris Sidonius, were pedantic imitators.

Both north and south of the Alps another and obviously enduring cause fostered the habit of regarding the Classics[Pg 108] as storehouses of knowledge: the fact that they were such for all the mediaeval centuries. They included not only poetry and eloquence, but also history, philosophy, natural knowledge, law and polity. The knowledge contained in them exceeded what the men of western Europe otherwise possessed. As century after century passed, mediaeval men learned more for themselves, and also drew more largely on the classic store. Yet it remained unexhausted. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitute the great mediaeval epoch. Men were then opening their eyes a little to observe the natural world, and were thinking a little for themselves. Nevertheless the chief increase in knowledge issued from the gradual discovery and mastering of the works of Aristotle. These centuries, like their predecessors, make clear that men who inherit from a greater past a universal literature containing the best they can conceive and more knowledge than they can otherwise attain, will be likely to regard every part of this literature as in some way a source of knowledge, physical or metaphysical, historical or ethical. And the Classics merited such regard; for where they did not instruct in science, they imparted knowledge of life, and norms and instances of conduct, from which men still may draw guidance. We have outlearned the physics, and perhaps the metaphysics of the Greeks; their knowledge of nature, in comparison with ours, was but as a genial beginning; their polities and their formal ethics we have tried and tested; but we have not risen above the power and inspiration of the story of Greece and Rome, and the exemplifications of life in the Greek and Latin Classics. It has not ceased to be true that he who best loves the Classics, and most deeply feels and glories in their unique excellence as literature, is he who still draws life from them, and discipline and knowledge. Their true lovers, like the true lovers of all noble literature, are always in a state of pupilage to the poems and the histories they love.

Obviously then no final word lies in the statement that through the Middle Ages men turned to the Classics for instruction. They did indeed turn to them for all kinds of knowledge, and for discipline. Often they looked for instruction from Ovid or Virgil in a way to make us smile.[Pg 109] Often they were like schoolboys, dully conning words which they did not feel and so did not understand. But in the tenth century, and in the twelfth, some men admired and loved the Latin Classics, and drew from them, as we may, lessons which are learned only by those who love aright.

It would be hard to say what the men of the Middle Ages did not thus gain. The pagan classical literature was one of humanity in its full range of interests. This was true of the Greek; and from the Greek, the universal human passed to the Latin, which the Middle Ages were to know. In both literatures, man was a denizen of earth. The laws of mortality and fate were held before his eyes; and the action of the higher powers bore upon mortal happiness, rather than upon any life to come. When reflecting upon the use and influence of the Classics through the Middle Ages, it is always to be kept in mind that the antique literature was the literature of this life and of this world; that it was universal in its humanity, and still in the Middle Ages might touch every human love and human interest not directly connected with the hopes and terrors of the Judgment Day.

So whenever educated mediaeval men were drawn by the ambitions or moved by the finer joys of human life, it lay in their path to seek instruction or satisfaction from some antique source. If a man wished the common education of a clerk, he drew it from antique text-books and their commentaries. Grammar and rhetoric meant Latin grammar and Latin rhetoric; dialectic also was Latin and antique. Likewise the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, could be studied only in Latin. These ordinary branches of education having been mastered, if then the man’s tastes or ambitions turned to the interests of earth (and who except the saintly recluse was not so drawn?) he would still look to the antique. A civilian or an ecclesiastic would need some knowledge of law, which for the most part was Roman, even when disguised as Canon law.[152] Did a man incline toward philosophy, and the scrutiny of life’s deeper problems, again the source was the antique; and when he lifted his mind to theology, he would still find[Pg 110] himself reasoning in categories of antique dialectic. Finally, and this was a broad field of humane inclination, if a clerkly educated man loved poetry, eloquence, and history, for their own sakes, he also would turn to the antique.

There is scarcely need to revert again to the use of the Classics in the earlier Middle Ages. We have seen that in Italy they never ceased to form the conscious background to all intellectual life; and that in the north, letters came a handmaid in the train of Latin Christianity—a handmaid that was apt to assert her own value, and also charm the minds of men. From the first, it was the orthodox view that Latin letters should provide the education enabling men to understand the Christian religion adequately. This is the object set forth in Charlemagne’s Capitularies upon education.[153] Three hundred years later Honorius of Autun says in his sermonizing way:

Honorius used Augustine’s reference to the Egyptians, and followed this Augustinian view, always recognized as orthodox in the Middle Ages. It was narrower than the practice among those who followed letters. Gerbert at the close of the tenth century loved to teach and read the pagan writers, and drew from them training and discipline.[155] In the next century, the German monk Froumund of Tegernsee, with Bernward and Godehard, bishops of Hildesheim, are instances of German love of antique letters.[156] Yet lofty souls might choose to limit their reading of the Classics, at least in theory, to the needs of their Latinity. Such a one was Hugo of St.-Victor, scholar, theologian, man of genius;[157] he professed to care more for the Christian ardours of the soul than for learning even as a means of righteousness,[Pg 111] and chose to take the side of those who would read the classic authors only so far as the needs of education demanded:

Temperament affected Hugo’s view. He was of the spiritual aristocracy, who may be somewhat disdainful of the common means by which men get their education and round out their natures. The mechanical monotony of pedagogy grated on him and evoked the ironical sketch of a school-room, which he put in his dialogue on the Vanity of the World. The little Discipulus, directed by his Magister, is surveying human things.

The Disciple is captivated with this many-coloured show of learning; but the Master declares it to be mostly foolishness, distracting the student from understanding his own nature, his Creator, and his future lot.[159]

These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious mediaeval view that the artes, with a very little reading of the auctores, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need was to understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its lures, even as Jerome’s Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous dream of exclusion from heaven as a “Ciceronian.” Alcuin, who led the educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness for Virgil made him forget his friend—“would that the Gospels rather than the Aeneid filled thy breast.”[160] Three hundred years later, St. Peter Damiani, himself a virtuoso in letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric, arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.[161] Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In France, about the same time, our worthy sermon-writer, Honorius of Autun, liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales, which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy[Pg 113] congregations. Yet he directs his pulpit-thunder at the cives Babyloniae, the superbi, who after their several tastes finger profane literature to their peril: “Those delighting in quibbling learn Aristotle: the lovers of war have Maro, and the lustful idlers their Naso. Lucan and Statius incite discords, while Horace and Terence equip the pert and wanton (petulantes)—but since the names of these are blotted from the book of life, I shall not commemorate them with my lips.”[162]

This with the excellent Honorius was pious rhetoric. Yet the love and fear of antique letters caused anxiety in many a mediaeval soul, deflected by them from its narrow path to the heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the love of letters and of knowledge was to play its part, and might take one side or the other, according to the motive of their pursuit, in the great mediaeval psychomachia between the cravings of mortal life and the militant insistencies of the soul’s salvation. This conflict, not confined to mediaeval monks, has its universal aspects. It echoes in the sigh of Michelangelo over the

—which had so long drawn his heart from Eternity.[163]

Commonly, however, this conflict did not greatly disturb scholars who felt in some degree the classic spell so manifold of delight in themes delightful, of pleasure somehow drawn from clear statement and convincing sequence of thought, of even deeper happiness springing from the stirring of those faculties through which man rejoices in knowledge. To be sure, readers of the Classics, who drew joy from them or satisfaction, or humane instruction, were comparatively few in the mediaeval centuries, as they are to-day. And undoubtedly in the Middle Ages the Classics usually were read in unenlightened schoolboy fashion. Yet making these reservations, we may be sure that letters yielded up their joys to the chosen few in every mediaeval century. “Amor litterarum ab ipso fere initio pueritiae mihi est innatus,” wrote Lupus in the ninth.[164] Gerbert might have said the[Pg 114] same, and many of the men who taught at Chartres in the generations following. So likewise might have said John of Salisbury. In studying the Classics he certainly looked to them for instruction. But he also loved them, and found companionship and solace in them, as he says, and as Cicero before him had said of letters.

We may ask ourselves what sort of pleasure do we get from reading the Classics? not necessarily a light distracting of the mind, but rather a deeper gratification: thought is aroused and satisfied, and our nature is appeased by the admirable presentation of things admirable. At the same time we may be conscious of discipline and benefit. There is good reason to suppose that a like pleasure, or satisfaction, with discipline and instruction, came to this exceedingly clever John from reading Terence, Virgil and Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius and Statius, Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian—for he read them all.[165] John is affected, impressed, and trained by his classic reading; he has absorbed his authors; he quotes from them as spontaneously and aptly as he quotes from Scripture. A quotation from the one or the other may give final point to an argument, and have its own eloquent suggestions. Sometimes the tone of one of his own letters—which usually are excellent in form and language—may agree with that of the pithy antique quotation garnishing it. A mediaeval writer was not likely to say just what we should when expressing ourselves on the same matter. Yet John makes quite clear to us how he cared for antique letters, in the Prologue to his Polycraticus, his chief work on philosophy and life; and we may take his word as to the satisfaction which he drew from them, since his own writings prove his assiduity in their cult. This prologue is somewhat cherché, and imbued with a preciosity of sentiment putting one in mind of Cicero’s oration Pro Archia poeta.

Hereupon, still addressing himself to his friend and patron, Thomas à Becket, John suggests that these recreations are peculiarly beneficial to men in their circumstances, burdened with affairs; and he puts his principles in practice, by launching forth upon his lengthy work of learned and philosophic disquisition.

To supplement this outline of John’s appreciation of the Classics, it will be interesting to look into the literary interpretation of a classical poem, from the pen of one of his contemporaries. So little is known of the author, Bernard Silvestris, that he usually has been confused with his more famous fellow, Bernard of Chartres. We may refer to both[Pg 116] of them again.[167] Here our business is solely with the Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex libros Aeneidos Virgilii.[168] The writer draws from the Saturnalia of the fifth-century grammarian, Macrobius; but his allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid seems to be his own. He finds in the Aeneid a twofold consideration, in that its author meant to teach philosophic truth, and at the same time was not inattentive to the poetic plot.

The above is excellent, but not particularly original. It shows, however, that Bernard could appreciate the Aeneid in this way. His allegorical interpretation is of a piece with current mediaeval methods. Yet to take a poem allegorically was not distinctively mediaeval; for Homer and other poets had been thus expounded from the days of Plato, who did not himself approve. With Bernard, each Book of the Aeneid represents one of the ages of man, the first Book betokening infancy, the second boyhood, and so forth. Allegorical etymologies are applied to the names of the personages; and in general the whole natural course and setting of the poem is taken allegorically. “The sea is the human body moved and tossed by drunkenness and lusts, which are represented by waves.” Aeneas, to wit, the human soul joined to its body, comes to Carthage, the mundane city where Dido reigns, which is lust; this allegory is unfolded in detail. So the interpretation ambles on, not more and not less jejune than such ingenuities usually are.

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Classical studies reached their zenith in the twelfth century. For in every way that century surpassed its predecessors; and in classical studies it excelled the thirteenth, which devoted to them a smaller portion of its intellectual energies. The twelfth century, to be sure, was prodigiously interested in dialectic and theology. Yet these had not quite engulfed the humanities; nor had any newly awakened interest in physical or experimental science distracted the eyes of men from the charms of the ancient written page.[Pg 118] The change took place in the thirteenth century. Its best intellectual efforts, north of the Alps at least, were directed to the study and theological appropriation of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia of metaphysics and universal knowledge.[171] The effect of Aristotle was totally unliterary. And the minds of men, absorbed in mastering this giant mass of knowledge and argument, ceased to regard literary form and the humane aspects of Latin literature.

Until the thirteenth century, dialectic and theology were not completely severed from belles lettres. The Platonic-Augustinian theology of the twelfth century had been idealizing and imaginative, not to say poetical. Such an interesting exponent of it as Hugo of St. Victor appears as a literary personage, despite his stinted advocacy of classical study. One notes that for his time the chief single source of physical knowledge was the Latin version of the Timaeus, certainly not a prosaic composition. Thus, for the twelfth century, an effective cause of the continuance of the study of letters lay herein: whatever branch of natural knowledge might allure the student, he could not draw it bodily from a serious but unliterary repository, like the Physics or De animalibus of Aristotle, which were not yet available; he must follow his bent through the writings of various Latin poets as well as prose-writers. In fine, the sources of profane knowledge open to the twelfth century were literary in their nature, and might form part of the literature which would be read by a student of grammar or rhetoric.

One sees this in John of Salisbury. There may have been a few men who knew more than he did of some particular topic. But his range and readiness of knowledge were unique. And it is evident from his writings that his knowledge (except in logic) had no special or scientific source, but was derived from a promiscuous reading of Latin literature. As a result, he is himself a literary man. One may say much the same of his younger contemporary, Alanus de Insulis.[172] He too has gathered knowledge from literary sources, and he himself is one of the best Latin poets of the Middle Ages. Another extremely poetic[Pg 119] philosopher was Bernard Silvestris, the interpreter of Virgil. His De mundi unitate is a Pantheistic exposition of the Universe; it is also a poem; and incidentally it affords another illustration of the general fact, that before the works of Aristotle were made known and expounded in the thirteenth century, all kinds of natural and quasi-philosophic knowledge were drawn from a variety of writings, some of them poor enough from any point of view, but none of them distinctly scientific and unliterary, like the works of Aristotle. Formal logic or dialectic, as cultivated by Abaelard for example, appears as an exception. It had been specialized and more scientifically treated than any branch of substantial knowledge; for indeed it was based on the logical treatises of Aristotle, most of which were in use before Abaelard’s death, and all of which were known to Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury.[173]

The contrast between the cathedral school of Chartres and the University of Paris illustrates the change from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. The former has been spoken of in a previous chapter, where its story was brought down to the times of its great teachers, Bernard and Thierry, of whom we shall have to speak in connection with the teaching of grammar and the reading of classical authors. The school flourished exceedingly until the middle of the twelfth century.[174] By that time the schools of Paris had received an enormous impetus from the popularity of Abaelard, and scholars had begun to push thither from all quarters. But it was not till the latter part of the century that the University, with its organization of Masters and Faculties, began visibly to emerge out of the antecedent cathedral school.[175] Chartres was a home of letters; and there Latin literature was read enthusiastically. But in[Pg 120] Paris Abaelard was pre-eminently a dialectician; and after he died, through those decades when the University was coming into existence, the tide of study set irresistibly toward theology and metaphysics. Students and masters of the Faculty of Arts outnumbered all the other Faculties; nevertheless, counting not by tumultuous numbers, but by intellectual strength, the great matter was Theology, and the majority of the Masters in the Arts were students in the divine science. The Arts were regarded as a preparatory discipline. So through its great period, which roughly coincides with the thirteenth century, the University of Paris was for all Europe the supreme seat of Dialectic, Metaphysics, and Theology, and yet no kindly nurse of belles lettres.

The tendencies of Oxford were not quite the same as those of Paris, yet Latin literature as such does not seem to have been cultivated there for its own fair sake. This apparently was unaffected by the fact that a movement for “close” or exact scholarship existed at the English university. Grosseteste, its first great chancellor, teacher and inspirer, unquestionably introduced, or encouraged, the study of Greek; and his famous pupil, Roger Bacon, was a serious Greek scholar, and wrote a grammar of that tongue. But neither Grosseteste nor Bacon appears to have been moved by any literary interest in Greek literature; both one and the other urged the importance of Greek, and of Hebrew too and Arabic, in order to reach a surer knowledge of Scripture and Aristotle. They sought to open the veritable founts of theology and natural knowledge, an intelligent aim indeed, but quite unliterary. In spirit both these men belong to the thirteenth century, not to the twelfth.[176]

In Italy, one does not find that the passage from the twelfth to the thirteenth century displays the decline in classical studies which is apparent north of the Alps. The reasons seem obvious. The passion for metaphysical theology did not invade this land of practical ecclesiasticism and urban living, where pagan antiquity, dumb, broken, and defaced, yet everywhere surviving, was the medium of life[Pg 121] and thought and temperamental inclination in the thirteenth as well as in the twelfth century. Nor was Italy as yet becoming scientific, or greatly interested in physical hypothesis; although medicine was cultivated in various centres, Salerno, for example, and Bologna. But for the twelfth, and for the thirteenth century as well, Italy’s great intellectual achievement was in the two closely neighbouring sciences of canon and civil law. These made the University of Bologna as pre-eminent in law as Paris was in theology. There had been schools of grammar and rhetoric at Bologna and Ravenna, before the lecturing of Irnerius on the Pandects drew to the first-named town the concourse of mature and seemly students who were gradually to organize themselves into a university.[177] Thus at Bologna law flourished and grew great, springing upward from an antecedent base of grammatical if not literary studies. The study of the law never cut itself away from this foundation. For the exigencies of legal business demanded training in the scrivener’s and notarial arts of inditing epistles and drawing documents, for which the ars dictaminis, to wit, the art of composition was of primary utility. This ars, teaching as it did both the general rules of composition and the more specific forms of legal or other formal documents, pertained to law as well as grammar. Of the latter study it was perhaps in Italy the main element, or, rather, end. But even without this hybrid link of the dictamen, grammar was needed for the interpretation of the Pandects; and indeed some of the glosses of Irnerius and other early glossators are grammatical rather than legal explanations of the text. We should bear in mind that this august body of jurisprudential law existed not in the inflated statutory Latin of Justinian’s time, but in the sonorous and correct language of the earlier empire, when the great Jurists lived, as well as Quintilian. Accordingly a close study of the Pandects required, as well as yielded, a knowledge of classical Latinity. Thus law tended to foster, rather than repress, grammar and rhetoric; and had no unfavourable effect on classical studies. And even as such studies “flourished” in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they did not[Pg 122] cease to “flourish,” there in the thirteenth, in the same general though rather dull and uncreative way. For it will hereafter appear that the productions of the Latin poets and rhetoricians of Italy were below the literary level of those composed north of the Loire in France, or in England.

 

II

From the days of the Roman Empire, the study of grammar was, and never ceased to be, the basis of the conscious and rational knowledge of the Latin tongue. The Roman boys studied it at Rome; the Latin-speaking provincials studied it, and all people of education who remained in the lands of western Europe which once had formed part of the Empire; its study was renewed under Charlemagne; he and Alcuin and all the scholars of the ninth century were deeply interested in what to them represented tangible Latinity, and in fact was to be a chief means by which their mediaeval civilization should maintain its continuity with its source. For grammar was most instrumental in preserving mediaeval Latin from violent deflections, which would have left the ancient literature as the literature of a forgotten tongue. Had mediaeval Latin failed to keep itself veritable Latin; had it instead suffered transmutation into local Romance dialects, the Latin classics, and all that hung from them, might have become as unknown to the Middle Ages as the Greek, and even have been lost forever. It was the study of Latin grammar, with classic texts to illustrate its rules, that kept Latin Latin, and preserved standards of universal usage throughout western Europe, by which one language was read and spoken everywhere by educated people. From century to century this language suffered modification, and varied according to the knowledge and training of those who used it; yet its changes were never such as to destroy its identity as a language, or prevent the Latin writer of one age or country from understanding whatever in any land or century had been written in that perennial tongue.

Therefore fortunately, as the Carolingian scholars studied[Pg 123] Latin grammar, so likewise did those of all succeeding mediaeval generations, thereby holding themselves to at least a homogeneity, though not an unvarying uniformity, of usage. Evidently, however, the method of grammatical instruction had to vary with the needs of the learners and the teachers’ skill. The Romans prattled Latin on their mothers’ knees; and so, with gradually widening deflections, did the Latinized provincials. Neither Roman nor Provincial prattled Ciceronian periods, or used quite the vocabulary of Virgil; yet it was Latin that they talked. Thenceforward there was to be a difference between the people who lived in countries where Romance dialects had emerged from the spoken Latin and prevailed, and those people who spoke a Teuton speech. Although always drawing away, the natal speech of Romance peoples was so like Latin, that in learning it they seemed rather to correct their vulgar tongue than to acquire a new language. So it was in the Christian parts of Spain, in Gaul, and, above all, in Italy, where the vulgar dialects were tardiest in taking distinctive form. Nevertheless, as the Romance dialects, for instance in the country north of the Loire, developed into the various forms of what is called Old French, young people at school would have to learn Latin as a quasi-foreign tongue. Across the Rhine in Germany boys ordinarily had to learn it at school, as a strange language, just as they must to-day; and every effort was devoted to this end.[178] It was not likely that the grammars composed for Roman boys, or at least for boys who spoke Latin from their infancy, would altogether meet the needs of German, or even French, youth. Yet only gradually and slowly in the Middle Ages were grammars put together to make good the insufficiencies of Donatus and Priscian.

The former was the teacher of St. Jerome. He composed a short work, in the form of questions and[Pg 124] answers, explaining the eight parts of speech, but giving no rules of gender, or forms of declension and conjugation, needed for the instruction of those who, unlike the Roman youth, could not speak the language. This little book went by the name of the Ars minor. The same grammarian composed a more extensive work, the third book of which was called the Barbarismus, after its opening chapter. It defined the figures of speech (figurae, locutiones), and was much used through the mediaeval period.

The Ars minor explained in simple fashion the elements of speech. But the Institutiones grammaticae of Priscian, a contemporary of Cassiodorus, offered a mine of knowledge. Of its eighteen books the first sixteen were devoted to the parts of speech and their forms, considered under the variations of gender, declension, and conjugation. The remaining two treated of constructio or syntax. As early as the tenth century Priscian was separated into these two parts, which came to be known as Priscianus major and minor. The Priscian manuscripts, whose name is legion, usually present the former. Diffuse in language, confused in arrangement, and overladen perhaps with its thousands of examples, it was berated for its labyrinthine qualities even in the Middle Ages; yet its sixteen books remained the chief source of etymological knowledge. Priscianus minor was less widely used.

The grammarians of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries followed Donatus and Priscian, making extracts from their works, or abridgements, and now and then introducing examples of deviation from the ancient usage. The last came usually from the Vulgate text of Scripture, which sometimes departed from the idioms or even word-forms approved by the old authorities.[179] The Ars minor of Donatus became enveloped in commentaries; but Priscian was so formidable that in these early centuries he was merely glossed, that is, annotated in brief marginal fashion.

[Pg 125]It would be tedious to dwell upon mediaeval grammatical studies. But the tendencies characterizing them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be indicated briefly. The substance of the Priscianus major was followed by mediaeval grammarians. That is to say, while admitting certain novelties,[180] they adhered to its rules and examples relating to the forms of words, their declension and conjugation. But the Priscianus minor, although used, was departed from. In the first place its treatment of its subject (syntax) was confused and inadequate. There was, however, a broader reason for seeking rules elsewhere. Mediaeval Latin, in its progress as a living or quasi-living language, departed from the classical norms far more in syntax and composition than in word-forms. The latter continued much the same as in antiquity. But the popular and so to speak Romance tendencies of mediaeval Latin brought radical changes of word-order and style, which worked back necessarily upon the rules of syntax. These had been but hazily stated by the old writers, and the task of constructing an adequate Latin syntax remained undone. It was a task of vital importance for the preservation of the Latin tongue. Word-forms alone will not preserve the continuity of a language; it is essential that their use in speech and writing should be kept congruous through appropriate principles of syntax. Such were intelligently formulated by mediaeval grammarians. The result was not exactly what it would have been had the task been carried out in the fourth century: yet it has endured in spite of the attacks, pseudo-attacks indeed, of the cinquecento; and the mediaeval treatment of Latin syntax is the basis of the modern treatment. One may add that syntax or constructio was taken broadly as embracing not only the agreements of number and gender, and the governing[181] of cases, but also the order of words in a sentence, which had changed so utterly between the time of Cicero and Thomas Aquinas.

These general statements find illustration in the famous Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei, whose author was[Pg 126] born in Normandy in the latter half of the twelfth century. He studied at Paris, and in course of time was summoned by the Bishop of Dol to instruct his nepotes in grammar. While acting as their tutor, he appears to have helped their memory by setting his rules in rhyme; and the bishop asked him to write a Summa of grammar in some such fashion. Complying, he composed the Doctrinale in the year 1199, putting his work into leonine or rhyming hexameter, to make it easier to memorize. Rarely has a school-book met with such success. It soon came into use in Paris and elsewhere, and for some three hundred years was the common manual of grammatical teaching throughout western Europe. It was then attacked and apparently driven from the field by the so-called Humanists, who, however, failed to offer anything better in its place, and plagiarized from the work which they professed to execrate.[182]

The etymological portions of the Doctrinale follow the teachings of the Priscianus major; the part devoted to syntax, or constructio, shows traces of the influence of the Priscianus minor. But Alexander’s treatment of syntax is more systematic and elaborate than Priscian’s; and he did not hesitate to defer to the Vulgate and other Christian Latin writings. Thus he made his work conform to contemporary usage, which its purpose was to set forth. He did the same in the section on Prosody, in which he says that the ancient metricians distinguished a number of feet no longer used, and he will confine himself to six—the dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapaest, iambus, and tribrach.[183] In contradiction to classical usage he condemns elision;[184] and in his chapter on accent he throws over the ancient rules:

Alexander was not really an innovator. He followed[Pg 127] previous grammarians in condemning elision, and in what he says of quantity and accent. In his syntax he endeavoured to set forth rules conforming to the best Latin usage of his time, like other mediaeval grammarians before him. He was indeed vehement in his advocacy of recent and Christian authors as standards of writing, and he inveighed against the scholars of Orleans, who read the Classics, and would have us sacrifice to the gods and observe the indecent festivals of Faunus and Jove.[186] But others defended the Orleans school, and perhaps still regarded the Classics as the best arbiters of grammar and eloquence. There exist thirteenth-century grammars which follow Priscian more closely than Alexander does.[187] Yet his work represents the dominant tendencies of his time.

Twelfth and thirteenth century grammarians recommended to their pupils a variety of reading, in which mediaeval and early Christian compositions held as large a place as Virgil and Ovid. The Doctrinale advocates no work more emphatically than Petrus Riga’s Aurora, a versified paraphrase of Scripture. Its author was a chorister in Rheims, and died in 1209.[188] The works of scholastic philosophers were not cited as frequently as the compositions of verse-writers; yet mediaeval grammarians were influenced by the language of philosophy, and drew from its training principles which they applied to their own science. Grammar could not help becoming dialectical when the intellectual world was turning to logic and metaphysics. Commencing in the twelfth century, overmasteringly in the thirteenth, logic penetrated grammar and compelled an application of its principles. Often grammarians might better have looked to linguistic usage than to dialectic; yet if grammar was to become a rational science, it had to systematize itself through principles of logic, and make use of dialectic in its endeavour to state a reason for its rules. Those who applied logic to grammar at least endeavoured to distinguish between the two, not always fruitfully. But[Pg 128] a real difference could not fail to assert itself inasmuch as logic was in truth of universal application, while mediaeval grammar never ceased to be the grammar of the Latin language. Nevertheless its terminology was largely drawn from logic.[189]

So dialectic brought both good and ill, proving itself helpful in the regulation of syntax, but banefully affecting grammarians with the conviction that language was the creature of reason, and must conform to principles of logic. One likewise notes with curious interest, that, from their dialectic training apparently, grammarians first found as many species of grammar as languages,[190] and then forsook this idea for the view that, in order to be a science, grammar must be universal, or, as they phrased it, one, and must possess principles not applicable specially to Greek or Latin, but to congruous construction in the abstract; “de constructione congrua secundum quod abstrahit ab omni lingua speciali,” are the words of the English thirteenth-century philosopher and grammarian, Robert Kilwardby.[191] A like idea affected Roger Bacon, who composed a Greek grammar,[192] which appears to have been intended as the first part of a work upon the grammars of the learned languages other than Latin. It was adapted to afford a grounding in the elements of Greek: yet it touches matters in a way showing that the writer had thought deeply on the affinities of languages and the common principles of grammar. Of this the following passage is evidence:

The dialecticizing of grammar took place in the north, under influences radiating from Paris, the chief dialectic centre. These did not deeply affect grammatical studies in Italy, or in the Midi of France, which in some respects exhibited like intellectual tendencies. Grammar was zealously studied in Italy, but it did not there become either speculative or dialectical. To be sure northern manuals were used, especially the Doctrinale; but the study remained practical, an art rather than a science, and its chief element, or end, was the ars dictaminis or dictandi. The grammatical treatises of Italians were treatises upon this art of epistolary composition and the proper ways of drawing documents. These works were studied also in the North, where the ars dictaminis was by no means neglected.[195]

Latin grammar, although over-dialecticized in the North, and in Italy made very practical, remained of necessity the foundation of classical studies, and of mediaeval literary effort, in prose and verse. As the basis of liberal studies, it had no truer home than the cathedral school of Chartres.[196] Contemporary writers picture the manner in which this study was there made to perform its most liberal office, under favourable mediaeval conditions, in the first[Pg 130] half of the twelfth century. The time antedates the Doctrinale, and one notes at once that the Chartrian masters used the ancient grammatical authorities. This is shown by the Eptateuchon of Thierry, who was headmaster (scholasticus) and then Chancellor there for a number of years between 1120 and 1150. As its name implies, the work was a manual, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the Seven Arts. Thierry compiled it from the writings of the “chief doctors on the arts.” He transcribed the Ars minor of Donatus and then portions of his larger work. Having commended this author for his conciseness and subtilty, Thierry next copied out the whole of Priscian. As text-books for the second branch of the Trivium, he gives Cicero’s De inventione rhetorica libri 2, Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri 4, De partitione oratoria dialogus, and concludes with the rhetorical writings of Martianus Capella and J. Severianus.[197]

So much for the books. Now for the method of teaching as described by John of Salisbury. He gives the practice of Bernard of Chartres, Thierry’s elder brother, who was scholasticus and Chancellor before him, in the first quarter of the twelfth century. John has been advocating the study of grammar as the fundamentum atque radix of those exercises by which virtue and philosophy are reached; and he is advising a generous reading of the Classics by the student, and their constant use by the professor, to illustrate his teaching.

This passage indicates with what generous use of the auctores Bernard expounded grammar and explained the orators and poets; how he assigned portions of their works for memorizing, and with what care he corrected his pupils’ prose and metrical compositions, criticizing their knowledge and their taste. He was a man mindful of his[Pg 132] Christian piety toward the dead and living, but caring greatly for the Classics, and loving study. “The old man of Chartres (senex Carnotensis),” says John of Salisbury, meaning Bernard, “named wisdom’s keys in a few lines, and though I am not taken with the sweetness of the metre, I approve the sense:

Bernard, Thierry, and other masters and scholars of their school, as the advocates of classical education, detested the men called by John of Salisbury Cornificiani, who were for shortening the academic course, as one would say to-day, so that the student might finish it up in two or three years, and proceed to the business of life. A good many in the twelfth century adopted this notion, and turned from the pagan classics, not as impious, but as a waste of time. Some of the good scholars of Chartres lost heart, among them William of Conches and a certain Richard, both teachers of John of Salisbury. They had followed Bernard’s methods; “but when the time came that so many men, to the great prejudice of truth, preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers and professors of the arts, engaging to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three years, or even two, then my masters vanquished by the clamour of the ignorant crowd, stopped. Since then, less time has been given to grammar. So it has come about that those who profess to teach all the arts, both liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the first of them, without which vainly will one try to get the rest.”[200]

Upon these people who seemed charlatans, and yet may have represented tendencies of the coming time, Thierry, Gilbert de la Porrèe,[201] and John of Salisbury poured their sarcasms. The controversy may have clarified Bernard’s consciousness of the value of classical studies and deepened his sense of obligation to the ancients, until it drew from him perhaps the finest of mediaeval utterances touching the[Pg 133] matter: “Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness.”[202]

Echoes of this same controversy—have they ever quite died away?—are heard in letters of the scholarly Peter of Blois, who was educated at Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, became a secretary of Henry Plantagenet and spent the greater part of his life in England, dying about the year 1200. He writes to a friend:

In another letter Peter writes to his bishop of Bath, as touching the accusation of some “hidden detractor,” that he, Peter, is but a useless compiler, who fills letters and sermons with the plunder of the ancients and Holy Writ:

It is evident how broadly Peter of Blois, or John of Salisbury, or the Chartrians, were read in the Latin Classics. Peter mentions even Tacitus, a writer not thought to have been much read in the Middle Ages. We have been looking at the matter rather in regard to poetry and eloquence—belles lettres. But one may also note the same broad reading (among the few who read at all) on the part of those who sought for the ethical wisdom of the ancients. This is apparent (perhaps more apparent than real) with Abaelard, who is ready with a store of antique ethical citations.[205] It is also borne witness to by the treatise Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, placed among the works of Hildebert of Le Mans,[206] but probably from the pen of William of Conches, grammaticus post Bernardum Carnotensem opulentissimus, as John of Salisbury calls him.[207] In some manuscripts it is entitled Summa moralium philosophorum, quite appropriately. One might hardly compare it for organic inclusiveness with the Christian Summa of Thomas Aquinas; but it may very well be likened to the more compact Sentences of the Lombard[208] which were so solidly put together about the same time. The Lombard drew his Sentences from the writings of the Church Fathers; William’s work consists of moral extracts, mainly from Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Terence,[Pg 135] Horace, Lucan, and Boëthius. The first part, De honesto, reviews Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitudo, and under these a number of particular virtues in correspondence with which the extracts are arranged. The De utili considers the adventitious goods of circumstance and fortune.

The extracts forming the substance of this work were intelligently selected and smoothly joined; and the treatise was much used by those who studied the antique philosophy of life. It was drawn upon, for instance, by that truculent and well-born Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his De instructione principum, which the author wrote partly to show how evilly Henry Plantagenet performed the functions of a king. This irrepressible claimant of St. David’s See had been long a prickly thorn for Henry’s side.[209] But he was a scholar, and quotes from the whole range of the Latin Classics.

 

III

When a man is not a mere transcriber, but puts something of himself into the product of his pen, his work will reflect his personality, and may disclose the various factors of his spiritual constitution. To discover from the writings of mediaeval scholars the effect of their classical studies upon their characters is of greater interest than to trace from their citations the authors read by them. Such a compilation as the Summa moralium which has just been noticed, while plainly disclosing the latter information, tells nothing of the personality of him who strung the extracts together. Yet he had read writings which could hardly have failed to influence him. Cicero and Seneca do not leave their reader unchanged, especially if he be seeking ethical instruction. And there was a work known to this particular compiler which moved men in the Middle Ages. Deep must have been the effect of that book so widely read and pondered on and loved, the De consolatione of Boëthius with its intimate consolings, its ways of reasoning and looking upon life, its setting of the intellectual above the physical, its insistence[Pg 136] that mind rather than body makes the man. Imagine it brought home to a vigorous struggling personality—imagine Alfred reading and translating it, and adding to it from the teachings of his own experience.[210] The study of such a book might form the turning of a mediaeval life; at least could not fail to temper the convulsions of a soul storm-driven amid unreconcilable spiritual conflicts.

One may look back even to the time of Alfred or Charlemagne and note suggestions coming from classical reading. For instance, the antique civilization being essentially urban, words denoting qualities of disciplined and polished men had sprung from city life, as contrasted with rustic rudeness. Thus the word urbanitas passed over into mediaeval use when the quality itself hardly existed outside of the transmitted Latin literature. For an Anglo-Saxon or a Frank to use and even partly comprehend its significance meant his introduction to a new idea. Alcuin writes to Charlemagne that he knows how it rejoices the latter to meet with zeal for learning and church discipline, and how pleasing to him is anything which is seasoned with a touch of wit—urbanitatis sale conditum.[211] And again, in more curious phrase, he compliments a certain worthy upon his metrical exposition of the creed, “wherein I have found gold-spouting whirlpools (aurivomos gurgites) of spiritual meanings abounding with gems of scholastic wit (scholasticae urbanitatis).”[212] Though doubtless this “scholastic wit” was flat enough, it was something for these men to get the notion of what was witty and entertaining through a word so vocalized with city life as urbanitas, a word that we have seen used quite knowingly by the more sophisticated scholar, Peter of Blois.

Again, it is matter of common observation that a feeling for nature’s loveliness depends somewhat on the growth of towns. But mediaeval men constantly had the idea suggested to them by the classic poetry of city-dwelling poets. Here are some lines by Alcuin or one of his friends, expressing sentiments which never came to them from the woods with which they were disagreeably familiar:

These are little hints of the effect of the antique literature upon men who still were somewhat rough-hewn. Advancing a century and a half, the influence of classic study is seen, as it were, “in the round” in Gerbert.[214] It is likewise clear and full in John of Salisbury, of whom we have spoken, and shall speak again.[215] For an admirable example, however, of the subtle working of the antique literature upon character and temperament, we may look to that scholar-prelate whose letters the youthful Peter of Blois studied with profit, Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Le Mans, and Archbishop of Tours. He shows the effect of the antique not so strikingly in the knowledge which he possessed or the particular opinions which he entertained, as in the balance and temperance of his views, and incidentally in his fine facility of scholarship.

Hildebert was born at Lavardin, a village near the mouth of the Loire, about the year 1055. He belonged to an unimportant but gentle family. Dubious tradition has it that one of his teachers was Berengar of Tours, and that he passed some time in the monastery of Cluny, of whose great abbot, Hugh, he wrote a life. It is more probable that he studied at Le Mans. But whatever appears to have been the character of his early environment, Hildebert belongs essentially to the secular clergy, and never was a monk. While comparatively young, he was made head of the cathedral school of Le Mans, and then archdeacon. In the year 1096, the old bishop of Le Mans died, and Hildebert, then about forty years of age, was somewhat quickly chosen his successor, by the clergy and people of the town, in spite of the protests of certain of the canons of the cathedral. The none too happy scholar-bishop found himself at once a powerless but not negligible element of a violently complicated feudal situation. There was the noble Helias,[Pg 138] Count of Maine, who was holding his domain against Robert de Bellesme, the latter slackly supported by William Rufus of England, who claimed the overlordship of the land. Helias reluctantly acquiesced in Hildebert’s election. Not so Rufus, who never ceased to hate and persecute the man that had obtained the see which had been in the gift of his father, William the Conqueror. It happened soon after that Count Helias was taken prisoner by his opponent, and was delivered over to Rufus at Rouen. But Fulk of Anjou now thrust himself into this feudal mêlée, appeared at Le Mans, entered, and was acknowledged as its lord. He left a garrison, and departed before the Red King reached the town. The latter began its siege, but soon made terms with Fulk, by which Le Mans was to be given to Rufus, Helias was to be set free, and many other matters were left quite unsettled.

Now Rufus entered the town (1098), where Hildebert nervously received him; Helias, set free by the King, offered to become his feudal retainer; Rufus would have none of him; so Helias defied the King, and was permitted to go his way by that strange man, who held his knightly honour sacred, but otherwise might commit any atrocity prompted by rage or greed. It was well for Helias that trouble with the French King now drew Rufus to the north. The next year, 1099, Rufus in England heard that the Count had renewed the war, and captured Le Mans, except the citadel. He hurried across the channel, rushed through the land, entered Le Mans, and passed on through it, chasing Helias. But the war languished, and Rufus returned to Le Mans, or to what was left of it. Hildebert had cause to tremble. He had met the King on the latter’s hurried arrival from England for the war. Rufus had spoken him fair. But now, at Le Mans, he was accused before the monarch of complicity in the revolt. Quickly flared the King’s anger against the man whom he never had ceased to detest. He ordered him to pull down the towers of his cathedral, which rose threatening and massive over the city’s ruins and the citadel of the King. What could the defenceless bishop do to avert disgrace and the desolation of his beloved church? Words were left him, but they did not prove effectual. Rufus commanded him to choose between immediate compliance[Pg 139] and going to England, there to submit himself to the judgment of the English bishops. He accepted the latter alternative, and followed the King, leaving his diocese ruined and his people dispersed. In England, Rufus dangled him along between fear and hope, till at last the disheartened prelate returned to the Continent, having ambiguously consented to pull down those towers. But instead, he set to work to repair the devastation of his diocese. The reiterated mandate of the King was not long in following him, and this time coupled with an accusation of treason. Hildebert’s state was desperate. His clergy were forbidden to obey him, his palace was sacked, his own property destroyed. Such were William’s methods of persuasion. Then the King proposed that the bishop should purge himself by the ordeal of hot iron. Hildebert, the bishop, the theologian, the scholar, was almost on the verge of taking up the challenge, when a letter from Yves, the saintly Bishop of Chartres, dissuaded him. At this moment, with ruin for his portion, and no escape, an arrow ended the Red King’s life in the New Forest. It was the year of grace 1100.

Now, what a change! Henry Beauclerc was from the first his friend, as William Rufus to the last had been his enemy. Hitherto Hildebert has appeared weakly endeavouring to elude destruction, and perhaps with no unshaken loyalty in his bosom toward any cause except his dire necessities. Henceforth, sailing a calmer sea, he repays Henry’s favour with adherence and admiration. He has no support to offer Anselm of Canterbury, still struggling with the English monarchy over investitures; nor has he one word of censure for the clever cold-eyed scholar King who kept his brother, Robert of Normandy, a prisoner for twenty-eight years till he died.

Hildebert had still thirty years of life before him; nor were they all to be untroubled. Shortly after the Red King’s death, he made a voyage to Rome, to obtain the papal benediction. To judge from his poems, he was deeply impressed with the ruins of the ancient city. Returning he devoted himself to the affairs of his diocese and to rebuilding the cathedral and other churches of Le Mans. In 1125, in spite of his unwillingness, for he was seventy years old, he[Pg 140] was enthroned Archbishop of Tours, where he was to be worried by disputes with Louis le Gros of France over investitures. But he acquitted himself with vigour, especially through his letters. A famous one relates to this struggle of his closing years:

[Pg 141]Hildebert was a classical scholar, and in his time unmatched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them so antique in sentiment and so correct in metre as to have been taken for products of the pagan period. One of the best is an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his visit to that city of ruins:

Its closing lines are interesting:

Such phrases, such frank admiration for the idols of pagan Rome, are startling from the pen of a contemporary of St. Bernard. The spell of the antique lay on Hildebert, as on others of his time. “The gods themselves marvel at their own images, and desire to equal their sculptured forms. Nature was unable to make gods with such visages as man has created in these wondrous images of the gods. There is a look (vultus) about these deities, and they are worshipped for the skill of the sculptor rather than for their divinity.”[217] Hildebert was not only a bishop, he was a Christian; but the sense and feeling of ancient Rome had entered into him. Besides the poem just quoted, he wrote another, either in Rome or after his return, Christian in thought but most antique in sympathy and turn of phrase.

The antique feeling of these lines is hardly balanced by the expressed sentiment: “plus Caesare Petrus!”[218] And again we hear the echo of the antique in

Hildebert has also a poem “On his Exile,” perhaps written while in England with the Red King. Quite in antique style it sings the loss of friends and fields, gardens and granaries, which the writer possessed while prospera fata smiled. Then

—a very antique sentiment. But the Christian faith of the despoiled and exiled bishop reasserts itself as the poem closes.[220] Did Hildebert also write the still more palpably “antique” elegiacs on Hermaphrodite, and other questionable subjects?[221] That is hard to say. He may or may not have been the author of a somewhat scurrilous squib against a woman who seems to have sent him verses:

With all his classical leanings, the major part of Hildebert was Christian. His theological writings which survive, his zeal against certain riotous heretics, and in general his letters, leave no doubt of this. It is from the Christian point of view that he gives his sincerest counsels; it is from that that he balances the advantages of an active or contemplative life, the claims of the Christian vita activa and vita contemplativa. Yet his classic tastes gave temperance to his Christian views, and often drew him to sheer scholarly pleasures and to an antique consideration of the incidents of life.

How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, that[Pg 143] Goliath of realism whom Abaelard discomfited in the Paris schools. The unhappy William retreated a little way across the Seine, and laid the foundations of the abbey of St. Victor in the years between 1108 and 1113. He sought to abandon his studies and his lectures, and surrender himself to the austere salvation of his soul, and yet scarcely with such irrevocable purpose as would rebuff the temperate advice of Hildebert’s letter proffered with tactful understanding.

Eventually William followed this, or other like advice. One sees Hildebert’s sympathetic point of view; he entirely approves of William’s renunciation of the world—a good bishop of the twelfth century might also have wished to renounce its troublous honours! Yes, William has at last turned to the true and most disburdened way of living. But this abandonment of worldly ends entails no abandonment of Christian knowledge or surrender of the cause of Christian[Pg 144] learning. Nay, let William resume, and herein give himself to God’s will without reserve.

So the letter presents a temperate and noble view of the matter, a view as sound in the twentieth century as in the twelfth. And a like broad consideration Hildebert brings to a more particular discussion of the two modes of Christian living, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary. He amply distinguishes these two ways of serving God from any mode of life with selfish aims. It happened that a devout monk and friend of Hildebert was made abbot of the monastery of St. Vincent, in the neighbourhood of Le Mans. The administrative duties of an abbot might be as pressing as a bishop’s, and this good man deplored his withdrawal from a life of more complete contemplation. So Hildebert wrote him a long discursive letter, of which our extracts will give the thread of argument:

And Hildebert descants upon the raptures of the vita contemplativa, of which his friend is now bereft.

And in closing, Hildebert shows his friend the abbot that for him the true course is to follow Jacob interchanging Leah and Rachel; and then in the watches of his pastoral duties the celestial vision shall be also his.[224]

Could any one adjust more fairly this contest, so insistent throughout the annals of mediaeval piety, between active duties and heavenly contemplation? The only solution for abbot and bishop was to join Leah with Rachel. And how clearly Hildebert sees the pervasive peril of the active life, that the prelate be drawn to serve his pleasures and not Christ. Many souls of prelates had that cast into hell!

In theory Hildebert is clear as day, and altogether Christian, so far as we have followed the counsels of these letters. But in fact the quiet life had for him a temptation, to which he yielded himself more generously than to any of[Pg 146] the grosser lures of his high prelacy. This temptation, so alluring and insidious, so fairly masked under the proffer of learning leading to fuller Christian knowledge, was of course the all too beloved pagan literature, and the all too humanly convincing plausibilities of pagan philosophy. Hildebert’s writings evince that kind of classical scholarship which springs only from great study and great love. His soul does not appear to have been riven by a consciousness of sin in this behoof. Sometimes he passes so gently from Christian to pagan ethics, as to lead one to suspect that he did not deeply feel the inconsistency between them. Or again, he seems satisfied with the moral reasonings of paganism, and sets them forth without a qualm. For there was the antique pagan side of our good bishop; and how pagan thoughts and views of life had become a part of Hildebert’s nature, appears in a most interesting letter written to King Henry, consoling him upon the loss of his son and the noble company so gaily sailing from Normandy in that ill-starred White Ship in the year 1120.

Hildebert begins reminding the King how much more it is for a monarch to rule himself than others. Hitherto he has triumphed over fortune, if fortune be anything; now she has wounded him with her sharpest dart. Yet that cannot penetrate the well-guarded mind. It is wisdom not to vaunt oneself in prosperity, nor be overwhelmed with grief in adversity. Hildebert then reasons on the excellence of man’s nature and will; he speaks of the effect of Adam’s sin in loss of grace and entailment of misery on the human race. He quotes from the Old Testament and from Virgil. Then he proceeds more specifically with his fortifying arguments. Their sum is, let the breast of man abound in weapons of defence and contemn the thrusts of fortune; there is nothing over which the triumphant soul may not triumph.

[Pg 147]After a while Hildebert passes on to consider what is man, and wherein consists his welfare:

Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches—bona vaga, bona sunt pennata haec omnia. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things—ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania.[226]

No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert’s ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique; while the emotion, the love and yearning, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity.

 

 

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[Pg 148]

CHAPTER XXXI

EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE

Classical antiquity lay far back of the mediaeval period, while in the nearer background pressed the centuries of transition, the time of the Church Fathers. The patristic material and a crude knowledge of the antique passed over to the early Middle Ages. Mediaeval progress was to consist, very largely, in the mastery and appropriation of the one and the other.

The varied illustration of these propositions has filled a large portion of this work. In this and the next chapter we are concerned with literature, properly speaking; and with the effect of the Classics, the pure literary antique, upon mediaeval literary productions. The latter are to be viewed as literature; not considering their substance, but their form, their composition, style, and temperamental shading, qualities which show the faculties and temper of their authors. We are to discover, if we can, wherein the qualities of mediaeval literature reflect the Latin Classics, or in any way betray their influence.

It is an affair of dull diligence to learn what Classics were read by the various mediaeval writers; and likewise is it a dull affair to note in mediaeval writings the direct borrowing from the Classics of fact, opinion, sentiment, or phrase. Such borrowing was incessant, resorted to as of course wherever opportunity offered and the knowledge was at hand. It would not commonly occur to a mediaeval writer to state in his own way what he could take from an ancient author, save in so far as change of medium—from prose to verse, or from Latin to the vernacular—compelled[Pg 149] him. So the church builders in Rome never thought of hewing new blocks of stone, or making new columns, when some ancient palace or temple afforded a quarry. The details of such spoliations offer little interest in comparison with the effect of antique architecture upon later styles. So we should like to discover the effect of the ancient compositions upon the mediaeval, and observe how far the faculties and mental processes of classic authors, incorporate in their writings, were transmitted to mediaeval men, to become incorporate in theirs.

Unless you are Virgil or Cicero, you cannot write like Virgil or Cicero. Writing, real writing, that is to say, creative self-expressive composition, is the personal product and closely mirrored reflex of the writer’s temperament and mentality. It gives forth indirectly the influences which have blended in him, education and environment, his past and present. His personality makes his style, his untransmittable style. Yet a group of men affected by the same past, and living at the same time and place, or under like spiritual influences, may show a like faculty and taste. Having more in common with one another than with men of other time, their mental processes, and therefore their ways of writing, will present more common qualities. Around and above them, as well as through their natal and acquired faculties, sweeps the genius of the language, itself the age-long product of a like-minded race. In harmony with it, not in opposition and repugnancy, each writer must, if he will write that language, shape his more personal diction.

Obviously the personal elements in classic writings were no more capable of transmission than the personal qualities of the writers. Likewise, the genius of the Latin language, though one might think it fixed in approved compositions, changed with the spiritual fortune of the Roman people, and constantly transmitted an altered self and novel tenets of construction to control the linguistic usages of succeeding men. None but himself could have written Cicero’s letters. No man of Juvenal’s time could have written the Aeneid, nor any man of the time of Diocletian the histories of Tacitus. There were, however, common elements in these[Pg 150] compositions, all of them possessing certain qualities which are associated with classical writing. These may be difficult to formulate, but they become clear enough in contrast with the qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. The mediaeval man did not feel and reason like a contemporary of Virgil or Cicero; he had not the same training in Greek literature; he did not have the same definitude of conception, did not care so much that a composition should have limit and the unity springing from adherence to a single topic; he did not, in fine, stand on the same level of attainment and faculty and taste with men of the Augustan time. He had his own heights and depths, his own temperament and predilections, his own capacities. Reading the Classics had not transformed him into Cicero or Seneca, or set his feet in the Roman Forum. His feet wandered in the ways of the Middle Ages, and whatever he wrote in prose or verse, in Latin or in his own vernacular, was himself and of himself, and but indirectly due to the antecedent influences which had been transmuted even in entering his nature and becoming part of his temper and faculty.

Any consideration of the knowledge and appreciation of the Classics in the Middle Ages would be followed naturally by a consideration of their effect upon mediaeval composition; which in turn forms part of any discussion of the literary qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. But inasmuch as mediaeval form and diction tend to remove further and further from classical standards, the whole discussion may seem a lucus a non lucendo for all the light it throws upon the effect of the Classics on mediaeval literature. Our best plan will be to note the beginnings of mediaeval Latinity in that post-Augustan and largely patristic diction which had been enriched and reinvigorated with many phrases from daily speech; and then to follow the living if sluggish river as it moves on, receiving increment along its course, its currents mottled with the silt of mediaeval Italy, France, Germany. We shall suppose this flood to divide in rivers of Latin prose and verse; and we may follow them, and see where they overflow their channels, carrying antique flotsam into the ample marshes of vernacular poetry.

[Pg 151]There has always been a difference in diction between speech and literature. At Rome, Cicero and Caesar, and of course the poets, did not, in writing, use quite the language of the people. All the words of daily speech were not taken into the literary or classical vocabulary, which had often quite other words of its own. Moreover the writers, in forming their prose and verse and constructing their compositions, were affected deeply by their study of Greek literature.[227] If Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and their friends spoke differently from the Roman shopkeepers, there was a still greater difference between their writings and the parlance of the town.

No one need be told that it was the spoken, and not the classical Latin, which in Italy, Spain, Provence, and Northern France developed into Italian, Spanish, Provençal, and French. On the other hand, the descent of written mediaeval Latin from the classical diction or the popular speech, or both, is not so clear, or at least not so simple. It cannot be said that mediaeval Latin came straight from the classical; and manifestly it cannot have sprung from the popular spoken Latin, like the Romance tongues, without other influence or admixture; because then, instead of remaining Latin, it would have become Romance; which it did not. Evidently mediaeval Latin, the literary and to some extent the spoken medium of educated men in the Middle Ages, must have carried classic strains, or have kept itself Latin by the study of Latin grammar and a conscious adherence to a veritable, if not classical, Latin diction. The mediaeval reading of the Classics, and the earnest and constant study of Latin grammar spoken of in the previous chapter, were the chief means by which mediaeval Latin maintained its Latinity. Nevertheless, while it kept the word forms and inflections of classical Latin, with most of the classical vocabulary, it also took up an indefinite[Pg 152] supplement of words from the spoken Latin of the late imperial or patristic period.

In order to understand the genesis and qualities of mediaeval Latin, one must bear in mind (as with most things mediaeval) that its immediate antecedents lie in the transitional fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and not in the classical period.[228] Those centuries went far toward declassicizing Latin prose, by departing from the balanced structure of the classic sentences and introducing words from the spoken tongue. The style became less correct, freer, and better suited to the expression of the novel thoughts and interests coming with Christianity. The change is seen in the works of the men to whom it was largely due, Tertullian, Jerome, and other great patristic writers.[229] Such men knew the Classics well, and regarded them as literary models, and yet wrote differently. For a new spirit was upon them and new necessities of expression, and they lived when, even outside of Christian circles, the classic forms of style were loosening with the falling away of the strenuous intellectual temper, the poise, the self-reliance and the self-control distinguishing the classical epoch.

The stylistic genius of Augustine and Jerome was not the genius of the formative beginnings of the Romance tongues, with, for instance, its inability to rely on the close logic of the case ending, and its need to help the meaning by the more explicit preposition. Yet the spirit of these two great men was turning that way. They were not classic writers, but students of the Classics, who assisted their own genius by the study of what no longer was themselves. So in the following centuries the most careful Latin writers are students of the Classics, and do not study Jerome and Augustine for style. Yet their writings carry out the tendencies beginning (or rather not beginning) with these two.

It was not in diction alone that the Fathers were the forerunners of mediaeval writers. Classic Latin authors, both[Pg 153] from themselves and through their study of Greek literature, had the sense and faculty of form. Their works maintain a clear sequence of thought, along with strict pertinency to the main topic, or adherence to the central current of the narrative, avoiding digression and refraining from excessive amplification. The classic writer did not lose himself in his subject, or wander with it wherever it might lead him. But in patristic writings the subject is apt to dominate the man, draw him after its own necessities, or by its casual suggestions cause him to digress. The Fathers in their polemic or expository works became prolix and circumstantial, intent, like a lawyer with a brief, on proving every point and leaving no loophole to the adversary. In their works literary unity and strict sequence of argument may be cast to the winds. Above all, as it seems to us, and as it would have seemed to Caesar or Cicero or Tacitus, allegorical interpretation carries them at its own errant and fantastic will into footless mazes.

Yet whoever will understand and appreciate the writings of the Fathers and of the mediaeval generations after them, should beware of inelastic notions. The question of unity hangs on what the writer deems the veritable topic of his work, and that may be the universal course of the providence of God, which was the subject of Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Indeed, the infinite relationship of any Christian topic was like enough to break through academic limits of literary unity. Likewise, the proper sequence of thought depends on what constitutes the true connection between one matter and another; it must follow what with the writer are the veritable relationships of his topics. If the visible facts of a man’s environment and the narratives of history are to him primarily neither actual facts nor literal narratives, but symbols and allegories of spiritual things, then the true sequence of thought for him is from symbol to symbol and from allegory to allegory. He is justified in ignoring the apparent connection of visible facts and the logic of the literal story, and in surrendering himself to that sequence of thought which follows what is for him the veritable significance of the matter.

Yet here we must apply another standard besides that[Pg 154] of the writer’s conception of his subject’s significance. He should be wise, and not foolish. Other men and later ages will judge him according to their own best wisdom. And with respect to the writings of the Fathers viewed as literature, the modern critic cannot fail to see them entering upon that course of prolixity which in mediaeval writings will develop into the endless; looking forward, he will see their errant habits resolving into the mediaeval lack of determined topic, and their symbolically driven sequences of thought turning into the most ridiculous topical transitions, as the less cogent faculties of later men permit themselves to be suggested anywhither.

The Fathers developed their distinguishing qualities of style and language under the demands of the topics absorbing them, and the influence of modes of feeling coming with Christianity. They were compelling an established language to express novel matter. In the centuries after them, further changes were to come through the linguistic tendencies moulding the evolution of the Romance tongues, through the counter influence of the study of grammar and rhetoric, and also through the ignorance and intellectual limitations of the writers. But as with the Latin of the Fathers, so with the Latin of the Middle Ages, the change of style and language was intimately and spiritually dependent upon the minds and temperaments of the writers and the qualities of the subjects for which they were seeking an expression. A profound influence in the evolution of mediaeval Latin was the continual endeavour of the mediaeval genius to express the thoughts and feelings through which it was becoming itself. With impressive adequacy and power the Christian writers of the Middle Ages moulded their inherited and acquired Latin tongue to utter the varied matters which moved their minds and lifted up their hearts. We marvel to see a language which once had told the stately tale of Rome here lowered to fantastic incident and dull stupidity, then with almost gospel simplicity telling the moving story of some saintly life; again sonorously uttering thoughts to lift men from the earth and denunciations crushing them to hell; quivering with hope and fear and love, and chanting the last verities of the human soul.

[Pg 155]As to the evolution of various styles of written Latin from the close of the patristic period on through the following centuries, one may premise the remark that there would commonly be two opposite influences upon the writer; that of the genius of his native tongue, and that of his education in Latinity. If he lived in a land where Teutonic speech had never given way to the spoken Latin of the Empire, his native tongue would be so different from the Latin which he learned at school, that while it might impede, it could hardly draw to its own genius the learned language. But in Romance countries there was no such absolute difference between the vernacular and the Latin, and the analytic genius of the growing Romance dialects did not fail to affect the latter. Accordingly in France, for example, the spoken Latin dialect, or one may say the genius that was forming the old French dialects to what they were to be, tends to break up the ancient periods, to introduce the auxiliary verb in the place of elaborate inflections, and rely on prepositions instead of case endings, which were disappearing and whose force was ceasing to be felt. One result was to simplify the order of words in a sentence; for it was not possible to move a noun with its accompanying preposition wherever it had been feasible to place a noun whose relation to the rest of the sentence was felt from its case ending. Gregory of Tours is the famous example of these tendencies, with his Historia francorum, an ideal forerunner of Froissart. He became Bishop of Tours in the year 573. In his writings he followed the instincts of the inchoate Romance tongues. He acknowledges and perhaps overstates his ignorance of Latin grammar and the rules of composition. Such ignorance was destined to become still blanker; and ignorance in itself was a disintegrating influence upon written Latin, and also gave freer play to the gathering tendencies of Romance speech.

Evidently, had all these influences worked unchecked, they would have obliterated Latinity from mediaeval Latin. Grammatical and rhetorical education countered them effectively, and the mighty genius of the ancient language endured in the extant masterpieces. Nevertheless the spirit of classical Latinity was never again to be a spontaneous[Pg 156] creative power. The most that men thenceforth could do was to study, and endeavour to imitate, the forms in which it had embodied its living self.

In brief, some of the chief influences upon the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages were: the classical genius dead, leaving only its works for imitation; the school education in Latin grammar and rhetoric; endeavour to follow classic models and write correctly; inability to do so from lack of capacity and knowledge; conscious disregard of classicism; the spirit of the Teutonic tongues clogging Latinity, and that of the Romance tongues deflecting it from classical constructions; and finally, the plastic faculties of advancing Christian mediaeval civilization educing power from confusion, and creating modes of language suited to express the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men.

The life, that is to say the living development, of mediaeval Latin prose, was to lie in the capacity of successive generations of educated men to maintain a sufficient grammatical correctness, while at the same time writing Latin, not classically, but in accordance with the necessities and spirit of their times. There resulted an enormous literature which was not dead, nor altogether living, and lacked throughout the spontaneity of writings in a mother tongue; for Latin was not the speech of hearth and home, nor everywhere the tongue of the market-place and camp. But it was the language of mediaeval education and acquired culture; it was the language also of the universal church, and, above all other tongues, expressed the thoughts by which men were saved or damned. More profoundly than any vernacular mediaeval literature, the Latin literature of the Middle Ages expresses the mediaeval mind. It thundered with the authority that held the keys of heaven; it was resonant with feeling, and through long centuries gave voice to emotions, shattering, terror-stricken, convulsively loving. When, say with the close of the eleventh century, the mediaeval peoples had absorbed with power the teachings of patristic Christianity, and had undergone some centuries of Latin schooling, and when under these two chief influences certain distinctive and homogeneous ways of thinking, feeling, and looking upon life, had been reached; when, in[Pg 157] fine, the Middle Ages had become themselves and had evolved a genius that could create,—then and from that time appears the adaptability and power of mediaeval Latin to serve the ends of intellectual effort and the expression of emotion.

To estimate the literary qualities of classical Latin is a simpler task than to judge the Latinity and style of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. Classic Latin prose has a common likeness. In general one feels that what Cicero and Caesar would have rejected, Tacitus and Quintilian would not have admitted. The syntax of these writers shows still greater uniformity. No such common likeness, or avoidance of stylistic aberration and grammatical solecism, obtains in mediaeval prose or verse. The one and the other include many kinds of Latin, and vary from century to century, diversified in idiom and deflected from linguistic uniformity by influences of race and native speech, of ignorance and knowledge. He who would appreciate mediaeval Latin will be diffident of academic standards, and mistrust his classical predilections lest he see aberration and barbarism where he might discover the evolution of new constructions and novel styles; lest he bestow encomium upon clever imitations of classical models, and withhold it from more living creations of the mediaeval spirit. He will realize that to appreciate mediaeval Latin literature, he must shelve his Virgil and his Cicero.[230]

The following pages do not offer themselves even as a slight sketch of mediaeval Latin literature. Their purpose is to indicate the stages of development of the prose and the phases of evolution of the verse; and to illustrate the way in which antique themes and antique knowledge passed into vernacular poetry. Classical standards will supply us less with a point of view than with a point of departure.[Pg 158] Nothing more need be said of the Latin of the Church Fathers and Gregory of Tours. But one must refer to the Carolingian period, in order to appreciate the Latin styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The revival of education and classical scholarship under the strong rule and fostering care of the greatest of mediaeval monarchs has not always been rightly judged. The vision of that prodigious personality ruling, christianizing, striving to civilize masses of barbarians and barbarized descendants of Romans and provincials; at the same time with eager interest endeavouring to revive the culture of the past, and press it into the service of the Christian faith; the striking success of his endeavours, men of learning coming from Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, creating a peripatetic centre of knowledge at the imperial court, and establishing schools in many a monastery and episcopal residence—all this has never failed to arouse enthusiasm for the great achievement, and has veiled the creative deadness of it all, a deadness which in some provinces of intellectual endeavour was quite veritably moribund, while in others it betokened the necessary preparation for creative epochs to come.[231]

Carolingian scholarship was directed to the mastery of Latin. Grammar was taught, and the rules of composition. Then the scholars were bidden, or bade themselves, do likewise. So they wrote verse or prose according to their school lessons. They might write correctly; but they had no style of their own. This was hopelessly true as to their metrical verses;[232] it was only somewhat less tangibly true of their prose. The “classic” of the period, in the eyes of modern classical scholars and also in the opinion of the mediaeval centuries, is Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. Numberless encomiums have been passed on it, and justly too. It was an excellent imitation of Suetonius’s Life of Augustus; and the writer had made a careful study of Caesar and Livy.[233] There is no need to quote from a writing so accessible and well known. Yet one remark may be added to what others have said: if Einhard’s composition[Pg 159] was an excellent copy of classical Latin it was nothing else; it has no stylistic individuality.[234]

Turning from this famous biography, we will illustrate our point by quoting from the letters of him who stands as the type of the Carolingian revival, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin. All praise to this noble educational coadjutor of Charlemagne; his learning was conscientious; his work was important, his character was lovable. His affectionate nature speaks in a letter to his former brethren at York, where his home had been before he entered Charlemagne’s service. Here is a sentence:

It were invidious to find fault with this Latin, in which the homesick man expresses his hope of sepulture in his old home. Note also the balance of the following, written to a sick friend:

This too is excellent, in language as in sentiment. So is another, and last, sentence from our author, in a letter congratulating Charlemagne on his final subjugation of the Huns, through which the survivors were brought to a knowledge of the truth:

Again, the only trouble is stylelessness. In fine, an absence[Pg 160] of quality characterizes Carolingian prose, of which a last example may be taken from the Spaniard Theodulphus, Bishop of Orleans, “an accomplished Latin poet,” and an educator yielding in importance to Alcuin alone. The sentence is from an official admonition to the clergy, warning them to attach more value to salvation than to lucre:

Evidently there was a good knowledge of Latin among these Carolingians, who laboured for the revival of education and the preservation of the Classics. The nadir of classical learning falls in the succeeding period of break-up, confusion, and dawning re-adjustment. In the century or two following the year 850, the writers were too unskilled in Latin and often too cumbered by it, to manifest in their writings that unhampered and distinctive reflex of a personality which we term style. A rare exception would appear in such a potent scholar as Gerbert, who mastered whatever he learned, and made it part of his own faculties and temperament. His letters, consequently, have an individual style, however good or bad we may be disposed to deem it.[239]

Accordingly, until after the millennial year Latin prose shows little beyond a clumsy heaviness resulting from the writer’s insufficient mastery of his medium; and there are many instances of barbarism and corruption of the tongue without any compensating positive qualities. A dreadful example is afforded by the Chronicon of Benedictus, a monk of St. Andrews in Monte Soracte, who lived in the latter part of the tenth century. He relates, as history, the fable of Charlemagne’s journey to the Holy Land; and his own eyes may have witnessed the atrocious times of John XII., of whom he speaks as follows:

No need to draw further from this writing, which is characterized throughout by crass ignorance of grammar and all else pertaining to Latin. It has no individual qualities; it has no style. Leaving this example of illiteracy, let us turn to a man of more knowledge, Odo, one of the greatest of the abbots of Cluny, who died in the year 943. He left lengthy writings, one of them a bulky epitome of the famous Moralia of Gregory the Great.[241] More original were his three dull books of Collationes, or moral comments upon the Scriptures. They open with a heavy note which their author might have drawn from the dark temperament of that great pope whom he so deeply admired; but the language has a leaden quality which is not Gregory’s, but Odo’s.

And, again, a little further on:

[Pg 162]One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger’s biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo’s writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno’s education and the kind of learned man it made him.

The gradual improvement in the writing of Latin in the[Pg 163] Middle Ages, and the evolution of distinctive mediaeval styles, did not result from a larger acquaintance with the Classics, or a better knowledge of grammar and school rhetoric. The range of classical reading might extend, or from time to time contract, and Donatus and Priscian were used in the ninth century as well as in the twelfth. It is true that the study of grammar became more intelligent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its teachers deferred less absolutely to the old rules and illustrations. They recognized Christian standards of diction: first of all the Vulgate; next, early Christian poets like Prudentius; and then gradually the mediaeval versifiers who wrote and won approval in the twelfth century. Thus grammar sought to follow current usage.[244] This endeavour culminated at the close of the twelfth century in the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei.[245] Before this, much of the best mediaeval Latin prose and verse had been written, and the period most devoted to the Classics had come and was already waning. That period was this same twelfth century. During its earlier half, Latinity gained doubtless from such improvement in the courses of the Trivium as took place at Chartres, for example, an improvement connected with the intellectual growth of the time. But the increase in the knowledge of Latin was mainly such as a mature man may realize within himself, if he has kept up his Latin reading, however little he seem to have added to his knowledge since leaving his Alma Mater.

So the development of mediaeval Latin prose (and also verse) advanced with the maturing of mediaeval civilization. That which was at the same time a living factor in this growth and a result of it, was the more organic appropriation of the classical and Christian heritages of culture and religion. As intellectual faculties strengthened, and men drew power from the past, they gained facility in moulding their Latin[Pg 164] to their purposes. Writings begin to reflect the personalities of the writers; the diction ceases to be that of clumsy or clever school compositions, and presents an evolution of tangible mediaeval styles. Henceforth, although a man be an eager student of the Classics, like John of Salisbury for example, and try to imitate their excellences, he will still write mediaeval Latin, and with a personal style if he be a strong personality. The classical models no longer trammel, but assist him to be more effectively himself on a higher plane.

If mediaeval civilization is to be regarded as that which the peoples of western Europe attained under the two universal influences of Christianity and antique culture, then nothing more mediaeval will be seen than mediaeval Latin. To make it, the antique Latin had been modified and reinspired and loosed by the Christian energies of the Fathers; and had then passed on to peoples who never had been, or no longer were, antique. They barbarized the language down to the rudeness of their faculties. As they themselves advanced, they brought up Latin with them, as it were, from the depths of the ninth and tenth centuries, but a Latin which in the crude natures of these men had been stripped of classical quality; a Latin barbarous and naked, and ready to be clothed upon with novel qualities which should make it a new creature. Throughout all this process, while Latin was sinking and re-emerging, it was worked upon and inspired by the spirit of the uses to which it was predominantly applied, which were those of the Roman Catholic Church and of the intimacies of the Christian soul, pressing to expression in the learned tongue which they were transforming.

In considering the Latin writings of the Middle Ages one should bear in mind the differences between Italy and the North with respect to the ancient language. These were important through the earlier Middle Ages, when modes of diction sufficiently characteristic to be called styles, were forming. The men of Latin-sodden Italy might have a fluent Latin when those of the North still had theirs to learn. Thus there were Italians in the eleventh century who wrote quite a distinctive Latin[Pg 165] prose.[246] Among them were St. Peter Damiani, and St. Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury.

The former died full of virtue in the year 1072. We have elsewhere observed his character and followed his career.[247] He was, to his great anxiety, a classical scholar, who had earned large sums as a teacher of rhetoric before natural inclination and fears for his soul drove him to an ascetic life. He was a master of the Latin which he used. His style is intense, eloquent, personal to himself as well as suited to his matter, and reflects his ardent character and keen perceptions. The following is a rhetorical yet beautiful description of a “last leaf,” taken from one of his compositions in praise of the hermit way of salvation.

[Pg 166]Anselm’s diction, in spite of its frequent cloister rhetoric, has a simple and modern word-order. An account has already been given of his life and of his thoughts, so beautifully sky-blue, unpurpled with the crimson of human passion, which made the words of Augustine more veritably incandescent.[249] The great African was the strongest individual influence upon Anselm’s thought and language. But the latter’s style has departed further from the classical sentence, and of itself indicates that the writer belongs neither to the patristic period nor to the Carolingian time, busied with its rearrangement of patristic thought. The following is from his Proslogion upon the existence of God. Through this discourse, Deity and the Soul are addressed in the second person after the manner of Augustine’s Confessions.

In a more emotional passage Anselm arouses in his soul the terror of the Judgment. It is from a “Meditatio”:

Damiani wrote in the middle of the eleventh century, Anselm in the latter part. The northern lands could as yet show no such characteristic styles,[252] although the classically educated German, Lambert of Hersfeld, wrote as correctly and perspicuously as either. His Annals have won admiration for their clear and correct Latinity, modelled upon the styles of Sallust and Livy. He died in 1077, the year of Canossa, his Annals covering the conflict between Henry IV. and Hildebrand up to that event. The narrative moves with spirit, as one may see by reading his description of King Henry and his consort struggling through Alpine ice and snow to reach that castle never to be forgotten, and gain absolution from the Pope before the ban should have completed Henry’s ruin.[253]

For the North, the best period of mediaeval Latin,[Pg 168] prose as well as verse, opens with the twelfth century. It was indeed the great literary period of the Middle Ages. For the vernacular literatures flourished as well as the Latin. Provençal literature began as the eleventh century closed, and was stifled in the thirteenth by the Albigensian Crusade. So the twelfth was its great period. Likewise with the Old French literature: except the Roland which is earlier, the chief chansons de geste belong to the twelfth century; also the romances of antiquity, to be spoken of hereafter; also the romances of the Round Table, and a great mass of chansons and fabliaux. The Old German—or rather, Mittel Hochdeutsch—literature touches its height as the century closes and the next begins, in the works of Heinrich von Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

The best Latin writers of the century lived, or sojourned, or were educated, for the most part in the France north of the Loire. Not that all of them were natives of that territory; for some were German born, some saw the light in England, and the birthplace of many is unknown. Yet they seem to belong to France. Nearly all were ecclesiastics, secular or regular. Many of them were notables in theology, like Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard, Alanus de Insulis (Lille); many were poets as well, like Alanus and Hildebert and John of Salisbury too; one was a thunderer on the earth, and a most deft politician, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some again are known only as poets, sacred or profane, like Adam of St. Victor, and Walter of Chatillon—but of these hereafter. The best Latin prose writing of this, or any other, mediaeval period, had its definite purpose, metaphysical, theological, or pietistic; and the writers have been or will be spoken of in connection with their specific fields of intellectual achievement or religious fervour. Here, without discussing the men or their works, some favourable examples of their writing will be given.

In the last passage quoted from Anselm, the reader must have felt the working of cloister rhetoric, and have noticed the antitheses and rhymes, to which mediaeval Latin lent itself so readily. Yet it is a slight affair compared with the confounding sonorousness, the flaring pictures, and[Pg 169] terrifying climaxes of St. Bernard when preaching upon the same topic—the Judgment Day. In one of his famous sermons on Canticles, the saint has been suggesting to his audience, the monks of Clara Vallis, that although the Father might ignore faults, not so the Dominus and Creator: “et qui parcit filio, non parcet figmento, non parcet servo nequam.” Listen to the carrying out and pointing of this thought:

As one recovers from the sound and power of this high-wrought passage, he notices how readily it might be turned into the form of a Latin hymn; and also how very modern is its sequence of words. Bernard’s Latin could whisper[Pg 170] intimate love, as well as thunder terror. He says, preaching on the medicina, the healing power, of Jesu’s name:

With the music of this prose one may compare the sweet personal plaint of the following:

Extracts can give no idea of Bernard’s literary powers, any more than a small volume could tell the story of that life which, so to speak, was magna pars of all contemporary history. But since he was one of the best of Latin letter-writers, one should not omit an example of his varied epistolary style, which can be known in its compass only from a large reading of his letters. The following is a short letter, written to win back to the cloister a delicately nurtured youth whose parents had lured him out into the world.

The argument of this letter is, from the standpoint of Bernard’s time, as resistless as the style. Did it win back the little monk? Many wonderful examples of loving expression could be drawn from Bernard’s letters;[258] but instead an instance may be given of his none too subtle way of uttering his hate: “Arnaldus de Brixia, cujus conversatio mel et doctrina venenum, cui caput columbae, cauda scorpionis est, quem Brixia evomuit, Roma exhorruit, Francia repulit, Germania abominatur, Italia non vult recipere, fertur esse vobiscum.”[259] And then he proceeds to warn his correspondent of the danger of intercourse with this arch-enemy of the Church.

Considering that Latin was a tongue which youths learned at school rather than at their mothers’ knees, such writing as Bernard’s is a triumphant recasting of an ancient language. One notices in him, as generally with mediaeval religious writers, the influence of the Vulgate, which was mainly in the language of St. Jerome—of Jerome when not writing as a literary virtuoso, but as a scholar occupied with rendering the meaning, and willing to accept such linguistic innovations as served his purpose.[260] But beyond this influence, one sees how masterful is Bernard’s diction, quite freed from observance of classical principles, quite of the writer and his time, adapting itself with ease and power to the topic and character of the composition, and always expressive of the personality of the mighty saint.

[Pg 172]Hildebert of Le Mans was a few years older than St. Bernard. As an example of his prose a letter may be cited, of which the translation has been given. It was written in 1128, when he was Archbishop of Tours, in protest against the encroachments of the royal power of the French king, Louis the Fat, upon the rights of the Archiepiscopacy of Tours in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments within that diocese:

[Pg 173]John of Salisbury (1110-1180), much younger than Hildebert and a little younger than Bernard, seems to have been the best scholar of his time. With the Classics he is as one in the company of friends; he cites them as readily as Scripture; their sententiae have become part of his views of life. John was an eager humanist, who followed his studies to whatever town and to the feet of whatsoever teacher they might lead him. So he listened to Abaelard and many others. His writing is always lively and often forcible, especially when vituperating the set who despised classic reading. His most vivacious work, the Metalogicus, was directed against their unnamed prophet, whom he dubs “Cornificus.”[262] Its opening passage is of interest as John’s exordium, and because a somewhat consciously intending stylist like our John is likely to exhibit his utmost virtuosity in the opening sentences of an important work:

[Pg 174]One perceives the effect of classical studies; yet the passage is good twelfth-century Latin, quite different from the compositions of the Carolingian epoch, those, for example, from the pen of Alcuin, who had studied the Classics like John, but unlike him had no personal style. One gains similar impressions from the diction of the Polycraticus, a lengthy, discursive work in which John surprises us with his classical equipment. Although containing many quoted passages, it is not made of extracts strung together; but reflects the sentiments or tells the opinions of ancient philosophers in the writer’s own way. The following shows John’s knowledge of early Greek philosophers, and is a fair example of his ordinary style:

These extracts from the writings of saints and scholars may be supplemented by two extracts from compositions of another class. The mediaeval chronicle has not a good reputation. Its credulity and uncritical spirit varied with the time and man. Little can be said in favour of its general form, which usually is stupidly chronological, or annalistic. The example of classical historical composition was lost on mediaeval annalists. Yet their work is not always dull; and, by the twelfth century, their diction had become as mediaeval as that of the theologian rhetoricians, although it rarely crystallizes to personal style by reason of the insignificance of the writers. A well-known work of this kind is the Gesta Dei per Francos, by Guibert of Nogent, who wrote his account of the First Crusade a few years after its turmoil had passed by. The following passage tells of proceedings upon the conclusion of Urban’s great crusading oration at the Council of Clermont in 1099:

This Frenchman Guibert is almost vivacious. A certain younger contemporary of his, of English birth, could construct his narrative quite as well. Ordericus Vitalis (d. 1142) is said to have been born at Wroxeter, though he spent most of his life as monk of St. Evroult in Normandy. There he wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica of Normandy and England. His account of the loss of the White Ship in 1120 tells the story:

[Pg 179]Our examples thus far belong to the twelfth century. As touching its successor, it will be interesting to observe the qualities of two opposite kinds of writing, the one springing from the intellectual activities, and the other from the religious awakening, of the time. In the thirteenth century, scientific and scholastic writing was of representative importance, and deeply affected the development of Latin prose. Very different in style were the Latin stories and vitae of the blessed Francis of Assisi and other saints, composed in Italy.

Roger Bacon, of whom there will be much to say, composed most of his extant works about the year 1267.[267] His language is often rough and involved, from his impetuosity and eagerness to utter what was in him. But it is always vigorous. He took pains to say just what he meant, and what was worth saying; and frequently rewrote his sentences. His writings show little rhetoric; yet they are stamped with a Baconian style, which has a cumulative force. The word-order is modern with scarcely a trace of the antique. Perhaps we may say that he wrote Latin like an Englishman of vehement temper and great intellect. He is powerful in continuous exposition; yet instances of his general, and very striking statements, will illustrate his diction at its best. In the following sentence he recognizes the progressiveness of knowledge, a rare idea in the Middle Ages:

Again, he animadverts upon the duty of thirteenth-century Christians to supply the defects of the old philosophers:

Speaking of language, he says:

In the first of these sentences Bacon shows his linguistic insight; in the second he reflects an uncritical view entertained since the time of the Church Fathers; in both, he writes with an order of words requiring no change in an English translation.

In his time, Bacon had but a sorry fame, and his works no influence. The writings of his younger contemporary Thomas Aquinas exerted greater influence than those of any man after Augustine. They represent the culmination of scholasticism. He was Italian born, and his language, however difficult the matter, is lucidity itself. It is never rhetorical; but measured, temperate, and balanced; properly proceeding from the mind which weighed every proposition in the scales of universal consideration. Sometimes it gains a certain fervour from the clarity and import of the statement which it so lucidly conveys. In article eighth, of the first Questio, of Pars Prima of the Summa theologiae, Thomas thus decides that Theology is a rational (argumentativa) science:

Of a different intellectual temperament was John of Fidanza, known as St. Bonaventura.[273] He also was born and passed his youth in Italy. This sainted General of the Franciscan Order was a few years older than the great Dominican, who was his friend. Both doctors died in the year 1274. Bonaventura’s powers of constructive reasoning were excellent. His diction is clear and beautiful, and eloquent with a spiritual fervour whenever the matter is such as to evoke it. His account of how he came to write his famous little Itinerarium mentis in Deum is full of temperament.

And Bonaventura at the end of his Itinerarium speaks of the perfect passing of Francis into God through the very mystic climax of contemplation, concluding thus:

Bonaventura’s fervent diction will serve to carry us over from the more unmitigated intellectuality of Bacon and Thomas to the simpler matter of those personal and pious narratives from which may be drawn concluding illustrations of mediaeval Latin prose. Some of the authors will show the skill which comes from training; others are quite innocent of grammar, and their Latin has made a happy surrender to the genius of their vernacular speech, which was the lingua vulgaris of northern Italy.

One of the earliest biographers of St. Francis of Assisi was Thomas of Celano, a skilled Latinist, who was enraptured with the loveliness of Francis’s life. His diction is limpid and rhythmical. A well-known passage in his Vita prima (for he wrote two Lives) tells of Francis’s joyous assurance of the great work which God would accomplish through the simple band who formed the beginnings of the Order. This assurance crystallized in a vision of multitudes hurrying to join. Francis speaks to the brethren:

We feel the flow and rhythm, and note the agreeable balancing of clauses. Francis died in 1226. The Vita prima by Celano was approved by Gregory IX. in 1229. Already other matter touching the saint was gathering in anecdote and narrative. Much of it was brought together in the so-called Speculum perfectionis, which has been confidently but very questionably ascribed to Francis’s personal disciple, Brother Leo. Brother Leo, or whoever may have been the narrator or compiler, was no scholar; his Latin is naively incorrect, and has also the simplicity of Gospel narrative. Indeed this Latin is as effectively “vulgarized” as the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. An interesting passage tells with what loving wisdom Francis interpreted a text of Scripture:

Another passage has Francis breaking out in song from the joy of his love of Christ:

This Latin is as childlike as the Old Italian of the Fioretti of St. Francis; it has a like word-order, and one might almost add, a like vocabulary. The simple, ignorant writer seems as if held by a direct and personal inspiration from the familiar life of the sweet saint. His language reflects that inspiration, and mirrors his own childlike character. Hence he has a style, direct, effective, moving to tears and joy, like his impression of the blessed Francis.

A not dissimilar kind of childlike Latin could attain to a remarkable symmetry and balance. The Legenda aurea is before us, written by the Dominican Jacobus à Voragine, by race a Genoese, and living toward the close of the thirteenth century. This book was the most popular compend of saints’ lives in use in the later Middle Ages. Its stories are told with fascinating naïveté. We cite the opening sentences from its chapter on the Annunciation, just to show the harmony and balance of its periods. The passage is exceptional and almost formal in these qualities:

These extracts bring us far into the thirteenth century. Two hundred years later, mediaeval Latin prose, if one may say so, sang its swan song in that little book which is a last, sweet, and composite echo of all mellifluous mediaeval piety. Yet perhaps this De imitatione Christi of Thomas à Kempis can scarcely be classed as prose, so full is it of assonances and rhythms fit for chanting.

 

 

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[Pg 186]

CHAPTER XXXII

EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE

In mediaeval Latin poetry the endeavour to preserve a classical style and the irresistible tendency to evolve new forms are more palpably distinguishable than in the prose. For there is a visible parting of the ways between the retention of the antique metres and their fruitful abandonment in verses built of accentual rhyme. Moreover, this formal divergence corresponds to a substantial difference, inasmuch as there was usually a larger survival of antique feeling and allusion in the mediaeval metrical attempts than in the rhyming poems.

As in the prose, so in the poetry, the lines of development may be followed from the Carolingian time. But a difference will be found between Italy and the North; for in Italy the course was quicker, but a less organic evolution resulted in verse less excellent and less distinctly mediaeval. By the end of the eleventh century Latin poetry in Italy, rhyming or metrical, seems to have drawn itself along as far as it was destined to progress; but in the North a richer growth culminates a century later. Indeed the most originative line of evolution of mediaeval Latin verse would seem to have been confined to the North, in the main if not exclusively.

The following pages offer no history of mediaeval Latin poetry, even as the previous chapter made no attempt to sketch the history of the prose. Their object is to point[Pg 187] out the general lines along which the verse-forms were developed, or were perhaps retarded. Three may be distinguished. The first is marked by the retention of quantity and the endeavour to preserve the ancient measures. In the second, accent and rhyme gradually take the place of metre within the old verse-forms. The third is that of the Sequence, wherein the accentual rhyming hymn springs from the chanted prose, which had superseded the chanting of the final a of the Alleluia.[280]

 

I

The lover of classical Greek and Latin poetry knows the beautiful fitness of the ancient measures for the thought and feeling which they enframed. If his eyes chance to fall on some twelfth-century Latin hymn, he will be struck by its different quality. He will quickly perceive that classic forms would have been unsuited to the Christian and romantic sentiment of the mediaeval period,[281] and will realize that some vehicle besides metrical verse would have been needed for this thoroughly declassicized feeling, even had metrical quantity remained a vital element of language, instead of passing away some centuries before. Metre was but resuscitation and convention in the time of Charlemagne. Yet it kept its sway with scholars, and could not lack votaries so long as classical poetry made part of the Ars grammatica or was read for delectation. Metrical composition did not cease throughout the Middle Ages. But it was not the true mediaeval style, and became obviously academic as accentual verse was perfected and made fit to carry spiritual emotion.[Pg 188] Nevertheless the simpler metres were cultivated successfully by the best scholars of the twelfth century.

Most of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian period was metrical, if we are to judge from the mass that remains. Reminiscence of the antique enveloped educated men, with whom the mediaeval spirit had not reached distinctness of thought and feeling. So the poetry resembled the contemporary sculpture and painting, in which the antique was still unsuperseded by any new style. Following the antique metres, using antique phrase and commonplace, often copying antique sentiment, this poetry was as dull as might be expected from men who were amused by calling each other Homer, Virgil, Horace, or David. Usually the poets were ecclesiastics, and interested in theology;[282] but many of the pieces are conventionally profane in topic, and as humanistic as the Latin poetry of Petrarch.[283] Moreover, just as Petrarch’s Latin poetry was still-born, while his Italian sonnets live, so the Carolingian poetry, when it forgets itself and falls away from metre to accentual verse, gains some degree of life. At this early period the Romance tongues were not a fit poetic vehicle, and consequently living thoughts, which with Dante and Petrarch found voice in Italian, in the ninth century began to stammer in Latin verses that were freed from the dead rules of quantity, and were already vibrant with a vital feeling for accent and rhyme.[284]

Through the tenth century metrical composition became rougher, yet sometimes drew a certain force from its rudeness. A good example is the famous Waltarius, or Waltharilied, of Ekkehart of St. Gall, composed in the year 960 as a school exercise.[285] The theme was a German story found in vernacular poetry. Ekkehart’s hexameters have a strong Teuton flavour, and doubtless some of the vigour of his paraphrase was due to the German original.

[Pg 189]The metrical poems of the eleventh century have been spoken of already, especially the more interesting ones written in Italy.[286] Most of the Latin poetry emanating from that classic land was metrical, or so intended. Frequently it tells the story of wars, or gives the Gesta of notable lives, making a kind of versified biography. One feels as if verse was employed as a refuge from the dead annalistic form. This poetry was a semi-barbarizing of the antique, without new formal or substantial elements. Italy, one may say, never became essentially and creatively mediaeval: the pressure of antique survival seems to have barred original development; Italians took little part in the great mediaeval military religious movements, the Crusades; no strikingly new architecture arose with them; their first vernacular poetry was an imitation or a borrowing from Provence and France; and by far the greater part of their Latin poetry presents an uncreative barbarizing of the antique metres.

These remarks find illustration in the principal Latin poems composed in Italy in the twelfth century. Among them one observes differences in skill, knowledge, and tendency. Some of the writers made use of leonine hexameters, others avoided the rhyme. But they were all akin in lack of excellence and originality both in composition and verse-form. There was the monk Donizo of Canossa, who wrote the Vita of the great Countess Matilda;[287] there was William of Apulia, Norman in spirit if not in blood, who wrote of the Norman conquests in Apulia and Sicily;[288] also the anonymous and barbarous De bello et excidio urbis[Pg 190] Comensis, in which is told the destruction of Como by Milan between 1118 and 1127;[289] then the metrically jingling Pisan chronicle narrating the conquest of the island of Majorca, and beginning (like the Aeneid!) with

We also note Peter of Ebulo, with his narrative in laudation of the emperor Henry VI., written about 1194; Henry of Septimella and his elegies upon the checkered fortunes of divers great men;[291] and lastly the more famous Godfrey of Viterbo, of probable German blood, and notary or scribe to three successive emperors, with his cantafable Pantheon or Memoria saecularum.[292] Godfrey’s poetry is rhymed after a manner of his own.

In the North, or more specifically speaking in the land of France north of the Loire, the twelfth century brought better metrical poetry than in Italy. Yet it had something of the deadness of imitation, since the vis vivida of song had passed over into rhyming verse. Still from the academic point of view, metre was the proper vehicle of poetry; as one sees, for instance, in the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendome,[293] written toward the close of the twelfth century. “Versus est metrica descriptio,” says he, and then elaborates his, for the most part borrowed, definition: “Verse is metrical description proceeding concisely and line by line through the comely marriage of words to flowers of thought, and containing nothing trivial or irrelevant.” A neat conception this of poetry; and the same writer denounces leonine rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of the Middle Ages, the elegiac; for he regards the hexameter and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse. It was in this metre that Hildebert wrote his almost classic[Pg 191] elegy over the ruins of Rome. A few lines have been quoted from it;[294] but the whole poem, which is not long, is of interest as one of the very best examples of a mediaeval Latin elegy:

The elegiac metre was used by Abaelard in his didactic[Pg 192] poem to his son Astralabius,[296] and by John of Salisbury in his Entheticus. The hexameter also was a favourite measure, used, for instance, by Alanus of Lille in the Anticlaudianus, perhaps the noblest of mediaeval narrative or allegorical poems in Latin.[297] Another excellent composition in hexameter was the Alexandreis of Walter, born, like Alanus, apparently at Lille, but commonly called of Chatillon. As poets and as classical scholars, these two men were worthy contemporaries. Walter’s poem follows, or rather enlarges upon the Life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius.[298] He is said to have written it on the challenge of Matthew of Vendome, him of the Ars versificatoria. The Ligurinus of a certain Cistercian Gunther is still another good example of a long narrative poem in hexameters. It sets forth the career of Frederick Barbarossa, and was written shortly after the opening of the thirteenth century. Its author, like Walter and Alanus, shows himself widely read in the Classics.[299]

The sapphic was a third not infrequently attempted metre, of which the De planctu naturae of Alanus contains examples. This work was composed in the form of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boëthius, where lyrics alternate with prose. The general topic was Nature’s complaint over man’s disobedience to her laws. The author apostrophizes her in the following sapphics:

Practically all of our examples have been taken from works composed in the twelfth century, and in the land comprised under the name of France. The pre-excellence of this period will likewise appear in accentual rhyming Latin poetry, which was more spontaneous and living than its loftily descended relative.

 

II

The academic vogue of metre in the early Middle Ages did not prevent the growth of more natural poetry. The[Pg 194] Irish had their Gaelic poems; people of Teutonic speech had their rough verse based on alliteration and the count of the strong syllables. The Romance tongues emerging from the common Latin were as yet poetically untried. But in the proper Latin, which had become as unquantitative and accentual as any of its vulgar forms, there was a tonic poetry that was no longer unequipped with rhyme.

Three rhythmic elements made up this natural mode of Latin versification: the succession of accented and unaccented syllables; the number of syllables in a line; and that regularly recurring sameness of sound which is called rhyme. The source of the first of these seems obvious. Accent having driven quantity from speech, came to supersede it in verse, with the accented syllable taking the place of the long syllable and the unaccented the place of the short. In the Carolingian period accentual verse followed the old metrical forms, with this exception: the metrical principle that one long is equivalent to two shorts was not adopted. Consequently the number of syllables in the successive lines of an accentual strophe would remain the same, where in the metrical antecedent they might have varied. This is also sufficient to account for the second element, the observance of regularity in the number of syllables. For this regularity seems to follow upon the acceptance of the principle that in rhythmic verse an accented syllable is not equal to two unaccented ones. The query might perhaps be made why this Latin accentual verse did not take up the principle of regularity in the number of strong syllables in a line, like Old High German poetry for example, where the number of unaccented syllables, within reasonable limits, is indifferent. A ready answer is that these Latin verses were made by people of Latin speech who had been acquainted with metrical forms of poetry, in which the number of syllables might vary, but was never indifferent; for the metrical rule was rigid that one long was equivalent to two short; and to no more and no less. Hence the short syllables were as fixed in number as the long.[301]

[Pg 195]The origin of the third element, rhyme, is in dispute. In some instances it may have passed into Greek and Latin verses from Syrian hymns.[302] But on the other hand it had long been an occasional element in Greek and Latin rhetorical prose. Probably rhyme in Latin accentual verse had no specific origin. It gradually became the sharpening, defining element of such verse. Accentual Latin lent itself so naturally to rhyme, that had not rhyme become a fixed part of this verse, there indeed would have been a fact to explain.

These, then, were the elements: accent, number of syllables, and rhyme. Most interesting is the development of verse-forms. Rhythmic Latin poetry came through the substitution of accent for quantity, and probably had many prototypes in the old jingles of Roman soldiers and provincials, which so far as known were accentual, rather than metrical. Christian accentual poetry retained those simple forms of iambic and trochaic verse which most readily submitted to the change from metre to accent, or perhaps one should say, had for centuries offered themselves as natural forms of accentual verse. Apparently the change from metre to accent within the old forms gradually took place between the sixth and the tenth centuries. During this period there was slight advance in the evolution of new verses; nor was the period creative in other respects, as we have seen. But thereafter, as the mediaeval centuries advanced from the basis of a mastered patristic and antique heritage, and began to create, there followed an admirable evolution of verse-forms: in some instances apparently issuing from the old metrico-accentual forms, and in others developing independently by virtue of the faculty of song meeting the need of singing.

This factor wrought with power—the human need and cognate faculty of song, a need and faculty stimulated in the Middle Ages by religious sentiment and emotion. In the[Pg 196] fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song—at last into a strophe—music worked potently, shaping the composition of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance and at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress, or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse, while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the evolution of the melodies. In fine, words and melody, each quickened by the other, and each moulding the other to itself, attained a perfected strophic unison; and mediaeval musician-poets achieved at last the finished verses of hymns or Sequences and student-songs.

There were two distinct lines of evolution of accentual Latin verse in the Middle Ages; and although the faculty of song was a moving energy in both, it worked in one of them more visibly than in the other. Along the one line accentual verse developed pursuant to the ancient forms, displacing quantity with accent, and evolving rhyme. The other line of evolution had no connection with the antique. It began with phrases of sonorous prose, replacing inarticulate chant. These, under the influence of music, through the creative power of song, were by degrees transformed to verse. The evolution of the Sequence-hymn will be the chief illustration. With the finished accentual Latin poetry of the twelfth century it may become impossible to tell which line of rhythmic evolution holds the antecedent of a given poem. In truth, this final and perfected verse may often have a double ancestry, descending from the rhythms which had superseded metre, and being also the child of mediaeval melody. Yet there is no difficulty in tracing by examples the two lines of evolution.

To illustrate the strain of verse which took its origin in the displacement of metre by accent and rhyme, we must look back as far as Fortunatus. He was born about the year 530 in northern Italy, but he passed his eventful life among Franks and Thuringians. A scholar and also a poet, he had a fair mastery of metre; yet some of his poems evince the spirit of the coming mediaeval time both in sentiment[Pg 197] and form. He wrote two famous hymns, one of them in the popular trochaic tetrameter, the other in the equally simple iambic dimeter. The first, a hymn to the Cross, begins with the never-to-be-forgotten

and has such lines as

In these the mediaeval feeling for the Cross shows itself, and while the metre is correct, it is so facile that one may read or sing the lines accentually. In the other hymn, also to the Cross, assonance and rhyme foretell the coming transformation of metre to accentual verse. Here are the first two stanzas:

Passing to the Carolingian epoch, some lines from a poem celebrating the victory of Charlemagne’s son Pippin over the Avars in 796, will illustrate the popular trochaic tetrameter which had become accentual, and already tended to rhyme:

Next we turn to a piece by the persecuted and interesting Gottschalk, written in the latter part of the ninth century. A young lad has asked for a poem. But how can he sing, the exiled and imprisoned monk who might rather weep as the Jews by the waters of Babylon?[304] yet he will sing a hymn[Pg 198] to the Trinity, and bewail his piteous lot before the highest pitying Godhead. The verses have a lyric unity of mood, and are touching with their sad refrain. Their rhyme, if not quite pure, is abundant and catching, and their nearest metrical affinity would be a trochaic dimeter.

Gottschalk (and for this it is hard to love him) was one of the initiators of the leonine hexameter, in which a syllable in the middle of the line rhymes with the last syllable.

is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to his friend Ratramnus.[306] To what horrid jingle such verses could attain may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy, beginning:

[Pg 200]Hector and Troy, and the dire wiles of the Greeks never left the mediaeval imagination. A poem of the early tenth century, which bade the watchers on Modena’s walls be vigilant, draws its inspiration from that unfading memory, and for us illustrates what iambics might become when accent had replaced quantity. The lines throughout end in a final rhyming a.

And from a scarcely later time, for it also is of the tenth century, rise those verses to Roma, that old “Roma aurea et eterna,” and forever “caput mundi,” sung by pilgrim bands as their eyes caught the first gleam of tower, church, and ruin:

This verse, which still lifts the heart of whosoever hears or reads it, may close our examples of mediaeval verses descended from metrical forms. It will be noticed that all of them are from the early mediaeval centuries; a circumstance which may be taken as a suggestion of the fact that by far the greater part of the earlier accentual Latin poetry was composed in forms in which accent simply had displaced the antique quantity.

 

III

We turn to that other genesis of mediaeval Latin verse, arising not out of antique forms, but rather from the mediaeval need and faculty of song. In the chief instance selected for illustration, this line of evolution took its[Pg 201] inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings. The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which came to be substituted for its cadenced reiteration were called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic correspondence with the notes of the melody to which they were sung.[310]

In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of Jumièges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall. There a young monk named Notker, poring over its contents, perceived that words had been written in the place of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung. So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to have had their beginning in Notker’s scanning of that fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary purpose was a musical one; for they were a device—mnemotechnic, if one will—to facilitate the chanting of cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes repeated or drawn out through several successive notes. One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker now set himself to realize; and he succeeded.

[Pg 202]He composed some fifty Sequences. In his work, as well as in that of others after him, the device of words began to modify and develop the melodies themselves. Sometimes Notker adapted his verbal compositions to those cadences or melodies to which the Alleluia had long been sung; sometimes he composed both melody and words; or, again, he took a current melody, sacred or secular, to which the Alleluia never had been sung, and composed words for it, to be chanted as a Sequence. In these borrowed melodies, as well as in those composed by Notker, the musical periods were more developed than in the Alleluia cadences. Thus the musical growth of the Sequences was promoted by the use of sonorous words, while the improved melodies in turn drew the words on to a more perfect rhythmic ordering.

Notker died in 912. His Sequences were prose, yet with a certain parallelism in their construction; and, even with Notker in his later years, the words began to take on assonances, chiefly in the vowel sound of a. Thereafter the melodies, seizing upon the words, as it were, by the principle of their syllabic correspondence to the notation, moulded them to rhythm of movement and regularity of line; while conversely with the better ordering of the words for singing, the melodies in turn made gain and progress, and then again reacted on the words, until after two centuries there emerged the finished verses of an Adam of St. Victor.

Thus these Sequences have become verse before our eyes, and we realize that it is the very central current of the evolution of mediaeval Latin poetry that we have been following. How free and how spontaneous was this evolution of the Sequence. It was the child of the Christian Middle Ages, seeing the light in the closing years of the ninth century, but requiring a long period of growth before it reached the glory of its climacteric. It was born of musical chanting, and it grew as song, never unsung or conceived of as severable from its melody. Only as it attained its perfected strophic forms, it necessarily made use of trochaic and other rhythms which long before had changed from quantity to accent and so had passed on into the[Pg 203] verse-making habitudes of the Middle Ages.[311] If there be any Latin composition in virtue of origin and growth absolutely un-antique, it is the mediaeval Sequence, which in its final forms is so glorious a representative of the mediaeval Hymn. And we shall also see that much popular Latin poetry, “Carmina Burana” and student-songs, were composed in verses and often sung to tunes taken—or parodied—from the Sequence-hymns of the Liturgy.

There were many ways of chanting Sequences. The musical phrases of the melodies usually were repeated once, except at the beginning and the close; and the Sequence would be rendered by a double choir singing antiphonally. Ordinarily the words responded to the repetition of the musical phrases with a parallelism of their own. The lines (after the first) varied in length by pairs, the second and third lines having the same number of syllables, the fourth and fifth likewise equal to each other, but differing in length from the second and third; and so on through the Sequence, until the last line, which commonly stood alone and differed in length from the preceding pairs. The Sequence called “Nostra tuba” is a good example. Probably it was composed by Notker, and in his later years; for it is filled with assonances, and exhibits a regular parallelism of structure.

Here, after the opening, the first pair has seventeen syllables, and the next pair twenty-six. The last pair quoted has twenty; and the final line of seventeen syllables has no fellow. A further rhythmical advance seems reached by the following Sequence from the abbey of St. Martial at Limoges. It may have been written in the eleventh century. It is given here with the first and second line of the couplets opposite to each other, as strophe and antistrophe; and the lines themselves are divided to show the assonances (or rhymes) which appear to have corresponded with pauses in the melody:

“(1) Canat omnis turba
(2a)	Fonte renata Spiritusque gratia		(2b)	Laude jucunda et mente perspicua
(3a)	Jam restituta pars est decima fuerat quae culpa perdita.		(3b)	Sicque jactura coelestis illa completur in laude divina.
(4a)	Ecce praeclara dies dominica		(4b)	Enitet ampla per orbis spatia,
(5a)	Exsultat in qua plebs omnis redempta,		(5b)	Quia destructa mors est perpetua.”[313]

A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout the Sequence:

[Pg 205]

As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned with palpable achievement. Yet the first brilliant creations of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years, during which his progress has been as real as when his works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth[Pg 206] of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice centuries, which illumine the period opening about the year 1100. This period would carry no human teaching if its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the fruit of antecedent discipline.

The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet’s genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his work a veritable creation; yet his antecedents made part of his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the general idea and form of the sequence were given him;—all honour to the man’s holy genius which made these into poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual measures and in the two-syllabled Latin rhyme which appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the eleventh century.[315] In using them Adam was no borrower, but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art. Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and do still. For, although accentual rhythms admit dactyls and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable. Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed assonances into rhymes; and indeed into rhymes of two syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one.

There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence, consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair, following the music of the melodies to which they were sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a number of the Sequences of which he may have been the author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities, and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme.

[Pg 207]Before giving examples of Adam’s poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns[316] of the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for Heloïse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,[317] and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam’s immediate predecessor; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam’s in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme.

The “prose” Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard’s hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard’s verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage.

For example, there may be some far echo of metrical asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse:

But the echo if audible is faint, and surely no antique whisper is heard in

Nor in

The variety of Abaelard’s verse seems endless. One or two further examples may or may not suggest any antecedents in those older forms of accentual verse which followed the former metres:

In this verse the first two lines are accentual iambic dimeters; while the last two begin each with two trochees, and close apparently with two dactyls. The last form of line is kept throughout in the following:

Next come some simple five-syllable lines, with a catching rhyme:

[Pg 209]In the following lines of ten syllables a dactyl appears to follow a trochee twice in each line:

These examples of Abaelard’s rhythms may close with the following curiously complicated verse:

In general, one observes in these verses that Abaelard does not use a pure two-syllable rhyme. The rhyme is always pure in the last syllable, and in the penult may either exist as a pure rhyme or simply as an assonance, or not at all.[318]

Probably Abaelard wrote his hymns in 1130, perhaps the very year when Adam as a youth entered the convent of St. Victor, lying across the Seine from Paris. The latter appears to have lived until 1192. Many Sequences have been improperly ascribed to him, and among the doubtful ones are a number having affinities with the older types. These may be anterior to Adam; for the greater part of his unquestionable Sequences are perfected throughout in their versification. Yet, on the other hand, one would expect some progression in works composed in the course of a long[Pg 210] life devoted to such composition—a life covering a period when progressive changes were taking place in the world of thought beyond St. Victor’s walls. We take three examples of these Sequences. The first contains occasional assonance in place of rhyme, and uses many rhymes of one syllable. It appears to be an older composition improperly ascribed to Adam. The second is unquestionably his, in his most perfect form; the third may or may not be Adam’s; but is given for its own sake as a lovely lyric.[319]

The first example, probably written not much later than the year 1100, was designed for the Mass at the dedication of a church. The variety in the succession of couplets and strophes indicates a corresponding variation in the melody.

The second example is Adam’s famous Sequence for St. Stephen’s Day, which falls on the day after Christmas. It is throughout sustained and perfect in versification, and in substance a splendid hymn of praise.

The last example, in honour of St. Nicholas’s Day, is a lovely poem by whomsoever written. Its verses are extremely diversified. It begins with somewhat formal chanting of the saint’s virtues, in dignified couplets. Suddenly it changes to a joyful lyric, and sings of a certain sweet sea-miracle wrought by Nicholas. Then it spiritualizes the conception of his saintly aid to meet the call of the sin-tossed soul. It closes in stately manner in harmony with its liturgical function.

The foregoing examples of religious poetry may be supplemented by illustrations of the parallel evolution of more profane if not more popular verse. Any priority in time, as between the two, should lie with the former; though it may be the truer view to find a general synchronism in the secular and religious phases of lyric growth. But priority of originality and creativeness certainly belongs to that line of lyric evolution which sprang from religious sentiments and emotions. For the vagrant clerkly poet of the Court, the roadside, and the inn, used the forms of verse fashioned by the religious muse in the cloister and the school. Thus the development of secular Latin verse presents a derivative parallel to the essentially primary evolution of the Sequence or the hymn.

It was in Germany that the composition of Sequences was most zealously cultivated during the century following Notker’s death; and it was in Germany that the Sequence, in its earlier forms, exerted most palpable influence upon popular songs.[323] In these so-called Modi (Modus == song), as in the Sequence, rhythmical compositions may be seen progressing in the direction of regular rhythm, rhyme, and strophic form. As in the Sequences, the tune moulded the words, which in turn influenced the melody. The following is from the Modus Ottinc, a popular song composed about[Pg 216] the year 1000 in honour of a victory of Otto III. over the Hungarians:

Another example is the Modus florum of approximately the same period, a song about a king who promised his daughter to whoever could tell such a lie as to force the king to call him a liar. It opens as follows:

Here the rhyme still is rude and the rhythm irregular. The following dirge, written thirty or forty years later on the death of the German emperor, Henry II., shows improvement:

We may pass on into the twelfth century, still following the traces of that development of popular verse which paralleled the evolution of the Sequence. We first note[Pg 217] some catchy rhymes of a German student setting out for Paris in quest of learning and intellectual novelty:

This Suabian, singing his uncouth Latin rhymes, and footing his way to Paris, suggests the common, delocalized influences which were developing a mass of student-songs, “Carmina Burana,” or “Goliardic” poetry. The authors belonged to that large and broad class of clerks made up of any and all persons who knew Latin. The songs circulated through western Europe, and their home was everywhere, if not their origin. Some of them betray, as more of them do not, the author’s land and race. Frequently of diabolic cleverness, gibing, amorous, convivial, they show the virtuosity in rhyme of their many makers. Like the hymns and later Sequences, they employed of necessity those accentual measures which once had their quantitative prototypes in antique metres. But, again like the hymns and Sequences, they neither imitate nor borrow, but make use of trochaic, iambic, or other rhythms as the natural and unavoidable material of verse. Their strophes are new strophes, and not imitations of anything in quantitative poetry. So these songs were free-born, and their development was as independent of antique influence as the melodies which ever moulded them to more perfect music. Many and divers were their measures. But as that great strophe of Adam’s Heri mundus exultavit (the strophe of the Stabat Mater) was of mightiest dominance among the hymns, so for these student-songs there was also one measure that was chief. This was the thirteen-syllable trochaic line, with its lilting change of stress after the seventh syllable, and its pure two-syllable rhyme. It is the line of the Confessio poetae, or Confessio Goliae, where nests that one mediaeval Latin verse which everybody still knows by heart:

It is also the line of the quite charming Phyllis and Flora of the Carmina Burana:

Another common measure is the twelve-syllable dactylic line of the famous Apocalypsis Goliae Episcopi:

An example of the not infrequent eight-syllable line is afforded by that tremendous satire against papal Rome, beginning:

Here the last line of the verse has but seven syllables, as is the case in the following verse of four lines:

But the eight-syllable lines may be kept throughout, as in the following lament over life’s lovely, pernicious charm, so touching in its expression of the mortal heartbreak of mediaeval monasticism:

 

IV

Our consideration of the different styles of mediaeval Latin prose and the many novel forms of mediaeval Latin verse has shown how radical was the departure of the one and the other from Cicero and Virgil. Through such changes Latin continued to prove itself a living language. Yet its vitality was doomed to wane before the rivalry of the vernacular tongues. The vivida vis, the capability of growth, had well-nigh passed from Latin when Petrarch was born. In endeavouring to maintain its supremacy as a literary vehicle he was to hold a losing brief, nor did he strengthen his cause by attempting to resuscitate a classic style of prose and metre. The victory of the vernacular was announced in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and demonstrated beyond dispute in his Divina Commedia.

A long and for the most part peaceful and unconscious conflict had led up to the victory of what might have been deemed the baser side. For Latin was the sole mediaeval literature that was born in the purple, with its stately lineage of the patristic and the classical back of it. Latin was the language of the Roman world and the vehicle of Latin Christianity. It was the language of the Church and its clergy, and the language of all educated people. Naturally[Pg 220] the entire contents of existing and progressive Christian and antique culture were contained in the mediaeval Latin literature, the literature of religion and of law and government, of education and of all serious knowledge. It was to be the primary literature of mediaeval thought; from which passed over the chief part of whatever thought and knowledge the vernacular literatures were to receive. For scholars who follow, as we have tried to, the intellectual and the deeper emotional life of the Middle Ages, the Latin literature yields the incomparably greater part of the material of our study. It has been our home country, from which we have made casual excursions into the vernacular literatures.

These existed, however, from the earliest mediaeval periods, beginning, if one may say so, in oral rather than written documents. We read that Charlemagne caused a book to be made of Germanic poems, which till then presumably had been carried in men’s memories. The Hildebrandslied is supposed to have been one of them.[329] In the Norse lands, the Eddas and the matter of the Sagas were repeated from generation to generation, long before they were written down. The habit, if not the art, of writing came with Christianity and the Latin education accompanying it. Gradually a written literature in the Teutonic languages was accumulated. Of this there was the heathen side, well represented in Anglo-Saxon and the Norse; while in Old High German the Hildebrandslied remains, heathen and savage. Thereafter, a popular and even national or rather racial poetry continued, developed, and grew large, notwithstanding the spread of Latin Christianity through Teutonic lands. Of this the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrun are great examples. But individual still famous poets, who felt and thought as Germans, were also composing sturdily in their vernacular—a lack of education possibly causing them to dictate (dictieren, dichten) rather than to write. Of these the greatest were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. With them and after them, or following upon the Niebelungenlied, came a mass of secular poetry,[Pg 221] some of which was popular and national, reflecting Germanic story, while some of it was courtly, transcribing the courtly poetry which by the twelfth century flourished in Old French.

Thus bourgeoned the secular branches of German literature. On the other hand, from the time of Christianity’s introduction, the Germans felt the need to have the new religion presented to them in their own tongues. The labour of translation begins with Ulfilas, and is continued with conscientious renderings of Scripture and Latin educational treatises, and also with such epic paraphrase as the Heliand and the more elegiac poems of the Anglo-Saxon Cynewulf.[330] Also, at least in Germany, there comes into existence a full religious literature, not stoled or mitred, but popular, non-academic, and non-liturgical; of which quantities remain in the Middle High German of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[331]

Obviously the Romance vernacular literatures had a different commencement. The languages were Latin, simply Latin, in their inception, and never ceased to be legitimate continuations and developments of the popular or Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. But as the speech of children, women, and unlettered people, they were not thought of as literary media. All who could write understood perfectly the better Latin from which these popular dialects were slowly differentiating themselves. And as they progressed to languages, still their life and progress lay among peoples whose ancestral tongue was the proper Latin, which all educated men and women still understood and used in the serious business of life.

But sooner or later men will talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natural expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to[Pg 222] the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the langue d’oc and the langue d’oil became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the chansons de geste came into existence; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-lyrics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men’s eyes as well as for men’s ears.

In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The chansons de geste met the taste of the feudal barons; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coarse fabliaux pleased the bourgeoisie; and chansons of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and miracles de Notre Dame without number; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds.

The accentual verses of the Romance tongues had their source in the popular accentual Latin verse of the later Roman period. Their development was not unrelated to the Latin accentual verse which was superseding metrical composition in the centuries extending, one may say, from the fifth to the eleventh. Divergences between the Latin and Romance verse would be caused by the linguistic evolution through which the Romance tongues were becoming independent languages. Nor was this divergence uninfluenced by the fact that Romance poetry was popular and usually concerned with topics of this life, while Latin poetry in the most striking lines of its evolution was liturgical; and even when secular in topic tended to become learned, since it was[Pg 223] the product of the academically educated classes. Much of the vernacular (Romance as well as Germanic) poetry in the Middle Ages was composed by unlearned men who had at most but a speaking acquaintance with Latin, and knew little of the antique literature. This was true, generally, of the Troubadours of Provence, of the authors of the Old French chansons de geste, and of such a courtly poet as Chrétien de Troies; true likewise of the great German Minnesingers, epic poets rather, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

On the other hand, vernacular poetry might be written by highly learned men, of whom the towering though late example would be Dante Alighieri. An instance somewhat nearer to us at present is Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the author of the second part of the Roman de la rose. His extraordinary Voltairean production embodies all the learning of the time; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically in his poem.

But here, at the close of our consideration of the mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are not occupied with the very loose and general question of the amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular literatures of western Europe. That was a casual matter depending on the education and learning, or lack thereof, of the author of the given piece. But it may be profitable to glance at the passing over of antique themes of story into mediaeval vernacular literature, and the manner of their refashioning. This is a huge subject, but we shall not go into it deeply, or pursue the various antique themes through their endless propagations.

Antique stories aroused and pointed the mediaeval imagination; they made part of the never-absent antique influence which helped to bring the mediaeval peoples on and evoke in them an articulate power to fashion and create all kinds of mediaeval things. But with antique story as with other antique material, the Middle Ages had to turn it over and absorb it, and also had to become themselves with power, before they could refashion the antique theme or[Pg 224] create along its lines. All this had taken place by the middle of the twelfth century. As to choice of matter, twelfth-century refashioners would either select an antique theme suited to their handling, or extract what appealed to them from some classic story. In the one case as in the other they might recast, enlarge, or invent as their faculties permitted.

Mediaeval taste took naturally to the degenerate productions of the late antique or transition centuries. The Greek novels seem to have been unknown, except the Apollonius of Tyre.[332] But the congenially preposterous story of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes was available in a sixth-century Latin version, and was made much of. Equally popular was the debasement and intentional distortion of the Tale of Troy in the work of “Dares” and “Dictys”; other tales were aptly presented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the stories of Hero and Leander, of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Narcissus, Orpheus, Cadmus, Daedalus, were widely known and often told in the Middle Ages.

The mediaeval writers made as if they believed these tales. At least they accepted them as they would have their own audiences accept their recasting, with little reflection as to whether truth or fable. But was the work of the refashioners conscious fiction? Scarcely, when it simply recast the old story in mediaevalizing paraphrase; but when the poet went on and wove out of ten lines a thousand, he must have known himself devising.

The mediaeval treatment of classic themes of history and epic poetry shows how the Middle Ages refashioned and reinspired after their own image whatever they took from the antique. If it was partly their fault, it was also their unavoidable misfortune that they received these great themes in the literary distortions of the transition centuries. Doubtless they preferred encyclopaedic dulness to epic unity;[Pg 225] they loved fantasy rather than history, and of course delighted in the preposterous, as they found it in the Latin version of the Life and Deeds of Alexander. As for the Tale of Troy, the real Homer never reached them: and perhaps mediaeval peoples who were pleased, like Virgil’s Romans, to draw their origins from Trojan heroes, would have rejected Homer’s story just as “Dares” and “Dictys,” whoever they were, did.[333] The true mediaeval rifacimenti, to wit, the retellings of these tales in the vernacular, mirror the mediaeval mind, the mediaeval character, and the whole panorama of mediaeval life and fantasy.

The chief epic themes drawn from the antique were the Tales of Troy and Thebes and the story of Aeneas. In verse and prose they were retold in the vernacular literatures and also in mediaeval Latin.[334] We shall, however, limit our view to the primary Old French versions, which formed the basis of compositions in German, Italian, English, as well as French. They were composed between 1150 and 1170 by Norman-French trouvères. The names of the authors of the Roman de Thebes and the Eneas are unknown; the Roman de Troie was written by Benoit de St. More.

These poems present a universal substitution of mediaeval manners and sentiment. For instance, one observes that the epic participation of the pagan gods is minimized, and in the Roman de Troie even discarded; necromancy, on the[Pg 226] other hand, abounds. A more interesting change is the transformation of the love episode. That had become an epic adjunct in Alexandrian Greek literature as early as the third century before Christ. It existed in the antique sources of all these mediaeval poems. Nevertheless the romantic narratives of courtly love in the latter are mediaeval creations.

The Eneas relates the love of Lavinia for the hero, most correctly reciprocated by him. The account of it fills fourteen hundred lines, and has no precedent in Virgil’s poem, which in other respects is followed closely. Lavinia sees Aeneas from her tower, and at once understands a previous discourse of her mother on the subject of love. She utters love’s plaints, and then faints because Aeneas does not seem to notice her. After which she passes a sleepless night. The next morning she tells her mother, who is furious, since she favours Turnus as a suitor. The girl falls senseless, but coming to herself when alone, she recalls love’s stratagems, and attaches a letter to an arrow which is shot so as to fall at Aeneas’s feet. Aeneas reads the letter, and turns and salutes the fair one furtively, that his followers may not see. Then he enters his tent and falls so sick with love that he takes to his bed. The next day Lavinia watches for him, and thinks him false, till at last, pale and feeble, he appears, and her heart acquits him; amorous glances now fly back and forth between them.[335]

To have this jaded jilt grow sick with love is a little too much for us, and Aeneas is absurd; but the universal human touches us quite otherwise in the sweet changing heart of Briseida in the Roman de Troie. There is no ground for denying to Benoit of St. More his meed of fame for creating this charming person and starting her upon her career. Following “Dares,” Benoit calls her Briseida; but she becomes the Griseis of Boccaccio’s Filostrato; and what good man does not sigh and love her under the name of Cressid in Chaucer’s poem, though he may deplore her somewhat brazen heartlessness in Shakespeare’s play.

It is not given to all men, or women, in presence or absence, in life and death, to love once and forever. One has[Pg 227] the stable heart, another’s fancy is quickly turned. Sometimes, of course, our moral sledge-hammers should be brought to bear; but a little hopeless smile may be juster, as we sigh “she (it is more often “he”) couldn’t help it.” Such was Briseida, the sweet, loving, helpless—coquette? jilt? flirt? these words are all too belittling to tell her truly. Benoit knew better. He took her dry-as-dust characterization from “Dares”; he gave it life, and then let his fair creature do just the things she might, without ceasing to be she.

The abject “Dares” (Benoit may have had a better story under that name) in his catalogue of characters has this: “Briseidam formosam, alta statura, candidam, capillo flavo et molli, superciliis junctis, oculis venustis, corpore aequali, blandam, affabilem, verecundam, animo simplici [O ye gods!], piam.” He makes no other mention of this tall, graceful girl, with her lovely eyes and eyebrows meeting above, her modest, pleasant mien, and simple soul; for simple she was, and therein lies the direst bit of truth about her. For it is simple and uncomplex to take the colour of new scenes and faces, and of new proffered love when the old is far away.

Now see what Benoit does with this dust: Briseida is the daughter of Calchas, a Trojan seer who had passed over to the Greeks, warned by Apollo. He is in the Grecian host, but his daughter is in Troy. Benoit says, she was engaging, lovelier and fairer than the fleur de lis—though her eyebrows grew rather too close together. “Beaux yeux” she had, “de grande manière,” and charming was her talk, and faultless her breeding as her dress. Much was she loved and much she loved, although her heart changed; and she was very loving, simple, and kind:

Calchas wants his daughter, and Priam decides to send[Pg 228] her. There is truce between the armies. Troilus, Troy’s glorious young knight, matchless in beauty, in arms second only to his brother Hector, is beside himself. He loves Briseida, and she him. What tears and protestations, and what vows! But the girl must go to her father.

On the morrow the young dame has other cares—to see to the packing of her lovely dresses and put on the loveliest of them; over all she threw a mantle inwoven with the flowers of Paradise. The Trojan ladies add their tears to the damsel’s; for she is ready to die of grief at leaving her lover. Benoit assures us that she will not weep long; it is not woman’s way, he continues somewhat mediaevally.

The brilliant cortège is met by one still more distinguished from the Grecian host. Troilus must turn back, and the lady passes to the escort of Diomede. She was young; he was impetuous; he looks once, and then greets her with a torrential declaration of love. He never loved before!! He is hers, body and soul and high emprize. Briseida speaks him fair:

One need not tell the flash of joy that then was Diomede’s, nor the many troubles that were to be his before at last Briseida finds that her heart has indeed turned to this new lover, always at hand, courting danger for her sake, and at last wounded almost to death by Troilus’s spear. The end of the story is assured in her first discreetly halting words.

Enough has been said to show how far Benoit was from Omers qui fu clers merveillos, and what a story in some thirty thousand lines he has made of the dry data of “Dares” and “Dictys.” His Briseida, with her changing heart, was to[Pg 229] rival steadier-minded but not more lovable women of mediaeval fiction—Iseult or Guinevere. And although the far-off echo of Briseid’s name comes from the ancient centuries, none the less she is as entirely a mediaeval creation as Lancelot’s or Tristram’s queen. Thus the Middle Ages took the antique narrative, and created for themselves within the altered lines of the old tale.[338]

The transformation of themes of epic story in vernacular mediaeval versions is paralleled by mediaeval refashionings of historical subjects which had been fictionized before the antique period closed. A chief example is the romance of Alexander the Great. The antique source was the conqueror’s Life and Deeds, written by one who took the name of Alexander’s physician, Callisthenes. The author was some Egyptian Greek of the first century after Christ. His work is preposterous from the beginning to the end, and presents a succession of impossible marvels performed by the somewhat indistinguishable heroes of the story. Its qualities were reflected in the Latin versions, which in turn were drawn upon by the Old French rhyming romancers.[Pg 230] The latter mediaevalized and feudalized the tale. Nor were they halted by any absurdity, or conscious of the characterlessness of the puppets of the tale.[339]

Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval literature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of Chrétien Légouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the Metamorphoses, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.[340]

Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid’s verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in symbolism; and tended to change to spiritual allegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the Ars amatoria. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking prototype of De Lorris’s Roman de la rose.

 

 

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[Pg 231]

CHAPTER XXXIII

MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ROMAN LAW

Classical studies, and the gradual development of mediaeval prose and verse, discussed in the preceding chapters, illustrate modes of mediaeval progress. But of all examples of mediaeval intellectual growth through the appropriation of the antique, none is more completely illuminating than the mediaeval use of Roman law. As with patristic theology and antique philosophy, the Roman law was crudely taken and then painfully learned, till in the end, vitally and broadly mastered, it became even a means and mode of mediaeval thinking. Its mediaeval appropriation illustrates the legal capacity of the Middle Ages and their concern with law both as a practical business and an intellectual interest.

 

I

Primitive law is practical; it develops through the adjustment of social exigencies. Gradually, however, in an intelligent community which is progressing under favouring influences, some definite consciousness of legal propriety, utility, or justice, makes itself articulate in statements of general principles of legal right and in a steady endeavour to adjust legal relationships and adjudicate actual controversies in accordance. This endeavour to formulate just[Pg 232] and useful principles, and decide novel questions in accordance with them, and enunciate new rules in harmony with the body of the existing law, is jurisprudence, which thus works always for concord, co-ordination, and system.

There was a jurisprudential element in the early law of Rome. The Twelve Tables are trenchant announcements of rules of procedure and substantial law. They have the form of the general imperative: “Thus let it be; If one summons [another] to court, let him go; As a man shall have appointed by his Will, so let it be; When one makes a bond or purchase,[341] as the tongue shall have pronounced it, so let it be.” These statements of legal rules are far from primitive; they are elastic, inclusive, and suited to form the foundation of a large and free legal development. And the consistency with which the law of debt was carried out to its furthest cruel conclusion, the permitted division of the body of the defaulting debtor among several creditors,[342] gave earnest of the logic which was to shape the Roman law in its humaner periods. Moreover, there is jurisprudence in the arrangement of the Laws of the Twelve Tables. Nevertheless the jurisprudential element is still but inchoate.

The Romans were endowed with a genius for law. Under the later Republic and the Empire, the minds of their jurists were trained and broadened by Greek philosophy and the study of the laws of Mediterranean peoples; Rome was becoming the commercial as well as social and political centre of the world. From this happy combination of causes resulted the most comprehensive body of law and the noblest jurisprudence ever evolved by a people. The great jurisconsults of the Empire, working upon the prior labours of long lines of older praetors and jurists, perfected a body of law of well-nigh universal applicability, and throughout logically consistent with general principles of law and equity, recognized as fundamental. These were in part suggested by Greek philosophy, especially by Stoicism as adapted to the Roman temperament. They represented the best ethics,[Pg 233] the best justice of the time. As principles of law, however, they would have hung in the air, had not the practical as well as theorizing genius of the jurisconsults been equal to the task of embodying them in legal propositions, and applying the latter to the decision of cases. Thus was evolved a body of practical rules of law, controlled, co-ordinated, and, as one may say, universalized through the constant logical employment of sound principles of legal justice.[343]

The Roman law, broadly taken, was heterogeneous in origin, and complex in its modes of growth. The great jurisconsults of the Empire recognized its diversity of source, and distinguished its various characteristics accordingly. They assumed (and this was a pure assumption) that every civilized people lived under two kinds of law, the one its own, springing from some recognized law-making source within the community; the other the jus gentium, or the law inculcated among all peoples by natural reason or common needs.

The supposed origin of the jus gentium was not simple. Back in the time of the Republic it had become necessary to recognize a law for the many strangers in Rome, who were not entitled to the protection of Rome’s jus civile. The edict of the praetor Peregrinus covered their substantial rights, and sanctioned simple modes of sale and lease which did not observe the forms prescribed by the jus civile. So this edict became the chief source of the jus gentium so-called, to wit, of those liberal rules of law which ignored the peculiar formalities of the stricter law of Rome. Probably foreign laws, that is to say, the commercial customs of the Mediterranean world, were in fact recognized; and their study led to a perception of elements common to the laws of many peoples. At all events, in course of time the jus gentium came to be regarded as consisting of universal rules of law which all peoples might naturally follow.

[Pg 234]The recognition of these simple modes of contracting obligations, and perhaps the knowledge that certain rules of law obtained among many peoples, fostered the conception of common or natural justice, which human reason was supposed to inculcate everywhere. Such a conception could not fail to spring up in the minds of Roman jurists who were educated in Stoical philosophy, the ethics of which had much to say of a common human nature. Indeed the idea naturalis ratio was in the air, and the thought of common elements of law and justice which naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, lay so close at hand that it were perhaps a mistake to try to trace it to any single source. Practically the jus gentium became identical with jus naturale, which Ulpian imagined as taught by nature to all animals; the jus gentium, however, belonged to men alone.[344]

Thus rules which were conceived as those of the jus gentium came to represent the principles of rational law, and impressed themselves upon the development of the jus civile. They informed the whole growth and application of Roman law with a breadth of legal reason. And conceptions of a jus naturale and a jus gentium became cognate legal fictions, by the aid of which praetor and jurisconsult might justify the validity of informal modes of contract. In their application, judge and jurist learned how and when to disregard the formal requirements of the older and stricter Roman law, and found a way to the recognition of what was just and convenient. These fictions agreed with the supposed nature and demands of aequitas, which is the principle of progressive and discriminating legal justice. Law itself (jus) was[Pg 235] identical with aequitas conceived (after Celsus’s famous phrase) as the ars boni et aequi.

The Roman law proper, the jus civile, had multifarious sources. First the leges, enacted by the people; then the plebiscita, sanctioned by the Plebs; the senatus consulta, passed by the Senate; the constitutiones and rescripta[345] principum, ordained by the Emperor. Excepting the rescripta, these (to cover them with a modern expression) were statutory. They were laws announced at a specific time to meet some definite exigency. Under the Empire, the constitutiones principum became the most important, and then practically the only kind of legal enactment.

Two or three other sources of Roman law remain for mention: first, the edicta of those judicial magistrates, especially the praetors, who had the authority to issue them. In his edict the praetor announced what he held to be the law and how he would apply it. The edict of each successive praetor was a renewal and expansion or modification of that of his predecessor. Papinian calls this source of law the “jus praetorium, which the praetors have introduced to aid, supplement, or correct the jus civile for the sake of public utility.”

Next, the responsa or auctoritas jurisprudentium, by which were intended the judicial decisions and the authority of the legal writings of the famous jurisconsults. Imperial rescripts recognized these responsa as authoritative for the Roman courts; and some of the emperors embodied portions of them in formally promulgated collections, thereby giving them the force of law. Justinian’s Digest is the great example of this method of codification.[346] One need scarcely add that the authoritative writings and responsa of the jurisconsults extended and applied the jus gentium, that is to say, the rules and principles of the best-considered jurisprudence, freed so far as might be from[Pg 236] the formal peculiarities of the jus civile strictly speaking. And the same was true of the praetorian edict. The Roman law also gave legal effect to inveterata consuetudo, the law which is sanctioned by custom: “for since the laws bind us because established by the decision of the people, those unwritten customs which the people have approved are binding.”[347]

Simply naming the sources of Roman law indicates the ways in which it grew, and the part taken by the jurisconsults in its development as a universal and elastic system. It was due to their labours that legal principles were logically carried out through the mass of enactments and decisions; that is, it was due to their large consideration of the body of existing law, that each novel decision—each case of first impression—should be a true legal deduction, and not a solecism; and that even the new enactments should not create discordant law. And it was due to their labours that as rules of law were called forth, they were stated clearly and in terms of well-nigh universal applicability.

The Laws of the Twelve Tables showed the action of legal intelligence and the result of much experience. They sanctioned a large contractual freedom, if within strict forms; they stated broadly the right of testamentary disposition. Many of their provisions, which commonly were but authoritative recognitions, were expressions of basic legal principles, the application of which might be extended to meet the needs of advancing civic life. And through the enlargement of this fundamental collection of law, or deviating from it in accordance with principles which it implicitly embodied, the jurists of the Republic and the first centuries of the Empire formed and developed a body of private and public law from which the jurisprudence of Europe and America has never even sought to free itself.

Roman jurisprudence was finally incorporated in Justinian’s Digest, which opens with a statement of the most general principles, even those which would have hung in the air but for the Roman genius of logical and practical application to the concrete instance. “Jus est ars[Pg 237] boni et aequi”—it is better to leave these words untranslated, such is the wealth of significance and connotation which they have acquired. “Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. Juris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere. Jurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, justi atque injusti scientia.”

The first pregnant phrase is from the older jurist Celsus; the longer passage is by the later Ulpian, and may be taken as an expansion of the first. Both the one and the other expressed the most advanced and philosophic ethics of the ancient world. They are both in the first chapter of the Digest, wherein they become enactments. An extract from Paulus follows: “Jus has different meanings; that which is always aequum ac bonum is called jus, to wit, the jus naturale: jus also means the jus civile, that which is expedient (utile) for all or most in any state. And in our state we have also the praetorian jus.” This passage indicates the course of the development of the Roman law: the fundamental and ceaselessly growing core of specifically Roman law, the jus civile; its continual equitable application and enlargement, which was the praetor’s contribution; and the constant application of the aequum ac bonum, observed perhaps in legal rules common to many peoples, but more surely existing in the high reasoning of jurists instructed in the best ethics and philosophy of the ancient world, and learned and practised in the law.

Now notice some of the still general, but distinctly legal, rather than ethical, rules collected in the Digest: The laws cannot provide specifically for every case that may arise; but when their intent is plain, he who is adjudicating a cause should proceed ad similia, and thus declare the law in the case.[348] Here is stated the general and important formative principle, that new cases should be decided consistently and eleganter, which means logically and in accordance with established rules. Yet legal solecisms will exist, perhaps in a statute or in some rule of law evoked by a special exigency. Their application[Pg 238] is not to be extended. For them the rule is: “What has been accepted contra rationem juris, is not to be drawn out (producendum) to its consequences,”[349] or again: “What was introduced not by principle, but at first through error, does not obtain in like cases.”[350]

These are true principles making for the consistent development of a body of law. Observe the scope and penetration of some other general rules: “Nuptias non concubitus, sed consensus facit.”[351] This goes to the legal root of the whole conception of matrimony, and is still the recognized starting-point of all law upon that subject. Again: “An agreement to perform what is impossible will not sustain a suit.”[352] This is still everywhere a fundamental principle of the law of contracts. Again: “No one can transfer to another a greater right than he would have himself,”[353] another principle of fundamental validity, but, of course, like all rules of law subject in its application to the qualifying operation of other legal rules.

Roman jurisprudence recognized the danger of definition: “Omnis definitio in jure civili periculosa est.”[354] Yet it could formulate admirable ones; for example: “Inheritance is succession to the sum total (universum jus) of the rights of the deceased.”[355] This definition excels in the completeness of its legal view of the matter, and is not injured by the obvious omission to exclude those personal privileges and rights of the deceased which terminate upon his death.

Thus we note the sources and constructive principles of the Roman law. We observe that while certain of the former might be called “statutory,” the chief means and method of development was the declarative edict of the praetor and the trained labour of the jurisconsults. In these appears the consummate genius of Roman jurisprudence, a jurisprudence matchless in its rational conception of principles of justice which were rooted in a philosophic consideration of human life; matchless also in its carrying through of such principles into the body of the law and the decision of every case.

 [Pg 239]

II

The Roman law was the creation of the genius of Rome and also the product of the complex civilization of which Rome was the kinetic centre. As the Roman power crumbled, Teutonic invaders established kingdoms within territories formerly subject to Rome and to her law—a law, however, which commonly had been modified to suit the peoples of the provinces. Those territories retained their population of provincials. The invaders, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Franks, planting themselves in the different parts of Gaul, brought their own law, under which they continued to live, but which they did not force upon the provincial population. On the contrary, Burgundian and Visigothic kings promulgated codes of Roman law for the latter. And these represent the forms in which the Roman law first passed over into modes of acceptance and application no longer fully Roman, but partly Teutonic and incipiently mediaeval. They exemplify, moreover, the fact, so many aspects of which have been already noticed, of transitional and partly barbarized communities drawing from a greater past according to their simpler needs.

One may say that these codes carried on processes of decline from the full creative genius of Roman jurisprudence, which had irrevocably set in under the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The decline lay in a weakening of the intellectual power devoted to the law and its development. The living growth of the praetorian edict had long since come to an end; and now a waning jurisprudential intelligence first ceased to advance the development of law, and then failed to save from desuetude the achieved jurisprudence of the past. So the jurisprudential and juridical elements (jus) fell away from the law, and the imperial constitutions (leges) remained the sole legal vehicle and means of amendment. The need of codification was felt, and that preserving and eliminating process was entered upon.

Roman codification never became a reformulation. The Roman Codex was a collection of existing constitutions. A[Pg 240] certain jurist (“Gregorianus”) made an orderly and comprehensive collection of such as early as the close of Diocletian’s reign; it was supplemented by the work of another jurist (“Hermogenianus”) in the time of Constantine. Each compilation was the work of a private person, who, without authority to restate, could but compile the imperial constitutions. The same method was adopted by the later codifications, which were made and promulgated under imperial decree. There were two which were to be of supreme importance for the legal future of western Europe, the Theodosian Code and the legislation of Justinian. The former was promulgated in 438 by Theodosius II. and Valentinianus. The emperors formally announce that “in imitation (ad similitudinem) of the Code of Gregorianus and Hermogenianus we have decreed that all the Constitutions should be collected” which have been promulgated by Constantine and his successors, including ourselves.[356] So the Theodosian Code contains many laws of the emperors who decreed it.[357] It was thus a compilation of imperial constitutions already in existence, or decreed from year to year while the codification was in process (429-438). Every constitution is given in the words of its original announcement, and with the name of the emperor. Evidently this code was not a revision of the law.

The codification of Justinian began with the promulgation of the Codex in 529. That was intended to be a compilation of the constitutions contained in the previous codes and still in force, as well as those which had been decreed since the time of Theodosius. The compilers received authority to omit, abbreviate, and supplement. The Codex was revised and promulgated anew in 534. The constitutions which were decreed during the remainder of Justinian’s long reign were collected after his death and published as Novellae. So far there was nothing radically novel. But, under Justinian, life and art seemed to have revived in the East; and Tribonian, with the others who assisted in these labours, had larger views of legal reform and jurisprudential[Pg 241] conservation than the men who worked for Theodosius. Justinian and his coadjutors had also serious plans for improving the teaching of the law, in the furtherance of which the famous little book of Institutes was composed after the model, and to some extent in the words, of the Institutes of Gaius. It was published in 533.

The great labour, however, which Justinian and his lawyers were as by Providence inspired to achieve was the encyclopaedic codification of the jurisprudential law. Part of the emperor’s high-sounding command runs thus:

The language of the ancient jurists was to be preserved even critically, that is to say, the compilers were directed to emend apparent errors and restore what seemed “verum et optimum et quasi ab initio scriptum.” It was not the least of the providential mercies connected with the compilation of this great body of jurisprudential law, that Justinian and his commission did not abandon the phrasing of the old jurisconsults, and restate their opinions in such language as we have a sample of in the constitution from which the above extract is taken. This jurisprudential part of Justinian’s Codification was named the Digest or Pandects.[359]

Inasmuch as Justinian’s brief reconquest of western portions of the Roman Empire did not extend north of the Alps, his codification was not promulgated in Gaul or[Pg 242] Germany. Even in Italy his legislation did not maintain itself in general dominance, especially in the north where the Lombard law narrowed its application. Moreover, throughout the peninsula, the Pandects quickly became as if they were not, and fell into desuetude, if that can be said of a work which had not come into use. This body of jurisprudential law was beyond the legal sense of those monarchically-minded and barbarizing centuries, which knew law only as the command of a royal lawgiver. The Codex and the Novellae were of this nature. They, and not the Digest, represent the influence upon Italy of Justinian’s legislation until the renewed interest in jurisprudence brought the Pandects to the front at the close of the eleventh century. But Codex and Novellae were too bulky for a period that needed to have its intellectual labours made easy. From the first, the Novellae were chiefly known and used in the condensed form given them in the excellent Epitome of Julianus, apparently a Byzantine of the last part of Justinian’s reign.[360] The cutting down and epitomizing of the Codex is more obscure; probably it began at once; the incomplete or condensed forms were those in common use.[361]

It is, however, with the Theodosian Code and certain survivals of the works of the great jurists that we have immediately to do. For these were the sources of the codes enacted by Gothic and Burgundian kings for their Roman or Gallo-Roman subjects. Apparently the earliest of them was prepared soon after the year 502, at the command of Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians. This, which later was dubbed the Papianus,[362] was the work of a skilled Roman lawyer, and seems quite as much a text-book as a code. It set forth the law of the topics important for the Roman provincials living in the Burgundian kingdom, not merely making extracts from its sources, but stating their contents and referring to them as authorities. These sources[Pg 243] were substantially the same as those used by the Visigothic Breviarium, which was soon to supersede the Papianus even in Burgundy.

Breviarium was the popular name of the code enacted by the Visigothic king Alaric II. about the year 506 for his provinciales in the south of Gaul.[363] It preserved the integrity of its sources, giving the texts in the same order, and with the same rubrics, as in the original. The principal source was the Theodosian Code; next in importance the collections of Novellae of Theodosius and succeeding emperors: a few texts were taken from the Codes of “Gregorianus” and “Hermogenianus.” These parts of the Breviarium consisted of leges, that is, of constitutions of the emperors. Two sources of quite a different character were also drawn upon. One was the Institutes of Gaius, or rather an old epitome which had been made from it. The other was the Sententiae of Paulus, the famous “Five Books of Sentences ad filium.” This work of elementary jurisprudence deserved its great repute; yet its use in the Breviarium may have been due to the special sanction which had been given it in one of the constitutions of the Theodosian Code, also taken over into the Breviarium: “Pauli quoque sententias semper valere praecipimus.”[364] The same constitution confirmed the Institutes of Gaius, among other great jurisconsults. Presumably these two works were the most commonly known as well as the clearest and best of elementary jurisprudential compositions.

An interesting feature of the Breviarium, and destined to be of great importance, was the Interpretatio accompanying all its texts, except those drawn from the epitome of Gaius. This was not the work of Alaric’s compilers, but probably represents the approved exposition of the leges, with the exposition of the already archaic Sentences of Paulus, current in the law schools of southern Gaul in the fifth century. The Interpretatio thus taken into the Breviarium had, like the texts, the force of royal law, and soon was to surpass them in practice by reason of its[Pg 244] perspicuity and modernity. Many manuscripts contain only the Interpretatio and omit the texts.

The Breviarium became the source of Roman law, indeed the Roman law par excellence, for the Merovingian and then the Carolingian realm, outside of Italy. It was soon subjected to the epitomizing process, and its epitomes exist, dating from the eighth to the tenth century: they reduced it in bulk, and did away with the practical inconvenience of lex and interpretatio. Further, the Breviarium, and even the epitomes, were glossed with numerous marginal or interlinear notes made by transcribers or students. These range from definitions of words, sometimes taken from Isidore’s Etymologiae, to brief explanations of difficulties in the text.[365] In like manner in Italy, the Codex and Novellae of Justinian were, as has been said, reduced to epitomes, and also equipped with glosses.

These barbaric codes of Roman law mark the passage of Roman law into incipiently mediaeval stages. On the other hand, certain Latin codes of barbarian law present the laws of the Teutons touched with Roman conceptions, and likewise becoming inchoately mediaeval.

Freedom, the efficient freedom of the individual, belongs to civilization rather than to barbarism. The actual as well as imaginary perils surrounding the lives of men who do not dwell in a safe society, entail a state of close mutual dependence rather than of liberty. Law in a civilized community has the twofold purpose of preserving the freedom of the individual and of maintaining peace. With each advance in human progress, the latter purpose, at least in the field of private civil law, recedes a little farther, while[Pg 245] the importance of private law, as compared with penal law, constantly increases.

The law of uncivilized peoples lacks the first of these purposes. Its sole conscious object is to maintain, or at least provide a method of maintaining peace; it is scarcely aware that in maintaining peace it is enhancing the freedom of every individual.

The distinct and conscious purpose of early Teutonic law was to promote peace within the tribe, or among the members of a warband. Thus was law regarded by the people—as a means of peace. Its communication or ordainment might be ascribed to a God or a divine King. But in reality its chief source lay in slowly growing regulative custom.[366] The force of law, or more technically speaking the legal sanction, lay in the power of the tribe to uphold its realized purpose as a tribe; for the power to maintain its solidarity and organization was the final test of its law-upholding strength.

Primarily the old Teutonic law looked to the tribe and its sub-units, and scarcely regarded the special claims of an individual, or noticed mitigating or aggravating elements in his culpability—answerability rather. It prescribed for his peace and protection as a member of a family, or as one included within the bands of Sippe (blood relationship); or as one of a warband or a chief’s close follower, one of his comitatus. On the other hand, the law was stiff, narrow, and ungeneralized in its recognized rules. The first Latin codifications of Teutonic law are not to be compared for breadth and elasticity of statement to the Law of the Twelve Tables. And their substance was more primitive.[367]

The earliest of these first codifications was the Lex Salica, codified under Clovis near the year 500. Unquestionably, contact with Roman institutions suggested the idea, even as the Latin language was the vehicle, of this code. Otherwise the Lex Salica is un-Christian and un-Roman, although probably it was put together after Clovis’s baptism. It was not a comprehensive codification, and omitted much[Pg 246] that was common knowledge at the time; which now makes it somewhat enigmatical. One finds in it lists of thefts of every sort of object that might be stolen, and of the various injuries to the person that might be done, and the sum of money to be paid in each case as atonement or compensation. Such schedules did not set light store on life and property. On the contrary, they were earnestly intended as the most available protection of elemental human rights, and as the best method of peaceful redress. The sums awarded as Wergeld were large, and were reckoned according to the slain man’s rank. By committing a homicide, a man might ruin himself and even his blood relatives (Sippe) and of course on failure to atone might incur servitude or death or outlawry.

The Salic law is scarcely touched by the law of Rome. From this piece of intact Teutonism the codes of other Teuton peoples shade off into bodies of law partially Romanized, that is, affected by the provincialized Roman law current in the locality where the Teutonic tribe found a home. The codes of the Burgundians and the Visigoths in southern France are examples of this Teutonic-Romanesque commingling. On the other hand, the Lombard codes, though later in time, held themselves even harshly Teutonic, as opposed to any influence from the law of the conquered Italian population, for whom the Lombards had less regard than Burgundians and Visigoths had for their subject provincials. Moreover, as the Frankish realm extended its power over other Gallo-Teuton states, the various Teuton laws modified each other and tended toward uniformity. Naturally the law of the Franks, first the Salic and then the partly derivative Ribuarian code, exerted a dominating influence.[368]

These Teuton peoples regarded law as pertaining to the tribe. There was little conscious intention on their part of forcing their laws on the conquered. When the Visigoths established their kingdom in southern France they had no idea of changing the law of the Gallo-Roman provincials living within the Visigothic rule; and shortly afterwards, when the Franks extended their power over the still Roman[Pg 247] parts of Gaul, and then over Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths, they likewise had no thought of forcing their laws either upon Gallo-Romans or upon the Teuton people previously dominant within a given territory. This remained true even of the later Frankish period, when the Carolingians conquered the Lombard kingdom in upper Italy.

Indeed, to all these Teutons and to the Roman provincials as well, it seemed as a matter of course that tribal or local laws should be permitted to endure among the peoples they belonged to. These assumptions and the conditions of the growing Frankish Empire evoked, as it were, a more acute mobilization of the principle that to each people belonged its law. For provincials and Teuton peoples were mingling throughout the Frankish realm, and the first obvious solution of the legal problems arising was to hold that provincials and Teutons everywhere should remain amenable and entitled to their own law, which was assumed to attend them as a personal appurtenance. Of course this solution became intolerable as tribal blood and delimitations were obscured, and men moved about through the territories of one great realm. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons remarks that one might see five men sitting together, each amenable to a different law.[369] The escape from this legal confusion was to revert to the idea of law and custom as applying to every one within a given territory. The personal principle gradually gave way to this conception in the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.[370] In the meanwhile during the Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king’s law, as distinguished from people’s law, had been an influence making for legal uniformity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the authority of the Frankish king or emperor. The king’s law might emanate from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal functionaries;[Pg 248] it was most formally promulgated in Capitularies, which with Charlemagne reach such volume and importance. Some of these royal ordinances related to a town or district only. Others were for the realm, and the latter not only were instances of law applying universally, but also tended to promote, or suggest, the harmonizing of laws which they did not modify directly.

 

III

The Roman law always existed in the Middle Ages. Provincialized and changed, it was interwoven in the law and custom of the land of the langue d’oc and even in the customary law of the lands where the langue d’oil was spoken. Through the same territory it existed also in the Breviarium and its epitomes. There was very little of it in England, and scarcely a trace in the Germany east of the Rhine. In Italy it was applied when not superseded by the Lombard codes, and was drawn from works based on the Codex and Novels of Justinian. But the jurisprudential law contained in Justinian’s Digest was as well forgotten in Italy as in any land north of the Alps, where the Codification of Justinian had never been promulgated. The extent to which the classic forms of Roman law were known or unknown, unforgotten or forgotten, was no accident as of codices or other writings lost accidentally. It hung upon larger conditions—whether society had reached that stage of civilized exigency demanding the application of an advanced commercial law, and whether there were men capable of understanding and applying it. This need and the capacity to understand would be closely joined.[371]

The history of the knowledge and understanding of Roman law in the Middle Ages might be resolved into a consideration of the sources drawn upon, and the extent and manner of their use, from century to century. In the fifth century, when the Theodosian Code was promulgated, law was thought of chiefly as the mandate of a ruler. The[Pg 249] Theodosian Code was composed of constitutiones principum. Likewise the Breviarium, based upon it, and other barbarian codes of Roman law, were ordained by kings; and so were the codes of Teutonic law. For law, men looked directly to the visible ruler. The jus, reasoned out by the wisdom of trained jurists, had lost authority and interest. To be sure, a hundred years later Justinian’s Commission put together in the Digest the body of jurisprudential law; but even in Italy where his codification was promulgated, the Digest fell still-born. Never was an official compilation of less effect upon its own time, or of such mighty import for times to come.

The Breviarium became par excellence the code of Roman law for the countries included in the present France. With its accompanying Interpretatio it was a work indicating intelligence on the part of its compilers, whose chief care was as to arrangement and explanation. But the time was not progressive, and a gathering mental decadence was shown by the manner in which the Breviarium was treated and used, to wit, epitomized in many epitomes, and practically superseded by them. Here was double evidence of decay; for the supersession of such a work by such epitomes indicates a diminishing legal knowledge in the epitomizers, and also a narrowing of social and commercial needs in the community, for which the original work contained much that was no longer useful.

There were, of course, epitomes and epitomes. Such a work as the Epitome Juliani, in which a good Byzantine lawyer of Justinian’s time presented the substance of the Novellae, was an excellent compendium, and deserved the fame it won. Of a lower order were the later manipulations of Justinian’s Codex, by which apparently the Codex was superseded in Italy. One of these was the Summa Perusina of the ninth or tenth century, a wretched work, and one of the blindest.[372]

Justinian’s Codex and Julian’s Epitome were equipped with glosses, some of which are as early as Justinian’s time; but the greater part are later. The glosses to Justinian’s legislation resemble those of the Breviarium before referred[Pg 250] to. That is to say, as the centuries pass downward toward the tenth, the glosses answer to cruder needs: they become largely translations of words, often taken from Isidore’s Etymologiae.[373] Indeed many of them appear to have had merely a grammatical interest, as if the text was used as an aid in the study of the Latin language.

The last remark indicates a way in which a very superficial acquaintance with the Roman law was kept up through the centuries prior to the twelfth: it was commonly taught in the schools devoted to elementary instruction, that is to say, to the Seven Liberal Arts. In many instances the instructors had only such knowledge as they derived from Isidore, that friend of every man. That is, they had no special knowledge of law, but imparted various definitions to their pupils, just as they might teach them the names of diseases and remedies, a list of which (and nothing more) they would also find in Isidore. It was all just as one might have expected. Elementary mediaeval education was encyclopaedic in its childish way; and, in accordance with the methods and traditions of the transition centuries, all branches of instruction were apt to be turned to grammar and rhetoric, and made linguistic, so to speak—mere subjects for curious definition. Thus it happened to law as well as medicine. Yet some of the teachers may have had a practical acquaintance with legal matters, with an understanding for legal documents and skill to draw them up.

The assertion also is warranted that at certain centres of learning substantial legal instruction was given; one may even speak of schools of law. Scattered information touching all the early mediaeval periods shows that there was no time when instruction in Roman law could not be obtained somewhere in western Europe. To refer to France, the Roman law was very early taught at Narbonne; at Orleans it was taught from the time of Bishop Theodulphus, Charlemagne’s contemporary, and probably the teaching of it long continued. One may speak in the same way of Lyons; and in the eleventh century Angers was famed for the study of law.

Our information is less broken as to an Italy where through the early Middle Ages more general opportunities[Pg 251] offered for elementary education, and where the Roman law, with Justinian’s Codification as a base, made in general the law of the land. There is no reason to suppose that it was not taught. Contemporary allusions bear witness to the existence of a school of law in Rome in the time of Cassiodorus and afterwards, which is confirmed by a statement of the jurist Odofredus in the thirteenth century. At Pavia there was a school of law in the time of Rothari, the legislating Lombard king; this reached the zenith of its repute in the eleventh century. Legal studies also flourished at Ravenna, and succumbed before the rising star of the Bologna school at the beginning of the twelfth century.[374] In these and doubtless many other cities[375] students were instructed in legal practices and formulae, and some substance of the Roman law was taught. Extant legal documents of various kinds afford, especially for Italy, ample evidence of the continuous application of the Roman law.[376]

As for the merits and deficiencies of legal instruction in Italy and in France, an idea may be gained from the various manuals that were prepared either for use in the schools of law or for the practitioner. Because of the uncertainty, however, of their age and provenance, it is difficult to connect them with a definite foyer of instruction.

Until the opening of the twelfth century, or at all events until the last quarter of the eleventh, the legal literature evinces scarcely any originality or critical capacity. There are glosses, epitomes, and collections of extracts, more or less condensed or confused from whatever text the compiler had before him. Little jurisprudential intelligence appears in any writings which are known to precede the close of the eleventh century; none, for instance, in the epitomes of the Breviarium and the glosses relating to that code; none in[Pg 252] those works of Italian origin the material for which was drawn directly or indirectly from the Codex or Novels of Justinian, for instance the Summa Perusina and the Lex Romana canonice compta, both of which probably belong to the ninth century. Such compilations were put together for practical use, or perhaps as aids to teaching.

Thus, so far as inference may be drawn from the extant writings, the legal teaching in any school during this long period hardly rose above an uncritical and unenlightened explanation of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized and deflected from its classic form and substance. There was also practical instruction in current legal forms and customs. Interest in the law had not risen above practical needs, nor was capacity shown for anything above a mechanical handling of the matter. Legal study was on a level with the other intellectual phenomena of the period.

In an opusculum[377] written shortly after the middle of the eleventh century, Peter Damiani bears unequivocal, if somewhat hostile, witness to the study of law at Ravenna; and it is clear that in his time legal studies were progressing in both France and Italy. It is unsafe to speak more definitely, because of the difficulty in fixing the time and place of certain rather famous pieces of legal literature, which show a marked advance upon the productions to be ascribed with certainty to an earlier time. The reference is to the Petri exceptiones and the Brachylogus. The critical questions relating to the former are too complex even to outline here. Both its time and place are in dispute. The ascribed dates range from the third quarter of the eleventh century to the first quarter of the twelfth, a matter of importance, since the opening of the twelfth century is marked by the rise of the Bologna school. As for the place, some scholars still adhere to the south of France, while others look to Pavia or Ravenna. On the whole, the weight of argument seems to favour Italy and a date not far from 1075.[378]

The Petrus, as it is familiarly called, is drawn from[Pg 253] immediately prior and still extant compilations. The compiler wished to give a compendious if not systematic presentation of law as accepted and approved in his time, that is to say, of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized in tone, and with certain extraneous elements from the Lombard codes. The ultimate Roman sources were the Codification of Justinian, and indeed all of it, Digest, Codex, and Novels, the last in the form to which they had been brought in Julian’s Epitome. The purpose of the compilation is given in the Prologue,[379] which in substance is as follows:

The arrangement of topics in the Petrus hardly evinces any clear design. The substance, however, is well presented. If there be a question to be solved, it is plainly stated, and the solution arrived at may be interesting. For example, a case seems to have arisen where the son of one who died intestate had seized the whole property to the exclusion of the children of two deceased daughters. The sons of one daughter acquiesced. The sons of the other per placitum et guerram forced their uncle to give up their share. Thereupon the supine cousins demanded to share in what had so been won. The former contestants resisted on the plea that the latter had borne no aid in the contest and that they had obtained only their own portion. The decision was that the supine cousins might claim their heritage from whoever held it, and should receive their share in what the[Pg 254] successful contestants had won; but that the latter could by counter-actions compel them to pay their share of the necessary expenses of the prior contest.[381]

Sometimes the Petrus seems to draw a general rule of law from the apparent instances of its application in Justinian’s Codification. Therein certain formalities were prescribed in making a testament, in adopting a son, or emancipating a slave. The Petrus draws from them the general principle that where the law prescribes formalities, the transaction is not valid if they are omitted.[382] In fine, unsystematized as is the arrangement of topics, the work presents an advance in legal intelligence over mediaeval law-writings earlier than the middle of the eleventh century.

If the Petrus was adapted for use in practice, the Brachylogus, on the other hand, was plainly a book of elementary instruction, formed on the model of Justinian’s Institutes. But it made use of his entire codification, the Novels, however, only as condensed in Julian’s Epitome. The influence of the Breviarium is also noticeable; which might lead one to think that the treatise was written in Orleans or the neighbourhood, since the Breviarium was not in use in Italy, while the Codification of Justinian was known in France by the end of the eleventh century. The beginning of the twelfth is the date usually given to the Brachylogus. It does not belong to the Bologna school of glossators, but rather immediately precedes them, wherever it was composed.[383]

The Brachylogus, as a book of Institutes, compares favourably with its model, from the language of which it departed at will. Both works are divided into four libri; but the libri of the Brachylogus correspond better to the logical divisions of the law. Again, frequently the author of the Brachylogus breaks up the chapters of Justinian’s Institutes and gives the subject-matter under more pertinent headings. Sometimes the statements of the older work are improved by rearrangement. The definitions of the[Pg 255] Brachylogus are pithy and concise, even to a fault. Often the exposition is well adapted to the purposes of an elementary text-book,[384] which was meant to be supplemented by oral instruction. On the whole, the work shows that the author is no longer encumbered by the mass or by the advanced character of his sources. He restates their substance intelligently, and thinks for himself. He is no compiler, and his work has reached the rank of a treatise.

The merits of the Brachylogus as an elementary text-book are surpassed by those of the so-called Summa Codicis Irnerii, a book which may mark the beginning of the Bologna school of law, and may even be the composition of its founder. Many arguments are adduced for this authorship.[385] The book has otherwise been deemed a production of the last days of the school of law at Rome just before the school was broken up by some catastrophe as to which there is little information. In that case the work would belong to the closing years of the eleventh century, whereas the authorship of Irnerius would bring it to the beginning of the twelfth. At all events, its lucid jurisprudential reasoning precludes the likelihood of an earlier origin.

This Summa is an exposition of Roman law, following the arrangement and titles of Justinian’s Codex, but making extensive use of the Digest. It thus contains Roman jurisprudential law, and may be regarded as a compendious text-book for law students, forming apparently the basis of a course of lectures which treated the topics more at length.[386] The author’s command of his material is admirable, and his presentation masterly. Whether he was Irnerius or some one else, he was a great teacher. His work may be also called academic, in that his standpoint is always that of the Justinianean law, although he limits his exposition to those topics which had living interest for the twelfth century. Private substantial law forms the chief matter, but procedure is set forth and penal law touched upon. The author[Pg 256] appreciates the historical development of the Roman law and the character of its various sources—praetorian law, constitutiones principum, and responsa prudentium. He also shows independence, and a regard for legal reasoning and the demands of justice. While he sets forth the jus civile, his exposition and approval follow the dictates of the jus naturale.

One must suppose that such concise statements were explained and qualified in the author’s lectures. But even as they stand, they afford an exposition of Roman principles of interpretation. Not only under the Roman Empire, but subsequently in mediaeval times, the Roman lawyer or the canonist did not pay the deference to adjudicated precedent which is felt by the English or American judge. The passage in the Codex which “Irnerius” was expounding commands that the judge, in deciding a case, shall follow the laws and the reasoning of the great jurists, rather than the decision of a like controversy.

Since the author of this Summa weighs the justice, the reason, and the convenience of the laws, and compares them with each other, his book is a work of jurisprudence. Its qualities may be observed in its discussion of possession and the rights arising therefrom. The writer has just been[Pg 257] expounding the usucapio, an institution of the jus civile strictly speaking, whereby the law of Rome in certain instances protected and, after three years, perfected, the title to property which one had in good faith acquired from a vendor who was not the owner:

Then follows a discussion of the persons through whom another may have possession, and of the various modes of possessing longa manu without actual touch:

voluntarily or otherwise. He now discusses the various[Pg 258] modes in which possession is acquired by transfer, then the nature of the justa or injusta causa with which possession may begin, and the effect on the rights of the possessor, and then some matters more peculiar to the time of Justinian. After which he passes to the loss of possession, and concludes with saying that he has endeavoured to go over the whole subject, and whatever is omitted or insufficiently treated, he begs that it be laid to the fault of humanae imbecillitatis. The discussion reads like a carefully drawn outline which his lecture should expand.[388]

The knowledge and understanding of the Roman law in the mediaeval centuries should be viewed in conjunction with the general progress of intellectual aptitude during the same periods. The growth of legal knowledge will then show itself as a part of mediaeval development, as one phase of the flowering of the mediaeval intellect. For the treatment of Roman law presents stages essentially analogous to those by which the Middle Ages reached their understanding and appropriation of other portions of their great inheritance from classical antiquity and the Christianity of the Fathers. Let us recapitulate: the Roman law, adapted, or corrupted if one will, epitomized and known chiefly in its later enacted forms, was never unapplied nor the study of it quite abandoned. It constituted a great part of the law of Italy and southern France; in these two regions likewise was its study least neglected. We have observed the superficial and mainly linguistic nature of the glosses which this early mediaeval period interlined or wrote on the margins of the source-books drawn upon, also the rude and barbarous nature of the earlier summaries and compilations. They were helps to a crude practical knowledge of the law. Gradually the treatment seems to become more intelligent, a little nearer the level of the matter excerpted or made use of. Through the eleventh century it is evident that social conditions were demanding and also facilitating an increase in legal knowledge; and at that century’s close a by no means stupid compilation appears, the Petri exceptiones, and perhaps such a fairly intelligent manual for elementary[Pg 259] instruction as the Brachylogus. These works indicate that the instruction in the law was improving. We have also the sparse references to schools of law, at Rome, at Ravenna, at Orleans. Then we come upon the Summa Codicis called of Irnerius, of uncertain provenance, like the Petrus and Brachylogus. But there is no need to be informed specifically of its place and date in order to recognize its advance in legal intelligence, in veritable jurisprudence. The writer was a master of the law, an adept in its exposition, and his oral teaching must have been of a high order. With this book we have unquestionably touched the level of the strong beginnings of the greatest of mediaeval schools of Roman law.

Its seat was Bologna, one of the chief centres of the civic and commercial life of Lombardy. The Lombards themselves had shown a persistent legal genius: their own Teutonic codes, enacted in Italy, had maintained themselves in that land of Roman law and custom. Lombard codification had almost reached a jurisprudence of its own, at Pavia, the juridical centre of Lombardy. The provisions of various codes had been compared and put together in a sort of Concordia, as early as the ninth century.[389] Possibly the rivalry of Lombard law might stimulate those learned in the law of Rome to sharper efforts to expound it and prove its superiority. Moreover, all sides of civic life and culture were flourishing in that region where novel commercial relations were calling for a corresponding progress in the law, and especially for a better knowledge of the Roman law which alone afforded provision for their regulation.

As some long course of human development approaches its climax, the advance apparently becomes so rapid as to give the impression of something suddenly happening, a sudden leap upward of the human spirit. The velocity of the movement seems to quicken as the summit is neared. One easily finds examples, for instance the fifth century before Christ in Greek art, or the fourth century in Greek philosophy, or again the excellence so quickly reached apparently by the Middle High German poetry just about the year 1200. But may not the seeming suddenness of[Pg 260] the phenomenon be due to lack of information as to antecedents? and the flare of the final achievement even darken what went before? Yet, in fact, as a movement nears its climax, it may become more rapid. For, as the promoting energies and favouring conditions meet in conjunction, their joint action becomes more effective. Forces free themselves from cumbrances and draw aid from one another. Thus when the gradual growth of intellectual faculty effects a conjunction with circumstances which offer a fair field, and the prizes of life as a reward, a rapid increase of power may evince itself in novel and timely productivity.

This may suggest the manner of the apparently sudden rise of the Bologna school of Roman law, which, be it noted, took place but a little before the time of Gratian’s achievement in the Canon law, itself contemporaneous with the appearance of Peter Lombard’s novel Books of Sentences.[390] The preparation, although obscure, existed; and the school after its commencement passed onward through stages of development, to its best accomplishment, and then into a condition of stasis, if not decline. Irnerius apparently was its first master; and of his life little is known. He was a native of Bologna. His name as causidicus is attached to a State paper of the year 1113. Thereafter he appears in the service of the German emperor Henry V. We have no sure trace of him after 1118, though there is no reason to suppose that he did not live and labour for some further years. He had taught the Arts at Ravenna and Bologna before teaching, or perhaps seriously studying, the law. But his career as a teacher of the law doubtless began before the year 1113, when he is first met with as a man of affairs. Accounts agree in ascribing to him the foundation of the school.

Unless the Summa Codicis already mentioned, and a book of Quaestiones, be really his, his glosses upon Justinian’s Digest, Codex, and Novels, are all we have of him;[391] of the[Pg 261] rest we know by report. The glosses themselves indicate that this jurist had been a grammarian, and used the learning of his former profession in his exposition of the law. His interlinear glosses are explanations of words, and would seem to represent his earlier, more tentative, work when he was himself learning the meaning of the law. But the marginal glosses are short expositions of the passages to which they are attached, and perhaps belong to the time of his fuller command over the legal material. They indicate, besides, a critical consideration of the text, and even of the original connection which the passage in the Digest held in the work of the jurisconsult from which it had been taken. Some of them show an understanding of the chronological sequence of the sources of the Roman law, e.g. that the law-making power had existed in the people and then passed to the emperors. These glosses of Irnerius represent a clear advance in jurisprudence over any previous legal comment subsequent to the Interpretatio attached to the Breviarium. It was also part of his plan to equip his manuscripts of the Codex with extracts taken from the text of the Novels, and not from the Epitome of Julian. He appears also as a lawyer versed in the practice of the law. For he wrote a book of forms for notaries and a treatise on procedure, neither of which is extant.[392]

The accomplishment of the Bologna school may be judged more fully from the works, still extant, of some of its chief representatives in the generations following Irnerius. A worthy one was Placentinus, a native of Piacenza. The year of his birth is unknown, but he died in 1192, after a presumably full span of life, passed chiefly as a student and teacher of the law. He taught in Mantua and Montpellier, as well as in Bologna. He was an accomplished jurist and a lover of the classic literature. His work entitled De varietate actionum was apparently the first attempt to set forth the Roman law in an arrangement and form that did not follow the sources.[393] He opens his treatise with an[Pg 262] allegory of a noble dame, hight Jurisprudentia, within the circle of whose sweet and honied utterances many eager youths were thronging. Placentinus drew near, and received from her the book which he now gives to others.[394] This little allegory savours of the De consolatione of Boëthius, or, if one will, of Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae.

The most admirable surviving work of Placentinus is his Summa of the Codex of Justinian. His autobiographical proemium shows him not lacking in self-esteem, and tells why he undertook the work. He had thought at first to complete the Summa of Rogerius, an older glossator, but then decided to put that book to sleep, and compose a full Summa of the Codex himself, from the beginning to the end. This by the favour of God he has done; it is the work of his own hands, from head to heel, and all the matter is his own—not borrowed. Next he wrote for beginners a Summa of the Institutes. After which he returned to his own town, and shortly proceeded thence to Bologna, whither he had been called. “There in the citadel (in castello) for two years I expounded the laws to students; I brought the other teachers to the threshold of envy; I emptied their benches of students. The hidden places of the law I laid open, I reconciled the conflicts of enactments, I unlocked the secrets most potently.” His success was great, and he was besought to continue his course of lectures. He complied, and remained two years more, and then returned to Montpellier, in order to compose a Summa of the Digest.[395] If indeed Placentinus speaks bombastically of his work, its excellence excuses him. His well-earned reputation as a jurist and scholar long endured.

Quaestiones, Distinctiones, Libri disputationum, Summae of the Codex or the Institutions, and other legal writings, are extant in goodly bulk and number from the Bologna school. The names of the men are almost legion, and many were of great repute in their day both as jurists and as men of affairs. We may mention Azo and Accursius, of a little[Pg 263] later time. Azo’s name appears in public documents from the year 1190 to 1220—and he may have survived the latter date by some years. His works were of such compass and excellence as to supersede those of his predecessors. His glosses still survive, and his Lectura on the Codex, his Summae of the Codex and the Institutes, and his Quaestiones, and Brocarda, the last a sort of work stating general legal propositions and those contradicting them. Azo’s glosses were so complete as to constitute a continuous exposition of the entire legislation of Justinian. His Summae of the Codex and Institutes drove those of Placentinus out of use, which we note with a smile.[396]

None of the glossators is better known than Accursius. He comes before us as a Florentine, and apparently a peasant’s son. He died an old man rich and famous, about the year 1260. Azo was his teacher. In 1252 he was Podesta of Bologna, which indicates the respect in which men held him. Villani, the Florentine historian, describes him as of martial form, grave, thoughtful, even melancholy in aspect, as if always meditating; a man of brilliant talents and extraordinary memory, sober and chaste in life, but delighting in noble vesture. His hearers drank in the laws of living from his mien and manners no less than from the dissertations of his mouth.[397] Late in life he retired to his villa, and there in quiet worked on his great Glossa till he died.

This famous, perhaps all too famous, Glossa ordinaria was a digest and, as it proved, a final one, of the glosses of his predecessors and contemporaries. He drew not only from their glosses, but also on their Summae and other writings. He added a good deal of his own. Great as was the feat, the somewhat deadened talent of a compiler shows in the result, which flattened out the individual labours of so many jurists. It came at once into general use in the courts and outside of them; for it was a complete commentary on the Justinianean law, so compendious and convenient that there was no further need of the glosses of earlier men. This book marked the turning-point of the Bologna school, after which its productivity lessened. Its[Pg 264] work was done: Codex, Novels, and above all the Pandects were rescued from oblivion, and fully expounded, so far as the matter in them was still of interest. When the labours of the school had been conveniently heaped together in one huge Glossa, there was no vital inducement to do this work again. The school of the glossators was functus officio. Naturally with the lessening of the call, productivity diminished. Little was left to do save to gloss the glosses, an epigonic labour which would not attract men of talent. Moreover, treating the older glosses, instead of the original text, as the matter to be interpreted was unfavourable to progress in the understanding of the latter.

Yet, for a little, the breath of life was still to stir in the school of the glossators. There was a man of fame, a humanist indeed, named Cino, whose beautiful tomb still draws the lover of things lovely to Pistoia. Cino was also a jurist, and it came to him to be the teacher of one whose name is second to none among the legists of the Middle Ages. This was Bartolus, born probably in the year 1314 at Sassoferrato in the duchy of Urbino. He was a scholar, learned in geometry and Hebrew, also a man of affairs. He taught the law at Pisa and Perugia, and in the last-named town he died in 1357, not yet forty-four years old. Bartolus wrote and compiled full commentaries on the entire Corpus juris civilis; and yet he produced no work differing in kind from works of his predecessors. Moreover, between him and the body of the law rose the great mass of gloss and comment already in existence, through which he did not always penetrate to the veritable Corpus. Yet his labours were inspired with the energy of a vigorous nature, and he put fresh thoughts into his commentaries.[398]

The school of glossators presented the full Roman law to Europe. The careful and critical interpretation of the text of Justinian’s Codification, of the Digest above all, was their great service. In performing it, these jurists also had educated themselves and developed their own intelligence. They had also put together in Summae the results of their own education in the law. These works facilitated legal study and sharpened the faculties of students and professors.[Pg 265] Books of Quaestiones, legal disputations, works upon legal process and formulae, served the same ends.[399] These men were deficient in historical knowledge. Yet they compared Digest, Codex, and Novels; they tried to re-establish the purity of the text; they weighed and they expounded. Theirs was an intellectual effort to master the jurisprudence of Rome: their labours constituted a renaissance of jurisprudence; and the fact that they were often men of affairs as well as professors, kept them from ignoring the practical bearings of the matters which they taught.

The work of the glossators may be compared with that of the theologian philosophers of the thirteenth century—Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas—who were winning for the world a new and comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle. Both jurists and philosophers, in their different spheres, carried through a more profound study, and reached a more comprehensive knowledge, of a great store of antique thought, than previous mediaeval centuries conceived of. Moreover, the interpretation of the Corpus juris was quite as successful as the interpretation of Aristotle. It was in fact surer, because freer from the deflections of religious motive. No consideration of agreement or disagreement with Scripture troubled the glossators’ interpretation of the Digest, though indeed they may have been interested in finding support for whatever political views they held upon the claims of emperor and pope. But this did not disturb them as much as Aristotle’s opinion that the universe was eternal, worried Albertus and Aquinas.

 

IV

The Church, from the time of its first recognition by the Roman Empire, lived under the Roman law;[400] and the constitutions safeguarding its authority were large and ample before the Empire fell. Constantine, to be sure, never dreamed of the famous “Donation of Constantine”[Pg 266] forged by a later time, yet his enactments fairly launched the great mediaeval Catholic Church upon the career which was to bring it more domination than was granted in this pseudo-charter of its power. A number of Constantine’s enactments were preserved by the Theodosian Code, in which the powers and privileges of Church and clergy were portentously set forth.

The Theodosian Code freed the property of the Church from most fiscal burdens, and the clergy from taxes, from public and military service, and from many other obligations which sometimes the Code groups under the head of sordida munera. The Church might receive all manner of bequests, and it inherited the property of such of its clergy as did not leave near relatives surviving them. Its property generally was inalienable; and the clergy were accorded many special safeguards. Slaves might be manumitted in a church. The church edifices were declared asylums of refuge from pursuers, a privilege which had passed to the churches from the heathen fanes and the statues of the emperors. Constitution after constitution was hurled against the Church’s enemies. The Theodosian Code has one chapter containing sixty-six constitutions directed against heretics, the combined result of which was to deprive them, if not of life and property, at least of protected legal existence.

Of enormous import was the sweeping recognition on the Empire’s part of the validity of episcopal jurisdiction. No bishop might be summoned before a secular court as a defendant, or compelled to give testimony. Falsely to accuse one of the clergy rendered the accuser infamous. All matters pertaining to religion and church discipline might be brought only before the bishop’s court, which likewise had plenary jurisdiction over controversies among the clergy. It was also open to the laity for the settlement of civil disputes. The command not to go to law before the heathen came down from Paul (1 Cor. vi.), and together with the severed and persecuted condition of the early Christian communities, may be regarded as the far source of the episcopal jurisdiction, which thus divinely sanctioned tended to extend its arbitrament to all manner of legal[Pg 267] controversies.[401] To be sure, under the Christian Roman Empire the authority of the Church as well as its privileges rested upon imperial law. Yet the emperors recognized, rather than actually created, the ecclesiastical authority. And when the Empire was shattered, there stood the Church erect amid the downfall of the imperial government, and capable of supporting itself in the new Teutonic kingdoms.

The constitutions of Christian emperors did not from their own force and validity become Ecclesiastical or Canon law—the law relating to Christians as such, and especially to the Church and its functions. The source of that law was God; the Church was its declarative organ. Acceptance on the Church’s part was requisite before any secular law could become a law of the Church.

Canon law may be taken to include theology, or may be limited to the law of the organization and functions of the Church taken in a large sense as inclusive of the laity in their relations to the religion of Christ.[402] Obviously part comes from Christ directly, through the Old Testament as well as New. The other part, and in bulk far greater, emanates from His foundation, the Church, under the guidance of His Spirit, and may be added to and modified by the Church from age to age. It is expressed in custom, universal and established, and it is found in written form in the works of the Fathers, in the decrees of Councils, in the decretals of the popes, and in the concordats and conventions with secular sovereignties. From the beginning, canon law tacitly or expressly adopted the constitutions of the Christian emperors relating to the Church, as well as the Roman law generally, under which the Church lived in its civil relations.

The Church arose within the Roman Empire, and who shall say that its wonderfully efficient and complete organization at the close of the patristic period was not the final creation of the legal and constructive genius of Rome,[Pg 268] newly inspired by the spirit of Christianity? But the centre of interest had been transferred from earth to heaven, and human aims had been recast by the Gospel and the understanding of it reached by Christian doctors. Evidently since the ideals of the Church were to be other than those of the Roman Empire, the law which it accepted or evolved would have ideals different from those of the Roman law. If the great Roman jurists created a legal formulation and rendering of justice adequate for the highly developed social and commercial needs of Roman citizens, the law of the Church, while it might borrow phrases, rules, and even general principles, from that system, could not fail to put new meaning in them. For example, the constant will to render each his due, which was justitia in the Roman law, might involve different considerations where the soul’s salvation, and not the just allotment of the goods of this world, was the law’s chief aim. Again, what new meaning might attach to the honeste vivere and the alterum non laedere of pagan legal ethics. Honeste vivere might mean to do no sin imperilling the soul; alterum non laedere would acquire the meaning of doing nothing to another which might impede his progress toward salvation. Injuries to a man in his temporalities were less important.

Further, Christianity although conceived as a religion for all mankind, was founded on a definite code and revelation. The primary statement was contained in the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. These were for all men, universal in application and of irrefragable validity and truth. Here was some correspondence to the conception of the jus gentium as representative of universal principles of justice and expediency, and therefore as equivalent to the jus naturale. There was something of logical necessity in the transference of this conception to the law of Christ. Says Gratian at the beginning of his Decretum: “It is jus naturae which is contained in the Law and the Gospel, by which every one is commanded to do to another as he would be done by, and forbidden to inflict on him what he does not wish to happen to himself.” Since the Law and the Gospel represent the final law of life for all men, they are par excellence the jus naturae, as well as lex[Pg 269] divina. Gratian quotes from Augustine: “Divinum jus in scripturis divinis habemus, humanum in legibus regum.”[403] And then adds: “By its authority the jus naturale prevails over custom and constitution. Whatever in customs or writings is contrary to the jus naturale is to be held vain and invalid.” Again he says more explicitly: “Since therefore nothing is commanded by natural law other than what God wills to be, and nothing is forbidden except what God prohibits, and since nothing may be found in the canonical Scripture except what is in the divine laws, the laws will rest divinely in nature (divine leges natura consistent). It is evident, that whatever is proved to be contrary to the divine will or canonical Scripture, is likewise opposed to natural law. Wherefore whatever should give way before divine will or Scripture or the divine laws, over that ought the jus naturale to prevail. Therefore whatever ecclesiastical or secular constitutions are contrary to natural law are to be shut out.”[404]

The canon law is a vast sea. Its growth, its age-long agglomerate accretion, the systematization of its huge contents, have long been subjects for controversialists and scholars. Its sources were as multifarious as those of the Roman law. First the Scriptures and the early quasi-apostolic and pseudo-apostolic writings; then the traditions of primitive Christianity and also the writings of the Fathers; likewise ecclesiastical customs, long accepted and legitimate, and finally the two great written sources, the decretals or decisions of the popes and the decrees of councils. From patristic times collections were made of the last. These collections from a chronological gradually acquired a topical and more systemic arrangement, which the compilers followed more completely after the opening of the tenth century. The decisions of the popes also had been collected, and then were joined to conciliar compilations and arranged after the same topical plan.

In all of them there was unauthentic matter, accepted as if its pseudo-authorship or pseudo-source were genuine. But in the stormy times of the ninth century following the[Pg 270] death of Charlemagne, the method of argument through forged authority was exceptionally creative. It produced two masterpieces which won universal acceptance. The first was a collection of false Capitularies ascribed to Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and ostensibly the work of a certain Benedictus Levita, deacon of the Church of Mainz, who worked in the middle of the century. Far more famous and important was the book of False Decretals, put together and largely written, that is forged, about the same time, probably in the diocese of Rheims, and appearing as the work of Saint Isidore of Seville. This contained many forged letters of the early popes and other forged matter, including the Epistle or “Donation” of Constantine; also genuine papal letters and conciliar decrees. These false collections were accepted by councils and popes, and formed part of subsequent compilations.

From the tenth century onward many such compilations were made, all of them uncritical as to the genuineness of the matter taken, and frequently ill-arranged and discordant. They were destined to be superseded by the great work in which appears the better methods and more highly trained intelligence developing at the Bologna School in the first part of the twelfth century. Its author was Gratianus, a monk of the monastery of St. Felix at Bologna. He was a younger contemporary of Irnerius and of Peter Lombard. Legend made him the latter’s brother, with some propriety; for the compiler of those epoch-making Sentences represents the same stage in the appropriation of the patristic theological heritage of the Middle Ages, that Gratian represents in the handling of the canon law. The Lombard’s Sentences made a systematic and even harmonizing presentation of the theology of the Fathers in their own language; and the equally immortal Decretum of Gratian accomplished a like work for the canon law. This is the name by which his work is known, but not the name he gave it. That appears to have been Concordia discordantium canonum, which indicates his methodical presentation of his matter and his endeavour to reconcile conflicting propositions.

The first part of the Decretum was entitled “De jure[Pg 271] naturae et constitutionis.” It presents the sources of the law, the Church’s organization and administration, the ordination and ranking of the clergy, the election and consecration of bishops, the authority of legates and primates. The second part treats of the procedure of ecclesiastical courts, also the law regulating the property of the Church, the law of monks and the contract of marriage. The third part is devoted to the Sacraments and the Liturgy.

Gratian’s usual method is as follows: He will open with an authoritative proposition. If he finds it universally accepted, it stands as valid. But if there are opposing statements, he tries to reconcile them, either pointing out the difference in date (for the law of the Church may be progressive), or showing that one of the discordant rules had but local or otherwise limited application, or that the first proposition is the rule, while the others make the exceptions. If he still fails to establish concord, he searches to find which rule had been followed in the Roman Church, and accepts that as authoritative. A rule being thus made certain, he proceeds with subdivisions and distinctions, treating them as deductions from the main rule and adjusting the supporting texts. Or he will suppose a controversy (causa) and discuss its main and secondary issues. Throughout he accompanies his authoritative matter with his own commentary—commonly cited as the Dicta Gratiani.[405] The Decretum was characterized by sagacity of interpretation and reconcilement, by vast learning, and clear ordering of the matter. Only it was uncritical as to the genuineness of its materials; and a number of Gratian’s own statements were subsequently disapproved in papal decretals. The Dicta Gratiani never received such formal sanction by pope or council as the writings of Roman jurists received by being taken into Justinian’s Digest.

The papal decretals had become the great source of canonical law. Gratian’s work was soon supplemented by various compilations known as Appendices ad Decretum or Decretales extravagantes, to wit, those which the Decretum[Pg 272] did not contain. These, however, were superseded by the collection, or rather codification, made at the command of the great canonist Gregory IX. and completed in the year 1234. This authoritative work preserved Gratian’s Decretum intact, but suppressed, or abridged and reordered, the decretals contained in subsequent collections. Arranged in five books, it forms the second part of the Corpus juris canonici. In 1298 Boniface VIII. promulgated a supplementary book known as the Sextus of Boniface. This with a new collection promulgated under the authority of Clement V. in 1313, called the Clementinae, and the Extravagantes of his successor John XXII. and certain other popes, constitute the last portions of the Corpus juris canonici.[406]

According to the law of the Empire the emperor’s authority extended over the Church, its doctrine, its discipline, and its property. Such authority was exercised by the emperors from Constantine to Justinian. But the Church had always stood upon the principle that it was better to obey God rather than man. This had been maintained against the power of the pagan Empire, and was not to be sunned out of existence by imperial favour. It was still better to obey God rather than the emperor. The Church still should say who were its members and entitled to participate in the salvation which it mediated. Ecclesiastical authorities could excommunicate; that was their engine of coercion. These principles were incarnate in Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, withstanding and prohibiting Theodosius from Christian fellowship until he had done penance for the massacre at Thessalonica. Of necessity they inhered in the Church; they were of the essence of its strength to fulfil its purpose; they stood for the duly constituted power of Christian resolution to uphold and advance the peremptory truth of Christ.

[Pg 273]So such principles persisted through the time of the hostile and then the favouring Roman Empire. And when the Empire in fact crumbled and fell, what de facto and de jure authority was best fitted to take the place of the imperial supremacy? The Empire represented a universal secular dominion; the Church was also universal, and with a universality now reaching out beyond the Empire’s shrinking boundaries. In the midst of political fragments otherwise disjoined, the Church endured as the universal unity. The power of each Teutonic king was great in fact and law within his realm. Yet he was but a local potency, while the Church existed through his and other realms. And when the power of one Teutonic line (the Carolingian) reached something like universal sway, the Church was also there within and without. It held the learning of the time, and the culture which large-minded seculars respected; and quite as much as the empire of Charlemagne, it held the prestige of Rome. Witness the attitude of Charles Martel and Pippin toward Boniface the great apostle, and the attitude of Boniface toward the Gregories whose legate he proclaimed himself, and upon whose central authority he based his claims to be obeyed. Through the reforms of the Frankish Church, carried out by him with the support of Charles Martel and Pippin, the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome was established. Charlemagne, indeed, from the nature and necessities of his own transcendent power, possessed in fact the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman emperors, whom men deemed his predecessors. But after him the secular power fell again into fragments scarcely locally efficient, while the Church’s universality of authority endured.

In the unstable fragmentation of secular rule in the ninth century, the Isidorean Decretals presented the truth of the situation as it was to be, although not as it had been in the times of the Church dignitaries whose names were forged for that collection. And thereafter, as the Church recovered from its tenth-century disintegration, it advanced to the pragmatic demonstration of the validity of those false Decretals, on through the tempests of the age of Hildebrand to the final triumph of Innocent III. at the opening of the thirteenth century. Evidently the canon law, whatever[Pg 274] might be its immediate or remote source, drew its authority from the sanction of the Roman Catholic Church, which enunciated it and made it into a body corresponding to the Church’s functions. It was what the Church promulgated as the law of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the kingdom of God on earth. It should be the temporal and legal counterpart of the Church’s spiritual purposes. Its general tendency and purpose was the promotion of the Church’s saving aim, which regarded all things in the light of their relationship to life eternal. Therefore the Church’s law could not but define and consider all worldly interests, all personal and property rights and secular authority, with constant regard to men’s need of salvation. The advancement of that must be the final appellate standard of legal right.

Such was the event. The entire canon law might be lodged within those propositions which Hildebrand enunciated and Innocent III. realized. For the salvation of souls, all authority on earth had been entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors. Theirs was the spiritual sword; secular power, the sword material, was to be exercised under the pope’s mandate and permission. No king or emperor, no layman whatsoever, was exempt from the supreme authority of the pope, who also was the absolute head of the Church, which had become a monarchy. “The Lord entrusted to Peter not only the universal Church, but the government of the whole world,” writes Innocent III., whose pontificate almost made this principle a fact. In private matters no member of the clergy could be brought before a secular court; and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over the laity threatened to reduce the secular jurisdiction to narrow functions.[407] The property of the Church might not be taxed or levied on by any temporal ruler or government; nor could the Church’s functions and authority be controlled or limited by any secular decree. Universally throughout every kingdom the Church was a sovereignty, not only in matters spiritual, but with respect to all the personal and[Pg 275] material relationships that might be connected in any way with the welfare of souls.[408]

 

V

The exposition of the Corpus juris civilis in the school of the glossators was of great moment in the evolution of mediaeval political theory, which in its turn yields one more example of the mediaeval application of thoughts derived from antique and patristic sources. Political thinking in the Middle Ages sought its surest foundation in theology; then it built itself up with concepts drawn from the philosophy and social theory of the antique world; and lastly it laid hold on jurisprudence, using the substance and reasoning of the Roman and the Canon law.

Mediaeval ideas upon government and the relations between the individual and his earthly sovereign, started from theological premises, of patristic origin: e.g. that the universe and man were made by God, a miraculous creation, springing from no other cause, and subject to no other fundamental law, than God’s unsearchable will, which never ceases to direct the whole creation to the Creator’s ends. A further premise was the Scriptural revelation of God’s purpose as to man, with all the contents of that revelation touching the overweening importance of man’s deathless soul.

Unity—the unity of the creation—springs from these premises, or is one of them. The principle of this unity is God’s will. Within the universal whole, mankind also constitutes a unit, a community, specially ordained and ordered. The Middle Ages, following the example of the patristic time, were delivered over to allegory, and to an unbridled recognition of the deductions of allegorical reasoning. Mankind was a community. Mankind was also an organism, the mystical body whereof the head was Christ. Here was an allegory potent for foolishness or wisdom. It[Pg 276] was used to symbolize the mystery of the oneness of all mankind in God, and the organic co-ordination of all sorts and conditions of men with one another in the divine commonwealth on earth; it was also drawn out into every detail of banal anthropomorphic comparison. From John of Salisbury to Nicholas Cusanus, Occam and Dante, no point of fancied analogy between the parts and members of the body and the various functions of Church and State was left unexploited.[409]

Mankind then is one community; also an organism. But within the human organism abides the duality of soul and body; and the Community of Mankind on earth is constituted of two orders, the spiritual and temporal, Church and State.[410] There must be either co-ordination between State and Church, body and soul, or subordination of the temporal and material to the eternal and spiritual. To evoke an adjustment of what was felt to be an actually universal opposition, was the chief problem of mediaeval polity, and forms the warp and woof of conflicting theories. The Church asserted a full spiritual supremacy even in things temporal, and, to support the claim, brought sound arguments as well as foolish allegory—allegory pretending to be horror-stricken at the vision of an animal with two heads, a bicephalic monstrosity. But does not the Church comprise all mankind? Did not God found it? Is not Christ its head, and under Him his vicegerent Peter and all the popes? Then shall not the pope who commands the greater, which is the spiritual, much more command the less, the temporal? And all the argumentation of the two swords, delivered to Peter, comes into play. That there are two swords is but a propriety of administration. Secular rulers wield the secular sword at the pope’s command. They are instruments[Pg 277] of the Church. Fundamentally the State is an ecclesiastical institution, and the bounds of secular law are set by the law spiritual: the canon law overrides the laws of every State. True, in this division, the State also is ordained of God, but only as subordinate. And divinely ordained though it be, the origin of the State lies in sin; for sin alone made government and law needful for man.[411]

On the other hand, the partisans of the State upheld co-ordination as the true principle.[412] The two swords represent distinct powers, Sacerdotium and Imperium. The latter as well as the former is from God; and the two are co-ordinates, although of course the Church which wields the spiritual sword is the higher. This theory creates no bicephalic monster. God is the universal head. And even as man is body as well as soul, the human community is State as well as Church; and the State needs the emperor for its head, as the Church has the pope. The Roman Dominion, imperium mundi, was legitimate, and by divine appointment has passed over to the Roman-German emperor. Other views sustaining the scheme of co-ordination upheld a plurality of states, rather than one universal Imperium. Of course these opposing views of subordination or co-ordination of State and Church took on every shade of diversity.

As to both Church and State, mediaeval political theory was predominantly monarchical. Ideally this flowed from the thought of God as the true monarch of the universe. Practically it comported with mediaeval social conditions. Under Innocent III., if not under Gregory VII., the Church had become a monarchy well-nigh absolute.[413] The pope’s power continued plenary until the great schism and the age of councils evoked by it. For the secular state, the common voice likewise favoured monarchy. The unity of the social organism is best effected by the singleness of its head. Thomas Aquinas authoritatively reasons thus, and[Pg 278] Dante maintains that as the unifying principle is Will, the will of one man is the best means to realize it.[414] But monarchy is no absolute right existing for the ruler’s benefit, rather it is an office to be righteously exercised for the good of the community. The monarch’s power is limited, and if his command outrages law or right, it is a nullity; his subjects need not obey, and the principle applies, that it is better to obey God than man. Even when, as in the days of the Hohenstaufen, the civil jurists claimed for the emperor the plenitudo potestatis of a Roman Caesar, the opposite doctrine held strong, which gave him only a limited power, in its nature conditioned on its rightful exercise.

Moreover, rights of the community were not unrecognized, and indeed were supported by elaborate theories as the Middle Ages advanced to their climacteric. The thought of a contract between ruler and people frequently appears, and reference to the contract made at Hebron between David and the people of Israel (2 Sam. v. 3). The civil jurist also looked back to the principle of the jus gentium giving to every free people the right to choose a ruler; also to that famous text of the Digest, where, through the lex regia, the people were said to have conferred their powers upon the princeps.[415] With such thoughts of the people’s rights came theories of representation and of the monarch as the people’s representative; and Roman corporation law supplied the rules for mediaeval representative assemblies, lay and clerical.[416]

The old Germanic state was a conglomerate of positive law and specific custom, having no existence beyond the laws, which were its formative constituents. Such a conception did not satisfy mediaeval publicists, imbued with antique views of the State’s further aims and potency. Nor were all men satisfied with the State’s divinely ordered origin in human sinfulness. An ultimate ground for its existence was sought, commensurate with its broadest aims. Such was found, not in positive, but in natural law—again[Pg 279] an antique conception. That a veritable natural law existed, all men agreed; also that its source lay back of human conventions, somehow in the nature of God. All admitted its absolute supremacy, binding alike upon popes and secular monarchs, and rendering void all acts and positive laws contravening it. It must be the State’s ultimate constituent ground.

God was the source of natural law. Some argued that it proceeded from His will, as a command, others that its source was eternal Reason announcing her necessary and unalterable dictates; again its source was held to lie more definitely in the Reason that was identical with God the summa ratio in Deo existens, as Aquinas puts it. From that springs the Lex naturalis, ordained to rest on the participation of man, as a rational creature, in the moral order which he perceives by the light of natural reason. This lex naturalis (or jus naturale) is a true promulgated law, since God implants it for recognition in the minds of men.[417] Absolute unconditional supremacy was ascribed to it, and also to the jus divinum, which God revealed supernaturally for a supramundane end. A cognate supremacy was ascribed to the jus commune gentium, which was composed of rules of the jus naturale adapted to the conditions of fallen human nature.

Such law was above the State, to which, on the other hand, positive law was subject. Whenever the ruler was conceived as sovereign or absolute, he likewise was deemed above positive law, but bound by these higher laws. They were the source and sanction of the innate and indestructible rights of the individual, to property and liberty and life as they were formulated at a later period. It is evident how the recognition of such rights fell in with the Christian revelation of the absolute value of every individual in and for himself and his immortal life. On the other hand, certain rights of the State, or the community, were also indestructible and inalienable by virtue of the nature of their source in natural law.[418]

This abstract of political theory has been stated in[Pg 280] terms generalized to vagueness, and with no attempt to follow the details or trace the historical development. The purpose has been to give the general flavour of mediaeval thought concerning Church and State, and the Individual as a member of them both. One observes how the patristic and mediaeval Christian thought mingles with the antique; and one may assume the intellectual acumen applied by legist, canonist, and scholastic theologian to the discussion and formulation of these high arguments. The mediaeval genius for abstractions is evident, and the mediaeval faculty of linking them to the affairs of life; clear also is the baneful effect of mediaeval allegory. Even as men now-a-days are disposed to rest in the apparent reality of the tangible phenomenon, so the mediaeval man just as commonly sought for his reality in what the phenomenon might be conceived to symbolize. Therefore in the higher political controversies, even as in other interests of the human spirit, argument through allegory was accepted as legitimate, if not convincing; and a proper sequence of thought was deemed to lie from one symbolical meaning to another, with even a deeper validity than from one palpable fact to that which followed from it.

 

 

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BOOK VII
ULTIMATE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES

[Pg 282]

 

[Pg 283]

CHAPTER XXXIV

SCHOLASTICISM: SPIRIT, SCOPE, AND METHOD

The religious philosophy or theology of the Middle Ages is commonly called scholasticism, and its exponents are called the scholastics. The name applies most properly to the respectable academic thinkers. These, in the early Middle Ages, usually were monks living in monasteries, like St. Anselm, for instance, who was Abbot of Bec in Normandy before, to his sorrow, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. In the thirteenth century, however, while these respected thinkers still were monks, or rather mendicant friars, they were also university professors. Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominicans, and their friend St. Bonaventura, who became the head of the Franciscan Order, all lectured at the University of Paris, the chief university of the Middle Ages in the domain of philosophy and theology. Moreover, as the scholastics were respectable and academic, so they were usually orthodox Churchmen, good Roman Catholics. The conduct or opinions of some of them, Abaelard for example, became suspect to the Church authorities; yet Abaelard, although his book had been condemned, kept within the Church’s pale, and died a monk of Cluny. There were plenty of obdurate heretics in the Middle Ages; but their bizarre ideas, sometimes coming down from Manichaean sources, were scarcely germane to the central lines of mediaeval thought.[419]

[Pg 284]One hears of scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology; and assuredly these mediaeval theologian-philosophers endeavoured to distinguish between the one and the other phase of the matters which occupied their minds. The distinction was intelligibly drawn and, in many treatises, doubtless affected the choice and ordering of topics. Whether it was consistently observed in the handling of those topics, is another question, which perhaps should be answered in the negative. At all events, to attempt to observe this distinction in considering the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, might sap the matter of the human interest attaching to it, to wit, that interest and validity possessed by all serious effort to know—and to be saved. These were the motives of the scholastics, whether they used their reason, or clung to revelation, or did both, as they always did.

Mediaeval methods of thinking and topics of thought are no longer in vogue. For the time, men have turned from the discussion of universals and the common unity or separate individuality of mind, and are as little concerned with transubstantiation as with the old dispute over investitures. But the scholastics were men and so are we.[Pg 285] Our humanity is one with theirs. Men are still under the necessity of reflecting upon their own existence and the world without, and still feel the need to reach conclusions and the impulse to formulate consistently what seem to them vital propositions. Herein we are blood kin to Gerbert and Anselm, to Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, to Thomas Aquinas as well as Roger Bacon: and our highest nature is one with theirs in the intellectual fellowship of human endeavour to think out and present that which shall appease the mind. Because of this kinship with the scholastics, and the sympathy which we feel for the struggle which is the same in us and them, their intellectual endeavours, their achieved conclusions, although now appearing as but apt or necessitated phrases, may have for us the immortal interest of the eternal human.

Let us then approach mediaeval thought as man meets man, and seek in it for what may still be valid, or at least real to us, because agreeing with what we find within ourselves. Being men as well as scholars, we would win from its parchment-covered tomes those elements which if they do not represent everlasting verities, are at least symbols of the permanent necessities of the human mind. Whatever else there is in mediaeval thought, as touching us less nearly, may be considered by way of historical setting and explanation.

In different men the impulse to know bears different relationships to the rest of life. It sometimes seems self-impelled, and again palpably inspired by a motive beyond itself. In some form, however, it winds itself into every action of our mental faculties, and no province of life appears untouched by this craving of the mind. Nevertheless to know is not the whole matter; for with knowledge comes appetition or aversion, admiration or contempt, love or abhorrence; and other impulses—emotional, desiderative, loving—impel the human creature to realize its nature in states of heightened consciousness that are not palpable modes of knowing, though they may be replete with all the knowledge that the man has gained.

These ultimate cravings which we recognize in ourselves, inspired mediaeval thought. Its course, its progress, its[Pg 286] various phases, its contents and completed systems, all represent the operation of human faculty pressing to expression and realization under the accidental or “historical” conditions of the mediaeval period. We may be sure that many kinds of human craving and corresponding faculty realized themselves in mediaeval philosophy, theology, piety and mysticism—the last a word used provisionally, until we succeed in resolving it into terms of clearer significance. And we also note that in these provinces, realization is expression. Every faculty, every energy, in man seeks to function, to realize its power in act. The sheer body—if there be sheer body—acts bodily, operates, and so makes actual its powers. But those human energies which are informed with mind, realize themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corresponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. Likewise, impelled by the desire to know, the faculties of cognition and reason realize themselves in expression; and in expression each part of rational knowledge is clarified, completed, rendered accordant with the data of observation and the laws or necessities of the mind.

Human faculties form a correlated whole; and this composite human nature seeks to act, to function. Thus the whole man strives to realize the fullest actuality of his being, and satisfy or express the whole of him, and not alone his reason, nor yet his emotions, or his appetites. This uttermost realization of human being—man’s summum bonum or summa necessitas—cannot unite the incompatible within its synthesis. It must be kept a consistent ideal, a possible whole. Here the demiurge is the discriminating and constructive intelligence, which builds together the permanent and valuable elements of being, and excludes whatever cannot coexist in concord with them. Yet the intelligence does not always set its own rational activities as man’s furthest goal of realization. It may place love above reason. And, of course, its discriminating judgment will[Pg 287] be affected by current knowledge and by dominant beliefs as to man and his destiny, the universe and God.

Manifestly whatever the thoughtful idealizing man in any period (and our attention may at once focus itself upon the Middle Ages) adjudges to belong to the final realization of his nature, will become an object of intellectual interest for him; and he will deem it a proper subject for study and meditation. The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his summum bonum, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain.

The philosophy, theology, and the profoundly felt and reasoned piety, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made up that period’s ultimate intellectual interests. We are not concerned with other matters occupying its attention, save as they bore on man’s supreme beatitude, which was held to consist in his everlasting salvation and all that might constitute his bliss in that unending state. The elements of this blessedness were not deemed to lie altogether in rational cognition and its processes; for the conception of the soul’s beatitude was catholic; and while with some men the intellectual elements were dominant, with others salvation’s summit was attained along the paths of spiritual emotion.

Obviously, from the side of the emotions, there could come no large and lasting happiness, unless emotional desire and devotion were directed to that which might also satisfy the mind, or at all events, would not conflict with its judgment. Hence the emotional side of the ultimate mediaeval ideal was pietistic; because the mediaeval dogmatic faith regarded the emotional impulses between one human being and another as distracting, if not wicked. Such mortal impulses were so very difficult to harmonize with the eternal beatitude which consisted in the cognition and love of God. This principle was proclaimed by monks and theologians, or philosophers; it was even recognized (although not followed)[Pg 288] in the literature which glorified the love of man and woman, but in which the lover-knight so often ends a hermit, and the convent at last receives his sinful mistress. On the other hand, reason, with its practical and speculative knowledge, is sterile when unmixed with piety and love. This is the sum of Bonaventura’s fervid arguments, and is as clearly, if more quietly, recognized by Aquinas, with whom fides without caritas is informis, formless, very far indeed from its true actuality or realization.

Thus, for the full realization of man’s highest good in everlasting salvation, the two complementary phases of the human spirit had to act and function in concord. Together they must realize themselves in such catholic expression as should exclude only the froward or evil elements, non-elements rather, of man’s nature. Both represent ultimate mediaeval interests and desires; and perhaps deep down and very intimately, even inscrutably, they may be one, even as they clearly are complementary phases of the human soul. Yet with certain natures who perhaps fail to hold the balance between them, the two phases seem to draw apart, or, at least, to evince themselves in distinct expression, and indeed in all men they are usually distinguishable.

Generally speaking, the conception of man’s divinely mediated salvation, and of the elements of human being which might be carried on, and realized in a state of everlasting beatitude, prescribed the range of ultimate intellectual interests for the Middle Ages. The same had been despotically true of the patristic period. Augustine would know God and the soul; Ambrose expressed equally emphatic views upon the vanity of all knowledge that did not contribute to an understanding of the Christian Faith. This view was held with temperamental and barbarizing narrowness by Gregory the Great. It was admitted, as of course, throughout the Carolingian period, although humanistically-minded men played with the pagan literature. Nor was it seriously disputed in the eleventh or twelfth century, when men began to delight in dialectic, and some cared for pagan literature; nor yet in the thirteenth when an increasing number were asking many things from philosophy and natural knowledge, which had but distant bearing on the[Pg 289] soul’s salvation. One of these men was Roger Bacon, whose scientific studies were pursued with ceaseless energy. But he could also state emphatically the principle of the worthlessness of whatever does not help men to understand the divine truths by which they are saved. In Bacon’s time, the love of knowledge was enlarging its compass, while, really or nominally as the individual case might be, the criterion of relevancy to the Faith still obtained, and set the topics with which men should occupy themselves. All matters of philosophy or natural science had to relate themselves to the summum bonum of salvation in order to possess ultimate human interest. Therefore, if philosophy was to preserve the strongest reason for its existence, it had to remain the handmaid of theology. Still, to be sure, the conception of man’s beatitude would become more comprehensive with the expansion and variegation of the desire for knowledge.

As the summum bonum of salvation prescribed the topics of ultimate intellectual interest for the Middle Ages, so the stress which it laid upon one topic rather than another tended to direct their ordering or classification, as well as the proportion of attention devoted to each one. Likewise the form or method of presentation was controlled by the authority of the Scriptural statement of the way and means of salvation, and the well-nigh equally authoritative interpretation of the same by the beatified Fathers. Thus the nature of the summum bonum and the character of its Scriptural statement and patristic exposition suggested the arrangement of topics, and set the method of their treatment in those works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which afford the most important presentations of the ultimate intellectual interests of that time. Obvious examples will be Abaelard’s Sic et non and his Theologia, Hugo of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, the Lombard’s Books of Sentences, and the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.

It will be seen in the next chapter that the arrangement of topics in these comprehensive treatises differed from what would have been evolved through the requirements of a systematic presentation of human knowledge. Aquinas sets forth the reasons why one mode of treatment is suitable to philosophy and another to sacred science, and why the[Pg 290] latter may omit matters proper for the former, or treat them from another point of view. The supremacy of sacred science is incidentally shown by the argument. In his Contra Gentiles[420] chapter four, book second, bears the title: “Quod aliter considerat de creaturis Philosophus et aliter Theologus” (“That the philosopher views the creation in one way and the theologian in another”). In the text he says:

Obviously sacra doctrina, which is to say, theologia, proceeds differently from philosophia humana, and evidently it has to do with matters of ultimate importance, and therefore of ultimate intellectual interest. The passage quoted from the Contra Gentiles may be taken as introductory to the more elaborate statement at the beginning of his Summa theologiae, where Thomas sets forth the principles by which sacra doctrina is distinguished from the philosophicae disciplinae, to wit, the various sciences of human philosophy:

Thomas now points out that, on account of many errors, it also was necessary for man to be instructed through divine revelation as to those saving truths concerning God which human reason was capable of investigating. He next proceeds to show that sacra doctrina is science.

The question then is raised whether sacra doctrina is one science, or many. And Thomas answers, that it is one, by reason of the unity of its formal object. For it views everything discussed by it as divinely revealed; and all things which are subjects of revelation (revelabilia) have part in the formal conception of this science; and so are comprehended under sacra doctrina, as under one science. Nevertheless it extends to subjects belonging to various departments of knowledge so far as they are knowable through divine illumination. As some of these may be practical and some speculative, it follows that sacred science includes both the practical and the speculative, even as God with the same knowledge knows himself and also the things He makes.

Thomas now shows, with scholastic formalism, that God is the subjectum of this science; since all things in it are treated with reference to God (sub ratione Dei), either because they are God himself, or because they bear relationship (habent ordinem) to God as toward their cause and end (principium et finem). The final question is whether this science be argumentativa, using arguments and proofs; and Thomas thus sets forth his masterly solution:

Mediaeval thought was beset behind and before by the compulsion of its conditions. Its mighty antecedents lived in it, and wrought as moulding forces. Well we know them, two in number, the one, of course, the antique philosophy; the other, again of course, the dogmatic Christian Faith, itself shot through and through with antique metaphysics, in the terms of which it had been formulated. These two,[Pg 294] very dual and yet joined, antagonistic and again united, constituted the form-giving principles of mediaeval thinking. They were, speaking in scholastic phrase, the substantial as well as accidental forms of mediaeval theology, philosophy, and knowledge. Which means that they set the lines of mediaeval theology or philosophy, and caused the one and the other to be what it became, rather than something else; and also that they supplied the knowledge which mediaeval men laboured to acquire, and attempted to adjust their thinking to. Thus, through the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth centuries, they remained the inworking formal causes of mediaeval thought; while, on the other hand, the moving and efficient causes (still speaking in scholastic-Aristotelian phrase) were the human impulses which those formal causes moulded, or indeed suggested, and the faculties which they trained.

The patristic system of dogma with the antique philosophy, set the forms of mediaeval expression, fixed the distinctive qualities of mediaeval thought, furnished its topics, and even necessitated its problems—in two ways: First, through the specific substance which passed over and filled the mediaeval productions; and secondly, simply by reason of the existence of such a vast authoritative body of antique and patristic opinion, knowledge, dogma, which the Middle Ages had to accept and master, and beyond which the substance of mediaeval thinking was hardly destined to advance.

The first way is obvious enough, inasmuch as patristic and antique matter palpably make the substance of mediaeval theology and philosophy. The second is less obvious, but equally important. This mass of dogma, knowledge, and opinion, existed finished and complete. Men imperfectly equipped to comprehend it were brought to it by the conviction that it was necessary to their salvation, and then gradually by the persuasion also that it offered the only means of intellectual progress. The struggle to master such a volume of knowledge issuing from a more creative past, gave rise to novel problems, or promoted old ones to a novel prominence. The problem of universals was taken directly from the antique dialectic. It played a monstrous rôle in[Pg 295] the twelfth century because it was in very essence a fundamental problem of cognition, of knowing, and so pressed upon men who were driven by the need to master continually unfolding continents of thought.[422] This is an instance of a problem transmitted from the past, but blown up to extraordinary importance by mediaeval intellectual conditions. So throughout the whole scholastic range, attitude and method alike are fixed by the fact that scholasticism was primarily an appropriation of transmitted propositions.

In considering the characteristics of mediaeval thought, it is well to bear in mind these diverse ways in which its antecedents made it what it was: through their substance transmitted to it; through the receptive attitude forced upon men by existing accumulations of authoritative doctrine, and the method entailed upon mediaeval thought by its scholastic rather than originative character. Also one will not omit to notice which elements came from the action of the patristic body of antecedents, rather than from the antique group, and vice versa.

Since the antique and patristic constituted well-nigh the whole substance of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages, a separate consideration of what was thus transmitted would amount to a history of mediaeval thought from a somewhat unilluminating point of view. On the other hand, one may learn much as to the qualities of mediaeval thought from observing the attitudes of various men in successive centuries toward Greek philosophy and patristic theology. The Fathers had used the concepts of the former in the construction of their systems of acceptance of the Christian Faith. But the spirit of inquiry from which Greek philosophy had sprung, was very different from the spirit in which the Fathers used its concepts and arguments, in order to substantiate what they accepted on the authority of Scripture and tradition. It is true that Greek philosophy in the Neo-Platonism of Porphyry and Iamblicus was not far from the patristic attitude toward knowledge. But the spirit of these declining moods of Neo-Platonism was not the spirit which had carried the philosophy of the Greeks to its intellectual[Pg 296] culmination in Plato and Aristotle, and to its attainment of the ethically rational in Stoicism and the system of Epicurus.

Thus patristic thinking was essentially different in purpose and method from the philosophy which it forced to serve its uses; and the two differed by every difference of method, spirit, and intent which were destined to appear among the various kinds of mediaeval thinkers. But the difference between Greek philosopher and Church Father was deeper than any that ever could exist among mediaeval men. Some of the last might be conventionally orthodox and passionately pious, while others cared more distinctly for the fruits of knowledge. But even these could not be as Greek philosophers, because they were accustomed to rely on authority, and because they who drew their knowledge from an existing store would not have the independence and originality distinguishing the Greeks, who had created so much of that store from which they drew.[423] Moreover, while neither Plato’s inquiry for truth, nor Aristotle’s catholic search for knowledge, was isolated from its bearing on either the conduct or the event of life, nevertheless with them rational inquiry was a final motive representing in itself that which was most divinely human, and so the best for man.[424] But with the philosophers of the Middle Ages, it never was quite so. For the need of salvation had worked in men’s blood for generations. And salvation, man’s highest good, did not consist in humanly-attained knowledge or in virtue won by human strength; but was divinely mediated and had to be accepted upon authority. Hence, even in the great twelfth and thirteenth centuries, intellectual inquiry was never unlimbered from bands of deference, nor ever quite dispassionately rational or unaffected by the mortal need to attain a salvation which was bestowed or withheld by God according to His plan authoritatively declared.

Accordingly all mediaeval variances of thought show common similitudes: to wit, some consciousness of need of[Pg 297] super-rational and superhuman salvation; deference to some authority; and finally a pervasive scholasticism, since mediaeval thought was of necessity diligent, acceptant, reflective, rather than original. One will be impressed with the formal character of mediaeval thought. For being thus scholastic, it was occupied with devising forms through which to express, or re-express, the mass of knowledge proffered to it. Besides, formal logic was a prominent part of the transmitted contents of antique philosophy; and became a chief discipline for mediaeval students; because they accepted it along with all the rest, and found its training helpful for men burdened with such intellectual tasks as theirs.

Within the lines of these universal qualities wind the divergencies of mediaeval thought; and one will notice how they consist in leanings toward the ways of Greek philosophy, or a reliance more or less complete upon the contents and method of patristic theology. One common quality, of which we note the variations, is that of deference to the authority of the past. The mediaeval scholar could hardly read a classic poet without finding authoritative statements upon every topic brushed by the poet’s fancy, and of course the matter of more serious writings, history, logic, natural science, was implicitly accepted. If the pagan learning was thus regarded, how much more absolute was the deference to sacred doctrine. Here all was authority. Scripture was the primary source; next came the creed, and the dogmas established by councils; and then the expositions of the Fathers. Thus the meaning of the authoritative Scripture was pressed into authoritative dogma, and then authoritatively systematized. The process had been intellectual and rational, yet with the driven rationality of Church Fathers struggling to formulate and express the accepted import of the Faith delivered to the saints. Authority, faith, held the primacy, and in two senses, for not only was it supreme and final, but it was also prior in initiative efficiency. Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile est, was an extreme paradox. But Augustine’s credimus ut cognoscamus was fundamental, and remained unshaken. Anselm lays it at the basis of his arguments; with Bernard and many others it is credo first[Pg 298] of all, let the intelligere come as it may, and as it will according to the fulness of our faith. The same principle of faith’s efficient primacy is temperamentally as well as logically fundamental with Bonaventura.

Here then was a first general quality of mediaeval thought: deference to authority. Now for the variances. Scarcely diverging, save in emphasis, from Augustine and Bonaventura, are the greatest of the schoolmen, Albert and Thomas. They defer to authority and recognize the primacy of faith, and yet they will, with abundant use of reason, deliminate the respective provinces of grace and human knowledge, and distinguish the absolute authority of Scripture from the statements even of the saints, which may be weighed and criticized. In secular philosophy, these two will, when their faith admits, accept the views of the philosophers—Aristotle above all—yet using their own reason. They are profoundly interested in knowledge and metaphysical dialectic, but follow it with deferential tempers and believing Christian souls.

Outside the company of such, are men of more independent temper, whose attitude tends to weaken the principle of acceptance of authority in sacred doctrine. The first of these was Eriugena with his explicit statement that reason is greater than authority; yet we may assume that he was not intending to impugn Scripture. Centuries later another chief example is Abaelard, whose dialectic temper leads him to wish to prove everything by reason. Not that he stated, or would have admitted this; yet the extreme rationalizing tendency of the man is projected through such a passage as the following from his Historia calamitatum, where he alludes to the circumstances of the composition of his work upon the Trinity. He had become a monk in the monastery of St. Denis, but students were still thronging to hear him, to the wrath of some of his superiors.

And Abaelard cites the verse from Matthew about the blind leaders of the blind, and goes on to tell of the success of his treatise, which pleased everybody, yet provoked the greater envy because of the difficulty of the questions which it elucidated; and at last envy blew up the condemnation of his book, at the Council of Soissons, in the year of grace 1121.[425]

Here one has the plain reversal. We must first understand in order to believe. Doubtless the demands of Abaelard’s students to have the principles of the Christian Faith explained, that they might be understood and accepted rationally, echoed the master’s imperative intellectual need. Not that Abaelard would breathe the faintest doubt of these verities; they were absolute and unquestionable. He accepted them upon authority just as implicitly (he might think) as St. Bernard. Herein he shows the mediaeval quality of deference. But he will understand with his mind the profoundest truths enunciated by authority; he will explain them rationally, that the mind may rationally comprehend them.

Men of an opposite cast of mind foresaw the outcome of this rationalization of dogma more surely than the subtle dialectician for whom this process was both peremptory and proper. And the Church acted with a true instinct in condemning Abaelard in spite of his protestations of belief, just as with a like true instinct Friar Bacon’s own Franciscan Order looked askance on one whose mind was suspiciously set upon observation and experiment—and cavilling at others. Celui-ci tuera cela! The ultra-scientific spirit is dangerous to faith—and Bacon’s asseverations that no knowledge was of value save as it helped the soul’s salvation, was doubtless regarded as a conventional insincerity. Yet Roger Bacon had his mediaeval deferences, as will appear.[426]

Neither one extreme view nor the other was to represent[Pg 300] the attitude of thoughtful and believing Christendom; not William of St. Thierry and St Bernard, nor yet (on these points) Abaelard and Friar Bacon should prevail; but the all-balancing and all-considering Aquinas. He will draw the lines between faith and reason, and bulwark them with arguments which shall seem to render unto reason the things of reason, and unto faith its due. Yet it is actually Roger Bacon who accuses Thomas of making his Theology out of dialectic and very human reasonings. It was true; and we are again reminded how variant views shaded into each other in the Middle Ages, and all within certain lines of similarity. Practically all mediaeval thinkers defer to authority—more or less; and all hold to some principle of faith, to the necessity of believing something, for the soul’s salvation. There is likewise some similarity in their attitudes toward intellectual interests. For all recognized their propriety, and gave credit to the human desire to know. Likewise all saw that salvation, the summum bonum for man, included more than intellection; and felt that it held some consummation of other human impulses; that it held love—the love of God along with the intellectual ardour of contemplation; and well-nigh all recognized also that the faith held mystery, not to be solved by reason. Thus all were rational—some more, some less; and all were devotional and believing, pietistic, ardent—some more, some less; according as the intellectual nature dominated over the emotional, or the emotions quelled the conscious exercise of reason, yet reached out and upward from what knowledge and reason had given as a base to spring from.

Thus the mediaeval spirit, variant within its lines of likeness; and of a piece with it was the field it worked in, which made its range and scope. Here as well, a saving knowledge of God and the soul was central and chief among all intellectual interests. None denied this. Augustine, the universal prototype of the mediaeval mind, had cried, “God and the soul, these will I know, and these are all.” But wide had been the scope of his knowledge of God and the soul; and in the centuries which hung upon his words, wide also was the range of knowledge subsumed under those capitals. How would one know God and the soul? Might one not[Pg 301] know God in all His universe, in the height and breadth thereof, and backwards and forwards through the reach of time? Might not one also know the soul in all its operations, all its queries and desires; would not it and they, and their activities, make up the complementary side of knowledge—complementary to the primal object, God, known in His eternity, in His temporal creation, in His everlasting governance? Wide or narrow might be the intellectual interests included within a knowledge of God and the soul. And while many men kept close to the centre and saving nexus of these potentially universal themes, others might become absorbed with data of the creature-world, or with the manifold actions of the mind of man, so as to forget to keep all duly ordered and connected with the central thought.

So the search for knowledge might roam afield. Likewise as to its motive; practically with many men it was, in itself, a joy and end; although they might continue to connect this end formally with the salvation of the soul. Roger Bacon of a surety was such a one. Another was Albertus Magnus. The laborious culling of twenty tomes of universal knowledge surely had the joy of knowing as the active motive. And Aquinas too; no one could be such an acquisitive and reasoning genius, without the love of knowledge in his soul. Yet Thomas never let this love point untrue to its goal of research and devotion, to wit, sacred doctrine, theology, the Christian Faith in its very widest compass, yet in its unity of saving purpose.

In Thomas Aquinas the certitude of faith, the sense of grace, the ardour of love, never quenched the conscious action of the reasoning and knowing mind; nor did reasoning quench devotion. A balance too, though perhaps with one scale higher than the other, was kept by Bonaventura, whose mind had reason’s faculty, but whose heart burned perpetually toward God. Another rationally ardent soul was Bonaventura’s intellectual forerunner, Hugo of St. Victor. In these men intellect did not outstrip the fervours of contemplation. But such catholic balance did not hold with Abaelard and Bacon, who lacked the pietistic temperament. With others, conversely, the strength of the pietistic and emotional nature overbore the intellect; the[Pg 302] mind was less exacting; and devotional ardour used reason solely for its purposes. The mightiest of these were Bernard and Francis. To the same key might chime the woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen. We narrow down from these to hectic souls content with a few thoughts which serve as a basis for the heart’s fervours.

The varying attitudes of mediaeval thinkers toward reason and authority, and even their different views upon the limits of the field of salutary knowledge, are exemplified in their methods, or rather in the variations of their common method. Here the factors were again authority and the intellect which considers the authority, and in terms of its own rational processes reacts upon the proposition under view. The intellect might simply accept authority; or, on the other hand, it might, through dialectic, seek a conclusion of its own. But midway between a mere acceptance of authority, and the endeavour of dialectic for a conclusion of its own, there is the reasoning process which perceives divergence among authorities, compares, discriminates, interprets, and at last acts as umpire. This was the combined and catholic scholastic method. It contained the two factors of its necessary duality; and its variations (besides the gradual perfecting of its form from one generation to another) consisted in the predominant employment of one factor or the other.

The beginning was in the Carolingian time, when Rabanus compiled his authorities from sources sacred and profane, scarcely discriminating except to maintain the pre-eminence of the sacred matter. His younger contemporary, Eriugena, was a translator of his own chief source, Pseudo-Dionysius, him of the Hierarchies, Celestial and Ecclesiastical. Yet he composed also a veritable book, De divisione naturae, in which he put his matter together organically and with argument. And while professing to hold to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, he not only took upon himself to select from their statements, but propounded the proposition that the authority which is not confirmed by reason appears weak. Eriugena made his authorities yield him what his reason required. His argumentative method became an independent rehandling of[Pg 303] matter drawn from them. It was very different from the plodding excerpt-gathering of Rabanus.

We pass down the centuries to Anselm. Contemplative and religious, his reverence for authority was unimpaired by any conscious need to refashion its meaning. Though he possessed creative intellectual powers, they were incited and controlled by his deep piety. Hence his works were constructed of original and lofty arguments, but such as did not infringe upon either the efficient or the final priority of faith.

With Abaelard of many-sided fame the duality of method becomes explicit, and is, if one may say so, set by the ears. On the one hand, he advances in his constructive theological treatises toward a portentous application of reason to explain the contents of the Christian Faith; on the other, somewhat sardonically, he devises a scheme for the employment and presentation of authorities upon these sacred matters, a scheme so obviously apt that once made known it could not but be followed and perfected.

The divers works of a man are likely to bear some relation and resemblance to each other. Abaelard was a reasoner, more specifically speaking, a dialectician according to the ways of Aristotelian logic. And in categories of formal logic he sought to rationalize every matter apprehended by his mind. Swayed by the master-interest of the time, he turned to theology; and his own nature impelled him to apply a constructive dialectic to its systematic formulation. The result is exemplified in the extant portion of his Theologia (mis-called Introductio ad Theologiam), which was condemned by the Council of Sens in 1141, the year before the master’s death. The spirit of this work appears in the passage already quoted from the Historia calamitatum, referring to what was substantially an earlier form of the Theologia.[427] The Theologia argues for a free use of dialectic in expounding dogma, especially in order to refute those heretics who will not listen to authority, but demand reasons. Like Abaelard’s previous theological treatises, it is filled with[Pg 304] citations of authority, principally Augustine; and the reader feels the author’s hesitancy to reveal that dialectic is the architect. Nor, in fact, is the work an exclusively dialectic structure; yet it illustrates (if it does not always inculcate) the application of the arguments of human reason to the exposition and substantiation of the fundamental and most deeply hidden contents of the Christian Faith. Obviously Abaelard was not an initiator here. Augustine had devoted his life to fortifying the Faith with argument and explanation; Eriugena, with a far weaker realization of its contents, had employed a more distorting metaphysics in its presentation; and saintly Anselm had flown his veritable eagle flights of reason. But Abaelard’s more systematic work represents a further stage in the application of independent dialectic to dogma, and an innovating freedom in the citation of pagan philosophers to demonstrate its philosophic reasonableness. Nevertheless his statement that he had gathered these citations from writings of the Fathers, and not from the books of the philosophers (quorum pauca novi),[428] shows that he was only using what the Fathers had made use of before him, and also indicates the slightness of his independent knowledge of Greek philosophy.

On the other hand, Abaelard’s way of presenting authorities for and against a theological proposition was more distinctly original. He seems to have been the first purposefully to systematize the method of stating the problem, and then giving in order the authorities on one side and the other—sic et non; as he entitled his famous work. But the trail of his nature lay through this apparently innocent composition, the evident intent of which was to emphasize, if not exaggerate, the opposition among the patristic authorities, and without a counterbalancing attempt to show any substantial accord among them. This, of course, is not stated in the Prologue, which however, like everything that Abaelard wrote, discloses his fatal facility of putting his hand on the raw spot in the matter; which unfortunately is likely to be the vulnerable point also. In it he remarks on the difficulty of interpreting Scripture, upon the corruption of the text (a perilous subject), and the[Pg 305] introduction of apocryphal writings. There are discrepancies even in the sacred texts, and contradictions in the writings of the Fathers. With a profuse backing of authority he shows that the latter are not to be read cum credendi necessitate, but cum judicandi libertate. Assuredly, as to anything in the canonical Scriptures, “it is not permitted to say: ‘The Author of this book did not hold the truth’; but rather ‘the codex is false or the interpreter errs, or thou dost not understand.’ But in the works of the later ones (posteriorum, Abaelard’s inclusive designation of the Fathers), which are contained in books without number, if passages are deemed to depart from the truth, the reader is at liberty to approve or disapprove.”

This view was supported by Abaelard’s citations from the Fathers themselves; and yet, so abruptly made, it was not a pleasant statement for the ears of those to whom the writings of the holy Fathers were sacred. Nothing was sacred to the man who wrote this prologue—so it seemed to his pious contemporaries. And who among them could approve of the Prologue’s final utterance upon the method and purpose of the book?

To use the discordant statements of the Fathers to sharpen the wits of the young! Was not that to uncover their shame? And the character of the work did not salve the Prologue’s sting. Abaelard selected and arranged his extracts from pagan as well as Christian writers, and prepared sardonic titles for the questions under which he ordered his material. Time and again these titles flaunt an opposition which the citations scarcely bear out. For example, title iv.: “Quod sit credendum in Deum solum, et contra”—certainly a flaming point; yet the excerpts display merely the verb credere, used in the palpably different senses[Pg 306] borne by the word “believe.” There is no real repugnancy among the citations. And again, in title lviii.: “Quod Adam salvatus sit, et contra”—there is no citation contra. And the longest chapter in the book (cxvii.) has this bristling title: “De sacramento altaris, quod sit essentialiter ipsa veritas carnis Christi et sanguinis, et contra.”

Because of such prickly traits the Sic et non did not itself come into common use. But the suggestions of its method once made, were of too obvious utility to be abandoned. First, among Abaelard’s own pupils the result appears in Books of Sentences, which, in the arrangement of their matter, followed the topical division not of the Sic et non, but of Abaelard’s Theologia, with its threefold division of Theology into Fides, Caritas, and Sacramentum.[429] But the arrangement of the Theologia was not made use of in the best and most famous of these compositions, Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri quatuor. This work employed the method (not the arrangement) of the Sic et non, and expounded the contents of Faith methodically, “Distinctio” after “Distinctio,” stating the proposition, citing the authorities bearing upon it, and ending with some conciliating or distinguishing statement of the true result. In canon law the same method was applied in Gratian’s Decretum, of which the proper name was Concordia discordantium canonum.

These Books of Sentences have sometimes been called Summae, inasmuch as their scope embraced the entire contents of the Faith. But the term Summa may properly be confined to those larger and still more encyclopaedic compositions in which this scholastic method reached its final development. The chief makers of these, the veritable Summae theologiae, were, in order of time, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. The Books of Sentences were books of sentences. The Summa proceeded by the same method, or rather issued from it, as its consummation and perfect logical form; thus the[Pg 307] scholastic method arrived at its highest constructive energy. In the Sentences one excerpted opinion was given and another possibly divergent, and at the end an adjustment was presented. This comparative formlessness attains in the Summa a serried syllogistic structure. Thomas, who finally perfects it, presents his connected and successive topics divided into quaestiones, which are subdivided into articuli, whose titles give the point to be discussed. He states first, and frequently in his own syllogistic terms, the successive negative arguments; and then the counter-proposition, which usually is a citation from Scripture or from Augustine. Then with clear logic he constructs the true positive conclusion in accordance with the authority which he has last adduced. He then refutes each of the adverse arguments in turn.

Thus the method of the Sentences is rendered dialectically organic; and with the perfecting of the form of quaestio and articulus, and the logical linking of successive topics, the whole composition, from a congeries, becomes a structure, organic likewise, a veritable Summa, and a Summa of a science which has unity and consistency. This science is sacra doctrina, theologia. Moreover, as compared with the Sentences, the contents of the Summa are enormously enlarged. For between the time of the Lombard and that of Thomas, there has come the whole of Aristotle, and what is more, the mastery of the whole of Aristotle, which Thomas incorporates in a complete and organic statement of the Christian scheme of salvation.[430]

[Pg 308-310]

 

 

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[Pg 311]

CHAPTER XXXV

CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS; STAGES OF EVOLUTION

 

I

Having considered the spirit, the field, and the dual method, of mediaeval thought, there remain its classifications of topics. The problem of classification presented itself to Gerbert as one involved in the rational study of the ancient material.[431] But as scholasticism culminated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the problem became one of arrangement and presentation of the mass of knowledge and argument which the Middle Ages had at length made their own, and were prepared to re-express. This ordering was influenced by a twofold principle of classification; for, as abundantly shown by Aquinas,[432] theology in which all is ordered with reference to God, will properly follow an arrangement of topics quite unsuitable to the natural or human sciences, which treat of things with respect to themselves. But the mediaeval practice was more confused than the theory; because the interest in human knowledge was apt to be touched by motives sounding in the need of divine salvation; and speculation could not free itself of the moving principles of Christian theology. On the other hand, an enormous quantity of human dialectic, and a prodigious mass of what strikes us as profane information, or[Pg 312] misinformation, was carried into the mediaeval Summa, and still more into those encyclopaedias, which attempted to include all knowledge, and still were influenced in their aim by a religious purpose.[433]

As the human sciences came from the pagan antique, the accepted classifications of them naturally were taken from Greek philosophy. They followed either the so-called Platonic division, into Physics, Ethics, and Logic,[434] or the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical. The former scheme, of which it is not certain that Plato was the author, passed on through the Stoic and Epicurean systems of philosophy, was recognized by the Church Fathers, and received Augustine’s approval. It was made known to the Middle Ages through Cassiodorus, Isidore, Alcuin, Rabanus, Eriugena and others.

Nevertheless the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical was destined to prevail. It was introduced to the western Middle Ages through Boëthius’s Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge,[435] and adopted by Gerbert; later it passed over through translations of Arabic writings. It was accepted by Hugo of St. Victor, by Albertus Magnus and by Thomas, to mention only the greatest names; and was set forth in detail with explanation and comment in a number of treatises, such as Gundissalinus’s De divisione philosophiae, and Hugo of St. Victor’s Eruditio didascalica,[436] which were formal and schematic introductions to the study of philosophy and its various branches.

The usual subdivisions of these two general parts of philosophy were as follows. Theoretica (or Theorica) was divided into (1) Physics, or scientia naturalis, (2) Mathematics, and (3) Metaphysics or Theology, or divina scientia, as it might be called. Physics and Mathematics were again divided into more special sciences. Practica was divided[Pg 313] commonly into Ethics, Economics, Politics, or into Ethics and Artes mechanicae. There was a difference of opinion as to what to do with Logic. It had, to be sure, its position in the current Trivium, along with grammar and rhetoric. But this was merely current, and might not approve itself on deeper reflection. Gundissalinus speaks of three propaedeutic sciences, the scientiae eloquentiae, grammar, poetics, and rhetoric, and then puts Logic after them as a scientia media between these primary educational matters and philosophy, i.e. the whole range of knowledge, theoretical and practical. Again, over against philosophia realis, which contains both the theoretica (or speculativa) and the practica, Thomas Aquinas sets the philosophia rationalis, or logic; and Richard Kilwardby opposes logica, the scientia rationalis, to practica, in his division.[437]

The last-named philosopher was the pupil and then the hostile critic of Aquinas, and also became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the author of a careful and elaborate classification of the parts of philosophy, entitled De ortu et divisione philosophiae.[438] In it, following the broad distinction between res divinae and res humanae, Kilwardby divides philosophy into speculativa and practica. Speculativa is divided into naturalis (physics), mathematica, and divina (metaphysics). He does not divide the first and third of these; but he divides mathematica into those sciences which treat of quantity in continuity and separation respectively (quantitas continua and quantitas discreta). The former embrace geometry, astronomy and astrology, and perspective; the latter, music and arithmetic. Practica, which is concerned with res humanae, is divided into activa and sermocinalis: because res humanae consist either of operationes or locutiones. The activa embraces Ethics and mechanics; the scientia sermocinalis embraces grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Such are Kilwardby’s bare captions; his treatise lengthily treats of the interrelations of these various branches of knowledge.

An idea of the scholastic discussion of the classification of sciences may be had by following Albertus Magnus’s[Pg 314] ponderous approach to a consideration of logic: whether it be a science, and, if so, what place should be allotted it. We draw from the opening of his liber on the Predicables,[439] that is to say, his exposition of Porphyry’s Introduction. Albert will consider “what kind of a science (qualis scientia) logic may be, and whether it is any part of philosophy; what need there is of it, and what may be its use; then of what it treats, and what are its divisions.” The ancients seem to have disagreed, some saying that logic is no science, since it is rather a modus (mode, manner or method) of every science or branch of knowledge. But these, continues Albertus, have not reflected that although there are many sciences, and each has its special modus, yet there is one modus common to all sciences, pertaining to that which is common to them all: the principle, to wit, that through reason’s inquiry, from what is known one arrives at knowledge of the unknown. This mode or method common to every science may be considered in itself, and so may be the subject of a special science. After further balancing of the reasons and authorities pro and con, Albertus concludes:

He next considers whether logic is a part of philosophy. Some say no, since there are (as they say) only three divisions of philosophy, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; others say that logic is a modus of philosophy and not one of its divisions. But, on the contrary, it is shown by others that this view of philosophy omits the practical side, for philosophy’s scope comprehends the truth of everything which man may understand, including the truth of that which is in ourselves, and strives to comprehend both truth[Pg 315] and the process of advancing from the known to a knowledge of the unknown. These point out that

And finally it may be shown that

From these latter arguments, approved by him and in part stated as his own, Albertus advances to a classification of the parts of logic, which he makes to include rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic, and to be demonstrative, sophistical or disputatious, according to the use to which logic (broadly taken) is applied and the manner in which it may in each case proceed, in advancing from the known to some farther ascertainment or demonstration.[440] Soon after this, in discussing the subject of this science, Albertus points out how logic differs from rhetoric and poetics, although with them it may treat of sermo, or speech, and be called a scientia sermonalis; for, unlike them, it treats of sermo merely as a means of drawing conclusions, and not in and for itself.

From the purely philosophical division of the sciences we pass to the hybrid arrangement adopted by Vincent of Beauvais, who died in 1264. This man was a prodigious devourer of books, and for a sufficient pabulum, St. Louis set before him his collection of twelve hundred volumes.[Pg 316] Thereupon Vincent compiled the most famous of mediaeval encyclopaedias, employing in that labour enormous diligence and a number of assistants. His ponderous Speculum majus is drawn from the most serviceable sources, including the works of Albertus, his contemporary, and great scholastics like Hugo of St. Victor, who were no more. It consisted of the Speculum naturale, doctrinale, and historiale; and a fourth, the Speculum morale, was added by a later hand.[441] Turning its leaves, and reading snatches here and there, especially from its Prologues, we shall gain a sufficient illustration of the arrangement of topics followed by this writer, whose faculties seem to drown in his shoreless undertaking.[442]

In his turgid generalis prologus to the Speculum naturale, Vincent presents his motives for collecting in one volume

He then refers to the evils of false copying and the ascription of extracts to the wrong author. And it seems to him that Church History has been rather neglected, while men have been intent on expounding knotty problems.[Pg 317] And now considering how to proceed and group his various matters, Vincent could find no better method than the one he has chosen, “to wit, that after the order of Holy Scripture, I should treat first of the Creator, next of the creation, then of man’s fall and reparation, and then of events (rebus gestis) chronologically.” He proposes to give a summary of titles at the end of the work. Sometimes he may state as his own, things he has had from his teachers or from very well-known books; and he admits that he did not have time to collate the gesta martyrum, and so some of the abstracts which he gives of these are not by his own hand, but by the hand of scribes (notariorum).

Vincent proposes to call the whole work Speculum majus, a Speculum indeed, or an Imago mundi, “containing in brief whatever, from unnumbered books, I have been able to gather, worthy of consideration, admiration, or imitation as to things which have been made or done or said in the visible or invisible world from the beginning until the end, and even of things to come.” He briefly adverts to the utility of his work, and then gives his motive for including history. This he thinks will help us to understand the story of Christ; and from a perusal of the wars which took place “before the advent of our pacific King, the reader will perceive with what zeal we should fight against our spiritual foes, for our salvation and the eternal glory promised us.” From the great slaughter of men in many wars, may be realized also the severity of God against the wicked, who are slain like sheep, and perish body and soul.[443]

As to nature, Vincent says:

Moreover, to know about things is useful for preachers and theologians, as Augustine says. But Vincent is conscious of another motive also:

Here Vincent feels it well to apologize for the limitlessness of his matter, being only an excerptor, and not really knowing even a single science; and he refers to the example of Isidore’s Etymologiae. He proceeds to enumerate the various sources upon which he relies, and then to summarize the headings of his work; which in brief are as follows:

One may stand aghast at the programme. Yet[Pg 319] practically all of it would go into a Summa theologiae, excepting the human history, and the matter of what we should call the arts and sciences! A programme like this might be handled summarily, according to the broad captions under which it is stated; or it might be carried out in such detail as to include all available information, or opinion, touching every part of every topic included under these universal heads. The latter is Vincent’s way. Practically he tries to include all knowledge upon everything. The first of his tomes (the Speculum naturale) is to be devoted to a full description of the forms and species of created beings, which make up the visible world. Yet it includes much relating to beings commonly invisible; for Vincent begins with a treatment of the angels. He then passes to a consideration of the seven heavens; and then to the physical phenomena of nature; then on to every known species of plant, the cultivation of trees and vines, and the making of wine; then to the celestial bodies, and after this to living things, birds, fishes, savage beasts, reptiles, the anatomy of animals,—and at last comes to man. He discusses him body and soul, his psychology, and the phenomena of sleep and waking; then human anatomy—nor can he keep from considerations touching the whole creation; then human generation, and a description of the countries and regions of the earth, with a brief compendium of history until the time of Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Of course he is utterly uncritical, even the pseudo-Turpin’s fictions as to Charlemagne serving him for authority.

Vincent’s Prologue to his second tome, the Speculum doctrinale, briefly mentions the topics of the tota naturalis historia, contained in his first giant tome. In that he had brought his matter down to God’s creation of humana natura, omnium rerum finis ac summa—and its spoliation (destitutio) through sin. Humana natura as constituted by God, was a universitas of all nature or created being, corporeal and spiritual. Now

So Vincent begins with the fall and misery of man; the peccatum and the supplicium. Then he proceeds to discuss the goods (bona) which God bestows, like the mental powers, by which man may learn wisdom, and how to strive against error and vice, and be overcome solely by the desire of the highest and immutable good. He speaks also of the corporeal goods bestowed on man, and the beauty and utility of visible things; and then of the principal evils;—ignorance which corrupts the divine image in man, concupiscence which destroys the divine similitude, sickness which destroys his original bodily immortality. “And the remedies are three by which these three evils may be repelled, and the three goods restored, to wit, Wisdom, Virtue, and Need.”

Here we touch the gist of the ordering of topics in the Speculum doctrinale, which treats of all the arts and sciences:

Thus the entire round of arts and sciences is connected with man’s corporeal and spiritual welfare, and is made to bear directly or indirectly on his salvation. All constitutes doctrina, and by doctrina man is saved. This is the reason for including the arts and sciences in one tome, rightly called the Speculum doctrinale. We need not follow the detail, but may view as from afar the long course ploughed by Vincent through his matter. He first sketches the history of antique philosophy, and then turns to books and language, and presents a glossary of Latin synonyms. Book II. treats of Grammar, Book III. of Logic, Book IV. of Practica scientia or Ethica, first giving pagan ethics and then passing on to the virtues of the monastic life. Book V. is a continuation of this subject. Book VI. concerns the Scientia oeconomica, treating of domestic economy, then of agriculture. Books VII. and VIII. take up Politica, and, having discussed political institutions, proceed to a treatment of law—the law of persons, things, and actions, according to the canon and the civil law. Books IX. and X. consider Crimes—simony, heresy, perjury, sacrilege, homicide, rape, adultery, robbery, usury. Book XI. is more cheerful, De arte mechanica, and tells of building, the military art, navigation, alchemy, and metals. Book XII. is Medicine, and Books XIII. and XIV. discuss Physics, in connection with the healing art. Book[Pg 322] XV. is Natural Philosophy—animals and plants. Book XVI., De mathematica, treats of arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and metaphysics cursorily. Book XVII. likewise thins out in a somewhat slight discussion of Theology, which was to form the topic of the tome that Vincent did not write.

But Vincent did complete another tome, the Speculum historiale. It is a loosely chronological compilation of tradition, myth, and history, with discursions upon the literary works of the characters coming under review. It would be tedious to follow its excerpted presentation of the profane and sacred matter.

We may leave Vincent, with the obvious reflection that his work is a conglomerate, both in arrangement and contents. It has the pious aim of contributing to man’s salvation, and yet is an attempted universal encyclopaedia of human knowledge, much of which is plainly secular and mundane. The monstrous scope and dual purpose of the work prevented any unity in method and arrangement. More single in aim, and better arranged in consequence, are the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. For although their scope, at least the scope of the Summa, is wide, all is ordered with respect to the true aim of sacra doctrina, just as Thomas explained in the passage which we have already given.

The alleged principle of the Lombard’s division strikes one as curious; yet he got it from Augustine: Signum and res—the symbol and the thing: verily an age-long play of spiritual tendency lay back of these contrasted concepts. Christian doctrina related, perhaps chiefly, to the significance of signa, signs, symbols, allegories, mysteries, sacraments. It was not so strange that the Lombard made this antithesis the ground of his arrangement. Quite as of course he begins by saying it is clear to any one who considers, with God’s grace, that the “contents of the Old and New Law are occupied either with res or signa. For as the eminent doctor Augustine says in his Doctrina Christiana, all teaching is of things or signs; but things also are learned through signs. Properly those are called res which are not employed in order to signify something; while signa are those whose[Pg 323] use is to signify.” Then the Lombard separates the sacraments from other signa, because they not only signify, but also confer saving aid; and he points out that evidently a signum is also some sort of a thing; but not everything is a signum. He will treat first of res and then of signa.

As to res, one must bear in mind, as Augustine says, that some things are to be enjoyed (fruendum), as from love we cleave to them for their own sake; and others are to be used (utendum) as a means; and still others to be both enjoyed and used.

So the Lombard’s first two Books consider res in the descending order of their excellence; the third considers the Incarnation, which, if not itself a sacrament, and the chief and sum of all sacraments, is the source of those of the New Law, considered in the fourth Book. The scheme is single and orderly; the difficulty will be in actually arranging the various topics within it. Endeavouring to do so, the Lombard in Book I. puts together the doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons composing it, and their attributes and qualities. Book II. considers in order, the Angels, and very briefly, the work of the Six Days down to the creation of man; then the Christian doctrina as to man is presented: his creation and its reasons; the creation of his anima; the creation of woman; the condition of man and woman before the Fall; their sin; next free-will and grace. Book III. treats of the Incarnation, in all the aspects in which it may be known, and of the nature of Christ, His saving merit, and the grace which was in Him; also of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the seven gifts of the Spirit, and the existence of them all in Christ. Book IV. considers the Sacraments of the New Law: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination to holy orders, marriage. It concludes with setting forth the Resurrection and the Last Judgment.

[Pg 324]The first chapters of Genesis were the ultimate source of the Lombard’s actual arrangement. And the Summa will follow the same order of treatment. One may perceive how naturally the adoption of this order came to Christian theologians by glancing over Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram.[445] This Commentary was partially constructive, and not simply exegetical; and afforded a cadre, or frame, of topical ordering, which could readily be filled out with the contents of the Sentences or even of the Summa: God, in His unity and trinity, the Creation, man especially, his fall, the Incarnation as the saving means of his restoration, and then the Sacraments, and the final Judgment unto heaven and hell. One may say that this was the natural and proper order of presenting the contents of the Christian sacra doctrina.

So the great Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas adopts the same order which the Lombard had followed. The Pars prima begins with defining sacra doctrina.[446] It then proceeds to consider God—whether He exists; then treats of His simplicitas and perfectio; next of His attributes; His bonitas, infinitas, immutabilitas, aeternitas, unitas; then of our knowledge of Him; then of His knowledge, and therein of truth and falsity; thereupon are considered the divine will, love, justice, and pity; the divine providence and predestination; the divine power and beatitude.

All this pertains to the unitas of the divine essence; and now Thomas passes on to the Trinitas personarum, or the more distinctive portions of Christian theology. He treats of the processio and relationes of the divinae Personae, and then of themselves—Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and then of their essential relationship and properties. Next he discusses the missio of the divine Persons, and the relations between God and His Creation. First comes the consideration of the principle of creation, the processio creaturarum a Deo, and of the nature of created things, with some discussion of evil, whether it be a thing.

Among created beings, Thomas treats first of angels, and at great length; then of the physical creation, in its order—the work of the six days, but with no great detail. Then[Pg 325] man, created of spiritual and corporeal substance—his complex nature is to be analysed and fathomed to its depths. Thomas discusses the union of the anima ad corpus; then the powers of the anima, in generali and in speciali—the intellectual faculties, the appetites, the will and its freedom of choice; how the anima knows—the full Aristotelian theory of cognition is given. Next, more specifically as to the creation of the soul and body of the first man, and the nature of the image and similitude of God within him; then as to man’s condition and faculties while in a state of innocence; also as to Paradise.

This closes the treatment of the creatio et distinctio rerum; and Thomas passes to their gubernatio, and the problem of how God conserves and moves the corporeal and spiritual; then concerning the action of one creature on another, and how the angels are ranged in hierarchies, and although purely spiritual beings, minister to men and guard them; then concerning the action of corporeal things, concerning fate, and the action of men upon men.

Here ends Pars prima. The first section of the second part (Prima secundae) begins. In a short Prologue Thomas says:

Hereupon Thomas takes up in order: the ultimate end of man; the nature of man’s beatitude, and wherein it consists, and how it may be attained; then voluntary and involuntary acts, and the nature and action of will; then fruition, intention, election, deliberation, consent, and actions good and bad, flowing from the will; then the passions; concupiscence and pleasure, sadness, hope and despair, fear, anger; next habits (habitus) and the virtues, intellectual, cardinal, theological; the gifts of the Spirit, and the beatitudes; the vices, and sin, and penalty. Thereupon it becomes proper to consider the external causes (principia)[Pg 326] of acts: “The external cause (principium) moving toward good is God; who instructs us through law, and aids us through grace. Therefore we must speak, first of law, then of grace.” So Thomas discusses: the essentia of law, and the different kinds of law—lex aeterna, lex naturalis, lex humana—their effect and validity; then the precepts of the Old Law (of the Old Testament); then as to the law of the Gospel and the need of grace; and lastly, concerning grace and human merit.

The Secunda secundae (the second division of the second part) opens with a Prologue, in which the author says that, having considered generally the virtues and vices, and other things pertaining to the matter of ethics, it is needful to consider these same matters more particularly, each in turn; “for general moral statements (sermones morales universales) are less useful, inasmuch as actions are always in particularibus.” A more special statement of moral rules may proceed in two ways: the one from the side of the moral material, discussing this or that virtue or vice; the other considers what applies to special orders (speciales status) of men, for instance prelates and the lower clergy, or men devoted to the active or contemplative religious life. “We shall, therefore, consider specially, first what applies to all conditions of men, and then what applies to certain orders (determinatos status).” Thomas adds that it will be best to consider in each case the virtue and corresponding gift, and the opposing vice, together; also that “virtues are reducible to seven, the three theological,[447] and the four cardinal virtues. Of the intellectual virtues, one is Prudence, which is numbered with the cardinal virtues; but ars does not pertain to morals, which relate to what is to be done, while ars is the correct faculty of making things (recta ratio factibilium).[448] The other three intellectual virtues, sapientia, intellectus, et scientia, bear the names of certain gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are[Pg 327] considered with them. Moral virtues are all reducible to the cardinal virtues; and therefore, in considering each cardinal virtue, all the virtues related to it are considered, and the opposite vices.”

This classification of the virtues seems anything but clear. And perhaps the weakest feature of the Summa is this scarcely successful ordering, or combination, of the Aristotelian virtues with those more germane to the Christian scheme. However this may be, the author of the Summa proceeds to consider in order: fides, and the gifts (dona) of intellectus and scientia which correspond to the virtue faith; next the opposing vices: infidelitas, haeresis, apostasia, blasphemia, and caecitas mentis (spiritual blindness). Next in order come the virtue spes, and the corresponding gift of the Spirit, timor, and the opposing vices of desperatio and praesumptio.[449] Next, caritas, with its dilectio, its gaudium, its pax, its misericordia, its beneficentia and eleemosyna, and its correctio fraterna; then the opposite vices, odium, acedia, invidia, discordia, contentio, schisma, bellum, rixa, seditio, scandalum. Next the donum sapientiae, and its opposite, stultitia; next, prudentia, and its correspondent gift, consilium; and its connected vices, imprudentia, negligentia, and its evil semblances, dolus and fraus.

Says Thomas: Consequenter post prudentiam considerandum est de Justitia. Whereupon follows a juristic treatment of jus, justitia, judicium, restitutio, acceptio personarum; then homicide and other crimes recognized by law. Then come the virtues, connected with justitia, to wit, religio, and its acts, devotio, oratio, adoratio, sacrificium, oblatio, decimae, votum, juramentum; then the vices opposed to religio: superstitio, idolatria, tentatio Dei, perjurium, sacrilegium, simonia. Next is considered the virtue of pietas; then observantia, with its parts, i.e. dulia (service), obedientia, and its opposite, inobedientia. Next, gratia (thanks) or gratitudo, and its opposite, ingratitudo; next, vindicatio (punishment); next, veritas, with its opposites, hypocrisis, jactantia (boasting), and ironia; next, amicitia, with the vices of adulatio and litigium. Next, the virtue of liberalitas, and its vices,[Pg 328] avaritia and prodigalitas; next, epieikeia (aequitas). Finally, closing this discussion of all that is connected with Justitia, Thomas speaks of its corresponding gift of the Spirit, pietas.

Now comes the third cardinal virtue, Fortitudo—under which martyrium is the type of virtuous act; intimiditas and audacia are the two vices. Then the parts of Fortitudo, to wit, magnanimitas, magnificentia, patientia, perseverantia, and the obvious opposing vices. Next, the fourth cardinal virtue, Temperantia, its obvious opposing vices, and its parts, to wit, verecundia, honestas, abstinentia, sobrietas, castitas, clementia, modestia, humilitas, and the various appropriate acts and opposing vices related to these special virtues.

So far,[450] Thomas has been considering the virtues proper for all men; and now he comes to those specially pertaining to certain kinds of men, according to their gifts of grace, their modes of life, or the diversity of their offices, or stations. Of the special virtues related to gifts of grace, the first is prophetia, next raptus (vision), then gratia linguarum, and gratia miraculorum. After this, the vita activa and contemplativa, with their appropriate virtues, are considered. And then Thomas proceeds to speak De officiis et statibus hominum, and their respective virtues.

Here ends the Secunda secundae, and Pars tertia opens with this Prologue:

[Pg 329]This Prologue indicates sufficiently the order of topics in the Pars tertia of the Summa, through Quaestio xc., at which point the hand of the Angelic Doctor was folded to eternal rest. He was then considering penance, the fourth in his order of Sacraments. All that he had to say as to the person, and attributes, and acts and passion of Christ had been written; and he had considered the Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist; he was occupied with poenitentia; and still other sacraments remained, as well as his final treatment of the matters which lie beyond the grave. So he left his work unfinished, and, in spite of many efforts, unfinishable by any of his pupils or successors.[451]

 

II

Inasmuch as the matter of their thoughts was transmitted to the men of the Middle Ages, and was not drawn from their own observation or constructive reasoning, the fundamental intellectual endeavour for mediaeval men was to apprehend and make their own, and re-express. Their intellectual progress followed this process of appropriation, and falls into three stages—learning, organically appropriating, and re-expressing with added elements of thought. Logically, and generally in time, these three stages were successive. Yet, of course, they overlapped, and may be observed progressing simultaneously. Thus, for example, what was known of Aristotle at the beginning of the twelfth century was slight compared with the knowledge of his philosophy that was opened to western Europe in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth. And while, by the middle of the twelfth century, the elements of Aristotle’s logic had been thoroughly appropriated, the substantial Aristotelian philosophy had still to be learned and mastered, before it could be reformulated and re-expressed as part of mediaeval thought.

[Pg 330]Looking solely to the outer form, the three stages of mediaeval thought are exemplified in the Scriptural Commentary of the later Carolingian time, in the twelfth-century Books of Sentences, and at last in the more organic Summa theologiae. With this significant evolution and change of outer form, proceeded the more substantial evolution consisting in learning, appropriating, and re-expressing the inherited material. In both cases, these three stages were necessitated by the greatness of the transmitted matter; for the intellectual energies of the mediaeval period were fully occupied with mastering the data proffered so pressingly, with presenting and re-presenting this superabundant material, and recasting it in new forms of statement, which were also expressions, or realizations, of the mediaeval genius. So the mediaeval product may be regarded as given by the past, and by the same token necessitated and controlled. But, on the other hand, each stage of intellectual progress rendered possible the next one.

The first stage of learning is represented by the Carolingian period, which we have considered. It was then that the patristic material was extracted from the writings of the Fathers, and rearranged and reapplied, to meet the needs of the time. The mastery of this material had scarcely made such vital progress as to enable the men of the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries to re-express it largely in terms of their own thinking. In the ninth century, Eriugena affords an extraordinary exception with his drastic restatement of what he had drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius and others; and at the end comes Anselm, whose genius is metaphysically constructive. But Anselm touches the coming time; and the springs of Eriugena’s genius are hidden from us.

As for the antique thought during these Carolingian centuries, Eriugena dealt in his masterful way with what he knew of it through patristic and semi-patristic channels. But let us rather seek it in the curriculum of the Trivium and Quadrivium. What progress Gerbert made in the Quadrivium, that is, in the various branches of mathematics which he taught, has been noted, and to what extent his example was followed by his pupil Fulbert, at the cathedral[Pg 331] school of Chartres.[452] The courses of the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—demand our closer attention; for they were the key of the situation. We must keep in mind that we are approaching mediaeval thought from the side of the innate human need of intellectual expression—the impulse to know and the need to formulate one’s conceptions and express them consistently. For mediaeval men the first indispensable means to this end was grammar, including rhetoric, and the next was logic or dialectic. The Latin language contained the sum of knowledge transmitted to the Middle Ages. And it had to be learned. This was true even in Italy and Spain and France, where each year the current ways of Romance speech were departing more definitely from the parent stock; it was more patently true in the countries of Teutonic speech. Centuries before, the Roman youth had studied grammar that they might speak and write correctly. Now it was necessary to study Latin grammar, to wit, the true forms and literary usages of the Latin tongue, in order to acquire any branch of knowledge whatsoever, and express one’s corresponding thoughts. And men would not at first distinguish sharply between the mediating value of the learned tongue and the learning which it held.[453]

Thus grammar, the study of the Latin language, represented the first stage of knowledge for mediaeval men. This was to remain true through all the mediaeval centuries; since all youths who became scholars had to learn the language before they could study what was contained in it alone. One may also say, and yet not speak fantastically,[Pg 332] that grammar, the study of the correct use of the language itself, corresponded spiritually with the main intellectual labour of the Carolingian period. Alcuin’s attention is commonly fixed upon the significance of language, Latin of course. And the labours of his pupil Rabanus, and the latter’s pupil Walafrid, are as it were devoted to the grammar of learning. That is to say, they read and endeavour to understand the works of the Fathers; they compare and collate, and make volumes of extracts, which they arrange for the most part as Scripture commentaries; commentaries, that is, upon the significance of the canonical writings which were the substance of all wisdom, but needed much explication. Such works were the very grammar of knowledge, being devoted to the exposition of the meaning of the Scriptures and the vast burden of patristic thought. A like purpose was evinced in the efforts of the great emperor himself to re-establish schools of grammar, in order that the Scriptures might be more correctly understood, and the expositions of the holy Fathers. In fine, just as knowledge of the Latin tongue was the end and aim of grammar, so a correct understanding of what was contained in Latin books was the aim of the intellectual labours of this period. It all represented the first stage in the mediaeval acquisition of knowledge, or in the presentation or expression of the same; and thus the first stage in the mediaeval endeavour to realize the human impulse to know.

The next course of the Trivium was logic; and likewise its study will represent truly the second stage in the mediaeval realization of the human impulse to know, to wit, the second stage in the appropriation and expression of the knowledge transmitted from the past. We have spoken at some length of the logical studies of Gerbert, and his endeavours to adjust his thinking and classify the branches of knowledge by means of formal logic.[454] Those discussions of his which seem somewhat puerile to us, were essential to his endeavours to formulate what he had learned, and present it as rational and ordered knowledge. Logic is properly the stage succeeding grammar in the formulation of rational knowledge. At least it was for men of Gerbert’s[Pg 333] time, and the following centuries. Rightly enough they looked on logic as a scientia sermotionalis, which on one side touched sheer linguistics, and on the other, had for its field the further processes of reason. Thus Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard’s very great contemporary, says:

The close connection between grammar and logic is evident. Logic treats of language used in rational expression, as well as of the reasoning processes carried on in language. Its elementary chapters teach a rational use of language, whereby men may reach a more deeply consistent expression of their thoughts than is gained from grammar. Yet grammar also is logic, and based on logical principles. All this is exemplified in the logical treatises composing the Aristotelian Organon, which the Middle Ages used. First comes Porphyry’s Isagoge, which clearly is bound up in language. Likewise Aristotle’s Categories treat of the rational and consistent use of language, or of what may be stated in language. Next it is obvious that the De interpretatione treats of language used to express thought, its generic function. The more advanced treatises of the Organon, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi, treat directly and elaborately of the reasoning processes themselves. So one perceives the grammatical affinities of the simpler treatises in the Organon. The more advanced ones seem to stand to them as oratorical rhetoric stands to elementary grammar. For the Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi are a kind of eristic, training the student to use the processes of thought and their expression in order to attain an end, commonly argumentative. The prior treatises have taught the elements, as it were the orthography and etymology of the rational expression of thought in language; the latter (even as syntax and rhetoric),[Pg 334] train the student in the use of these elements. And one observes a nice historical fitness in the fact that only the simpler treatises of the Organon were in common use in the early Middle Ages, since they alone were necessary to the first stage in the appropriation of the substance of patristic and antique thought. The full Organon was rediscovered, and retaken into use in the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, when men had progressed to a more organic appropriation of the patristic material and what they knew of the antique philosophy.

Thus in mediaeval education, and in the successive order of appropriating the patristic and the antique, logic stood on grammar’s shoulders. It was grammar’s rationalized stage, and treated language as the means of expressing thought consistently and validly; that is, so as not to contravene the necessities of that whereof it was the vehicle. And since language thus treated was in accord with rational thought, it would accord with the realities to which thought corresponds; and might be taken as expressing them. This last reflection introduces metaphysics.

And properly. For the three stages in the mediaeval appropriation and expression of knowledge were grammar, logic, metaphysics. Logic has to do with the processes of thought; with the positing of premises and the drawing of the conclusion. It does not necessarily consider whether the contents of its premises represent realities. This is matter for ontology, metaphysics. Now mediaeval metaphysics, which were those of Greek philosophy, were extremely pre-Kantian, in assuming a correspondence between the necessities or conclusions of thought and the supreme realities, God and the Universe. Nor did mediaeval logic doubt that its processes could elucidate and express the veritable natures of things. So mediaeval logic readily wandered into the province of metaphysics, and ignored the line between the two.

Yet there is little metaphysics in the Organon; none in its simpler treatises. So there was none in the elementary logical instruction of the schools before the twelfth century at least.[456] One may always distinguish between logic and[Pg 335] metaphysics; and it is to our purpose to do so here. For as we have taken logic to represent the second stage in the mediaeval appropriation of knowledge, so metaphysics, poised in turn on logic’s shoulders, is very representative of the third stage, to wit, the stage of systematic and organic re-expression of the ancient matter, with elements added by the great schoolmen.

Metaphysics was very properly the final stage. The grammatical represented an elementary learning of what the past had transmitted; the logical a further retrying of the matter, an attempt to understand and express it, formulate parts of it anew, with deeper consistency of expression. Then follows the attempt for final and universal consistency: final inasmuch as thought penetrates to the nature of things and expresses realities and the relationships of realities; and universal, in that it seeks to order and systematize all its concepts, and bring them to unity in a Summa—a perfected scheme of rational presentation of God and His creation. This will be, largely speaking, the final endeavour of the mediaeval man to ease his mind, and realize his impulse to know and express himself with uttermost consistency.

So for mediaeval men, metaphysics stood on logic’s shoulders and represented the final completion of their thought, in a universal system and scheme of God and man and things.[457] But the first part of this proposition had not been true with Greek philosophy. Metaphysics is properly occupied with being, in its ultimate essence and relationships; with the consistent putting together of things, to wit, the presentation or expression of them so as not to disagree with any of the data recognized as pertinent. The thinker considers profoundly, seeking to penetrate the ultimate reality and relationships of things, through which a universal whole is constituted. This makes ontology, metaphysics—the science of being, of causes, and so the science of the first Cause, God. Aristotle called this the “first” philosophy, because lying at the base of all branches of knowledge, and[Pg 336] depending on nothing beyond itself. Some time after his death, the Peripatetics and then the Neo-Platonists called this first science by the name of Metaphysics, “after” or “beyond” physics, if one will, perhaps because of the actual order of treatment in the schools.

The term Metaphysics is vague enough; either “first” philosophy or “ontology” is preferable. Yet as to Greek philosophy the term has apt historical suggestiveness. For it did come after physics in time, and was in fact evoked by the imperfect method and consequent contradictions of the earlier philosophies. From the beginning, Greek philosophy drove straight at the cause or origin of things—surely the central problem of metaphysics. Thales and the other Ionians began with rational, though crude, hypotheses as to the sources of the universe. These were first attempts to reach a consistent expression of its origin and nature. Each succeeding philosopher considered further, from the vantage-ground of the recognized inconsistencies or inadequacies in the theories of his predecessors. He was thus led on to consider more profoundly the essential relationships of things, the very truth of their relationships, and on and on into the problem of their being. For the verity of relations must be according to the verity of being of the things related. The world about us consists in relationships, of antecedents and sequences, of cause and effect; and our thought of it is made up of consistencies or contradictions, which last we struggle to eliminate, or to transform to consistencies.

These early philosophers looked only to the Aristotelian material cause for the origin and cause of things; yet reflection plunged them deeper into a consideration of the nature of being and relationships. The other causes were evoked by Anaxagoras and then by Plato, and by them were led into the arena of debate; and philosophers discussed the efficient and final cause as well as the material. Such discussions are recognized by Plato, and finally by Aristotle as relating to the first principles of cognition and being, and so as constituting metaphysics. The constant search for a deeper consistency of explanation had led on and on through a manifold consideration of those palpable[Pg 337] relationships which make up the visible world; it had disclosed the series of necessary assumptions required by those visible relationships; and thus the search for causality and origins, and essential relationships, became one and the same—metaphysics.

Metaphysics was not ineptly called so, since it had in time come after the cruder physical hypotheses. But such was not the order of mediaeval intellectual progress. The Middle Ages passed through no preliminary course of physical hypotheses, explanatory of the universe. Not physics, but logic (introduced by grammar) led up to the final construction—or rather adoption and reconstruction—of ultimate hypotheses as to God and man, led up to the all-ordering and all-compassing Theologia. Metalogics, rather than Metaphysics, would be the proper name for these final expressions or actualizations of the mediaeval impulse to know.

 

 

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[Pg 338]

CHAPTER XXXVI

TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICISM

 

I

From the somewhat elaborate general considerations which have occupied the last two chapters, we turn to the representative manifestations of mediaeval thought in the twelfth century. These belong in part to the second or “logical,” and in part to the third or “meta-logical,” stage of the mediaeval mind. The first or “grammatical” stage was represented by the Carolingian period; and in reviewing the mental aspects of the eleventh century, we entered upon the second stage, that of logic, or dialectic, to use the more specific mediaeval term. Toward the close of the tenth century Gerbert was found strenuously occupying himself with logic, and using it as a means of ordering the branches of knowledge. At the end of the eleventh, Anselm has not only considered certain logical problems, but has vaulted over into constructive metaphysical theology. Looking back over Anselm’s work, from the vantage-ground of the twelfth century’s further reflections, one may be conscious of a certain genial youthfulness in his reliance upon single arguments, noble and beautiful soarings of the spirit, which however pay little regard to the firmness of the premises from which they spring, and still less to a number of cognate[Pg 339] and pertinent considerations, which the twelfth century was to analyze.

Anselm’s thoughts perhaps overleaped logic. At all events he appears only occasionally absorbed with its formal problems. Yet he lived in a time of dawning logical controversy. Roscellin was even then blowing up the problem of universals, a problem occasioned by the entering of mediaeval thought upon the “logical” stage of its appropriation of the patristic and antique.

The problem of universals, or general ideas, from the standpoint of logic, lies at the basis of consistent thinking. It reverts to the time when Aristotle’s assertion of the pre-eminently real existence of individuals broke away from the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. For the early mediaeval philosophers, it took its rise in a famous passage in Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories, the concluding sentence of which, as translated into Latin by Boëthius, puts the question thus: “Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia, dicere recusabo.” “Next as to genera and species, do they actually exist or are they merely in thought; are they corporeal or incorporeal existences; are they separate from sensible things or only in and of them?—I refuse to answer,” says Porphyry; “it is a very lofty business, unsuited to an elementary work.”

Thus, in three pairs of crude alternatives, the question came over to the early Middle Ages. The men of the Carolingian period took one position or another, without sensing its difficulties, or observing how it lay athwart the path of knowledge. Students were not as yet attempting such a dynamic appropriation of the ancient material as would evoke this veritable problem of cognition. Even Gerbert at the close of the tenth century was still so busy with the outer forms and figments of logic that he had no time to enter on those ulterior problems where logic links itself to metaphysics. One Roscellin, living and teaching apparently at Besançon in the latter part of the eleventh century, seems to have been the first to attack the[Pg 340] currently accepted “realism” with some sense of the matter’s thorny intricacies. With his own “nominalistic” position we are acquainted only through his adversaries, who imputed to him views which a thoughtful person could hardly have entertained—that universals were merely words and breath (flatus vocis). Roscellin seems at all events to have been a man strongly held by the reality of individuals, and one who found it difficult to ascribe a sufficient intellectual actuality to the general idea as distinguished from the perception of things and the demands of the concepts of their individual existences. His logical difficulties impelled him to theological heresy. The unity in the Trinity became an impossibility; he could only conceive of three beings, just as he might think of three angels; and he would have spoken of three Gods had usage not forbidden it, says St. Anselm.[458] As it was, he said enough to draw on him the condemnation of a Council held at Soissons in 1092, before which he quailed and recanted. For the remainder of his life he so constrained the expression of his thoughts as to ensure his safety.

One may say that Plato’s theory of ideas was a metaphysical presentation of the universe, sounding in conceptions of reality. But for the Middle Ages, the problem whether genera and species exist when abstracted from their particulars, sprang from logical controversy. It was a problem of cognition, cognizance, understanding: how should one understand and analyze the contents of a statement, e.g. Socrates is a man. Moreover, it was a fundamental and universal problem of cognition; for it was not merely occupied, like all mental processes, with bringing data to consistent formulation, but pertained to those processes themselves by which any and all data are stated or formulated. It touched every formulation of truth, asking, in fine, how are we to think our statements? The philosophers of the[Pg 341] eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, did not view this problem as one pertaining to the mind’s processes, and as having to do solely with the understanding of the contents of a statement. Rather, even as Plato had done, they approached it as if it were a problem of modes of existence; and for this very reason it had pushed Roscellin into theological error.

The discussion was to pass through various stages; and each stage may seem to us to represent the point reached by the thinker in his analysis of his conscious meaning in stating a proposition. Moreover, each solution may be valid for him who gives it, because of its correspondence to the meaning of his utterances so far as he has analyzed them. But mediaeval men could not take it in this way. Their intellectual task lay in appropriating, and in their own way re-expressing, all that had come to them from an authoritative past. The problem of universals had been stated by a great authority, who put it as pertaining to the objective reality of genera and species. How then might mediaeval men take it otherwise, especially when at all events it pertained in all verity to their endeavour to grasp and re-express the contents of transmitted truth? It became for a while the crucial problem, the answer to which might indicate the thinker’s general intellectual attitude. Far from keeping to logic, to the organon or instrumental part of the mediaeval endeavour to know, it wound itself through metaphysics and theology. Obviously the thinker’s answer to the problem would bear relation to his thoughts upon the transcendent reality of spiritual essences.

The men who first became impressed with the importance of this problem, gave extreme answers to it, sometimes crassly denying the real existence of universals, but more often hailing them as antecedent and all-permeating realities. If Roscellinus took the former position, a pupil of his, William of Champeaux, held the extreme opposite view, when both he and the twelfth century were still young. One may, however, bear in mind that as the views of the older nominalist are reported only by his enemies, so our knowledge of William’s lucubrations comes mainly from the exacerbated pen of Peter Abaelard.

[Pg 342]William held apparently “that the same thing, in its totality and at the same time, existed in its single individuals, among which there was no essential difference, but merely a variety of accidents.”[459] Abaelard appears to have performed a reductio ad absurdum upon this view that the total genus exists in each individual. He pointed out that in such case the total genus homo would at the same time exist in Socrates and also in Plato, when one of them might be in Rome and the other in Athens. “At this William changed his opinion,” continues Abaelard, “and taught that the genus existed in each individual not essentialiter but indifferenter or [as some texts read] individualiter.” Which seems to mean that William no longer held that the total genus existed in each individual actually, but “indistinguishably,” or “individually.”

And the students flocked away with Abaelard, he also says; and William fled the lecture chair. William and Peter; shall we say of them arcades ambo? This would be but a harmless depreciation of Abaelard, in the face of the universal and correct tradition as to his epoch-making intellectual progressiveness. Indeed it might be well to let the phrase sound in our ears, just for the reminder’s sake, that Abaelard was, like William, a man of logic, although far more expert both in manipulating the dialectic processes and in applying them to theology.

Before endeavouring briefly to reconstruct the intellectual qualities of Abaelard from his writings, let us see how the famous open letter to a friend, in giving an apologetic story of the writer’s life, discloses the fatalities of his character. This Historia calamitatum suarum makes it plain enough why the crises of his life were all of them catastrophes—even leaving out of view his liaison with Heloïse and its penalty. A fatal impulse to annoy seems to drive him from fate to fate; the old word of Heraclitus ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (character is a man’s genius) was so patently true of him. Much that he said was to receive orthodox approval after his time. Quite true. It has often been remarked, that the heresy of one age is the accepted doctrine of the next, even within the Church. But would the heretic have been persona[Pg 343] grata to the later time? Perhaps not. Peter Abaelard at all events would have led others and himself a life of thorns in the thirteenth century, or the fourteenth had he been born again, when some of his methods and opinions had become accepted commonplace. Did he have an eye for logical and human truth more piercing than his twelfth-century fellows? Apparently. Was his need to speak out his truth so much the more imperative than theirs? Possibly. At all events, he was certainly possessed with an inordinate impulsion to undo his rivals. He sits down before their fortress walls by night, and when they see him there, they know not whether they look on friend or foe—in this auditor. They will find out soon enough. He studied dialectic under William of Champeaux at Paris, as all men were to know. He got what William had to teach, and moved on, to lecture in Melun and elsewhere. Then he returned and sat at William’s feet awhile to learn rhetoric, as he announced. But quickly he rose up, and assailed his master’s doctrine of universals, and overthrew him, as we have seen. The victim’s friends made Abaelard’s eristically won lecturer’s seat a prickly one. He left Paris for a while, and then returned and taught on Mount St. Geneviève, outside the city.

Up to this time he had not been known to study theology. But in 1113, at the age of thirty-four, he went to Laon to listen to a famous theologian named Anselm, who himself had studied at Bec under a greater Anselm. Says Abaelard in his Historia calamitatum: “So I came to this old man, whose repute was a tradition, rather than merited by talent or learning. Any one who brought his uncertainties to him, went away more uncertain still! He was a marvel in the eyes of his hearers, but a nobody before a questioner. He had a wonderful wordflow, but the sense was contemptible and the reasoning abject.” Well, I didn’t listen to him long, Abaelard intimates; but began to absent myself from his lectures, and was brought to task by his auditors, to whom jokingly I said, I, too, could lecture on Scripture; and I was taken up. Nothing loath, the next day I lectured to them on the passage they had chosen from Ezekiel’s obscure prophecies. So, all unprepared, and trusting[Pg 344] in my genius, I began to lecture, at first to sparse audiences, but they quickly grew. Such is the substance of Abaelard’s own account, and he goes on to tell how “the old man aforesaid was violently moved with envy,” and shortly Abaelard had to take his lecturings elsewhere. He returned to Paris, and we have the episode of Heloïse, for whom, as his life went on, he evinced a devoted affection.[460]

Now he is monk in the abbey of St. Denis; and there again he lectures, and takes up certain themes against Roscellinus, whom he seems to resurrect from the quiet of old age to make a target of. This old man, too, hits back, and other vicious people blow up a cloud of envy, until the gifted lecturer finds himself an accused before the Council of Soissons, and his book condemned. Untaught by the burning of his book, Abaelard returns to his convent, and proceeds to unearth statements of the Venerable Bede showing that Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, was not the St. Denis who became patron saint of France, and founder of the great abbey which even now was sheltering a certain Abaelard, and drawing power and revenue from the fame of its reputed almost apostolic founder. Its abbot and monks did not care to have the abbey walls undermined by truth, and Abaelard was hunted forth from among them.

It was after this that he made for himself a lonely refuge, which he named the Paraclete, not far from Troyes, and thither again his pupils followed him in swarms, and built their huts around him in the wilderness. But still mightier foes—or their phantoms—rise against this hunted head. The Historia seems to allude to St. Norbert and to St. Bernard. Whatever the storm was, it was escaped by flight to a remote Breton convent which—still for his sins!—had chosen Abaelard its abbot. There in due course they tried to murder him, and again he fled, this time back to his congenial sphere, the schools of Paris, where he lectured, now at the summit of fame, to enthusiastic multitudes of students. Some years pass, and then the pious jackal, William of St. Thierry, rouses his lion Bernard to contend with Abaelard and crush him, not with dialectic, at the[Pg 345] Council of Sens in 1141. In a year he died, a broken man, in Cluny’s shelter. The conflict had not been of his seeking. Perhaps, had he been less vain, he might have avoided it. When it was upon him, the unhappy athlete of the schools found himself a pigmy matched against the giant of Clairvaux—the Thor and Loki of the Church! Whether or not the unequal battle raises Abaelard in our esteem, its outcome commends him to our pity; and all our sympathy stays with him to the last days of a life that was, as if physically, crushed. This accumulation of sad fortune bears witness enough to the character of the man on whose neck it did not fall by accident. Now let us try to reconstruct him intellectually.

We have heretofore observed the genius and noted the somewhat swaddling dialectic categories of a certain eager intellect bearing the name of Gerbert.[461] Abaelard’s mental processes have advanced beyond such logical stammerings. He and his time are in the fulness of youth, and feel the strength and joyful assurance of an intellectual progress, to be brought about by a new-found proficiency in dialectic. In the first half of the twelfth century, the intellectual genius of the time—and Abaelard was its quintessence—knew itself advancing by this means in truth. A like intellectual consciousness had rejoiced the disputants in Plato’s academy, under the inspiration of that beautiful reasoner’s exquisite dialectic. The one time, like the other, was justified in its confidence. For in such epochs, language, reasoning, and knowledge advance with equal step; thought clears up with linguistic and logical analysis; it becomes clear and illuminated because more distinctly conscious of the character of its processes, and the nature of statement. There is thus a veritable progress, at least in the methodology of truth.

In Abaelard’s time men had already studied grammar, the grammar of the Latin tongue, and the quasi-grammar of rearrangement and first painful learning of the knowledge which it held. They had studied logic too, its simpler elements, those which consist mainly in a further clearing up of the meanings of language. Some men—Anselm of[Pg 346] Canterbury—had already made sudden flights beyond grammar, and out of logic’s pale. And the labour of logical and organic appropriation, with some reconstruction of the ancient material, was to go on in this first half of the twelfth century, when Hugo of St. Victor lived as well as Abaelard. Progress by means of dialectic controversy, and first attempts at systematic construction, mark this period intellectually. Abaelard lived and moved and had his being in dialectic. The further interest of Theology was lent him by the spirit of his time. Through the medium of the one he reasoned analytically; and in the province of the other he applied his reasoning constructively, using patristic materials and the fragments of Greek philosophy scattered through them. Thus Abaelard, a true man of the twelfth century, passes on through logic to theology or metaphysics.

For the completeness of his logical knowledge he lived and worked twenty or thirty years too soon. He was unacquainted with the more elaborate logical treatises of Aristotle, to wit, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi. The sources of his own treatises upon Dialectic are Porphyry’s Introduction, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, and certain treatises of Boëthius.[462] A first result of the elementary and quasi-grammatical character of the sources of logic upon which he drew, is that the connection between logic and grammar is very plain with him. Note, for example, this paragraph of his, the substance of which is drawn from Aristotle’s Categories:

[Pg 347]Evidently this elementary sort of logic, whether with Aristotle or Abaelard, represents a clearing up of the mind on current modes of expression. And sometimes from such studies men make discoveries like that of Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who discovered that he had always been talking prose. Some of the points on which the minds of Abaelard’s contemporaries required clarification, would be foolish word-play to ourselves, as, for instance, whether the significance of the sentence homo est animal is contained in the subject, copula, or predicate, or only in all three; and whether when a word is spoken, the very same word and the whole of it comes to the ears of all the hearers at the same time: “utrum ipsa vox ad aures diversorum simul et tota aequaliter veniat.”[465] Such questions, as was observed regarding the problems of logical arrangement in Gerbert’s mind, may be pertinent and reasonable enough, if viewed in connection with the intellectual conditions of a period; just as many questions now make demand on us for solution, being links in the chain of our knowledge, or manner of reasoning. But future men may pass them by as not lying in their path to progressive knowledge of the universe and man.

So the problem of universals was still cardinal with Abaelard and his fellow-logicians, who through logic were advancing, as they believed, along the path of objective truth. Its solution would determine the nature of the categories into which logic was fitting whatever might be enunciated or expressed. The inquiry represented an ultimate analysis of statement, of the general nature of propositions; and also related to their assumed correspondence with realities. What William of Champeaux had unqualifiedly alleged, Abaelard tried to determine more analytically, to wit, the value of the proposition “si aliquid sit ea res quae est species, id est vel homo vel equus et caetera, sit quaelibet res quae eorum genus est, veluti animal aut corpus aut substantia,”—if species be something, as man,[Pg 348] horse, and so forth, then that which is the genus of these may be something, as animal, body, or substance.[466]

Abaelard’s discussion of this matter is a discussion of the true content of propositions. His conclusion is not so clear as to have occasioned no dispute. One must not think of him as an Aristotelian—for he knew little of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle. Our dialectician had absorbed more of Plato, through turbid patristic channels and the current translation of the Timaeus. So his solution of the question of genus and species may prove an analytic bit of eclecticism, an imagined reconcilement of the two great masters. The universal or general is, says he, “quod natum est de pluribus praedicari,” that which is by its nature adapted to be predicated of a number of things. The universal consists neither in things as such nor in words as such; it consists rather in general predicability; it is sermo, sermo praedicabilis, that which may be stated, as a predicate, of many. As such it is not a mere word: sermo is not merely vox; that is not the true general predicable. On the other hand, one thing cannot be the predicate of another; res de re non praedicatur: therefore sermo is not res. Yet Abaelard does not limit the existence of the universal to the concept of him who thinks it. It surely exists in the individuals, since substantia specierum is not different from the essentia individuorum. But does not the general concept exist as an objective unity? Apparently Abaelard would answer: Yes, it does thus exist as a common sameness (consimilitudo).

All this is anything but clear. And the various twelfth-century opinions on universals no longer possess human interest. It is hard for us to distinguish between them, or understand them clearly, or state them intelligibly. They are bound up in a phraseology untranslatable into modern language, because the discussion no longer corresponds to modern ways of thought. But one is interested in the human need which drove Abaelard and his fellows upon the horns of this problem, and in the nature of their endeavours to formulate their thought so as to escape those opposing horns—of an extreme realism which might issue in pantheism,[Pg 349] and an extreme nominalism which seemed to deprive predication of substance and validity.[467]

So much for Abaelard as sheer logician, formal adjuster of the instrumental processes of thinking. Dialectic was for him a first stage in the actualization of the impulse to know, and bring knowledge to consistent expression. It was also his way of approach to the further systematic presentation of his thoughts upon God and man, human society and justice, divine and human.

In this passage the man himself is speaking, and disclosing his innermost convictions. For Abaelard’s nature was set upon understanding all things through reason, even the mysteries of the Faith. He does not say, or quite think, that he will disbelieve whatever he cannot understand; but his reasoning and temper point to the conclusion. This was obviously true of Abaelard’s ethical opinions; his enemies said it was true of his theology. Such a man would naturally plead for freedom of discussion, even for freedom of conclusion; but within certain bounds; for who in the twelfth century could maintain that heretics or infidels did rightly in rejecting the Christian Faith? Yet Abaelard says heretics should be compelled (coercendi) by reason rather than force.[469] And he could at least conceive of the rejection of the Faith upon, say, imperfect rational grounds. In his dialogue between Philosopher, Jew, and Christian, the Christian says to the Philosopher: One cannot argue against you from the authority of Scripture, which you do not recognize; for no one can be refuted save with arguments drawn from what he admits: Nemo quippe argui nisi ex concessis potest.[470] However this sounded in Abaelard’s time, the same was enunciated by Thomas Aquinas after him, in a passage already given.[471] But it is doubtful whether Thomas would have cared to follow Abaelard in some of the arguments of his Ethics or Book called, Know Thyself, in which he maintains that no act is a sin unless the actor was conscious of its sinfulness; and therefore that killing the martyrs could not be imputed as sin to those persecutors who deemed themselves thereby to be doing a service acceptable to God.[472]

The titles given by Abaelard to his various treatises are indicative of the critical insistency of his nature. He called[Pg 351] his Ethica, Scito te ipsum, Know Thyself: understand thy good and ill intentions, and what may be vice or virtue in thee. Through the book, the discussion of right and wrong directs itself as pertinaciously to considerations of human nature as was possible in an age when theological dogma held the final criteria of human conduct. And Abaelard is capable of a lofty insight touching the relationship between God and man.

Possibly when reading the Scito te ipsum one is conscious of a dialectician drawing distinctions, rather than of a moralist searching the heart of the matter. Everything is set forth so reasonably. Yet Abaelard’s impartial delight in a rational view of belief and conduct shows nowhere quite as obviously as in his Dialogue between Philosopher and Jew and Christian. Each in turn is made to set forth the best arguments his position admits of. The author does his best for each, and perhaps seems temperamentally drawn to the position of the Philosopher, whom he permits to call the Jews stultos and the Christians insanos. This philosopher naturally is no Greek of Plato’s or Aristotle’s time, but a good Roman, who regards moralis philosophia as the finis omnium disciplinarum, and hangs all intellectual considerations upon a discussion of the summum bonum. His well-worn arguments are put with earnestness. He deprecates the blind acceptance of beliefs by children from their fathers, and the narrowness of mind which keeps men from perceiving the possible truth in others’ opinions:

The qualities cultivated by dialectic, and the impartial rational temper, here displayed, reappear in the works of Abaelard devoted to sacred doctrine. Enough has been said of the method and somewhat captious qualities of the Sic et non.[475] Unquestionably its manner of presenting the contradictory opinions of the Fathers, without any attempt to reconcile them, tended to bring into view the difficulties inhering in the formulation of Christian belief. And indeed the book made prominent all the diabolic insoluble problems of the Faith, or rather of life itself and any view of God and man: Predestination, for example; whether God causes evil; whether He is omnipotent; whether He is free. The Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas’s Summa considered all these questions; but they strove to solve them; and Thomas did solve every one, leaving no loose ends to his theology. More potently than Abaelard did the Angelic Doctor employ dialectic in his finished scheme. With him, this propaedeutic discipline, this tool of truth, perfectly performs its task of construction. So also Abaelard intended to work with it; but his somewhat unconsidered use of the tool did not meet the approval of his contemporaries. Accordingly, in his more constructive theological treatises his impulse to know and state appears finally actualized in the systematic formulation of convictions upon topics of ultimate interest, to wit, theology, the contents of the Christian Faith, the full relationship of God and man. Did he sever theology from philosophy? Nay, rather, with him theology was ultimate philosophy.

Several times Abaelard rewrote what was substantially the same general work upon Theology. In one of its earliest forms it was burnt by the Council of Soissons in 1121.[476] In another form it exists under the title Theologia Christiana;[477] and the first part of its apparently[Pg 353] final revision is now improperly entitled, Introductio ad theologiam.[478]

The first Book of the Theologia Christiana is an exposition of the Trinity, not clinched in syllogisms, but consisting mainly of an orderly presentation of the patristic authorities supporting the author’s view of the matter. The testimonies of profane writers are also given. Liber II. opens by saying that in the former part of the work “we have collected the testimonia of prophets and philosophers, in support of the faith of the Holy Trinity.” Hereupon, by the same method of adducing authorities, Abaelard proceeds to refute those who had blamed him for citing the pagan philosophers. He marshals his supporting excerpts from the Fathers, and remarks: “That nothing is more needful for the defence of our faith than that as against the importunities of all the infidels we should have witness from themselves wherewith to refute them.” Then he points to the moral worth of some of the philosophers, to their true teaching of the soul’s immortality, and quotes Horace’s

He continues at some length setting forth their well-nigh evangelical virtue, and speaks of the Gospel as reformatio legis naturalis.

At the beginning of Liber III. comes the statement: “We set the faith of the blessed Trinity as the foundation of all good.” Whereupon Abaelard breaks out in a denunciation of those who misuse dialectic; but again he passes to a defence of the art as an art and branch of knowledge, and shows its need as a weapon against those wranglers who will be quieted neither by the authority of the saints nor the philosophers: against whom, he, Abaelard, trusting in the divine aid, will turn this weapon as David did the sword of Goliath. He now states the true object of his work: “First then is to be set forth the theme of our whole labour, and the sum of faith; the unity of the divine substance and the Trinity of persons, which are in God, and are one God. Next we state the objections to our theses, and then the solutions of those objections.” And he[Pg 354] gives the substance of the Athanasian Creed. From this point, his work becomes more dialectical and constructive, although of course continuing to quote authorities. He is emboldened to discuss the deepest mysteries, the very penetralia of the Trinity, and in a way which might well alarm men like Bernard, who desired acceptance of the Faith, with rhetoric, but without discussion. To be sure Abaelard pauses to justify himself by reverting to his apologetic purpose: “Heretics must be coerced with reason rather than by force.” However this may be, the work henceforth shows the passing on of logic to the exercise of its architectonic functions in constructing a systematic theological metaphysics.

The miscalled Introductio ad theologiam, as might be expected of a last revision of the author’s Theology, is a more organic work. In the Prologue, Abaelard speaks of it as a Summa sacrae eruditionis or an Introductio to Divine Scripture. And again he states the justifying purpose of his labour, or rather puts it into the mouths of his disciples who have asked for such a work from him: “Since our faith, the Christian Faith, seems entangled in such difficult questions, and to stand apart from human reason (et ab humana ratione longius absistere), it should be fortified by so much the stronger arguments, especially against the attacks of those who call themselves philosophers.” Continuing, Abaelard protests that if in any way, for his sins, he should deviate from the Catholic understanding and statement, he will on seeing his error revise the same, like the blessed Augustine.

The work itself opens with a statement of its intended divisions: “In three matters, as I judge, rests the sum of human salvation: Fides, caritas, and sacramentum”; and he gives his definition of faith, which was so obnoxious to Bernard and others, as the existimatio rerum non apparentium. The three extant Books do not conclude the treatment even of the first of these three topics. But one readily sees that were the work complete, its arrangement might correspond with that of Thomas’s Summa.[479] One may reiterate that it was more constructively argumentative than the Theologia[Pg 355] Christiana, even in the manner of using the cited authorities. For instance, Abaelard’s mind is fixed on the analogy between the Neo-Platonic Trinity of Deus, nous, and anima mundi, and that of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The nous fitly represents Christ, who is the Sapientia Dei—which Abaelard sets forth; but then with even greater insistency he identifies the Holy Spirit with the world-soul. Nothing gave a stronger warrant to the accusations of heresy brought against him than this last doctrine, with which he was obsessed. Yet what roused St. Bernard and his jackals was not so much any particular opinion of Abaelard, as his dialectic and critical spirit, which insisted upon understanding and explaining, before believing. “The faith of the righteous believes; it does not dispute. But that man, suspicious of God (Deum habens suspectum), has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued.”[480]

Still, when Bernard says that faith does not discuss, but believes, he states a conviction of his mind, a conviction corresponding with an inner need of his own to formulate and express his thought. Only, with Abaelard the need to consider and analyse was more consciously imperative. He could not avoid the constant query: How shall I think this thing—this thing, for example, which is declared by revelation? Just as other questioning spirits in other times might be driven upon the query: How shall we think these things which are disclosed by the variegated walls of our physical environment? Those yield data, or refuse them, and force the mind to put many queries, and come to some adjustment. So experience presents data for adjustment, just as dogma, Scripture, revelation present that which reason must bring within the action of its processes, and endeavour to find rational expression for.

 

II

The greatest dialectician of the early twelfth century felt no problems put him by the physical world. That did not attract his inquiry; it did not touch the reasonings evolved by his self-consciousness, any more than it impressed[Pg 356] the fervid mind of his great adversary, St. Bernard. The natural world, however, stirred the mind of Abaelard’s contemporary, Hugo of St. Victor.[481] Its colours waved before his reveries, and its visible sublimities drew his mind aloft to the contemplation of God: for him its things were all the things of God—opus conditionis or opus restaurationis;[482] the work of foundation, whereby God created the physical world for the support and edification of its crowning creature man; and the work of restoration, to wit, the incarnation of the Word, and all its sacraments.

Hugo was a Platonic and very Christian theologian. He would reason and expound, and yet was well aware that reason could not fathom the nature of God, or bring man to salvation. “Logic, mathematics, physics teach some truth, yet do not reach that truth wherein is the soul’s safety, without which whatever is is vain.”[483] So Hugo was not primarily a logician, like Abaelard; nor did he care chiefly for the kind of truth which might be had through logic. Nevertheless the productions of his short life prove the excellence of his mind and his large enthusiasm for knowledge.

As Hugo was the head of the school of St. Victor for some years before his death, certain of his works cover topics of ordinary mediaeval education, secular and religious; while others advance to a more profound expression of the intellectual, or spiritual, interests of their author. For elementary religious instruction, he composed a veritable book of Sentences,[484] which preceded the Lombard’s in time, but was later than Abaelard’s Sic et non. Without striking features, it lucidly and amiably carried out its general purpose of setting forth the authoritative explanations of the elements of the Christian Faith. The writer did not hesitate to quote opposing views, which were not heralded, however,[Pg 357] by such danger-signals of contradiction as flare from the chapter headings of the Sic et non.

The corresponding treatise upon profane learning—the Eruditio didascalica—is of greater interest.[485] It commences in elementary fashion, as a manual of study: “There are two things by which we gain knowledge, to wit, reading and meditation; reading comes first.” The book is to be a guide to the student in the study both of secular and divine writings; it teaches how to study the artes, and then how to study the Scriptures.[486] Even in this manual, Hugo shows himself a meditative soul, and one who seeks to base his most elementary expositions upon the nature and needs of man. The mind, says he, is distracted by things of sense, and does not know itself. It is renewed through study, so that it learns again not to look without for what itself affords. Learning is life’s solace, which he who finds is happy, and he who makes his own is blessed.[487]

For Hugo, philosophy is that which investigates the rationes of things human and divine, seeking ever the final wisdom, which is knowledge of the primaeva ratio: this distinguishes philosophy from the practical sciences, like agriculture: it follows the ratio, and they administer the matter. Again and again, Hugo returns to the thought that the object of all human actiones and studia is to restore the integrity of our nature or mitigate its weaknesses, restore the image of the divine similitude in us, or minister to the needs of life. This likeness is renewed by speculatio veritatis, or exercitium virtutis.[488]

Such is a pretty broad basis of theory for a high school manual. Hugo proceeds to set forth the scheme, rather than the substance, of the arts and sciences, pausing occasionally to admonish the reader to hold no science vile, since knowledge always is good; and he points out that all knowledge hangs together in a common coherency. He sketches[489] the true student’s life: Whoever seeks[Pg 358] learning, must not neglect discipline! He must be humble, and not ashamed to learn from any one; he must observe decent manners, and not play the fool and make faces at lecturers on divinity, for thereby he insults God. Yea, and let him mind the example of the ancient sages, who for learning’s sake spurned honours, rejected riches, rejoiced in insults, deserted the companionship of men, and gave themselves up to philosophy in desert solitudes, that they might be more free for meditation. Diligent search for wisdom in quietude becomes a scholar; and likewise poverty, and likewise exile: he is very delicate who clings to his fatherland; “He is brave to whom every land is home (patria); and he is perfect to whom the whole world is an exile!”[490]

Hugo has much to say of the pulchritudo and the decor of the creature-world. But with him the world and its beauty point to God. One should observe it because of its suggestiveness, the visible suggesting the invisible. Hugo has already been followed in his argument that the world, in its veriest reality, is a symbol.[491] Here we follow him along his path of knowledge, which leads on and upward from cogitatio, through meditatio, to contemplatio. The steps in Hugo’s scheme are rational, though the summit lies beyond. This path to truth, leading on from the visible symbol to the unseen power, is for him the reason and justification of study; drawing to God it makes for man’s salvation.

Hugo has put perhaps his most lucid exposition of the three grades of knowledge into the first of his Nineteen Sermons on Ecclesiastes.[492] He is fond of certain numbers, and here his thought revolves in categories of the number three. Solomon composed three works, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles. In the first, he addresses his son paternally, admonishing him to pursue virtue and shun vice; in the second, he shows the grown man that nothing in the world is stable; finally, in Canticles, he brings the consummate one, who has spurned the world, to the Bridegroom’s arms.

So the victrix flamma achieves the three stages of spiritual insight, fighting its way through the smoke of[Pg 360] cogitation, through the smoke and flame of meditation, and at last through the flame of creature contemplation, to the high peace of God, where all is love’s ardent vision, without flame or smoke. It is thus through the grades of knowledge that the soul reaches at last that fulness of intelligence which may be made perfect and inflamed with love, in the contemplation of God. All knowledge is good according to its grade; only let it always lead on to God, and with humility. Hugo makes his principles clear at the opening of his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius.[493]

This study made the wisdom of the world, whereby it devised the arts and sciences which we still learn. But the world in its pride did not read aright the great book of nature. It had not the knowledge of the true Exemplar, for the sanitation of its inner vision, to wit, the flesh of the eternal Word in the humanity of Jesus.

Hugo then classifies the sciences in the usual Aristotelian way, and shows that Christian theology is the end of all philosophy. The first part of philosophia theorica is mathematics, which speculates as to the visible forms of visible things. The second is physics, which scrutinizes the invisible causes of visible things. The third, theology, alone contemplates invisible substances and their invisible natures. Herein is a certain progression; and the mind mounts to knowledge of the true. Through the visible forms of visible things, it comes to invisible causes of visible things; and through the invisible causes of visible things, it ascends to invisible substances, and to knowing their natures. This is the summit of philosophy and the perfection of truth. In this, as already said, the wise of this world were made foolish; because proceeding by the natural document alone, making account only of the elements and appearance of the world, they missed the instructive instances of Grace: which in spite of humble guise afford the clearer insight into truth.

This is Hugo’s scheme of knowledge; it begins with cogitatio, then proceeds through meditatio to contemplatio of the creature world, and finally of the Creator. The arts and sciences, as well as the face of nature, afford a simulacrum of the unseen Power; but all this knowledge by itself will not bring man to the perfect knowledge of God. For this he needs the exemplaria of Grace, shown through the incarnation of the Word. Only by virtue of this added means, may man attain to perfect contemplation of the truth of God. That end and final summit is beyond reason’s reach; but the attainment of rational knowledge makes part of the path thither. Keen as was Hugo’s intellectual nature, his interest in reason was coupled with a deeper interest in that which reason might neither include nor understand. The intellect does not include the emotional and immediately desiderative elements of human nature; neither can it comprehend the infinite which is God; and[Pg 362] Hugo drew toward God not only through his intellect, but likewise through his desiderative nature, with its yearnings of religious love. That love with him was rational, since its object satisfied his mind as far as his mind could comprehend it.

So Hugo’s intellectual interests were connected with the emotional side of human nature, and also led up to what transcended reason. Thus they led to what was a mystery because too great for human reason, and they included that which also was somewhat of a mystery to reason because lying partly outside its sphere. Hugo is an instance of the intellectual nature which will not rest in reason’s province, but feels equally impelled to find expression for matters that either exceed the mind, or do not altogether belong to it. Such an intellect is impelled to formulate its convictions in regard to these; its negative conviction that it cannot comprehend them, and why it cannot; and its more positive conviction of their value—of the absolute worth of God, and of man’s need of Him, and of the love and fear by which men may come close to Him, or avoid His wrath.

What Hugo has had to say as to cogitation, meditation, and contemplation, represents his analysis of the stages by which a sufficing sense may be reached of the Creator and His world of creature-kind. In this final wisdom and ardour of contemplation, both human reason and human love have part. The intellect advances along its lines, considering the world, and drawing inferences as to the unseen Being who created and sustains it. Mind’s unaided power will not reach. But by the grace of God, supremely manifested in the Incarnation, the man is humbled, and his heart is touched and drawn to love the power of the divine pity and humility. The lesson of the Incarnation and its guiding grace, emboldens the heart and enlightens the mind; and the man’s faculties are strengthened and uplifted to the contemplation of God, wherein the mind is satisfied and the heart at rest.

We have here the elements of piety, intellectual and devotional. Hugo is an example of their union; they also preserve their equal weight in Aquinas. But because Hugo emphasizes the limitations of the intellect, and so ardently[Pg 363] recognizes the heart’s yearning and immediacy of apperception, he is what is styled a mystic; a term which we are now in a position to consider, and to some extent exchange for other phrases of more definite significance.[494]

Quite to avoid the term is not possible, inasmuch as the conception certainly includes what is mysterious because unknowable through reason. For it includes a sense of the supreme, a sense of God, who is too great for human reason to comprehend, and therefore a mystery. And it includes a yearning toward God, the desire of Him, and the feeling of love. The last is also mysterious, in that it has not exclusive part with reason, but springs as well from feeling. Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love’s conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. And the final goal attainable by this mystic love is, even as the goal of other love, union with the Beloved.

The mystic spirit is an essential part of all piety or religion, which relates always and forever to the rationally unknown, and therefore mysterious. Without a consciousness of mystery, there can be neither piety nor religion. Nor can there be piety without some devotion to God, nor the deepest and most ardent forms of piety, without fervent love of God. This devotion and this love supply strength of conviction, creating a realness of communion with the divine, and an assurance of the soul’s rest and peace therein. But that the intellect has part, Hugo abundantly demonstrates. One must have perceptions, and thought’s severest wrestlings—cogitatio and meditatio—before reaching that first stage of wide and sure intelligence, which relates[Pg 364] to the creature world, and affords a broad basis of assurance, whence at last the soul shall spring to God. Intellectual perceptions and rational knowledge, and all the mind’s puttings together of its data in inductions and deductions and constructions, form a basis for contemplation, and yield material upon which the emotional side of human nature may exercise itself in yearning and devotion. Herein the constructive imagination works; which is intellectual faculty illuminated and impelled by the emotions.

This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man’s relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul’s desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks symbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul’s relations with the Infinite; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul’s craving to give voice to its great love.

In Greek thought as well as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, allegorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.[495] But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsifying apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate.[Pg 365] In the early times of the Church militant of Christ, allegorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety’s other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men; and in age-long answer to this need, allegory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time.

Thus it became the universal vehicle of pious expression: it may be said almost to have co-extended with all mediaeval piety. It was ardently loving, as with St. Bernard; it might be filled with scarlet passion, as with Mechthild of Magdeburg; or it might be used in the self-conscious, and yet inspired vision-pictures of Hildegard of Bingen. And indeed with almost any mediaeval man or woman, it might keep talking, as a way of speech, obtrusively, conventionally, ad nauseam. For indeed in treatise after treatise even of the better men, allegory seems on the one hand to become very foolish and perverse, banal, intolerably talking on and on beyond the point; or again we sense its mechanism, hear the creaking of its jaws, while no living voice emerges,—and we suspect that the mystery of life, if it may not be compassed by direct statement, also lies deeper than allegorical conventions.

Hugo’s great De sacramentis showed the equipoise of intellectual and pietistic interests in him, and the Platonic quality of his mind’s sure sense of the reality of the supersensual.[496] Other treatises of his show his yearning piety, and the Augustinian quality of his soul, “made toward thee, and unquiet till it rests in thee.” The De arca Noe morali,[497] that is to say, the Ark of Noah viewed in its moral significance, is charming in its spiritual refinement, and interesting in its[Pg 366] catholic intellectual reflections. The Prologue presents a situation:

Hugo’s object is to give rest to the restless heart, by directing its love to God. One still bears in mind his three[Pg 367] plains of knowledge, forming perhaps the three stages of ascent, at the top of which is found the knowledge that turns to divine contemplation and love. There may be a direct and simple love of God for simple souls; but for the man of mind, knowledge precedes love.

Then make a habitation for God in thy heart. This is the great matter, and indeed all: for this, Scripture exists, and the world was made, and God became flesh, through His humility making man sublime. The Ark of Noah is the type of this spiritual edifice, as it is also the type of the Church.

The piety and allegory of this work rise as from a basis of knowledge. The allegory indeed is drawn out and out, until it seems to become sheer circumlocution. This was the mediaeval way, and Hugo’s too, alas! We will not follow further in this treatise, nor take up his De arca Noe mystica,[499] which carries out into still further detail the symbolism of the Ark, and applies it to the Church and the people of God. Hugo has also left a colloquy between man and his soul on the true love, which lies in spiritual meditation.[500] But it is clear that the reaches of Hugo’s yearning are still grounded in intellectual considerations, though these may be no longer present in the mind of him whose consciousness is transformed to love.

One may discern the same progression, from painful thought to surer contemplation, and thence to the heart’s devoted communion, in him whom we have called the Thor and Loki of the Church. No twelfth-century soul loved God more zealously than St. Bernard. He was not strong in abstract reasoning. His mind needed the compulsion of[Pg 368] the passions to move it to sublime conclusions. Commonly he is dubbed a mystic. But his piety and love of God poise themselves on a basis of consideration before springing to soar on other wings. In his De consideratione,[501] Bernard explains that word in the sense given by Hugo to meditatio, while he uses contemplatio very much as Hugo does. It applies to things that have become certain to the mind, while “consideratio is busy investigating. In this sense contemplatio may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind (intuitus animi) regarding anything, or the sure apprehension of the true: while consideratio is thought intently searching, or the mind’s endeavour to track out the true.”[502]

Contemplatio, even though it forget itself in ecstasy, must be based on prior consideration; then it may take wings of its own, or rather (with orthodox Hugo and Bernard) wings of grace, and fly to the bosom of its God. This flight is the immediacy of conviction and the ecstasy which follows. One may even perceive the thinking going on during the soul’s outpour of love. For the mind still supports the soul’s ardour with reasonings, original or borrowed, as appears in the second sermon of that long series preached by Bernard on Canticles to his own spiritual élite of Clairvaux.[503] The saintly orator is yearning, yearning for Christ Himself; he will have naught of Moses or Isaiah; nor does he desire dreams, or care for angels’ visits: ipse, ipse me osculetur, cries his soul in the words of Canticles—let Him kiss me. The phrasing seems symbolical; but the yearning is direct, and at least rhetorically overmastering. The emotion is justified by its reasons. They lie in the personality of Christ and Bernard’s love of Him, rising from all his knowledge of Him, even from his experience of Jesus’ whisperings to the soul. He knows how vastly Jesus surpasses the human prophets who prefigured or foretold Him: ipsos longe superat Jesus meus—the word meus is love’s very articulation. The orator cries: “Listen! Let the kissing[Pg 369] mouth be the Word assuming flesh; and the mouth kissed be the flesh which is assumed; then the kiss which is consummated between them is the persona compacted of the two, to wit, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

This identical allegory goes back to Origen’s Commentary on Canticles. Bernard has kindled it with an intimate love of Jesus, which is not Origen’s. But the thought explains and justifies Bernard’s desire to be kissed by the kiss of His mouth, and so to be infolded in the divine love which “gave His only-begotten Son,” and also became flesh. Os osculans signifies the Incarnation: one realizes the emotional power which that saving thought would take through such a metaphor. At the end of his sermon, Bernard sums up the conclusion, so that his hearers may carry it away:

 

III

There is small propriety in speaking of these men of the first half of the twelfth century as Platonists or Aristotelians; nor is there great interest in trying to find in Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus the specific origin of any of their thoughts. They were apt to draw on the source nearest and most convenient; and one must remember that their immediate philosophic antecedents were not the distinct systems of Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus, but rather the late pagan eras of eclecticism, followed by that strongly motived syntheticism of the Church Fathers which selected whatever might accord with their Christian scheme. So Abaelard must not be called an Aristotelian. Neither he nor his contemporaries knew what an Aristotelian was, and when they called Abaelard Peripateticus, they meant one skilled in the logic which was derived from the simpler treatises of Aristotle’s Organon. Nor will we call Hugo a[Pg 370] Platonist, in spite of his fine affinities with Plato; for many of Hugo’s thoughts, his classification of the sciences for example, pointed back to Aristotle.

Abaelard, Hugo, St. Bernard suggest the triangulation of the epoch’s intellectual interests. Peter Lombard, somewhat their junior, presents its compend of accepted and partly digested theology. He took his method from Abaelard, and drew whole chapters of his work from Hugo; but his great source, which was also theirs, was Augustine. The Lombard was, and was to be, a representative man; for his Sentences brought together the ultimate problems which exercised the minds of the men of his time and after.

The early and central decades of the twelfth century offer other persons who may serve to round out our general notion of the character of the intellectual interests which occupied the period before the rediscovery of Aristotle, that is, of the substantial Aristotelian encyclopaedia of knowledge. Among such Adelard of Bath (England) was somewhat older than Abaelard. His keen pursuit of knowledge made him one of its early pilgrims to Spain and Greece. He compiled a book of Quaestiones naturales, and another called De eodem et diverso,[504] in which he struggled with the problem of universals, and with palpable problems of psychology. His cosmology shows a genial culling from the Timaeus fragment of Plato, and such other bits of Greek philosophy as he had access to.

Adelard was influenced by the views of men who taught or studied at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the great Chartrian teachers of the early twelfth century,[505] wrote on Porphyry, and after his death was called by John of Salisbury perfectissimus inter Platonicos saeculi nostri. He was one of those extreme realists whose teachings might bear pantheistic fruit in his disciples; he had also a Platonistic imagination, leading him to see in Nature a living organism. Bernard’s younger brother, Thierry, also called of Chartres, extended his range of studies, and compiled numerous works on natural knowledge, indicating his wide reading and receptive nature. His realism brought him very close to pantheism,[Pg 371] which indeed flowered poetically in his admirer or pupil, Bernard Silvestris of Tours.

If we should analyze the contents of the latter’s De mundi universitate, it might be necessary to affirm that the author was a dualistic thinker, in that he recognized two first principles, God and matter; and also that he was a pantheist, because of the way in which he sees in God the source of Nature: “This mind (nous) of the supreme God is soul (intellectus), and from its divinity Nature is born.”[506] One should not, however, drive the heterogeneous thoughts of these twelfth-century people to their opposite conclusions. A moderate degree of historical insight should prevent our interpreting their gleanings from the past by formulas of our own greater knowledge. Doubtless their books—Hugo’s as well as Thierry’s and Bernard Silvester’s—have enough of contradiction if we will probe for it with a spirit not their own. But if we will see with their eyes and perceive with their feelings, we shall find ourselves resting with each of them in some unity of personal temperament; and that, rather than any half-borrowed thought, is Hugo or Thierry or Bernard Silvestris. Silvester’s book, De mundi universitate, sive Megacosmus et microcosmus, is a half poem, like Boëthius’s De consolatione and a number of mediaeval productions to which there has been occasion to allude. It is fruitless to dissect such a composite of prose and verse. In it Natura speaks to Nous, and then Nous to Natura; the four elements come into play, and nine hierarchies of angels; the stars in their firmaments, and the genesis of things on earth; Physics and her daughters, Theorica and Practica, and all the figures of Greek mythology. An analysis of such a book will turn it to nonsense, and destroy the breath of that twelfth-century temperament which loved to gather driftwood from the wreckage of the ancient world of thought. Thus perhaps they expected to draw to themselves, even from the pagan flotsam, some congenial explanation of the universe and man.

[Pg 372]A far more acute thinker was Gilbert de la Porrée,[507] who taught at Chartres for a number of years, before advancing upon Paris in 1141. He next became Bishop of Poictiers, and died in 1154. Like Abaelard, he was primarily a logician, and occupied himself with the problem of universals, taking a position not so different from Abaelard’s. Like Abaelard also, Gilbert was brought to task before a council, in which St Bernard sought to be the guiding, scilicet, condemning spirit. But the condemnation was confined to certain sentences, which when cut from their context and presented in distorting isolation, the author willingly sacrificed to the flames. He refused, some time afterwards, to discuss his views privately with the Abbot of Clairvaux, saying that the latter was too inexpert a theologian to understand them. Gilbert’s most famous work, De sex principiis, attempted to complete the last six of Aristotle’s ten Categories, which the philosopher had treated cursorily; it was almost to rival the work of the Stagirite in authority, for instance, with Albertus Magnus, who wrote a Commentary upon it in the same spirit with which he commented on the logical treatises of the Organon.

In the same year with Gilbert (1154) died a man of different mental tendencies, William of Conches,[508] who likewise had been a pupil of Bernard of Chartres. He was for a time the tutor of Henry Plantagenet. William was interested in natural knowledge, and something of a humanist. He made a Commentary on the Timaeus, and wrote various works on the philosophy of Nature, in which he wavered around an atomistic explanation of the world, yet held fast to the Biblical Creation, to save his orthodoxy. He also pursued the study of medicine, which was a specialty at Chartres; through the treatises of Constantinus Africanus[509] he had some knowledge of the pathological theories of Galen and Hippocrates. For his interest in physical knowledge,[Pg 373] he may be regarded as a precursor of Roger Bacon. On the other hand, he was a humanist in his strife against those “Cornificiani” who would know no more Latin than was needful;[510] and he compiled from the pagan moralists a sort of Summa. It is called, in fact, a Summa moralium philosophorum (an interesting title, connecting it with the Christian Summae sententiarum).[511] It treats the virtues under the head of de honesto; and under that of de utile, reviews the other good things of mind, body, and estate. It also discusses whether there may be a conflict between the honestum and the utile.

These men of the first half of the twelfth century lived before the new revealing of the Aristotelian philosophy and natural knowledge coming at the century’s close. Their muster is finally completed by two younger men, the one an Englishman and the other a Lowlander. The youthful years of both synchronize with the old age of the men of whom we have been speaking. For John of Salisbury was born not far from the year 1115, and died in 1180; and Alanus de Insulis (Lille) was probably born in 1128, and lived to the beginning of the next century. They are spiritually connected with the older men because they were taught by them, and because they had small share in the coming encyclopaedic knowledge. But they close the group: John of Salisbury closing it by virtue of his critical estimate of its achievement; Alanus by virtue of his final rehandling of the body of intellectual data at its disposal, to which he may have made some slight addition. Abaelard knew and used the simpler treatises of the Aristotelian Organon of logic. He had not studied the Analytics and the Topics, and of course was unacquainted with the body of Aristotle’s philosophy outside of logic. John of Salisbury and Alanus know the entire Organon; but neither one nor the other knows the rest of Aristotle, which Alexander of Hales was the first to make large use of.

John of Salisbury, Little John, Johannes Parvus, as he was called, was the best classical scholar of his time.[512] His[Pg 374] was an acute and active intellect, which never tired of hearing and weighing the views of other men. He was, moreover, a man of large experience, travelling much, and listening to all the teachers prominent in his youth. Also he was active in affairs, being at one time secretary to Thibaut, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the intimate of Becket, of Henry II., and Pope Adrian IV.! A finished scholar, who knew not one thing, but whatever might be known, and was enlightened by the training of the world, Little John critically estimates the learning and philosophy of the men he learns from. Having always an independent point of view he makes acute remarks upon it all, and admirable contributions to the sum of current thought. But chiefly he seems to us as one who looks with even eye upon whatsoever comes within his vision. He knows the weaknesses of men and the limitations of branches of discipline; knows, for instance, that dialectic is sterile by itself, but efficient as an aid to other disciplines. So, as to logic, John keeps his own point of view, and is always reasonable and practical.[513] Likewise, with open mind, he considers what there may be in the alleged science of the Mathematicians, i.e. diviners and astrologers. He uses such phrases as “probabilia quidem sunt haec ... sed tamen the venom lies under the honey!” For this science sets a fatal necessity on things, and would even intrude into the knowledge of the future reserved for God’s majesty. And as John considers the order of events to come, and the diviner’s art, cornua succrescunt—the horns of more than one dilemma grow.[514]

John knew more than any man of the ancient philosophies.[515] For himself, of course he loved knowledge; yet he would not dissever it from its value in the art of living. “Wisdom indeed is a fountain, from which pour forth the streams which water the whole earth; they fill not alone the garden of delights of the divine page, but flow on to the Gentiles, and do not altogether fail even the Ethiopians.... It is[Pg 375] certain that the faithful and wise reader, who from love keeps learning’s watch, escapes vice and draws near to life.”[516] Philosophy is the moderatrix omnium (a favourite phrase with John); the true philosopher, as Plato says, is a lover of God: and so philosophia is amor divinitatis. Its precept is to love God with all our strength, and our neighbour as ourselves: “He who by philosophizing has reached charitas, has attained philosophy’s true end.”[517] John goes on to show how deeply they err who think philosophy is but a thing of words and arguments: many of those who multiply words, by so doing burden the mind. Virtue inseparably accompanies wisdom; this is John’s sum of the matter. Clearly he is not always, or commonly, wrestling with ultimate metaphysical problems; he busies himself, acutely but not metaphysically, with the wisdom of life. He too can use the language of piety and contemplation. In the sixth chapter of his De septem septenis (The seven Sevens) he gives the seven grades of contemplation—meditatio, soliloquium, circumspectio, ascensio, revelatio, emissio, inspiratio.[518] He presents the matter succinctly, thus perhaps giving clarity to current pietistic phraseology.

Alanus de Insulis was a man of renown in his life-time, and after his death won the title of Doctor Universalis. Although the fame of scholar, philosopher, theologian, poet, may have uplifted him during his years of strength, he died a monk at Citeaux, in the year 1202. Fame came justly to him, for he was learned in the antique literature, and a gifted Latin poet, while as thinker and theologian he made skilful and catholic use of his thorough knowledge of whatever the first half of the twelfth century had achieved in thought and system. Elsewhere he has been considered as a poet;[519] here we merely observe his position and accomplishment in matters of salvation and philosophy.[520]

Alanus possessed imagination, language, and a faculty of acute exposition. His sentences, especially his definitions,[Pg 376] are pithy, suggestive, and vivid. He projected much thought as well as fantasy into his poem, Anticlaudianus, and his cantafable, De planctu naturae. He showed himself a man of might, and insight too, in his Contra haereticos. His suggestive pithiness of diction lends interest to his encyclopaedia of definitions, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium; and his keen power of reasoning succinctly from axiomatic premises is evinced in his De arte fidei catholicae.

The intellectual activities of Alanus fell in the latter decades of the twelfth century, when mediaeval thought seemed for the moment to be mending its nets, and preparing for a further cast in the new waters of Aristotelianism. Alanus is busy with what has already been won; he is unconscious of the new greater knowledge, which was preparing its revelations. He is not even a man of the transition from the lesser to the greater intellectual estate; but is rather a final compendium of the lesser. Himself no epoch-making reasoner, he uses the achievements of Abaelard and Hugo, of Gilbert de la Porrée and William of Conches, and others. Neither do his works unify and systematize the results of his studies. He is rather a re-phraser. Yet his refashioning is not a mere thing of words; it proceeds with the vitalizing power of the man’s plastic and creative temperament. One may speak of him as keen and acquisitive intellectually, and creative through his temperament.

Alanus shows a catholic receptivity for all the mingled strains of thought, Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean, which fed the labours of his predecessors. He has studied the older sources, the Timaeus fragment, also Apuleius and Boëthius of course. His chief blunder is his misconception of Aristotle as a logician and confuser of words (verborum turbator)—a phrase, perhaps, consciously used with poetic license. For he has made use of much that came originally from the Stagirite. Within his range of opportunity, Alanus was a universal reader, and his writings discover traces of the men of importance from Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena down to John of Salisbury and Gundissalinus.

These remarks may take the place of any specific presentation of Alanus’s work in logic, of his view of universals,[Pg 377] of his notions of physics, of nature, of matter and form, of man’s mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead.[521] In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His vice-regent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable.[522] This thought, imaginatively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the De planctu and the Anticlaudianus. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato’s divine fooling in the Timaeus, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive consideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus’s death through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus.

 

 

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[Pg 378]

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE UNIVERSITIES, ARISTOTLE, AND THE MENDICANTS

Intellectually, the thirteenth century in western Europe is marked by three closely connected phenomena: the growth of Universities, the discovery and appropriation of Aristotle, and the activities of Dominicans and Franciscans. These movements were universal, in that the range of none of them was limited by racial or provincial boundaries. Yet a line may still be drawn between Italy, where law and medicine were cultivated, and the North, where theology with logic and metaphysics were supreme. Absorption in these subjects produced a common likeness in the intellectual processes of men in France, England, and Germany, whose writings were to be no longer markedly affected by racial idiosyncrasies. This was true of the logical controversy regarding universals, so prominent in the first part of the twelfth century. It was very true of the great intellectual movement of the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, to wit, the coming of Aristotle to dominance, in spite of the counter-currents of Platonic Augustinianism.

The men who followed the new knowledge had slight regard for ties of home, and travelled eagerly in search of learning. So, even as from far and wide those who could study Roman law came to Bologna, the study of theology and all that philosophy included drew men to Paris. Thither came the keen-minded from Italy and from England; from the Low Countries and from Germany; and from the many very different regions now covered by the name of France. Wherever born and of whatever race, the devotees of philosophy and theology at some period of their career reached[Pg 379] Paris, learned and taught there, and were affected by the universalizing influence of an international aggregate of scholarship. So had it been with Breton Abaelard, with German Hugo, and with Lombard Peter; so with English John, hight of Salisbury. And in the following times of culmination, Albertus Magnus comes in his maturity from Germany; and his marvellous pupil Thomas, born of noble Norman stock in southern Italy, follows his master, eventually to Paris. So Bonaventura of lowly mid-Italian birth likewise learns and teaches there; and that unique Englishman, Roger Bacon, and after him Duns Scotus. These few greatest names symbolize the centralizing of thought in the crowded and huddled lecture-rooms of the City on the Seine.

The origins of the great mediaeval Universities can scarcely be accommodated to simple statement. Their history is frequently obscure, and always intricate; and the selection of a specific date or factor as determining the inception, or distinctive development, of these mediaeval creations is likely to be but arbitrary. They had no antique prototype: nothing either in Athens or Rome ever resembled these corporations of masters and students, with their authoritative privileges, their fixed curriculum, and their grades of formally certified attainment. Even the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, with all the pedantry of its learned litterateurs and their minute study of the past, has nothing to offer like the scholastic obsequiousness of the mediaeval University, which sought to set upon one throne the antique philosophy and the Christian revelation, that it might with one and the same genuflection bow down before them both. It behoves us to advert to the conditions influencing the growth of Universities, and give a little space to those which were chief among them.

The energetic human advance distinguishing the twelfth century in western Europe exhibits among its most obvious phenomena an increased mobility in all classes of society, and a tendency to gather into larger communities and form strong corporate associations for profit or protection. New towns came into being, and old ones grew apace. Some of them in the north of Europe wrested their freedom from[Pg 380] feudal lords; and both in the north and south, municipalities attained a more complex organization, while within them groups of men with common interests formed themselves into powerful guilds. As strangers of all kinds—merchants, craftsmen, students—came and went, their need of protection became pressing, and was met in various ways.

No kind of men were more quickly touched by the new mobility than the thousands of youthful learners who desired to extend their knowledge, or, in some definite field, perfect their education. In the eleventh century, such would commonly have sought a monastery, near or far. In the twelfth and then in the thirteenth, they followed the human currents to the cities, where knowledge flourished as well as trade, and tolerable accommodation might be had for teachers and students. Certain towns, some for more, some for less, obvious reasons, became homes of study. Bologna, Paris, Oxford are the chief examples. Irnerius, famed as the founder of the systematic study of the Roman law, and Gratian, the equally famous orderer of the Canon law, taught or wrote at Bologna when the twelfth century was young. Their fame drew crowds of laymen and ecclesiastics, who desired to equip themselves for advancement through the business of the law, civil or ecclesiastical. At the same time, hundreds, which grew to thousands, were attracted to the Paris schools—the school of Notre Dame, where William of Champeaux held forth; the school of St. Victor, where he afterwards established himself, and where Hugo taught; and the school of St. Geneviève, where Abaelard lectured on dialectic and theology. These were palpable gatherings together of material for a University. What first brought masters and students to Oxford a few decades later is not so clear. But Oxford had been an important town long before a University lodged itself there.

In the twelfth century, citizenship scarcely protected one beyond the city walls. A man carried but little safety with him. Only an insignificant fraction of the students at Bologna, and of both masters and students at Paris and Oxford, were citizens of those towns. The rest had come from everywhere. Paris and Bologna held an utterly cosmopolitan, international, concourse of scholar-folk. And[Pg 381] these scholars, turbulent enough themselves, and dwelling in a turbulent foreign city, needed affiliation there, and protection and support. Organization was an obvious necessity, and if possible the erection of a civitas within a civitas, a University within a none too friendly town. This was the primal situation, and the primal need. Through somewhat different processes, and under different circumstances, these exigencies evoked a University in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford.[523]

In Italy, where the instincts of ancient Rome never were extinguished, where some urban life maintained itself through the early helpless mediaeval centuries, where during the same period an infantile humanism did not cease to stammer; where “grammar” was studied and taught by laymen, and the “ars dictaminis” practised men in the forms of legal instruments, it was but natural that the new intellectual energies of the twelfth century should address themselves to the study of the Roman law, which, although debased and barbarized, had never passed into desuetude. And inasmuch as abstract theology did not attract the Italian temperament or meet the conditions of papal politics in Italy, it was likewise natural that ecclesiastical energies should be directed to the equally useful and closely related canon law. Such studies with their practical ends could best be prosecuted at some civic centre. In the first part of the twelfth century, Irnerius lectured at Bologna upon the civil law; a generation later, Gratian published his Decretum there. The specific reasons inducing the former to open his lectures in that city are not known; but a large and thrifty town set at the meeting of the great roads from central Italy to the north and east, was an admirable place for a civil doctor and his audience, as the event proved. Gratian was a monk in a[Pg 382] Bologna convent, and may have listened to Irnerius. The publication of his Decretum from Bologna, by that time (cir. 1142) famous for jurisprudence, lent authority to this work, whose universal recognition was to enhance in turn Bologna’s reputation.

From the time of this inception of juristic studies, the talents of the doctors, and the city’s fame, drew a prodigious concourse of students from all the lands of western Europe. The Doctors of the Civil and Canon Laws organized themselves into one, and subsequently into two, Colleges. Apparently they had become an efficient association by the third quarter of the twelfth century. But the University of Bologna was to be constituted par excellence, not of one or more colleges of doctors, but of societies of students. The persons who came for legal instruction were not boys getting their first education in the Arts. They were men studying a profession, and among them were many individuals of wealth and consequence, holding perhaps civil or ecclesiastic office in the places whence they came. The vast majority had this in common, that they were foreigners, with no civil rights in Bologna. It behoved them to organize for their protection and mutual support, and for the furtherance of the purposes for which they had come. That a body of men in a foreign city should live under the law of their own home, or the law of their own making, did not appear extraordinary in the twelfth century. It was not so long since the principle that men carried the law of their home with them, had been widely recognized, and in all countries the clergy still lived under the law of the Church. The gains accruing from the presence of a great number of foreign students might induce the authorities of Bologna to permit them to organize as student guilds, and regulate their affairs by rules of their own, even as was done by other guilds in most Italian cities. At Bologna the power of Guelf and Ghibeline clubs, and of craftsmen’s guilds, rivalled that of the city magistrates.

There is some indirect evidence that these students first divided themselves into four Nationes. If so, the arrangement did not last. For by the middle of the thirteenth century they are found organized in two Universitates, or corporations, a Universitas Citramontanorum and a Universitas[Pg 383] Ultramontanorum; each under its own Rector. These two corporations of foreign students constituted the University. The Professors did not belong to them, and therefore were not members of the University. Indeed they fought against the recognition of this University of students, asserting that the students were but their pupils. But the students prevailed, strong in their numbers, and in the weapon which they did not hesitate to use, that of migration to another city, which cut off the incomes of the Professors and diminished the repute and revenue of Bologna. So great became the power of the student body, that it brought the Professors to complete subjection, paying them their salaries, regulating the time and mode of lecturing, and compelling them to swear obedience to the Rectors. The Professors protested, but submitted. To make good its domination over them, and its independence as against the city, the student University migrated to Arezzo in 1215 and to Padua in 1222.[524]

In origin as well as organization, the University of Paris differed from Bologna. It was the direct successor of the cathedral school of Notre Dame. This had risen to prominence under William of Champeaux. But Abaelard drew to Paris thousands of students for William’s hundreds (or at least hundreds for William’s tens); and Abaelard at the height of his popularity taught at the school of St. Geneviève, across the Seine. Therefore this school also, although fading out after Abaelard’s time, should be regarded as a causal predecessor of the Paris University. So, for that matter, should the neighbouring school of St. Victor, founded by the discomfited William; for its reputation under Hugo and Richard drew devout students from near and far, and augmented the scholastic fame of Paris.

It was both the privilege and duty of the Chancellor of Notre Dame to license competent Masters to open schools near the cathedral. In the course of time, these Masters formed an Association, and assumed the right to admit to[Pg 384] their Society the licentiates of the Chancellor, to wit, the new Masters who were about to begin to teach. In the decades following Abaelard’s death, the Masters who lectured in the vicinity of Notre Dame increased in number. They spread with their schools beyond the island, and taught in houses on the bridges. They were Masters, that is, teachers, in the Arts. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, interest in the Arts waned before the absorbing passion for metaphysical theology. This was a higher branch of study, for which the Arts had come to be looked on as a preparation. So the scholars of the schools of Arts became impatient to graduate, that is, to reach the grade of Master, in order to pass on to the higher study of theology. A result was that the course of study in the Arts was shortened, while Masters multiplied in number. Their Society seems to have become a definite and formal corporate body or guild, not later than the year 1175. Herein was the beginning of the Paris University. It had become a studium generale, like Bologna, because there were many Masters, and students from everywhere were admitted to study in their schools.

Gradually the University came to full corporate existence. From about 1210, written statutes exist, passed by the Society of Masters; at the same date a Bull of Innocent III. recognizes the Society as a Corporation. Then began a long struggle for supremacy, between the Masters and the Chancellor: it was the Chancellor’s function to grant the licence to become a Master; but it was the privilege of the Society to admit the licentiate to membership. The action of both being thus requisite, time alone could tell with whom the control eventually should rest. Was the self-governing University to prevail, or the Chancellor of the Cathedral? The former won the victory.

The Masters in Arts constituted par excellence the University, because they far outnumbered the Masters in the upper Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine. They were the dominant body; what they decided on, the other Faculties acquiesced in. These Masters in Arts, besides being numerous, were young, not older than the law students at Bologna. With their still younger students,[525] they made[Pg 385] the bulk of the entire University, and were the persons who most needed protection in their lawful or unlawful conduct. At some indeterminate period they divided themselves into the four Nationes, French, Normans, Picards, and English. They voted by Nationes in their meetings; but from a period apparently as early as their organization, a Rector was elected for all four Nationes, and not one Rector for each. There were, however, occasional schisms or failures to agree. It was to be the fortune of the Rector thus elected to supplant the Chancellor of the Cathedral as the real head of the University.

The vastly greater number of the Masters in Arts were actually students in the higher Faculties of Theology, Law,[526] or Medicine, for which graduation in the Arts was the ordinary prerequisite. The Masters or Doctors of these three higher Faculties, at least from the year 1213, determined the qualifications of candidates in their departments. Nevertheless the Rector of the Faculty of Arts continued his advance toward the headship of the whole University. The oath taken by the Bachelors in the Arts, of obedience to that Faculty and its Rector, was strengthened in 1256, so as to bind the oath-taker so long as he should continue a member of the University.

The University had not obtained its privileges without insistence, nor without the protest of action as well as word. Its first charter of privileges from the king was granted in 1200, upon its protests against the conduct of the Provost of Paris in attacking riotous students. Next, in combating the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, it obtained privileges from the Pope; and in 1229, upon failure to obtain redress for an attack from the Provost’s soldiers, ordered by the queen, Blanche of Castile, the University dispersed. Thus it resorted to the weapon by which the University of Bologna had won the confirmation of its rights. In the year 1231 the great Papal Bull, Parens scientiarum, finally confirmed the Paris University in its contentions and demands: the right to suspend lectures was sanctioned, whenever satisfaction for outrage had been refused for fifteen days; likewise[Pg 386] the authority of the University to make statutes, and expel members for a breach of them. The Chancellor of Notre Dame and the Bishop of Paris were both constrained by the same Bull.

A different struggle still awaited the University, in which it was its good fortune not to be altogether successful; for it was contending against instruments of intellectual and spiritual renovation, to wit, the Mendicant Orders. The details are difficult to unravel at this distance of time. But the Dominicans and Franciscans, in the lifetime of their founders, established themselves in Paris, and opened schools of theology. Their Professors were licensed by the Chancellor, and yet seem to have been unwilling to fall in with the customs of the University, and, for example, cease from teaching and disperse, when it saw fit to do so. The doctors of the theological Faculty became suspicious, and opposed the admission of Mendicants to the theological Faculty. The struggle lasted thirty years, until the Dominicans obtained two chairs in that Faculty, and the Franciscans perhaps the same number, on terms which looked like a victory for the Orders, but in fact represented a compromise; for the Mendicant doctors in the end apparently submitted to the statutes of the University.[527]

The origin of Oxford University was different, and one may say more adventitious than that of Paris or Bologna. For Oxford was not the capital of a kingdom, nor is it known to have been an ancient seat of learning. The city was not even a bishop’s seat, a fact which had a marked effect upon the constitution of the University. The old town lay at the edge of Essex and Mercia, and its position early gave it importance politically, or rather strategically, and as a place of trade. How or whence came the nucleus of Masters and students that should grow into a University is unknown. An interesting hypothesis[528] is that it was a colony from Paris, shaken off by some academic or political disturbance. This surmise has been connected with the year 1167. Some evidence exists of a school having existed there before. Next comes a distinct statement from the year 1185, of the reading of a book before the[Pg 387] Masters and students.[529] After this date the references multiply. In 1209, one has a veritable “dispersion,” in protest against the hanging of some scholars. A charter from the papal legate in 1214 accords certain privileges, among others that a clerk arrested by the town should be surrendered on demand of the Bishop of Lincoln[530] or the Archdeacon, or the Chancellor, whom the Bishop shall set over the scholars. This document points to the beginning of the chancellorship. The title probably was copied from Paris; but in Oxford the office was to be totally different. The Paris Chancellor was primarily a functionary of a great cathedral, who naturally maintained its prerogatives against the encroachments of university privilege. But at Oxford there was no cathedral; the Chancellor was the head of the University, probably chosen from its Masters, and had chiefly its interests at heart.

Making allowance for this important difference in the Chancellor’s office, the development of the University closely resembled that of Paris. Its first extant statute, of the year 1252, prescribes that no one shall be licensed in Theology who has not previously graduated in the Arts. To the same year belongs a settlement of disputes between the Irish and northern scholars. The former were included in the Australes or southerners, one of the two Nationes composing the Faculty of Arts. The Australes included the natives of Ireland, Wales, and England south of the Trent; the other Natio, the Boreales, embraced the English and Scotch coming from north of that river. But the division into Nationes was less important than in the cosmopolitan University of Paris, and soon ceased to exist. The Faculty of Arts, however, continued even more dominant than at Paris. There was no serious quarrel with the Mendicant Orders, who established themselves at Oxford—the Dominicans in 1221, and the Franciscans three years later.

The curriculum of studies appears much the same at both Universities, and, as followed in the middle of the thirteenth century, may be thus summarized. For the lower degree of Bachelor of Arts, four or five years were[Pg 388] required; and three or four years more for the Master’s privileges. The course of study embraced grammar (Priscian), also rhetoric, and in logic the entire Organon of Aristotle, preceded by Porphyry’s Isagoge, and with the Sex principia of Gilbert de la Porrée added to the course. The mathematical branches of the Quadrivium also were required: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. And finally a goodly part of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle was studied, with considerable choice permitted to the student in his selection from the works of the philosopher. At Oxford he might choose between the Physics or the De coelo et mundo, or the De anima or the De animalibus. The Metaphysics and Ethics or Politics were also required before the Bachelor could be licensed as a Master.

In Theology the course of study was extremely lengthy, especially at Paris, where eight years made the minimum, and the degree of Doctor was not given before the candidate had reached the age of thirty-five. The chief subjects were Scripture and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Besides which, the candidate had to approve himself in sermons and disputations. The latter might amount to a trial of nerve and endurance, as well as proficiency in learning, since the candidate was expected to militare in scholis, against a succession of opponents from six in the morning till six in the evening, with but an hour’s refreshment at noon.[531]

In spite of the many resemblances of Oxford to Paris in organization and curriculum, the intellectual tendencies of the two Universities were not altogether similar. At Paris, speculative theology, with metaphysics and other branches of “philosophy,” regarded as its adjuncts, were of absorbing interest. At Oxford, while the same matters were perhaps supreme, a closer scholarship in language or[Pg 389] philology was cultivated by Grosseteste, and his pupils, Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. The genius of observation was stirring there; and a natural science was coming into being, which was not to repose solely upon the authority of ancient books, but was to proceed by the way of observation and experiment. Yet Roger Bacon imposed upon both his philology and his natural science a certain ultimate purpose: that they should subserve the surer ascertainment of divine and saving truth, and thus still remain handmaids of theology, at least in theory.

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The year 1200 may be taken to symbolize the middle of a period notable for the enlargement of knowledge. If one should take the time of this increase to extend fifty years on either side of the central point, one might say that the student of the year 1250 stood to his intellectual ancestor of the year 1150, as a man in the full possession and use of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would stand toward his father who had saved up the purchase money for the same. The most obvious cause of this was an increasing acquaintance with the productions of the so-called Arabian philosophy, and more especially with the works of Aristotle, first through translations from the Arabic, and then through translations from the Greek, which were made in order to obviate the insufficiency of the former.

It would need a long excursus to review the far from simple course of so-called Arabian thought, philosophic and religious. It begins in the East, and follows the setting sun. Even before the Hegira (622) the Arabs had rubbed up against the inhabitants of Syria, Christian in name, eastern or Hellenic in culture and proclivity. Then in a century or two, when the first impulsion of Mohammedan conquest was spent, the works of Aristotle and his later Greek commentators were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions, under the encouragement of the rulers of Bagdad. The Syrian versions, as we may imagine, were somewhat eclecticized and, more especially, Neo-Platonized. So it was not the pure Aristotle that passed on into Arabic philosophy, but the Aristotelian substance interpreted through later phases of Greek and Oriental thought. Still, Aristotle was[Pg 390] the great name, and his system furnished the nucleus of doctrine represented in this Peripatetic eclecticism which was to constitute, par excellence, Arabic philosophy. Also Greek mathematical and medical treatises were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions. El-Farabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (980-1036) were the chief glories of the Arabic philosophy of Bagdad. These two gifted men were commentators upon the works of the Stagirite, and authors of many interesting lucubrations of their own.[532] Arabian philosophy declined in the East with Avicenna’s death; but only to revive in Mussulman Spain. There its great representative was Averroes, whose life filled the last three quarters of the twelfth century. So great became his authority as an Aristotelian, with the Scholastics, that he received the name of Commentator, par excellence, even as Aristotle was par excellence, Philosophus. We need not consider the ideas of these men which were their own rather than the Stagirite’s; nor discuss the pietistic and fanatical sects among the Mussulmans, who either sought to harmonize Aristotle with the Koran, or disapproved of Greek philosophy. One readily perceives that in its task of acquisition and interpretation, with some independent thinking, and still more temperamental feeling, Arabic philosophy was the analogue of Christian scholasticism, of which it was, so to speak, the collateral ancestor.[533]

And in this wise. The Commentaries of Averroes, for example, were translated into Latin; and, throughout all the mediaeval centuries, the Commentary tended to supplant the work commented on, whether that work was Holy Scripture or a treatise of Aristotle. By the middle of the thirteenth century all the important works of Averroes had been translated into Latin, and he had many followers at Paris; and before then, from the College of Toledo, had come translations of the principal works of the other chief[Pg 391] Arabian philosophers. Of still greater importance for the Christian West was the work of Jews and Christians in Spain and Provence, in translating the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, sometimes directly, and sometimes first into Hebrew and then into Latin. They attempted a literal translation, which, however, frequently failed to give the significance even of the Arabic version. These Arabic-Latin translations were of primary importance for the first introduction of Aristotle to the theologian philosophers of Christian Europe.

They were not to remain the only ones. In the twelfth century, a number of Western scholars made excursions into the East; and the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 enlarged their opportunities of studying the Greek language and philosophy. Attempts at direct translation into Latin began. One of the first translators was the sturdy Englishman, Robert Grosseteste. He was born in Suffolk about 1175; studied at Lincoln, then at Oxford, then at Paris, whence he returned to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was made Bishop of Lincoln in 1236, and died seventeen years later. It was he who laid the foundation of the study of Greek at Oxford, and Roger Bacon was his pupil. But the most important and adequate translations were the work of two Dominicans, the Fleming, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant, who translated the works of Aristotle at the instance of Thomas Aquinas, possibly all working together at Rome, in 1263 and the years following. Aquinas recognized the inadequacy of the older translations, and based his own Aristotelian Commentaries upon these made by his collaborators, learned in the Greek tongue. The joint labour of translation and commentary seems to have been undertaken at the command of Pope Urban IV., who had renewed the former prohibitions put upon the use of Aristotle at the Paris University, in the older, shall we say, Averroistic versions.

If these prohibitions, which did not touch the logical treatises, were meant to be taken absolutely, such had been far from their effect. In 1210 and again in 1215, an interdict was put upon the naturalis philosophia and the methafisica of the Stagirite. It was not revoked, but rather[Pg 392] provisionally renewed, in 1231, until those works should be properly expurgated. A Commission was appointed which accomplished nothing; and the old interdict still hung in the air, unrescinded, yet ignored in practice. So Pope Urban referred to it as still effective—which it was not—in 1263. For Aristotle had been more and more thoroughly exploited in the Paris University, and by 1255 the Faculty of Arts formally placed his works upon the list of books to be studied and lectured upon.[534]

So the founding of Universities and the enlarged and surer knowledge brought by a study of the works of Aristotle were factors of power in the enormous intellectual advance which took place in the last half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century. Yet these factors could not have operated as they did, but for the antecedent intellectual development. Before the first half of the twelfth century had passed, the patristic material had been mastered, along with the current notions of antique philosophy, for the most part contained in it. Strengthened by this discipline, men were prepared for an extension and solidifying of their knowledge of the universe and man. Not only had they appropriated what the available sources had to offer, but, when we think of Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, we see that organic restatements had been made of what had been acquired. Still, men really knew too little. It is very well to exploit logic, and construct soul-satisfying schemes of cosmogonic symbolism, in order to represent the deepest truth of the material world. But the evident sense-realities of things are importunate. The minds even of spiritual men may, in time, crave explanation of this side of their consciousness. Abaelard seems to have been oblivious to natural phenomena; Hugo recognizes them in order to elicit their spiritual meaning; and Alanus de Insulis, a generation and more afterwards, takes a poet’s view of Nature. Other men had a more hard-headed interest in these phenomena; but they knew too little to attempt seriously to put them[Pg 393] together in some sense-rational scheme. The natural knowledge presented by the writings of the Church Fathers was little more than foolishness; the early schoolmen were their heirs. They observed a little for themselves; but very little.

There is an abysmal difference in the amount of natural knowledge exhibited by any writing of the twelfth century, and the works of Albertus Magnus belonging say to the middle of the thirteenth. The obvious reason of this is, that the latter had drawn upon the great volume of natural observation and hypothesis which for the preceding five hundred years had been actually closed to western Europe, and for five hundred years before that had been spiritually closed, because of the ineptitude of men to read therein. That volume was of course the encyclopaedic Natural Philosophy of Aristotle, completed, and treated in its ultimate causal relationships, by his Metaphysics. The Metaphysics, the First Philosophy, gave completeness and unity to the various provinces of natural knowledge expounded in his special treatises. For this reason, one finds in the works of Albertus a fund of natural knowledge solid with the solidity of the earth upon which one may plant his feet, and totally unlike the beautiful dreaming which drew its prototypal origins from the skyey mind of Plato.

The utilization of Aristotle’s philosophy by the Englishman, Alexander of Hales, who became a Franciscan near the year 1230, when he had already lectured for some thirty years at Paris; its far more elaborate and complete exposition by the very Teutonic Dominican, Albertus Magnus; and its even closer exposition and final incorporation within the sum of Christian doctrine, by Thomas,—this three-staged achievement is the great mediaeval instance of return to a genuine and chief source of Greek philosophy. These three schoolmen went back of the accounts and views of Greek philosophy contained in the writings of the Fathers. And in so doing they also went back of what was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boëthius and other “transmitters.”[535]

[Pg 394]But the achievement of these schoolmen had other import. Their work represents the culmination of the third stage of mediaeval thought: that of systematic and organic restatement of the substance of the patristic and antique, with added elements; for there can be no organic restatement which does not hold and present something from him who achieves it. The result, attained at least by Thomas, was even more than this. Based upon the data and assumptions of scholasticism, it was a complete and final statement of the nature of God so far as that might be known, of the creature world, corporeal and incorporeal, and especially of man, his nature, his qualities, his relationship to God and final destiny. And herein, in its completeness, it was satisfying. The human mind in seeking explanation of the phenomena of its consciousness—presumably a reflex of the universe without—tends to seek a unity of explanation. A unity of explanation requires a completeness in the mental scheme of what is to be explained. Thoughtful men in the Middle Ages craved a scheme of life complete even in detail, which should educe life’s currents from a primal Godhead, and project them compacted, with none left straying or pointing nowhither, on toward universal fulfilment of His will.

Mediaeval thought had been preceded by whole views, entire schemes of life. Greek philosophy had held only such from the time when Thales said that water was the cause of all things. Plato’s view or scheme also was beautiful in its ideally pyramided structure, with the Idea of the Good at the apex. For Aristotle, knowledge was to be a syllogistic, or at least rational and jointed, encyclopaedia, rounded, unified, complete. After the pagan times, another whole scheme was that of Augustine, or again, that of Gregory the Great, though barbarized and hardened. Thus as patterns for their own thinking, mediaeval men knew only of entire schemes of thought. Their creed was, in every sense, a symbol of a completed scheme. And no mediaeval philosopher or theologian suspected himself of fragmentariness. Yet, in fact, at first they did but select and compile. After a century and more of this, they began to make organic statements of[Pg 395] parts of Christian doctrine. So we have Anselm’s Proslogium and Cur Deus Homo. Abaelard’s Theologia is far more complete; and so is Hugo’s De sacramentis, which offers an entire scheme, symbolical, sacramental, Christian, of God and the world and man. Hugo’s scheme might be ideally satisfying; but little concrete knowledge was represented in it. And when in the generations following his death, the co-ordinated Aristotelian encyclopaedia was brought to light and studied, then and thereafter any whole view of the world must take account of this new volume of argument and concrete knowledge. Alexander of Hales begins the labour of using it in a Christian Summa; Albertus makes prodigious advance, at least in the massing and preparation of the full Aristotelian material. Both try for whole views and comprehensive results. Then Thomas, most highly favoured in his master Albert, and gifted with a genius for acquisition and synthetic exposition, incorporates Aristotle, and Aristotle’s whole views, into the whole view presented by the Catholic Faith.

Thomas’s view, to be satisfying, had to be complete. It was knowledge united and amalgamated into a scheme of salvation. But a scheme of salvation is a chain, which can hold only in virtue of its completeness; break one link, and it snaps; leave one rivet loose, and it may also snap. A scheme of salvation must answer every problem put to it; a single unanswered problem may imperil it. The problem, for example, of God’s foreknowledge and predestination—that were indeed an open link, which Thomas will by no means leave unwelded. Hence for us modern men also, whose views of the universe are so shamelessly partial, leaving so much unanswered and so much unknown, the philosophy of Thomas may be restful, and charm by its completeness.

It is of great interest to observe the apparently unlikely agencies by which this new volume of knowledge was made generally available. In fact, it was the new knowledge and the demand for it that forced these agencies to fulfil the mission of exploiting it. For they had been created for other purposes, which they also fulfilled. Verily it happened that the chief means through which the new[Pg 396] knowledge was gained and published were the two new unmonastic Orders of monks, friars rather we may call them. Francis of Assisi was born in 1182 and died in 1226; Dominic was born in 1177 and died in 1221. The Orders of Minorites and Preachers were founded by them respectively in 1209 and 1215. Neither Order was founded to promote secular knowledge. Francis organized his Minorites that they might imitate the lives of Christ and His apostles, and preach repentance to the world. Dominic founded his Order to save souls through preaching: “For our Order is known from the beginning to have been instituted especially for preaching and the saving of souls, and our study (studium nostrum) should have as the chief object of its labour to enable us to be useful to our neighbours’ souls (ut proximorum animabus possimus utiles esse).”[536]

Within an apparent similarity of aim, each Order from the first reflected the temper of its founder; and the temper of Francis was not that of Dominic. For our purpose here, the difference may perhaps be symbolized by the Dominican maxim to preach the Gospel throughout the world equally by word and example (verbo pariter et exemplo); and the Franciscan maxim, to exhort all plus exemplo quam verbo.[537] A generation later St Bonaventura puts it thus: “Alii (scilicet, Praedicatores) principaliter intendunt speculationi ... et postea unctioni. Alii (scilicet, Minores) principaliter unctioni et postea speculationi.”[538]

It is safe to say that St Francis had no thought of secular studies; and as for the Order of Preachers, the Constitutions of 1228 forbade the Dominicans to study libros gentilium and seculares scientias. They are to study libros theologicos.[539] Francis, also, recognized the necessity of Scriptural study for those Minorites who were allowed to preach. In these views the early Franciscans and Dominicans were not peculiar; but rather represented the attitude of the older monastic Orders and of the stricter[Pg 397] secular clergy. The Gospel teaching of Christ had nothing to do with secular knowledge—explicitly. But the first centuries of the Church perceived that its defenders should be equipped with the Gentile learning, into which indeed they had been born. And while Francis was little of a theologian, and Dominic’s personality and career remain curiously obscure, one can safely say that both founders saw the need of sacred studies, and left no authoritative expression prohibiting their Orders from pursuing them to the best advantage for the cause of Christ. Yet we are not called on to suppose that either founder, in founding his Order for a definite purpose, foresaw all the means which after his death might be employed to attain that purpose—or some other!

The new Order cometh, the old rusteth. So has it commonly been with Monasticism. Undoubtedly these uncloistered Orders embodied novel principles of efficiency for the upholding of the Faith: their soldiers marched abroad evangelizing, and did not keep within their fastnesses of holiness. The Mendicant Orders were still young, and fresh from the inspiration of their founders. In those years they moved men’s hearts and drew them to the ideal which had been set for themselves. The result was, that in the first half of the thirteenth century the greater part of Christian religious energy girded its loins with the cords of Francis and Dominic.

At the commencement of that century, when the Orders of Minorites and Preachers were founded, the world of Western thought was prepared to make its own the new Aristotelian volume of knowledge and applied reason. Once that was opened and its contents perceived, the old Augustinian-Neo-Platonic ways of thinking could no longer proceed with their idealizing constructions, ignoring the pertinence of the new data and their possible application to such presentations of Christian doctrine as Hugo’s De sacramentis or the Lombard’s Sentences. The new knowledge, with its methods, was of such insistent import, that it had at once to be considered, and either invalidated by argument, or accepted, and perhaps corrected, and then accommodated within an enlarged Christian Philosophy.

[Pg 398]The spiritual force animating a new religious movement attracts the intellectual energies of the period, and furnishes them a new reality of purpose. This was true of early Christianity, and likewise true of the fresh religious impulse which proceeded from Francis’s energy of love and the organizing zeal of Dominic. From the very years of their foundation, 1209 and 1215, the rapid increase of the two Orders realized their founders’ visions of multitudes hurrying from among all nations to become Minorites or Preachers. And more and more their numbers were recruited from among the clergy. The lay members, important in the first years of Francis’s labours, were soon wellnigh submerged by the clericals; and the educated or learned element became predominant in the Franciscan Order as it was from the first in the Dominican.

Consider for an instant the spread of the former. In 1216, Cardinal Jacques of Vitry finds the Minorites in Lombardy, Tuscany, Apulia, and Sicily. The next year five thousand are reported to have assembled at the general meeting of the Order. Two years later Francis proceeds to carry out his plan of world-conquest by apportioning the Christian countries, and sending the brethren into France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and throughout Italy.[540] It was a period when in the midst of general ignorance on the part of the clergy as well as laity, Universities (generalia studia) were rising in Italy, France, and England. The popes, Innocent III. (died 1216), Honorius III. (died 1221), and Gregory IX. (died 1241), were seeking to raise the education and even the learning of the Church. Their efforts found in the zeal of the Mendicants a ready response which was not forthcoming from the secular clergy. The Mendicants were zealous for the Faith, and loyal liegemen of the popes, who were their sustainers and the guarantors of their freedom from local ecclesiastical interference. What more fitting instruments could be found to advance the cause of sacred learning at the Universities, and enlarge it with the new knowledge which must either serve the Faith or be its enemy. If all this was not evident in the first decades of the century, it had become so by the middle of[Pg 399] it, when the Franciscan Bonaventura and the Dominicans Albertus and Thomas were the intellectual glories of the time. And thus, while the ardour of the new Orders drew to their ranks the learning and spiritual energy of the Church, the intellectual currents of the time caught up those same Brotherhoods, which had so entrusted their own salvation to the mission of saving other souls abroad in the world, where those currents flowed.

The Universities, above all the University par excellence, were in the hands of the secular clergy; and long and intricate is the story of their jealous endeavours to exclude the Mendicants from Professors’ chairs. The Dominicans established themselves at Paris in 1217, the Franciscans two years later. The former succeeded in obtaining one chair of theology at the University in 1229, and a second in 1231; and about the same time the Franciscans obtained their first chair, and filled it with Alexander of Hales. When he died an old man, fifteen years later, they wrote upon his tomb:

closing the epitaph with the words: “primus Doctor eorum,” to wit, of the Minorites. He was the author of the first Summa theologiae, in the sense in which that term fits the work of Albert and Thomas. And there is no harm in repeating that this Summa of Alexander’s was the first work of a mediaeval schoolman in which use was made of the physics, metaphysics, and natural history, of Aristotle.[541] He died in 1245, when the Franciscans appear to have possessed two chairs at the University. One of them was filled in 1248 by Bonaventura, who nine years later was taken from his professorship, to become Minister-General of his Order. It was indeed only in this year 1257 that the University itself had been brought by papal injunctions formally to recognize as magister this most eloquent of the Franciscans, and the greatest of the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas. The latter’s master, Albert, had been recognized as magister by the University in 1245.

[Pg 400]Before the intellectual achievements of these two men, the Franciscan fame for learning paled. But that Order went on winning fame across the Channel, which the Dominicans had crossed before them. In 1224 they came to Oxford, and were received as guests by an establishment of Dominicans: this was but nine years after the foundation of the preaching Order! Perhaps the Franciscan glories overshone the Dominican at Oxford, where Grosseteste belongs to them and Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. But whichever Order led, there can be no doubt that together they included the greater part of the intellectual productivity of the maturing thirteenth century. Nevertheless, in spite of the vast work of the Orders in the field of secular knowledge, it will be borne in mind that the advancement of sacra doctrina, theology, the saving understanding of Scripture, was the end and purpose of all study with Dominicans and Franciscans, as it was universally with all orthodox mediaeval schoolmen; although for many the nominal purpose seems a mere convention. Few men of the twelfth or thirteenth century cared to dispute the principle that the Carmina poetarum and the Dicta philosophorum “should be read not for their own sake, but in order that we may learn holy Scripture to the best advantage: I say they are to be offered as first-fruits, for we should not grow old in them, but spring from their thresholds to the sacred page, for whose sake we were studying them for a while.”[542]

Within the two Orders, especially the Franciscan, men differed sharply as to the desirability of learning. So did their contemporaries among the secular clergy, and their mediaeval and patristic predecessors as far back as Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. On this matter a large variance of opinion might exist within the compass of orthodoxy; for Catholicism did not forbid men to value secular knowledge, provided they did not cleave to opinions contradicting Christian verity. This was heresy, and indeed was the sum of what was called Averroism, the chief intellectual heresy of the thirteenth century. It consisted in a sheer following of Aristotle and his infidel commentator, wheresoever the opinions of the Philosopher, so interpreted,[Pg 401] might lead. They were not to be corrected in the interest of Christian truth. A representative Averroist, and one so important as to draw the fire of Aquinas, as well as the censures of the Church, was Siger de Brabant. He followed Aristotle and his commentator in maintaining: The universal oneness of the (human) intelligence, the anima intellectiva, an opinion which involved the denial of an individual immortality, with its rewards and punishments; the eternity of the visible world,—uncreated and everlasting; a rational necessitarianism which precluded freedom of human action and moral responsibility.

It would be hard to find theses more fundamentally opposed to the Christian Faith. Yet Siger may have deemed himself a Christian. With other Averroists, he sought to preserve his religious standing by maintaining that these opinions were true according to philosophy, but not according to the Catholic Faith: “Dicunt enim ea esse vera secundum philosophiam, sed non secundum fidem catholicam.”[543] With what sincerity Siger held this untenable position is hard to say.

 

 

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[Pg 402]

CHAPTER XXXVIII

BONAVENTURA

The range and character of the ultimate intellectual interests of the thirteenth century may be studied in the works of four men: St. Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, and lastly, Roger Bacon. The first and last were as different as might be; and both were Franciscans. Albertus and Thomas represent the successive stages of one achievement, the greatest in the course of mediaeval thought. In some respects, their position is intermediate between Bonaventura and Bacon. Bonaventura reflects many twelfth-century ways of thinking; Albert and Thomas embody par excellence the intellectual movement of the thirteenth century in which they all lived; and Roger Bacon stands for much, the exceeding import of which was not to be recognized until long after he was forgotten. The four were contemporaries, and, with the possible exception of Bacon, knew each other well. Thomas was Albert’s pupil; Thomas and Bonaventura taught at the same time in the Faculty of Theology at Paris, and stood together in the academic conflict between their Orders and the Seculars. Albertus and Bonaventura also must have known each other, teaching at the same time in the theological faculty. As for Bacon, he was likewise at Paris studying and teaching, when the others were there, and may have known them.[544] Albert and Thomas came of princely stock, and sacrificed their fortune in the world for theology’s sake. Bacon’s family was well-to-do; Bonaventura was lowly born.

[Pg 403]John of Fidanza, who under the name of Bonaventura was to become Minister-General of his Order, Cardinal, Saint, and Doctor Seraphicus, saw the light in the Tuscan village of Bagnorea. That he was of Italian, half Latin-speaking, stock is apparent from his own fluent Latin. Probably in the year 1238, when seventeen years old, he joined the Franciscan Order; and four years later was sent to Paris, where he studied under Alexander of Hales. In 1248 he was licensed to lecture publicly, and thenceforth devoted himself at Paris to teaching and writing, and defending his Order against the Seculars, until 1257, when, just as the University conferred on him the title of Magister, he was chosen Minister-General of his Order, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. The greater part of his writings were composed before the burdens of this primacy drew him from his studies. He was still to become Prince of the Church, for he was made Cardinal of Albano in 1273, the year before his death.

For all the Middle Ages the master in theology was Augustine. Either he was studied directly in his own writings, or his views descended through the more turbid channels of the works of men he influenced. Mediaeval theology was overwhelmingly Augustinian until the middle of the thirteenth century; and since theology was philosophy’s queen, mediaeval philosophy conformed to that which Augustine employed in his theology. This, if traced backward to its source, should be called Platonism, or Neo-Platonism if we turn our mind to the modes in which Augustine made use of it. His Neo-Platonism was not unaffected by Peripatetic and later systems of Greek philosophy; yet it was far more Platonic than Stoical or Aristotelian.

Those first teachers, who in the maturity of their powers became Brothers Minorites, were Augustinians in theology, and consequently Platonists, in so far as Platonism made part of Augustine’s doctrines. Thus it was with the first great teacher at the Minorites school in Oxford, Robert Grosseteste, and with the first great Minorite teacher at Paris, Alexander of Hales. Both of these men were promoters of the study of Aristotle; yet neither became so[Pg 404] imbued with Aristotelianism as to revise either his theological system or the Platonic doctrines which seemed germane to it. Moreover, in so far as we may imagine St. Francis to have had a theology, we must feel that Augustine, with his hand on Plato’s shoulder, would have been more congenial to him than Aristotle. And so in fact it was to be with his Order. Augustine’s fervent piety, his imagination and religious temperament, held the Franciscans fast. Surely he was very close to the soul of that eloquent Franciscan teacher, who called Alexander of Hales “master and father,” sat at his feet, and never thought of himself as delivering new teachings. It would have been strange indeed if Bonaventura had broken from the influences which had formed his soul, this Bonaventura whose most congenial precursor lived and wrote and followed Augustine far back in the twelfth century, and bore the name of Hugo of St. Victor. Bonaventura’s writings did much to fix Augustinianism upon his Order; rivalry with the Dominicans doubtless helped to make it fast; for the latter were following another system under the dominance of their two Titan leaders, who had themselves come to maturity with the new Aristotelian influences, whereof they were magna pars.

But just as Grosseteste and Alexander made use of what they knew of Aristotle, so Bonaventura had no thought of misprizing him who was becoming in western Europe “the master of those who know.” In specific points this wise Augustinian might prefer Aristotle to Plato. For example, he chose to stand, with the former, upon the terra firma of sense perception, rather than keep ever on the wing in the upper region of ideal concepts.

So there is Aristotelian ballast in Bonaventura’s Platonic-Augustinian theology. His chief divergence from Albert and Thomas (who, of course, likewise held Augustine in honour, and drew on Plato when they chose) is to be found in his temperamental attitude, toward life, toward God, or toward theology and learning. His Augustinian soul held to the pre-eminence of the good above the true, and tended to shape the second to the first. So he maintained the primacy of willing over knowing. Man attains God through goodness of will and through love. The way of knowledge is less prominent with Bonaventura than with Aquinas. Surely the latter, and his master Albert, saw the main sanction of secular knowledge in its ministry to sacra doctrina; but their hearts may seem to tarry with the handmaid. Bonaventura’s position is the same; but his heart never tarries with the handmaid; for with him heart and mind are ever constant to the queen, Theology. Yet he recognizes the queen’s need of the handmaid. Holy Writ is not for babes; the fulness of knowledge is needed for its understanding: “Non potest intelligi sacra Scriptura sine aliarum scientiarum peritia.”[547] And without philosophy many matters of the Faith cannot be intelligently discussed. There is no knowledge which may not be sanctified to the purpose of understanding Scripture; only let this purpose really guide the mind’s pursuits.

[Pg 406]Bonaventura wrote a short treatise to emphasize these universally admitted principles, and to show how every form of human knowledge conformed to the supreme illumination afforded by Scripture, and might be reduced to the terms and methods of Theology, which is Scripture rightly understood. He named the tract De reductione artium ad theologiam[548] (The leading back of the Arts to Theology).

He enumerates the mechanical arts, drawing from Hugo of St. Victor; then he follows with Augustine’s explanation of the second lumen, as that which discerns corporeal things. He next speaks of the third lumen which lightens us to the investigation of truths intelligible, scrutinizing the truth of words (Logic), or the truth of things (Physics), or the truth of morals (Ethics). The fourth lumen, of Holy Scripture, comes not by seeking, but descends through inspiration from the Father of lights. It includes the literal, the spiritual, moral and anagogic signification of Scripture, teaching the eternal generation and incarnation of Christ, the way to live, and the union of God and the soul. The first of these branches pertains to faith, the second to morals, and the third to the aim and end of both.

“Let us see,” continues Bonaventura, “how the other illuminations have to be reduced to the light of Holy Scripture. And first as to the illumination from sense cognition, as to which we consider its means, its exercise, and its delight (oblectamentum).” Its means is the Word eternally generated, and incarnated in time; its exercise is in the sense perception of an ordered way of living, following[Pg 407] the suitable and avoiding the nocuous; and as for its object of delight, as every sense pursues that which delights it, so the sense of our heart should seek the beautiful, harmonious, and sweet-smelling. In this way divine wisdom dwells hidden in sense cognition.

Next, as to the illumination of mechanical art, which is concerned with the production of the works of craft. Herein likewise may be observed analogies with the light from Holy Scripture, which reveals the Word, the order of living, and the union of God and the soul. No creature proceeds from the great Artificer, save through the Word; and the human artificer works to produce a beautiful, useful, and enduring work; which corresponds to the Scriptural order of living. Each human artificer makes his work that it may bring him praise or use or delight; as God made the rational soul, to praise and serve and take delight in Him, through love.

By similar methods of reasoning Bonaventura next “reduces,” or leads back, Logic, and Natural and Moral Philosophy to the ways and purposes of Theology, and shows how “the multiform wisdom of God, which is set forth lucidly by Scripture, lies hidden in every cognition, and in every nature. It is also evident that all kinds of knowledge minister to Theology; and that Theology takes illustrations, and uses phrases, pertaining to every kind of knowledge (cognitionis). It is also plain how ample is the illuminating path, and how in every thing that is sensed or perceived, God himself lies concealed.”[549]

Ways of reasoning change, while conclusions sometimes endure. Bonaventura’s reasoning in the above treatise is for us abstruse and fanciful; yet many will agree with the conclusion, that all kinds of knowledge may minister to our thought of God, and of man’s relationship to Him. And with Bonaventura, all his knowledge, his study of secular philosophy, his logic and powers of presentation, had theology unfailingly in view, and ministered to the satisfaction, the[Pg 408] actualization (to use our old word) of his religious nature. He belongs among those intellectually gifted men—Augustine, Anselm, Hugo of St. Victor—whose mental and emotional powers draw always to God, and minister to the conception of the soul’s union with the living spring of its being. The life, the labours of Bonaventura were as the title of the little book we have just been worrying with, a reductio artium ad theologiam, a constant adapting of all knowledge and ways of meditation, to the sense of God and the soul’s inclusion in the love divine. No one should expect to find among his compositions any independent treatment of secular knowledge for its own sake. Rather throughout his writings the reasonings of philosophy are found always ministering to the sovereign theme.

The most elaborate of Bonaventura’s doctrinal works was his Commentary upon the Lombard’s Sentences. In form and substance it was a Summa theologiae.[550] He also made a brief and salutary theological compend, which he called the Breviloquium.[551] The note of devotional piety is struck by the opening sentence, taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians, and is held throughout the work:

The depth (profunditas) of Scripture consists in its manifold mystic meanings. It reveals these meanings of the creature world for the edification of man journeying to his fatherland. Scripture throughout its breadth, length, height, and depth uses narrative, threat, exhortation, and promise all for one end. “For this doctrina exists in order that we may become good and be saved, which comes not through naked consideration, but rather through inclination of the will.... Here examples have more effect than arguments, promises are more moving than ratiocinations, and devotion is better than definition.” Hence Scripture does not follow the method and divisions of other sciences, but uses its own diverse means for its saving end. The Prologue closes with rules of Scriptural interpretation.[553]

In our plan of following what is of human interest in mediaeval philosophy or theology, prologues and introductions are sometimes of more importance than the works which they preface; for they disclose the writer’s intent and purpose, and the endeavour within him, which may be more[Pg 411] intimately himself, than his performance. So more space has been given to Bonaventura’s Prologue than the body of the treatise will require. The order of topics is that of the Lombard’s Sentences or Aquinas’s Summa. Seven successive partes consider the Trinity, the creation, the corruption from sin, the Incarnation, the grace of the Holy Spirit, the sacramental medicine, and the Last Judgment. Each pars is divided into chapters setting forth some special topic. Bonaventura’s method, pursued in every chapter, is to state first the scriptural or dogmatic propositions, and then give their reason, which he introduces with such words as: Ratio autem ad praedictorum intelligentiam haec est. The work is a complete systematic compend of Christian theology; its conciseness and lucidity of statement are admirable. For an example of its method and quality, the first chapter of the sixth part may be given, upon the origin of Sacraments.

The Breviloquium was Bonaventura’s rational compendium of Christian theology. It offered in brief compass as complete a system as the bulkiest Summa could carry out to doctrinal elaboration. Quite different in method and intent was his equally famous Itinerarium mentis in Deum,[557] the praise of which, according to the great Chancellor Gerson, could not fitly be uttered by mortal mouth. We have seen how in the Reductio artium ad theologiam Bonaventura conformed all modes of perception and knowledge to the uses and modes of theology; the final end of which is man’s salvation, consisting in the union of the soul with God, through every form of enlightenment and all the power of love. The Breviloquium has given the sum of Christian doctrine, an intelligent and heart-felt understanding of which leads to salvation. And now the Itinerarium—well, it is best to let Bonaventura tell how he came to compose it, and of its purpose and character.

Thus Bonaventura writes his prologue to this devotional tract, which will also hold “pertinent speculations.” Remarkable is the intellectuality and compacted thought which he fuses in emotional expression. He will write seven chapters, on the seven steps, or degrees, in the ascent to God, which is the mind’s true itinerarium. Since we cannot by ourselves lift ourselves above ourselves, prayer is the very mother and source of our upward struggle. Prayer opens our eyes to the steps in the ascent. Placed in the universe of things, we find in it the corporeal and temporal footprint (vestigium) leading into the way of God. Then we enter our mind, which is the everlasting and spiritual image of God; and this is to enter the truth of God. Whereupon we should rise above us to the eternal most spiritual first cause; and this is to rejoice in the knowledge of God’s majesty. This is the threefold illumination, by which we recognise the triple existence of things, in matter, in the intelligence, and in the divine way—in arte divina. And likewise our mind has three outlooks, one upon the corporeal world without, which is called sense, another into and within itself, which is called spiritus, and a third above[Pg 415] itself, which is called mens. By means of all three, man should set himself to rising toward God, and love Him with the whole mind, and heart, and soul.

Then Bonaventura makes further analysis of his triple illumination into

Chapter one closes with little that is novel; for we seem to be retracing the thoughts of Hugo of St. Victor. The second chapter is on the “Contemplation of God in His Footprints in the Sensible World.” This is the next grade of speculation, because we shall now contemplate God not only through His footprints, but in them also, so far as He is in them through essence, power, or presence. The sensible world, the macrocosmus, enters the microcosmus, which is the anima, through the gates of the five senses. The author sketches the processes of sense-perception, through which outer facts are apprehended according to their species, and delighted in if pleasing, and then adjudged according to the ratio of their delightfulness, to wit, their beauty, sweetness, salubrity, and proportion. Such are the footprints in which we may contemplate our God. All things knowable possess the quality of generating their species in our minds, through the medium of our perceptions; and thus we are led to contemplate the eternal generation of the Word—image and Son—from the Father. Likewise sweetness and beauty point on to their fontal source. And from speculation on the local, the temporal, and mutable, our reason carries us to the thought of the immutable, the uncircumscribed and eternal. Then from the[Pg 416] beauty and delightfulness of things, we pass to the thought of number and proportion, and judge of their irrefragable laws, wherein are God’s wisdom and power.

From these first grades of speculation, which contemplate the footprints of God in the world, we are led to contemplate the divine image in the natural powers of our minds. We find the image of the most blessed Trinity in our memory, our rational intelligence, and our will; the joint action of which leads on to the desire of the summum bonum. Next we contemplate the divine image in our minds remade by the gifts of grace upon which we must enter by the door of the faith, hope, and love of the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ. As philosophy helped us to see the image of God in the natural qualities of our mind, so Scripture now is needed to bring us to these three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which enable the mind of fallen man to be repaired and made anew through grace.

From this fourth grade, in which God is still contemplated in his image, we rise to consider God as pure being, wherein there is neither privation, nor bound, nor particularity; and next in his goodness, the highest communicability (summam communicabilitatem) of which may be contemplated, but not comprehended, in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. “In whom [the persons of the Trinity] it is necessary because of the summa bonitas that there should be the summa communicabilitas, and because of the latter, the summa consubstantialitas, and because of this the summa configurabilitas, and from these the summa coaequalitas, and through this the summa coaeternitas, and[Pg 417] from all the preceding the summa cointimitas, by which each is in the other, and one works with the other through every conceivable indivisibility (indivisionem) of the substance, virtue, and operation of the same most blessed Trinity....” “And when thou contemplatest this,” adds Bonaventura, “do not think to comprehend the incomprehensible.”

From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge; yet still it ever finds these vestigia, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the Itinerarium of Bonaventura’s mind as it traces the footprints of its God? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. This reason has comprehended what it might comprehend of the traces and evidences of God in the visible creation and the soul of man; it has sought to apprehend the being of God, but has humbly recognized its inability to penetrate the marvels of his goodness in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. There it stops at the sixth grade of contemplation; yet not baffled, or rendered vain, for it has performed its function and brought the soul on to where she may fling forth from reason’s steeps, and find herself again, buoyant and blissful, in a medium of super-rational contemplation. This makes the last chapter of the mind’s Itinerarium; it is the apex mentis, the summit of all contemplations in which the mind has rest. Henceforth

Here Bonaventura loses himself in an untranslatable extract from Eriugena’s version of the Areopagite, and then proceeds:

It is best to leave the saint and doctor here, and not follow in other treatises the current of his yearning thought till it divides in streamlets which press on their tortuous ways through allegory and the adumbration of what the mind disclaims the power to express directly. Those more elaborate treatises of his, which are called mystic, are difficult for us to read. As with Hugo of St. Victor, from whom he drew so largely, Bonaventura’s expression of his[Pg 419] religious yearnings may interest and move us; but one needs perhaps the cloister’s quiet to follow on through the allegorical elaboration of this pietism. Bonaventura’s Soliloquium might weary us after the Itinerarium, and we should read his De septem itineribus aeternitatis with no more pleasure than Hugo’s Mystic Ark of Noah. It is enough to witness the spiritual attitude of these men without tracking them through the “selva oscura” to their lairs of meditation.

 

 

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[Pg 420]

CHAPTER XXXIX

ALBERTUS MAGNUS

Albert the Great was prodigious in the mass of his accomplishment. Therein lay his importance for the age he lived in; therein lies his interest for us. For him, substantial philosophy, as distinguished from the instrumental rôle of logic, had three parts, set by nature, rather than devised by man; they are physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. “It is our intention,” says Albert at the beginning of his exposition of Aristotle’s Physics, “to make all the said parts intelligible to the Latins.” And he did. Perhaps the world has had no greater purveyor of a knowledge not his own. He is comparable with Boëthius, who gave the Latin world the Aristotelian Organon, a gift but half availed of for many centuries. Albert gave his Latin world the rest of Aristotle, the philosophia realis. His world was as ready to receive this great donation, as the time of Boëthius was unready to profit by any intellectual gift demanding mental energies for its assimilation. Boëthius stood alone in his undertaking; if his hand failed there was none to take up his task. Fate stayed his hand; and the purpose that was his, to render the whole of Plato and Aristotle intelligible to the Latin world, perished with him, the Latin world being by no means eager for the whole of Aristotle and Plato, and unfit to receive it had it been proffered. But Albert’s time was eager; it was importunate for the very enlargement of knowledge which Albert, more than any other man, was bringing it. An age obtains what it demands. Albert had fellow-labourers, some preceding, some assisting, and others following him, to perfect the[Pg 421] knowledge in which he worked, and build it into the scholastic Christian scheme. But in this labour of purveyorship he overtopped the rest, the giant of them all.

He was born Count of Bollstadt, in Suabia, probably in the year 1193. Whether his youth was passed in the profession of arms, or in study, is not quite clear. But while still young he began his years of studious travel, and at Padua in 1223 he joined the Dominican Order. He became a miracle of learning, reputed also as one who could explain the phenomena of nature. From 1228 to 1245 he taught in German cities, chiefly at Cologne. Then the scene changed to Paris, where he lectured and won fame from 1245 to 1248. With this period begins the publication of his philosophical encyclopaedia. Perhaps it was first completed in 1256. But Albert kept supplementing and revising it until his death. In 1248 he was remanded to Cologne to establish a school there. His life continued devoted to study and teaching, yet with interruptions. For he filled the office of Provincial of his Order for Germany from 1254 to 1257, and was compelled to be Bishop of Regensburg from 1260 to 1262. Then he insisted on resigning, and retired to a cloister at Cologne. Naturally he was engaged in a number of learned controversies, and was burdened with numerous ecclesiastical affairs. In 1277 for the last time he set his face toward Paris, to defend the doctrines and memory of his great pupil, who had died three years before. His own illustrious life closed at Cologne on the fifteenth of November, 1280. Albert was a man of piety, conforming strictly to the rules of his Order. It is said that he refused to own even the manuscripts which he indited; and as Dominican Provincial of Germany he walked barefoot on his journeys through the vast territory set under his supervision. Tradition has him exceeding small of stature.

Albert’s labours finally put within reach of his contemporaries the sum of philosophy and science contained in the works of Aristotle, and his ancient, as well as Arabian, commentators. The undertaking was grandly conceived; it was carried out with tireless energy and massive learning. Let us observe the principles which[Pg 422] informed the mind of this mighty Teuton scholar. He transcribed approvingly the opinion expressed by Aristotle at the opening of the Metaphysics, that the love of knowledge is natural to man; and he recognized the pleasure arising from knowledge of the sensible world, apart from considerations of utility.[560] He took this thought from Aristotle; but the proof that he made it his own with power lay in those fifty years of intellectual toil which produced the greatest of all mediaeval storehouses of knowledge.

In his reliance on his sources, Albert is mediaeval; his tendency is to accept the opinion which he is reproducing, especially when it is the opinion of Aristotle. Yet he protested against regarding even him as infallible. “He who believes that Aristotle was God, ought to believe that he never erred. If one regards him as a man, then surely he may err as well as we.”[561] Albert was no Averroist to adhere to all the views of the Philosopher; he pointedly differed from him where orthodoxy demanded it, maintaining, for instance, the creation of the world in time, contrary to the opinion of the Peripatetics. Albert, and with him Aquinas, had not accepted merely the task of expounding Aristotle, but also that of correcting him where Truth (with a large Christian capital) required it. Albert held that Aristotle might err, and that he did not know everything. The development of science was not closed by his death: “Dicendum quod scientiae demonstrativae non omnes factae sunt, sed plures restant adhuc inveniendae.”[562] This is not Roger Bacon speaking, but Albertus; and still more might one think to hear the voice of the recalcitrant Franciscan in the words: “Oportet experimentum non in uno modo, sed secundum omnes circumstantias probare.”[563] Yet these words too are Albert’s, and he is speaking of the observation of nature’s phenomena; regarding which one shall not simply transcribe the ancient statement; but observe with his own eyes and mind.

[Pg 423]This was in the spirit of Aristotle; Albert recognizes and approves. But did he make the experimental principle his own with power, as he did the thought that the desire to know is inborn? This is a fundamental question as to Albert. No one denies his learning, his enormous book-diligence. But was he also an observer of natural phenomena? One who sought to test from his own observation the statements of the books he read? It is best here to avoid either a categorical affirmation or denial. The standard by which one shapes one’s answer is important. Are we to compare Albert with a St. Bernard, whose meditations shut his eyes to mountains, lakes, and woods? Or are we to apply the standards of a natural science which looks always to the tested results of observation? There is sufficient evidence in Albert’s writings to show that he kept his eyes open, and took notice of interesting phenomena, seen, for instance, on his journeys. But, on the other hand, it is absurd to imagine that he dreamed of testing the written matter which he paraphrased, or of materially adding to it, by systematic observation of nature. Accounts of his observations do not always raise our opinion of his science. He transcribes the description of certain worms, and says that they may come from horse-hairs, for he has seen horse-hairs, in still water, turning into worms.[564] The trouble was that Albert had no general understanding of the processes of nature. Consequently, in his De animalibus for instance, he gives the fabulous as readily as the more reasonable. Nevertheless let no one think that natural knowledge did not really interest and delight him. His study of plants has led the chief historian of botany to assert that Albert was the first real botanist, after the ancient Theophrastus, inasmuch as he studied for the sake of learning the nature of plants, irrespective of their medical or agricultural uses.[565]

The writings of Albertus Magnus represent, perhaps more fully than those of any other man, the round of knowledge and intellectual interest attracting the attention of western Europe in the thirteenth century. At first glance[Pg 424] they seem to separate into those which in form and substance are paraphrases of Aristotelian treatises, or borrowed expositions of Aristotelian topics; and those which are more independent compositions. Yet the latter, like the Summa de creaturis, for example, will be found to consist largely of borrowed material; the matter is rearranged, and presented in some new connection, or with a purpose other than that of its source.

In his Aristotelian paraphrases, which were thickly sown with digressive expositions, Albert’s method, as he states at the beginning of the Physica, is “to follow the order and opinions of Aristotle, and to give in addition whatever is needed in the way of explanation and support; yet without reproducing Aristotle’s text (tamen quod textus eius nulla fiat mentio). And we shall also compose digressiones to expound whatever is obscure.” The titles of the chapters will indicate whether their substance is from Aristotle. Thus instead of giving the Aristotelian text, with an attached commentary, Albert combines paraphrase and supplementary exposition. Evidently the former method would have presented Aristotle’s meaning more surely, and would have thus subserved a closer scholarship. But for this the Aristotelian commentaries of Aquinas must be awaited.

The compass of Albert’s achievement as a purveyor of ancient knowledge may be seen from a cursory survey of his writings; which will likewise afford an idea of the quality of his work, and how much there was of Albert in it.[566] To begin with, he sets forth with voluminous exposition the entire Aristotelian Organon. The preliminary questions as to the nature of logic were treated in the De praedicabilibus,[567] which expanded the substance of Porphyry’s Isagoge. In this treatise Albert expounds his conclusions as to universals, the universal being that which is in one yet is fit (aptum) to be in many, and is predicable of many. “Et hoc modo prout ratio est praedicabilitatis, ad logicam pertinet de universali tractare; quamvis secundum quod est natura quaedam[Pg 425] et differentia entis, tractare de ipso pertineat ad metaphysicam.” That is to say, It pertains to logic to treat of the universal in respect to its predicability; but in so far as the question relates to the nature and differences of essential being, it pertains to metaphysics. This sentence is an example of Albert’s awkward Latin; but it shows how firmly he distinguishes between the logical and the metaphysical material. His treatment of logic is exhaustive, rather than acutely discriminating. He works constantly with the material of others, and the result is more inclusive than organic.[568] In his ponderous treatment of logical themes, no possible consideration is omitted.

The De praedicabilibus is followed by the De praedicamentis, Albert’s treatise on the Categories. Next comes his Liber de sex principiis, which is a paraphrasing exposition of the work of Gilbert de la Porrée. Then comes his Perihermenias, which keeps the Greek title of the De interpretatione. These writings are succeeded by elaborate expositions of the more advanced logical treatises of Aristotle, all of them, of course, Analytics (Prior and Posterior), Topics, and Elenchi. The total production is detailed, exhaustive, awful; it is ingens truly, only not quite informis; and Teutonically painstaking and conscientious.

Thus logic makes Tome I. of the twenty-one tomes of Albert’s Opera. Tome II. contains his expository paraphrases of Aristotle’s Physics and lesser treatises upon physical topics, celestial and terrestrial. From the opening chapter we have already taken the programme of his large intention to make known all Aristotle to the Latins. In this chapter likewise he proceeds to lay out the divisions of philosophia realis into Aristotelian conceptions of metaphysica, mathematica, and physica. With chapter two he falls into the first of his interminable digressions, taking up what were called “the objections of Heracleitus” to any science of physics. Another digressive chapter considers the proper subject of physical science, to wit, corpus mobile, and another considers its divisions. After a while he takes up the opinions of the ancients upon the beginnings (principia) of things, and then[Pg 426] reasons out the true opinion in the matter. Liber II. of his Physica is devoted to Natura, considered in many ways, but chiefly as the principium intrinsecum omnium eorum quae naturalia sunt. It is the principle of motion in the mobile substance. Next he passes to a discussion of causes; and in the succeeding books he considers movement, place, time, and eternity. Albert’s paraphrase is replete with logical forms of thinking; it seems like formal logic applied in physical science. The world about us still furnishes, or is, data for our thoughts; and we try to conceive it consistently, so as to satisfy our thinking; so did Aristotle and Albertus. But they avowedly worked out their conceptions of the external world according to the laws determining the consistency of their own mental processes; and deemed this a proper way of approach to natural science. Yet the work of Aristotle represents a real consideration of the universe, and a tremendous mass of natural knowledge. The achievement of Albertus in rendering it available to the scholar-world of the thirteenth century was an extension of knowledge which seems the more prodigious as we note its enormous range. This continues to impress us as we turn over Albert’s next treatises, paraphrasing those of Aristotle, as their names indicate: De coelo et mundo; De generatione et corruptione; Libri IV. meteorum; De mineralibus, which ends Tome II. and the physical treatises proper.

Tome III. introduces us to another region, opening with Albert’s exhaustive paraphrase, De anima. It is placed here because the scientia de anima is a part of naturalis scientia, and comes after minerals and other topics of physics, but precedes the science of animate bodies—corporum animatorum; for the last cannot be known except through knowing their animae. In this, as well as in other works of Albert, psychological material is gathered from many sources. One may hardly speak of the psychology of Albertus Magnus, since his matter has no organic unity. It is largely Aristotelian, with the thoughts of Arab commentators taken into it, as in Albert’s Aristotelian paraphrases generally. But it is also Augustinian, and Platonic and Neo-Platonic. Albert is capable of defending opposite views in the same treatise; and in spite of best intentions, he does not succeed[Pg 427] in harmonizing what he draws from Aristotle, with what he takes from Augustine. Hence his works nowhere present a system of psychology which might be called Albert’s, either through creation or consistent selection. But at least he has gathered, and bestowed somewhere, all the accessible material.[569]

Tome III. of Albert’s Opera contains also his Aristotelian paraphrase, Metaphysicorum libri XIII. In this vera sapientia philosophiae, he follows Aristotle closely, save where orthodoxy compels deviation.[570] Tome IV. contains his paraphrasing expositions, Ethica and In octo libros politicorum Aristotelis commentarii. Tome V. contains paraphrases of Aristotle’s minor natural treatises,—parva naturalia; to wit, the Liber de sensu et sensato, treating problems of sense-perception; next the Liber de memoria et reminiscentia, in which the two are thus distinguished: “Memoria motus continuus est in rem, et uniformis. Reminiscibilitas autem est motus quasi interceptus et abscissus per oblivionem.” Treatises follow: De somno et vigilia; De motibus animalium; De aetate, sive de juventute et senectute; De spiritu et respiratione; De morte et vita; De nutrimento et nutribile; De natura et origine animae; De unitate intellectus contra Averroem (a controversial tract); De intellectu et intelligibile (an important psychological writing); De natura locorum; De causis proprietatum elementorum; De passionibus aeris, sive de vaporum impressionibus; and next and last, saving some minor tracts, Albert’s chief botanical work, De vegetabilibus.

Aristotle’s Botany was lost, and Albert’s work was based on the De plantis of Nicolas of Damascus, a short compend vulgarly ascribed to Aristotle, but really made in the first century, and passing through numerous translations from one language to another, before Albert accepted it as the composition of the Stagirite. It consisted of two short books; Albert’s work contained seven long ones, and made the most important work on botany since the times of Aristotle[Pg 428] and his pupil Theophrastus. In opening, Albert says that generalities applicable to all animate things have been already presented, and now it is time to consider more especially and in turn, vegetabilia, sensibilia, rationabilia. In the first eight chapters of his first book, Albert follows his supposed Aristotelian source, and then remarks that the translation of the Philosopher’s treatise is so ignorantly made that he will himself take up in order the six problems thus far incompetently discussed. So he considers whether plants have souls; whether plant-souls feel and desire; whether plants sleep; as to sex in plants; whether without sex they can propagate their species; and as to their hidden life.

In the second book, having again bewailed the insufficiency of his source, Albert takes up the classification of plants, and proceeds with a description of their various parts, then passes on to the shape of leaves, the generation and nature of flowers, their colour, odour, and shape. Liber III., still as an independent digressio, discusses seeds and fruit. In Liber IV. Albert returns to his unhappy source, and his matter declines in interest; but again, in Liber V., he frees himself in a digressio on the properties and effects of plants, gathered from many sources, some of which are foolish enough. His sixth book is a description of trees and other plants in alphabetical order. The last and seventh is devoted to agriculture.[571]

In the De vegetabilibus, Albert, as an expounder of natural knowledge, is at his best. A less independent and intelligent production is his enormous treatise De animalibus libri XXVI., which fills the whole of Tome IV. of Albert’s Opera. A certain Thomas of Cantimpré, an admiring pupil of Albert, may have anticipated the above-named work of his teacher by his own compilation, De naturis rerum, which appears to have been composed shortly before the middle of the thirteenth century. Its descriptions of animals, although borrowed and uncritical, were at least intended to describe them actually, and were not merely fashioned for the moral’s sake, after the manner of the Physiologus,[572] and many a compilation of the[Pg 429] early Middle Ages. Yet the work contains moralities enough, and plenty of the fabulous. But Thomas diligently gathered information as he might, and from Aristotle more than any other. Thus, in his lesser way, he, as well as Albert, represents the tendency of the period to interest itself in the realities, as well as in the symbolisms, of the natural world.

Albert’s work is not such an inorganic compilation as Thomas’s. He has paraphrased the ten books of Aristotle’s natural histories, his four books on the parts of animals, and his five books on their generation. To these nineteen, he has added seven books on the nature of animal bodies and on their grades of perfection; and then on quadrupeds, birds, aquatic animals, snakes, and small bloodless creatures. Besides Aristotle, he draws on Avicenna, Galen, Ambrose (!), and others, including Thomas of Cantimpré. Thus, his work is made up mainly of the ancient written material. Moreover, Albert is kept from a natural view of his subject through the need he feels to measure animals by the standards of human capacity, and learn to know them through knowing man. His digressiones usually discuss abstract problems, as, for instance, whether beyond the four elements, any fifth principle enters the composition of animal bodies. As for his anatomy, he describes the muscles, and calls the veins nerves, having no real knowledge of the latter. He corrects few ancient errors, either anatomical or physiological; and his own observations, occasionally referred to in his work, scarcely win our respect. Nor does he exclude fabulous stories, or the current superstitions as to the medicinal or magical effect of parts of certain animals. On the whole, Albert’s merit in the province of Zoology lies in his introduction of the Aristotelian data and conceptions to the mediaeval Latin West.[573]

After Tome IV. of Albert’s Opera, follow many portly tomes, the contents of which need not detain us. There are enormous commentaries on the Psalms and Prophets, and the Gospels (Tomes VII.-XI.); then a tome of sermons, then a tome of commentaries on the Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius; and three tomes of commentaries on the Lombard’s Sentences,—commentaries, that is to say, upon works which stood close[Pg 430] to Scripture in authority. With these we reach the end of Albert’s labours in paraphrase and commentary, and pass to his more constructive work. Of course, the first and chief is his Summa theologiae, contained in Tomes XVII. and XVIII. of the Opera. With Albert, theology is a science, a branch of systematic knowledge, the highest indeed, and yet one among others. This science, says he in the Prologue to his Summa,

Albert’s dialectic is turgid enough, and lacks the lucidity of his pupil. Yet his reasoning may be weighty and even convincing. Intellect, Reason and its realm of that which is known through Reason, is higher than sense perceptions and imaginations springing from them: it affords the surest knowledge; the science that treats of pure reason, which is in God, is the surest and noblest of sciences. Albert clearly defines the province and nature of theology.

The Summa theologiae treats of the encyclopaedic matter of the sacred science, in the order and arrangement with which we are familiar.[575] It is followed (Tome XIX.) by Albert’s Summa de creaturis, a presentation of God’s creation, omitting the special topics set forth in the De vegetabilibus and De animalibus. It treats of creation, of[Pg 431] matter, of time and eternity, of the heavens and celestial bodies, of angels, their qualities and functions, and the hierarchies of them; of the state of the wicked angels, of the works of the six days, briefly; and then of man, soul and body, very fully; of man’s habitation and the order and perfection of the universe. Thus the Summa de creaturis treats of the world and man as God’s creation; but it is not directly concerned with man’s salvation, which is the distinguishing purpose of a Summa theologiae, however encyclopaedic such a work may be.

Two tomes remain of Albert’s opera, containing much that is very different from anything already considered. Tome XX. is devoted to the Virgin Mary, and is chiefly made up of two prodigious tracts: De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis libri XII., and the Mariale, sive quaestiones super evangelium, Missus est angelus Gabriel. These works—it is disputed whether Albert was their author—are a glorification, indeed a deification, of Mary. They are prodigious; they are astounding. The worship of Mary is gathered up in them, of Mary the chief and best beloved religious creation of the Middle Ages; only not a creation, strictly speaking, for the Divine Virgin, equipped with attribute and quality, sprang from the fecund matrix of the early Church. The works before us represent a simpler piety than Albert’s Summa theologiae. They contain satisfying, consoling statements, not woven of dialectic. And the end is all that the Mary-loving soul could wish. “Christ protects the servants of His genetrix:—and so does Mary, as may be read in her miracles, protect us from our bodily enemies, and from the seducers of souls.”[576] The praises of Mary will seem marvellous indeed to anyone turning over the tituli of books and chapters. There is here a whole mythology, and a universal symbolism. Symbolically, Mary is everything imaginable; she has every virtue and a mass of power and privileges. She is the adorable and chief efficient Goddess mediating between the Trinity and the creature man.

Tome XXI., last tome of all, has a variety of writings, some of which may not be Albert’s. Among them is a work[Pg 432] of sweet and simple piety, a work of turning to God as a little child; and one would be loath to take it away from this man of learning. De adhaerendo Deo is its title, which tells the story. Albert wished at last to write something presenting man’s ultimate perfection, so far as that might be realized in this life. So he writes this little tract of chamber-piety, as to how one should cling to Christ alone. Yet he cannot disencumber himself of his lifelong methods of composition. He might conceive and desire; but it was not for him to write a tract to move the heart. The best he can say is that the end of all our study and discipline is intendere et quiescere in Domino Deo intra te per purissimum intellectum, et devotissimum affectum sine phantasmatibus et implicationibus. The great scholar would come home at last, like a little child, if he only could.

 

 

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[Pg 433]

CHAPTER XL

THOMAS AQUINAS

 

I

With Albert it seemed most illuminating to outline the masses of his work of Aristotelian purveyorship and inchoate reconstruction of the Christian encyclopaedia in conformity with the new philosophy. Such a treatment will not avail for Thomas. His achievement, even measured by its bulk, was as great as Albert’s. But its size and encyclopaedic inclusiveness do not represent its integral excellences. The intellectual qualities of Thomas, evinced in his work, are of a higher order than those included in intelligent diligence, however exceptional. They must be disengaged from out of the vast product of their energies, in order that they may be brought together, and made to appear in the organic correlation which they held in the mind of the most potent genius of scholasticism.

We are pleased to find some clue to a man’s genius in the race and place from which he draws his origin. So for whatever may be its explanatory value as to Thomas, one may note that he came of Teutonic stocks, which for some generations had been domiciled in the form-giving Italian land. The mingled blood of princely Suabian and Norman lines flowed in him; the nobility of his father’s house, the[Pg 434] Counts of Aquinum, was equalled by his mother’s lineage. Probably in 1225 he was born, in Southern Italy, not far from Monte Cassino. Thither, as a child, he was sent to school to the monks, and stayed with them through childhood’s formative period. His education did not create the mind which it may have had part in directing to sacred study. Near his tenth year, the extraordinary boy was returned to Naples, there to study the humanities and philosophy under selected masters. When eighteen, he launched himself upon the intellectual currents of the age by joining the Dominican Order. Stories have come down of the violent, but fruitless opposition of his family. In two years, with true instinct, Thomas had made his way from Naples to the feet of Albert in Cologne. Thenceforth the two were to be together, as their tasks permitted, and the loyal relationship between master and scholar was undisturbed by the latter’s transcendent genius. Plato had the greatest pupil, and Aristotle the greatest master, known to fame. That pupil’s work was a redirecting of philosophy. The work of pupil Thomas perfected finally the matter upon which his master laboured; and the master’s aged eyes beheld the finished structure that was partly his, when the pupil’s eyes had closed. Thomas, dying, left Albert to defend the system that was to be called “Thomist,” after him who constructed and finished it to its very turret points, rather than “Albertist,” after him who prepared the materials.

To return to the time when both still laboured. Thomas in 1245 accompanied his master to Paris, and three years later went back with him to Cologne. Thereafter their duties often separated them. We know that in 1252 Thomas was lecturing at Paris, and that he there received with Bonaventura the title of magister in 1257. After this he is found south of the Alps; it was in the year 1263 that Urban IV. at Rome encouraged him to undertake a critical commentary upon Aristotle, based on a closer rendering into Latin of the Greek. In 1268, at the height of his academic fame, he is once more at Paris; which he leaves for the last time in 1272, having been directed to establish a studium generale at Naples. Two years later[Pg 435] he died, on his way to advise the labours of the Council assembled at Lyons.[577]

Thomas wrote commentaries upon the Aristotelian De interpretatione and Posterior Analytics; the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the Meteorum, the Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and certain other Aristotelian treatises. His work shows such a close understanding of Aristotle as the world had not known since the days of the ancient Peripatetics. Of course, he lectured on the Sentences, and the result remains in his Commentaries on them. He lectured, and the resulting Commentaries exist in many tomes, on the greater part of both the Old and New Testaments. It would little help our purpose to catalogue in detail his more constructive and original works, wherein he perfected a system of philosophy and sacred knowledge. Chief among them were the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, the latter the most influential work of all western mediaeval scholasticism. Many of his more important shorter treatises are included in the Quaestiones disputatae, and the Quodlibetalia. They treat of many matters finally put together in the Summa theologiae. De malo in communi, de peccatis, etc.; De anima; De virtutibus in communi, etc.; De veritate; De ideis; De cognitione angelorum; De bono; De voluntate; De libero arbitrio; De passionibus animae; De gratia;—such are titles drawn from the Quaestiones. The Quodlibetalia were academic disputations held in the theological faculty, upon any imaginable thesis having theological bearing. Some of them still appear philosophical, while many seem bizarre to us; for example: Whether an angel can move from one extreme to the other without passing through the middle. One may remember that such questions had been put, and put again, from the time of the Church Fathers. This question answered by Thomas whether an angel may pass from one extreme to the other without traversing the middle is pertinent to the conception of angels as completely immaterial beings,—a conception upon the elaboration of which theologians expended much ingenious thought.

In the earlier Middle Ages, when men were busy putting[Pg 436] together the ancient matter, the personalities of the writers may not clearly appear. It is different in the twelfth century, and very different in the thirteenth, when the figures of at least its greater men are thrown out plainly by their written works. Bonaventura is seen lucidly reasoning, but with his ardently envisioning piety ever reaching out beyond; the personality of Albert most Teutonically wrestles itself into salience through the many-tomed results of his very visible efforts; when we come to Roger Bacon, we shall find wormwood, and many higher qualities of mind, flowing in his sentences. And the consummate fashioning faculty, the devout and intellectual temperament of Thomas, are writ large in his treatises. His work has unity; it is a system; it corresponds to the scholastically creative personality, from the efficient concord of whose faculties it proceeded. The unity of Thomas’s personality lay in his conception of man’s summum bonum, which sprang from his Christian faith, but was constructed by reason from foundation to pinnacle; and it is evinced in the compulsion of an intellectual temperament that never let the pious reasoner’s energies or appetitions stray loitering or aberrant from that goal. Likewise the unity of his system consists in its purpose, which is to present that same summum bonum, credited by faith, empowered, if not empassioned, by piety, and constructed by reason. To fulfil this purpose in its utmost compass, reason works with the material of all pertinent knowledge; fashioning the same to complete logical consistency of expression.

Therefore, it is from his conception of this summum bonum as from a centre of illumination, that we may trace the characteristic qualities alike of Thomas and his work. His faith, his piety, and his intellectual nature are revealed in his thought of supreme felicity. Man’s chief good being the ground of the system, the thought and study which Thomas puts upon the created universe and upon God, regarded both as Creator and in the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, conduce to make large and sure and ample this same chief good of man. To it likewise conduce the Incarnation, and the Sacraments springing therefrom; in accord with it, Thomas accepts or constructs his[Pg 437] metaphysics, his psychology, his entire thought of human capacity and destiny, and sets forth how nearly man’s reason may bring him to this goal, and where there is need of divine grace. In this goal, moreover, shall be found the sanction of human knowledge, and the justification of the right enjoyment of human faculties; it determines what elements of mortal life may be gathered up and carried on, to form part of the soul’s eternal beatitude.

Thomas’s intellectual powers work together in order to set his thought of man’s summum bonum on its surest foundations, and make clear its scope: his faculty of arrangement, and serious and lucid presentation; his careful reasoning, which never trips, never overlooks, and never either hurries or is taken unprepared; his marvellous unforgetfulness of everything which might remotely bear on the subject; his intellectual poise, and his just weighing of every matter that should be taken into the scales of his determination. Observing these, we may realize how he seemed to his time a new intellectual manifestation of God’s illuminating grace. There was in him something unknown before; his argument, his exposition, was new in power, in interest, in lucidity. On the quality of newness the wretched old biographer rings his reiteration:

His biographer’s view is justified. Thomas was the greatest of the schoolmen. His way of teaching, his translucent exposition, came to his hearers as a new inspiration. Only Bonaventura (likewise Italian-born) may be compared with him for clearness of exposition—of solution indeed; and Thomas is more judicial, more supremely intellectual; his way of treatment was a stronger[Pg 438] incitement and satisfaction to at least the minds of his auditors. Albert, with his mass of but half-conquered material, could not fail to show, whether he would or not, the doubt-breeding difficulties of the new philosophy, which was yet to be worked into Christian theology. Thomas exposed every difficulty and revealed its depths; but then he solved and adjusted everything with an argumentation from whose careful inclusiveness no questions strayed unshepherded. Placed with Thomas, Albert shows as the Titan whose strength assembles the materials, while Thomas is the god who erects the edifice. The material that Thomas works with, and many of his thoughts and arguments, are to be found in Albert; and the pupil knew his indebtedness to the great master, who survived him to defend his doctrines. But what is not in Albert, is Thomas, Thomas himself, with his disentangled reasoning, his clarity, his organic exposition, his final construction of the mediaeval Christian scheme.[579]

In the third book of his Summa philosophica contra Gentiles, and in the beginning of Pars prima secundae of his Summa theologiae, Thomas expounds man’s final end, ultimus finis, which is his supreme good or perfect beatitude. The exposition in the former work, dating from the earlier years of the author’s academic activities, seems the simpler at first reading; but the other includes more surely Thomas’s last reasoning, placed in the setting of argument and relationship which he gave it in his greatest work. We shall follow the latter, borrowing, however, from the former when its phrases seem to present the matter more aptly to our non-scholastic minds. The general position of the topic is the same in both Summae; and Thomas gives the reason in the Prologus to Pars prima secundae of the Summa theologiae. His way of doing this is significant:

Thereupon Thomas continues, opening his first Quaestio:[581]

Assuming the final end of human life to be beatitude, Thomas considers wherein man as a rational creature may properly have one final end, on account of which he wills all that he wills. Quaestio ii. shows that man’s beatitude cannot consist in riches, honours, fame, power, pleasures of the body, or in any created good, not even in the soul. Man gains his beatitude through the soul; but in itself the soul is not man’s final end. The next Quaestio is devoted to the gist of the matter: what beatitude is, and what is needed for it. Thomas first shows in what sense beatitude is something increate (increatum). He has already pointed out that end (finis) has a twofold meaning: the thing itself which we desire to obtain, and the fruition of it.

Thomas next shows:

The next point to consider is whether beatitude is the action of man’s senses or his intellect. Drawing distinctions, Thomas points out that

Beatitude then is the action of man’s intellectual part; and Thomas next inquires, whether it is an action of the intelligence or will (intellectus aut voluntatis). With this inquiry we touch the pivot of Thomas’s attitude, wherein he departs from Augustine, in apparent reliance on the word of John: “This is eternal life that they should know thee, the one true God.” Life eternal is man’s final end; and therefore man’s beatitude consists in knowledge of God, which is an act of mind. Thomas argues this at some length. He refers to the distinction between what is essential to the existence of beatitude, and what is joined to it per accidens, like enjoyment (delectatio).

The supremely intellectual attitude of the Angelic Doctor, shows at once, and as it were universally, in his conviction of the primacy of the true over the good, and of knowledge over will. Sometimes he argues these points directly; and again, his temperamental attitude appears in the course of argument upon other points. For example, Quaestio xvi. of Pars prima has for its subject Veritas. And in the first article, which discusses whether truth is in the thing (in re) or only in the mind, he argues thus:

In Articulus 4, Thomas comes to his point: that the true secundum rationem (i.e. according to its formal nature) is prior to the good.

This argument, whatever validity it may have, is significant of its author’s predominantly intellectual temperament, and consistent with his conception of man’s supreme beatitude as the intellectual vision of God. Obviously, moreover, the setting of the true above the good is another way of stating the primacy of knowledge over will, which is also maintained: “Will and understanding (intellectus) mutually include each other: for the understanding knows the will; and the will wills that the understanding should know.”[582] Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could knowledge progress but for the will to know? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will—

These positions of the Angelic Doctor were sharply opposed in his lifetime and afterwards. Without entering the lists, let us rather follow him on his evidently Aristotelian path, which quickly brings him to his next conclusion: “That beatitude consists in the action of the speculative rather than the practical intellect, as is evident from three arguments:

It being thus shown that perfect beatitude lies in the action of the speculative intelligence, Thomas next shows that it cannot consist in consideration of the speculative sciences—

[Pg 444]Neither can perfect beatitude consist in knowledge of the higher, entirely immaterial, or, as Thomas calls them, separate (separatae) substances, to wit, the Angels. Because it cannot consist in that which is the perfection of intelligence only from participation. The object of the intelligence is the true. Whatever has truth only through participation in something else cannot make the contemplating intelligence perfect with a final perfection. But the angels have their being (esse) as they have their truth, from the participation of the divine in them. Whence it remains that only the contemplation of God, Who alone is truth through His essential being, can make perfectly blessed. “But,” adds Thomas, “nothing precludes the expectation of some imperfect beatitude from contemplating the angels, and even a higher beatitude than lies in the consideration of the speculative sciences.”

So the conclusion is that “the final and perfect beatitude can be only in the vision of the divine essence. The proof of this lies in the consideration of two matters: first, that man is not perfectly blessed (beatus) so long as there remains anything for him to desire or seek; secondly, that the perfection of every capacity (potentiae), is adjudged according to the nature (ratio) of its object.” And a patent line of argument leads to the unavoidable conclusion: “For perfect beatitude it is necessary that the intellect should attain to the very essence of the first cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as its object.”

There are few novel thoughts in Thomas’s conception of man’s supreme beatitude. But he has taken cognizance of all pertinent considerations, and put the whole matter together with stable coherency. He continues, discussing in the succeeding Quaestiones a number of important matters incidental to his central determination of the nature of man’s supreme good. Thus he shows how joy (delectatio) is a necessary accompaniment of beatitude, which, however, in principle consists in the action of the mind, which is visio, rather than in the resulting delectatio. The latter consists in a quieting or satisfying of the will, through the goodness of that in which it is satisfied. When the will is satisfied in any action, that results from the goodness of the action; and the good lies[Pg 445] in the action itself rather than in the quieting of the will.[584] Here Thomas’s reasoning points to an active ideal, an ideal of energizing, rather than repose. But he concludes that for beatitude “there must be a concurrence of visio, which is the perfect cognizance of the intelligible end; the getting it, which implies its presence; and the joy or fruition, which implies the quieting of that which loves in that which is loved.”[585] Thomas also shows how rectitude of will is needed, and discusses whether a body is essential; his conclusion being that a body is not required for the perfect beatitude of the life to come; yet he gives the counter considerations, showing the conduciveness of the perfected body to the soul’s beatitude even then. Next he follows Aristotle in pointing out how material goods may be necessary for the attainment of the imperfect beatitude possible on earth, while they are quite impertinent to the perfect beatitude of seeing God; and likewise he shows how the society of friends is needed here, but not essential hereafter, and yet a concomitant to our supreme felicity.

The course of argument of the Liber iii. of the Contra Gentiles is not dissimilar. A number of preliminary chapters show how all things tend to an end; that the end of all is God; and that to know God is the end of every intellectual being. Next, that human felicitas does not consist in all those matters, in which the Summa theologiae also shows that beatitude does not lie; but that it consists in contemplation of God. He puts his argument simply:

Having reached this central conclusion of the Contra Gentiles, as well as of the Summa theologiae, Thomas proceeds to trim it further, so as clearly to differentiate that knowledge of God in which lies the ultimate felicity of intelligent beings from other ways of knowing God, which do not fully represent this supreme and final bliss. He first excludes the sort of common and confused knowledge of God, which almost all men draw from observing the natural order of things; then he shuts out the knowledge of God derived from logical demonstration, through which, indeed, one rather approaches a proper knowledge of Him;[587] next, he will not admit that supreme felicity lies in the cognition of God through faith; since that is still imperfect. This felicity consists in seeing[588] the divine essence, an impossibility in this life, when we see as in a glass. The supreme felicity is attainable only after death. Hereupon Thomas continues with the very crucial discussion of the capacity of the rational creature to know God. But instead of following him further in the Contra Gentiles, we will rather turn to his final presentation of this question in his Summa theologiae.

 [Pg 447]

II

The great Summa, having opened with an introductory consideration of the character of sacra doctrina,[589] at once fixes its attention upon the existence and attributes of God. These having been reviewed, Thomas begins Quaestio xii. by saying, that “as we have now considered what God is in His own nature (secundum se ipsum) it remains to consider what He is in our cognition, that is, how He is known by creatures.” The first question is whether any created intelligence whatsoever may be able to see God per essentiam. Having stated the counter arguments, and relying on John’s “we shall see Him as He is,” Thomas proceeds with his solution thus:

So this general conclusion, or assumption, is based on faith, and also leaps, as from the head of Jove, the creature[Pg 448] of unconquerable human need, which never will admit the inaneness of its yearnings. And now, assuming the possibility of seeing God in his true nature, Thomas proves that He cannot be seen thus through the similitude of any created thing: in order to behold God’s essence some divine likeness must be imparted from the seeing power (ex parte visivae potentiae), to wit, the light of divine glory (which is consummated grace) strengthening the intelligence that it may see God. And he next shows that it is impossible to see God by the sense of sight, or any other sense or power of man’s sensible nature. For God is incorporeal. Therefore He cannot be seen through the imagination, but only through the intelligence. Nor can any created intelligence through its natural faculties see the divine essence. “Cognition takes place in so far as the known is in the knower. But the known is in the knower according to the mode and capacity (modus) of the knower. Whence any knower’s knowledge is according to the measure of his nature. If then the being of the thing to be known exceeds the measure of the knowing nature, knowledge of it will be beyond the nature of that knower.” In order to see God in His essential nature, the created intellect needs light created by God: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen. And it may be given to one created intellect to see more perfectly than another.

Do those who see God per essentiam, comprehend Him? No.

Again he reasons; They who shall see God in His essence will see what they see through the divine essence united to their intelligence; they will see whatever they see at once, and not successively; for the contents of this intellectual, God-granted vision are not apprehended by means of the respective species or general images, but in and through the one divine essence. But in this life, man may not see God in His essential nature:

Natural reason stops with the unity of God, and can give no knowledge of the Trinity of divine Persons. Says Thomas:[592]

Here Thomas seems rationally to recognize the limits upon reason in discovering the divine nature. In the regions of faith, reason’s feet lack the material footing upon which to mount. So Thomas would assert. But will he stand to his assertion? The shadowy line between reason and faith wavers with him. At least so it seems to us, for whom ontological reasoning has lost reality, and who find proofs of God not so much easier than proofs of the Trinity. But Thomas and the other scholastics dwelt in the region of the metaphysically ideal. To them it was not only real, but the most real; and it was so natural to step across the line of faith, trailing clouds of reason. The feet of such as Thomas are as firmly planted on the one side of the line as on the other. And now, as it might also seem, Thomas, having thus formally reserved the realm of faith, quickly steps across the line, to undertake a tremendous metaphysical exposition of the Trinity, of the distinctions between its Persons, of their properties, respective functions, and relationships; and all this is carried on largely in the categories of Aristotelian philosophy. Yet is he not still consistent with himself? For he surely did not conceive the elements of his discussion to lie in the lucubrations or discoveries of the natural reason; but in the data of revelation, and their explanation by saintly doctors. And was not he also a vessel of their inspiration, a son of faith, who might humbly hope for the light of grace, to transfigure and glorify his natural powers in the service of revealed truth?

Thomas’s ideal is intellectual, and yet ends in faith. His intellectual interests, by faith emboldened, strengthened, and pointed heavenward, make on toward the realisation of that intellectual beatitude which is to be consummate hereafter, when the saved soul’s grace-illumined eye shall re-awaken where it may see face to face.

 [Pg 451]

III

Knowledge, then, supplemented in this life by faith, is the primary element of blessedness. We now turn our attention to the forms of knowledge and modes of knowing appropriate to the three rational substances: God, angel, man. The first is the absolute incorporeal being, the primal mover, in whom there is no potentiality, but actuality simple and perfect. The second is the created immaterial or “separated” substance, which is all that it is through participation in the uncreate being of its Creator. The third is the composite creature man, made of both soul and body, his capacities conditioned upon the necessities of his dual nature, his sense-perception and imagination being as necessary to his knowledge, as his rational understanding; for whom alone it is true that sense-apprehension may lead to the intelligible verities of God: “etiam sensibilia intellecta manuducunt ad intelligibilia divinorum.”[593]

The earlier Quaestiones of Pars prima, on the nature of God, lead on to a consideration of God’s knowledge and ways of knowing. Those Quaestiones expounded the qualities of God quite as far as comported with Thomas’s realization of the limitation of the human capacity to know God in this life. Quaestio iii. upon the Simplicitas of God, shows that God is not body (corpus); that in Him there is no compositeness of form and material; that throughout His nature, He is one and the same, and therefore that He is His Deitas, His vita, and whatever else may be predicated of Him. Next it is shown (Qu. iv.) that God is perfect; that in Him are the perfectiones of all things, since whatever there may be of perfection in an effect, should be found in the effective cause; and as God is self-existent being, He must contain the whole perfection of being in Himself (totam perfectionem essendi in se). Next, that God is the good (bonum) and the summum bonum; He is infinite; He is in all things (Qu. viii. Art. 1) not as a part of their essence, but as accidens, and as the doer is in his deeds; and not only in their beginning, but so long as they exist; He acts[Pg 452] upon everything immediately, and nothing is distant from Him; God is everywhere: as the soul is altogether in every part of the body, so God entire is in all things and in each. God is in all things created by Him as the working cause; but He is in the rational creature, through grace; as the object of action is in the actor, as the known is in the knower, and the desired in the wishful. God is immutable (Qu. ix.); for as final actuality (actus purus), with no admixture of potentiality, He cannot change; nor can He be moved; since His infinitude comprehends the plenitude of all perfection, there is nothing that He can acquire, and no whither for Him to extend. God is eternal (Qu. x.); for him there is no beginning, nor any succession of time; but an interminable now, an all at once (tota simul), which is the essence of eternity, as distinguished from the successiveness of even infinite time. And God is One (Qu. xi.). “One does not add anything to being, save negation of division. For One signifies nothing else than undivided being (ens indivisum). And from this it follows that One is convertible with being.” That God is One, is proved by His simplicitas; by the infiniteness of His perfection; and by the oneness of the world.

Thus clearly laying out his topic, Thomas begins his discussion of God’s knowledge (scientia Dei); of the modes in which God knows and the knowledge which He has. In[Pg 453] God is the most perfect knowledge. God knows Himself through Himself; in Him knowledge and Knower (intellectum and intellectus) are the same.[595] He perfectly comprehends Himself; for He knows Himself so far as He is knowable; and He is absolutely knowable being utter reality (actus purus). Likewise He knows things other than Himself. For He knows Himself perfectly, which implies a knowledge of those things to which His power (virtus) extends. Moreover, He knows all things in their special natures and distinctions from each other: for the perfection, or perfected actuality, of everything is contained in Him; and therefore God in Himself is able to know all things perfectly, and the special nature of everything exists through some manner of participation in the divine perfection. God knows all things in one, to wit, Himself; and not successively, or by means of discursive reasoning. “God’s knowledge is the cause of things. It stands to all created beings as the knowledge of the artificer to the things he makes. God causes things through His knowledge, since His being is His knowing (cum suum esse sit suum intelligere).” His knowledge causes things when it has the will joined with it, and, in so far as it is the cause of things, is called scientia approbationis. God knows things which are not actually (actu). Whatever has been or will be, He knows by the knowledge of sight (scientia visionis, which by implication is equivalent to scientia approbationis). For God’s knowing, which is His being, is measured by eternity; and eternity includes all time, as present, and without succession; so the present vision (intuitus) of God embraces all time and all things existing at any time, as if present. As for whatever is in the power of God or creature, but which never has been or will be, God knows it not as in vision, but simply knows it.

God also knows evil.

Thomas now takes up a point curious perhaps to us, but of importance to him and Aristotle: does God know individuals (singularia), the particular as opposed to the universal? This point might seem disposed of in the argument by which Thomas maintained that God knew things in their special and distinct natures. But he now proves that God knows singularia by an argument which bears on his contention that man does not know singularia through the intelligence, but perceives them through sense; and as we shall see, that the angels have no direct knowledge of individuals, being immaterial substances.

And replying to a counter-argument Thomas continues:

With these arguments still echoing, Thomas shows that God can know infinite things; also future contingencies; also whatever may be stated (enuntiabilia). His knowledge, which is His substance, does not change. It is speculative knowledge, in so far as relating to His own unchangeable nature, and to whatever He can do, but does not; it is practical knowledge so far as it relates to anything which He does.

Thomas concludes his direct discussion of God’s knowledge, by an application of the Platonic theory of ideas, in which he mainly follows Augustine.

There must be many ideas or (as Augustine phrases it) stable rationes of things. There is a ratio in the divine mind corresponding to whatever God does or knows.

Such are the divine modes of knowledge. Thomas proceeds to discuss other aspects of the divine nature, the life and power, will and love, which may be ascribed to God. He then passes on to a discussion of the Persons of the Trinity. This completed, he turns to the world of created substances; into which we will follow him so far as to observe[Pg 456] the forms of knowledge and ways of knowing proper to angels and mankind. We shall hereafter have to speak of the divine and angelic love, and of man’s love of God; but here, as our field is intellectual, we will simply recall to mind that Thomas applies a like intellectual conception of beatitude to both God and His rational creatures:

 

IV

Thomas regards the creation as a processio, a going out of all creatures from God. Every being (ens) that in any manner (quocumque modo) is, is from God.

God not only is the efficient and exemplary cause, but also the final cause of all things (Divina bonitas est finis omnium rerum). “The emanation (emanatio) of all being from the universal cause, which is God, we call creation.”[600] God alone may be said to create. The function pertains not to any Person, but to the whole Trinity in common. And there is found some image of the Trinity in rational[Pg 457] creatures in whom is intelligence and will; and in all creatures may be found some vestiges of the creator.

Thomas, after a while, takes up the distinction between spiritual and corporeal creatures, and considers first the purely spiritual, called Angels. We enter with him upon the contemplation of these conceptions, which scholasticism did not indeed create, but elaborated with marvellous logic, and refined to a consistent intellectual beauty. None had larger share in perfecting the logical conception of the angelic nature, as immaterial and essentially intellectual, than our Angelic Doctor. A volume might well be devoted to tracing the growth of these beings of the mind, from their not unmilitant career in the Old Testament and the Jewish Apocrypha, their brief but classically beautiful mention in the Gospels, and their storm-red action in the Apocalypse; then through their treatment by the Fathers, to their hierarchic ordering by the great Pseudo-Areopagite; and so on and on, through the earlier Scholastics, the Lombard’s Sentences, and Hugo of St. Victor’s appreciative presentation; up to the gathering of all the angelic matter by Albertus Magnus, its further encyclopaedizing by Vincent of Beauvais, and finally its perfect intellectual disembodiment by Thomas;—while all the time the people’s mythopoeic love went on endowing these guardian spirits with heart and soul, and fashioning responsive stories of their doings. For men loved and feared them, and looked to them as God’s peculiar messengers. Thus they flash past us in the Divina Commedia; and their forms become lovely in Christian art.

As we enter upon the contemplation of the angelic nature, let us not as of course regard angels simply as imaginative conceptions of Scripture and of the patristic and mediaeval mind. Thomas will show his reasons for their necessary existence, which may not convince us. Yet we may believe in angels, inasmuch as any real conception of the world’s governance by God requires the fulfilling of His thoughts through media that bring them down to move and live and realize themselves with each of us. Who, in striving to express, can do more than symbolize, the ways of God? What symbols truer than angels have been devised?

Thomas then argues that the intellectual substance is entirely immaterial. “Angelic substances are above our understanding. So our understanding cannot attain to apprehending them as they are in themselves; but only in its own fashion as it apprehends composite things.” These immaterial substances exist in exceeding great number, and each is a species, because there cannot be several immaterial beings of one species, any more than there could be separate whitenesses or many humanities. Angels in their nature are imperishable. For nothing is corrupted save as its form is separated from its matter. But these immaterial substances are not composed of matter and form, being themselves subsisting forms and indestructible. Brass may have and lose a circular shape; but the circular shape cannot be separated from the circle, which it is.

Thomas next shows (Pars prima, Qu. li.) that angels have no bodies by nature joined to them. Body is not of the ratio of intellectual substances. These (when perfect and not like the human soul) have no need to acquire knowledge through sensation. But though angels are intellectual substances, separate (separatae) from bodies, they sometimes assume bodies. In these they can perform those actions[Pg 459] of life which have something in common with other kinds of acts; as speech, a living act, has something in common with inanimate sounds. Thus far only can physical acts be performed by angels, and not when such acts essentially belong to living bodies. Angels may appear as living men, but are not; neither are they sentient through the organs of their assumed bodies; they do not eat and digest food; they move only per accidens, incidentally to the inanimate motion of their assumed bodies; they do not beget, nor do they really speak; “but it is something like speech, when these bodies make sounds in the air like human voices.”

Dropping the sole remark, that scholasticism has no sense of humour, we pass on to Thomas’s careful consideration of the angelic relations to space or locality (Qu. lii. and liii.). “Equivocally only may it be said that an angel is in a place (in loco): through application of the angelic virtue to some corporeal spot, the angel may be said in some sense to be there.” But, as angels are finite, when one is said, in this sense, to be in a place, he is not elsewhere too (like God). Yet the place where the angel is need not be an indivisible point, but may be larger or smaller, as the angel wills to apply his virtue to a larger or smaller body. Two angels may not be in the same place at the same time, “because it is impossible that there should be two complete immediate causes of one and the same thing.” Angels are said, likewise equivocally, to move, in a sense analogous to that in which they are said to be in a place. Such equivocal motion may be continuous or not. If not continuous, evidently the angel may pass from one place to another without traversing the intervening spaces. The angelic movement must take place in time; there must be a before and after to it, and yet not necessarily with any period intervening.

Now as to angelic knowledge: De cognitione Angelorum. Knowing is no easy thing for man; and we shall see that it is not a simple matter to know, without the senses to provide the data and help build up knowledge in the mind. The function of sense, or its absence, conditions much besides the mere acquisition of the elements from[Pg 460] which men form their thoughts. Thomas’s exposition of angelic knowledge and modes of knowing is a logical and consistent presentation of a supersensual psychology and theory of knowledge.

Entering upon his subject, Thomas shows (Qu. liv.) that knowing (intelligere) is not the substantia or the esse of an angel. Knowing is actio, which is the actuality of faculty, as being (esse) is the actuality of substance. God alone is actus purus (absolute realized actuality), free from potentiality. His substantia is His being and His action (suum esse and suum agere). “But neither in an angel, nor in any creature, is virtus or the potentia operativa the same as the creature’s essentia,” or its esse or substantia. The difficult scholastic-Aristotelian categories of intellectus agens and possibilis do not apply to angelic cognition (for which the reader and the angels may be thankful). The angels, being immaterial intelligences, have no share in those faculties of the human soul, like sight or hearing, which are exercised through bodily organs. They possess only intelligence and will. “It accords with the order of the universe that the supreme intellectual creature should be intelligent altogether, and not intelligent in part, like our souls.”

Quaestio lv., concerning the medium cognitionis angelicae, is a scholastic discussion scarcely to be rendered in modern language. The angelic intelligence is capable of knowing all things; and therefore an angel does not know through the medium of his essentia or substantia, which are limited. God alone knows all things through His essentia. The angelic intellect is made perfect for knowing by means of certain forms or ideas (species). These are not received from things, but are part of the angelic nature (connaturales). The angelic intelligence (potentia intellectiva) is completed through general concepts, of the same nature with itself (species intelligibiles connaturales). These come to angels from God at the same time with their being. Such concepts or ideas cover everything that they can know by nature (naturaliter). And Thomas proves that the higher angels know through fewer and more universal concepts than the lower.

Through this argument, and throughout the rest of his exposition of the knowledge of God, angel, and man, we perceive that, with Thomas, knowledge is superior and more delightful, as it is abstract in character, and universal in applicability. By knowing the abstract and the universal we become like to God and the angels; knowledge of and through the particular is but a necessity of our half-material nature.

Thomas turns now to consider the knowledge had by angels of immaterial beings, i.e. themselves and God (Qu. lvi.): “An angel, being immaterial, is a subsisting form, and therefore intelligible actually (actu, i.e. not potentially). Wherefore, through its form, which is its substance, it knows itself.” Then as to knowledge of each other: God from the beginning impressed upon the angelic mind the likenesses of things which He created. For in Him, from the beginning, were the rationes of all things, both spiritual and corporeal. Through the impression of these rationes upon the angelic mind, an angel knows other angels as well as corporeal creatures. Their natures also yield them some knowledge of God. The angelic nature is a mirror holding the divine similitude. Yet without the illumination of grace the angelic nature knows not God in His essence, because no created likeness may represent that.

As for material things (Qu. lvii.), angels have knowledge of them through the intelligible species or concepts impressed by God on the angelic mind. But do they know[Pg 462] particulars—singularia? To deny it, says Thomas, would detract from the faith which accords to angels the ministration of affairs. This matter may be thought thus:

One observes that the whole scholastic discussion of universals lies back of arguments like these.

The main principles of angelic knowledge have now been set forth; and Thomas pauses to point out to what extent the angels know the future, the secret thoughts of our hearts, and the mysteries of grace. He has still to consider the mode and measure of the angelic knowledge from other points of view. Whatever the angels may know through their implanted natures, they know perfectly (actu); but it may be otherwise as to what is divinely revealed to them. What they know, they know without the need of argument. And the discussion closes with remarks on Augustine’s phrase and conception of the matutina and vespertina knowledge of angels: the former being the knowledge of things as they are in the Word; the latter being the knowledge of things as they are in their own natures.[603]

 

V

That the abstract and the universal is the noble and delectable, we learn from this exposition of angelic knowledge. We may learn the same from Thomas’s presentation of the modes and contents of human understanding. The Summa theologiae follows the Scriptural order of presentation;[604][Pg 463] which is doubtless the reason why Thomas, instead of passing from immaterial creatures to the partly immaterial creature man, considers first the creation of physical things—the Scriptural work of the six days. After this he takes up the last act of the Creation—man. In the Summa he considers man so far as his composite nature comes within the scope of theology. Accordingly the principal topic is the human soul (anima); and the body is regarded only in relation to the soul, its qualities and its fate. Thomas will follow Dionysius (Pseudo-Areopagite) in considering first the nature (essentia) of the soul, then its faculties (virtus sive potentiae), and thirdly, its mode of action (operatio).

Under the first head he argues (Pars prima, Qu. lxxv.) that the soul, which is the primum principium of life, is not body, but the body’s consummation (actus) and forma. Further, inasmuch as the soul is the principium of mental action, it must be an incorporeal principle existing by itself. It cannot properly be said to be the man; for man is not soul alone, but a composite of soul and body. But the soul, being immaterial and intellectual, is not a composite of form and matter. It is not subject to corruption. Concerning its union with the body (Qu. lxxvi.), “it is necessary to say that the mind (intellectus), which is the principle of intellectual action, is the form (forma) of the human body.” One and the same intellectual principle does not pertain to all human bodies: there is no common human soul, but as many souls as there are men.[605] Yet no man has a plurality of souls. “If indeed the anima intellectiva were not united to the body as form, but only as motor (as the Platonists affirm), it would be necessary to find in man another substantial form, through which the body should be set in its being. But if, as we have shown, the soul is united to the body as substantial form, there cannot be another substantial form beside it” (Qu. lxxvi. Art. 4). The human soul is fitly joined to its body; for it holds the lowest grade among intellectual substances, having no knowledge of truth implanted in it, as the angels have; it has to gather knowledge per viam sensus. “But nature never omits what is necessary. Hence the anima intellectiva must have not only[Pg 464] the faculty of knowing, but the faculty of feeling (sentiendi). Sense-action can take place only through a corporeal instrument. Therefore the anima intellectiva ought to be united to such a body, which should be to it a convenient organ of sense” (Art. 5). Moreover, “since the soul is united to the body as form, it is altogether in any and every part of the body” (Art. 8).

It is a cardinal point (Qu. lxxvii.) with Thomas that the soul’s essentia is not its potentia: the soul is not its faculties. That is true only of God. In Him there is no diversity. There is some diversity of faculty in an angel; and more in man, a creature on the confines of the corporeal and spiritual creation, in whom concur the powers of both. There is order and priority among the powers of the soul: the potentiae intellectivae are higher than the potentiae sensitivae, and control them; while the latter are above the potentiae nutritivae. Yet the order of their generation is the reverse. The highest of the sensitive faculties is sight. The anima is the subject in which are the powers of knowing and willing (potentiae intellectivae); but the subject in which are the powers of sensation is the combination of the soul and body. All the powers of the soul, whether the subject be soul alone or soul and body, flow from the essence of the soul, as from a source (principium).

Thomas follows (Qu. lxxviii.) Aristotle in dividing the powers of the soul into vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, motor, and intellectual. In taking up the last, he points out (Qu. lxxix.) that intelligence (intellectus) is a power of the soul, and not the soul itself. He then follows the Philosopher in showing how intelligence (intelligere) is to be regarded as a passive power, and he presents the difficult Aristotelian device of the intellectus agens, and argues that memory and reason are not to be regarded as powers distinct from the intelligence (intellectus).

How does the soul, while united to the body (the anima conjuncta), (1) know corporeal things which are beneath it? (2) how does it know itself and what is in itself? and (3) how does it know immaterial substances which are above it? The exposition of these problems is introduced by (Qu. lxxxiv.) a historical discussion of the primi philosophi who[Pg 465] thought there was nothing but body in the world. Then came Plato, seeking “to save some certain cognition of truth” by means of his theory of Ideas. But Plato seems to have erred in thinking that the form of the known must be in the knower as it is in the known. This is not necessary. In sense-perception the form of the thing is not in sense as it is in the thing. “And likewise the intelligence receives the species (Ideas) of material and mobile bodies immaterially and immutably, after its own mode; for the received is in the recipient after the mode of the recipient. Hence it is to be held that the soul through the intelligence knows bodies by immaterial, universal, and necessary cognition.”

Thomas sets this matter forth in a manner very illuminating as to his general position regarding knowledge:

Then Thomas again differs from Plato, and holds with Aristotle, that the intelligence through which the soul knows has not its ideas written upon it by nature, but from the first is capable of receiving them all (sed est in principio in potentia ad hujusmodi species omnes). Hereupon, and with further arguments, Thomas shows “that the species intelligibiles, by which our soul knows, do not arise from separate forms” or ideas.

[Pg 466]To the converse question, whether intelligent cognition comes from things of sense, Thomas answers, following Aristotle: “One cannot say that sense perception is the whole cause of intellectual cognition, but rather in a certain way is the matter of the cause (materia causae).” On the other hand,

It is next queried whether the judgment of the mind is impeded through binding (per ligamentum) the senses. In view of the preceding argument the answer is, that since “all that we know in our present state, becomes known to us through comparison with sensible things, it is impossible that there should be in us perfect mental judgment when the senses are tied, through which we take cognizance of sensible things” (Qu. lxxxiv. Art. 8).

This entire argument shows in what firm Aristotelian manner, scholasticism, in the person of Thomas, set itself upon a basis of sense perception; through which it still pressed to a knowledge of the supersensible and abstract. In this argument we also see, as always with Thomas, that knowledge is perfect and blessed, the more immaterial and abstract are its modes. All of which will continue to impress us as we follow Thomas, briefly, through his exposition of the modus and ordo of knowing (intelligendi) (Qu. lxxxv.).

The first question is whether our mind knows corporeal things by abstracting the species from the images—the type from the particular. There are three grades of the cognizing faculty (virtutis cognoscitivae). The lowest is sensation, which is the act of a bodily organ. Its appropriate object is form as existing in matter. And since matter is the principle of individuation (i.e. the particularizing principle from which results the particular or individual), sense perception is confined to the particular. The highest grade of the cognitient faculty is that which is independent of bodily organs and separate from matter, as the angelic intelligence; and its object is form subsisting without matter. For though angels know material things, they view them only in the immaterial, to wit, themselves or God. Between the two is the human mind, which

It is next proved that the soul, through the intelligible species or forms abstracted from particulars, knows things which are outside the soul. In a way, intellection arises from sense perception; therefore the sense perception of the particular precedes the intellectual knowledge of universals. But, on the other hand, the intelligence, in coming to perfect cognition, proceeds from the undistinguished to the distinguished, from the more to the less general, and so knows animal before it knows homo, and homo before it knows Socrates. The next conclusion reads very neatly in scholastic Latin, but is difficult to paraphrase: it is that the intelligence may know many things at once (simul) per modum unius, but not per modum multorum; that is to say, the mind may grasp at once whatever it may grasp under one species, but cannot know a number of things at once which fall under different species.

Next as to what our mind knows in material things (Qu. lxxxvi.). It does not know the particular or singular (singularia) in them directly; for the principle of singularity in material things is the particular matter. But our mind knows by abstracting from such the species, that is, the universal. This it knows directly. But it knows singularia indirectly, inasmuch as, when it has abstracted the intelligible species, it must still, in order to know completely (actu), turn itself to the images in which it knows the species.

How does the anima intellectiva know itself, and those things which are in it (Qu. lxxxvii.)? Everything is knowable in so far as it is actually (in actu) and not merely potentially. So the human intelligence knows itself not through its essence, which is still but potential, but in so far as it has actually realized itself; knows itself, that is, through its actuality. The permanent qualities (habitus) of the soul exist in a condition between potentiality and actuality. The mind knows them when they are actually present or operative.

Does the human intelligence know its own act—know that it knows? In God, knowing and being are one.[Pg 469] Although this is not true of the angelic intelligence, nevertheless with an angel the prime object of knowledge is his own essence. With one and the same act an angel knows that it knows, and knows its essence. But the primal object of the human intelligence is neither its knowledge (knowing, intelligere) nor its essence, but something extrinsic, to wit, the nature of the material thing. Hence that is the first object known by the human intelligence; and next is known its own actus, by which that first object is known. Likewise the human intelligence knows the acts of will. An act of will is nothing but a certain inclination toward some form of the mind (formam intellectam) as natural appetite is an inclination toward a natural form. The act of will is in the knowing mind and so is known by it.

So far as to how the soul knows material things, which are below it, and its own nature and qualities. It is another question whether the soul knows those things which are above it, to wit, the immaterial substances. Can the soul in the state of the present life know the angels in themselves? With lengthy argument, differing from Plato and adhering to Aristotle, Thomas proves the negative: that in the present life we cannot know substantias separatas immateriales secundum seipsas. Nor can we come to a knowledge of the angelic substances through knowing material things.

Much less can we thus know God.

The discussion hitherto has been confined to the intellectual capacities of souls united to their bodies. As to the knowledge which the “separated” soul may have, other considerations arise akin to those touching the knowledge possessed by the separated substances called angels. Is the separated soul able to know? Thomas has shown that so long as the soul is joined to the body it cannot know[Pg 470] anything except by turning itself to images. If this were a mere accident of the soul, incidental to its existence in the body, then with that impediment removed, it would return to its own nature and know simply. But if, as we suppose, this turning to images is of the nature of the soul, the difficulty grows. Yet the soul has one mode of existence when united to the body, and another when separated, but with its nature remaining. Souls united to bodies may know through resort to images of bodies, which are in the bodily organs; but when separated, they may know by turning to that which is intelligible simply, as other separate substances do. Yet still this raises doubt; for why did not God appoint a nobler way for the soul to know than that which is natural to it when joined to the body? The perfection of the universe required that there should be diverse grades among intellectual substances. The soul is the lowest of them. Its feeble intelligence was not fit to receive perfect knowledge through universal conceptions, save when assisted by concrete examples. Without these, souls would have had but a confused knowledge. Hence, for their more perfect knowledge of things, they are naturally united to bodies, and so receive a knowledge from things of sense proper to their condition; just as rude men can be led to know only through examples. So it was for a higher end that the soul was united to the body, and knows through resort to images; yet, when separated, it will be capable of another way of knowing.[606]

Separated from the body, the soul can know itself through itself. It can know other separated souls perfectly, but the angels, who are higher natures, only imperfectly, at least through the knowledge which the separated soul has from its nature; but that may be increased through grace and glory. The separated soul will know natural objects through the species (ideas) received from the inflowing divine light; yet less perfectly than the angels. Likewise, less universally than angels, will separated souls, by like means of species received from the divine light, know particular things, and only such as they previously knew, or may know through some affection or aptitude or the divine decree. For the habit and aptitude of knowledge, and the knowledge already[Pg 471] acquired, will remain in the separated soul, so far as relates to the knowledge which is in the intellect, and no longer in the lower perceptive faculties. Neither will distance from the object affect the soul’s knowledge, since it will know through the influx of forms (species) from the divine light.

Nevertheless, it would seem, according to the opinions of Augustine and Gregory, “that the souls of the saints who see God know all that is done here. Yet, perfectly joined to the divine righteousness, they are not grieved, nor do they take part in the affairs of the living, save as the divine disposition requires.”

 

VI

We have thus traced Thomas’s view of the faculty of knowledge, the primary constituent of beatitude in God, and in angels and men. There are other elements which not only supplement the faculty of knowledge, but even flow as of necessity from a full and true conception of that faculty and its perfect energizing. These needful, yet supplementary, factors are the faculties of will and love and natural appetite; though the last does not exist in God or angel or in “separated soul.” The composite creature man shares it with brutes: it is of enormous importance, since it may[Pg 472] affect his spiritual progress in this life, and so determine his state after death. Let us observe these qualities in God, in the immaterial substances called angels, and in man.

In God there is volition as well as intelligence; for voluntas intellectum consequitur; and as God’s being (esse) is His knowing (intelligere), so likewise His being is His will (velle).[607] Essentially alike in God and man and angel are the constituents of spiritual beatitude and existence—knowing, willing, loving. From Creator down to man, knowledge differs in mode and in degree, yet is essentially the same. The like is true of will. As to love, because passion is of the body, love and every mode of turning from or to an object is passionless in God and the angels. Yet man through love, as well as through willing and through knowing, may prove his kinship with angels and with God.

God is love, says John’s Epistle. “It is necessary to place love in God,” says Thomas. “For the first movement of will and any appetitive faculty (appetitivae virtutis) is love (amor).” It is objected that love is a passion; and the passionless God cannot love. Answers Thomas, “Love and joy and delight are passions in so far as they signify acts (or actualities, actus) of the appetitus sensitivi; but they are not passions when they signify the actus of the appetitus intellectivi; and thus are they placed in God” (Pars prima, Qu. xx. Art. 1).

God loves all existences. Now all existences, in so far as they are, are good. For being itself (esse) is in a sense the good of any thing, and likewise its perfection. It has been shown that God’s will is the cause of all things; and thus it is proper that a thing should have being, or good, in so far as it is willed by God. God wills some good to every existent thing. And since to love is nothing else than to will good to something, it is evident that God loves all things that are, yet not in the way we love. For since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by an object, our love by which we will good to anything is not the cause of its goodness; but its goodness calls forth the love by which we wish to preserve[Pg 473] and add to the good it has; and for this we work. But God’s love imparts and creates goodness in things.

The divine love embraces all things in one and the same act of will; but inasmuch as His love creates goodness, there could be no greater goodness in one thing than in another unless He willed greater good to one than to the other: in this sense He may be said to love one creature more than another; and in this way He loves the better things more. Besides love, the order of the universe proves God’s justitia; an attribute which is to be ascribed to Him, as Dionysius says, in that He grants to all things what is appropriate, according to the dignity of the existence of each, and preserves the nature of each in its own order and virtue. Likewise misericordia is to be ascribed to God, not as if He were affected by pitying sadness, but in that He remedies the misery or defects of others.

Thus far as to will and love in God. Next, as to these qualities in Angels. Have angels will? (Pars prima, Qu. lix.). Thomas argues: All things proceed from the divine will, and all per appetitum incline toward good. In plants this is called natural appetite. Next above them come those creatures who perceive the particular good as of the senses; their inclination toward it is appetitus sensitivus. Still above them are such as know the ratio of the good universally, through their intelligence. Such are the angels; and in them inclination toward the good is will. Moreover, since they know the nature of the good, they are able to form a judgment as to it; and so they have free will: ubicumque est intellectus, est liberum arbitrium. And as their knowledge is above that of men, so in them free will exists more excellently.

The angels have only the appetitus intellectivus which is will; they are not irascible or concupiscent, since these belong to the appetitus sensitivus. Only metaphorically can furor and evil concupiscence be ascribed to demons, as anger is to God—propter similitudinem effectus. Consequently amor and gaudium do not exist as passions in angels. But in so far as these qualities signify solely an act of will, they are intellectual. In this sense, to love is to will good[Pg 474] to anything, and to rejoice (gaudere) is to rest the will in a good obtained. Similarly, caritas and spes, in so far as they are virtues, lie not in appetite, but in will; and thus exist in angels. With man the virtues of temperance and fortitude may relate to things of sense; but not so with angels, who have no passions to be bridled by these virtues. Temperance is ascribed to them when they temper their will according to the will divine, and fortitude, when they firmly execute it (Qu. lix. Art. 4).

In a subsequent portion of Pars prima (Qu. cx.) Thomas has occasion to point out that, as in human affairs, the more particular power is governed by the more universal, so among the angels.

Next Thomas considers the action of angels upon men, and shows that men may have their minds illumined by the lower orders of angels, who present to men intelligibilem veritatem sub similitudinibus sensibilium. God sends the angels to minister to corporeal creatures; in which mission their acts proceed from God as a cause (principio). They are His instruments. They are sent as custodians of men, to guide and move them to good. “To every man an angel is appointed for his guard: of which the reason is, that the guardianship (custodia) of the angels is an execution of divine providence in regard to men.” Every man, while as viator he walks life’s via non tuta, has his guardian angel. And the archangels have care of multitudes of men (Qu. cxiii.).

Thus Thomas’s, or rather, say the Christian doctrine as to angels, becomes a corollary necessary to Christian theism, and true at least symbolically. But—and this is the last[Pg 475] point as to these ministering spirits—do the angels who love without passion, grieve and suffer when those over whom they minister are lost?

We come to man. He has will, and free will or choice, as the angels have. Will is part of the intellectual nature: it is as the intellectivus appetitus. But man differs from the angels in possessing appetites which belong to his sense-nature and do not perceive the good in its common aspects; because sense does not apprehend the universal, but only the particular.[608] Sometimes Thomas speaks of amor as including every form of desire, intellectual or pertaining to the world of sense. “The first movement of will and of any appetitive faculty (virtus) is amor.”[609] So in this most general signification amor “is something belonging to appetite; for the object of both is the good.”

Further distinguishing definitions are now in order:

Moreover, amor may be divided into amor amicitiae, whereby we wish good to the amicus, and amor concupiscentiae, whereby properly we desire a good to ourselves.

The Good is the object and, in that sense, the cause, of amor (Qu. xxvii.).

From this broad conception of amor the argument rises to amor in its purest phases, which correspond to the highest modes of knowledge man is capable of. They are considered in their nature, in their causes, and effects. It is evident whither we are travelling in this matter.

Caritas is one of the theological virtues, and as such Thomas treats it. To it corresponds the “gift” of sapientia, likewise a virtue bestowed by God, but more particularly regarded as the “gift” of the Holy Spirit. Caritas is set not in the appetitus sensitivus, but in the will. Yet as it exceeds our natural faculties, “it is not in us by nature, nor acquired through our natural powers; but through the infusion of the Holy Spirit, who is the amor Patris et Filii.” He infuses caritas according to His will; and it will increase as we draw near to God; nor is there any bound to its augmentation. May caritas be perfect in this life? In one sense it never can be perfect, because no creature ever can love God according to His infinite lovableness.

The caritas with which we love God, extends to our neighbours, and even to our enemies, for God’s sake; also to ourselves, including our bodies; it embraces sinners, but not their sinfulness. It embraces the angels. There is order and grade in caritas, according to its relationship to God, the source of beatitude and voluntary love (dilectionis). God is to be loved ex caritate above all; for He is loved as the cause of beatitude, while our neighbour is loved as a participant with us in the beatitude from God. We should love God more than ourselves; because beatitude is in God as in the common and fontal source of all things that participate in beatitude.

[Pg 478]We may love some of our neighbours more than others; for those bound to us by natural ties and proximity can be loved more and in more actual ways. The order and grades of love will endure when our natures are perfected in glory.

Love (caritas) is the supreme theological virtue. It comes to us in this life through grace; it can be perfected only when grace is consummated in glory. Likewise the highest knowledge possible in this life comes through grace, to be perfected in glory. All is from God, and that which, of all the rest, seems most freely given is the divine influence disposing the intelligence and will toward good, and illuminating these best God-given faculties. This, as par excellence, through the exceeding bounty of its free bestowal, is called gratia (grace). It is a certain habitual disposition of the soul; it is not the same as virtus, but a divinely implanted disposition, in which the virtues must be rooted; it is the imparted similitude of the divine nature, and perfects the nature of the soul, so far as that has part in likeness to the divine: it is the medial state between nature and that further consummation of the grace-illumined nature, which is glory; and so it is the beginning, the inchoatio, of our glorified beatitude. Clearly, grace is no part of our inborn nature, and does not belong to our natural faculties. It is a divinely bestowed increment, directing our natural faculties toward God and uplifting them to higher capacities of knowing and loving.

To follow Thomas’s exposition of grace a little more closely:[613] man, through his natural powers, may know truth, but not the highest; and without grace, our fallen nature cannot will all the good belonging to it (connaturale), nor love God above all else, nor merit eternal life. “Grace is something supernatural in man coming from God.” It

Grace may be conceived either as “divine aid, moving us to willing and doing right, or as a formative and abiding (habituale) gift, divinely placed in us” (Qu. cxi. Art. 2). “The gift of grace exceeds the power of any created nature; and is nothing else than a sharing (participatio) of the divine nature” (Qu. cxii. Art. 1).

So it is clear that without grace man cannot rise to the highest knowledge and the purest love of which he is capable in this life; far less can he reach that final and perfected blessedness which is expected hereafter. For this he must possess the virtue of Faith, which comes not without grace.

Within the province of the Christian Faith “it is necessary that man should accept per modum fidei not only what is above reason, but also what may be known through reason.” (Art. 4). He must believe explicitly the prima credibilia, that is to say, the Articles of Faith; it is enough if he believes other credibilia implicitly, by holding his mind prepared to accept whatever Scripture teaches (Art. 5).

And Thomas, having shown the function of will in any act of faith, passes on by the same path to connect fides with caritas:

Thomas makes his conclusion more precise:

Only the fides which is formed and completed in caritas is a virtue (Art. 5). And Thomas says concisely (Qu. vi. Art. 1) what in many ways has been made evident before: For Faith, it is necessary that the credibilia should be propounded, and then that there should be assent to them; but since man, in assenting to those things which are of the Faith, is lifted above his nature, his assent must proceed from a supernatural principle working within him, which is God moving him through grace.

It is not hard to see why two gifts (dona) of the Holy Spirit should belong to the virtue Faith, to wit, understanding and knowledge, intellectus et scientia. Thomas gives the reasons in an argument germane to his Aristotelian theory of cognition:

This gift follows grace. Grace is more perfect than nature. It does not abrogate, but perfects the natural faculties. Nor does it fail in those matters in which man’s natural power is competent (Qu. ix. Art. 1). So, besides the donum intellectus, to Faith belongs the donum scientiae also, which brings and guides knowledge of human things (Art. 2).

And now we shall not be surprised to find sapientia, the very highest gift of the Spirit, attached to the grace-given virtue caritas. For caritas is the informing principle of Faith, and the highest virtue of the grace-illumined will. The will, be it remembered, belongs to man’s intellectual nature; its object is the good which is known by the mind (bonum intellectum). “Sapientia (wisdom, right knowledge as to the highest cause, which is God) signifies rectitude of judgment in accordance with the rationes divinae,” the ideas and reasons which exist in God. Rectitude of judgment regarding things divine may arise from rational inquiry; in which case it pertains to the sapientia which is an intellectual virtue. But it may also spring from affinity to those things themselves; and then it is a gift of the Holy Spirit (II. ii., Qu. xlv. Art. 2).

Says Thomas:

But mark: the perfection of the intellectual nature does not consist merely in knowing, narrowly taken. The right action of will is also essential, of the will directed toward the highest good, which is God: and this is caritas, of which the corresponding gift from the Spirit is wisdom. In accord with this full consummation of human nature, comprising the perfection of cognition and will, Thomas outlines his conception of the vita contemplativa, the life of most perfect beatitude attainable on earth:

The moral virtues, continues Thomas, do not pertain essentially to this vita. But they may promote it, by regulating the passions and quieting the tumult of outside affairs. In principle it is fixed upon the contemplation of truth, which here we see but in a glass darkly; and so we help ourselves along by contemplating the effects of the divine cause in the world.

Thus final beatitude, and its mortal approach in the vita contemplativa of this earth, is of the mind, both in its knowledge and its love. Immateriality, spirituality, is with Thomas primarily intellectual. Yet his beatitude is not limited to the knowing faculties. It embraces will and love. The grace of God and the gifts of the Holy Spirit touch love as well as knowledge, raising one and both to final unison of aim. Thus far in this life, while in the life to come, these grace-uplifted qualities of knowledge, and that choosing love (dilectio) which rises from knowledge of the good, are perfected in gloria.

Further than this we shall not go with Thomas, nor follow him, for example, through his exposition of the means of salvation—the Incarnation and the sacraments. Nor need we further mark the prodigious range of his theology, or his metaphysics, logic, or physics. To all this many books have been devoted. We are but seeking to realise his intellectual interests and qualities, in such way as to bring them[Pg 483] within the compass of our sympathy. A more encyclopaedic and systematic presentation of his teaching is proper for those who would trace, or perhaps attach themselves to, particular doctrines; or would find in scholasticism, even in Thomas, some special authoritativeness. For us these doctrines have but the validity of all human striving after truth. Moreover, perhaps a truer view of Thomas, the theologian and philosopher, is gained from following a few typical forms of his teaching presented in his own exposition, than by analyzing his thought with later solvents which he did not apply, and presenting his matter classified as he would not have ordered it, and in modern phrases, which have as many meanings foreign to scholasticism as scholasticism has thoughts not to be translated into modern ways of thinking.

 

 

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[Pg 484]

CHAPTER XLI

ROGER BACON

Of all mediaeval men, Thomas Aquinas achieved the most organic and comprehensive union of the results of human reasoning and the data of Christian theology. He may be regarded as the final exponent of scholasticism, perfected in method, universal in scope, and still integral in purpose. The scholastic method was soon to be impugned and the scholastic universality broken. The premature attack upon the method came from Roger Bacon;[615] the fatal breach in the scholastic wholeness resulted from the constructive, as well as critical, achievements of Duns Scotus and Occam.

Bacon is a perplexing personality. With other mediaeval thinkers one quickly feels the point of view from which to regard them. Not so with this most disparate genius of the Middle Ages. Reading his rugged[Pg 485] statements, and trying to form a coherent thought of him, we are puzzled at the contradictions of his mind. One may not say that he was not of his time. Every man is of his time, and cannot raise himself very far out of the mass of knowledge and opinion furnished by it, any more than a swimmer can lift himself out of the water that sustains him. Yet personal temper and inclination may aline a man with less potent tendencies, which are obscured and hampered by the dominant intellectual interests of the period. Assuredly, through all the Middle Ages, there were men who noticed such physical phenomena as bore upon their lives, even men who cared for the dumb beginnings of what eventually might lead to natural science. But they were not representative of their epoch’s master energies; and in the Middle Ages, as always, the man of evident and great achievement will be one who, like Aquinas, stands upon the whole attainment of his age. Roger Bacon, on the contrary, was as one about whose loins the currents of his time drag and pull; they did not aid him, and yet he could not extricate himself. It was his intellectual misfortune that he was held by his time so fatally, so fatally, at least, for the proper doing of the work which was to be his contribution to human enlightenment, a contribution well ignored while he lived, and for long afterward.

Bacon accepted the dominant mediaeval convictions: the entire truth of Scripture; the absolute validity of the revealed religion, with its dogmatic formulation; also (to his detriment) the universally prevailing view that the end of all the sciences is to serve their queen, theology. Yet he hated the ways of mediaeval natural selection and survival of the mediaeval fittest, and the methods by which Albert or Thomas or Vincent of Beauvais were at last presenting the sum of mediaeval knowledge and conviction. Well might he detest those ways and methods, seeing that he was Roger Bacon, one impelled by his genius to critical study, to observation and experiment. He was impassioned for linguistics, for mathematics, for astronomy, optics, chemistry, and for an experimental science which should confirm the contents of all these, and also enlarge the scope of human ingenuity. Yet he was held fast, and his thinking[Pg 486] was confused, by what he took from his time. Especially he was obsessed by the idea that philosophy, including every branch of knowledge, must serve theology, and even in that service find its justification. But what has chemistry to do with theology? What has mathematics? And what has the physical experimental method? By maintaining the utility of these for theology, Bacon saved his mediaeval orthodoxy, and it may be, his skin from the fire. But it wrecked the working of his genius. His writings remain, such of them as are known, astounding in their originality and insight, and almost as remarkable for their inconsistencies; they are marked by a confusion of method and a distortion of purpose, which sprang from the contradictions between Bacon’s genius and the current views which he adopted.

The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conforming to the old principles of tragic art: that the hero’s character shall be large and noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member; quite as fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of current opinions; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows, or, in the thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon attacked dead and living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly. Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to himself and others; and these are insufficient for the construction of even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Oxford; went to Paris, studied, experimented; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan; studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris, kept under surveillance, receives a[Pg 487] letter from the pope, writes, writes, writes,—his three best-known works; is again in trouble, confined for many years, released, and dead, so very dead, body and fame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries.

Inference and construction may fill out this sombre outline. England was the land of Bacon’s birth, and Ilchester is said to have been the natal spot. The approximate date may be guessed at from his reference to himself as senex in 1267, and his remark that he had then been studying forty years. His family seems to have been wealthy. Besides the letter of Pope Clement, hereafter to be quoted, there is one contemporary reference to him. Mathew Paris has a story of a certain clericus de curia, scilicet Rogerus Bacum, speaking up with bold wit to King Henry III. at Oxford in 1233. Bacon when a young man studied there under Robert Grosseteste and Adam of Marsh. He frequently refers to both, and always with respect. His chief enthusiasm is for the former. For years this admirable man was chancellor of Oxford; until made bishop of Lincoln in 1235. Although never a Franciscan, he was the Order’s devoted friend, and lectured in its house at Oxford. Grosseteste founded the study of Greek at Oxford, and collected treatises upon Greek grammar. Bacon, following him, wrote a Greek grammar. Grosseteste, before Bacon, devoted himself to physics and mathematics, and all that these many-branched sciences might include. Besides a taste for these studies Bacon may have had from him the idea that they were useful for theology. “No one,” says Bacon, “knew the sciences save Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, from his length of life and experience, and studiousness and industry, and because he knew mathematics and optics, and was able to know all things; and he knew enough of the languages to understand the saints and philosophers of antiquity; but not enough to translate them, unless towards the end of his life when he invited Greeks, and had books of Greek grammar gathered from Greece and elsewhere.”[616] There is evidence that others at Oxford, besides Grosseteste, were interested in the study of Greek and natural science.

[Pg 488]From Oxford Bacon went to Paris, where apparently he remained for a number of years; he was made a doctor there, and afterwards became a Franciscan. Since a monk could own nothing, one may perhaps infer that Bacon did not join the Order until after the lapse of certain twenty years of scientific research, in which he spent much money, as he says in 1267, in an often-quoted passage of the Opus tertium:

After his first stay at Paris Bacon returned to Oxford. There he doubtless continued his researches, and divulged them, or taught in some way. For he roused the suspicions of his Order, and in the course of time was sent or conducted back to Paris, where constraint seems to have been put upon his actions and utterances. Like the first, this second, possibly enforced, stay was a long one; he speaks of himself in the first chapter of the Opus tertium as “for ten years an exile.” Yet here as always, one is not quite certain how literally to take Bacon’s personal statements, either touching himself or others.

A short period of elation was at hand. He had evidently been forbidden to write, or spread his ideas; he had been disciplined at times with a diet of bread and water. All this had failed to sweeten his temper, or conform his mind to current views. In 1265, an open-minded man who had been a jurist, a warrior, and the counsellor of a king, before becoming an ecclesiastic, was made Pope Clement IV. While living in Paris he had been interested in Bacon’s[Pg 489] work. Soon after the papal election our sore-bestead philosopher managed to communicate with him, as appears by the pope’s reply, written from Viterbo, in July 1266:

Poor Bacon! The pope’s letter roused him to ecstasy, then put him in a quandary, and elicited elaborate apologies, and the flood of persuasive exposition which he poured forth with tremulous haste in the eighteen months following. Delight at being solicited by the head of Christendom breaks out in hyperbole, not to be wondered at: he is uplifted and cast prone; that his littleness and multiple ignorance, his tongue-tied mouth and rasping pen, and himself unlistened to by all men, a buried man delivered to oblivion, should be called on by the pope’s wisdom for wisdom’s writings (sapientales scripturas)!

The word “expenditures” touches one horn of Bacon’s dilemma. He is a Franciscan; therefore penniless; and,[Pg 490] besides that, apparently under the restraining ban of his own Order. The pope has enjoined secrecy; therefore Bacon cannot set up the papal mandate against the probable interference of his own superiors. The pope has sent no funds; sitting in culmine mundi he was too busy with high affairs to think of that.[620] And now comes the chief matter for Bacon’s apologies: his Beatitude misapprehends, has been misinformed: the work is not yet written; it is still to be composed.

In spite of these obstacles the friendless but resourceful philosopher somehow obtained opportunity to write, and the means needed for the fair copy. And then in those great eighteen, or perhaps but fifteen, months, what a flood of enlightenment, of reforming criticism, of plans of study and methods of investigation, of examples and sketches of the matter to be prepared or discovered, is poured forth. Four works we know of,[621] and they may have made the greater part of all that Bacon ever actually wrote. With variations of emphasis, of abridgement and elaboration, the four have the one purpose to convince the pope of the enormous value of Bacon’s scheme of useful and saving knowledge. To a great extent they set forth the same matters; indeed the Opus tertium was intended to convey the substance of the Opus majus, should that fail to reach the pope. So there is much repetition and some disorder in these eager, hurried works, defects which emphasise the dramatic situation of the impetuous genius whose pent-up utterance was loosed at last. The Opus minus and the Vatican Fragment are as from a man overpowered by the eagerness to say everything at once, lest the night close in before he have chance of speech. And[Pg 491] when the Opus majus was at last sent forth, accompanied by the Opus minus, as a battleship by a light armed cruiser, the Opus tertium was despatched after them, filled with the same militant exposition, for fear the former two should perish en voyage.

Did they ever reach the pope? We may presume so. Did he read any one of them? Here there is no information. Popes were the busiest men in Europe, and death was so apt to cut short their industry. Clement died the next year, and so far as known, no syllable of acknowledgement from him ever reached the feverishly expectant philosopher.

A few words will tell the rest. In 1271, apparently, Bacon wrote his Compendium studii philosophiae, taking the occasion to denounce the corruptions of Church and society in unmeasured terms. He rarely measured his vituperation! His life was setting on toward its long last trial. In 1277, Jerome of Ascoli, the General of the Franciscan Order, held a Chapter at Paris, and Bacon was condemned to imprisonment (carceri condempnatus) because of his teachings, which contained aliquas novitates suspectas.[622] Jerome became Pope Nicholas IV. At a Chapter of the Order held in Paris in 1292, just after his death, certain prisoners condemned in 1277, were set free. Roger Bacon probably was among the number. If so, it was in the year of his liberation that he wrote a tract entitled Compendium theologiae; for that was written in 1292. This is the last we hear of him. But as he must now have been hard on to eighty, probably he did not live much longer.

There seems to have been nothing exceptional in Bacon’s attitude toward Scripture and the doctrines of the Church. He deemed, with other mediaeval men, that Scripture held, at least implicitly, the sum of knowledge useful or indeed possible for men. True, neither the Old Testament nor the New treats of grammar, or physics, or of minerals, or plants, or animals. Nevertheless, the statements in these revealed writings are made with complete knowledge of every topic or thing considered or referred to—bird, beast, and plant,[Pg 492] the courses of the stars, the earth and its waters, yea, the arts of song or agriculture, and the principles of every science. Conversely (and here Bacon even gave fresh emphasis and novel pointings to the current view) all knowledge whatsoever, every art and science, is needed for the full understanding of Scripture, sacra doctrina, in a word, theology. This opinion may hold large truth; but Bacon’s advocacy of it sometimes affects us as a reductio ad absurdum, especially when he is proceeding on the assumption that the patriarchs and prophets had knowledge of all sciences, including astrology and the connection between the courses of the stars and the truth of Christianity.

There was likewise nothing startling in Bacon’s view of the Fathers, and their knowledge and authoritativeness. Thomas did not regard them as inspired. Neither did Bacon; he respects them, yet discerns limitations to their knowledge; by reason of their circumstances they may have neglected certain of the sciences; but this is no reason why we should.[623]

As for the ancient philosophers, Bacon holds to their partial inspiration. “God illuminated their minds to desire and perceive the truths of philosophy. He even disclosed the truth to them.”[624] They received their knowledge from God, indirectly as it were, through the prophets, to whom God revealed it directly. More than once and with every detail of baseless tradition, he sets forth the common view that the Greek philosophers studied the prophets, and drew their wisdom from that source.[625] But their knowledge was not complete; and it behoves us to know much that is not in Aristotle.[626]

It may be that Bacon was suspected of raising the philosophers too near the Christian level; and perhaps his argument that their knowledge had come from the prophets may have seemed a vain excuse. Says he, for example:

Possibly one is here reminded of Abaelard, and his thought of Christianity as reformatio legis naturalis. Yet Christ had said, He came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and the chief Christian theologians had followed Augustine in “despoiling the Egyptians” as he phrased it; the very process which in fact was making the authority of Aristotle supreme in Bacon’s time. So there was little that was peculiar or suspicious in Bacon’s admiration of the philosophers.

The trouble with Bacon becomes clearer as we turn to his views upon the state of knowledge in his time, and the methods of contemporary doctors in rendering it worse, rather than better. These doctors were largely engaged upon sacra doctrina; they were primarily theologians and expounders of the truth of revelation. Bacon’s criticism of their methods might disparage that to which those methods were applied. His caustic enumeration of the four everlasting causes of error, and the seven vices infecting the study of theology, will show reason enough why his error-stricken and infected contemporaries wished to close his mouth. The anxiousness of some might sour to enmity under the acerbity of his attack; nor would their hearts be softened by Bacon’s boasting that these various doctors,[Pg 494] of course including Albert, could not write in ten years what he is sending to the pope.[630] Bacon declares that there is at Paris a great man (was it Albert? was it Thomas?), who is set up as an authority in the schools, like Aristotle or Averroes; and his works display merely “infinite puerile vanity,” “ineffable falsity,” superfluous verbiage, and the omission of the most needful parts of philosophy.[631] Bacon is not content with abusing members of the rival Dominican Order; but includes in his contempt the venerable Alexander of Hales, the defunct light of the Franciscans. “Nullum ordinem excludo,” cries he, in his sweeping denunciation of his epoch’s rampant sins. As for the seculars, why, they can only lecture by stealing the copy-books of the “boys” in the “aforesaid Orders.”[632] “Never,” says Bacon in the Compendium studii from which the last phrases are taken, “has there been such a show of wisdom, nor such prosecution of study in so many faculties through so many regions as in the last forty years. Doctors are spread everywhere, especially in theology, in every city, castle, and burg, chiefly through the two student Orders. Yet there was never so great ignorance and so much error—as shall appear from this writing.”[633]

Bacon never loses a chance of stating the four causes of the error and ignorance about him. These causes preyed upon his mind—he would have said they preyed upon the age. They are elaborately expounded in pars i. of the Opus majus:[634]

Therefore they think the true the false, and spend their time and money vainly, says Bacon with many strainings of phrase.

“There is no remedy,” continues Bacon, “against the first three causes of error save as with all our strength we set the sound authors above the weak ones, reason above custom, and the opinions of the wise above the humours of the crowd; and do not trust in the triple argument: this has precedent, this is customary, this is the common view.” But the fourth cause of error is the worst of all. “For this is a lone and savage beast, which devours and destroys all reason,—this desire of seeming wise, with which every man is born.” Bacon arraigns this cause of evil, through numerous witnesses, sacred and profane. It has two sides: display of pretended knowledge, and excusing of ignorance. Infinite are the verities of God and the creation: let no one boast of knowledge. It is not for man to glory in his wisdom; faith goes beyond man’s knowledge; and still much is unrevealed. In forty years we learn no more than could be taught youth in one. I have profited more from simple men “than from all my famous doctors.”

Bacon’s four universal causes of ignorance indicate his general attitude. More specific criticisms upon the academic methods of his time are contained in his septem peccata studii principalis quod est theologiae. This is given in the Opus minus.[636] Bacon, it will be remembered, says again and again[Pg 496] that all sciences must serve theology, and find their value from that service: the science of theology includes every science, and should use each as a handmaid for its own ends. Accordingly, when Bacon speaks of the seven vices of the studium principale quod est theologia, we may expect him to point out vicious methods touching all branches of study, yet with an eye to their common service of their mistress.

Evidently, this first vice of theological study infected the method of Albert and Thomas, and of practically all other theologians! Its correction might call for a complete reversal of method. But the reversal desired by Bacon would scarcely have led back to Gospel simplicity, as may be seen from what follows.

Bacon goes at some length into the errors of the Vulgate, and gives a good account of the various Latin versions of the Bible. Next, the “sextum peccatum is far graver than all, and may be divided into two peccata maxima: one is that through these errors the literal sense of the Vulgate has infinite falsities and intolerable uncertainties, so that the truth cannot be known. From this follows the other peccatum, that the spiritual sense is infected with the same doubt and error.” These errors, first in the literal meaning, and thence in the spiritual or allegorical significance, spring from ignorance of the original tongues, and from ignorance of the birds and beasts and objects of all sorts spoken of in the Bible. “By far the greater cause of error, both in the literal and spiritual meaning, rises from ignorance of things in Scripture. For the literal sense is in the natures and properties of things, in order that the spiritual meaning may be elicited through convenient adaptations and congruent similitudes.” Bacon cites Augustine to show that we cannot understand the precept, Estote prudentes sicut serpentes, unless we know that it is the serpent’s habit to expose his body in defence of his head, as the Christian should expose all things for the sake of his head, which is Christ. Alack! is it for such ends as[Pg 498] these that Bacon would have a closer scholarship fostered, and natural science prosecuted? The text of the Opus minus is broken at this point, and one cannot say whether Bacon had still a seventh peccatum to allege, or whether the series ended with the second of the vices into which he divided the sixth.

Bacon’s strictures upon the errors of his time were connected with his labours to remedy them, and win a firmer knowledge than dialectic could supply. To this end he advocated the study of the ancient languages, which he held to be “the first door of wisdom, and especially for the Latins, who have not the text, either of theology or philosophy, except from foreign languages.”[637] His own knowledge of Greek was sufficient to enable him to read passages in that tongue, and to compose a Greek grammar.[638] But he shows no interest in the classical Greek literature, nor is there evidence of his having studied any important Greek philosopher in the original. He was likewise zealous for the study of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic, the other foreign tongues which held the learning so inadequately represented by Latin versions. He spoke with some exaggeration of the demerits of the existing translations;[639] but he recognised the arduousness of the translator’s task, from diversity of idiom and the difficulty of finding an equivalent in Latin for the statements, for example, in the Greek. The Latin vocabulary often proved inadequate; and words had to be taken bodily from the original tongue. Likewise he saw, and so had others, though none had declared it so clearly, that the translator should not only be master of the two languages, but have knowledge of the subject treated by the work to be translated.[640]

After the languages, Bacon urged the pursuit of the sciences, which he conceived to be interdependent and corroborative; the conclusions of each of them susceptible of proof by the methods and data of the others.

Thus, with antique and mediaeval looseness, Bacon conceived this science. He devotes to it the long Pars quarta of the Opus majus: saying at the beginning that of—

Bacon adduces authorities to prove the need of mathematics for the study of grammar and logic; he shows that its processes reach indubitable certitude of truth; and “if in other sciences we would reach certitude free from doubt, and truth without error, we must set the foundations of cognition in mathematics.”[641] He points out its obvious necessity in the study of the heavens, and in everything pertaining to speculative and practical astrologia; also for the study of physics and optics. Thus his interest lay chiefly in its application. As human science is nought unless it may be applied to things divine, mathematics must find its supreme usefulness in its application to the matters of theology. It should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell, and promote our knowledge of Scriptural geography, and more especially, sacred chronology. Next it affords us knowledge of the exact forms of things mentioned in Scripture, like the ark, the tabernacle, and the temple, so that from an accurate ascertainment of the literal sense, the true spiritual meaning may be deduced.[Pg 500] It should not be confused with its evil namesake magic,[642] yet the true science is useful in determining the influence of the stars on the fortunes of states. Moreover, mathematics, through astrology, is of great importance in the certification of the faith, strengthening it against the sect of Antichrist;[643] then in the correction of the Church’s calendar; and finally, as all things and regions of the earth are affected by the heavens, astrology and mathematics are pertinent to a consideration of geography. And Bacon concludes Pars quarta with an elaborate description of the regions, countries, and cities of the known world.

Bacon likewise was profoundly interested in optics, the scientia perspectiva, which he sets forth elaborately in Pars quinta of the Opus majus. Much space would be needed to discuss his theories of light and vision, and the propagation of physical force, treated in the De multiplicatione specierum. He knew all that was to be learned from Greek and Arabic sources, and, unlike Albert, who compiled much of the same material, he used his knowledge to build with. Bacon had a genius for these sciences: his Scientia perspectiva is no mere compilation, and no work used by him presented either a theory of force or of vision, containing as many adumbrations of later theorizing.[644] Yet he fails to cast off his obsession with the “spiritual meaning” and the utility of science for theology. He discussed the composition of Adam’s body while in a state of innocence,[645] a point that may seem no more tangible than Thomas’s reasonings upon the movements of Angels, which Bacon ridicules. Again in his Optics, after an interesting discussion of refraction and reflection, he cannot forego a consideration of the spiritual significations of refracted rays.[646] Even his discussion of experimental science has touches of mediaevalism, which are peculiarly dissonant in this most original and “advanced” product of Bacon’s genius, which now must be considered more specifically.

[Pg 501]The speculative intellect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was so widely absorbed with the matter and methods of the dominant scholasticism, that no one is likely to think of the eminent scholastics as isolated phenomena. Plainly they were but as the highest peaks which somewhat overtop the other mountains, through whose aggregation and support they were lifted to their supreme altitude. But with Bacon the danger is real lest he seem separate and unsupported; for the influences which helped to make him are not over-evident. Yet he did not make himself. The directing of his attention to linguistics is sufficiently accounted for by the influence of Grosseteste and others, who had inaugurated the study of Greek, and perhaps Hebrew at Oxford. As for physics or optics, others also were interested—or there would have been no translations of Greek and Arabic treatises for him to use;[647] and in mathematics there was a certain older contemporary, Jordanus Nemorarius (not to mention Leonardo Fibonacci), who far overtopped him. It is safe to assume that in the thirteenth, as in the twelfth and previous centuries, there were men who studied the phenomena of nature. But they have left scant record. A period is remembered by those features of its main accomplishment which are not superseded or obliterated by the further advance of later times. Nothing has obliterated the work of the scholastics for those who may still care for such reasonings; and Aquinas to-day holds sway in the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, the sparse footprints of the mediaeval men who essayed the paths of natural science have long since been trodden out by myriad feet passing far beyond them, along those ways. Yet there were these wayfarers, who made little stir in their own time, and have long been well forgotten. Had it not been for the letter from Pope Clement, Bacon himself might be among them; and only his writings keep from utter oblivion the name of an[Pg 502] individual who, according to Bacon, carried the practice of “experimental science” further than he could hope to do. It may be fruitful to approach Bacon’s presentation of this science, or scientific method, through his references to this extraordinary Picard, named Peter of Maharncuria, or Maricourt.

In the Opus tertium, Bacon has been considering optics and mathematics, and has spoken of this Peter as proficient in them; and thus he opens chapter xiii., which is devoted to the scientia experimentalis:

By following the text further, we may be able to appreciate what Bacon will shortly say of him:

It may be pertinent to our estimate of Bacon’s experimental science to query where the experimentator ever observed an eagle or a phoenix renewing its youth, outside of the Physiologus?

It is impossible to complete philosophy, usefully and with certitude, without Peter; but he is not to be had for a price; he could have had every honour from princes; and if he wished to publish his works, the whole world of Paris would follow him. But he cares not a whit for honours or riches, though he could get them any time he chose through his wisdom. This man has worked at such a burning-glass for three years, and soon will perfect it by the grace of God.

There is a great deal of Roger Bacon in these curious passages; much of his inductive genius, much of his sanguine hopefulness, not to say inventive imagination; and enough of his credulity. No one ever knew or could perform all he[Pg 504] ascribes to this astounding Peter, from whom, apparently, there is extant a certain intelligent treatise upon the magnet.[649] And as for those burning-glasses, or possibly reflectors, by which distant fleets and armies should be set afire—did they ever exist? Did Archimedes ever burn with them the Roman ships at Syracuse? Were they ever more than a myth? It is, at all events, safe to say that no device from the hand and brain of Peter of Maharncuria ever threatened Turk or Saracen.

It is knowledge that gives insight. Modern critical methods amount chiefly to this, that we know more. Bacon did not have such knowledge of animal physiology as would assure him of the absurdity of the notion that an eagle or any animal could renew its youth. Nor did he know enough to realise the vast improbability of Greek philosophers drawing their knowledge from the books of Hebrew prophets. And one sees how loose must have been the practice, or the dreams, of his “experimental science.” His fundamental conception seems to waver: Scientia experimentalis, is it a science, or is it a means and method universally applicable to all scientific investigation? The sciences serve it as handmaids, says Bacon; and he also says, that it alone can test and certify, make sure and certain, the conclusions of the other sciences. Perhaps he thought it the master-key fitting all the doors of knowledge; and held that all sciences, so far as possible, should proceed from experience, through further observation and experiment. But he has not said quite this.

He is little to be blamed for his vagueness, and greatly to be admired for having reached his possibly inconsistent conception. Observation and experiment were as old as human thought upon human experience. And Albert the Great says that the conclusions of all sciences should be tested by them. But he evinces no formal conception of either an experimental science or method; though he has much to say as to logic, and ponderously considers whether it is a science or the means or method of all sciences.[650][Pg 505] Herein he is discussing consciously with respect to logic, the very point as to which Bacon, in respect to experimental science, rather unconsciously wavers: is it a science, and almost the queen? Or is it the true scientific method to be followed by all sciences when applicable?[651] Bacon had no high regard for the study of logic, deeming that the thoughts of untaught men naturally followed its laws.[652] This was doubtless true, and just as true, moreover, of experimental[Pg 506] science as of logic. The one and the other were built up from the ways of the common man and universal processes of thought. Yet the logic of the trained mind is the surer; and so experimental science may reach out beyond the crude observations of unscientific men.

Manifestly with Roger Bacon the scientia experimentalis held the place which logic held with Albert, or queenly dialectic with Abaelard. He repeats himself continually in stating its properties and prerogatives, yet without advancing to greater clearness of conception. Pars sexta of the Opus majus is devoted to it: and we may take one last glance to see whether the statements there throw any further light upon the matter.

And Bacon says, as illustration, that you could never by mere argument convince a man that fire would burn; also that “in spite of the demonstration of the properties of an equilateral triangle, the mind would not stick to the conclusion sine experientia.”

After referring to Aristotle, and adducing some examples of foolish things believed by learned and common men alike, because they had not applied the tests of observation, he concludes: “Oportet ergo omnia certificari per viam experientiae.” He continues with something unexpected:

Any doubt as to the religious and Christian meaning of the last passage is removed by Bacon’s statement of the

These utterances are religious, and bring us back to the religious, or practical, motive of Bacon’s entire endeavour after knowledge: knowledge should have its utility, its practical bearing; and the ultimate utility is that which promotes a sound and saving knowledge of God. The true method of research, says Bacon in the Compendium studii,

It is as with an echo of this thought, that Bacon begins the second chapter of his exposition of experimental science in the sixth part of the Opus majus, from which we have but now withdrawn our attention. He anxiously reiterates what he has already said more than once, as to the properties and prerogatives of this scientia experimentalis. Then he gives his most interesting and elaborate example of its application in the investigation of the rainbow, an example too lengthy and too difficult to reproduce. In stating the three prerogatives, he makes but slight change of phrasing; yet his restatement of the last of them:—“The third dignitas of this science is that it investigates the secrets of nature by its own competency and out of its own qualities, irrespective of any connection with the other sciences,”—signifies an autonomous science, rather than a method applicable to all investigation. The illustrations which Bacon now gives, range free indeed; yet in the main relate to “useful discoveries” as one might say: to ever-burning lamps, Greek fire, explosives, antidotes for poison, and matters useful to the Church and State. Along these lines of discovery through experiment, Bacon lets his imagination travel and lead him on to surmises of inventions that long after him were realised. “Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, like great ships suited to river or ocean, going with greater velocity than if they were full of rowers: likewise wagons may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili, as we deem the chariots of antiquity to have been. And there may be flying machines, so made that a man may sit in the middle of the machine and direct it by some devise: and again, machines for raising great weights.”[656] The modern reality has outdone this mediaeval dream.

 

 

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[Pg 509]

CHAPTER XLII

DUNS SCOTUS AND OCCAM

The thirteenth century was a time of potent Church unity, when the papacy, triumphant over emperors and kings, was drawing further strength from the devotion of the two Orders, who were renewing the spiritual energies of Western Christendom. Scholasticism was still whole and unbroken, in spite of Roger Bacon, who attacked its methods with weapons of his own forging, yet asserting loudly the single-eyed subservience of all the sciences to theology. This assertion from a man of Bacon’s views, was as vain as the Unam sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII., fulminated in 1302, arrogating for the papacy every power on earth. In earlier decades such pretensions had been almost acquiesced in; but the Unam sanctam was a senile outcry from a papacy vanquished by the new-grown power of the French king, sustained by the awakening of a French nation.

The opening years of the fourteenth century, so fatal for the papacy, were also portentous for scholasticism. The Summa of Thomas was impugned by Joannes Duns Scotus, whose entire work, constructive as well as critical, was impressed with qualities of finality, signifying that in the forms of reasoning represented by him as well as Thomas, thought should advance no farther. Bacon’s attack upon scholastic methods had proved abortive from its tactlessness and confusion, and because men did not care for, and perhaps did not understand, his arguments. It was not so with the arguments of Duns Scotus. Throughout the academic world, thought still was set to chords of metaphysics; and although men had never listened to quite such dialectic[Pg 510] orchestration as Duns provided, they liked it, perceived its motives, and comprehended the meaning of its themes. So his generation understood and appreciated him. That he was the beginning of the end of the scholastic system, could not be known until the manner of that ending had disclosed itself more fully. We, however, discern the symptoms of scholastic dissolution in his work. His criticism of his predecessors was disintegrating, even when not destructive. His own dialectic was so surpassingly intricate and dizzy that, like the choir of Beauvais, it might some day collapse. With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic purpose finally broke. For he no longer maintained the union of metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely; but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other sciences—all human knowledge—to its service. Although rational in content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on revelation.

There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. But it was quite another matter that the severance between metaphysics and theology should be demonstrated by a prodigious metaphysical theologian after a different view had been carried to its farthest reaches by the great Aquinas. Henceforth philosophy and theology were set on opposite pinnacles, only with theology’s pinnacle the higher. In spite of the last circumstance, the coming time showed that men cannot for long possess in peace two standards of truth—philosophy and revelation; but will be driven to hold to the one and ignore the other. By breaking the rational union of philosophy and theology, Duns Scotus prepared the way for Occam. The latter also asserts vociferously the superiority of the divine truth over human knowledge and its reasonings. But the popes are at Avignon, and the Christian world no longer bows down before those willing Babylonian captives. Under such a blasted condition of the Church, how should any inclusive Christian synthesis of thought and faith be maintained?

[Pg 511]Duns Scotus[657] could not have been what he was, had he not lived after Thomas. He was indeed the pinnacle of scholasticism; set upon all the rest. Yet this pinnacle had its more particular supports—or antecedents. And their special line may be noted without intending thereby to suggest that the influences affecting the thought of Duns Scotus did not include all the men he heard or read, and criticised.

That Duns Scotus was educated at Oxford, and became a Franciscan, and not a Dominican, had done much to set the lines of thought reflected in his doctrines. Anselm of Aosta, of Bec, of Canterbury, had been an intellectual force in England. Duns was strongly influenced by his bold realism, by his emphasis upon the power and freedom of the will, and by his doctrine of the atonement.[658] But Anselm also affected Scotus indirectly through the English worthy who stands between them.

This, of course, was Robert Grosseteste, to whom we have had occasion to refer, yet, despite of his intrinsic worth, always in relation to his effect on others. He was a great man; in his day a many-sided force, strong in the business of Church and State, strong in censuring and bridling the wicked, strong in the guidance of the young university of Oxford, and a mighty friend of the Franciscan Order, then establishing itself there. To his pupils, and their pupils apparently, he was a fruitful inspiration; yet the historian of thought may be less interested in the master than in certain of these pupils who brought to explicit form divers matters which in Grosseteste seem to have been but inchoate.[659] One thinks immediately of Roger Bacon, who was his pupil; and then of Duns, the metaphysician, who possibly may have listened to some aged pupil of Grosseteste. In different ways, Duns as well as Bacon took much from the master. And it is possible to see how the great teacher[Pg 512] and bishop may have incited the genius of Scotus as well as that of Bacon to perform its task. For Grosseteste was a rarely capable and clear-eyed man, honest and resolute, who with the entire strength of a powerful personality insisted upon going to the heart of every proposition, and testing its validity by the surest means obtainable. By virtue of his training and intellectual inheritance, he was an Augustinian and a Platonist; a successor of Anselm, rather than a predecessor of the great Dominican Aristotelians. He was accordingly an emphatic realist, yet one who would co-ordinate the reality of his “universals” with the reality of experience. Even had he not been an Augustinian, such a masterful character would have realised the power of the human will, and felt the practical insistencies of the art of human salvation, which was the science of theology.

Views like these prevailed at Oxford. They may be found clearly stated by Richard of Middleton, an Oxford Franciscan somewhat older than Duns Scotus. He declares that theology is a practical science, and emphasises the primacy and freedom of the will. Voluntas est nobilissima potentia in anima. Again: Voluntas simpliciter nobilior est quam intellectus: the intellect indeed goes before the Will, as the servant who carries the candle before his lord. So the idea of the Good, toward which the Will directs itself, is higher than that of the True, which is the object of the mind; and loving is greater than knowing.[660] Roger Bacon had also held that Will (Voluntas) was higher than the knowing faculty (intellectus); and so did Henry of Ghent,[661] a man of the Low Countries, doctor solemnis hight, and a ruling spirit at the Paris University in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Many of his doctrines substantially resembled those of Scotus, although attacked by him.

So we seem to see the pit in which Duns may have digged. This man, who was no mere fossor, but a builder, and might have deserved the name of Poliorcetes, as the overthrower of many bulwarks, has left few traces of himself, beyond his twenty tomes of metaphysics, which contain no personal references to their author. The birthplace of[Pg 513] Johannes Duns Scotus, whether in Scotland, England or Ireland, is unknown. The commonly accepted date, 1274, probably should be abandoned for an earlier year. It is known that he was a Franciscan, and that the greater part of his life as student and teacher was passed at Oxford. In a letter of commendation, written by the General of his Order in 1304, he is already termed subtilissimus. He was then leaving for Paris, where, two or three years later, in 1307, he was made a Doctor. The following year he was sent to Cologne, and there he died an enigmatical death on November 8, 1308. Report has it that he was buried alive while in a trance.[662] Probably there was little to tell of the life of Duns Scotus. His personality, as well as his career, seems completely included and exhausted in his works. Yet back of them, besides a most acutely reasoning mind, lay an indomitable will. The man never faltered in his labour any more than his reasoning wavered in its labyrinthic course to its conclusions. His learning was complete: he knew the Bible and the Fathers; he was a master of theology, of philosophy, of astronomy, and mathematics.

The constructive processes of his genius appear to issue out of the action of its critical energies. Duns was the most penetrating critic produced by scholasticism. Whatever he considered from the systems of other men he subjected to tests that were apt to leave the argument in tatters. No logical inconsequence escaped him. And when every point had been examined with respect to its rational consistency, this dialectic genius was inclined to bring the matter to the bar of psychological experience. On the other hand he was a churchman, holding that even as Scripture and dogma were above question, so were the decrees of the Church, God’s sanctioned earthly Civitas.

Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And here lies the trouble with him. The endless[Pg 514] ramification and refinement of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a reductio ad absurdum of scholastic ways of reasoning. Logically, eristically, the argumentation is inerrant. It never wanders aimlessly, but winding and circling, at last it reaches a conclusion from some point unforeseen. Would you run a course with this master of the syllogism? If you enter his lists, you are lost. The right way to attack him, is to stand without, and laugh. That is what was done afterwards, when whoever cared for such reasonings was called a Dunce, after the name of this most subtle of mediaeval metaphysicians.

Thus a man is judged by his form and method, and by the bulk of his accomplishment. Form, method, bulk of accomplishment, with Scotus were preposterous. When the taste or mania for such dialectics passed away, this kind of form, this maze of method, this hopelessness of bulk, made an unfit vehicle for a philosophy of life. Men would not search it through to find the living principles. Yet living principles were there; or, at least, tenable and consistent views. The main positions of Duns Scotus, some of which he held in opposition to Thomas, may strike us as quite reasonable: we may be inclined to agree with him. Perhaps it will surprise us to find sane doctrine so well hidden in such dialectic.

He held, for example, that there is no real difference between the soul and its faculties. Thomas never demonstrated the contrary quite satisfactorily. Again, Duns Scotus was a realist: the Idea exists, since it is conceived. For the intellect is passive, and is moved by the intelligible. Therefore the Universal must be a something, in order to occasion the conception of it. Thus the reality of the concept proves the actuality of the Idea.[663] Duns adds further explanations and distinctions regarding the actuality of universals, which are somewhat beyond the comprehension[Pg 515] of the modern mind. But one may remark that he reaches his views of the actuality of universals through analysis of the processes of thought. Sense-perception occasions the Idea in us; there must exist some objective correspondence to our general concepts, as there must also be in things some objective correspondence to our perception of them as individuals, whereby they become to us this or that individual thing. Such individual objectivity is constituted by the thisness of the thing, its haecceitas which is to be contra-distinguished from its general essence, to wit, its whatness, or quidditas. Duns holds that we think individual things directly as we think abstract Ideas; and so their haecceitas is as true an object of our thought as their quidditas. This seems a reasonable conclusion, seeing that the individual and not the type is the final end of creation. So our conceptions prove for us the actuality both of the universal and the concrete; and the proof of one and the other is rooted in sense-perception.

Nothing was of greater import with Duns than the doctrine of the primacy of the Will over the intellect. Duns supports it with intricate argument. The soul in substance is identical with its faculties; but the latter are formally distinguishable from it and from each other. Knowing and willing are faculties or properties of the soul. The will is purely spiritual, and to be distinguished from sense-appetite: the will, and the will alone, is free; absolutely undetermined by any cause beyond itself. Even the intellect, that is the knowing faculty, is determined from without. Although some cognition precedes the act of willing, the will is not determined by cognition, but uses it. So the will, being free, is higher than the intellect. It is the will that constitutes man’s greatness; it raises him above nature, and liberates him from her coercions. Not the intellect, but the will directs itself toward the goal of blessedness, and is the subject of the moral virtues. Such seems to be Duns’s main position; but he distinguishes and refines the matter beyond the limits of our comprehension.[664]

Another fundamental doctrine with Duns Scotus is that theology is not a speculative, but a practical, science—a[Pg 516] position which Duns unfortunately disproved with his tomes of metaphysics! But in spite of the personal reductio ad absurdum of his argument, the position taken by him betokens the breaking up of the scholastic system. The subject of theology, at least for men, is the revelation of God contained in Scripture. “Holy Scripture is a kind of knowledge (quaedam notitia) divinely given in order to direct men to a supernatural end—in finem supernaturalem.”[665] The knowledge revealed in Scripture relates to God’s free will and ordainment for man; which is, that man should attain blessedness. Therefore the truths of Scripture are practical, having an end in view; they are such as are necessary for Salvation. The Church has authority to declare the meaning of Scripture, and supplement it through its Catholic tradition.

Is theology, then, properly a science? Duns will not deny it; but thinks it may more properly be called a sapientia, since according to its nature, it is rather a knowledge of principles than a method of conclusions. It consists in knowledge of God directly revealed. Therefore its principles are not those of the human sciences: for example, it does not accept its principles from metaphysics, although that science treats of much that is contained in theology. Nor are the sciences—we can hardly say the other sciences—subordinated to it; since their province is natural knowledge obtained through natural means. Theology, if it be a science, is one apart from the rest. The knowledge which makes its substance is never its end, but always means to its end; which is to say, that it is practical and not speculative. By virtue of its primacy as well as character, theology pertains to the Will, and works itself out in practice: practical alike are its principles and conclusions. Apparently, with Duns, theology is a science only in this respect, that its substance, which is most rational, may be logically treated with a view to a complete and consistent understanding of it.[666]

[Pg 517]In entire consistency with these fundamental views, Duns held that man’s supreme beatitude lay in the complete and perfect functioning of his will in accordance with the will of God. This was a strong and noble view of man, free to think and act and will and love, according to the will, and aided by the Grace, of the Creator of his will and mind. The trouble lay, as said before, in the method by which all was set forth and proved. The truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly-burning Christlike love actualizing itself in living act and word—or possibly such a one as Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding? Not from such does one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas’s frankly intellectual view. Duns is as intellectual as Thomas; but Thomas is the more consistent. And shall we say, that with Duns all makes toward God, as the final end, through the strong action of the human will and love? So be it—Thomas said, through intellection and through love. Again one queries, did the Scotian reasoning ever foster love?

And then Duns set theology apart,—and supreme. Again, so be it. Let the impulsive religion of the soul assert its primacy. But this was not the way of Duns. Theology and philosophy do not rest on the same principles, says he; but how does he demonstrate it? By substantiating this severance by means of metaphysical dialectic, and using the same dialectic and the same metaphysics to prove[Pg 518] that theology can do without either. Not by dialectic and metaphysics can theology free itself from them, and set itself on other foundations.

Duns Scotus exerted great influence, both directly and through the reaction occasioned by certain of his teachings. The next generations were full of Scotists, who were proud if only they might be reputed more subtle than their master. They succeeded in becoming more inane. There were other men, whom the critical processes of Duns led to deny the validity of his constructive metaphysics. Of those who profited by his teaching, yet represented this reaction against parts of it, the ablest was the Franciscan, William of Occam, a man but few years younger than Duns. He was born in England, in the county of Surrey; and studied under Duns at Paris. It is known that in 1320 he was lecturing with distinction at this centre of intellectual life. Three years afterward, he quitted his chair, and in the controversies then rending his Order, hotly espoused the cause of the Spirituales—the Franciscans who would carry out the precepts of Francis to the letter. Next, he threw himself with all the ardour of his temper into the conflict with the papacy, and became the literary champion of the rights of the State. He was cited before the pope, and imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped, in 1328, and fled to the Court of the emperor, Louis of Bavaria, to whom, as the accounts declare, he addressed the proud word: Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo. He died about 1347.

The succession, as it were, of Occam to Duns Scotus, is of great interest. It was portentous for scholasticism. The pupil, for pupil in large measure he was, profited by the critical methods and negations of the master. But he denied the validity of the metaphysical constructions whereby Duns sought to rebuild what his criticism had cast down or shaken. Especially, Occam would not accept the subtle Doctor’s fabrication of an external world in accord with the apparent necessities of thought. For with all Duns’s critical insistency, never did a man more unhesitatingly make a universe to fit the syllogistic processes of his reason, projected into the external world. Here Occam would not follow him, as Aristotle would not follow Plato.

[Pg 519]It were well to consider more specifically these two sides of Occam’s succession to Duns Scotus, shown in his acceptance and rejection of the master’s teaching. He followed him, of course, in emphasising the functions of the will; and accepted the conception of theology as practical, and not speculative, in its ends; and, like Duns, he distinguished, nay rather, severed, theology from philosophy, widening the cleft between them. If, with Duns, theology was still, in a sense, a science; with Occam it could hardly be called one. Although Duns denied that theology was to be controlled by principles drawn from metaphysics, he laboured to produce a metaphysical counterfeit, wherein theology, founded on revelation and church law, should present a close parallel to what it would have been, had its controlling principles been those of metaphysics. Occam quite as resolutely as his master, proves the untenability of current theological reasonings. More unreservedly than Duns, he interdicts the testing of theology by reason: and goes beyond him in restricting the sphere of rationally demonstrable truth, denying, for instance, that reason can demonstrate God’s unity, infinity, or even existence. Unlike Duns, he would not attempt to erect a quasi-scientific theology, in the place of the systems he rejects. To make up for this negative result, Occam asserted the verity of Scripture unqualifiedly, as Duns also did. With Occam, Scripture, revelation, is absolutely infallible, neither requiring nor admitting the proofs of reason. To be sure he co-ordinates with it the Law of Nature, which God has implanted in our minds. But otherwise theology, faith, stands alone, very isolated, although on the alleged most certain of foundations. The provinces of science and faith are different. Faith’s assent is not required for what is known through evidence; science does not depend on faith. Nor does faith or theology depend on scientia. And since, without faith, no one can assent to those verities which are to be believed (veritatibus credibilibus), there is no scientia proprie dicta respecting them. So the breach in the old scholastic, Thomist, unity was made utter and irreparable. Theology stands on the surest of bases, but isolated, unsupported; philosophy, all human knowledge, extends[Pg 520] around and below it, and is discredited because irrelevant to highest truth.

Thus far as to Occam’s loyal and rebellious succession to the theology of Duns. In philosophy, it was much the same. He accepted his critical methods, but would not follow him in his constructive metaphysics. Although the older man was pre-eminently a metaphysician, the critical side of his intellect drew empiric processes within the sweep of its energies. Occam, unconvinced of the correspondence between the logic of concepts and the facts of the external world, seeks to limit the principles of the former to the processes of the mind. Accordingly, he rejects the inferences of the Scotian dialectic which project themselves outward, as proofs of the objective existence of abstract or general ideas. It is thus from a more thoroughgoing application of the Scotian analysis of mental processes, and a more thoroughgoing testing of the evidence furnished by experience, that Occam refuses to recognise the existence of universals save in the mind, where evidently they are necessary elements of thinking. Manifestly, he is striving very earnestly not to go beyond the evidence; and he is also striving to eliminate all unevidenced and unnecessary elements, and those chimeras of the mind, which become actual untruths when posited as realities of the outer world.

Such were the motives of Occam’s far from simple theory of cognition. In it, mental perceptions, or cognitions, were regarded as symbols (signa, termini) of the objects represented by them. They are natural, as contrasted with the artificial symbols of speech and writing. They fall into three classes; first, sense-perception of the concrete object, and thirdly, so to speak, the abstract concept representative of many objects, or of some ideal figment or quality. Intermediate between the two, Occam puts notitia intuitiva, which relates to the existence of concrete things. It serves as a basis for the cognition of their combinations and relationships, and forms a necessary antecedent to abstract knowledge. Notitia abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam.[667] Occam holds that notitia intuitiva presents the concrete thing as it exists. Otherwise with abstract or general concepts. They[Pg 521] are signa of mental presentations, or processes; and there is no ground for transferring them to the world of outer realities. Their existence is confined to the mind, where they are formed from the common elements of other signa, especially those of our notitia intuitiva. “And so,” says Occam, “the genus is not common to many things through any sameness in them, but through the common nature (communitatem) of the signum, by which the same signum is common to many things signified.”[668] These universals furnish predicates for our judgments, since through them we conceive of realities as containing a common element of nature. They are not mere words; but have a real existence in the mind, where they perform functions essential to thinking. Indirectly, through their bases of notitiae intuitivae, they even reflect outer realities. “The Universal is no mere figment, to which there is no correspondence of anything like it (cui non correspondet aliquod consimile) in objective being, as that is figured in the thinker.”

It results from the foregoing argument, that science, ordered knowledge, which seeks co-ordination and unity, has not to do with things; but with propositions, its object being that which is known, rather than that which is. Things are singular, while science treats of general ideas, which are only in the mind. “It should be understood, that any science, whether realis or rationalis, is only concerned with propositions (propositionibus); because propositions alone are known.”[669]

It was not so very great a leap from the realism of Duns, which ascribed a certain objective existence to general ideas, to the nominalism, or rather conceptualism, of Occam, which denied it, yet recognised the real existence and necessary functions of universals, in the mind. The metaphysically proved realities of Duns were rather spectral, and Occam’s universals, subjective though they were, lived a real and active life. One feels that the realities of Duns’s metaphysics scarcely extended beyond the thinker’s mind. In[Pg 522] many respects Occam’s philosophy was a strenuous carrying out of Duns’s teachings; and when it was not, we see the younger man pushed, or rather repelled, to the positions which he took, by the unsatisfying metaphysics of his teacher. History shows other rebounds of thought, which seem abrupt, and yet were consequential in the same dual way that Occam’s doctrine followed that of Duns. Out of the Brahmin Absolute came the Buddhist wheel of change; even as Parmenides was followed hard by Heraclitus. And how often Atheism steps on Pantheism’s heels!

Thus, developing, revising, and changing, Occam carried out the work of Duns, and promulgated a theory of knowledge which pointed on to much later phases of thinking. In his school he came to be called venerabilis inceptor, a proper title for the man who shook loose from so much previous thought, and became the source of so many novel views. He had, indeed, little fear of novelty. “Novelties (novitates) are not altogether to be rejected; but as what is old (vetusta), on becoming burdensome, should be abolished, so novelties when, to the sound judgment, they are useful, fruitful, necessary, expedient, are the more boldly to be embraced.”[670]

It is not, however, as the inceptor of new philosophies or of novel views on the relations between State and Papacy that we are viewing Occam here at the close of this long presentation of the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But rather as the man who represented the ways in which the old was breaking up, and embodied the thoughts rending the scholastic system; who even was a factor in the palpable decadence of scholastic thinking that had set in before his eyes were closed. For from him came a new impulse to a renewed overstudy of formal logic—with Thomas, for example, logic had but filled its proper rôle. Withdrawing from metaphysics the matter pertaining to the problem of universals and much more besides, Occam transferred the same to logic, which he called omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum.[671] This reinstatement of logic as the instrument and means of all knowledge was to be the perdition of emptier-minded men,[Pg 523] who felt no difference between philosophy and the war of words. And in this respect at least the decadence of scholasticism took its inception from this bold and virile mind which had small reverence for popes or for the idols of the schools. We shall not follow the lines of this decay, but simply notice where they start.

In the growth and decline of thought, things so go hand in hand that it is hard to say what draws and what is drawn. In the scholastic decadence, the preposterous use of logic was a palpable element. Yet was it cause or effect? Obviously both. Scholasticism was losing its grasp of life; and the universities in the fourteenth century were crowded with men whose minds mistook words for thoughts; and because of this they gave themselves to hypertrophic logic. On the other hand, this windy study promoted the increasing emptiness of philosophy.

Likewise, as cause and effect, inextricably bound together, the other factors work, and are worked upon. The number of universities increases; professors and students multiply; but there is an awful dearth of thinkers among them. There ceases even to be a thorough knowledge of the scholastic systems; men study from compendia; and thereby remain most deeply ignorant, and unfecundated by the thoughts of their forbears. Cause and effect again! We can hardly blame them, when tomes and encyclopaedias were being heaped mountain high, with life crushed beneath the monstrous pile, or escaping from it. But whether cause or effect, the energies of study slackened, and even rotted, both at the universities and generally among the members of the two Student Orders, from whom had come the last creators—and perhaps destroyers—of scholasticism.

Next: the language of philosophy deteriorated, becoming turbid with the barbarisms of hair-splitting technicalities. Likewise the method of presentation lost coherence and clarity. All of which was the result of academic decadence, and promoted it.

So decay worked on within the system, each failing element being both effect and cause, in a general subsidence of merit. There were also causes, as it were, from without; which possibly were likewise effects of this scholastic decay[Pg 524] As the life of the world once had gone out of paganism, and put on the new vigour of Christianity, so the life of the world was now forsaking scholasticism, and deriding, shall we say, the womb it had escaped from. Was the embryo ripe, that the womb had become its mephitic prison? At all events, the fourteenth century brought forth, and the next was filled with, these men who called the readers of Duns Scotus Dunces—and the word still lives. Men had new thoughts; the power of the popes was shattered, and within the Church, popes and councils fought for supremacy; there was no longer any actual unity of the Church to preserve the unity of thought; Wicliffe had risen; Huss and Luther were close to the horizon; a new science of observation was also stirring, and a new humanism was abroad. The life of men had not lessened nor their energies and powers of thought. Yet life and power no longer pulsed and wrought within the old forms; but had gone out from them, and disdainfully were flouting the emptied husks.

 

 

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[Pg 525]

CHAPTER XLIII

THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS: DANTE

It lies before us to draw the lines of mediaeval development together. We have been considering the Middle Ages very largely, endeavouring to fix in mind the more interesting of their intellectual and emotional phenomena. We have found throughout a certain spiritual homogeneity; but have also seen that the mediaeval period of western Europe is not to be forced to a fictitious unity of intellectual and emotional quality—contradicted by a disparity of traits and interests existing then as now. Yet just as certain ways of discerning facts and estimating their importance distinguish our own time, making it an “age” or epoch, so in spite of diversity and conflict, the same was true of the mediaeval period. From the ninth to the fourteenth century, inter-related processes of thought, beliefs, and standards prevailed and imparted a spiritual colour to the time. While not affecting all men equally, these spiritual habits tended to dominate the minds and tempers of those men who were the arbiters of opinion, for example, the church dignitaries, or the theologian-philosophers. Men who thought effectively, or upon whom it fell to decide for others, or to construct or imagine for them, such, whether pleasure-loving, secularly ambitious, or immersed in contemplation of the life beyond the grave, accepted certain beliefs, recognized certain authoritatively prescribed ideals of conduct and well-being, and did not reject the processes of proof supporting them.

The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and[Pg 526] temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. As waves of barbarism washed over the somewhat decadent society of Italy and her Latin daughters, we saw a new ignorance setting a final seal upon the inability of these epigoni to emulate bygone achievements. Plainly there was need of effort to rescue the disjecta membra of the antique and Christian heritages. The wreckers were famous men, young Boëthius, old Cassiodorus, the great pope Gregory, and princely Isidore. For their own people they were gatherers and conservers; but they proved veritable transmitters for Franks, Anglo-Saxons and Germans, who were made acquainted with Christianity and Latinity between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the period in the course of which the Merovingian kingdoms were superseded by the Carolingian Empire.

With the Carolingian period the Middles Ages unquestionably are upon us. The factors and material of mediaeval development, howsoever they have come into conjunction, are found in interplay. It was for the mediaeval peoples, now in presence of their spiritual fortunes, to grow and draw from life. Their task, as has appeared from many points of view, was to master the Christian and antique material, and change its substance into personal faculty. Under different guises this task was for all, whether living in Italy or dwelling where the antique had weaker root or had been newly introduced.

This Carolingian time of so much sheer introduction to the teaching of the past presented little intellectual discrimination. That would come very gradually, when men had mastered their lesson and could set themselves to further study of the parts suited to their taste. Nevertheless, there was even in the Carolingian period another sort of discrimination, towards which men’s consciences were drawn by the contrast between their antique and Christian[Pg 527] heritages, and because the latter held a criterion of selection and rejection, touching all the elements of human life.

Whoever reflects upon his life and its compass of thought, of inclination, of passion, action, and capacity for happiness or desolation, is likely to consider how he may best harmonize its elements. He will have to choose and reject; and within him may arise a conflict which he must bring to reconcilement if he will have peace. He may need to sacrifice certain of his impulses or even rational desires. As with a thoughtful individual, so with thoughtful people of an epoch, among whom like standards of discrimination may be found prevailing. The ninth century received, with patristic Christianity, a standard of selection and rejection. In conformity with it, men, century after century, were to make their choice, and try to bring their lives to a discriminating unity and certain peace. Yet in every mediaeval century the soul’s peace was broken in ways demanding other modes of reconcilement.

What profiteth a man to gain the world and lose his eternal life? Here was the Gospel basis of the matter. And, following their conception of Christ’s teaching, the Fathers of the Church elaborated and defined the conditions of attainment of eternal life with God, which was salvation. This was man’s whole good, embracing every valid and righteous element of life. Thus it had been with Christ; thus it was with Augustine; thus it was with Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great; only in Benedict and Gregory the salvation which represented the true and uncorrupt life of man on earth, as well as the assured preparation for eternal life with God, had shrunken from the universality of Christ, and even from the fulness of desire with which Augustine sought to know God and the soul. In these later men the conception of salvation had contracted through ascetic exclusion and barbaric fear.

Yet with Benedict and Gregory, in whom there was much constructive sanity, and indeed with all men who were not maniacally constrained, there was recognition that salvation was of the mind as well as through faith and love, or abhorrent fear. It is necessary to know the truth; and surely it is absolutely good to desire to know the truth forever,[Pg 528] without the cumbrances of fleshly mortality. This desire is a true part of everlasting life. Through it Origen, Hilary of Poictiers, Augustine largely, and after them the great scholastics with Dante at their close, achieved salvation.

But why should one desire to know the truth utterly and forever, were not the truth desirable, lovable? Naturally one loves that which through desire and effort one has come to know. Love is required and also faith by him who will have and know the salvation which is eternal life; the emotions must take active part. Yet salvation comes not through the unguided sense-desiderative nature. It is for reason to direct passionate desire, and raise it to desire rationally approved, which is volition.

Thus salvation not only requires the action of the whole man, but is in and of his entire nature. It presents a unity primarily because of its agreement with the will of God, and then because of its unqualified and universal insistence that it, salvation, life eternal, be set absolutely first in man’s endeavour. What indeed could be more irrational, and more loveless and faithless, than that any desire should prevail over the entire good of man and the will of God as well? Oneness and peace consist in singleness of purpose and endeavour for salvation. Herein lies the standard of conduct and of discrimination as touching every element of mortal life.

With mediaeval men, the application of the criterion of salvation depended on how the will of God for man, and man’s accordant conduct, was conceived. What kind of conduct, what elements of the intellectual and emotional life were proper for the Kingdom of Heaven? What matters barred the way, or were unfit for the eternal spiritual state? The history of Christian thought lies within these queries. An authoritative consensus of opinion was represented by the Church at large, holding from century to century a juste milieu of doctrine, by no means lax and yet not going to ascetic extremes. Seemingly the Church maintained varying standards of conduct for different orders of men. Yet in truth it was applying one standard according to the responsibilities of individuals and their vows.

The Church (meaning, for our purpose, the authoritative[Pg 529] consensus of mediaeval ecclesiastical or religious approvals) always upheld as the ideal of perfect living the religious life, led under the sanction and guidance of some recognized monastic regula. So lived monks and nuns, and in more extreme or sporadic instances, anchorites and reclusae. The main peril of this strait and narrow path was its forsaking, the breaking of its vows. Less austerely guarded and exposed to further dangers were the secular clergy, living in the world, occupied with the care of lay souls, and with other cares that hardly touched salvation. The world avowedly, the flesh in reality, and the devil in all probability, beset the souls of bishops and other clergy. In view of their exposed positions “in the world,” a less austerely ascetic life was expected of the seculars, whose lapses from absolute holiness God might—or perhaps might not—condone.

Around, and for the most part below, regulars and seculars were the laity of both sexes, of all ages, positions, and degrees of instruction or ignorance. They had taken no vows of utter devotion to God’s service, and were expected to marry, beget children, fight and barter, and fend for themselves amid the temptations and exigencies of affairs. Well for them indeed if they could live in communion with the Church, and die repentant and absolved, eligible for purgatory.

For all these kinds of men and women like virtues were prescribed, although their fulfilment was looked for with varying degrees of expectation. For instance, the distinctly theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially the first, could not be completely attained by the ignorance and imperfect consecration of laymen. The vices, likewise, were the same for all, pride, anger, hypocrisy, and the rest; only with married people a venial unchastity was sacramentally declared not to constitute mortal sin. For this one case, human weakness, also mankind’s necessity, was recognized; while, in practice, the Church, through its boundless opportunities for penitence and absolution, mercifully condoned all delinquency save obstinate pride, impenitence, and disbelief.

These were the bare poles ethical of the orthodox mediaeval Christian scheme. How as to its intellectual and[Pg 530] emotional inclusiveness? The many-phased interest of the mind, i.e. the desire to know, was in principle accepted, but with the condition that the ultimate end of knowledge should be the attainment of salvation. It was stated and re-emphasized by well-nigh every type of mediaeval thinker, that Theology was the queen of sciences, and her service alone justified her handmaids. All knowledge should make for the knowledge of God, and enlarge the soul’s relationship to its Creator and Judge. “He that is not with me is against me.” Knowledge which does not aid man to know his God and save his soul, all intellectual pursuits which are not loyal to this end, minister to the obstinacy and vainglory of man, stiff-necked, disobedient, unsubmissive to the will of God. Knowledge is justified or condemned according to its ultimate purpose. Likewise every deed, business, occupation, which can fill out the active life of man. As they make for Christ and salvation, the functions of ruler, warrior, lawyer, artisan, priest, are justified and blessed—or the reverse.

But how as to the appetites and the emotions? How as to love, between the sexes, parent and child, among friends? The standard of discrimination is still the same, though its application vary. Appetite for food, if unrestrained, is gluttony; it must be held from hindering the great end. One must guard against love’s obsession, against sense-passion, which is so forgetful of the ultimate good: concupiscence is sinful. Through bodily begetting, the taint of original sin is transmitted; and in all carnal desire, though sanctioned by the marriage sacrament, is lust and spiritual forgetfulness. When in fornication and adultery its acts contravene God’s law, they are mortal sins which will, if unabsolved, cast the sinner into hell.

Few men in the Middle Ages were insensible to their future lot, and therefore the criterion of salvation unto eternal life would rarely be rejected. But often there was conflict within the soul before it acquiesced in what it felt compelled to recognize; and sometimes there was clear revolt against current convictions, or practical insistence that a larger volume of the elements of human nature were fit for life eternal.

[Pg 531]Conflict before acquiescence had agitated the natures of sainted Fathers of the Church, who marked out the path to salvation which the Middle Ages were to tread. One thinks at once of Jerome’s never-forgotten dream of exclusion from Paradise because of too great delight in classic reading. Another phase was Augustine’s, set forth somewhat retrospectively in his Confessions. Therein, as would seem, the drawings of the flesh were most importunate. Yet not without sighs and waverings did the mind of Augustine settle to its purpose of knowing only God and the soul. At all events the chafings of mortal curiosity, the promptings of cultivated taste, and the cravings of the flesh, were the moving forces of the Psychomachia which passed with Patristic Christianity to the Middle Ages. Thousands upon thousands of ardent souls were to experience this conflict before convincing themselves that classic studies should be followed only as they led heavenward, and that carnal love was an evil thing which, even when sacramentally sanctioned, might deflect the soul.

The revolt against the authoritatively accepted standard declared itself along the same lines of conflict, but did not end in acquiescence and renunciation. It contended rather for a peace and reconcilement which should include much that was looked upon askance. It was not always violent, and might be dumb to the verge of unconsciousness, merely a tacit departure from standards more universally recognized than followed.

There were countless instances of this silent departure from the standard of salvation. With cultivated men, it realized itself in classical studies, as with Hildebert of Le Mans or John of Salisbury. It does not appear that either of them experienced qualms of conscience or suffered rebuke from their brethren. No more did Gerbert, an earlier instance of catholic interest in profane knowledge, though legends of questionable practices were to encircle his fame.

Other men pursued knowledge, rational or physical, in such a way as to rouse hostile attention to its irrelevancy or repugnancy to saving faith, and this even in spite of formal demonstration by the investigator—Roger Bacon is in our mind—of the advantage of his researches to the[Pg 532] Queen Theology. Bacon might not have been so suspect to his brethren, and his demonstration of the theological serviceableness of natural knowledge would have passed, had he not put forth bristling manifestos denouncing the blind acceptance of custom and authority. Moreover, the obvious tendencies of methods of investigation advocated by him countered methods of faith; for the mediaeval and patristic conception of salvation, whatever collateral supports it might find in reason, was founded on the authority of revelation.

Indeed it was the lifting up of the standard of rational investigation which distinguished the veritable revolt from those preliminary inner conflicts which often strengthened final acquiescence. And it was the obstinate elevation of one’s individual wisdom (as it appeared to the orthodox) that separated the accredited supporters of the Church among theologians and philosophers, from those who were suspect. We mark the line of the latter reaching back through Abaelard to Eriugena. Such men, although possibly narrower in their intellectual interests than some who more surely abode within the Church’s pale, may be held as broader in principle. For inasmuch as they tended to set reason above authority, it would seem that there was no bound to their pursuit of rational knowledge, wherewith to expand and fortify their reason.

But if the intellectual side of man pressed upon the absolutism of the standard of salvation, more belligerent was the insistency of love—not of the Crucified. To the Church’s disparagement of the flesh, love made answer openly, not slinking behind hedges or closed doors, nor even sheltering itself within wedlock’s lawfulness. It, love, without regard to priestly sanction, proclaimed itself a counter-principle of worth. The love of man for woman was to be an inspiration to high deeds and noble living as well as a source of ennobling power. It presented an ideal for knights and poets. It could confer no immortality on lovers save that of undying fame: but it promised the highest happiness and worth in mortal life. If only knights and ladies might not have grown old, the supremacy of love and its emprize would have been impregnable. But age[Pg 533] must come, and the ghastly mediaeval fear of death was like to drive lover and mistress at the last within some convent refuge. Fear brought compunction and perhaps its tears. Renunciation of the joy of life seemed a fit penance to disarm the Judge’s wrath. So at the end of life the ideal of love was prone to make surrender to salvation. Asceticism even enters its literature, as with the monkish Galahad. There was, however, another way of reconcilement between the carnal and the spiritual, the secular and the eternal, by which the secular and carnal were transformed to symbols of the spiritual and eternal—the way of the Vita nuova and the Divina Commedia, as we shall see.

So in spite of conflicts or silent treasons within the natures of many who fought beneath the Christian banner, in spite of open mutinies of the mind and declared revolts of the heart, salvation remained the triumphant standard of discrimination by which the elements of mediaeval life were to be esteemed or rejected. What then were these elements to which this standard, or deflections from it, should apply? How specify their mediaeval guise and character? It would be possible to pass in review synoptically the contents of this work. We might return, and then once more travel hitherward over the mediaeval path, the many paths and byways of mediaeval life. We might follow and again see applied—or unapplied—these standards of discrimination, salvation over all, and the deviations of pretended acquiescence or subconscious departure. We might perhaps make one final attempt to draw the currents of mediaeval life together, or observe the angles of their divergence, and note once more the disparity of taste and interest making so motley the mediaeval picture. But this has been done so excellently, in colours of life, and presented in the person of a man in whom mediaeval thought and feeling were whole, organic, living—an achievement by the Artist moving the antecedent scheme of things which made this man Dante what he was. We shall find in him the conflict, the silent departures, and the reconcilement at last of recalcitrant elements brought within salvation as the standard of universal discrimination. Dante accomplishes this reconcilement in personal yet full mediaeval[Pg 534] manner by transmuting the material to the spiritual, the mortal to the eternal, through the instrumentality of symbolism. He is not merely mediaeval; he is the end of the mediaeval development and the proper issue of the mediaeval genius.

Yes, there is unity throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof. For the elements of mediaeval growth combine in him, demonstrating their congruity by working together in the stature of the full-grown mediaeval man. When the contents of patristic Christianity and the surviving antique culture had been conceived anew, and had been felt as well, and novel forms of sentiment evolved, at last comes Dante to possess the whole, to think it, feel it, visualize its sum, and make of it a poem. He had mastered the field of mediaeval knowledge, diligently cultivating parts of it, like the Graeco-Arabian astronomy; he thought and reasoned in the terms and assumptions of scholastic (chiefly Thomist-Aristotelian) philosophy; his intellectual interests were mediaeval; he felt the mediaeval reverence for the past, being impassioned with the ancient greatness of Rome and the lineage of virtue and authority moving from it to him and thirteenth-century Italy and the already shattered Holy Roman Empire. He took earnest joy in the Latin Classics, approaching them from mediaeval points of view, accepting their contents uncritically. He was affected with the preciosity of courtly or chivalric love, which Italy had made her own along with the songs of the Troubadours and the poetry of northern France. His emotions flowed in channels of current convention, save that they overfilled them; this was true as to his early love, and true as to his final range of religious and poetic feeling. His was the emotion and the cruelty of mediaeval religious conviction; while in his mind (so worked the genius of symbolism) every fact’s apparent meaning was clothed with the significance of other modes of truth.

Dante was also an Italian of the period in which he lived; and he was a marvellous poet. One may note in him what was mediaeval, what was specifically Italian, and what, apparently, was personal. This scholar could not[Pg 535] but draw his education, his views of life and death, his dominant inclinations and the large currents of his purpose, from the antecedent mediaeval period and the still greater past which had worked upon it so mightily. His Italian nature and environment gave point and piquancy and very concrete life to these mediaeval elements; and his personal genius produced from it all a supreme poetic creation.

The Italian part of Dante comes between the mediaeval and the personal, as species comes between the genus and the individual. The tremendous feeling which he discloses for the Roman past seems, in him, specifically Italian: child of Italy, he holds himself a Latin and a direct heir of the Republic. Yet often his attitude toward the antique will be that of mediaeval men in general, as in his disposition to accept ancient myth for fact; while his own genius appears in his beautifully apt appropriation of the Virgilian incident or image; wherein he excels his “Mantuan” master, whose borrowings from Homer were not always felicitous. Frequently the specifically Italian in Dante, his yearning hate of Florence, for example, may scarcely be distinguished from his personal temper; but its civic bitterness is different from the feudal animosities or promiscuous rages which were more generically mediaeval. As a lighter example, there are three lines in the fourth canto of the Purgatorio which do not reflect the Middle Ages, nor yet pertain to Dante’s character, but are, we feel, Italian. They are these: “Thither we drew; and there were persons who were staying in the shadow behind the rock, as one through indolence sets himself to stay.”

Again, Dante’s arguments in the De monarchia[672] seem to be those of an Italian Ghibelline. Yet beyond his intense realization of Italy’s direct succession to the Roman past, his reasoning is scholastic and mediaeval, or springs occasionally from his own reflections. The Italian contribution to the book tends to coalesce either with the general or the personal elements. Dante argues that the rewards or fruits of virtue belonged to the Roman people because of the[Pg 536] pre-eminent virtue, high lineage, and royal marriage-connections, of their ancestor Aeneas.[673] Here, of course, the statements of Virgil are accepted literally, and one notes that while the argument is mediaeval in its absurdity, it will be made Italian in its application. Likewise his further arguments making for the same conclusion, however Italianized in their pointing, are mediaeval, or patristic, in their provenance: for example, that the Roman Empire was divinely helped by miracles; that the divine arbitrament decided the world-struggle or duellum in its favour; and that Christ was born and suffered legally to redeem mankind under the Empire’s authority and jurisdiction.[674] Moreover, in refuting the very mediaeval papal arguments from “the keys,” from “the two swords,” and from the analogy of the sun and moon, Dante himself reasons scholastically.[675]

The De vulgari eloquentia illustrates the difference between Dante accepting and reproducing mediaeval views, and Dante thinking for himself. In opening he speaks of mixing the stronger potions of others with the water of his own talent, to make a beverage of sweetest hydromel—we have heard such phrases before! Then the first chapters give the current ideas touching the nature and origin of speech, and describe the confusion of language at the building of Babel: each group of workmen engaged in the same sort of work found themselves speaking a new tongue understood only by themselves; while the sacred Hebrew speech endured with that seed of Shem who had taken no part in the impious construction. After this foolishness, the eighth chapter of Book I. becomes startlingly intelligent as Dante discusses the contemporary Romance tongues of Europe and takes up the idioma which uses the particle si. Out of its many dialects he detaches his thought of a volgare, a mother tongue, which shall be the illustrious, noble, and courtly speech in Latium, and shall seem to be of every Latian city and yet of none, and afford a standard by which the speech of each city may be criticized. The mediaeval period offers no such penetrating linguistic observation; and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, as in the[Pg 537] Convito, Dante is deeply conscious of the worth of the Romance vernacular.

Written in the volgare, the style of the latter nondescript work bears curious likeness to scientific Latin writing. The Latin scholastic thought shows plainly through this involved and scholastic volgare, while the scholastic substance is rendered in a scarcely altered medium. The Convito is indeed a curious work which one need not lament that Dante did not carry out to its mediaeval interminableness in fourteen books. The four that he wrote suffice to show its futility and apparent confusion in conception and form. Besides incidentally explaining the thought of the idyllic Vita nuova, it professed to be a commentary upon fourteen of Dante’s canzone, the meaning of which had been misunderstood. Indeed they had been suspected of disclosing a passion bearing a morganatic relationship to the love of Beatrice. Truly understood they referred to that love which is the love of knowledge, philosophy to wit; and their commentary should expound that, and might properly set forth the contents of the Seven Liberal Arts and the higher divine reaches of knowledge. The Convito seems also to mark a stage in Dante’s life: the time perhaps when he turned, or imagined himself as turning, to philosophy for consolation in youthful grief, or the time perhaps when his nature looked coldly upon its early faith and sought to stay itself with rational knowledge. The book might thus seem a De consolatione philosophiae, after the temper, if not the manner, of Boëthius’ work, which then was much in Dante’s mind. Yet it was to be a setting forth of knowledge for the ignorant, a sort of Summa contra Gentiles, as is hinted in the last completed chapter. These three purposes fall in with the fact that the work was apparently the expression of Dante’s intellectual nature, and of his spiritual condition between the experience of the Vita nuova and the time or state of the Commedia.[676]

Certainly the Convito gives evidence touching the writer’s mental processes and the interests of his mind. Except for its lofty advocacy of the volgare and its personal apologetic[Pg 538] references, it contains little that is not blankly mediaeval. And had it kept on to its completion, so as to have become no torso, but a full Summa or Tesoro of liberal knowledge, its whimsical form as a commentary upon canzone would have made it one of the most bizarre of mediaeval compositions. One should not take this most repellent of Dante’s writings as an adequate expression of the intellectual side of his nature; though a significant phrase may be drawn from it: “Philosophy is a loving use of wisdom (uno amoroso uso di sapienza) which chiefly is in God, since in Him is utmost wisdom, utmost love, and utmost actuality.”[677] A loving use of wisdom—with Dante the pursuit of knowledge was no mere intellectual search, but a pilgrimage of the whole nature, loving heart as well as knowing mind, and the working virtues too. This pilgrimage is set forth in the Commedia, perhaps the supreme creation of the Middle Ages, and a work that by reason of the beautiful affinity of its speech with Latin,[678] exquisitely expressed the matters which in Latin had been coming to formulation through the mediaeval centuries.

The Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is a Summa, a Summa salvationis, a sum of saving knowledge. It is such just as surely as the final work of Aquinas is a Summa theologiae. But Aquinas was the supreme mediaeval theologian-philosopher, while Dante was the supreme theologian-poet; and with both Aquinas and Dante, theology includes the knowledge of all things, but chiefly of man in relation to God. Such was the matter of the divina scientia of Thomas, and such was the subject of the Commedia, which was soon recognized as the Divina Commedia in the very sense in which Theology was the divine science. The Summa of Thomas was scientia not only in substance, but in form; the Commedia was scientia, or sapientia, in substance, while in form it was a poem, the epic of man the pilgrim of salvation. In every sense, Aristotelian and otherwise, it was a work of art; and herein if we cannot compare it with a Summa, we may certainly liken it to a Cathedral, which also was a work of art and a Summa salvationis wrought in stone. For a[Pg 539] Cathedral—it is the great French type we have in mind—was a Summa of saving knowledge, as well as a place for saving acts. And presenting the substance of knowledge in the forms of art, very true art, the matter of which had long been pondered on and loved or hated, the Cathedral in its feeling and beauty, as well as in the order of its manifested thought, was a Commedia; for it too was a poem with a happy ending, at least for those who should be saved.

The Cathedral had grown from dumb barrel-vaulted Romanesque to Gothic, speaking in all the terms of sculpture and painted glass. It grew out of its antecedents. The Commedia rested upon the entire evolution of the Middle Ages. Therein had lain its spiritual preparation. To be sure it had its casual forerunners (precursori): narratives, real or feigned, of men faring to the regions of the dead.[679] But these signified little; for everywhere thoughts of the other life pressed upon men’s minds: fear of it blanched their hearts; its heavenly or hellish messengers had been seen, and not a few men dreamed that they had walked within those gates and witnessed clanging horrors or purgatorial pain. Heaven they had more rarely visited.

Dante gave little attention to any so-called “forerunners,” save only two, Paul and Virgil. The former was a warrant for the poet’s reticence as to the manner of his ascent to Heaven;[680] the latter supplied much of his scheme of Hell. Yet there were one or two others possessed of some affinity of soul with the great Florentine, who perhaps knew nothing of them. One of these was Hildegard of Bingen, with her vision of the spirits in the cloud, and her pungent sights of the bitterness of the pains of hell.[681] Another sort of affinity is disclosed in the allegorical Anticlaudianus of Alanus de Insulis, in which Reason can take Prudentia just so far upon her heavenly journey, and then gives place to Theology, even as Virgil, symbol of rational wisdom, gives[Pg 540] place to Beatrice at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.[682] Dante might have drawn still more enlightenment from the De sacramentis of Hugo of St. Victor, in which the rational basis of the universal scheme of things is shown to lie in the principle of allegorical intendment. Yet one finds few traces of Hugo in Dante except through Hugo’s pupil, Richard, whose works he had read. That such apt forerunners should scarcely have affected him shows how he was taught and inspired, not by individuals, but by the entire Middle Ages.

One observes mediaeval characteristics in the Commedia raised to a higher power. The mediaeval period was marked by contrasts of quality and of conduct such as cannot be found in the antique or the modern age. And what other poem can vie with the Commedia in contrasts of the beautiful and the loathsome, the heavenly and the hellish, exquisite refinement of expression and lapses into the reverse,[683] love and hate, pity and cruelty, reverence and disdain? These contrasts not only are presented by the story; they evince themselves in the character of the author. Many scenes of the Inferno are loathsome:[684] Dante’s own words and conduct there may be cruel and hateful[685] or show tender pity; and every reader knows the poetic beauty which glorifies the Paradiso, renders lovely the Purgatorio, and ever and anon breaks through the gloom of Hell.

Another mediaeval quality, sublimated in Dante’s poem, is that of elaborate plan, intended symmetry of composition, the balance of one incident or subject against another.[686] And finally one observes the mediaeval inclusiveness which belongs to the scope and purpose of the Commedia as a Summa of salvation. Dante brings in everything that can illuminate and fill out his theme. Even as the Summa of St. Thomas, so the Commedia must present a whole doctrinal scheme of salvation, and leave no loopholes, loose ends, broken links of argument or explanation.

[Pg 541]The substance of the Commedia, practically its whole content of thought, opinion, sentiment, had source in the mediaeval store of antique culture and the partly affiliated, if not partly derivative, Latin Christianity. The mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and of the contents of ancient philosophy, is not to be so very sharply distinguished from the attitude of the fifteenth or sixteenth, nay, if one will, the eighteenth, century, when the Federalist in the young inchoately United States, and many an orator in the revolutionary assemblies of France, quoted Cicero and Plutarch as arbiters of civic expediency. Nevertheless, if we choose to recognize deference to ancient opinion, acceptance of antique myth and poetry as fact,[687] unbounded admiration for a shadowy and much distorted ancient world, as characterizing the mediaeval attitude toward whatever once belonged to Rome and Greece, then we must say that such also is Dante’s attitude, scholar as he was;[688] and that in his use of the Classics he differed from other mediaeval men only in so far as above them all he was a poet.

Lines of illustrative examples begin with the opening canto of the Inferno, where Dante addresses Virgil as famoso saggio, an appellative strictly corresponding with the current mediaeval view of the “Mantuan.” Mediaeval also is the grouping of the great poets who rise to meet Virgil, first Homer, then Orazio satiro, and Ovid and Lucan.[689] More[Pg 542] narrowly mediaeval, that is, pertaining particularly to the thirteenth century, is Dante’s profound reverence for the authority of Aristotle, il maestro di color che sanno.[690] It may be that the poet’s sense of the enormous, elect, importance of Aeneas,[691] and his putting Rhipeus, most righteous of the Trojans, as the fifth regal spirit in the Eagle’s eye,[692] belonged more especially to Dante as the Ghibelline author of the De monarchia. But generically mediaeval was his acceptance of antique myth for fact, a most curious instance of which is his referring to the consuming of Meleager with the consuming of the brand, to illustrate a point of physiological psychology.[693] Antique heroes, even monsters, seem as real to him as the people of Scripture and history. It is not, however, his mediaevalism, but his own greatness that enables him to lift his treatment of them to the level of their presentation in the Classics. Noble as an antique demigod is the damned Jason, silent and tearless, among the scourged;[694] and Ulysses is as great in the tale he tells from out the lambent flame as he was in the palace of Alcinoos, telling the tale which Dante never read.[695]

The poet, especially in the Purgatorio, constantly balances moral examples alternately drawn from pagan and sacred story. This propensity was quite mediaeval; for throughout the Middle Ages the antique authority was used to fortify or parallel the Christian argument. Yet herein, as always, Dante is Dante as well as a mediaeval man; and his moral examples, for the aid of souls who are purging themselves for Heaven, are interesting and curious enough. On the pavement of the first ledge of Purgatory, Lucifer is figured falling from Heaven and Briareus transfixed by the bolt of Jove; then Nimrod, Niobe, Saul, Arachne, Rehoboam, Eriphyle and Sennacherib, the Assyrians routed after Holophernes’ death, and Troy in ashes.[696] On the third ledge, as instances of gentle forgivingness, he sees in vision the Virgin Mary, and then appear Peisistratus (tyrant of Athens) refusing to avenge himself, and Stephen asking pardon for his slayers.[697] But the most wonderful instance of this[Pg 543] combining of the Christian and the antique, each at its height of feeling, occurs in the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio, where angels herald the appearance of Beatrice with the chant, Benedictus qui venis, and, as they scatter flowers, sing Manibus o date lilia plenis. This unison of the hail to Christ upon His sacrificial entry into Jerusalem and the Virgilian heartbreak over the young Marcellus, shows how Dante rose in his combinings, and how potent an element of his imagination was the antique.[698]

Of course the plan of Hell reflects the sixth Book of the Aeneid, and throughout the whole Commedia the Virgilian phrase rises aptly to the poet’s lips. “Thou wouldst that I renew the desperate grief which presses my heart even before I put it into words,” says Ugolino, nearly as Aeneas speaks to Dido.[699] And in the Paradiso the power of the Dantesque reminiscence rouses the reader, spiritually as it were, to emulate the glorious ones who passed to Colchos.[700] A more desperate passage was the lot of those who must drop from Acheron’s bank into Charon’s boat;—the whole scene here is quite reminiscent of Virgil. The simile:

is even beautified and made more pregnant with significance in Dante’s

On the other hand, the threefold attempt of Aeneas to embrace Anchises is stripped of its beautiful dream-simile in Dante’s use.[702] A lovelier bit of borrowing is that of the quick springing up again of the rush, the symbol of humility, l’umile pianta, with which the poet is girt before proceeding up the Mount of Purgatory.[703]

[Pg 544]With Dante the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters symbolized, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.[704] We may be jarred by the apostrophe:

But this is a kind of Christian-antique phrase by no means unexampled in mediaeval poetry. And we feel the poetic breadth and beauty of the invocation in which Apollo symbolizes or represents, exactly what we will not presume to say, but at all events some veritable spiritual power, as Minerva does, apparently, in another passage.[706] In such instances the antique image which beautifies the poem is transfigured to a Christian symbol, if it does not present actual truth.

Yet however universally Dante’s mind was solicited by the antique matter and his poet’s nature charmed, he was profoundly and mediaevally Christian. The Commedia is a mediaeval Christian poem. Its fabric, springing from the life of earth, enfolds the threefold quasi-other world of damned, of purging, and of finally purified, spirits. It is dramatic and doctrinal. Its drama of action and suffering, like the narratives of Scripture, offers literal fact, moral teaching, and allegorical or spiritual significance. The doctrinal contents are held partly within the poem’s dramatic action and partly in expositions which are not fused in the drama. Thus whatever else it is, the poem is a Summa of saving doctrine, which is driven home by illustrations of the sovereign good and abysmal ill coming to man under the providence of God. One may perhaps discern a twofold purpose in it, since the poet works out his own salvation and gives precepts and examples to aid others and help truth and righteousness on earth. The subject is man as[Pg 545] rewarded or punished eternally by God—says Dante in the letter to Can Grande. This subject could hardly be conceived as veritable, and still less could it be executed, by a poet who had no care for the effect of his poem upon men. Dante had such care. But whether he, who was first and always a poet, wrote the Commedia in order to lift others out of error to salvation, or even in order to work out his own salvation,—let him say who knows the mind of Dante. No divination, however, is required to trace the course of the saving teaching, which, whether dramatically exemplified or expounded in doctrinal statement, is embodied in the great poem; nor is it hard to note how Dante drew its substance from the mediaeval past.

The Inferno, which is the most dramatic and realistic, “Dantesque,” part of the Commedia, and replete with terrestrial interest, is doctrinally the least rich. Its doctrine chiefly lies in its scheme of punishment, or divine vengeance, for different sins. Herein Dante followed no set series like the seven deadly sins expiated in Purgatory. Neither the Church nor authoritative writers had laid out the plan of Hell. Dante had in mind Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, also Cicero’s De officiis,[707] and, structurally, Virgil. His scheme also was affected by his own character, situation, and aversions, and assuredly by the movement of its own composition. At the mouth of Hell the worthless nameless ones and the neutral angels receive their due. Then after the sad calm of the place of the unbaptized and the great blameless heathen, the veritable Hell begins, and the series of tortures unfold, the lightest being such as punish incontinence, while the most awful are reserved for those fraudulent ones who have betrayed a trust. Dante’s power of presenting the humanly loathsome does not let the progress of hellish torment fail in climax even to the end, where Brutus, Cassius, and Judas are crunched in the dripping mouths of Lucifer at the bottom of the lowest pit of Hell.

[Pg 546]The general idea of hell torments came to the poet from current beliefs and authoritative utterances, ranging from the “outer darkness” of the Gospel to the lurid oratory of St. Bernard. Dante’s thoughts were drawn generically from the stores of mediaeval convictions, approvals, and imaginings: they were given to him by his epoch. Of necessity—innocently, one may say—he made them into concrete realities because he was Dante. Terrifying phrases and crude ghastliness were raised through his dramatic power to living experiences. The reader goes through Hell, sees with his own eyes, hears with his own ears, and stifles in the choking air. Doubtless the narrative brought fear and contrition to the men of Dante’s time. But for us the disproportion of the vengeance to the crime, the outrage of everlasting torments for momentary, even impulsive sin, is shocking and preposterous.[708] The torments themselves present conditions which become unthinkable when we try to conceive them as enduring eternally. Human flesh, or implicated spirit could not last beneath them. And as for our impulses, there is many a tortured soul with whom we would keep company, for instance, with the excellent band of Sodomites—Priscian (!) Brunetto Latini, and those three Florentines whose “honoured names” the poet greets with reverence and affection.[709] One might even wish to make a third in the flame which enwraps Diomede and Ulysses. In fact, Dante’s dramatic genius has brought the mediaeval hell to a reductio ad absurdum, to our minds.

The poet is of it too. He can pity those who touch his pity. And how great he can be, how absolute. There is compacted in the story of Francesca all that can be thought or felt over unhappy love. Yet Dante never doubts the justice of the punishment he describes; sometimes he calmly or cruelly approves. Nel mio bel San Giovanni! How many thousands have quoted these detached words to show the poet’s love of his beautiful baptistery. But, in fact, he refers to the little cylindrical places where stood the[Pg 547] baptizing priests, in order to bring home to the reader the size of the holes in the burning rock from which protruded the quivering feet of Simoniacs![710] It appears that the souls of all the damned will suffer more when they shall again be joined to their bodies after the resurrection.[711]

The Inferno fully exemplifies the doctrinal statement obscurely set over the gate which shut out hope: moved by justice, the Trinity, “divine power, supreme wisdom, primal love, created me (Hell) to endure eternally.” Dante follows this current authoritative opinion, stated by Aquinas. Here one may repeat that Dante is the child of the Middle Ages, rather than a disciple of any single teacher. If he follows Aquinas more than any other scholastic, he follows Bonaventura also with breadth and balance. These two, however, were themselves final results of lines of previous development. Both were rational and also mystically contemplative, though the former quality predominates in Thomas and the latter in Bonaventura. And in Dante’s poem, at the end of the Paradiso, Theology, the rational apprehension of divine truth, gives place to contemplation’s loftier insight. Dante is kin to both these men; but when he thinks, more frequently he thinks like Thomas, and the intellectual realization of life is dominant with him. This was evident in the Convito; and that the intellectual vision constitutes the substance of the Commedia, becomes luminously apparent in the Paradiso.[712] It is even suggested at the gate of Hell, within which the wretched people will be seen, who have lost the good of the Intellect,[713] by which is meant knowledge of God.

The Purgatorio presents more saving doctrine than the cantica of damnation. Its Mount with the earthly paradise at the top, may have been his own, but might have been taken from the Venerable Bede or Albertus Magnus.[714] The ante-purgatory appears as a creation of the poet, influenced by certain passages of the Aeneid and by ancient disciplinary practices which kept the penitents waiting outside the[Pg 548] church.[715] The teaching of the whole cantica relates to the purgation of pride, envy, anger, accidia (sloth), avarice, gluttony, lust. These are the seven deadly sins whose provenance is early monasticism.[716] Through their purgation man is made pure and fit to mount to the stars.

We shall not follow Dante through the Purgatorio and Paradiso, or observe in detail the teachings set forth and the sources whence they were derived.[717] But a brief reference to the successive incidents and topics of instruction will show how the Commedia touches every key of saving doctrine. The soul entering Purgatory goes seeking liberty from sin,[718] and as a first lesson learns to detach itself from memories of the damned.[719] It receives some slight suggestion of the limits of human reason;[720] and is told that according to the correct teaching there is one soul in man with several faculties.[721] It learns the risk of repentance in the hour of death;[722] and the efficacy of the prayers of others to help souls through their purifying expiation; also, that, after death, souls can advance only by the aid of grace.[723] The symbolism of the gate of Purgatory teaches the need of contrition and confession. Upon the first ledge, the proud do penance, disciplined with examples of humility, and through the Lord’s Prayer are taught man’s entire dependence upon God. It is fitting that Pride should be the first sin expiated, since it lies at the base of all sins in the Christian scheme. Much doctrine is inculcated by the treatment of the different sins and the appositeness of the hymns sung by the penitents.[724]

Ascending the second ledge, Virgil, i.e. human reason, expounds the first principles of the doctrine of that love which is of the Good.[725] Next is set forth the theory of human free-will and the effect of the spheres in directing[Pg 549] human inclination—all in strict accord with the teaching of Thomas;[726] and then, still in accord with Thomas, the fuller nature of love (or desire) is expounded, and the allotment of purgatorial pains in expiation of the various modes of evil desire or failure to love aright.[727] These fitting pains are as a solace to the soul yearning to accomplish its purgation.[728] Next, generation is explained, the creation of the soul, and the manner of its existence after separation from the body, according to dominant scholastic theories.[729] In the concluding cantos of the Purgatorio, much Church doctrine is symbolically set forth by the Mystic Procession and the rivers of the earthly paradise, Lethe and Eunoe—the latter representing sacramental grace through which good works, killed by later sins, are made to live again.[730] The earthly paradise symbolizes the perfect happiness of life in the flesh, and the state wherein man is fit to pass to the heavenly Paradise.

Besides doctrine directly bearing on Salvation, the Commedia contains explanations by the way, needed to understand Dante’s journey through the earth and heavens, and give it verisimilitude. Apparently these explanations were also intended to afford a sufficient knowledge of the structure of the universe. The Paradiso abounds in this kind of information, largely physical and astronomical. Its first canto offers a general statement, beautifully put, of the ordering of created things. In this instance, the instruction is not exclusively astronomical or physical,[731] but touches upon animated creatures, and follows Thomist teaching. Another interesting instance is the explanation in the second canto of the spots on the moon and then of the influence of the heavens. Here the astronomical matter runs on into elucidations touching human nature, even that human nature which is to be saved through saving doctrine. In this way the Christian-Thomist-Dantesque scheme of knowledge holds together. The Commedia is the pilgrimage of the soul after[Pg 550] all wisdom, and includes, implicitly at least, the matter of the Convito.

The Paradiso contains the chief store of saving knowledge. It sets forth the ultimate problems of human life and divine salvation, with due emphasis laid upon the limitations of human understanding. Dante, conscious of the strenuousness of his high argument, warns off all but the chosen few.

A first point learned in the heavenly voyage is that no soul in Paradise desires aught save what it has; since such desire would contravene the will of God. Paradise is everywhere in Heaven, though the divine grace rains not upon all in one mode.[732] Beatified souls do not dwell in any particular star, though Plato seems to say so. Scripture condescends to figure the intelligible under the guise of sensible forms, as Plato may have done.[733] Broken vows and their reparation are now considered. Then the history of the Roman Eagle brings out the fact that Christ was crucified under Tiberius and His death avenged by Titus, which leads on to the explanation of the Fall and the Redemption, occupying the seventh canto. The next offers comment upon the divine goodness and the diversity of human lots; and shows how the bitter may rise from the sweet. With deep consistency the poet exclaims against the insensate toilsome reasonings through which mortals beat their wings downward, away from God.[734]

In canto thirteen the reader is enlightened regarding the wisdom of Adam, of Solomon, and of Christ; and then as to the existence of the beatified soul before and after it is clothed with the glorified body of the Resurrection.[735] Incidentally the justice of eternal punishment is adverted to.[736] The depth of the divine righteousness is next presented,[737] and its application to the heathen, with illustrations of God’s saving ways, in the instances of certain princes who loved righteousness, including Trajan and the Trojan Rhipeus.[738] The incomprehensibility of Predestination next receives attention.

Now intervenes the marvellous and illuminative beauty of canto twenty-three, preceding Dante’s declaration of his[Pg 551] creed, upon interrogatories from the apostles, Peter, James, and John. In this way he states the dogmatic fundamentals of the Christian Faith, and the substantiating rôles of philosophic argument and authority.[739] After this, the vision of the hierarchies of angels leads on to discourse upon their creation and nature, the immediate fall of those who fell, the exaltation of the steadfast with added grace, and the mode and measure of their knowledge. Thomas is followed in this scholastic argument.

With the vision of the Rose, rational theology gives place to mystic contemplation;[740] and further visions of the divine ordering precede the prayer to the Virgin, with which the last canto opens—that prayer so beautiful and so expressive of mediaeval thought and feeling as to the most kind and blessed Lady of Heaven. This prayer or hymn is made of phrases which the mediaeval mind and heart had been recasting and perfecting for centuries. It is almost a great cento, like the Dies Irae. After the Lady’s answering benediction, there comes to Dante, in grace, the final mystic vision of the Trinity, enfolding all existence—substance, accidents and their modes, bound with love in one volume. Supreme dogmatic truth is set forth, and the furthest strainings of reason are stilled in supersensual and super-rational vision, which satisfies all intellectual desire. This vision, vouchsafed through the Virgin’s grace, assures the pilgrim soul: the goal is reached alike of knowledge and salvation.

One may say that the Commedia begins and ends with the Virgin. It was she who sent Beatrice into the gates of Hell to move Virgil—meaning human reason—to go to Dante’s aid. The prayer which obtains her benediction, and the vision following, close the Paradiso. So the teaching of the poem ends in mediaeval strains. For the Virgin was the mediaeval goddess, beloved and universally adored, helpful in every way, and the chief aid in bringing man to Heaven. But no more with Dante than with other mediaeval men is she the end of worship and devotion. Her eyes are turned[Pg 552] on God. So are those of Beatrice, of Rachel, and of all the saints in Paradise. As for man on earth, he is viator, journeying on through discipline, in righteousness and beneficence, but above all in faith and hope and love of God, with his eyes of knowledge and desire set on God. God is the goal, even of the vita activa, which is also training and enlightenment. Loving his brother whom he hath seen, man may learn to love God—practising himself in love. Even Christ’s parable, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these,” rightly interpreted, implies that the end of human charity is God: the human charity is preparation, obedience, means of enlightenment. The brother for whom Christ died—that is he whom thou shalt love, and that is why thou shalt love him. In themselves human relationships are disciplinary, ancillary, as all the sciences are ancillary to Theology. Mediaeval religion is turned utterly toward God; the relationship of the soul to God is its whole matter. It is not humanitarian: not human, but divina scientia, fides, et amor, make mediaeval Christianity. Thus Dante’s doctrine is mediaeval. Toward God moves the desire of the viatores in Purgatory, though they still are incidentally mindful of earth’s memories. In Paradise the eyes of all the blessed are set on Him. Because of the divine love they may for a moment turn the eyes of their knowledge and desire to aid a fellow-creature; the occasion past, they fix them again on God: thus the Virgin, thus Bernard, thus Beatrice.

As a son of the Middle Ages, Dante was possessed with the spirit of symbolism. Allegory, with him, was not merely a way of expressing that which might transcend direct statement: it embodied a principle of truth. The universally accepted allegorical interpretation of Scripture justified the view that a deeper verity lay in allegorical significance than in literal meaning. This principle applied to other writings also. “Now since the literal sense [of the first canzone] is sufficiently explained, it is time to proceed to the allegorical and true interpretation.”[741]

[Pg 553]In the Vita Nuova and somewhat more lifelessly in the Convito, Dante explains that it is his way to invest his poetry with a secondary or allegorical sense. He proposes in the latter work to carry out the formal notion of the four kinds of meaning contained in profound writings—literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical.[742] He never holds himself, however, to the lines of any such obsession, but is content in practice with the literal and the broadly allegorical sense.[743] Even then the great Florentine occasionally can be jejune enough. The conception of the ten heavens figuring the Seven Liberal Arts along with metaphysics, ethics, and theology, as a plan of composition for the Convito,[744] was on a level with the structural symbolism of the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Capella. Yet the likening of Ethics to the primum mobile and Theology to the Empyrean has bearing on Dante’s, and the mediaeval, scheme of the sciences, among which Theology is chief.

Allegory moulds the structure and permeates the substance of the Commedia. For this Dante himself vouches in the famous dedicatory letter to Can Grande, where his thoughts may be heard creaking scholastically, as he describes the nature of his poem, and explains why he entitled it Commedia:

This is the positive statement emanating, in all probability, from the poet. Perhaps it is as well that he did not live to inaugurate the series of Commentaries upon his poem, which began within a few years of his death and show no signs of ceasing.[745] So it has been left to others to[Pg 554] determine the metes and bounds and special features of the Commedia’s allegorical intent. The task has proved hazardous, because Dante was such a great poet, so realistic in his visualizing and so masterful in forcing the different phases of his many-sided thoughts to combine in concrete creations. His drama is so living that one can hardly think it an allegory.

Evidently certain matters, like the Mystic Procession and its apocalyptic appurtenances in the last cantos of the Purgatorio, are sheer allegory. Such, while suited to suggest theological tenets, are formal and lifeless, a little like the hieratic allegorical mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, which were composed before Christian art had become imbued with Christian feeling.[746] Indeed, doffing for an instant one’s reverence for the great poet, one may say that from the point of view of art and life, Dante’s symbolism becomes jejune, or at least ceases to draw us, according as it becomes palpable allegory.[747]

Beyond such incidents one recognizes that the general course of the poem, its more pointed occurrences, together with its chief characters and the scenes amid which they move, have commonly both literal and allegorical meaning.[748] Usually it is wise not to press either side too rigorously. The poet’s mind worked in the clearly imagined setting and dramatic action of his poem, where fact and symbolism combined in that reality which is both art and life. Surely the Commedia was completed and rendered real and beautiful through many a touch and incident which had no allegorical intent. Even as in a French cathedral, the main sculptured and painted subjects have doctrinal, that is to[Pg 555] say, allegorical, significance, besides their literal truth; but there is also much lovely carving of scroll and flowered ornament and beast and bird, which beautifies the building.

For Dante’s purpose, to set out the state of disembodied spirits after death, allegory might prove prejudicial, because of the intensity of his artist’s vision. Much of the poem’s symbolism, especially in the Paradiso, belongs to that unavoidable imagery to which every one is driven when attempting to describe spiritual facts. Such symbolism, however, when constructed with the plastic power of a Dante, may become itself so convincing or compelling as to reduce the intended spiritual signification to the terms of its concrete embodiment in the symbol. In view of the carnality of most sin, one is not surprised to find the place of punishment a converging cavity within the earth. With Dante, as with Hildegard, the sights and torments of Hell are realistically given quite as of course. Perhaps Dante’s Mount of Purgatory begins to give us pause, and its corniced mise en scène tends to enflesh the idea of spirit and materialize its purgation. But the limiting effect of symbolism is most keenly felt in the Paradiso, notwithstanding the beauty of that cantica; for its very concrete symbolism seems sometimes to ensphere the intended truths of spirit in a sort of crystalline translucency. It is all a marvellously imagined description of the state of blessed souls. Yet in the final pure and glorious image of a white rose (candida rosa) the company of the glorified spirits is so visualized as to become, surely not theatrical, but as if assembled upon the rounding tiers of seats occupied by an audience.[749] There are topics in which the sheer ratiocination of Thomas is more completely spiritual than the poetic vision of Dante.

Dante’s most admirable symbolic creation was also his dearest reality—Beatrice. And while this being in which he has immortalized his fame and hers, is eminently the creation of his genius, the elements were drawn from the many-chambered mediaeval past. Some issued out of the vast matter of chivalric love, with its high heart of service and sense of its own worth, its science, its foolish and most wise reasoning, its preciosity of temper—Dante and his[Pg 556] literary friends were virtuosos in everything pertaining to its understanding.[750] This love was of the fine-reasoning mind. The first canzone of the Vita Nuova does not begin “Donne, che sentite amore,” but: “Donne, ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore.” Through that book love is what it never ceases to be with Dante, intelligenza:

The piangendo, the tears, have likewise part; without them love is not had or even understood. The enormous sense of love’s supreme worth—that too is in Dante. It had all been with the Troubadours of Provence, with Chrétien de Troies, and with the great Minnesingers, and had been reasoned on, appreciated, felt and wept over, by ladies and knights who listened to their poems. From France and Provence love and its reasonings had come to Italy even before Dante’s eyes had opened to it and other matters.

This was one strain that entered the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, of the Convito, of the Commedia. But Beatrice is something else: she is, or becomes, Theology, the God-given science of the divine and human. Long had Theologia (divina scientia) been a queen; and even before her, Philosophia, as with Boëthius, had been a queenly woman gowned with as full symbolical particularity as ever the Beatrice of Dante. Indeed from the time of the Psychomachia of Prudentius to the Roman de la Rose of De Lorris and De Meun, every human quality, and many an aspect of human circumstance, had been personified, for the most part under the forms of gracious or seductive women. Above all of these rose, sweet, gracious, and potent, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. It came as of course to Dante to symbolize his conception of divine wisdom in a woman’s form. The achievement of his genius was the transfusing combination of elements of courtly love, didactic allegory, and divina scientia, in a creature before whom the whole man Dante, heart and reason and religious faith, could stand and gaze and love and worship.

Beatrice was his and of him always; but with the visions[Pg 557] and experience of that mature and grace-illuminated manhood, which expressed itself in the Commedia, she comes to be much that she had not been when she lived on earth or had just left it, and Dante was a maker of exquisite verses in Florence; and much too that she had scarce become while the poet was consoling himself with philosophy for his bereavement and the dulling of his early faith. Beatrice lives and moves and has her ever more uplifted being as the reality as well as symbol of Dante’s thoughts of life. With all first love’s idealism, he loved a girl; then she, having passed from earth, becomes the inspiration and object of address of the young maker of sonnets and canzoni, who with such intellectual preciosity was intent on building these verses of fine-spun sentiment. Thereafter, when he is in darker mood, she does not altogether leave him, whatever variant attitudes his thought and temper take. And at last the yearning self-fulfilments of his renewed life draw together in the Beatrice of the Commedia.

It is very beautiful, and the growth, as well as work, of genius; but it is not strange. For there is no bound to the idealizing of the love which first transfuses a youth’s nature with a mortal golden flame, and awakens it to new understanding. Out of whatever of experience of life and joy and sorrow may come to the man, this first love may still vivify itself anew—often in dreams—and become again living and beautiful, in tears, and will awaken new perceptions and disclose further vistas of the intelligenza nuova which love never ceases to impart to him who has loved.

Dante’s mind was always turning from the obvious sense-actuality of the fact to its symbolism; which held the truer reality. With such a man it is not strange that the beloved and adored woman, the love of whom was virtue and enlightenment, should, when dead to earth, become that divine wisdom which opens Heaven to the lover who would follow, for all eternity, whither his beloved has so surely gone. No, it was not strange, but only as wonderful as all the works of God, that she who while living had been the spring of virtue of all kinds and meanings in the poet’s breast, should after death become the emblem, even the reality, of that whereby man is taught how to win his[Pg 558] heavenly salvation. Passage after passage in the Purgatorio and Paradiso show that Beatrice is this divina scientia, and yet has never ceased to be one whom the poet loves.[751]

Thus it is clear that mediaeval development converges at last in Dante. He, or his Commedia, might be the final Summa, were not he, or rather it, the final poem. Man and work include the emotions and the intellectual interests of the Middle Ages, embracing what had been known,—Physics, Astronomy, Politics, History, Pagan Mythology, Christian Theology,—all bent and moulded at last to the matter of the book. Not the contents of the Commedia is Dante’s own, but the poem itself—that is his creation.

Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power of its feeling had been preparing in the conceptions, even in the reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus had mediaeval thought become emotionalized and plastic and living in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante’s genius could not have fused the contents of mediaeval thought into a poem. How many passages in the Commedia illustrate this—like the lovely picture of Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her a garland. The twenty-third canto of the Paradiso, telling of the triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration; and within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if it be Dante’s genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries, which lifts the last cantos of the Paradiso from glory to glory, and makes this closing singing of the Commedia such supreme poetry. Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in Dante. Passage after passage of the Paradiso is the apotheosis of scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics had endeavoured to put in words the[Pg 559] universalities of substance and accident and the absolute qualities of God.

Yet one more feature of Dante’s typifying inclusiveness of the past. Its elements exist in him at first without conscious opposition and yet not subordinated one to another, the less worthy to those of eternal validity. Then conflict arises; the mediaeval Psychomachia awakes in Dante. Evidently he who wrote the Convito after the Vita Nuova, had not continued spiritually undisturbed. Had there come dullings of his early faith? Did his mind seek too exclusive satisfaction in knowledge? Had he possibly swerved a little from some high intention? The facts are veiled. Dante wears neither his mind nor his heart upon his sleeve. Yet a reconcilement was attained by him, though perhaps he had to fetch it out of Hell. He achieved it in his great poem, which in its long making made the poet into the likeness of itself. Fitness for salvation is the ultimate criterion with Dante respecting the elements of mortal life, as it had been through the Middle Ages. And the Commedia—truly the Divina Commedia—while it presents the scheme of salvation for universal man, is the achieved salvation of the poet.

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INDEX

Note.—Of several references to the same matter the more important are shown by heavy type.

 

THE END

 

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Footnotes:

[1] See post, Chapter XXXVI., I.

[2] Lev. xxi. 20; Deut. xxiii. 1.

[3] Lucan, Pharsalia, viii. 94.

[4] Heloïse here in mediaeval fashion cites a number of examples from Scripture showing the ills and troubles brought by women to men.

[5] Again she quotes to prove this, from Job and St. Gregory and Ambrose.

[6] Heloïse’s last problema did not relate to Scripture, and may have been suggested by her own life. “We ask whether one can sin in doing what is permitted or commanded by the Lord?” Abaelard answers with a discussion of what is permissible between man and wife.

[7] This letter of Heloïse is not extant.

[8] The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach have been given. One may also refer to works of older contemporaries, e.g. to the Aeneid of Heinrich von Veldeke, translated (1184) from a French rendering of Virgil; and the two courtly narrative poems, the Erec and Ivain (Knight of the Lion) taken from Chrétien of Troies by Hartmann von Aue, who flourished as the twelfth century was passing into the thirteenth.

[9] On Walther von der Vogelweide, see Wilmann, Leben und Dichtung Walthers, etc. (Bonn, 1882); Schönbach, Walther von der Vogelweide (2nd ed., Berlin, 1895). The citations from his poems in this chapter follow the Pfeiffer-Bartsch edition.

[10] No. 3 in the Pfeiffer-Bartsch edition.

[11] 184.

[12] 33.

[13] 22.

[14] 14, 16, 69.

[15] 18.

[16] 39.

[17] See Lieder, 46, 51, 56, 59, 61, 62, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77.

[18] A lucid account of this struggle is given in Luchaire, Innocent III., vol. iii. (“La Papauté et l’Empire”), Paris, 1906.

[19] 81.

[20] From “Freidank in Auswahl,” in Hildebrand’s Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge, p. 336 (Deutsche Nat. Lit.).

[21] 85, cf. 164.

[22] 110.

[23] 113, cf. 111, 112.

[24] 115, 116.

[25] 133. My statement of the opposition to the papacy might be much more analytical, and contain further apt distinctions. But this would remove it too far from the anti-papal feeling of the common man; and the period, moreover, is not yet that of Occam and Marsilius of Padua—as to whom see Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900).

[26] 88, 137.

[27] 158. Walter shared the crusading spirit. The inference that he was himself a Crusader is unsafe; but he wrote stirring crusading poems, one opening with a line that in sudden power may be compared with Milton’s

[28] 87.

[29] Parzival, i. 824.

[30] 186.

[31] 188.

[32] While an allegory is a statement having another consciously intended meaning, metaphor is the carrying over or deflection of a meaning from its primary application. According to good usage, which has kept these terms distinct, allegory implies a definite and usually a sustained intention, and suggests the spiritual; while metaphor suggests figures of speech and linguistic changes often unconscious. Language develops through the metaphorical (not allegorical) extension or modification of the meanings of words. The original meaning sometimes is obscured (e.g. in profane or depend), and sometimes continues to exist with the new one. In a vast number of languages, such words as straight, oblique, crooked, seem always to have had both a direct and a metaphorical meaning. Moral and intellectual conceptions necessarily are expressed in phrases primarily applicable to physical phenomena.

[33] Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage, p. 97 sqq.

[34] Ante, Chapters IV., V.

[35] Contra Faustum, xxii. 1-5.

[36] Contra Faustum, xxii. 66-68.

[37] Augustine’s method in this twenty-second Book is first to consider the actual sinfulness or justification of these deeds, and afterwards to take up in succession their typological significance. So, for example, he discusses the blamefulness of Judah’s conduct with Tamar in par. 61-64 and its typology in 83-86.

[38] Contra Faustum, xxii. 87. St. Ambrose, in his Apologia Prophetae David, cap. iii. (Migne 14, col. 857), written some years before Augustine’s treatise against Faustus, finds Bathsheba to signify the “congregatio nationum quae non erat Christo legitimo quodam fidei copulata connubio.”

[39] Quaestiones in Vet. Testam. in Regum II. (Migne 83, col. 411). Isidore died A.D. 636 (ante, Chapter V.)

[40] Comment. in Libros IV. Regum, in lib. ii. cap. xi.; Migne, Pat. Lat. 109, col. 98 (written in 834). On Rabanus and Walafrid see ante, Chapter X.

[41] Glossa ordinaria, Lib. Regum, ii. cap. xi. (Migne 113, col. 571, 572).

[42] Comment. in Matthaeum (Migne 107, col. 734).

[43] Migne 114, col. 67.

[44] It was the way of Bede in his commentaries to speak briefly of the literal or historic meaning of the text, and then give the usual symbolical interpretations, paying special attention to the significance of the Old Testament narratives as types of the career of Christ (see e.g. the beginning of the Commentary on Exodus, Migne 92, col. 285 sqq.; and Prologue to the allegorical Commentary on Samuel, Migne 92, col. 501, 502). For example, in the opening of the First Book of Samuel, Elkanah is a type of Christ, and his two wives Peninnah and Hannah represent the Synagogue and the Church. When Samuel is born to Hannah he also is a type of Christ; and Bede says it need not astonish one that Hannah’s spouse and Hannah’s son should both be types of Christ, since the Mediator between God and man is at once the spouse and son of Holy Church: He is her spouse as He aids her with His confidence and hope and love, and her son when by grace He enters the hearts of those who believe and hope and love. In Samuelam, cap. iii. (Migne 91, col. 508). Bede’s monastic mind balked at the literal statement that Elkanah had two wives (see the Prologue, Migne 91, col. 499).

[45] Com. in Exodum, Praefatio (Migne 108, col. 9).

[46] Migne 112, col. 849-1088. A number of these dictionaries were compiled, the earliest being the De formulis spiritalis intellegentiae of Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, who died in 450, ed. by Pauly 1884. In the later Middle Ages Alanus de Insulis (post, Chapter XXIX.) compiled one.

[47] These distinctions, not commonly observed, are frequently reiterated. Says Hugo of St. Victor (see post, Chapter XXVIII.) in the Prologue to his De sacramentis: “Divine Scripture, with threefold meaning, considers its matter historically, allegorically, and tropologically. History is the narrative of facts, and follows the primary meaning of words; we have allegory when the fact which is told signifies some other fact in the past, present, or future; and tropology when the narrated fact signifies that something should be done.” Cf. Hugo’s Didascalicon, v. cap. 2, where Hugo illustrates his meaning, and points out that this threefold significance is not to be found in every passage of Scripture. In ibid. v. cap. 4, he gives seven curious rules of interpretation (Migne 176, col. 789-793). In his De Scripturis, etc., praenotatiunculae, cap. 3 (Migne 175, col. 11 sqq.), Hugo speaks of the anagogical significance in the place of the tropological.

[48] Raban’s Latin is “Ligabit earn ancillis suis”—the verse in Job xl. 24 reads “Ligabis earn ancillis tuis?” In the English version the verse is Job xli. 5, “Wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?”

[49] “Per fidem me cognoverunt”; I surmise a non is omitted.

[50] The Scriptural citations are omitted. Rabanus wrote an allegorical De laudibus sanctae crucis (Migne 107, col. 133-294), composed in metre with prose explanations, which explain very little. The metrical portion is a puzzle consisting of twenty-eight “figures,” or lineal delineations interwoven in hexameter verses; the words and letters contained within each figure “make sense” when read by themselves, and form verses in metres other than hexameters. The whole is as incomprehensible in meaning as it is indescribable in form. Angels, cherubim and seraphim, tetragons, the virtues, months, winds, elements, signs of the Zodiac, and other twelvefold mysteries, the days of the year, the number seven, the five books of Moses, the four evangelists, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the eight beatitudes, the mystery of the number forty, the sacrament shown by the number fifty,—all these and much besides contribute to the glory of the Cross, and are delineated and arranged in cruciform manner, so as to be included within the scope of the cross’s symbolical significance.

[51] Since allegory and the spirit of symbolism pervaded all mediaeval thought, the present and two following chapters aim only at setting forth the elements (with pertinent examples) of this quite limitless subject.

[52] See prefatory epistle to Speculum ecclesiae, Migne 172, col. 813. Compare the prefatory epistle to the Gemma animae, ibid. col. 541, and the Preface to the Elucidarium, ibid. col. 1109. Probably Honorius died about 1130.

[53] We have these sermons only in Latin. Presumably a preacher using them, gave them in that language or rendered them in the vernacular as he thought fit.

[54] “Ommia legalia Christus nobis convertit in sacramenta spiritualia” is Honorius’s apt phrase (which may be borrowed!), Migne 172, col. 842. His special reference is to circumcision.

[55] Ps. xxxi. Vulgate; Ps. xxxii. 2, Authorized Version.

[56] Speculum ecclesiae, “Dominica XI.” (Migne 172, col. 1053 sqq.).

[57] Yet, curiously enough, near the time when I was making the following translation, I heard an elderly country clergyman preach substantially this sermon of Honorius—wherever he may have culled it, perhaps from some useful “Homiletical” Commentary.

[58] Speculum ecclesiae, “Dominica XIII.” (Migne 172, col. 1059-1061).

[59] Speculum ecclesiae, “Dominica in Septuagesima” (Migne 172, col. 855-857). Honorius may have forgotten the weariness of his supposed audience; for his sermon goes on with further admonition as to how the victory is to be won.

The allegorical interpretation of Scripture is exemplified in the whole limitless mass of mediaeval sermons. Illustrations from St. Bernard’s sermons on Canticles are given in Chapter XVII., also post, in Chapter XXXVI., II.

[60] For the Eucharist in the Carolingian period see ante, Chapter X. Berengar of Tours is spoken of in Chapter XII., IV.

[61] Many members in one body, one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 4, 5).

[62] Cf. post, Chapter XXXIII., V.

[63] The works of Hugo of Saint-Victor are contained in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, 175-177 (Paris, 1854; the reprint of 1882 is full of misprints). The Prolegomena (in French) of Mgr. Hugonin are elaborate and valuable. Mignon, Les Origines de la scholastique et Hugues de Saint-Victor (2 vols., Paris, 1895), follows Hugonin’s writing and adds little of value. An exposition of Hugo’s philosophy is to be found in Stöckl, Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Band I. pp. 305-355 (Mainz, 1864). On the authenticity of the writings ascribed to him see Hauréau, Les Œuvres de Hugues de Saint-Victor (2nd ed., Paris, 1886). For Hugo’s position in the history of scholasticism and mysticism see post, Chapter XXXVI., II.

[64] Post, Chapter XXXI., I.

[65] Hildebert’s letter is given post, Chapter XXX., III.

[66] On the neighbouring schools of Notre-Dame and St. Genevieve see post, Chapter XXXVII.

[67] At the opening of his Expositio in regulam beati Augustini, Migne 176, col. 881, Hugo explains that the precepts under which a monastic community lives are called the regula, and what we call a regula is called a canon by the Greeks; and those are called canonici or regulares, who “juxta regularia praecepta sanctorum Patrum canonice atque apostolice vivunt.” Thus the “regular canons” of St. Augustine were monks who lived according to the rule ascribed to that saint. In the case of the Victorines the rule was drawn up chiefly by Abbot Gilduin. See Prolegomena to the works of Hugo, Migne 175, col. xxiv. sqq.

[68] See the Prolegomena to the works of Hugo de Saint-Victor, by Hugonin, Migne 175, col. xl. sqq.

[69] Didascalicon, vi. 3 (Migne 176, col. 799). Other contents of this work are given post, Chapter XXXVI., I.

[70] His death is touchingly described in a letter of Osbert, the canon in charge of the infirmary. See Migne 175, col. xlvii and clxi.

[71] Hugo, De arrha animae, Migne 176, col. 954. Yet Hugo sometimes was stung with an irrelevant pang for the German fatherland, which he had left: “I have been an exile since my boyhood, and I know how the mind grieves to forsake some poor hut’s narrow hearth, and how easily it may then despise the marble hall and fretted roof” (Didascalicon, iii. 20; Migne 176, col. 778). Compare the single letter of Hugo that has a personal note, Ep. i. (Migne 176, col. 1011).

[72] The De sacramentis Christianae fidei is printed in Migne 176, col. 174-618. It is thus a lengthy work.

[73] Hugo evidently refers to his De Scripturis et scriptoribus sacris praenotatiunculae, and his various Adnotationes elucidatoriae, which will be found printed in vol. 175 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina. In chap. v. of the work first mentioned (Migne 175, col. 13) he speaks sensibly of the folly of those who profess not to care for the literal historical meaning of the sacred text, but, in ignorance, spring at once to very inept allegorical interpretations.

[74] De sacramentis, Prologus (Migne 176, col. 183-185). A more elementary statement may be found in De Scripturis, etc., cap. xiii. (Migne 175, col. 20).

[75] God is perfect and utterly good. His beatitude cannot be increased or diminished, but it can be imparted. Therefore the primal cause for creating rational creatures was God’s wish that there should be partakers of His beatitude. This reasoning may be Christian; but it is also close to the doctrine of Plato’s Timaeus, which Hugo had read.

[76] Hugo also takes a wider view of the “place” of mankind’s restoration, and finds that it includes (1) heaven, where the good are confirmed and made perfect; (2) hell, where the bad receive their deserts; (3) the fire of purgatory, where there is correction and perfecting; (4) paradise the place of good beginnings; and (5) the world, the place of pilgrimage for those who need restoring.

[77] “Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repraesentans, et ex institutione significans, et ex sanctificatione continens aliquam invisibilem et spiritalem gratiam” (pars ix. 2; Migne 176, col. 317). In spite of Hugo the old definition held its ground, being adopted by Peter Lombard and others after him.

[78] Here we see clearly that the works of the Creation have the sacramental quality of similitude and, in a way, the quality of institution, since their similitude to spiritual things was intended by the Creator for the instruction of man. They lack, however, the third quality of sanctification, which enables the material signum to convey its spiritual res.

[79] e.g. the material of the sacrament, which may consist in things, as in bread and wine, or in actions (as in making the sign of the cross), or in words, as in the invocation of the Trinity. He also shows how faith itself may be regarded as a sacrament, inasmuch as it is that whereby we now see in a glass darkly and behold but an image. But we shall hereafter see clearly through contemplation. Faith then is the image, i.e. the sacrament, of the future contemplation which is the sacrament’s real verity, the res.

[80] De sacr. lib. i. pars xi. cap. 1. The sacraments of the natural law included tithes, oblations, and sacrifices. Hugo also considers the good works which the natural law prescribed. This period ceases with the written law given implicitly through Abraham and explicitly through Moses. See De sacr. lib. i. pars xii. cap. i. Hugo appears to me to vary his point of view regarding the natural law and its time, for sometimes he regards it as the law prevailing till the time of Abraham or Moses, and again as the law under which pagan peoples lived, who did not know the Mosaic law.

[81] De sacr. lib. i. pars xi. cap. 6 (Migne 176, col. 346).

[82] Whoever should wish for further illustration of Hugo’s allegorical methods may examine his treatises entitled De arca Noë morali and De arca Noë mystica (Migne 176, col. 618-702), where every detail of the Ark, which signifies the Church, is allegorically applied to the Christian scheme of life and salvation. With these treatises, Hugo’s De vanitate mundi (Migne 176, col. 703-740) is connected. They will be referred to when considering Hugo’s position in mediaeval philosophy, post, Chapter XXXVI., II.

[83] See Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien.

[84] See the epitaph from his tomb in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, given by Savigny, Geschichte des Römischen Rechts, v. 571 sqq., who also gives a sketch of his life. With the work of Durandus, the Gemma animae of Honorius of Autun (Books I. II. III.; Migne 172, col. 541 sqq.) should be compared, as marking a somewhat earlier stage in the interpretation of the Liturgy. It also gives the symbolism of the church and its parts, its ministers, and services.

[85] Every article worn or borne by the bishop (or celebrating priest) has symbolic significance.

[86] All this (which is taken from Book IV. of the Rationale) is but the first part of the Mass. The maze of symbolism increases in vastness and intricacy as the office proceeds.

[87] Neh. iv.

[88] Matt. xix. 17.

[89] Many parts of the church have more than one significance. The windows were said before to represent hospitality and pity.

[90] Post, Chapter XXXV., I.

[91] The application of Vincent’s work to the sculpture and painting of a Gothic cathedral is due to Didron, Iconographie chrétienne, histoire de Dieu, Introduction (1843). Other writers have followed him, like Émile Male in his L’Art religieux du XIII^e siècle en France (2nd ed., Paris, 1902), to which the present writer is much indebted. It goes without saying, that the sources from which Vincent drew (e.g. the works of Albertus Magnus) likewise form a commentary upon the subjects of Gothic glass and sculpture, and may even have suggested the manner of their presentation.

[92] The opening verses of John’s Gospel account for this. Christ, or God in the person of Christ, is shown in Old Testament scenes as early as the fourth century upon sarcophagi in the Lateran at Rome.

[93] These subjects illustrated the series of events celebrated in the calendar of church services.

[94] Post, pp. 86 sqq.

[95] Ante, Chapter XXVII.

[96] So the composition and the arrangement of topics in the cathedral sculpture and glass have scarcely the excellence of natural grouping. The arrangement is intended to illustrate the series of successive acts making up God’s own artist-composition, itself symbolical of His purpose in the creation and redemption of man.

[97] Adam’s hymns are edited with notes and an introductory essay by L. Gautier, Œuvres poétiques d’Adam de S.-Victor (3rd ed., Paris, 1894). A number of his hymns will be found in Migne 196, col. 1422 sqq.; and also in Clement’s Carmina e poetis christianis excerpta. On Adam’s verse see post, Chapter XXXII., III.

[98] Dante draws much from Richard of St. Victor.

[99] See post, Chapter XXXII., III.

[100] Gautier, o.c. p. 46 (Migne 196, col. 1437).

[101] The Hebrews in bondage to the Egyptians are the symbol of all men in the bonds of sin.

[102] As Christ expires the cherubim at the gate of Eden lower the flaming sword, so that the men bathed with His blood may pass in.

[103] Isaac was always a type of Christ; his name was interpreted laughter (risus) from Gen. xxi. 6: “And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.”

[104] Joseph another type of Christ.

[105] This serpent, i.e. Christ the rod of Aaron, safe from the devil’s spite, consumes the false idols.

[106] The Brazen Serpent, a type of Christ. Cf. John iii. 14.

[107] Cf. Job xli. 1. The hook (hamus) is Christ’s divinity, whereby He pierces the devil’s jaw.

[108] Cf. Isa. xi. 8. The guiltless child is Christ, and the cockatrice is the devil.

[109] The children who mocked Elisha represent the Jews mocking Christ as He ascended Calvary; the bear is Vespasian and Titus who destroy Jerusalem.

[110] These again are types of Christ: David feigning madness among the Philistines, 1 Sam. xxi. 12-15; the goat cast forth for the people’s sins, Lev. xvi. 21, 22; and the sparrow in the rite of cleansing from leprosy, Lev. xiv. 2-7.

[111] Samson a type of Christ, will not wed a woman of his tribe (Judges xiv. 1-3) as Christ chooses the Gentiles; Samson bursts open Gaza’s gates as Christ the gates of death and hell.

[112] The allusion here is to the statement of mediaeval Bestiaries that the lion cub, when born, lies lifeless for three days, till awakened by his father’s roar. The supernal mother is the Church triumphant.

[113] The body of Christ, i.e. the Church.

[114] A topic everywhere represented in church windows and cathedral sculpture.

[115] Printed at the end of his Paedagogus; see Taylor, Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, pp. 253-255, where it is translated.

[116] Although the dogmas of Christianity were formulated by reason, they were cradled in love and hate. Nowadays, in a time when dogmas are apt to be thought useless clogs to the spirit, it is well for the historically-minded to remember the power of emotional devotion which they have inspired in other times.

[117] Gautier, Œuvres d’Adam (1st ed., vol. i. p. 11); Gautier (3rd ed., p. 269) doubts whether this hymn is Adam’s. But for the purpose of illustrating the symbolism of the twelfth-century hymn, the question of authorship is not important.

[118] Ante, Chapter XXVII.

[119] In these closing lines the “salubre sacramentum” is in apposition to “Ille de Samaria”—i.e. the “sacramentum” is the Saviour, who is also typified by the Good Samaritan. In another hymn for Christmas, Adam speaks of the concurrence in one persona of Word, flesh, and spirit, and then uses the phrase “Tantae rei sacramentum” (Gautier, o.c. p. 5). Here the sacramentum designates the visible human person of Christ, which was the life-giving signum or symbol of so great a marvel (tantae rei) as the Incarnation. Adam has Hugo’s teaching in mind, and the full significance of his phrase will appear by taking it in connection with Hugo’s definition of the Sacrament, ante, Chapter XXVIII.

[120] Gautier, o.c. p. 10.

[121] The reference is to Aaron’s rod in Numbers xvii.

[122] The reference is to Gideon’s fleece, Judges vi. 37, which is a type of the Virgin Mary.

[123] Gautier, o.c. 1st ed., i. 155 (Migne 196, col. 1464). In his third edition, Gautier is doubtful of Adam’s authorship of this hymn because of its irregular rhyme.

[124] Cf. Gautier’s notes to this hymn, Gautier, o.c. 1st ed., i. 159-167.

[125] Gautier, o.c. i. 168.

[126] Gautier, o.c. ii. 127.

[127] Gautier, 3rd ed., p. 186. This is in Migne 196, col. 1502.

[128] A charlatan in Salimbene’s Chronicle, ante, Chapter XXI., uses a like phrase.

[129] For the data as to Alanus see the Prolegomena to Migne, Pat. Lat. 210, which volume contains his works. See also Hauréau, Mém. de l’acad. des inscriptions et des belles lettres, tome 32 (1886), p. 1, etc.; also Hist. lit. de France, tome 16, p. 396, etc. On Alanus and his place in scholastic philosophy, see post, Chapter XXXVI., III.

[130] Migne 210, col. 686-1012.

[131] Migne 210, col. 431-481. See post, Chapter XXXII., I.

[132] The significance of the title is not quite clear. The poem is written in hexametre, and is not far from 4700 lines in length. It is printed in Migne 210, col. 486-576; also edited by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59, ii. (1872).

[133] The poem is highly imaginative in the delineation of its allegorical figures.

[134] These curious lines are as follows:

[135] The allusion here is to the fate of Hippolytus, whose chariot-horses, maddened by the wiles of Venus, dashed the chariot to pieces and caused their lord’s death.

[136] i. cap. vi. Her garb and attributes are elaborately told. In the latter part of the poem she is usually called Phronesis.

[137] A favourite commonplace; Heloïse uses it.

[138] The functions of these virgins, the Seven Liberal Arts, are poetically told. The Anticlaudianus is no text-book. But the poet apparently is following the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, ante, Chapter IV.

[139] Compare the succession of Heavens in Dante’s Paradiso.

[140] One may recall Raphael’s painting of Theology on the ceiling of the Stanza del Segnatura in the Vatican. It is impossible not to compare the rôles of Alan’s Reason and Theology with those of Virgil and Beatrice in the Commedia.

[141] Here we are back in the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite.

[142] As in Dante’s Paradiso.

[143] Most of these epithets of the Virgin come from allegorical interpretations of the text of the Vulgate.

[144] Compare the final vision of Dante in Paradiso, xxxiii.

[145] The reader will notice the Platonism and Neo-Platonism of all this.

[146] Notice that the Arts are here equipping and perfecting the man for his fight against sin;—which corresponds with the common mediaeval view of the function of education.

[147] The poem gives a full description of Fortune and her house, and unstable splendid gifts.

[148] But the different names of Alanus’s Virtues and Vices, and their novel antagonisms, indicate an original view of morality with him. On the Psychomachia see Taylor, Classical Heritage, pp. 278 sqq. and 379. Allegorical combats and débats (both in Latin and in the vernacular tongues) are frequent in mediaeval literature. Cf. e.g. post, Chapter XXX. Again, in certain parabolae ascribed to St. Bernard (Migne 183, col. 757 sqq.) the various virtues, Prudentia, Fortitude, Discretio, Temperantia, Spes, Timor, Sapientia, are so naturally made to act and speak, that one feels they had become personalities proper for poetry and art. Compare Hildegard’s characterizations of the Vices, ante, Chapter XIX.

[149] The English reader will derive much pleasure from F. S. Ellis’s admirable verse translation: The Romance of the Rose (Dent and Co., London, 1900). Each of the three little volumes of this translation has a convenient synopsis of the contents. Those who would know what is known of the tale and its authors should read Langlois’s chapter on it, in Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, edited by Petit de Julleville. It may be said here, for those whose memories need refreshing, that William de Lorris wrote the first part, some forty-two hundred lines, about the year 1237, and died leaving it unfinished; John de Meun took up the poem some thirty years afterwards, and added his sequel of more than eighteen thousand lines.

[150] The names are Englished after Ellis’s translation.

[151] See ante, Chapter XXIII.; De Meun took much from the De planctu naturae of Alanus.

[152] Post, Chapter XXXIII.

[153] Ante, Vol. I. p. 213.

[154] Migne, Pat. Lat. 172, col. 1056.

[155] Ante, Chapter XII., I.

[156] Ante, Chapter XIII., I.

[157] Ante, Chapter XXVIII.

[158] Didascalicon, iii. 4 (Migne 176, col. 768-769).

[159] De vanitate mundi, i. (Migne 176, col. 709, 710).

[160] Ep. 169 (Migne, Pat. Lat. 100, col. 441).

[161] Opusc. xiii.; De perfectione monachi, cap. xi. (Migne 144, col. 306). See ante, Chapter XVI.

[162] Speculum ecclesiae (Migne 172, col. 1085).

[163] Sonnet 56.

[164] Ep. i. (Migne 119, col. 433).

[165] John approved of reading the auctores, for educational purposes, and not confining the pupil to the artes. See Metalogicus, i. 23, 24 (Migne, Pat. Lat. 199, col. 453). On John, cf. post, Chapter XXXI. and XXXVI., III.

[166] Polycraticus, Prologus (Migne, Pat. Lat. 199, col. 385).

[167] Post, Chapter XXXVI., III.

[168] I draw upon the extracts given in the thesis of M. Demimuid, De Bernardo Carnotensi grammatico professore et interprete Virgilii (Paris, 1873), who, as appears by his title, confuses the two Bernards.

[169] The author of a bastard epitome on the Trojan War, see post, Chapter XXXII., IV.

[170] The above, in substance, is taken from Macrobius.

[171] Post, Chapter XXXVII.

[172] Ante, Chapter XXIX., II., and post, Chapter XXXVI., III.

[173] Post, Chapter XXXVI., I.

[174] For a successor or friendly rival to Chartres, in the interest taken in grammar and classical literature, one should properly look to Orleans, where apparently those studies continued to flourish. Cf. L. Delisle, “Les Écoles d’Orléans au douzième siècle,” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Societé de l’Histoire de France, t. vii. (1869), p. 139 sqq. In a Bataille des septs arts, by Henri d’Andeli, of the first half of the thirteenth century, Logic, from its stronghold of Paris, vanquishes Grammar, whose stronghold is Orleans. In the conflict, with much symbolic truth, Aristotle overthrows Priscian, Histoire littéraire de la France, t. xxiii. p. 225.

[175] Post, Chapter XXXVII.

[176] See post, Chapter XLI. and XLII. for the work of Grosseteste.

[177] Cf. post, Chapter XXXIII. and XXXVII.

[178] Cf. Specht, Geschichte des Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland, etc. (Stuttgard, 1885), p. 75 and passim.

Yet how soon and with what childish prattle youths might begin to speak and write Latin is touchingly shown by a boy’s letter, written from a monastic school, to his parents. It just asks for various little things, and its superscription is: “Parentibus suis A. agnus ablactatus pium balatum”: which seems to mean: “To his parents, A, a weaned lamb, sends a loving bah.” This and other curious little letters are ascribed to one Robertus Metensis (cir. A.D. 900) (Migne 132, col. 533).

[179] See Thurot, Histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen âge; Notices et extraits des MSS. vol. 22, part 2, p. 85. For what is said in the preceding and following pages the writer’s obligations are deep to this well-known work of Thurot, and to Reichling’s edition of the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei (Mon. Germ. paedagogica, XII., Berlin, 1893). Paetow’s Arts Course at Medieval Universities (University of Illinois, 1910) treats learnedly of these matters.

[180] See Thurot, o.c. p. 204 sqq.

[181] Regere, a mediaeval term not used in this sense by Priscian.

[182] See the Einleitung to Reichling’s edition of the Doctrinale already referred to; also Thurot, De Alexandri de Villa-Dei doctrinali (Paris, 1850). The chief mediaeval rival of the Doctrinale was the Graecismus of Eberhard of Bethune, written a little later. See Paetow, o.c. p. 38.

[183] Doctrinale, line 1561 sqq.

[184] Doctrinale, 1603 sqq.

[185] Doctrinale, 2330-2331.

[186] See passage in Reichling’s Einleitung, p. xxvii.

[187] See e.g. Une Grammaire latine inédite du XIII^e siècle, par Ch. Fierville (Paris, 1886).

[188] See Reichling, o.c. Einleitung, p. xix; Thurot, Not. et extr. xxii. 2, p. 112 sqq.

[189] See e.g. Thurot, o.c. p. 176 sqq.; p. 216 sqq.

[190] Thurot, o.c. pp. 126-127.

[191] Thurot, o.c. p. 127.

[192] The Greek Grammar of Roger Bacon, ed. by Nolan and Hirsch (Cambridge, 1902).

[193] Bacon defines idioma “as the determined peculiarity (proprietas) of language, which one gens uses after its custom; and another gens uses another idioma of the same language” (Greek Grammar, p. 26). Dialect is the modern term.

[194] Greek Grammar, p. 27. Bacon appears to have followed Priscian chiefly. As to whether he used Byzantine models, or other sources, see the Introduction to Nolan and Hirsch’s edition of the Greek Grammar. These thoughts inspiring Bacon’s Grammar became a veritable metaphysics in the Grammatica speculativa ascribed to Duns Scotus, see post, Chapter XLII.

[195] Cf. L. Rockinger, “Die Ars Dictandi in Italien,” Sitzungsber. bayerisch. Akad., 1861, pp. 98-151. For examples of these dictamina, see L. Delisle, “Dictamina Magistri Berardi de Neapoli” (a papal notary equally versed in law and rhetoric), Notices et extraits des MSS., etc., vol. 27, part 2, p. 87 sqq.; Ch. V. Langlois, “Formulaires de lettres,” etc., Not. et ext. vol. 32 (2), p. 1 sqq.; ibid. vol. 34 (1), p. 1 sqq. and p. 305 sqq. and vol. 35 (2), p. 409 sqq.

[196] For the history of this school in the eleventh century, see ante, Chapter XII. III.

[197] The Eptateuchon exists in manuscript. I have taken the above from Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge (Chartres, 1895), p. 221 sqq. Thierry appears to have written a commentary on Cicero’s Rhetoric. See Mélanges Graux, pp. 41-46.

[198] Metalogicus, i. cap. xxiv. (Migne, Pat. Lat. 199, col. 853-856).

[199] Polycraticus, vii. 13 (Migne 199, col. 666).

[200] Metalogicus, i. 24 (Migne 199, col. 856).

[201] Cf. Clerval, o.c. p. 211 sqq. and p. 227 sqq.

[202] Metalogicus, iii. 4 (Migne 199, col. 900).

[203] Petrus Blesensis, Epist. 101 (Migne 207, col. 312).

[204] Epist. 92 (Migne 207, col. 289). These letters are cited by Clerval.

[205] See post, Chapter XXXVI. I.

[206] Migne, Pat. Lat. 171, col. 1007-1056.

[207] Metalogicus, i. 5.

[208] See post, Chapter XXXV. I.

[209] The works of Giraldus Cambrensis are published in Master of Rolls Series, 21, in eight volumes. The last contains the De instructione principum. Giraldus lived from about 1147 to 1220.

[210] Ante, Chapter VIII.

[211] Alcuin, Ep. 80 (Migne 100, col. 260).

[212] Alcuin, Ep. 113, ad Paulinum patriarcham (Migne 100, col. 341).

[213] Traube, Poëtae Lat. Aevi Carolini (Mon. Germ.), 1, p. 243. Cf. “Versus in laude Larii laci,” by Paulus Diaconus, ibid. p. 42.

[214] Ante, Chapter XII.

[215] Post, Chapter XXXVI. III.

[216] Ep. ii. 33 (Migne 171, col. 256). For the Latin text of this letter see post, Chapter XXXI.

[217] For the entire poem, which is of interest throughout, see post, Chapter XXXII. I.

[218] For the poem see Hauréau, Mélanges poétiques d’Hildebert de Lavardin, p. 64 (Paris, 1882).

[219] Hauréau, o.c. p. 56.

[220] Ibid. p. 82.

[221] Ibid. p. 144.

[222] Migne, Pat. Lat. 171, col. 1428. This volume of Migne also contains the poems criticized and (some of them) edited by Hauréau in the book already referred to.

[223] Hildebert, Epis. i. 1 (Migne 171, col. 141).

[224] Hildebert, Ep. i. 22 (Migne 171, col. 197).

[225] A technical illustration from Roman law.

[226] Hildeberti, Ep. ii. 12 (Migne 171, col. 172-177). Compare Ep. i. 17, consoling a friend on loss of place and dignities. Hildebert’s works are in vol. 171 of Migne’s Pat. Lat. A number of his poems are more carefully edited by Hauréau in Notices et extraits des MSS., etc., vol. 28, ii. p. 289 sqq.; and some of them in vol. 29, ii. p. 231 sqq. of the same series. The matter is more conveniently given by Hauréau in his Mélanges poétiques d’Hildebert de Lavardin. On the man and his writings see De servillers, Hildebert et son temps (Paris, 1876); Hebert Duperron, De Venerabilis Hildeberti vita et scriptis (Bajocis, 1855); also vol. xi. of Hist. lit. de la France; and (best of all) Dieudonné, Hildebert de Lavardin, sa vie, ses lettres, etc. (Paris, 1898).

[227] It is well known that the great Latin prose, in spite of variances of stylistic intent and faculty among the individual writers, was an artistic, not to say artificial creation, formed under the influence of Greek models. Cicero is the supreme example of this, and he is also the greatest of all Latin prose writers. After his time some great writers (e.g. Tacitus, Quintilian) preserved a like tradition; others (e.g. Seneca) paid less attention to it. And likewise on through the patristic period, and the Middle Ages too, some men endeavoured to preserve a classic style, while others wrote more naturally.

[228] Even as it is necessary, in order to appreciate some of the methods of the Latin classical poetry, to realize that their immediate antecedents lay in Greek Alexandrian literature rather than in the older Greek Classics.

[229] See Taylor, Classical Heritage, chapter viii.

[230] A palpable difficulty in judging mediaeval Latin literature is its bulk. The extant Latin classics could be tucked away in a small corner of it. Every well-equipped student of the Classics has probably read them all. One mortal life would hardly suffice to read a moderate part of mediaeval Latin. And, finally, while there are histories of the classic literature in every modern tongue, there exists no general work upon mediaeval Latin writings regarded as literature. Ebert’s indispensable Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters ends with the tenth century. The author died. Within the scope of its purpose Dr. Sandys’ History of Classical Scholarship is compact and good.

[231] Ante, Chapter X.

[232] Post, Chapter XXXII., I.

[233] See Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 463-464.

[234] There was no attempt at classicism in the narrative in which he recounted the Translation of the relics of the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter from Rome to his own new monastery at Seligenstadt (Migne 104, col. 537-594). It was an entertaining story of a pious theft, and one may be sure that he wrote it more easily, and in a style more natural to himself than that shown in his consciously imitative masterpiece.

[235] Ep. vi. (Migne 100, col. 146).

[236] Ep. xxxii. (Migne 100, col. 187).

[237] Ep. xxxiii. (Migne 100, col. 187).

[238] Capitula ad Presbyteros (Migne 105, col. 202).

[239] See ante, Chapter XII.

[240] Chronicon, cap. 35 (Migne 139, col. 46). The sense is easy to follow, but the impossible constructions render an exact translation quite impossible. It is doubtful whether this Benedictus was an Italian. The Italian writing of this period, like that of Liutprand, is easier than among more painful students north of the Alps. But otherwise its qualities are rarely more pronounced. Ease is shown, however, in the Chronicon Venetum of John the Deacon (d. cir. 1008). See ante, Chapter XIII., III.

[241] Migne 133. This work fills four hundred columns in Migne. On Odo see ante, Chapter XII., II.

[242] Odo of Cluny, Collationes, lib. i. cap. i. (Migne 133, col. 519 and 520).

“Therefore God, Creator and Judge of mankind, although He have justly driven our race from that felicity of Paradise, yet mindful of His goodness, lest man all guilt should incur what he deserves, softens the sorrows of this pilgrimage with many benefits.... Indeed the purpose of that same Scripture is to press us from the depravities of this life. For to that end with its dreadful utterances, as with so many goads, it pricks our heart, that man struck by fear may shudder, and may recall to memory the divine judgments which he is wont so easily to forget, cut off by lust of the flesh and the solicitudes of earth.”

[243] Ruotgerus, Vita Brunonis, cap. 4 and 6; Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 254, and Migne 134, col. 944 and 946. A translation of this passage is given ante, Vol. I., p. 310. See ibid., p. 314, for the scholarship and writings of Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh-century German. Ruotger’s clumsy Latin is outdone by the linguistic involutions of the Life of Wenceslaus, the martyr duke of Bohemia, written toward the close of the tenth century by Gumpoldus, Bishop of Mantua, who seems to have cultivated classical rhetoric most disastrously (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 211, and in Migne 135, col. 923 sqq.).

[244] From Thurot, Notices et extraits, etc., 22 (2), p. 87, and p. 341 sqq., one may see that the principles of construction stated by mediaeval grammarians followed the usage of mediaeval writers in adopting a simpler or more natural order than that of classical prose. An extract, for example, from an eleventh-century MSS. indicates the simple order which this grammarian author approved: e.g. “Johannes hodie venit de civitate; Petrus, quem Arnulfus genuit et nutrivit, intellexit multa” (Thurot, p. 87).

[245] Ante, Chapter XXX., II.

[246] So likewise in regard to verse, the perfected two-syllable rhyme came first in Italy, and more slowly in the North, although the North was to produce better Latin poetry.

[247] Ante, Chapters XI., IV., and XVI.

[248] Opusc. xiv., De ordine erimitarum (Migne 145, col. 329).

“We may see upon a tree a leaf ready to succumb beneath the wintry frosts, and, with the sap of autumnal clemency consumed, even now about to fall, so that it barely cleaves to the twig it hangs from, but displays most evident signs of (its) light ruin. The blasts are quivering, wild winds strike it from all sides, the mid-winter horror of heavy air congeals with cold; and that you may marvel the more, the ground is strewn with the rest of the leaves everywhere flowing down, and, with its locks laid low, the tree is stripped of its grace; yet that alone, none other remaining, endures, and, as the survivor of co-heirs, succeeds to the rights of the brotherhood’s possession. What then is left to be understood from consideration of this thing, save that a leaf of a tree cannot fall unless it receive beforehand the divine command?”

This description is rhetorically elaborated; but Damiani commonly wrote more directly, as in this sentence from a letter to a nobleman, in which Damiani urges him not to fail in his duty to his mother through affection for his wife: “Sed forte dices: mater mea me frequenter exasperat, duris verbis meum et uxoris meae corda perturbat; non possumus tot injuriarum probra perferre, non valemus austeritatis ejus et severae correptionis molestias tolerare” (Ep. vii. 3; Migne 144, col. 466). This needs no translation.

[249] Ante, Chapter XI., IV.

[250] Proslogion, cap. 24 (Migne 158, col. 239).

“Awaken now, my soul, and rouse all thy mind, and consider, as thou art able, of what nature and how great is that Good (God). For if single goods are objects of delight, consider intently how delightful is that good which contains the joy of all goods; and not such as in things created we have tried, but differing as greatly as differs the Creator from the creature. For if life created is good, how good is the life creatrix! If joyful is the salvation wrought, how joyful is the salvation which wrought all salvation! If lovely is wisdom in the knowledge of things created, how lovely is the wisdom which created all from nothing. In fine, if there are many and great delectations in things delightful, of what quality and greatness is delectation (i.e. the delectation that we take) in Him who made the delights themselves!”

The reader may observe that the word-order of Anselm’s Latin is preserved almost unchanged in the translation.

[251] “Meditatio II.” (Migne 158, col. 722).

“My soul is offended with my life. I blush to live; I fear to die. What then remains for thee, O sinner, save that all thy life thou weepest over all thy life, that it all may lament its whole self. But in this also is my soul miserably wonderful and wonderfully miserable, since it does not grieve as much as it knows itself (i.e. to the full extent of its self-knowledge) but secure, is listless as if it knew not what it may be suffering. O barren soul, what art thou doing? why art thou drowsing, sinner soul? The Day of Judgment is coming, near is the great day of the Lord, near and too swift the day of wrath, (that day!) day of tribulation and distress, day of calamity and misery, day of shades and darkness, day of cloud and whirlwind, day of the trump and the roar! O voice of the day of the Lord—harsh! Why sleepest thou, soul lukewarm and fit to be spewed out?”

[252] Perhaps it may seem questionable to treat Anselm as an Italian, since he left Lombardy when a young man. Undoubtedly his theological interests were affected by his northern environment. But his temperament and language, his diction, his style, seem to me more closely connected with native temperament.

[253] Annals for the year 1077 (Migne 146, col. 1234 sqq.); also in Mon. Germ. Script. iii.

[254] Sermo xvi. (Migne 183, col. 851). The power of this passage keeps it from being hysterical. But the monkish hysteria, without the power, may be found in the writings of St. Bernard’s jackal, William of St. Thierry, printed in Migne, Pat. Lat. 180. Notice his Meditationes, for example; also his De contemplando Deo, printed among St. Bernard’s works (Migne 184, col. 365 sqq.).

[255] Sermo xv. (Migne 183, col. 847). Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 411.

[256] Ep. xii., ad Guigonem (Migne 182, col. 116).

[257] Bernard, Ep. 112, ad Gaufridum (Migne 182, col. 255). For translation see ante, Vol. I., p. 398.

[258] E.g. Ep. i. and 144 (Migne 182, col. 70 and 300).

[259] Ep. 196, ad Guidonem (Migne 182, col. 363). Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 401. See also the preceding letter, 195.

[260] As to Jerome’s two styles see Goelzer, La Latinité de St. Jerome, Introduction.

[261] Ep. ii. 33 (Migne 171, col. 256). Translation ante, Chapter XXX., III.

[262] See ante, Chapter XXX., I.

[263] “Against that signal gift of parent nature and grace, a shameless wrangler has stirred up an old calumny, condemned by the judgment of our ancestors; and, seeking everywhere comfort for his ignorance, he hopes to advance himself toward glory, if he shall see many like himself, see them ignorant, that is to say. For he has this special tumour of arrogance, that he would be making himself the equal of others, exalting his own good qualities (if they exist), and depreciating those of others. And he deems his neighbour’s defect to be his own advancement.

“Now it is indubitable to all truly wise, that Nature, kindest parent of all, and best-ordering directress, among the other living beings which she brought forth, distinguished man with the prerogative of reason and ennobled him with the exercise of eloquence (or ‘with the use of speech’): executing this with unremitting zeal and best-ordering decree, in order that man who was pressed and dragged to the lowest by the heaviness of a clodlike nature and the slowness of corporeal bulk, borne aloft as it were by these wings might ascend to the heights, and by obtaining the crown of true blessedness excel all others in happy reward. While Grace thus fecundates Nature, Reason watches over the matters to be inspected and considered; Nature’s bosom gives forth, metes out the fruits and faculty of individuals; and the inborn love of good, stimulating itself by its natural appetite, follows this (i.e. the good) either solely or before all else, since it seems best adapted to the bliss descried” (Metal. i. 1; Migne 199, col. 825). These translations are kept close to the original, in order to show the construction of the sentences.

[264] “There is another class of philosophers called the Ionic, and it took its origin from the more remote Greeks. The chief of these was Thales the Milesian, one of those seven who were called ‘wise.’ He, when he had searched out the nature of things, shone among his fellows, and especially stood forth as admirable because, comprehending the laws of astrology, he predicted eclipses of the sun and moon. To him succeeded his hearer, Anaximander, who (in turn) left Anaximenes as disciple and successor. Diogenes, likewise his hearer, arose and Anaxagoras who taught that the divine mind was the author of all things that we see. To him succeeded his pupil Archelaus, whose disciple is said to have been Socrates, the master of Plato, who, according to Apuleius, was first called Aristotle, but then Plato from his breadth of chest, and was borne aloft to such height of philosophy, by vigour of genius, by assiduity of study, by graciousness in all his ways, and by sweetness and force of eloquence, that, as if seated on the throne of wisdom, he has seemed to command by a certain ordained authority the philosophers before and after him. And indeed Socrates is said to have been the first to have turned universal philosophy to the improvement and ordering of manners; since before him all had devoted themselves chiefly to physics, that is to examining the things of nature” (Polycraticus, vii. 5; Migne 199, col. 643).

[265] “The most excellent man concluded his oration, and by the power of the blessed Peter absolved all who had taken the vow to go, and by the same apostolic authority confirmed it; and he instituted a suitable sign of this so honourable vow; and as a badge of soldiering (or knighthood), or rather, of being about to soldier, for God, he took the mark of the Lord’s Passion, the figure of a cross, made from material of any kind of cloth, and ordered it to be sewed upon the tunics and cloaks of those about to go. But if any one, after receiving this sign, or after making open promise, should draw back from that good intent, by base repenting or through affection for his kin, he ordained that he should be held an outlaw utterly and perpetually, unless he turn and set himself again to the neglected performance of his pledge.

“Furthermore, with terrible anathema he damned all who within the term of three years should dare to do ill to the wives, children, or property of those setting forth on this journey of God. And finally he committed to a certain and praiseworthy man (a bishop of some city on the Po, whose name I am sorry never to have found or heard) the care and regulation of the expedition, and conferred his own authority upon him over the tribute (?) of Christian people wherever they should come. Whereupon giving his benediction, in the apostolic manner, he placed his hands upon him. How sagaciously that one executed the behest, is shown by the marvellous outcome of so great an undertaking” (Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos, ii. 2; Migne 156, col. 702).

[266] Hist. ecclesiastica, pars iii. lib. xii. cap. 14 (Migne 188, col. 889-892). “Thomas, son of Stephen, approached the king, and offering him a mark of gold, said: ‘Stephen, son of Airard, was my sire, and all his life he served thy father (William the Conqueror) on the sea. For him, borne on his ship, he conveyed to England, when he proceeded to England in order to make war on Harold. In this manner of service serving him until death he gave him satisfaction, and honoured with many rewards from him, he flourished grandly among his people. This privilege, lord king, I claim of thee, and the vessel which is called White Ship I have ready, fitted out in the best manner for royal needs.’ To whom the king said: ‘I grant your petition. For myself indeed I have selected a proper ship, which I shall not change; but my sons, William and Richard, whom I cherish as myself, with much nobility of my realm, I commend now to thee.’

“Hearing these words the sailors were merry, and bowing down before the king’s son, asked of him wine to drink. He ordered three measures of wine to be given them. Receiving these they drank and pledged their comrades’ health abundantly, and with deep potations became drunk. At the king’s order many barons with their sons went aboard the ship, and there were about three hundred, as I opine, in that fatal bark. Then two monks of Tiron, and Count Stephen with two knights, also William of Rolmar, and Rabellus the chamberlain, and Edward of Salisbury, and a number of others, went out from it, because they saw such a crowd of wanton showy youth aboard. And fifty tried rowers were there and insolent marines, who having seized seats in the ship were brazening it, forgetting themselves through drunkenness, and showed respect for scarcely any one. Alas! how many of them had minds void of pious devotion toward God!—‘Who tempers the exceeding rages of the sea and air.’ And so the priests, who had gone up there to bless them, and the other ministrants who bore the holy water, they drove away with derision and loud guffaws; but soon after they paid the penalty of their mocking.

“Only men, with the king’s treasure and the vessels holding the wine, filled the keel of Thomas; and they pressed him eagerly to follow the royal fleet which was already cutting the waves. And he himself, because he was silly from drink, trusted in his skill and that of his satellites, and rashly promised to outstrip all who were now ahead of him. Then he gave the word to put to sea. At once the sailors snatched their oars, and glad for another reason because they did not know what hung before their eyes, they adjusted their tackle, and made the ship start over the sea with a great bound. Now while the drunken rowers were putting forth all their strength, and the wretched pilot was paying slack attention to steering his course over the gulf, upon a great rock which daily is uncovered by the ebbing wave and again is covered when the sea is at flood, the left side of White Ship struck violently, and with two timbers smashed, all unexpectedly the ship, alas! was capsized. All cried out together in such a catastrophe; but the water quickly filling their mouths, they perished alike. Two only cast their hands upon the boom from which hung the sail, and clinging to it a great part of the night, waited for some aid. One was a butcher of Rouen named Berold, and the other a well-born lad named Geoffrey, son of Gislebert of Aquila.

“The moon was then at its nineteenth in the sign of the Bull, and lighted the earth for nearly nine hours with its beams, making the sea bright for navigators. Captain Thomas after his first submersion regained his strength, and bethinking himself, pushed his head above the waves, and seeing the heads of those clinging to some piece of wood, asked, ‘What has become of the king’s son?’ When the shipwrecked answered that he had perished with all his companions, ‘Miserable,’ said he, ‘is my life henceforth.’ Saying this, and evilly despairing, he chose to sink there, rather than meet the fury of the king enraged for the destruction of his child, or undergo long punishment in chains.”

[267] Post, Chapter XLI.

[268] Opus majus, pars i. cap. 6.

[269] Op. maj. ii. cap. 14.

[270] Op. maj. iii. 1.

[271] Op. maj. ii. 14.

[272] For translation see post, Chapter XXXIV.

[273] Post, Chapter XXXVIII.

[274] Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Prologus, 2.

[275] Ibid. cap. vii. 6. For translations see post, Chapter XXXVIII.

[276] Vita prima, cap. xi. Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 427, note 1.

[277] Spec. perfectionis, ed. Sabatier, cap. 53. Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 427.

[278] Ibid. cap. 93. Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 432.

[279] Cap. li., ed. Graesse.

“Annunciation Sunday (Advent) is so called, because on that day by an angel the advent of the Son of God in the flesh was announced, for it was fitting that the angelical annunciation should precede the incarnation, for a threefold reason. For the first reason, of betokening the order, that to wit the order of reparation should answer to the order of transgression. Accordingly as the devil tempted the woman, that he should draw her to doubt and through doubt to consent and through consent to fall, so the angel announced to the Virgin, that by announcing he should arouse her to faith and through faith to consent and through consent to conceiving God’s son. For the second reason, of the angelic ministry, because since the angel is God’s minister and servant, and the blessed Virgin was chosen in order that she might be God’s mother, and it is fitting that the minister should serve the mistress, so it was proper that the annunciation to the blessed Virgin should take place through an angel. For the third reason, of repairing the angelical fall. Because since the incarnation was made not only for the reparation of the human fall, but also for the reparation of the angelical catastrophe, therefore the angels ought not to be excluded. Accordingly as the sex of the woman does not exclude her from knowledge of the mystery of the incarnation and resurrection, so also neither the angelical messenger. Behold, God twice announces to a woman by a mediating angel, to wit the incarnation to the Virgin Mary and the resurrection to the Magdalene.” The order of the Latin words is scarcely changed in the translation.

[280] In order that no reader may be surprised by the absence of discussion of the antique antecedents of the more particular genres of mediaeval poetry (Latin and Vernacular), I would emphasize the impossibility of entering upon such exhaustless topics. Probably the very general assumption will be correct in most cases, that genres of mediaeval poetry (e.g. the Conflicts or Débats in Latin and Old French) revert to antecedents sufficiently marked for identification, in the antique Latin (or Greek) poetry, or in the (extant or lost) productions of the “low” Latin period from the third century downward. An idea of the difficulty and range of such matters may be gained from Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1889), and the admirable review of this work by Gaston Paris in the Journal des savants for 1891 and 1892 (four articles). Cf. also Batiouchkof in Romania, xx. (1891), pages 1 sqq. and 513 sqq.

[281] Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chap. ix.

[282] There is much verse from noted men, Alcuin, Paulus Diaconus, Walafrid Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Theodulphus. It is all to be found in the collection of Dümmler and Traube, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini (Mon. Germ. 1880-1896).

[283] It is amusing to find a poem by Walafrid Strabo turning up as a favourite among sixteenth-century humanists. The poem referred to, “De cultura hortorum” (Poet. Lat. aev. Car. ii. 335-350), is a poetic treatment of gardening, reminiscent of the Georgics, but not imitating their structure. It has many allusions to pagan mythology.

[284] Post, p. 193 sqq.

[285] Ante, Vol. I., p. 147.

[286] Ante, Chapter XI., III.

[287] The following leonine hexameters are attributed to Donizo:

[288] William was a few years older than Donizo, and died about the year 1100. His hero is Robert Guiscard, and his poem closes with this bid for the favour of his son, Roger:

[289] Muratori, Script. v. 407-457.

[290] Muratori, Script. vi. 110-161; also in Migne.

[291] Written at the close of the twelfth century. On these people see Ronca, Cultura medioevale e poesia Latina d’ Italia (Rome, 1892).

[292] Muratori, vii. pp. 349-482; Waitz, Mon. Germ. xxii. 1-338. Godfrey lived from about 1120 to the close of the century. The Pantheon was completed in 1185. Cf. L. Delisle, Instructions du comité des travaux historiques, etc.; Littérature latine, p. 41 (Paris, 1890).

[293] Matthaei Vindocinensis ars versificatoria, L. Bourgain (Paris, 1879).

[294] Ante, Chapter XXX., III.

[295] Text from Hauréau, Les Mélanges poetiques d’Hildebert de Lavardin, p. 60: also in Notices des manuscrits de la bib. nat. t. 28, 2nd part (1878), p. 331.

[296] Hauréau gives a critical text of the Carmen ad Astralabium filium, in Notices et extraits, etc., 34, part ii., p. 153 sqq. Other not unpleasing instances of elegiac verse are afforded by the poems of Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil (d. 1130). They are occasional and fugitive pieces—nugae, if we will. See L. Delisle, Romania, i. 22-50.

[297] The substance of this poem has been given ante, Chapter XXIX. On Alanus see also post, Chapter XXXVI., III.

[298] It is printed in Migne 209. Cf. post, p. 230, note 1.

[299] The Ligurinus is printed in tome 212 of Migne’s Patrol. Lat. On its author see Pannenborg, Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, Band ii. pp. 161-301, and Band xiii. pp. 225-331 (Göttingen, 1871 and 1873).

[300] Alanus de Insulis, De planctu naturae (Migne 210, col. 447). A translation of the work has been made by D. M. Moffat (New York, 1908). For other examples of Sapphic and Alcaic verses see Hauréau in Notices et extraits, etc., 31 (2), p. 165 sqq.

[301] Wilhelm Meyer, a leading authority upon mediaeval Latin verse-structure, derives the principle of a like number of syllables in every line from eastern Semitic influence upon the early Christians. See Fragmenta Burana (Berlin, 1901), pp. 151, 166. That may have had its effect; but I do not see the need of any cause from afar to account for the syllabic regularity of Latin accentual verse.

[302] Again Wilhelm Meyer’s view: see l.c. and the same author’s “Anfänge der latein. und griech. rhythmischen Dichtung,” Abhand. der Bairish. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1886.

[303] Poet. Lat. aev. Car. i. 116. Cf. Ebert, Gesch. etc. ii. 86. For similar verses see those on the battle at Fontanetum (A.D. 841), Poet. Lat. aev. Car. ii. 138, and the carmen against the town of Aquilegia, ibid. p. 150.

[304] Cf. ante, Vol. I., pp. 227, 228.

[305] Traube, Poetae Lat. aevi Car. iii. p. 731. Cf. Ebert, Gesch. etc. ii. 169 and 325.

[306] Poet. Lat. aev. Car. iii. 733.

[307] Du Meril, Poésies populaires latines, i. 400.

Perhaps the most successful attempt to write hexameters containing rhymes or assonances is the twelfth-century poem of Bernard Morlanensis, a monk of Cluny, beginning with the famous lines:

Bernardi Morlanensis, De contemptu mundi, ed. by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59 (ii.), 1872. Bernard says in his Preface, as to his measures: “Id genus metri, tum dactylum continuum exceptis finalibus, tum etiam sonoritatem leonicam servans....”

[308] “Carmina Mutinensia,” Poet. Lat. aev. Car. iii. 703. The poem has forty-two lines, of which the above are the first four. The usual date assigned is 924, but Traube in Poet. aev. Car. has put it back to 892.

[309] See further text and discussion in Traube, “O Roma nobilis,” Abhand. Bairish. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1891.

[310] The verbal Sequence or prosa was thus a species of trope. Tropes were interpolations or additions to the older text of the Liturgy. The Sequences were the tropes appended to the last Alleluia of the Gradual, the psalm chanted in the celebration of the Mass, between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Cf. Leon Gautier, Poésie liturgique au moyen âge, chap. iii. (Paris, 1886); ibid. Œuvres poétiques d’Adam de Saint-Victor, p. 281 sqq. (3rd ed., Paris, 1894).

[311] On the Sequence see Leon Gautier, Poésie liturgique au moyen âge (Paris, 1886), passim, and especially the comprehensive summary in the notes from p. 154 to p. 159. Also see Schubiger, Die Sängerschule St. Gallus (1858), in which many of Notker’s Sequences are given with the music; also v. Winterfeld, “Die Dichterschule St. Gallus und Reichenau,” Neue Jahrbücher f. d. klassisch. Altertum, Bd. v. (1900), p. 341 sqq.

The present writer has found Wilhelm Meyer’s Fragmenta Burana (Berlin, 1901) most suggestive; and in all matters pertaining to mediaeval Latin verse-forms, use has been made of the same writer’s exhaustive study: “Ludus de Antichristo und über lat. Rythmen,” Sitzungsber. Bairisch. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1882. See also Ch. Thurot, “Notices, etc., de divers MSS. latins pour servir à l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen âge,” in vol. xxii. (2) of Notices et extraits des MSS. pp. 417-457.

[312] “May our trumpet be guided mightily by God’s right hand, and may He hear our prayers with gentle and tranquil ear: for our praise will be accepted if what we sing with the voice a pure conscience sings likewise. And that we may be able, let us all beseech divine aid to be always present with us.... O good King, kind, just, and pitying, who art the way and the door, unlock the gates of the kingdom for us, we beg, and pardon our offences, that we may praise thy name now and through all the ages.”

[313] G. M. Dreves, “Die Prosen der Abtei St. Martial zu Limoges,” p. 59 (vol. vii. of Dreves’s Analecta hymnica medii aevi; Leipzig, 1889). “Let every band sing with fount renewed and the Spirit’s grace with joyful praise and clear mind. Now is made good the tenth part (i.e. the fallen angels), undone by fault; and thus that celestial casting out is made good in divine praise. Lo! the bright day of the Lord gleams through the broad spaces of the world: in which all the redeemed people exult because everlasting death is destroyed.”

[314] Published by Boucherie, “Mélanges Latins, etc.,” Revue des langues romanes, t. vii. (1875), p. 35.

“Alleluia! O flock, proclaim joy; with melodious praise utter deeds divine now fixed by revealed doctrine. Through the great sacrifice of Christ thou art liberated from death; the gates of hell destroyed, opened are heaven’s doors. Now He rules all things celestial and terrestrial by eternal power; wherein by the Father’s authority He gives judgment always just.”

[315] See Gautier, Poésie liturgique, p. 147 sqq. It came somewhat earlier in Italy. See Ronca, Cultura medioevale, etc., p. 348 sqq. (Rome, 1892).

[316] While Sequences may be called hymns, all hymns are not Sequences. For the hymn is the general term designating a verbal composition sung in praise of God or His saints. A Sequence then would be a hymn having a peculiar history and a certain place in the Liturgy.

[317] Contained in Migne 178, col. 1771 sqq. They have not been properly edited or even fully published.

[318] Reference should also be made to the six laments (planctus) composed by Abaelard (Migne 178, col. 1817-1823). They are powerful elegies, and exhibit a richness and variety of poetic measures. It may be mentioned that the pure two-syllable rhyme is found in hymns ascribed to Saint Bernard.

[319] Leon Gautier, the editor of the Œuvres poétiques d’Adam de Saint-Victor, in his third edition of 1894, has thrown out from among Adam’s poems our first and third examples. On Adam see ante, Chapter XXIX., II.

[320] Gautier, Œuvres poétiques d’Adam de Saint-Victor, i. 174.

[321] Gautier, o.c. 3rd edition, p. 87.

[322] Gautier, o.c. 1st edition, i. 201.

[323] Did the Sequence exert an influence upon Hrotsvitha, the tiresome but unquestionably immortal nun of Gandersheim, who flourished in the middle and latter part of the tenth century? She wrote narrative poems, like the Gesta Ottonis (Otto I.) in leonine hexameters. Her pentameter lines also commonly have a word in the middle rhyming with the last syllable of the line. But it is in those famous pious plays of hers, formed after the models of Terence, that we may look for a kind of writing corresponding to that which was to progress to clearer form in the Sequence. Without discussing to what extent the Latin of these plays may be called rhythmical, one or two things are clear. It is filled with assonances and rude rhymes, usually of one syllable. It has no clear verse-structure, and the utterances of the dramatis personae apparently observe no regularity in the number of syllables, such as lines of verse require.

[324] For these and other songs, written after the manner of Sequences, see Du Meril, Poésies pop. lat. i. p. 273 sqq. They are also printed by Piper in Nachträge zur älteren deutschen Lit. (Deutsche Nat. Lit.) p. 206 sqq. and p. 234 sqq. See also W. Meyer, Fragmenta Burana, p. 174 sqq. and Ebert, Allgemeine Gesch. etc. ii. 343 sqq.

[325] Du Meril, ibid. i. p. 285.

[326] Wil. Meyer, Fragmenta Burana, p. 180.

[327] The best text of the “Phillidis et Florae altercatio” is Hauréau’s in Notices et extraits, 32 (1), p. 259 sqq. The same article has some other disputes or causae, e.g. causa pauperis scholaris cum presbytero, p. 289.

[328] Du Meril, Poésies pop. lat. ii. p. 108 sqq. The piece is a cento, and its tone changes and becomes brutal further on. The poems, from which are taken the preceding citations, are to be found in Wright’s Latin Poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes (London, 1841, Camden Society); Carmina Burana, ed. J. A. Schmeller; “Gedichte auf K. Friedrich I. (archipoeta),” in vol. iii. of Grimm’s Kleinere Schriften. Cf. also Hubatsch, Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder (Gorlitz, 1870). The best texts of many of these and other “Carmina Burana,” and such like poems, are to be found in the contributions of Hauréau to the Notices et extraits, etc.; especially in tome 29 (2), pp. 231-368; tome 31 (1), p. 51 sqq.

[329] Ante, Vol. I., p. 145.

[330] Ante, Chapter IX., II. and III.

[331] For generous samples of it, see Geistliche Lit. des Mittelalters, ed. P. Piper (Deutsche National Literatur).

[332] For this novel, a Greek original is usually assumed; but the Middle Ages had it only in a sixth-century Latin version. It was copied in Jourdain de Blaie, a chanson de geste. See Hagen, Der Roman von König Apollonius in seinen verschiedenen Bearbeitungen (Berlin, 1878). The other Greek novels doubtless would have been as popular had the Middle Ages known them. In fact, the Ethiopica of Heliodorus, and others of these novels, did become popular enough through translations in the sixteenth century.

[333] Hugo of St. Victor says in the twelfth century: “Apud gentiles primus Darhes Phrygius Trojanam historiam edidit, quam in foliis palmarum ab eo scriptam esse ferunt” (Erud. didas. iii. cap. 3; Migne 176, col. 767).

On the Trojan origin of the Franks, Britons, and other peoples, see Joly in his “Benoit de St. More et le Roman de Troie,” pp. 606-635 (Mem. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de Normandie, vol. vii. 3^me ser., 1869); also Graf, Roma nella memoria, etc., del medio aevo. The Trojan origin of the Franks was a commonplace in the early Middle Ages, see e.g. Aimoinus of Fleury in beginning of his Historia Francorum, Migne 139, col. 637.

On Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan see “Dares and Dictys,” N. E. Griffin (Johns Hopkins Studies, Baltimore, 1907); Taylor, Classical Heritage, pp. 40 and 360 (authorities); also, generally, L. Constans, “L’Épopée antique,” in Petit de Julleville’s Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, vol. i. (Paris, 1896).

[334] Joseph of Exeter or de Iscano, as he is called, at the close of the twelfth century composed a Latin poem in six books of hexameters entitled De bello Trojano. It is one of the best mediaeval productions in that metre. The author followed Dares, but his diction shows a study of Virgil, Ovid, Statius, and Claudian. See J. J. Jusserand, De Josepho Exoniensi vel Iscano (Paris, 1877); A. Sarradin, De Josepho Iscano, Belli Trojani, etc. (Versailles, 1878).

[335] Eneas, ed. by Salverda de Grave (Halle, 1891), lines 7857-9262.

[336] Roman de Troie, 5257-5270, ed. Joly; “Benoit de St. More et le Roman de Troie, etc.,” Mem. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de Normandie, vol. vii. 3^me ser., 1869. On its sources see also L. Constans, in Petit de Julleville’s Hist. de la langue et de la litt. française, vol. i. pp. 188-220.

[337] Roman de Troie, 13235 sqq.

[338] The Roman de Thebes, the third of these large poems, is temperate in the adaptation and extension of its theme. Its ten thousand or more lines of eight-syllable rhyming verse are no longer than the Thebaid of Statius, and as a narrative make quite as interesting reading. Statius, who lived under Domitian, was a poet of considerable skill, but with no genius for the construction of an epic. His work reads well in patches, but does not move. Several books are taken up with getting the Argive army in motion, and when the reader and Jove himself are wearied, it moves on—to the next halt. And so forth through the whole twelve books. See Nisard, Études sur les poètes latins de la décadence, vol. i. p. 261 sqq. (2nd ed., Paris, 1849); Pichon, Hist. de la litt. lat. p. 606 (2nd ed., Paris, 1898). The Roman de Thebes was not drawn directly from the work of Statius, but through the channels, apparently, of intervening prose compendia. It also evidently drew from other works, as it contains matters not found in Statius’s Thebaid. It is easy, if not inspiring reading. The style is clear, and the narrative moves. Of course it presents a general mediaevalizing of the manners of Statius’s somewhat fustian antique heroes; it introduces courtly love (e.g. the love between Parthonopeus and Antigone, lines 3793 sqq.), mediaeval commonplaces, and feudal customs. It drops the antique conception of accursed fate as a fundamental motive of the plot, substituting in its place the varied play of romantic and chivalric sentiment.

Leopold Constans has made the Roman de Thebes his own. Having followed the story of Oedipus through the Middle Ages in his Légende d’Œdipe, etc. (Paris, 1881) he has corrected some of his views in his critical edition of the poem, “Le Roman de Thèbes,” 2 vols., 1890 (Soc. des anciens textes français), and has treated the same matters more popularly in Petit de Julleville’s Hist. de la langue et de la litt. française, vol. i. pp. 170-188. These works fully discuss the sources, date, and language of the poem, and the later redactions in prose and verse through Europe.

[339] On Pseudo-Callisthenes see Paul Meyer, Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature française du moyen âge (Paris, 1886); Taylor, Classical Heritage, etc., pp. 38 and 360. In the last quarter of the twelfth century Walter of Lille, called also Walter of Chatillon, wrote his Alexandreis in ten books of easy-flowing hexameters. It is printed in Migne, Pat. Lat. 209, col. 463-572. Cf. ante, page 192. His work shows that a mediaeval scholar-poet could reproduce a historical theme quite soberly. His poem was read by other bookmen; but the Alexander of the Middle Ages remained the Alexander of the fabulous vernacular versions.

[340] See Gaston Paris, “Chrétien Légouais et autres imitateurs d’Ovide,” Hist. litt. de la France, t. xxix., pp. 455-525.

[341] The words “nexum mancipiumque” are more formal and special than the English given above.

[342] The early law had as yet devised no execution against the debtor’s property.

[343] The jurisconsults whose opinions were authoritative flourished in the second and third centuries. The great five were Gaius, Julian, Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus. Inasmuch as these jurisconsults of the Empire were members of the Imperial (or, later, Praetorian) Auditory, they were judges in a court of last resort, and their “responsa” were decisions of actual cases. They subsequently “digested” them in their books. See Munroe Smith, “Problems of Roman Legal History,” Columbia Law Review, 1904, p. 538.

[344] Dig. i. 1 (“De Just. et jure”) 1. See Savigny, System des heutigen römischen Rechts, i. p. 109 sqq. Apparently some of the jurists (e.g. Gaius, Ins. i. 1) draw no substantial distinctions between the jus naturale and the jus gentium. Others seem to distinguish. With the latter, jus naturale might represent natural or instinctive principles of justice common to all men, and jus gentium, the laws and customs which experience had led men to adopt. For instance, libertas is jure naturali, while dominatio or servitus is introduced ex gentium jure (Dig. i. 5, 4; Dig. xii. 6, 64). Jus gentium represented common expediency, but its institutions (e.g. servitus) might or might not accord with natural justice. For manumissio as well as servitus was ex jure gentium (Dig. i. 1, 4), and so were common modes and principles of contract. Ulpian’s notion of the jus naturale as pertaining to all animals, and jus gentium as belonging to men alone, was but a catching classification, and did not represent any commonly followed distinction.

[345] Constitutio is the more general term, embracing whatever the emperor announces in writing as a law. The term rescript properly applies to the emperor’s written answers to questions addressed to him by magistrates, and to the decisions of his Auditory rendered in his name.

[346] For this whole matter, see vol. i. of Savigny’s System des heutigen römischen Rechts; Gaius, Institutes, the opening paragraphs; and the first two chapters of the first Book of Justinian’s Digest.

[347] Dig. i. 3, 32.

[348] Dig. i. 3, 10, and 12.

[349] Dig. i. 3, 14.

[350] Ibid. 39.

[351] Dig. l. 17, 30.

[352] Dig. l. 17, 31.

[353] Ibid. 54.

[354] Ibid. 202.

[355] Dig. l. 16, 24; Ibid. 17, 62.

[356] Cod. Theod. (ed. by Mommsen and Meyer) i. 1, 5.

[357] With the Theodosian Code the word lex, leges, begins to be used for the constitutiones or other decrees of a sovereign.

[358] From the constitution directing the compilation of the Digest, usually cited as Deo auctore.

[359] The original plan of Theodosius embraced the project of a Codex of the jurisprudential law. See his constitution of the year 429 in Theod. C. i. 1, 5. Had this been carried out, as it was not, Justinian’s Digest would have had a forerunner.

[360] Juliani epitome Latina Novellarum Justiniani, ed. by G. Haenel (Leipzig, 1873).

[361] Conrat, Ges. der Quellen und Lit. des röm. Rechts, pp. 48-59, and 161 sqq.; Mommsen, Zeitschrift für Rechtsges. 21 (1900), Roman. Abteilung, pp. 150-155.

[362] Ed. by Bluhme, Mon. Germ. leges, iii. 579-630. Cf. Tardif, Sources du droit français, 124-128. A code of Burgundian law had already been made.

[363] Edited by Haenel, with the epitomes of it in parallel columns, under the name of Lex Romana Visigothorum (Leipzig, 1849). See Tardif, o.c. 129-143.

[364] Cod. Theod. i. 4, 3; Brev. i. 4, 1.

[365] On these epitomes and glosses see Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 222-252. Mention should be made of the Edict of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a piece of legislation contemporary with the Breviarium and the Papianus. In pursuance of Theodoric’s policy of amalgamating Goths and Romans, the Edict was made for both (Barbari Romanique). Its sources were substantially the same as those of the Breviarium, except that Gaius was not used. The sources are not given verbatim, but their contents are restated, often quite bunglingly. Naturally a Teutonic influence runs through this short and incomplete code, which contains more criminal than private law. No further reference need be made to it because its influence practically ceased with the reconquest of Italy by Justinian. It is edited by Bluhme, in Mon. Ger. leges, v. 145-169. See as to it, Savigny, Geschichte des röm. Rechts, ii. 172-181; Salvioli, Storia del diritto italiano, 3rd ed., pp. 45-47.

[366] Cf. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, i. p. 109 sqq.

[367] For the characteristics and elements of early Teutonic law see Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, Bd. i.

[368] See Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, i. p. 254 sqq., and 338-340.

[369] “Adversus Gundobadi legem,” c. 4 (Mon. Germ. leges, iii. 504). As to Agobard see ante, Vol. I. p. 232.

[370] The matter is suggested here only in its general aspects. The details present every kind of complication (for some purposes to-day a court will apply the law of the litigant’s domicile). The professio (professus sum or professa sum), by which a man or woman formally declares by what law he or she lives, remained common in Italy for five centuries after Pippin’s conquest, and indicates the legal situation there, especially of the Teutonic newcomers.

[371] One sees an analogy in the fortunes of the Boëthian translations of the more advanced treatises of Aristotle’s Organon. They fell into disuse (or never came into use) and so were “lost” until they came to light, i.e. into use, in the last part of the twelfth century.

[372] See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, pp. 182-187.

[373] See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 162-166, 168-182, 192-202, 240-252.

[374] See Salvioli, Storia di diritto italiano, 3rd ed., 1899, pp. 84-90; ibid. L’ Istruzione pubblica in Italia nei secoli VIII. IX. X.; Tardif, Hist. des sources du droit français, p. 281 sqq.; Savigny, Geschichte, etc., iv. pp. 1-9; Fitting, “Zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Rges. Sav. Stift., Roman. Abteil., Bd. vi., 1885, pp. 94-186; ibid. Juristische Schriften des früheren Mittelalters, 108 sqq. (Halle, 1876).

[375] A contemporary notice speaks of the enormous number of judges, lawyers, and notaries in Milan about the year 1000. Salvioli, L’ Istruzione pubblica, etc., p. 78. It is hard to imagine that no legal instruction could be had there.

[376] The evidence is gathered in different parts of Savigny’s Geschichte.

[377] De parentelae gradibus, see Savigny, Geschichte, Bd. iv. p. 1 sqq.

[378] See Savigny, Geschichte, Bd. ii. pp. 134-163 (the text is published in an Appendix to that volume, pp. 321-428); Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 420-549; Tardif, Hist. des sources du droit français, pp. 213-246.

[379] This follows the so-called Tübingen MSS., the largest immediate source of the Petrus. As well-nigh the entire substance of the Petrus is drawn from the immediately prior compilations (which are still unpublished) its characteristics are really theirs.

[380] Apparently the chief magistrate of Valence: “Valentinae civitatis magistro magnifico.”

[381] Petri exceptiones, iii. 69.

[382] Petrus, i. 66.

[383] See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., 550-582; Tardif, Hist. des sources, etc., pp. 207-213; Fitting, Zeitschrift für Rges. Bd. vi. p. 141. It is edited by Bocking (Berlin, 1829) under the title of Corpus legum sive Brachylogus juris civilis.

[384] For instance, Brach. ii. 12, “De juris et facti ignorantia,” is short and clear. It follows mainly Digest xxii. 6.

[385] Summa Codicis des Irnerius, ed. by Fitting (Berlin, 1894). See Introduction, and also Fitting in Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Bd. xvii. (1896), Romanische Abteilung, pp. 1-96.

[386] Cf. Summa Codicis Irnerii, vii. 23, and vii. 31. 1.

[387] Summa Codicis Irnerii, i. 14. The corresponding passages in Justinian’s Codification are Dig. i. 3, lex 12 and 38, and Codex vii. 45, lex 13.

[388] Summa Codicis Irnerii, vii. 22 and 23. The chief Justinianean sources are Dig. xli. 2, and Cod. xii. 32.

[389] See Salvioli, Manuale, etc., pp. 65-68; ibid. L’ Istruzione pubblica in Italia, pp. 72-75; Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, i. p. 387 sqq.

[390] Post, Chapter XXXV., I.

[391] The Bologna school is commonly called the school of the glossators. Their work was to expound the law of Justinian; and their glosses, or explanatory notes, were the part of their writings which had the most permanent influence. The glosses were originally written between the lines or on the margins of the codices of the Digest, Codex, Novels, and Institutes.

[392] Savigny gives examples of Irnerius’s glosses in an appendix to the fourth volume of his Geschichte. Pescatore (Die Glossen des Irnerius, Greifswald, 1888) maintains that Savigny overstates the difference between the interlinear and the marginal glosses of Irnerius.

[393] On Placentinus see Savigny, Geschichte, iv. pp. 244-285.

[394] Proemium to De var. actionum, given by Savigny, iv. p. 540.

[395] This is from the proemium attached to one old edition, and is given in Sav. Ges. iv. p. 245. In an appendix, p. 542, Savigny gives an even more florid proemium to the Summa Codicis from a manuscript.

[396] On Azo, see Savigny, Ges. v. pp. 1-44.

[397] Quoted by Savigny. On Accursius see Sav. Ges. v. pp. 262-305.

[398] On Bartolus see Savigny, Ges. etc. vi. pp. 137-184.

[399] Cf. Savigny, Ges. v. pp. 222-261.

[400] “Ecclesia vivit lege Romana,” Lex Ribuaria, 58. This was universally recognized, although the individual clericus might remain amenable to the law of his birth.

[401] For these matters see primarily the sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code, and book i. chap. 27. Also the suspected Constitutiones Sirmondianae attached to that Code. Justinian’s Codex and Novellae add much. Zorn, in his Kirchenrecht, p. 29 sqq., gives a convenient synopsis of the matter.

[402] One observes that the opening chapter of Justinian’s Digest speaks of jurisprudentia as knowledge of divine as well as human matters.

[403] Decretum, i. dist. viii. c. i.

[404] Decretum, i. dist. ix. c. xi.; see ibid. dist. xiii., opening.

[405] Tardif, Sources du droit canonique, p. 175 sqq., has been chiefly followed here.

[406] On the above matters see (with the authorities and bibliographies therein given) Maasen, Geschichte der Quellen, etc., der canonischen Rechts (Bd. i., to the middle of the ninth century); Tardif, Sources du droit canonique (Paris, 1887); Zorn, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts (Stuttgart, 1888); Gerlach, Lehrbuch des catholischen Kirchenrechts (5th edition, Paderborn, 1890); Hinschius, Decretales pseudo-Isidorianae (Leipzig, 1863); Corpus juris canonici, ed. by Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879-1881).

[407] Jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts embraced marriage and divorce, wills and inheritance, and, by virtue of their surveillance of usury and vows and oaths, practically the whole relationship between debtor and creditor.

[408] Volume ii. of R. W. and A. J. Carlyle’s History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (1909) maintains that the statements of papal pretensions which were incorporated in the recognized collections of Decretals were less extreme than those emanating from the papacy under stress of controversy.

[409] See Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900), p. 22 sqq. and notes. I would express my indebtedness to this book for these pages on mediaeval political theories. Dunning’s History of Political Theories is a convenient outline; Carlyle’s History of Mediaeval Political Theory gives the sources carefully.

[410] Occasionally studium (knowledge, study, or science) is introduced as a third part or element of the human community or of human life. Thus in the famous statement of Jordanes of Osnabrück—the Romans received the Sacerdotium, the Germans the Imperium, the French the Studium. See Gierke, Political Theories, p. 104, note 8.

[411] Cf. Gierke, o.c. p. 109, note 16. But compare Carlyle, o.c. vol. ii. part ii. chaps. vii.-xi.

[412] Even toward the close of the Middle Ages Marsilius of Padua was almost alone in positing the absolute supremacy of the State, says Gierke.

[413] See Gierke, o.c. p. 144, note 131, and compare notes 132, 133, and 183 for attacks upon the plenary power of the pope.

[414] Gierke, o.c. pp. 31-32, and p. 139, notes 107 and 108.

[415] Dig. i. 4, 1; Gierke, o.c. p. 39 and pp. 146, 147.

[416] Gierke, o.c. p. 64.

[417] Gierke, o.c. p. 172, note 256. Cf. ante, p. 268.

[418] See Gierke, o.c. pp. 73-86, and corresponding notes.

[419] Little will be said in these pages of palpable crass heretics like the Cathari, for example. The philosophic ideas of such seem gathered from the flotsam and jetsam of the later antique world; their stock was not of the best, and bore little interesting fruit for later times. Such mediaeval heresies present no continuous evolution like that of the proper scholasticism. Progress in philosophy and theology came through academic personages, who at all events laid claim to orthodoxy. All lines of advance leading on to later phases of philosophic, scientific, and religious thought, lay within the labours of such, some of whom, however, were suspected or even condemned by the Church, like Eriugena, Abaelard, or Roger Bacon. But these men did not stand apart from orthodox academic circles, and were never cast out by the Church. Thought and learning in the Middle Ages were domiciled in monastic, episcopal, or university circles; and these were at least conventionally orthodox.

It has been said, to be sure, that the heresy of one generation becomes the orthodoxy of another; but this is true only of tendencies like those of Abaelard, which represent the gradual expansion and clearing up of scholastic processes. For the time they may be condemned, perhaps because of the vain and contentious character of the suspected thinker; but in the end they are recognized as admissible.

The Averroists constitute an apparent exception. Yet they were a philosophic and academic sect, whose heresy consisted in an implicit following of Aristotle as interpreted by Averroes. Moreover, they sought to save their orthodoxy by their doctrine of the two kinds of truth, philosophic and theological or dogmatic. It is not clear that much fruitful thought came from their school. The positions of Siger de Brabant, a prominent Averroist and contemporary of Aquinas, are referred to post, Chapter XXXVII. The best account of Averroism is Mandonnet’s Siger de Brabant et l’averroisme latin au XIII^e siècle (a second edition, Louvain, is in preparation). See also De Wulf, Hist. of Medieval Philosophy (3rd. ed., Longmans, 1909) p. 379 sqq. with authorities cited.

[420] Called also his Summa philosophica, to distinguish it from his Summa theologiae.

[421] Summa theologiae, i. i., quaestio i. art. 1-8.

[422] Post, Chapter XXXVI., I.

[423] Even the Averroists were more mediaeval than Greek, inasmuch as they professed to follow Aristotle implicitly. Cf. post, Chapter XXXVII., at the end.

[424] A touch of “salvation,” or salvation’s need, is on Plato when his “philosophy” becomes a consideration of death (μελέτη θανάτου) and a process of growing as like to God (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ) as man can. Phaedo, 80 E, and Theaetetus, 176 A.

[425] Historia calamitatum, cap. 9 and 10. Cf. post, p. 303.

[426] Post, Chapter XLI.

[427] Ante, p. 298. I cannot avoid referring to Abaelard several times before considering the man and his work more specifically, and in the proper place; post, Chapter XXXVI. I.

[428] Introductio ad theologiam, lib. ii. (Migne 178, col. 1039).

[429] See Denifle, “Die Sentenzen Abaelard’s und die Bearbeitungen seiner Theologia,” Archiv für Literatur und Kirchengeschichte, i. p. 402 sqq. and p. 584 sqq. Also Picavet, “Abélard et Alexander de Hales, créateurs de la méthode scholastique,” Bib. de l’école des hautes études, sciences religieuses, t. vii. p. 221 sqq.

[430] Two extracts, one from the Sentences and one from the Summa, touching the same matter, will illustrate the stage in the scholastic process reached by Peter Lombard, about the year 1150, and that attained by Thomas Aquinas a hundred years later.

The Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences are divided into Distinctiones, with sub-titles to the latter. Distinctio xlvi. of the first Book bears the general title: “The opinion (sententia) declaring that the will of God which is himself, cannot be frustrated, seems to be opposed by some opinions.” The first subdivision of the text begins: “Here the question rises. For it is said by the authorities above adduced [the preceding Distinctio had discussed “The will of God which is His essence, one and eternal”] that the will of God, which is himself, and is called His good pleasure (beneplacitum) cannot be frustrated, because by that will fecit quaecumque voluit in caelo et in terra, which—witness the Apostle—nihil resistit. [I leave the Scriptural quotations in Latin, so as to mark them.] It is queried, therefore, how one should understand what the Apostle says concerning the Lord, 1 Tim. 2: Qui vult omnes homines salvos fieri. For since all are not saved, but many are damned, that which God wills to take place, seems not to take place (become, fieri), the human will obstructing the will of God. The Lord also in the Gospel reproaching the wicked city, Matt, xxiii., says: Quoties volui congregare filios tuos, sicut gallina congregat pullos suos sub alis, et noluisti. Thus it might seem from these, that the will of God may be overcome by the will of men, and, resisted by the unwillingness of the weakest, the Most Strong may prove unable to do what He willed. Where then is that omnipotence by which in coelo et terra, according to the Prophet, omnia quaecumque voluit fecit? And how does nothing withstand His will, if He wished to gather the children of Jerusalem, and did not? For these sayings seem indeed to oppose what has been stated.”

The second paragraph proceeds: “But let us see the solution, and first hear how what the Lord said should be understood. For it was not intended to mean (as Augustine says, Enchiridion, c. 97, solving this question) that the Lord wished to gather the children of Jerusalem, and did not do what He willed because she would not; but rather she did not wish her children to be gathered by Him, yet in spite of her unwillingness (qua tamen nolente) He gathered all He willed of her children.... And the sense is: As many as I have gathered by my will, always effective, I have gathered, thou being unwilling. Hence it is evident that these words of the Lord are not opposed to the authorities referred to.”

(Paragraph 3) “Now it remains to see how the aforesaid words do not contradict what the Apostle said of the Lord: Vult omnes homines salvos fieri. Because of these words many have wandered from the truth, saying that God willed many things which did not come to pass. But the saying is not thus to be understood, as if God willed any to be saved, and they were not. For who can be so impiously foolish as to say that God cannot change the evil wills of men to good when and where He will? Surely what is said in Psalm 113, Quaecumque voluit fecit, is not true, if He willed anything and did not accomplish it. Or,—(and this is still more shameful) for that reason He did not do it, because what the Omnipotent willed to come to pass, the will of man obstructed. Hence when we read in Holy Scripture velit omnes homines salvos fieri, we should not detract from the will of omnipotent God, but understand the text to mean that no man is saved except whom He wills to be saved: not that there is no man whom He does not will to be saved, but that no man may be saved except whom He wills should be saved.... Thus also is to be understood the text from John i.: Illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum; not as if there is no man who is not lighted, but that none is lighted save from Him....”

The next and fourth paragraph takes up the problem whether evil, that is sin, takes place by the will of God, or He unwilling (eo nolente). “As to this, divers men thinking diversely have been found in contradiction. For some say that God wills evils to be or become (esse vel fieri) yet does not will evils. But others say that He neither wills evils to be nor to become. Yet these and those agree in declaring that God does not will evils. Yet each with arguments as well as authorities strives to make good his assertion.” We will not follow the Lombard through this thorny problem. He cuts his way with passages from his chief patristic authority, Augustine, and in the end concludes: “Leaving this and other like foolish opinions, and favouring the sounder view, which is more fully sanctioned by the testimonies of the Saints, we may say that God neither wills evils to become, nor wills that they should not become, nor yet is He unwilling (nolle) that they should become. All that He wills to become, becomes, and all that He wills not to become does not become. Yet many things become which He does not will to become, as every evil.”

Thus the Lombard. Now let us see how Thomas, in his Summa theologiae, Pars Prima, Quaestio xix. Articulus ix. expounds the point: utrum voluntas Dei sit malorum.

“As to the ninth articulus thus one proceeds. (1) It seems [Videtur, formula for stating the initial argument which will not be approved] that the will of God is [the cause] of evils. For God wills every good that becomes (i.e. comes into existence). But it is good that evils should come; for Augustine says in the Enchiridion: ‘Although those things which are evils, in so far as they are evils, are not goods; yet it is good (bonum) that there should be not only goods (bona) but evils.’ Therefore God wills evils.”

“(2) Moreover [Praeterea, Thomas’s regular formula for introducing the succeeding arguments, which he will not approve] Dionysius says, iv. cap. de divinis nominibus: ‘There will be evil making for the perfection of the whole.’ And Augustine says in the Enchiridion: ‘Out of all (things) the admirable beauty of the universe arises; wherein even that which is called evil, well ordered and set in its place, commends the good more highly; since the good pleases more, and is the more praiseworthy, when compared with evil.’ But God wills everything that pertains to the perfection and grace of the universe; since this is what God chiefly wills in His creation. Therefore God wills evils.”

“(3) Moreover, the occurrence and non-occurrence of evils (mala fieri, et non fieri) are contradictory opposites. But God does not will evils not to occur; because since some evils do occur, the will of God would not be fulfilled. Therefore God wills evils to occur.”

“Sed contra est [Thomas’s formula for stating the opinion which he will approve] what Augustine says in his book of Eighty-three Questions: ‘No wise man is the author of man’s deterioration; yet God is more excellent than any wise man; much less then, is God the author of any one’s deterioration. But He is said to be the author when He is spoken of as willing anything. Therefore man becomes worse, God not willing it. But with every evil, something becomes worse. Therefore God does not will evils.’”

“Respondeo dicendum quod [Thomas’s formula for commencing his elucidation] since the reason (or ground or cause, ratio) of the good is likewise the reason of the desirable (as discussed previously), evil is opposed to good: it is impossible that any evil, as evil, should be desired, either by the natural appetite or the animal, or the intellectual, which is will. But some evil may be desired per accidens, in so far as it conduces to some good. And this is apparent in any appetite. For the natural impulse (agens naturale) does not aim at privation or destruction (corruptio); but at form, to which the privation of another form may be joined (i.e. needed, conjungitur); and at the generation of one, which is the destruction of another. Thus a lion, killing a stag, aims at food, to which is joined the killing of an animal. Likewise the fornicator aims at enjoyment, to which is joined the deformity of guilt.

“Thus evil which is joined to some good, is privation of another good. Never, therefore, is evil desired, not even per accidens, unless the good to which the evil is joined appears greater than the good which is annulled through the evil. But God wills no good more than His goodness; yet He wills some one good more than some other good. Hence the evil of guilt, which destroys relationship to divine good (quod privat ordinem ad bonum divinum), God in no way wills. But the evil of natural defect, or the evil of penalty, He wills in willing some good to which such evil is joined; as, in willing righteousness He wills penalty; and in willing that the order of nature be preserved, He wills certain natural corruptions.

“Ad primum ergo dicendum [Thomas’s formula for commencing his reply to the first false argument] that certain ones have said that although God does not will evils, He wills evils to be or become: because, although evils are not goods, yet it is good that evils should be or become. They said this for the reason that those things which are evil in themselves, are ordained for some good; and they deemed this ordainment involved in saying mala esse vel fieri. But that is not said rightly. Because evil is not ordained for good per se but per accidens. For it is beyond the sinner’s intent, that good should come of it; just as it was beyond the intent of the tyrants that from their persecutions the patience of the martyrs should shine forth. And therefore it cannot be said that such ordainment for good is involved in saying that it is good for evil to be or become: because nothing is adjudged according to what pertains to it per accidens but according to what pertains to it per se.”

“Ad secundum dicendum that evil is not wrought for the perfection or beauty of the whole except per accidens, as has been shown. Hence this which Dionysius says that evil makes for the perfection of the whole may lead to an illogical conclusion.”

“Ad tertium dicendum that although the occurrence and non-occurrence of evils are opposed as contradictories; yet to will the occurrence and to will the non-occurrence of evils, are not opposed as contradictories, since both one and the other may be affirmative. God therefore neither wills the occurrence nor the non-occurrence of evils; but wills to permit their occurrence. And this is good.”

[431] Ante, Chapter XII.

[432] Ante, pp. 289 sqq.

[433] The Speculum majus of Vincent of Beauvais will afford the principal example of the resulting hybrid arrangement.

[434] Ludwig Baur, Dominicus Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophiae (Baeumker’s Beiträge, Münster, 1903), p. 193 sqq., to which I am indebted for what I have to say in the next few pages.

[435] Migne, Pat. Lat. 64, col. 10 sqq.

[436] These works were written near the middle of the twelfth century. Gundissalinus was Archdeacon of Segovia and drew upon Arab writings.

[437] See L. Baur, Gundissalinus, etc., p. 376 sqq.

[438] The treatise is not printed. Its captions are given by L. Baur in his Gundissalinus, pp. 368-375, from which I have borrowed what I give of them.

[439] Liber de praedicabilibus (tome 1 of Albertus’s works), which in scholastic logic means the five “universals,” genus, species, difference, property, accident, (also called the quinque voces) discussed in Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories. The Categories themselves are called praedicamenta.

[440] The above gives the arguments of chapters i. and ii. of the work. One notices that Albertus in this exposition of the subject of Porphyry’s treatise, is using the method which Thomas brings to syllogistic perfection in his Summa.

[441] It was printed, more than once, in the late fifteenth century; the most readable edition is that printed at Douai in 1624, in four huge folios.

[442] Boundless as the work appears, neither in mental powers, nor learning, nor in massiveness of achievement, is its author to be compared with Albertus Magnus. The De universo of Rabanus Maurus, Migne 111, col. 9-612, is in its arrangement and method a forerunner of Vincent’s Speculum. Later predecessors were the English Franciscan Bartolomaeus, whose encyclopaedic De proprietatibus rerum was written a little before the middle of the twelfth century (see Felder, Studien in Franciscanerorder, etc., pp. 251-253); and Lambertus Audomarensis (St. Omer) with his Liber floridus, a general digest of knowledge, historical, ecclesiastical, and natural, taken from many writers, an account of which is given in Migne 163, col. 1004 sqq.

[443] Here, of course, we have the hands of Esau, but the voice of Augustine and Orosius!

[444] The above is from cap. 9 of liber i. of the Speculum doctrinale.

[445] Migne, Pat. Lat. 34, col. 246-485.

[446] Ante, p. 290.

[447] The three theological virtues are fides, spes, and caritas. They are called thus because Deum habent pro objecto; and because they are poured (infunduntur) into us by God alone. They are distinguished from the moral and intellectual virtues because their object surpasses our reason, while the object of the moral and intellectual virtues can be comprehended by human reason (Summa, Pars prima secundae, Quaestio lxii., Art. 1-4).

[448] ἕξις μετὰ λόγου ἀληθοῦς ποιητική, Arist. Nich. Ethics, vi. 4.

[449] One notes that these two, like many other of the vices enumerated, are vices in that they are extremes, in the Aristotelian sense.

[450] We are at Quaestio clxxi. of Secunda secundae.

[451] The order which Thomas would have followed in the unfinished conclusion of his Summa theologiae, may be inferred from the order of the last half of Book IV. of his Contra Gentiles, or indeed from the last part of the fourth Book of the Lombard’s Sentences.

[452] Ante, Chapter XII.

[453] There were, of course, attempts at translation, notably those of Notker the German (see ante, Vol. I., p. 308) and Alfred’s translation of Boëthius’s De consolatione. But such were made only of the popular parts of Scripture (e.g. the Psalms) or of very elementary profane treatises. To what extent Notker’s translations were used, is hard to say. But at all events any one really seeking learning, studied and worked and thought in the medium of Latin; for the bulk of the patristic writings never were translated; and when the works of Aristotle had at last reached the Middle Ages in the Latin tongue, they were studied in that tongue. Because of the crudeness of the vernacular tongues, the Latin classics were even more untranslatable in the tenth or eleventh century than now.

One may add, that it was fortunate for the progress of mediaeval learning that Latin was the one language used by all scholars in all countries. This facilitated the diffusion of knowledge. How slow and painful would have been that diffusion if the different vernacular tongues had been used in their respective countries, for serious writing.

[454] Ante, Chapter XII., I.

[455] Eruditio didascalica, i. cap. 12 (Migne, Pat. Lat. 176, col. 750).

[456] Cf. Abelson, The Seven Liberal Arts (New York, 1906).

[457] I am speaking generally, that is to say, omitting for the present the aberrant or special or intrusive tendencies found in a man like Roger Bacon, for example. They were of importance for what was to come thereafter; but are not broadly representative of the Middle Ages.

[458] St. Anselm, Epist. lib. iii. 41, ad Fulconem (Migne, Pat. Lat. 158, col. 1192). So Roscellin showed in his own case how problems primarily logical could pass over to metaphysics or theology. Likewise, although on the other side of the controversy, one, Odo of Tournai, a good contemporary realist, found realism an efficient aid in explaining the transmission of original sin; since for him all men formed but one substance, which was infected once for all by the sin of the first parents. Cf. Hauréau, Hist. de la philosophie scholastique, i. pp. 297-308; De Wulf, Hist. of Medieval Philosophy, p. 156, 3rd ed.

[459] Abaelard, Hist. calamitatum, chap. 2.

[460] Ante, Chapter XXV.

[461] Ante, Chapter XII., I.

[462] Abaelard’s Dialectica was published by Cousin, Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard (Paris, 1836). For a thorough exposition of Abaelard’s logic see Prantl, Ges. der Logik, ii. p. 160 sqq.

[463] I.e. as positive, comparative, and superlative.

[464] Cousin, Ouvr. inédits, p. 175. Cf. Aristotle’s Categories, ii. v. 20. The opening of Pars tertia of Abaelard’s Dialectica (in Cousin’s edition, p. 324 sqq.) affords an interesting example of this logical analysis and reconstruction of statement, which seems to originate in sheer grammar, and then advance beyond it.

[465] Cousin, o.c. pp. 190, 192.

[466] Cousin, o.c. p. 331.

[467] Prantl’s Geschichte der Logik, vol. ii., contains an exhaustive discussion of the various phases of this controversy: its language is little less difficult than that of the twelfth-century word-twisters.

[468] Cousin, o.c. pp. 434, 435.

[469] Theologia Christiana, iv. (Migne 178, col. 1284).

[470] Migne, Pat. Lat. 178, col. 1641.

[471] Ante, p. 292.

[472] Scito te ipsum, cap. 13 (Migne 178, col. 653).

[473] Scito te ipsum, cap. 19 (Migne 178, col. 664).

[474] Migne 178, col. 1615.

[475] Ante, pp. 304 sqq.

[476] This has been published by Stölzle: Abaelards 1121 zu Soissons verurteilter Tractatus de Unitate et Trinitate divina (1891).

[477] Migne 178, col. 1123-1330; Cousin and Jourdain, P. Abaelardi opera, ii. pp. 357-566 (1859).

[478] Migne 178, col. 979-1114; Cousin and Jourdain, o.c. pp. 1-149.

[479] Ante, Chapter XXXV., I.

[480] Bernard, Ep. 338 (Migne 182, col. 542).

[481] Whose sacramental theory of the Creation has already been given at length, ante, Chapter XXVIII. For the incidents of Hugo’s life see the same chapter. Bibliography, note to page 61. See also Ostler, “Die Psychologie des Hugo von St. Viktor” (Baeumker’s Beiträge, Münster, 1906).

[482] De script. cap. 2 (Migne 175, col. 11).

[483] De script. cap. 2 (Migne 175, col. 10).

[484] Summa sententiarum (Migne 176, col. 42-174); also under title of Tractatus theologicus, wrongly ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin, in Migne 171, col. 1067-1150.

[485] Migne 176, col. 740-838.

[486] I think of no previous work so closely resembling the Erud. didas. as the Institutiones divinarum et saecularum lectionum of Cassiodorus.

[487] Erud. did. i. 2.

[488] Here one sees the source of much that we quoted from Vincent de Beauvais, ante, Chapter XXXV., 1.

[489] Lib. iii. cap. 13 sqq.

[490] Erud. did. iii. cap. 20. Cf. ante, p. 63.

[491] Ante, Chapter XXVIII.

[492] Migne, Pat. Lat. 175, col. 115 sqq.

[493] Migne, Pat. Lat. 175, col. 923 sqq.

[494] The following consideration of the mysticism of Christian theologians is not intended to include other forms of “mysticism” (Pantheistic, poetical, pathological, neurotic, intellectual, and sensuous) within or without the Christian pale.

[495] Ante, p. 42 sqq.

[496] Ante, Chapter XXVIII.

[497] Migne, Pat. Lat. 176, col. 617-680.

[498] De arca Noe morali, i. cap. 2 (Migne 176, col. 621).

[499] Migne 176, col. 681-703. With Hugo’s pupil, Richard of St. Victor, this constant allegory, especially the constant allegorical use of Scripture names, becomes pedantic, precieux, impossible. See e.g. his Benjamin major in Migne 196, col. 64-202.

[500] De arrha animae, Migne 176, col. 951-970.

[501] Migne 182, col. 727-808. A translation is announced by George Lewis in the Oxford Library of Translations.

[502] De consid. lib. ii. cap. 2.

[503] Migne 183, col. 789 sqq. Chapter XVII., ante, is devoted to Bernard, and his letters and sermons.

[504] Ed. by Willner (Baeumker’s Beiträge, Münster, 1903).

[505] See ante, Chapter XXX., 1.

[506] Bernardus Silvestris, De mundi universitate, i. 2 (ed. by Barach and Wrobel; Innsbrück, 1876). As to Bernard Silvestris, see Clerval, Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge, p. 259 sqq. and passim; also Hauréau (who confuses him with Bernard of Chartres), Hist. de la phil. scholastique, ii. 407 sqq.

[507] See Hauréau, Hist. etc. ii. 447-472; R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought, chap. vi. His Liber de sex principiis is printed in Migne 188, col. 1257-1270.

[508] Werner, “Die Kosmologie und Naturlehre des scholastischen Mittelalters, mit specialler Beziehung auf Wilhelm von Conches,” Sitzungsb. K. Akad., philos. Klasse, 1873, Bd. lxxv.; Hauréau, Hist. etc. i. 431-446; ibid. Singularités littéraires, etc.

[509] Ante, Vol. I., p. 251.

[510] Ante, Chapter XXX., I.

[511] Under another title, Moralis philosophia de honesto et utile, it has been ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin, Migne 171, col. 1007-1056.

[512] For examples of John’s Latin, see ante, p. 173.

[513] See e.g. his treatment of logic in Lib. III. and IV. of the Metalogicus (Migne 199).

[514] Polycraticus, ii. 19-21 sqq. There is now a critical edition of this work by C. C. J. Webb (Joannis Saresberiensis Policratici libri VIII.; Clarendon Press, 1910).

[515] Polycraticus, lib. vii., is devoted to a history of antique philosophy.

[516] Polycraticus, vii. cap. 10.

[517] Polycrat. vii. cap. 11.

[518] Migne 199, col. 955.

[519] Ante, Chapter XXIX., 11. and XXXII., 1.

[520] The works of Alanus are collected in Migne, Pat. Lat. 210. What follows in the text is much indebted to M. Baumgartner, “Die Philosophie des Alanus de Insulis” (Baeumker’s Beiträge, Münster, 1896).

[521] All this is thoroughly done by Baumgartner, o.c.

[522] See Baumgartner, p. 76 sqq. and citations.

[523] What I have felt obliged to say upon the organization of mediaeval Universities, I have largely drawn from Rashdall’s Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895). The subject is too large and complex for independent investigation, except of the most lengthy and thorough character. Extracts from illustrative mediaeval documents, with considerable information touching mediaeval Universities, are brought together by Arthur O. Norton in his Mediaeval Universities (Readings in the History of Education, Harvard University, 1909). For the Paris University, the most important source is the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. by Denifle and Chatelain (1889-1891). See also Ch. Thurot, L’Organisation de l’enseignement dans l’Université de Paris (Paris, 1850), and Denifle, Die Universitäten des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1885).

[524] What has been said applies to the Bologna Law University. That had been preceded by a school of Arts, and later there grew up a flourishing school of Medicine, where surgery was also taught. These schools became affiliated Universities, but never equalled the Law University in importance.

[525] The Masters who taught were called Regentes.

[526] Both civil and canon law were studied till 1219, when a Bull of Honorius III. forbade the study of the former at Paris.

[527] See post, p. 399.

[528] Mr. Rashdall’s.

[529] Rashdall, o.c. ii. p. 341.

[530] Oxford lay in the diocese of Lincoln.

[531] For the course of medicine and the list of books studied or lectured on, especially at Montpellier, from which we have the most complete list, see Rashdall, ii. p. 118 sqq. and ibid. p. 780. In Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. xx., 1909, C. H. Haskins publishes An unpublished List of Text-books, belonging to the close of the twelfth century, when classical studies had not as yet been overshadowed by Dialectic. See also, generally, Paetow, The Arts Course at Medieval Universities (Univ. of Illinois, 1910).

[532] See generally, Carra de Vaux, Avicenne (Paris, 1900); also Gazali, by the same author.

[533] Whoever will read the two monographs of the Baron Carra de Vaux, Avicenne and Gazali, will be struck by the closely analogous courses of Moslem and Christian thought; each showing the parallel phases of scholastic rationalism (reliant upon reason and rational authority) and scholastic theological piety, or mysticism (reliant upon the authority of Revelation and sceptical as to the validity of human reason).

[534] See for this matter Mandonnet, O.P., Aristote et la mouvement intellectuel du moyen âge, contained in his Siger de Brabant, and printed separately; De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 243-253 and authorities; C. Marchesi, L’ Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione medievale (Messina, 1904).

[535] Ante, Chapter V.

[536] Constitutiones des Prediger-Ordens vom Jahre 1228, Prologus; H. Denifle, Archiv für Litt. und Kirchenges. des Mittelalters, Bd i. (1885), p. 194.

[537] See Felder, Wissenschaftlichen Studien im Franciskanerorden, p. 24 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1904); a valuable work.

[538] See Felder, o.c. p. 29.

[539] Constitutiones, etc., cap. 28-31.

[540] Cf. Felder, o.c. p. 107 sqq.

[541] Cf. Felder, o.c. p. 177 sqq.

[542] From Denifle, Universitäten des Mittelalters, i. 99, note 192.

[543] See generally, Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’averroisme latin au moyen âge (Fribourg, Switzerland, 1899); Baeumker (Beiträge, 1898), Die Impossibilia des Siger von Brabant; De Wulf, Hist. of Medieval Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 379 sqq. (Longmans, 1909).

[544] Albert was born probably in 1193, and died in 1280; Bacon was born some twenty years later, and died about 1292. Bonaventura was born in 1221, and Thomas in 1225 or 1227; they both died in 1274.

[545] So Raphael represents them in his “School of Athens.”

[546] Bonaventura, Sermo IV., Quaracchi edition, tome v. p. 572 (cited by De Wulf, Hist. etc. p. 304, note). With all their Augustinian-Platonism, the Franciscans made a good second to the Dominicans in the study of Aristotle, as is proved by the great number of commentaries upon his works by members of the former Order. See Felder, o.c. p. 479.

[547] Epist. de tribus quaestionibus, § 12.

[548] Tome v. (Quaracchi ed.) pp. 319-325.

[549] This is from § 26, the last in the work. Bonaventura has already said (§ 7): “Omnes istae cognitiones ad cognitionem Sacrae Scripturae ordinantur, in ea clauduntur et in illa perficiuntur, et mediante illa ad aeternam illuminationem ordinantur.” (“All kinds of knowledge are ordained for the knowledge of Holy Scripture, are in it enclosed and thereby are perfected; and through its mediation are ordered for eternal illumination.”)

[550] It is contained in tomes i.-iv. of the Quaracchi edition.

[551] T. v. pp. 201-291.

[552] Breviloquium, Prologus.

[553] One feels the reality of Bonaventura’s distinctions here between theology and philosophy. They are enunciations of his religious sense, and possess a stronger validity than any elaborate attempt to distinguish by argument between the two. Thomas distinguishes them with excellent reasoning. It lacks convincingness perhaps from the fact that Thomas’s theology is so largely philosophy, as Roger Bacon said.

[554] As this chapter opens a pars, it begins with a recapitulation of what has preceded and a summary of what is to come. The specific topic of the chapter commences here.

[555] I.e. the desiderative, rational, and irascible elements in man.

[556] Bonaventura closely follows Hugo of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, see ante, Chap. XXVIII., especially p. 72.

[557] Opera, t. v. pp. 295-313.

[558] Vir desideriorum, Dan. ix. 23 (Vulgate).

[559] The Breviloquium and Itinerarium are conveniently edited by Hefele in a little volume (Tübingen, 1861).

[560] Albertus, Metaphysicorum libri XIII., lib. i. tract. 1, cap. 4.

[561] Physic. lib. viii. tract. 1, cap. 14.

[562] Poster. Analyt. lib. i. tract. 1, cap. 1. This and the previous citation are from Mandonnet’s Siger de Brabant.

[563] Ethic. lib. vi. tract. 2, cap. 25.

[564] Carus, Ges. der Zoologie, p. 231.

[565] Ernst Meyer, Ges. der Botanik, Bd. iv. p. 77.

[566] The works of Albertus were edited by the Dominican Jammy in twenty-one volumes (Lyons, 1651); they are reprinted by Borgnet (Paris, 1890 et seq.). My references to volumes follow Jammy’s edition.

[567] See ante, pp. 314 sqq.

[568] Prantl, Ges. der Logik, iii. 89 sqq., calls him an “unklarer Kopf,” incapable of consistent thinking.

[569] This is the view of A. Schneider, Die Psychologie Alberts des Grossen (Baeumker’s Beiträge, Münster, 1903). The author presents analytically the disparate elements—Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, and theological-Augustinian, which are found in Albert’s writings.

[570] See Endriss, Albertus Magnus als Interpret der Aristotelischen Metaphysik (Munich, 1886).

[571] The above is mainly drawn from E. Meyer’s Ges. der Botanik, Bd. iv. pp. 38-78.

[572] Ante, Volume I. p. 76.

[573] See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, pp. 211-239.

[574] Sum. theol. pars prima, tract. I, quaest. ii.

[575] Ante, Chapter XXXV., I.

[576] Tome xx. p. 41a.

[577] The Vita of Thomas by Guilielmus de Thoco, Acta sanctorum, Martius, tome i. folio 657 sqq. (March 7), is wretchedly confused.

[578] Vita, cap. iii. § 15.

[579] One may see the truth of this by comparing the treatment of a matter in Albert’s Summa theologiae with the corresponding sections in Thomas. For example, compare Albert’s Summa theol. prima, Tract. vii. Quaest. xxx.-xxxiii., on generatio, processio, missio of the divine persons, with Thomas, Sum. theol. prima, Quaest. xxvii. and xliii.

[580] John of Damascus, an important Greek theologian of the eighth century, often cited by Thomas.

[581] Quaestiones are the larger divisions of the argument.

[582] Pars prima, Qu. xvi. Art. 3.

[583] Pars prima, Qu. lxxxii. Art. 3.

[584] Prima sec. Qu. iv. Art. 2.

[585] Prima sec. Qu. iv. Art. 3.

[586] Sum. Phil. contra Gentiles, iii. 37.

[587] One cannot avoid applying the masculine pronouns to God, and to the angels also. But, of course, this is a mere convenience of speech. Thomas ascribes no sex either to God or the angels.

[588] It will, of course, be borne in mind, that Thomas’s use of videre and visio to express man’s perception of God’s essential nature, does not mean a physical but an intellectual seeing.

[589] Given ante, pp. 290 sqq.

[590] Secundum quod est in actu, i.e. in realized actuality as distinguished from potentiality (Aristotelian conceptions).

[591] The foregoing is taken from the thirteen articuli into which Quaestio xii. is divided.

[592] Pars prima, Quaestio xxxii. Art. 1.

[593] Quaestiones disputatae: De Veritate, x. 6. Citing Rom. i. 20.

[594] Prooemium to Qu. xiv. Pars prima.

[595] Qu. xiv. Art. 2—a point which Thomas reasons out in interesting scholastic Aristotelian fashion, but in language too technical to translate.

[596] Pars prima, Qu. xiv. Art. 11.

[597] Pars prima, Qu. xv. Art. 1-3.

[598] Pars prima, Qu. xxvi. Art. 2.

[599] Pars prima, Qu. xliv. Art. 3.

[600] Pars prima, Qu. xlv. Art. 1.

[601] Summa theol. pars prima, Qu. l. As heretofore, I follow the exposition of the Summa theologiae. But Thomas began a large and almost historical treatment of angels in his unfinished Tract. de substantiis separatis, seu de Angelorum natura (unfinished, in Opuscula theol.). He has another and important tractatus, De cognitione Angelorum, Quaestiones disput. de veritate, viii.

[602] Pars prima, Qu. l. Art. 1. Thomas goes on to contradict Aristotle, in holding quod nullum ens esset nisi corpus.

[603] All that has been given concerning the knowledge of angels relates to what they know through their own natures as created. Further enlightenment (as with men) comes through grace as soon as they become beati through turning to good. Pars prima, Qu. lxii. Art. 1 sqq.

[604] Ante, Chapter XXXV., 1.

[605] A burning controversy between the Averroists and the orthodox schoolmen.

[606] This is the substance of Qu. lxxxix. Art. 1.

[607] Pars prima, Qu. xix. Art. 1.

[608] Pars prima, Qu. lxxxii. and lxxxiii.

[609] Pars prima, Qu. xx. 1.

[610] Summa theol., Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xvii. Art 8.

[611] Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xxiv. Art. 8.

[612] Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xxvi. Art. 4 and 5.

[613] Pars prima secundae, Qu. cix. sqq.

[614] Another reading is delectatio, i.e. enjoyment.

[615] Bacon’s Opus majus was edited in incomplete form by Jebb in 1733, and reprinted in 1750 at Venice. This edition is superseded by that of Bridges, in two volumes, published with the Moralis philosophia and Multiplicatio specierum by the Clarendon Press in 1897. The text of this edition had many errors, which have been corrected by a third volume published in 1900 by Williams and Norgate, who are now the publishers of the three volumes. In 1859 Brewer edited the Opus tertium, the Opus minus, and Compendium philosophiae for the Master of the Rolls Series.

“An unpublished Fragment of a work by Roger Bacon” was discovered by F. A. Gasquet in the Vatican Library, and published in the English Historical Review for July 1897. It appears to be a letter to Clement IV., written in 1267.

In 1861 appeared the excellent monograph by Émile Charles, entitled Roger Bacon, sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines. To this one still must turn for extracts from the Compendium theologiae, and the Communia naturalium. The last-named work, with the Compendium philosophiae and the Multiplicatio specierum (which appears not to be an intrinsic part of the Opus majus), may have been composed as parts of what was to be the writer’s Opus principale. Bacon’s Greek Grammar has been edited by Nolan and Hirsch (Cambridge, 1902).

[616] Opus tertium, chap. xxv. p. 91 (Brewer’s text).

[617] Opus tertium, chap. xvii. (pp. 58-59, Brewer’s ed.).

[618] Brewer, R. Bacon, Opera inedita, p. 1.

[619] Opus tertium, pp. 7 and 8.

[620] In Opus tertium, chap. iii. (Brewer, p. 15), Bacon plainly tells the pope the difficulties in which he had been placed by this injunction of secrecy: “The first cause of delay came through those who are over me. Since you have written nothing to them in my excuse, and I could not reveal to them your secret, they insisted with unspeakable violence that I should obey their will; but I refused, because of the bond of your mandate, which bound me to your work, notwithstanding any order from my prelates. And, of a surety, as I was not excused by you, I met with obstacles too great and many to enumerate.... And another obstacle, enough to defeat the whole business, was the lack of funds.”

[621] These are, of course, the Opus majus, the Opus minus, and the Opus tertium; also the Vatican Fragment, the position of which is not quite clear; but it is part of the writings of this year, and constitutes apparently the introductory letter to Clement.

[622] The authority for this is the Chronica XXIV., Generalium Ordinis Minorum; see Bridges, vol. iii. p. 158.

[623] See Op. tertium, p. 26 sqq. (Brewer).

[624] Opus majus, pars ii. end of chap. v. and beginning of chap. vi. (Bridges, iii. p. 49); see Op. tertium (Brewer), p. 81.

[625] Op. maj. pars ii. chap. xv. (Bridges, iii. p. 71).

[626] Op. tertium, p. 39.

[627] Op. maj. pars ii. (Bridges, iii. pp. 69-70). Cf. ante, p. 180.

[628] The reference seems to be to the Ethics and Politics.

[629] Compendium studii, p. 424 (Brewer).

[630] Op. tertium, p. 14.

[631] Op. tertium, p. 30.

[632] Compendium studii phil., p. 429 (Brewer).

[633] Ibid. p. 398—written in 1271.

[634] I follow the paging of Bridges, vol. iii. These four causes of error are also given in Opus tertium, p. 69, Compendium studii, p. 414 (Brewer), and the Gasquet Fragment, p. 504.

[635] Op. maj. pp. 2 and 3.

[636] P. 322 sqq. (Brewer).

[637] Opus tertium, p. 102.

[638] Ante, p. 128.

[639] As, e.g. where he says that it would have been better for the Latins “that the wisdom of Aristotle should not have been translated, than to have been translated with such perverseness and obscurity.” Compend. studii, p. 469, (Brewer).

[640] See Opus majus, pars iii.

[641] Opus majus, Bridges, vol. i. p. 106.

[642] Commonly called “mathematica.”

[643] Opus majus (Bridges, i. p. 253). Bacon goes into this matter elaborately.

[644] Cf. S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (Erlangen, 1906). Gives Bacon’s sources.

[645] Opus minus, pp. 367-371.

[646] Opus majus, pars v. dist. iii. (Bridges, ii. p. 159 sqq.).

[647] A contemporary of Bacon named Witelo composed a Perspectiva about 1270, following an Arab source; and a few years later a Dominican, Theodoric of Freiburg, was devoted to optics, and wrote on light, colour, and the rainbow. Baeumker, “Witelo, ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII. Jahrh.” (Beiträge, etc., Münster, 1908); Krebs, “Meister Dietrich, sein Leben, etc.” (Baeumker’s Beiträge, 1906).

[648] With Bacon, experientia does not always mean observation; and may mean either experience or experiment.

[649] See Charles, Roger Bacon, pp. 17-18.

[650] Ante, pp. 313-315. Duns Scotus puts clearly the double aspect of logic, which Albertus Magnus approached: “It should be understood that logic is to be considered in two ways. First, in so far as it is docens (instructs, holds its own school): and from its own necessary and proper principles proceeds to necessary conclusions, and is therefore a science. Secondly, in so far as we use it, by applying it to those matters in which it is used: and then it is not a science” (Super universalia Porphyrii, Quaestrio i., Duns Scotus, Opera, t. i. p. 51).

[651] The two aspects of the experimental science appear in the following statement from the Gasquet Fragment: “The antepenultima science is called experimental; and is the mistress of those which precede it; for it excels the others in three chief prerogatives. One is that all the sciences except this either use arguments alone to prove their conclusions, like the purely speculative sciences, or possess general and imperfect experiences. But only the perfect experience (experientia perfecta, i.e. the scientific experiment or observation), sets the mind at rest in the light of truth; which is certain and is proved in that part [of my work]. Wherefore it was necessary that there should be one science which should certify for us, all the magnificent truths of the other sciences, through the truth of experience, and this is that whereof I say that it is called scientia experimentalis of its own right from the truth of experience (per autonomasiam ab experienciae veritate); and I show by the illustration of the rainbow and other things, how this prerogative is reserved to that science.

“The second prerogative is the dignity which relates to those chief truths which, although they are to be formulated (nominandae) in the terms (vocabulis) of the other sciences, yet the other sciences cannot furnish (procurare) them; and of this character are the prolongation of life through remedies to counteract the lack of a hygienic regimen from infancy, or constitutional debility inherited from parents who have not followed such a regimen. I shall show how it is possible thus to prolong life to the term set by God. But men, through neglecting the rules of health, pass quickly to old age, and die before reaching that term. The art of medicine is not able to furnish (dare) these remedies, nor does it; but it says they are possible (sed fatetur ea possibilia), and so experimental science has devised remedies known to the wisest men alone, by which the ills of old age are delayed, or are mitigated when they arrive.

“The third prerogative of this science belongs to it secundum se et absolute; for here it leaves the two ways already touched on, and addresses itself to all things which do not concern the other sciences, save that often it requires the service of the others. As a mistress it commands the others as servants ... and orders them to do its work, and furnish the wise instruments which it uses; as navigation directs the art of carpentry, to make a ship for it; and the military art directs the forger’s art to make it a breastplate and other arms. In like manner, this science [the experimental], as a mistress, directs geometry to make it a burning-glass, which shall set on fire things near or far, one of the most sublime wonders that can come to pass through geometry. So it commands the other sciences in all the wonderful and hidden things of nature and art” (pp. 510-511).

[652] Opus tertium, chap. xxviii.

[653] Opus majus, pars vi. 1 (Bridges, ii. p. 169).

[654] Ibid. p. 171. Doubtless the meaning of the above is connected with Bacon’s view of the Aristotelian intellectus agens, which he takes to signify the direct illumination of the mind of man by God. “All the wisdom of philosophy is revealed by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that illuminates the minds of men in all wisdom. That which illuminates our minds is now called by the theologians intellectus agens. But my position is that this intellectus agens is God principaliter, and secondarily, the angels, who illuminate us” (Opus tertium, p. 74; cf. Op. majus, pars i. chap. v.).

[655] Compendium studii (Brewer), p. 397.

[656] De secretis operibus artis et naturae, et de nullitate magiae, p. 533 (Brewer). Cf. Charles, Roger Bacon, p. 296 sqq.

[657] The most convenient edition of the works of Joannes Duns Scotus is that published by Vives, at Paris (1891 sqq.) in twenty-six volumes. It is little more than a reprint of Wadding’s Edition.

[658] See Seeberg, Die Theologie des Johannes Duns Scotus (Leipzig, 1900), p. 8 sqq., a work to which the following pages owe much.

[659] Grosseteste’s philosophical or theological works are still unpublished or very difficult of access; and there is no sufficient exposition of his doctrines.

[660] Seeberg, o.c. p. 16 sqq.

[661] See De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 363 sqq.

[662] See Seeberg, o.c. p. 34 sqq.

[663] The kernel of Duns’s proof is contained in the following passage, which is rather simple in its Scotian Latin: “Dicendum, quod Universale est ens, quia sub ratione non entis, nihil intelligitur: quia intelligibile movet intellectum. Cum enim intellectus sit virtus passiva (per Aristotelem 3, de Anima, cont. 5 et inde saepe), non operatur, nisi moveatur ab objecto; non ens non potest movere aliquid ut objectum; quia movere est entis in actu; ergo nihil intelligitur sub ratione non entis. Quidquid autem intelligitur, intelligitur sub ratione Universalis: ergo illa ratio non est omnino non ens” (Super universalia Porphyrii, Quaestio iv.).

[664] Cf. the far from clear exposition in Seeberg, o.c. p. 86 sqq. and 660 sqq.

[665] Miscell. quaest. 6, 18, cited by Seeberg, o.c. p. 114.

[666] The last two or three pages have been drawn mainly from Seeberg, o.c. p. 113 sqq. In discussing Duns Scotus, I have given less from his writings than has been my wont with other philosophers. And for two reasons. The first, as I frankly avow, is that I have read less of him than I have of his predecessors. With the exception of such a curious treatise as the (doubtful) Grammatica speculativa (tome i. of the Paris edition); and the elementary, and comparatively lucid, De rerum principio (tome iv. of the Paris edition)—with these exceptions Duns is to me unreadable. My second reason for omitting excerpts from his writings, is that I wished neither to misrepresent their quality, nor to cause my reader to lay down my book, which is heavy enough anyhow! If I selected lucid and simple extracts, they would give no idea of the intricacy and prolixity of Duns. His commentary on the Sentences fills thirteen tomes of the Paris edition! No short and simple extract will illustrate that! On the other hand, I could not bring myself by lengthy or impossible quotations to vilify Duns. It is unjust to expose a man’s worst features, nakedly and alone, to those who do not know his better side and the conditions which partly explain the rest of him.

[667] Quodlibetalia, i. Qu. 14, cited by De Wulf, o.c. p. 422.

[668] Expos. aurea, cited by De Wulf, o.c. p. 423, whose exposition of Occam’s theory I have followed here.

[669] On Occam, see Seeberg’s article in Hauck’s Encyclopaedia; Siebeck, “Occams Erkenntnislehre, etc.,” in Archiv für Ges. der Philosophie, Bd. x., Neue Folge (1897).

[670] Quoted by Seeberg.

[671] De Wulf, o.c. p. 425.

[672] In view of the enormous literature upon Dante, popular as well as learned, it would be absurd to give any bibliographical, biographical or historical information as to his works, himself, or his Italian circumstances.

[673] De mon. ii. 3.

[674] De mon. ii. chaps. 4, 10, 12.

[675] De mon. iii. 4 sqq.

[676] All this seems supported by Conv. i. 1, and ii. 13, the main explanatory chapters of the work.

[677] Conv. iii. 12.

[678] e.g. “benigna volontade,” Par. xv. 1.

[679] Cf. A. d’Ancona, I Precursori di Dante (Florence, 1874); M. Dods, Forerunners of Dante (Edinburgh, 1903); A. J. Butler, Forerunners of Dante (Oxford, 1910); Hettinger, Göttliche Komödie, p. 79 (2nd ed., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1889). Mussafia, “Monumenti antichi di dialetti italiani,” Sitzungsber. philos. hist. Classe (Vienna Academy), vol. 45, 1864, p. 136 sqq., gives two old Italian descriptions, one of the heavenly Jerusalem, the other of the infernal Babylon.

[680] 2 Cor. xii. 2; Paradiso, i. 73-75.

[681] Ante, Chapter XIX.

[682] Ante, pp. 98-100.

[683] The coarseness of Inf. xxi. 137-139 is of a piece with the way of mediaeval art in making demons horrible through a grotesquely indecent rendering of their persons.

[684] e.g. Inf. xviii. 100 sqq.; and Inf. xxviii. and xxix.

[685] Inf. viii. 37 sqq.; xxxii. 97 sqq.; xxxiii. 116 and 149.

[686] Cf. Moore, Dante Studies, vol. ii. pp. 266-267.

[687] Any one who looks through the first volume of Tiraboschi’s great Storia della letteratura italiana, written in the early part of the nineteenth century, will find a generous acceptance of myth as fact; just as he would find the same in the Histoire ancienne of the good Rollin, written a century or more before.

[688] Dante has frequently been spoken of as the “first scholar” of his time. I do not myself know enough regarding the scholarship of every scholar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to confirm or deny this. Personally, I do not regard him as a Titanic scholar, like Albertus Magnus for example. He studied all the classic Latin authors available. Doubtless he had a memory corresponding to his other extraordinary powers. His also was the intellectual point of view, and the intellectual interest in knowledge and its deductions. His view of life was as intellectual as that of Aquinas. But as Dante’s powers of plastic visualization were unequalled, so also, it seems to me, were his faculties of using as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar. Regarding the extent of Dante’s use and reading of the Classics, nothing could be added to Dr. Moore’s Studies in Dante, First Series; though I think what Dr. Moore has to say of “Dante and Aristotle” would have cast a more direct light upon the matter, had he cited as far as possible from the Latin translation probably used by Dante, instead of from the original Greek.

[689] Inf. iv. 88. Cf. Moore, Studies in Dante, i. p. 6. The application of the term satirist to Horace is peculiarly mediaeval.

[690] Inf. iv. 131.

[691] Inf. ii. 20.

[692] Par. xx. 68.

[693] Purg. xxv. 22.

[694] Inf. xviii. 83 sqq.

[695] Inf. xxvi. 88 sqq.

[696] Purg. xii.

[697] Purg. xv.

[698] According to Dr. Moore, Dante quotes or refers to the “Vulgate more than 500 times, to Aristotle more than 300, Virgil about 200, Ovid about 100, Cicero and Lucan about 50 each, Statius and Boëthius between 30 and 40 each, Horace, Livy, and Orosius between 10 and 20 each,”—and other scattering references.

[699] Inf. xxxiii. 4; Aen. ii. 3.

[700] Par. ii. 16.

[701] Aen. vi. 309; Inf. iii. 112.

[702] Aen. vi. 700; Purg. ii. 80.

[703] Purg. i. 135; cf. Aen. vi. 143 “Primo avulso non deficit alter, etc.”

[704] See Inf. xxxi.; Purg. xii. 25 sqq.

[705] Purg. vi. 118: “O highest Jove that wast on earth crucified for us.”

[706] Par. i. 13 sqq.; Par. ii. 8.

[707] The provenance, etc., of Dante’s classification of sins in the Inferno, like everything else in Dante, has been interminably discussed. The reference to the De officiis of Cicero is due to Dr. Moore. See “Classification of Sins in the Inferno and Purgatorio,” Studies in Dante, 2nd Series. Also cf. Hettinger, Die göttliche Kömödie, pp. 159-162, and notes 6 and 23 on p. 204 and 207 (2nd ed., Freiburg in Breisgau, 1889). Dante’s main statement is in Inf. xi.

[708] In whom does not the awful anguish of the suicides (Inf. xiii.) arouse grief and horror?

[709] Inf. xvi. 59. They are more respectable than the blessed denizens of the Heaven of Venus, Par. ix.

[710] Inf. xix.

[711] Inf. vi. 103 sqq.

[712] The intellectual temperament finds voice in many great expressions, which are very Dante and also very Thomas, as Par. xxviii. 106-114; xxix. 17; xxx. 40-42.

[713] Inf. iii. 18.

[714] Hettinger, o.c. p. 254.

[715] Aeneid vi. 327 sqq.; Hettinger, o.c. p. 226.

[716] See Taylor, Classical Heritage, p. 162.

[717] These are pointed out in the Commentaries (e.g. Scartazzini’s) and in many monographs. Hettinger’s Göttliche Kömödie is serviceable: also Moore’s Studies in Dante and Toynbee’s Dante Studies.

[718] Purg. i. 71; John viii. 36.

[719] Purg. i. 89.

[720] Purg. iii. 34 sqq.

[721] Purg. iv. 4 sqq.

[722] Purg. v. 105 sqq.

[723] Purg. vii. 54; iv. 133-135.

[724] Cf. e.g. Purg. xii. 109.

[725] Purg. xv. 40 sqq.

[726] Purg. xvi. 64 sqq.

[727] Purg. xvii. 85 sqq., and xviii.; Hettinger, o.c. p. 235 sqq., and pp. 261-264.

[728] Purg. xxiii. 72; xxvi. 14.

[729] Purg. xxv. The notes in Hettinger, o.c., are quite full in citations of passages from Thomas and other scholastics.

[730] Thomas, Summa, iii. Qu. 89, Art. 5.

[731] As it is rather in Par. xxvii. 76 sqq.

[732] Par. iii. 52, 64, 89.

[733] Par. iv.

[734] Par. xi. 1 sqq.

[735] Par. xiv.

[736] Par. xv. 10.

[737] Par. xix. 40 sqq.

[738] Par. xx.

[739] Par. xxiv.-xxvi.

[740] Typified in St. Bernard, Par. xxxi. and following. Suitable reasons for this choice may be suggested by the extracts from Bernard’s De deligendo Deo and Sermons on Canticles, ante, Chapter XVII.

[741] Conv. ii. 13. The symbolism inherent in all human mental processes seems indicated by the argument of Aquinas (ante, p. 466) that the mind knows “the particular through sense and imagination; ... it must turn itself to images in order to behold the universal nature existing in the particular.” This is a necessity of our half material nature.

[742] Convito ii. 1. Letter to Can Grande, par. 7.

[743] In the Can Grande letter, having stated this fourfold significance, Dante does not proceed to exemplify it in the interpretation which follows of the opening lines of the Paradiso. Possibly those lines did not admit of the fourfold interpretation; yet, in general, Dante does not try to carry it out in practice, any more than other mediaeval writers commonly.

[744] Convito ii. ch. 14 and 15.

[745] Doubtless the commentator habit is fixed in the nature of man; but it was pre-eminently mediaeval. We have seen enough elsewhere of the multiplication of Commentaries on the Sentences of the Lombard and other scholastic works. Dante’s friend, Guido Cavalcanti, wrote a little poem beginning Donna mi priego, upon which we have eight Commentaries, the first from Egidio Colonna in 1316.

[746] Yet, however obvious the meaning, tying the pole of the Chariot to the Tree of Life was a great stroke (Purg. xxxii. 49).

[747] There is a piece of allegory in the Paradiso which almost gets on one’s nerves, i.e. the ceaseless whirling of the blessed spirits, usually in wheel formations: e.g. Par. xii. 3; xxi. 81; xxiv. 10 sqq.: cf. x. 145; xiii. 20.

[748] One notes that all the symbolizing personages of the poem—Virgil, Statius, Matilda, Lia, Beatrice—have literal reality, however subtle or far-reaching may be the allegorical intendment with which the poet has invested them.

[749] See e.g. Par. xxxi. 67.

[750] Cf. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, i. p. 46 sqq.

[751] Compare Purg. xxvii. 34 sqq.; xxx.; xxxi.; Par. xviii. 13 sqq.; xxiii.; xxx.; xxxi.; xxxii. 8.

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