^ Univ&rSfhj o£ Ct&'^ovnjeu, • J THE MEDIAEVAL MIND THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE MEDIAEVAL MIND A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT AND EMOTION IN THE MIDDLE AGES HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I THIRD (AMERICAN) EDITION Neto gork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1919 TO J. I. T. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from Getty Research Institute https://archive.org/details/mediaevalmindhis01tayl PREFACE TO THE THIRD (AMERICAN) EDITION Since the second edition of this book was exhausted, nearly a year ago, there has been a constant and gratifying demand for it. As the work was then carefully revised wherever there was need of revision or addition, no changes have been made in the text of the present edition. The second edition was published shortly before the War began. During the last four years the comparatively few publications relating to the Middle Ages, which have come to my notice, have not sug- gested any alterations. Henry Osborn Taylor. New York, September , 1919. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION When through some years of happy labour one has written a book after his own plan, and has set forth in it the things which were to him interesting and valuable, there is no keener pleasure than to have others likewise find them so. The reception of The Mediaeval Mind has been very gratify- ing. My thanks are due to those reviewers who have praised it above its deserts, and to those whose salutary criticisms have been availed of for the present edition. The book has been carefully reconsidered throughout, and some statements have been changed or amplified. A new chapter has been introduced upon the Towns and Guilds and the Crusades, regarded as phases of mediaeval growth. My translations from the Latin have been examined and the slips corrected. Although occasionally abridged, I have tried to keep them literal, and free from thoughts not in the original. Henry Osborn Taylor. New York, January , 1914. viii PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The Middle Ages ! They seem so far away ; intellectu- ally so preposterous, spiritually so strange. Bits of them may touch our sympathy, please our taste; their window- glass, their sculpture, certain of their stories, their romances, — as if those straitened ages really were the time of romance, which they were not, God knows, in the sense commonly taken. Yet perhaps they were such intellectu- ally, or at least spiritually. Their terra — not for them incognita , though full of mystery and pall and vaguer glory — was not the earth. It was the land of metaphysical construction and the land of spiritual passion. There lay their romance, thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning. Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb : in full voice speaks the noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone craftsmen. Why it moves us we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps, of the building’s formative and earnestly intended meaning. Do we care to get at that? There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths, penetrating to the rationale of the Middle Ages, learning the doctrinale , or emotionale, of the modes in which they still present themselves so persuasively. But if the pageant of those centuries charm our eyes with forms that seem so full of meaning, why should we IX X THE MEDIAEVAL MIND stand indifferent to the harnessed processes of mediaeval thinking and the passion surging through the thought ? Thought marshalled the great mediaeval procession, which moved to measures of pulsating and glorifying emotion. Shall we not press on, through knowledge, and search out its efficient causes, so that we too may feel the reality of the mediaeval argumentation, with the possible validity of mediaeval conclusions, and tread those channels of mediaeval passion which were cleared and deepened by the thought? This would be to reach human comradeship with mediaeval motives, no longer found too remote for our sympathy, or too fantastic or shallow for our under- standing. But where is the path through these footless mazes? Obviously, if we would attain, perhaps, no unified, but at least an orderly presentation of mediaeval intellectual and emotional development, we must avoid entanglements with manifold and not always relevant detail. We must not drift too far with studies of daily life, habits and dress, wars and raiding, crimes and brutalities, or trade and craft and agriculture. Nor will it be wise to keep too close to theology or within the lines of growth of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. Let the student be mindful of his purpose (which is my purpose in this book) to follow through the Middle Ages the development of intellectual energy and the growth of emotion. Holding this end in view, we, students all, shall not stray from our quest after those human qualities which impelled the strivings of mediaeval men and women, informed their imaginations, and moved them to love and tears and pity. The plan and method by which I have endeavoured to realize this purpose in my book may be gathered from the Table of Contents and the First Chapter, which is intro- ductory. These will obviate the need of sketching here the order of presentation of the successive or co-ordinated topics forming the subject-matter. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xi Yet one word as to the standpoint from which the book is written. An historian explains by the standards and limitations of the times to which his people belong. He judges — for he must also judge — by his own best wisdom. His sympathy cannot but reach out to those who lived up to their best understanding of life ; for who can do more? Yet woe unto that man whose mind is closed, whose standards are material and base. Not only shalt thou do what seems well to thee ; but thou shalt do right, with wisdom. History has laid some thousands of years of emphasis on this. Thou shalt not only be sincere, but thou shalt be righteous, and not iniquitous ; beneficent, and not malignant ; loving and lovable, and not hating and hateful. Thou shalt be a promoter of light, and not of darkness; an illuminator, and not an obscurer. Not only shalt thou seek to choose aright, but at thy peril thou shalt so choose. “Unto him that hath shall be given” — nothing is said about sincerity. The fool, the maniac, is sincere; the mainsprings of the good which we may commend lie deeper. So, and at his peril likewise, must the historian judge. He cannot state the facts and sit aloof, impartial between good and ill, between success and failure, progress and retrogression, the soul’s health and loveliness, and spiritual foulness and disease. He must love and hate, and at his peril love aright and hate what is truly hateful. And although his sympathies quiver to understand and feel as the man and woman before him, his sympathies must be controlled by wisdom. Whatever may be one’s beliefs, a realization of the power and import of the Christian Faith is needed for an understanding of the thoughts and feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages, and for a just apprecia- tion of their aspirations and ideals. Perhaps the fittest standard to apply to them is one’s own broadest conception of the Christian scheme, the Christian scheme whole and Xll THE MEDIAEVAL MIND entire with the full life of Christ’s Gospel. Every age has offered an interpretation of that Gospel and an attempt at fulfilment. Neither the interpretation of the Church Fathers, nor that of the Middle Ages satisfies us now. And by our further understanding of life and the Gospel of life, we criticize the judgment of mediaeval men. We have to sympathize with their best, and understand their lives out of their lives and the conditions in which they were passed. But we must judge according to our own best wisdom, and out of ourselves offer our comment and contribution. Henry Osborn Taylor. New York, January , 1911. CONTENTS BOOK I THE GROUNDWORK CHAPTER I PAGE Genesis of the Mediaeval Genius 3 CHAPTER II The Latinizing of the West 23 CHAPTER III Greek Philosophy as the Antecedent of the Patristic Apprehension of Fact 33 CHAPTER IV Intellectual Interests of the Latin Fathers . . . 61 CHAPTER V Latin Transmitters of Antique and Patristic Thought 88 CHAPTER VI The Barbaric Disruption of the Empire . . . . no xiii XIV THE MEDIAEVAL MIND CHAPTER VII The Celtic Strain in Gaul and Ireland . CHAPTER VIII Teuton Qualities: Anglo-Saxon, German, Norse CHAPTER IX The Bringing of Christianity and Antique Knowledge to the Northern Peoples I. Irish Activities ; Columbanus of Luxeuil. II. Conversion of the English ; the Learning of Bede and Alfred. III. Gaul and Germany; from Clovis to St. Winifried- Boniface. BOOK II THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES CHAPTER X Carolingian Period: the First Stage in the Appro- priation of the Patristic and Antique CHAPTER XI Mental Aspects of the Eleventh Century: Italy I. From Charlemagne to Hildebrand. II. The Human Situation. III. The Italian Continuity of Antique Culture. IV. Italy’s Intellectual Piety: Peter Damiani and St. Anselm. PACK 124 138 169 207 23Q CONTENTS xv CHAPTER XII PAGE Mental Aspects of the Eleventh Century: France . 282 I. Gerbert. II. Odilo of Cluny, III. Fulbert and the School of Chartres; Trivium and Quadrivium. IV. Berengar of Tours, Roscellin and the Coming Time. CHAPTER XIII Mental Aspects of the Eleventh Century: Germany; England 308 I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture. II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict. III. England ; Closing Comparisons. CHAPTER XIV Phases of Mediaeval Growth 33 r I. The Crusades. II. Towns and Guilds. CHAPTER XV The Growth of Mediaeval Emotion 346 I. The Patristic Chart of Passion. II. Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity. XVI THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK III THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: THE SAINTS CHAPTER XVI PAGE The Reforms of Monasticism 369 Mediaeval Extremes ; Benedict of Aniane ; Cluny ; Citeaux’s Charta Charitatis; the vita contemplativa accepts the vita activa. CHAPTER XVII The Hermit Temper 384 Peter Damiani; Romuald; Dominicus Loricatus; Bruno and Guigo, Carthusians. CHAPTER XVIII The Quality of Love in St. Bernard .... 408 CHAPTER XIX St. Francis of Assisi 431 CHAPTER XX Mystic Visions of Ascetic Women 458 Elizabeth of Schonau; Hildegard of Bingen; Mary of Ognies ; Liutgard of Tongern ; Mechthild of Magdeburg. CHAPTER XXI The Spotted Actuality 487 The Testimony of Invective and Satire ; Archbishop Ri- gaud’s Register; Engelbert of Cologne ; Popular Credences. CONTENTS xvu CHAPTER XXII PAGE The World of Salimbene . 510 BOOK IV THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY CHAPTER XXIII Feudalism and Knighthood 537 Feudal and Christian Origin of Knightly Virtue; the Order of the Temple; Godfrey of Bouillon; St. Louis- Froissart’s Chronicles . CHAPTER XXIV Romantic Chivalry and Courtly Love ... 574 From Roland to Tristan and Lancelot. BOOK I THE GROUNDWORK CHAPTER I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS The antique civilization of the Roman Empire was followed by that depression of decadence and barbarization which separates antiquity from the Middle Ages. Out of the confusion of this intervening period emerged the mediaeval peoples of western Europe. These, as knowledge increased with them, began to manifest spiritual traits having no clear counterpart in the ancient sources from which they drew the matter of their thought and contemplation. The past which furnished the content of mediaeval thought was twofold, very dual, even carrying within itself the elements of irreconcilable conflict ; and yet with its opposing fronts seemingly confederated, if not made into one. Sprung from such warring elements, fashioned by all the interests of life in heaven as well as life on earth, the traits and faculties of mediaeval humanity were to make a motley company. Clearly each mediaeval century will offer a manifold of disparity and irrelationship, not to be brought to unity, any more than can be followed to the breast of one mighty wind-god the blasts that blow from every quarter over the waters of our own time. Nevertheless, each mediaeval century, and if one will, the entire Middle Ages, seen in distant perspective, presents a consistent picture, in which dominant mediaeval traits, retaining their due pre- eminence, may afford a just conception of the mediaeval genius . 1 1 The present work is not occupied with the brutalities of mediaeval life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition abounding in the Middle Ages, and still existing, in a less degree, through parts of Spain and southern 4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I I While complex in themselves, and intricate in their interaction, the elements that were to form the spiritual constituency of the Middle Ages of western Europe may be disentangled and regarded separately. There was first the element of the antique, which was descended from the thought and knowledge current in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire, where Latin was the common language. In those Roman times, this fund of thought and knowledge consisted of Greek metaphysics, physical science, and ethics, and also of much that the Latins had themselves evolved, especially in private law and political institutions. Rome had borrowed her philosophy and the motives of her literature and art from Greece. At first, quite provincially, she drew as from a foreign source ; but as the great Republic extended her boundaries around the Mediterranean world, and brought under her levelling power the Hellenized or still Asiatic East, and Africa and Spain and Gaul as well, Greek thought, as the informing principle of knowledge, was diffused throughout all this Roman Empire, and ceased to be alien to the Latin West. Yet the peoples of the West did not become Hellenized, or change their speech for Greek. Latin held its own against its subtle rival, and continued to advance with power through the lands which had spoken other tongues before their Roman subjugation ; and it was the soul of Latium, and not the soul of Hellas, that imbued these lands with a new homogeneity of civic order. The Greek knowledge which spread through them was transmuted in Latin speech or writings; while the great Latin authors who modelled Latin literature upon the Greek, and did so much to fill the Latin mind with Greek thoughts, recast their borrowings in their own style as well as language, and re-tempered the France and Italy. Consequently I have not such things very actively in mind when speaking of the mediaeval genius. That phrase, and the like, in this book, will signify the more informed and constructive spirit of the mediaeval time. ch.i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 5 matter to accord with the Roman natures of themselves and their countrymen. Hence only through Latin paraphrase, and through transformation in the Latin classics, Greek thought reached the mediaeval peoples ; until the thirteenth century, when a better acquaintance was opened with the Greek sources, yet still through closer Latin translations, as will be seen. Thus it was with the pagan antique as an element of mediaeval culture. Nor was it very different with the patristic, or Christian antique, element. For in the fourth and fifth centuries, the influence of pagan Greece on pagan Rome tended to repeat itself in the relations between the Greek and the Latin Fathers of the Church. The dogmatic formulation of Christianity was mainly the work of the former. Tertullian, a Latin, had indeed been an early and important contributor to the process. But, in general, the Latin Fathers were to approve and confirm the work of Athanasius and of his coadjutors and predecessors, who thought and wrote in Greek. Nevertheless, Augustine and other Latin Fathers ordered and made anew what had come from their elder brethren in the East, Latinizing it in form and temper as well as language. At the same time, they supplemented it with matter drawn from their own thinking. It was thus that patristic theology and the entire mass of Christianized knowledge and opinion came to the Middle Ages in a Latin medium. A third and vaguest factor in the evolution of the mediaeval genius consisted in the diverse and manifold capacities of the mediaeval peoples : Italians whose ancestors had been very part of the antique ; inhabitants of Spain and Gaul who were descended from once Latinized provincials ; and lastly that widespread Teuton folk, whose forbears had barbarized and broken the Roman Empire in those centuries when a decadent civilization could no longer make Romans of barbarians. Moreover, the way in which Christianity was brought to the Teuton peoples and accepted by them, and the manner of their introduction to the pagan culture, reduced at last to following in the Christian train, did not cease for centuries to react upon the course of mediaeval development. 6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I The distinguishing characteristics which make the Mid- dle Ages a period in the history of western Europe were the result of the interaction of the elements of mediaeval development working together, and did not spring from the singular nature of any one of them. Accordingly, the proper beginning of the Middle Ages, so far as one may speak of a beginning, should lie in the time of the conjunction of these elements in a joint activity. That could not be before the barbaric disturbers of the Roman peace had settled down to life and progress under the action of Latin Christianity and the surviving antique culture. Nor may this beginning be placed before the time when Gregory the Great (d. 604) had refashioned Augustine, and much that was earlier, to the measure of the coming centuries; nor before Boethius (d. 523), Cassiodorus (d. 575), and Isidore of Seville (d. 636) had prepared the antique pabulum for the mediaeval stomach. All these men were intermediaries or transmitters, and belong to the epoch of transition from the antique and the patristic to the properly inceptive time, when new learners were beginning, in typically mediaeval ways, to rehandle the patristic material and what remained of the antique. Contemporary with those intermediaries, or fol- lowing hard upon them, were the great missionaries or converters, who laboured to introduce Christianity, with the antique thought incorporated in it and the squalid survival of antique education sheltered in its train, to Teuton peoples in Gaul, England, and Rhenish Germany. Among these was the truculent Irishman, St. Colum- banus (d. 615), founder of Luxeuil and Bobbio, whose disciple was St. Gall, and whose contemporary was St. Augustine of Canterbury, whom Gregory the Great sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons. A good century later, St. Winifried-Boniface is working to establish Christianity in Germany. 1 Thus it will not be easy to find a large and catholic beginning for the Middle Ages until the eighth century is reached, and we are come on what is called the Carolingian period. Let us approach a little nearer, and consider the situa- tion of western Europe with respect to antique culture and 1 There will be much to say of all these men in later chapters. ch.i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 7 Latin Christianity in the centuries following the disruption of the Roman Empire. The broadest di tinction is to be drawn between Italy and the lands north of the Alps. Under the Empire, there was an Italian people. However diverse may have been its ancient stocks, this people had long since become Latin in language, culture, sentiment, and tradition. They were the heirs of the Greek, and the creators of the Roman literature, art, philosophy, and law. They were never to become barbarians, although they suffered decadence. Like all great peoples, they had shown a power to assimilate foreigners, which was not lost, but only degraded and diminished, in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Teutonic slaves, immigrants, invaders, seemed to be barbarizing the Latin order quite as much as it was Latinizing them. In these and the following times the culture of Italy sank lamentably low. Yet there was no break of civilization, but only a deep decline and then a re-emergence, in the course of which the Latin civilization had become Italian. For a lowered form of classical educa- tion had survived, and the better classes continued to be educated people according to the degraded standard and lessened intellectual energies of those times . 1 Undoubtedly, in its decline this Latin civilization of Italy could no longer raise barbarians to the level of the Augustan age. Yet it still was making them over into the likeness of its own weakened children. The Visigoths broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern France ; other confused barbarians came and went, and then the Ostrogoths, with Theodoric at their head, an excellent but not very numerous folk. They stayed in Italy, and fought and died, or lived on, changing into indistinguishable Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and re- appearing where the Goths had lived. And then the Lombards, crueller than the Goths, but better able to main- tain their energies effective. Their numbers also were not great, compared with the Italians. And thereafter, in spite of their fierceness and the tenacity of their Germanic customs, the succeeding Lombard generations became imbued with the culture of Italy. They became North Italians, gravi- 1 Post, Chapter XI. 8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I tating to the towns of Lombardy, or perhaps, farther to the south, holding together in settlements of their own, or forming the nucleus of a hill-dwelling country nobility. The Italian stock remained predominant over all the incomers of northern blood. It certainly needed no intro- duction to what had largely been its own creation, the Latin civilization. With weakened hands, it still held to the education, the culture, of its own past ; it still read its ancient literature, and imitated it in miserable verse. The incoming barbarians had hastened the land’s intellectual downfall. But all the plagues of inroad and pestilence and famine, which intermittently devastated Italy from the fifth to the tenth century, left some squalid continuity of educa- tion. And those barbarian stocks which stayed in that home of the classics, became imbued with whatever culture existed around them, and tended gradually to coalesce with the Italians. Evidently in its old home, where it merely had become decadent, this ancient culture would fill a role quite different from any specific influence which it might exert in a country where the Latin education was freshly introduced. In Italy, a general survival of Roman law and institution, custom and tradition, endured so far as these various ele- ments of the Italian civilization had not been lost or dis- possessed, or left high and dry above the receding tide of culture and intelligence. Christianity had been superim- posed upon paganism ; and the Christian faith held thoughts incompatible with antique views of life. Teutonic customs were brought in, and the Lombard codes were enacted, working some specific supersession of the Roman law. The tone, the sentiment, the mind of the Italian people had altered from the patterns presented by Cicero, or Virgil, or Horace, or Tacitus. Nevertheless, the antique remained as the soil from which things grew, or as the somewhat turgid atmosphere breathed by living beings. It was not merely a form of education or vehicle of edifying knowledge, nor solely a literary standard. The common modes of the antique were there as well, its daily habits, its urbanity and its dross. The relationship toward the antique held by the peoples ch. i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 9 of the Iberian peninsula and the lands which eventually were to make France, was not quite the same as that held by the Italians. Spain, save in intractable mountain regions, had become a domicile of Latin culture before its people were converted to Christianity. Then it became a strong- hold of early Catholicism. Latin and Catholic Spain absorbed its Visigothic invaders, who in a few generations had appropriated the antique culture, and had turned from Arianism to the orthodoxy of their new home. Under Visigothic rule, the Spanish church became exceptionally authoritative, and its Latin and Catholic learning flourished at the beginning of the seventh century. These conditions gave way before the Moorish conquest, which was most complete in the most thoroughly Romanized portions of the land. Yet the permanent Latinization of the territory where Christianity continued, is borne witness to by the languages growing from the vulgar Latin dialects. The endurance of Latin culture is shown by the polished Latinity of Theodulphus, a Spanish Goth, who left his home at the invitation of Charlemagne, and died, the best Latin verse- maker of his time, as Bishop of Orleans in 821. Thus the education, culture, and languages of Spain were all from the antique. Yet the genius of the land was to be specifi- cally Spanish rather than assimilated to any such deep-soiled paganism as underlay the ecclesiastical Christianization of Italy. As for France, in the southern part which had been Provincia, the antique endured in laws and institutions, in architecture and in ways of life, to a degree second only to its dynamic continuity in Italy. And this in spite of the crude masses of Teutondom which poured into Provincia to be leavened by its culture. In northern France there were more barbarian folk and a less universally diffused Latinity. The Merovingian period swept most of the last away, leaving a fair field to be sown afresh with the Latin education of the Carolingian revival. Yet the inherited dis- cipline of obedience to the Roman order was not obliterated from the Gallic stock, and the lasting Latinization of Gaul endured in the Romance tongues, which were also to be impressed upon all German invaders. Franks, Burgundians, IO THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I or Alemanni, who came in contact with the provincials, began to be affected by their language, their religion, their ways of living, and by whatever survival of letters there was among them. The Romance dialects were to triumph, were to become French; and in the earliest extant pieces of this vernacular poetry, the effect of Latin verse-forms appears. Yet Franks and Burgundians were not Latinized in spirit; and, in truth, the Gauls before them had only become good imitation Latins. At all events, from these mixed and intermediate conditions, a people were to emerge who were not German, nor altogether Latin, in spite of their Romance speech. Latin culture was not quite as a foreign influence upon these Gallo-Roman, Teutonically re- inspirited, incipient, French. Nor were they born and bred to it, like the Italians. The antique was not to dominate the French genius; it was not to stem the growth of what was, so to speak, Gothic or northern or Teutonic. The glass-painting, the sculpture, the architecture of northern France were to become their own great French selves ; and while the literature was to hold to forms derived from the antique and the Romanesque, the spirit and the contents did not come from Italy. The office of Latin culture in Germany and England was to be more definite and limited. Germany had never been subdued to the Roman order ; in Anglo-Saxon England, Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon conquest, which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most com- plete in those parts of the land where the Roman influence had been strongest. In neither of these lands was there any antique atmosphere, or antique pagan substratum — save as the universal human soul is pagan ! Latinity came to Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was not to pertain to all men’s daily living. It was matter for the educated, for the clergy. Its vehicle was a formal language, having no connection with the vernacular. And when the antique culture had obtained certain resting-places in England and Germany, the first benign labours of those Germans or Anglo-Saxons who had mastered the language consisted in the translation of edifying Latin matter into their own tongues. So Latinity in England and Germany ch. i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS n was likely to remain a distinguishable influence. The Anglo-Saxons and the rest in England were to become Englishmen, the Germans were to remain Germans ; nor was either race ever to become Latinized, however deeply the educated people of these countries might imbibe Latinity, and exercise their intellects upon all that was contained in the antique metaphysics and natural science, literature and law. Thus diverse were the situations of the young mediaeval peoples with respect to the antique store. There were like differences of situation in regard to Latin Christianity. It had been formed (from some points of view, one might say, created) by the civilized peoples of the Roman Empire who had been converted in the course of the original diffusion of the Faith. It was, in fact, the product of the conversion of the Roman Empire, and, in Italy and the Latin provinces, received its final fashioning and temper from the Latin Fathers. So from the Latin-speaking portions of the Empire came the system which was to be presented to the Teutonic heathen peoples of the north. They had neither made it nor grown up with it. It was brought to the Franks, to the Anglo-Saxons, and to the Germans east of the Rhine, as a new and foreign faith. And the import of the fact that it was introduced to them as an authoritative religion did not lessen as Christianity became a formative element in their natures. One may say that an attitude of humble inferiority before Christianity and Latin culture was an initial condition of mediaeval development, having much to do with setting its future lines. In Italy, men looked back to what seemed even as a greater ancestral self, while in the minds of the northern peoples the ancient Empire represented all know- ledge and the summit of human greatness. The formulated and ordered Latin Christianity evoked even deeper homage. Well it might, since besides the resistless Gospel (its source of life) it held the intelligence and the organizing power of Rome, which had passed into its own last creation, the Catholic Church. And when this Christianity, so mighty in itself and august through the prestige of Rome, was pre- sented as under authority, its new converts might well be 12 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I struck with awe . 1 It was such as this that acknowledged the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman and Catholic Church — the most potent unifying influence of the Middle Ages. Still more was the character of mediaeval progress set by the action and effect of these two forces. The Latin culture provided the means and method of elementary education, as well as the material for study; while Latin Christianity, with transforming power, worked itself into the souls of the young mediaeval peoples. The two were assuredly the moulding forces of all mediaeval development ; and whatever sprang to life beyond the range of their action was not, properly speaking, mediaeval, even though seeing the light in the twelfth century . 2 Yet one should not think of these two great influences as entities, unchanging and utterly distinct from what must be called for simplicity’s sake the native traits of the mediaeval peoples. The antique culture had never ceased to be part of the nature and faculties of Italians, and to some extent still made the inherited equipment of the Latinized or Latin-descended people of Spain and France. In the same lands also, Latin Christianity had attained its form. And even in England and Germany, Christianity and Latin culture would be distinct from the Teuton folk only at the first moment of presentation and 1 See post, Chapter IX., as to the manner of the coming of Augustine to Eng- land. 2 The Icelandic Sagas, for example, were then brought into written form. They have a genius of their own; they are realistic and without a trace of symbolism. They are wonderful expressions of the people among whom they were composed. Post, Chapter VIII. But, products of a remote island, they were unaffected by the moulding forces of mediaeval development, nor did they exert any influence in turn. The native traits of the mediaeval peoples were the great complementary factor in mediaeval progress — complementary, that is to say, to Latin Christianity and antique culture. Mediaeval characteristics sprang from the interaction of these elements; they certainly did not spring from any such indepen- dent and severed growth of native Teuton quality as is evinced by the Sagas. One will look far, however, for another instance of such spiritual aloofness. For clear as are the different racial or national traits throughout the mediaeval period, they constantly appear in conjunction with other elements. They are discerned work- ing beneath, possibly reacting against, and always affected by, the genius of the Middle Ages, to wit, the genius of the mutual interaction of the whole. Wolfram’s very German Parzival, the old French Chanson de Roland, and above them all the Divina Commedia, are mediaeval. In these compositions in the vernacular, racial traits manifest themselves distinctly, and yet are affected by the mediaeval spirit. ch.i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 13 acceptance. Thereupon the two would begin to enter into and affect their new disciples, and would themselves change under the process of their own assimilation by these Teutonic natures. Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and the antique fund of sentiment and knowledge, through their self-conserving strength, affected men in constant ways. Under their action the peoples of western Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a homo- geneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other period of history — a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse of the past ; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly joys discerned the devil’s lures; which lived in the unrecon- ciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life’s terror and its pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment Day. II Under the action of Latin Christianity and the antique culture the mediaeval genius developed, as it fused the constituents of its growth into temperament and power. It was not its destiny to produce an extension of knowl- edge or originate substantial novelties either of thought or imaginative conception. Its energies were rather to expend themselves in the creation of new forms — forms of apprehending and presenting what was (or might be) known from the old books, and all that from century to century was ever more plastically felt. This principle is most important for the true appreciation of the intellectual and emotional phenomena of the Middle Ages. When a sublime religion is offered to capable but half- civilized peoples, and at the same time an acquaintance 14 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I is opened to them with the education, the knowledge, the literature of a great civilization, they cannot create new forms or presentations of what they have received, until the same has been assimilated, and has become plastic in their minds, as it were, part of their faculty and feeling. Mani- festly the northern peoples could not at once transmute the lofty and superabundant matter of Latin Christianity and its accompanying Latin culture, and present the same in new forms. Nor in truth could Italy, involved as she was in a disturbed decadence, wherein she seemed to be receding from an understanding of the nobler portions of her antique and Christian heritage, rather than progressing toward a vital use of one or the other. In Spain and France there was some decadence among Latinized provincials ; and the Teutonic conquerors were novices in both Christianity and Latinity. In these lands neither decadence nor the novelty of the matter was the sole embarrassment, but both com- bined to hinder creativeness, although the decadence was less obvious than in Italy, and the newness of the matter less utter than in Germany. The ancient material was appropriated, and then re- expressed in new forms, through two general ways of transmutation, the intellectual and the emotional. Al- though patently distinguishable, these would usually work together, with one or the other dominating the joint progress. Of the two, the intellectual is the easier to analyze. Thinking is necessarily dependent on the thinker, although it appear less intimately part of him than his emotions, and less expressive of his character. Accordingly, the mediaeval genius shows somewhat more palely in its intellectual pro- ductions, than in the more emotional phases of literature and art. Yet the former exemplify not only mediaeval capacities, but also the mediaeval intellectual temperament, or, as it were, the synthetic predisposition of the mediaeval mind. This temperament, this intellectual predisposition, became in general more marked through the centuries from the ninth to the twelfth. People could not go on generation after generation occupied with like topics of intellectual interest, reasoning upon them along certain lines of religious and ch.i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 15 ethical suggestion, without developing or intensifying some general type of intellectual temper. From the Carolingian period onward, the men interested in knowledge learned the patristic theology, and, in gradually expanding compass, acquired antique logic and metaphysics, mathematics, natural science and jurisprudence. What they learned, they laboured to restate or expound. With each succeeding generation, the subjects of mediaeval study were made more closely part of the intelligence occupied with them ; because the matter had been considered for a longer time, and had been constantly restated and restudied in terms more nearly adapted to the comprehension of the men who were learning and restating it. At length mediaeval men made the antique and patristic material, or rather their understanding of it, dynamically their own. Their com- prehension of it became part of their intellectual faculties, they could think for themselves in its terms, think almost originally and creatively, and could present as their own the matter of their thoughts in restatements, that is, in forms essentially new. From century to century may be traced the process of restatement of patristic Christianity, with the antique material contained in it. The Christianity of the fifth century contained an amplitude of thought and learning. To the creative work of earlier and chiefly eastern men, the Latin intellect finally incorporate in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine had added its further great accomplishment and ordering. The sum of dogma was well-nigh made up ; the Trinity was established; Christian learning had reached a compass beyond which it was not to pass for the next thousand years ; the doctrines as to the “ sacred mysteries, ” as to the functions of the Church and its spiritual authority, existed in substance ; the principles of symbolism and allegory had been set ; the great mass of allegorical Scriptural interpretations had been devised ; the spiritual relationship of man to God’s ordainment, to wit, the part to be played by the human will in man’s salvation or damnation, had been reasoned out; and man’s need and love of God, his nothingness apart from the Source and King and End of Life, had been uttered in words which men still use. Evi- i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I dently succeeding generations of less illumination could not add to this vast intellectual creation; much indeed had to be done before they could comprehend and make it theirs, so as to use it as an element of their own thinking, or possess it as an inspiration of passionate, imaginative reverie. At the darkening close of the patristic period, Gregory the Great was still partially creative in his barbarizing handling of patristic themes . 1 After his death, for some three centuries, theologians were to devote themselves to mastering the great heritage from the Church Fathers. It was still a time of racial antipathy and conflict. The disparate elements of the mediaeval personality were as yet unblended. How could the unformed intellect of such a period grasp the patristic store of thought? Still less might this wavering human spirit, uncertain of itself and unadjusted to novel and great conceptions, transform, and so renew, them with fresh life. Scarcely any proper re- casting of patristic doctrine will be found in the Carolingian period, but merely a shuffling of the matter. There were some exceptions, arising, as in the case of Eriugena, from the extraordinary genius of this thinker ; or again from the narrow controversial treatment of a matter argued with rupturing detachment of patristic opinions from their setting and balancing qualifications . 2 But the typical works of the eighth and ninth centuries were commentaries upon Scripture, consisting chiefly of excerpts from the Fathers. The flower of them all was the compendious Glossa Or dinar ia of Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of the volumi- nous commentator Rabanus Maurus . 3 Through the tenth and eleventh centuries, one finds no great advance in the systematic restatement of Christian doctrine . 4 Nevertheless, two hundred years of devotion have been put upon it; and statements of parts of it occur, showing that the eleventh century has made progress over 1 See post, Chapter V. 2 The Predestination and Eucharistic controversies are examples ; post , Chap- ter X. 8 See post, Chapter X. 4 The lack of originality in the first half of the tenth century is illustrated by the Epitome of Gregory’s M or alia, made by such an energetic person as Odo of Cluny. It occupies four hundred columns in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, 133. See post, Chapter XII. ch. i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 17 the ninth in its thoughtful and vital appropriation of Latin Christianity. A man like German Othloh has thought for himself within its lines ; 1 Anselm of Canterbury has set forth pieces of it with a depth of reflection and intimacy of understanding which make his works creative ; 2 Peter Damiani through intensity of feeling has become the embodiment of Christian asceticism and the grace of Chris- tian tears ; 3 and Hildebrand has established the mediaeval papal church. Of a truth, the mediaeval man was adjusting himself, and reaching his understanding of what the past had given him. The twelfth century presents a universal progress in philosophic and theological thinking. It is the century of Abaelard, of Hugo of St. Victor and St. Bernard, and of Peter Lombard. The first of these penetrates into the logical premises of systematic thought as no mediaeval man had done before him; St. Bernard moves the world through his emotional and political comprehension of the Faith; Hugo of St. Victor offers a sacramental explanation of the universe and man, based upon symbolism as the working principle of creation; and Peter Lombard makes, or, at least, typifies, the systematic advance, from the Commentary to the Books of Sentences , in which he presents patristic doctrine arranged according to the cardinal topics of the Christian scheme. Here Abaelard’s Sic et non had been a precursor rather carping in its excessive clear-sightedness. Thus, as a rule, each successive mediaeval period shows a more organic restatement of the old material. Yet this principle may be impeded or deflected, in its exemplifications, by social turmoil and disaster, or even by the use of further antique matter, demanding assimilation. For example, upon the introduction of the complete works of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, an enormous intellectual effort was required for the mastery of their contents. They were not mastered at once, or by all people who studied the philos- opher. So the works of Hugo of St. Victor, of the first half of the twelfth century, are more original in their organic restatement of less vast material than are the works of 1 Sea post , Chapter XIII. 2 See post, Chapter XI. 3 See post, Chapter XVII. VOL. I C i8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I Albertus Magnus, Aristotle’s prodigious expounder, one hundred years later. But Thomas Aquinas accomplishes a final Catholic presentation of the whole enlarged material, patristic and antique . 1 One may perceive three stages in this chief phase of mediaeval intellectual progress consisting in the appropria- tion of Latin Christianity : its first conning, its more vital appropriation, its re-expression, with added elements of thought. There were also three stages in the evolution of the outer forms of this same catholic mastery and re-expres- sion of doctrine : first, the Scriptural Commentary ; secondly, the Books of Sentences; and thirdly, the Summa Theologiae , of which Thomas Aquinas is the final definitive creator. The philosophical material used in its making was the sub- stantial philosophy of Aristotle, mastered at length by this Christian Titan of the thirteenth century. In the Summa , regarded visibly, as well as more inwardly and essentially considered, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers received an organically new form. Quite as impressive, more moving, and possibly more creative, than the intellectual recasting of the ancient patristic matter, were its emotional transformations. The sequence and character of mediaeval development is clearly seen in the evolution of new forms of emotional, and especially of poetic and plastic, expression. The intellectual transfor- mation of the antique and more especially the patristic matter, was accompanied by currents of desire and aversion running with increasing definiteness and power. As patristic thought became more organically mediaeval, more intrinsi- cally part of the intellectual faculties of men, it constituted with increasing incisiveness the suggestion and the rationale of emotional experiences, and set the lines accordingly of impassioned expression in devotional prose and verse, and in the more serious forms of art. Patristic theology, the authoritative statement of the Christian faith, contained men’s furthest hopes and deepest fears set forth together with the divine Means by which those might be realized and these allayed. As generation after generation clung to this system as to the stay of their salvation, the intellectual 1 These men will be fully considered later. Chapters XXXV.-XLI. ch. i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 19 consideration of it became instinct with the emotions of desire and aversion, and with love and gratitude toward the suffering means and instruments which made salvation possible — the Crucified, the Weeping Mother, and the martyred or self-torturing saints. All these had suffered; they were sublime objects for human compassion. Who could think upon them without tears ? Thus mediaeval religious thought became a well of emotion. Emotion breaks its way to expression ; it feeds itself upon its expression, thereby increasing in resistlessness ; it even becomes identical with its expression. Surely it creates the modes of its expression, seeking continually the more facile, the more unimpeded, which is to say, the adequate and perfect form. Typical mediaeval emotion, which was religious, cast itself around the Gospel of Christ and the theology of the Fathers as studied and pondered on in the mediaeval centuries. Seeking fitting forms of expres- sion, which are at once modes of relief and forms of added power, the passionate energy of the mediaeval genius con- strained the intellectual faculties to unite with it in the production of these forms. They were to become more personal and original than any mere scholastic restatement of the patristic and antique thought. Yet the perfect form of the emotional expression was not quickly reached. It could not outrun the intelligent appropriation of Latin Christianity. Its media, moreover, as in the case of sculp- ture, might present retarding difficulties to be overcome before that means of presentation could be mastered. A sequence may be observed in the evolution of the forms of the mediaeval emotional expression of patristic Christianity. One of the first attained was impassioned devotional Latin prose, like that of Peter Damiani or St. Anselm of Canter- bury. 1 But prose is a halting means of emotional expression. It is too circumstantial and too slow. Only in the chanted strophe, winged with the power of rhythm, can emotion pour out its unimpeded strength. But before the thought can be fused in verse, it must be plastic, molten indeed. Even then, the finished verse is not produced at once. The perfected mediaeval Latin strophe was a final form of religious 1 See post, Chapter XXXII. 20 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I emotional expression, which was not attained until the twelfth century . 1 Impassioned prose may be art ; the loftier forms of verse are surely art. And art is not spontaneous, but carefully intended; no babbling of a child, but a mutual fitting of form and content, in which efficient unison the artists intel- lect has worked. Such intellectual, such artistic endeavour, was evinced in the long development of mediaeval plastic art. The sculpture and the painted glass, which tell the Christian story in Chartres Cathedral, set forth the patristic and antique matter in forms expressive of the feeling and emotion which had gathered around the scheme of Latin Christianity. They were forms never to be outdone for appropriateness and power. Several centuries not only of spiritual growth, but of mechanical and artistic effort, had been needed for their perfecting. In these and like emotional recastings, or indeed creations, patristic and antique elements were transformed and transfigured. And again, in fields non-religious and non- philosophical, through the evolution of the mediaeval mind and heart, novelties of sentiment and situation were intro- duced into antique themes of fiction ; new forms of romance, new phases of human love and devotion were evolved, in which (witness the poetry of chivalric love in Provencal and Old French) the energies of intellect and passion were curiously blended . 2 These represented a side of human growth not unrelated to the supreme mediaeval achievement, the vital appropriation and emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity. For that carried an impassioning of its teachings with love and tears, a fostering of them with devotion, an adorning of them with quivering fantasies, a translation of them into art, into poetry, into romance. With what wealth of love and terror, with what grandeur of imagination, with what power of mystery and symbolism, did the Middle Ages glorify their heritage, turning its precepts into spirit. Of a surety the emotional is not to be separated from the intellectual recasting of Christianity. The greatest ex- ponents of the one had their share in the other. Hugo of St. 1 See post , Chapter XXXIII. 2 Post, Chapter XXIV. qh. i GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 21 Victor as well as St. Bernard were mighty agents of this spiritually passionate mode of apprehending Latin Chris- tianity and transfusing it with emotion, or reviving the Gospel elements in it. Here work, knowingly or instinctively, many men and women, Peter Damiani and St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegarde of Bingen and Mechthilde of Magde- burg, who, according to their diverse temperaments, overmasteringly and burningly loved Christ. With them the intellectual appropriation of dogmatic Christianity was subordinate. Such men and women were poets and artists, even when they wrote no poetry, and did not carve or paint. For their lives were poems, unisons of overmastering thoughts and the emotions inspired by them. The life of Francis was a living poem. It was kin to the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater , the hymns of Adam of St. Victor, and in a later time, the Divina Commedia. For all these poems, in their different ways, using Christian thought and feeling as symbols, created imaginative presentations of universal human moods, even as the lives of Francis and many a cloistered soul presented like moods in visible embodiment. Such lives likewise close in with art. They poured themselves around the symbols of the human person of Christ and its sacrificial presence in the Eucharist; they grasped the infinite and universal through these tangibilities. But the poems also sprang into being through a concrete realizing in mood, and a visualizing in narrative, of such symbols. And the same need of grasping the infinite and universal through symbols was the inspiration of mediaeval art : it built the cathedrals, painted their windows, filled their niches with statues, carving prophet types, carving the times and seasons of God’s providence, carving the vices and virtues of the soul and its eternal destiny, and at the same time augmenting the Liturgy with symbolic words and acts. So saint and poet and artist-craftsman join in that appro- priation of Christianity which was vivifying whatever had come from the Latin Fathers, by pondering upon it, loving it, living it, imagining it, and making it into poetry and art. It is better not to generalize further, or attempt more specifically to characterize the mediaeval genius. As its 22 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I manifestations pass before our consideration, we shall see the complexity of thought and life within the interplay of the moulding forces of mediaeval development, as they strove with each other or wrought in harmony, as they were displayed in frightful contrasts between the brutalities of life and the lofty, but not less real, strainings of the spirit, or again in the opposition between inchoately variant ideals and the endeavour for their more inclusive reconcilement. Various phases of the mediaeval spirit were to unfold only too diversely with popes, kings, and knights, monks, nuns, and heretics, satirists, troubadours and minnesingers ; in emotional yearnings and intellectual ideals ; in the literature of love and the literature of its suppression; in mistress- worship, and the worship of the Virgin and the passion- flooded Christ of Canticles. Sublimely will this spirit show itself in the resistless apotheosis of symbolism, and in art and poetry giving utterance to the mediaeval conceptions of order and beauty. Other of its phases will be evinced in the striving of earnest souls for spiritual certitude; in the scholastic structure and accomplishment; in the ways in which men felt the spell of the Classics; and everywhere and universally in the mediaeval conflict between life’s fulness and the insistency of the soul’s salvation. CHAPTER II THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST The intellectual and spiritual life of the partly Hellenized, and at last Christianized, Roman Empire furnished the contents of the intellectual and spiritual development of the Middle Ages . 1 In Latin forms the Christian and antique elements passed to the mediaeval period. Their Latiniza- tion, their continuance, and their passing on, were due to the existence of the Empire as a political and social fact. Rome’s equal government facilitated the transmission of Greek thought through the Mediterranean west; Roman arms, Roman qualities conquered Spain and Gaul, subdued them to the Roman order, opened them to Graeco-Latin influences, also to Christianity. Indelibly Latinized in language and temper, Spain, Gaul, and Italy present first a homogeneity of culture and civic order, and then a common decadence and confusion. But decadence and confusion did not obliterate the ancient elements ; which painfully endured, passing down disfigured and bedimmed, to form the basis of mediaeval culture. The all-important Latinization of western Europe began with the unification of Italy and Rome. This took five centuries of war. In central Italy, Marsians, Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans, were slowly conquered; and in the south Rome stood forth at last triumphant after the war against Tarentum and Pyrrhus of Epirus. With Rome’s political domination, the Latin language also won its way to supremacy throughout the peninsula, being drasti- 1 The term “ spiritual ” is here intended to signify the activities of the mind which are emotionalized with yearning or aversion, and therefore may be said to belong to the entire nature of man. 23 24 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I cally forced, along with Roman civic institutions, upon Tarentum and the other Greek communities of Magna Graecia. 1 Yet in revenge, from this time on, Greek medicine and manners, mythology, art, poetry, philosophy — Greek thought in every guise — entered the Latin pale. At the time of which we speak, the third century before Christ, the northern boundaries of Italy were still the rivers Arno and, to the east, the Aesis, which flows into the Adriatic, near Ancona. North-west of the Arno, Ligurian highlanders held the mountain lands as far as Nice. North of the Aesis lay the valley of the Po. That great plain may have been occupied at an early time by Etruscan communities scattered through a Celtic population gradually settling to an agricultural life. Whatever may be the facts as to the existence of these earlier Celts, other and ruder Celtic tribes swarmed down from the Alps 2 about 400 b.c., spread through the Po Valley, pushing the Etruscans back into Etruria, and following them there to carry on the war. After this comes the well-known story of Roman interference, leading to Roman overthrow at the river Allia in 390, and the capture of the city by these “Gauls.” The latter then retired northward, to occupy the Po Valley; though bands of them settled as far south as the Aesis. Time and again, Rome was to be reminded of the Celtic peril. Between the first and second Punic wars, the Celts, reinforced from beyond the Alps, attacked Etruria and threatened Rome. Defeating them, the Consuls pushed north to subdue the Po Valley (222 b . c .). South of the river the Celts were expelled, and their place was filled by Roman colonists. The fortress cities of Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona were founded on the right and left banks of the Po, and south-east of them Mutina (Modena). The 1 The history of the spread of Latin through Italy and the provinces is from the nature of the subject obscure. Budinsky’s Die Ausbreitung der lateinischer Sprache (Berlin, 1881) is somewhat unsatisfactory. See also Meyer-Liibke, Die lateinische Sprache in den romanischen Ldndern (Grober’s Grundriss, i 2 , 451 sqq.; F. G. Mohl, Introduction d la chronologie du latin vulgaire (1899). The statements in the text are very general, and ignore intentionally the many difficult questions as to what sort of Latin — dialectal, popular, or literary — was spread through the peninsula. See Mohl, o.c. § 33 sqq. 2 Tradition says from Gaul, but the sifted evidence points to the Danube north of the later province of Noricum. See Bertrand and Reinach, Les Celtes dans les vallees du Po et du Danube (Paris, 1894). CHAP. II LATINIZING OF THE WEST 25 Flaminian road was extended across the Apennines to Fanum, and thence to Ariminum (Rimini), thus connecting the two Italian seas. Hannibal’s invasion of Italy brought fresh disturbance, and when the war with him was over, Rome set herself to the final subjugation of the Celts north of the Po. Upon their submission the Latinization of the whole valley began, and advanced apace; but the evidence is scanty. Statius Caecilius, a comic Latin poet, was a manumitted Insubrian Celt who had been brought to Rome probably as a prisoner of war. He died in 168 b.c. Some generations after him, Cornelius Nepos was born in upper Italy, and Catullus at Verona; Celtic blood may have flowed in their veins. In the meanwhile the whole region had been organized as Gallia Cisalpina, with its southern boundary fixed at the Rubicon, which flows near Rimini. The Celts of northern Italy were the first palpably non- Italian people to adopt the Latin language. Second in time and thoroughness to their Latinization was that of Spain. Military reasons led to its conquest. Hamilcar’s genius had created there a Carthaginian power, as a base for the invasion of Italy. This project, accomplished by Hamilcar’s son, brought home to the Roman Senate the need to control the Spanish peninsula. The expulsion of the Carthaginians, which followed, did not give mastery over the land ; and two centuries of Roman persistence were required to subdue the indomitable Iberians. So, in the end, Spain was conquered, and became a Latin country. Its tribal cantons were replaced with urban communities, and many Roman colonies were founded, to grow to prosperous cities. These were strongholds of Latin. Cordova became a very famous home of education and letters. Apparently the southern Spaniards had fully adopted the ways and speech of Rome before Strabo wrote his Geography , about a.d. 20. The change was slower in the mountains of Asturia, but quite rapid in the north-eastern region known as Nearer Spain, Hispania Citerior, as it was called. There, at the town of Osca (Huesca), Sertorius eighty years before Christ had established the first Latin school for the native Spanish youth. 26 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I The reign of Augustus, and especially his two years’ sojourn in Spain (26 and 25 b.c.), brought quiet to the peninsula, and thereafter no part of the Empire enjoyed such unbroken peace. Of all lands outside of Italy, with the possible exception of Provincia, Spain became most completely Roman in its institutions, and most unequivo- cally Latin in its culture. It was the most populous of the European provinces ; 1 and no other held so many Roman citizens, or so many cities early endowed with Roman civic rights. 2 The great Augustan literature was the work of natives of Italy. 3 But in the Silver Age that followed, many of the chief Latin authors — the elder and younger Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian — were Spaniards. They were unquestioned representatives of Latin literature, with no provincial twang in their writings. Then, of Rome’s emperors, Trajan was born in Spain, and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were of Spanish blood. Perhaps even more completely Latinized was Narbonensis, commonly called Provincia. Its official name was drawn from the ancient town of Narbo (Narbonne), which in 118 B.c. was refounded as a Roman colony in partial accomplish- ment of the plans of Caius Gracchus. The boundaries of this colony touched those of the Greek city-state Massilia (Marseilles), whose rights were respected until it sided against Caesar in the Civil War. Save for the Massilian territory, which it later included, Provincia stretched from the eastern Pyrenees by the way of Nemausus (Nimes) and the Arelate (Arles) north-easterly through the Rhone Valley, taking in Vienne and Valence in the country of the Allobroges, and then onward to the edge of Lake Geneva ; thence southerly along the Maritime Alps to the sea. Many of its towns owed their prosperity to Caesar. In his time the country west of the Rhone was already half Latin, and was filling 1 See Beloch, Bevolkerung der griechisch-romischen Welt, p. 507 (Leipzig, 1 886). 2 Mommsen says that in Augustus’s time fifty Spanish cities had the full priv- ileges of Roman citizenship and fifty others the rights of Italian towns ( Roman Provinces, i. 75, Eng. trans.). But this seems a mistake; as the enumeration of Beloch, Bevolkerung, etc., p. 330, gives fifty in all, following the account of Pliny. 3 Cicero, Pro Archia, 10, speaks slightingly of poets born at Cordova, but later, Latro of Cordova was Ovid’s teacher. CHAP. II LATINIZING OF THE WEST 27 up with men from Italy . 1 Two or three generations later, Pliny dubbed it Italia verius quam provincia. At all events, like northern Italy and Spain, Provincia, throughout its length and breadth, had appropriated the Latin civilization of Rome; that civilization city-born and city-reared, solvent of cantonal organization and tribal custom, destructive of former ways of living and standards of conduct ; a civiliza- tion which was commercial as well as military in its means, and urban in its ends ; which loved the life of the forum, the theatre, the circus, the public bath, and seemed to gain its finest essence from the instruction of the grammarian and rhetorician. The language and literature of this civilization were those of an imperial city, and were to be the language and literature of the Latin city universal, in whatever western land its walls might rise. North of Provincia stretched the great territory reaching from the Atlantic to the Rhine, and with its edges following that river northerly, and again westerly to the sea. This was Caesar’s conquest, his omnis Gallia. The resistlessness of Rome, her civic and military superiority over the western peoples whom she conquered, may be grasped from the record of Gallic subjugation by one in whom great Roman qualities were united. Perhaps the deepest impression received by the reader of those Commentaries is of the man behind the book, Caesar himself. The Gallic War passes before us as a presentation, or medium of realization, of that all-compelling personality, with whom to consider was to plan, and to resolve was to accomplish, without hesitation or fear, by the force of mind. It is in the mirror of this man’s contempt for restless irresolution, for unsteadiness and impotence, that Gallic qualities are shown, the reflection undisturbed either by intolerance or sympathy. The Gauls were always anxious for change, mobiliter celeriterque in- flamed to war or revolution, says Caesar in his memorable words ; and, like all men, they were by nature zealous for liberty, hating the servile state — so it behoved Caesar to distribute his legions with foresight in a certain 1 The Roman lav/ was used throughout Provincia. In this respect a line is to be drawn between Provincia and the North. See post, Chapter XXXIV., II and III. 28 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I crisis . 1 Thus, without shrug or smile, writes the greatest of revolutionists who for himself was also seeking liberty of action, freely and devisingly, not hurried by impatience or any such planless restlessness as, for example, drove Dumnorix the Aeduan to plot feebly, futilely, without plan or policy, against fate, to wit Caesar — so he met his death . 2 h Instability appears as peculiarly characteristic of the Gauls. They were not barbarians, but an ingenious folk, quick-witted and loquacious . 3 Their domestic customs were reasonable ; they had taxes and judicial tribunals ; their religion held belief in immortality, and in other respects was not below the paganism of Italy. It was directed by the priestly caste of Druids, who possessed considerable know- ledge, and used the Greek alphabet in writing. They also presided at trials, and excommunicated suitors who would not obey their judicial decrees . 4 The country was divided into about ninety states ( civitates ). Monarchies appear among them, but the greater number were aristocracies torn with jealousy, and always in alarm lest some noble’s overweening influence upset the government. The common people and poor debtors seem scarcely to have counted. Factions existed in every state, village, and even household, says Caesar , 5 headed by the rival states of the Aedui and Sequani. Espousing, as he professed to, the Aeduan cause, Caesar could always appear as an ally of one faction. At the last a general confederacy took up arms against him under the noble Auvernian, Vercingetorix . 6 But the instability of his authority forced the hand of this brilliant leader. In fine, it would seem that the Gallic peoples had pro- 1 Bettum Gallicum, iii. io. Cf., generally, Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, T. R. Holmes (2nd ed., Oxford, 1911). 2 Bettum, Gallicum, v. 6. 3 Porcius Cato in his Origines, written a hundred years before Caesar crossed the mountains, says that Gallia was devoted to the art of war and to eloquence ( argute loqui). Presumably the Gallia that Cato thus characterized as clever or acute of speech, was Cisalpine Gaul, to wit, the north of Italy; yet Caesar’s transalpine Gauls were both clever of speech and often the fools of their own arguments. Lucian, in Hercules (No. 55, Dindorf’s edition), has his “Celt” argue that Hercules accom- plished his deeds by the power of words. 4 See, generally, Fustel de Coulanges, Institutions politiques de Vancienne France, vol. i. {La Gaule romaine). 6 Bettum Gallicum, vi. 11, 12. 6 Cf. Julian, V ercingetorixfi nd ed., Paris, 1902). CHAP. II LATINIZING OF THE WEST 29 gressed in civilization as far as their limited political capacity and self-control would allow. These were the limitations set by the Gallic character. It is a Gallic custom, says Caesar, to stop travellers, and insist upon their telling what they know or have heard. In the towns the crowd will throng around a merchant and make him tell where he has come from and give them the news. Upon such hear- say the Gauls enter upon measures of the gravest importance. The states which are deemed the best governed, he adds, have a law that whenever any one has heard a report or rumour of public moment, he shall communicate it to a magistrate and to none else. The magistrates conceal or divulge such news in their discretion. It is not permitted to discuss public affairs save in an assembly. 1 Apparently Caesar is not joking in these passages, which speak of a statecraft based on gossip gathered in the streets, carried straight to a magistrate, and neither discussed nor divulged on the way ! Quite otherwise were Roman officials to govern, when Caesar’s great campaigns had subdued these mercurial Gauls. It was after his death that Augustus established the Roman order through the land. In those famous partes tres of the Commentaries he settled it : Iberian and Celtic Aquitania, Celtic Lugdunensis, and Celtic-Teuton Belgica, making together the three Gauls. It is significant that the emperor kept them as imperial provinces, still needing military administration, while he handed over Pro- vincia to the Senate. Provincia had been Romanized in law and government as the “Three Gauls” never were to be. Augustus followed Caesar in respecting the tribal and cantonal divisions of the latter, making only such changes as were necessary. Gallic cities under the Empire show no great uniformity. Each appears as the continuance of the local tribe, whose life and politics were focussed in the town. The city ( civitas ) did not end with the town walls, but included the surrounding country and perhaps many villages. A number of these cities preserved their ancient constitutions ; others con- formed to the type of Roman colonies, whose constitutions were modelled on those of Italian cities. Colonia Claudia 1 Bellum Gallicum, iv. 5 ; vi. 20 30 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I Agrippina (Cologne) is an example. But all the cities of the “Three Gauls” as well as those of Provincia, whatever their form of government, conducted their affairs with senate, magistrates and police of their choosing, had their municipal property, and controlled their internal finances. A diet was established for the “Three Gauls” at Lyons, to which the cities sent delegates. Whatever were its powers, its existence tended to foster a sense of common Gallic nationality. The Roman franchise, however, was but sparingly bestowed on individuals, and was not granted to any Gallic city (except Lyons) until the time of Claudius, himself born at Lyons. He refounded Cologne as a colony, granted the franchise to Treves, and abolished the provisions forbidding Gauls to hold the imperial magistracies. With the reorganization of the Empire under Diocletian, Treves became the capital not only of Gaul, but of Spain and Britain also. Although there was thus no violent Romanization of Gaul, Roman civilization rapidly progressed under imperial fostering, and by virtue of its own energy. Roman roads traversed the country ; bridges spanned the rivers ; aque- ducts were constructed ; cities grew, trade increased, agri- culture improved, and the vine was introduced. At the time of Caesar’s conquest, the quick-minded Gauls were prepared to profit from a superior civilization ; and under the mighty peace of Rome, men settled down to the blessings of safe living and law regularly enforced. The spread of the Latin tongue and the finer elements of Latin culture followed the establishment of the Roman order. One Gallic city and then another adopted the new language according to its circumstances and situation. Of course the cities of Provincia took the lead, largely Italian as they were in population. On the other hand, Latin made slow progress among the hills of Auvergne. But further north, the Roman city of Lyons was Latin-tongued from its foundation. Thence to the remoter north and west and east, Latin spread by cities, the foci of affairs and provincial administration. The imperial government did not demand of its subjects that they should abandon their native speech, but required in Gaul, as elsewhere, the use of Latin in the transaction of official business. This compelled all to study Latin who had affairs CHAP. II LATINIZING OF THE WEST 3i in law courts or with officials, or hoped to become magistrates. Undoubtedly the rich and noble, especially in the towns, learned Latin quickly, and it soon became the vehicle of polite, as well as official, intercourse. It was also the language of the schools attended by the noble Gallic youth. But among the rural population, the native tongues con- tinued indefinitely. Obviously one cannot assign any specific time for the popular and general change from Celtic ; but it appears to have very generally taken place before the Frankish conquest . 1 By that time, too, those who would naturally constitute the educated classes possessed a Latin education. First in the cities of Provincia, Nimes, Arles, Vienne, Frejus, Aix in Provence, then of course at Lyons and in Aquitaine, and later through the cities of the north-east, Treves, Mainz, Cologne, and most laggingly through the north-west Belgic lands lying over against the channel and the North Sea, Latin education spread. Grammar and rhetoric were taught, and the great Classics were explained and read, till the Gauls doubtless felt themselves Roman in spirit as in tongue. Of course they were mistaken. To be sure the Gaul was a citizen of the Empire, which not only represented safety and civilization, but in fact was the entire civilized world. He had no thought of revolting from that, any more than from his daily habits or his daily food. Often he felt himself sentimentally affected toward this universal symbol of his welfare. He had Latin speech ; he had Roman fashions; he took his warm baths and his cold, enjoyed the sports of the amphitheatre, studied Roman literature, and talked of the Respublica and Aurea Roma. Yet he was, after all, merely a Romanized inhabitant of Gaul. Roman law and government, Latin education, and the colour of the 1 There are a number of texts from the second to the fifth century which bear on the matter. Taken altogether they are unsatisfying, if not blind. They have been frequently discussed. See Grober, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, i. 451 sqq. (2nd edition, 1904); Brunot, Origines de la langue franqaise, which is the Introduction to Petit de Julleville’s Eistoire de la langue et de la litter ature franqaise (Paris, 1896) ; Bonnet, Le Latin de Gregoire de Tours, pp. 22-30 (Paris, 1890); Mommsen’s Provinces of the Roman Empire, p. 108 sqq. of English translation ; Fustel de Coulanges, Institutions politiques vol. i. (La Gaule romaine ), pp. 125-135 (Paris, 1891); Roger, L’Enseignement des lettres classiques d’Ausone a Alcuin, p. 24 sqq. (Paris, 1905). 32 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I Roman spirit had been imparted ; but the inworking, creative genius of Rome was not within her gift or his capacity. The Gauls, however, are the chief example of a mediating people. Romanized and not made Roman, their epoch, their geographical situation, and their modified faculties, all made them intermediaries between the Roman and the Teuton. If the Romanization of the “Three Gauls” was least thorough in Belgica, there was even less of it across the channel. Britain, as far north as the Clyde and Firth of Forth, was a Roman province for three or four hundred years. Latin was the language of the towns ; but probably never supplanted the Celtic in the country. The Roman- ization of the Britons, however, whether thorough or super- ficial, affected a people who were to be apparently submerged. They seem to have transmitted none of their Latin civiliza- tion to their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. Yet even the latter when they came to Britain were not quite untouched by Rome. They were familiar with Roman wares, if not with Roman ways ; and certain Latin words which are found in all Teutonic languages had doubtless entered Anglo-Saxon . 1 But this early Roman influence was slight, compared with that which afterwards came with Christianity. Nor did the Roman culture, before the introduction of Christianity, exert a deep effect on Germany, at least beyond the neighborhood of the large Roman or Romanized towns like Cologne and Mainz. In many ways, indeed, the Germans were touched by Rome. Roman diplomacy, exciting tribe against tribe, was decimating them. Roman influences, and sojourn at Rome, had taught much to many German princes. Roman weapons, Roman utensils and wares of all kinds, were used from the Danube to the Baltic. But all this did not Romanize the Germans, any more than the Latin words which had crept in Latinized their language . 2 1 Such words are, e.g., wine, street, wall. See Toller, History of the English Lan- guage (Macmillan & Co., 1900), pp. 41, 42. 2 See Paul, Grundriss der germaniscken Philologie, Band i. pp. 305-315 (Strass- burg, 1891). CHAPTER III GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC APPREHENSION OF FACT The Latin West afforded the milieu in which the thoughts and sentiments of the antique and partly Christian world were held in Latin forms and preserved from obliteration during the fifth and succeeding centuries, until taken up by the currents of mingled decrepitude and callowness which marked the coming of the mediaeval time. Latin Christianity survived, and made its way across those stormy centuries to its mediaeval harbourage. The antique also was carried over, either in the ship of Latin Christianity, or in tenders freighted by certain Latin Christians who dealt in secular learning, though not in “unbroken packages.” Those unbroken packages, to wit, the Latin classics, and after many centuries the Greek, also floated over. But in the early mediaeval times, men preferred the pagan matter rehashed, as in the Etymologies of Isidore. The great ship of Christian doctrine not only bore bits of the pagan antique stowed here and there, but itself was built with many a plank of antique timber, and there were antique ingredients in its Christian freight; in other words, the theology of the Church Fathers was partly made of Greek philosophy, and was put together in modes of Greek philosophic reasoning. The Fathers lived in the Roman Empire, or in what was left of it in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Many of them were born of pagan parents, and all received the common education in grammar, rhetoric, and literature, which were pagan and permeated with pagan philosophy. For philosophy was then the highest branch of education, and had become a source of VOL. I 3.3 D 33 34 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I principles of conduct and “daily thoughts for daily needs. ” Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least unsanctified, youth had deeply studied it. Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the Latin Fathers, who were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Never- theless, in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren had evolved . 1 Obviously, in order to appreciate the mental endowment of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers, their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must consider their intel- lectual environment ; which was, of course, made up of the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world, first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of the Church. What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung from open and unpreju- diced observation of the visible world. They were physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from 1 A prime illustration is afforded by the Latin juristic word persona used in the Creed. The Latins had to render the three i^oo-rao-eis of the Greeks; and “three somethings,” tria quaedam, was too loose, as Augustine says ( De Trinitate, vii. 7-12). The true and literal translation of vnoo-Tacns would have been substantia; but that word had been taken to render ovata. So the legal word persona was em- ployed in spite of its recognized unfitness. Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage, etc., p. CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 35 fact to truth, to a consideration of the validity of human understanding. Thereupon the Greek mind became en- tranced with its own creations. Man was the measure of all things, for the Sophists. More irrefragably and pregnantly, man became the measure of all things for Socrates and Plato. The aphorism might be discarded ; but its transcendental import was established in an imaginative dialectic whose correspondence to the divinest splendours of the human mind warranted its truth. With Platonists — and the world was always to be filled with them — perceptions of physical facts and the data of human life and history, were henceforth to constitute the outer actuality of a creation within the mind. Every observed fact is an apparent tangibility; but its reality consists in its unison with the ultimate realities of rational conception. The apprehension of the fact must be made to conform to these. For this reason every fact has a secondary, nay, primary, because spiritual, meaning. Its true interpretation lies in that significance which accords with the mind’s consistent system of conceptions, which present the fact as it must be thought, and therefore as it is ; it is the fact brought into right relationship with spiritual and ethical verity. Of course, methods of apprehending terrestrial and celestial phenomena as illustrations of ideally conceived principles, were unlikely to foster habits of close observation. The apparent facts of sense would probably be imaginatively treated if not transformed in the process of their apprehension. Nor, with respect to human story, would such methods draw fixed lines between the narration of what men are pleased to call the actual occurrence, and the shaping of a tale to meet the exigencies of argument or illustration. All this is obvious in Plato. The Timaeus was his vision of the universe, in which physical facts became plastic material for the spirit’s power to mould into the likeness of ideal conceptions. The creation of the universe is conformed to the structure of Platonic dialectic. If any meaning be certain through the words and imagery of this dialogue, it is that the world and all creatures which it contains derive such reality as they have from conformity to the thoughts or ideal patterns in the divine mind. Visible things are real 36 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I only so far as they conform to those perfect conceptions. Moreover, the visible creation has another value, that of its ethical significance. Physical phenomena symbolize the conformity of humanity to its best ideal of conduct. Man may learn to regulate the lawless movements of his soul from the courses of the stars, the noblest of created gods. Thus as to natural phenomena; and likewise as to the human story, fact or fiction. The myth of the shadow-seers in the cave, with which the seventh book of the Republic opens, is just as illustratively and ideally true as that opening tale in the Timaeus of the ancient Athenian state, which fought for its own and others’ freedom against the people of Atlantis — till the earthquake ended the old Athenian race, and the Atlantean continent was swallowed in the sea. This story has piqued curiosity for two thousand years. Was it tradition, or the creation of an artist dialec- tician? In either case its ideal and edifying truth stood or fell, not by reason of conformity to any basic antecedent fact, but according to its harmony with the beautiful and good. Plato’s method of conceiving fact might be applied to man’s thoughts of God, of the origin of the world and the courses of the stars ; also to the artistic manipulation of illustrative or edifying story. Matters, large, remote, and mysterious, admit of idealizing ways of apprehension. But it might seem idiocy, rather than idealism, to apply this method to the plain facts of common life, which may be handled and looked at all around — to which there is no mysterious other side, like the moon’s for ever turned away. Nevertheless the method and its motives drew men from careful observa- tion of nature, and would invest biography and history with interests promoting the ingenious application, rather than the close scrutiny, of fact. Thus Platonism and its way of treating narrative could not but foster the allegorical interpretation of ancient tradition and literature, which was already in vogue in Plato’s time. It mattered not that he would have nothing to do with the current allegories through which men moralized or rationalized the old tales of the doings of the gods. He was himself a weaver of the loveliest allegories when it CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 37 served his purpose. And after him the allegorical habit entered into the interpretation of all ancient story. In the course of time allegory will be applied by the Jew Philo of Alexandria to the Pentateuch ; and one or two centuries later it will play a great role in Christian polemics against Jew and then against Manichean. It will become par excellence the chief mode of patristic exegesis, and pass on as a legacy of spiritual truth to the mediaeval church. Aristotle strikes us as a man of different type from Plato. Whether his intellectual interests were broader than his teacher’s is hardly for ordinary people to say. He certainly was more actively interested in the investigation of nature. Head of an actual school (as Plato had been), and assisted by the co-operation of able men, he presents himself, with what he accomplished, at least in threefold guise : as a metaphysician and the perfector, if not creator, of formal logic ; as an observer of the facts of nature and the institu- tions and arts of men ; as a man of encyclopaedic learning. These three phases of intellectual effort proportioned each other in a mind of universal power and appetition. Yet it has been thought that there was more metaphysics and formal logic in Aristotle than was good for his natural science. The lost and extant writings which have been ascribed to him embraced a hundred and fifty titles and amounted to four hundred books. Those which have been of universal influence upon human inquiry suffice to illustrate the scope of his labours. There were the treatises upon Logic and first among them the Categories or classes of propositions, and the De inter pretatione on the constituent parts and kinds of sentences. These two elementary treatises (the author- ship of which has been questioned) were the only Aristotelian writings generally used through the West until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the remainder of the logical treatises became known, to wit, the Prior Analytics , upon the syllogism ; the Posterior Analytics upon logical dem- onstration; the Topics , or demonstrations having proba- bility; and the Sophistical Elenchi , upon false conclusions and their refutation. Together these constitute the Organon or complete logical instrument, as it became known to the 38 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I latter half of the twelfth century, and as we possess it to-day. The Rhetoric follows, not disconnected with the logical treatises. Then may be named the Metaphysics , and then the writings devoted to Nature, to wit, the Physics , Concern- ing the Heavens , Concerning Genesis and Decay , the Meteor- ology , the Mechanical Problems , the History of Animals , the Anatomical descriptions , the De anima, the Parts of Animals , the Generation of Animals. There was a Botany, which is lost. Finally, one names the great works on Ethics, Politics, and Poetry. Every one is overwhelmed by the compass of the achieve- ment of this intellect. As to the transcendent value of the works on Logic, Metaphysics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, and Poetry, the world of scholarship has long been practically at one. There is a difference of opinion as to the quantity and quality of actual investigation represented by the writings on Natural History. But Aristotle is commonly regarded as the founder of systematic Zoology. On the whole, perhaps one will not err in repeating what has been said hundreds of times, that the works ascribed to Aristotle, and which undoubtedly were produced by him or his co-labourers under his direction, represent the most prodigious intellectual achievement ever connected with any single name. In the school of Aristotle, one phase or another of the master’s activity would be likely to absorb the student’s energy and fasten his entire attention. Aristotle’s own pupil and successor was the admirable Theophrastus, a man of comprehensive attainment, who nevertheless devoted himself principally to carrying on his master’s labours in botany, and other branches of natural science. A History of Physics was one of the most important of his works. Another pupil of Aristotle was Eudemus of Rhodes, who became a physicist and a historian of the three sciences of Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. He exhibits the learned activities thenceforth to characterize the Peripatetics. It would have been difficult to carry further the logic or meta- physics of the master. But his work in natural science might be supplemented, while the body of his writings offered CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 39 a vast field for the labours of the commentator. And so, in fact, Peripatetic energies in the succeeding generations were divided between science and learning, the latter centring chiefly in historical and grammatical labours and the exposition of the master’s writing . 1 Aristotelianism was not to be the philosophy of the closing pre-Christian centuries, any more than it was to be the philosophy of the thousand years and more following the Crucifixion. During all that time, its logic held its own, and a number of its metaphysical principles were absorbed in other systems. But Aristotelianism as a system soon ceased to be in vogue, and by the sixth century was no longer known. Yet one might find an echo of its spirit in all men who were seeking knowledge from the world of nature, from history and humane learning. There were always such; and some famous examples may be drawn even from among the practical-minded Romans. One thinks at once of Cicero’s splendid breadth of humane and literary interest. His friend Terentius Varro was a more encyclopaedic personality, and an eager student in all fields of knowledge. Although not an investigator of nature he wrote on agri- culture, on navigation, on geometry, as well as the Latin tongue, and on Antiquities, divine and human, even on philosophy . 2 Another lover of knowledge was the elder Pliny, who died from venturing too near to observe the eruption which destroyed Pompeii. He was an important functionary under the emperor Vespasian, just as Varro had held offices of authority in the time of the Republic. Pliny’s Historia naturalis was an astounding compilation, intended to cover the whole plain of common and uncommon knowledge. The compiler neither observed for himself nor weighed the statements of others. His compilation is a happy harbour- age for the preposterous as well as reasonable, where the traveller’s tale of far-off wonders takes its place beside the testimony of Aristotle. All is fish that comes to the net 1 On these Peripatetics see Zeller, Philosophic der Griechett, 3rd ed. vol. ii. pp. 806-946. 2 See Boissier, Etude sur M. T. Varron (Paris, 1861). 40 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I of the good Pliny, though it be that wonderful piscis, the Echinus , which though but a cubit long has such tenacity of grip and purpose that it holds fast the largest galley, and with the resistance of its fins, renders impotent the efforts of a hundred rowers. Fish for Pliny also are all the stories of antiquity, of dog-headed, one-legged, big-footed men, of the Pigmies and the Cranes, of the Phoenix and the Basilisk. He delights in the more intricate causality of nature’s phenomena, and tells how the bowels of the field-mouse increase in number with the days of the moon, and the energy of the ant decreases as the orb of Venus wanes . 1 But this credulous person was a marvel of curiosity and diligence, and we are all his debtors for an acquaintance with the hearsay opinions current in the antique world. Varro and Pliny were encyclopaedists. Yet before, as well as after them, the men possessed by the passion for knowledge of the natural world were frequently devoted to some branch of inquiry, rather than encyclopaedic gleaners or universal philosophers. Hippocrates, Socrates’s contem- porary, had left a name rightly enduring as the greatest of physicians. In the third century before Christ Euclid is a great mathematician, and Hipparchus and Archimedes have place for ever, the one among the great astronomers, the other among the great terrestrial physicists. All these men represent reflection and theory, as well as investigation and experiment. Leaping forward to the second century a.d., we find among others two great lovers of science. Galen of Pergamos was a worthy follower, if not a peer, of the great physician of classic Greece ; and Ptolemy of Alexandria emulated the Alexandrian Hipparchus, whose fame he revered, and whose labours (with his own) he transmitted to posterity. Each of these men may be regarded as advanc- ing some portion of the universal plan of Aristotle. Another philosophy, Stoicism, had already reached a wide acceptance. As for the causes of this, doubtless the decline of Greek civic freedom before the third century b.c., had tended to throw thoughtful men back upon their inner life; and those who had lost their taste for the popular religion, needed a philosophy to live by. Stoicism became especially 1 Hist, naturalis, ii. 41. CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 4i popular among the Romans. It was ethics, a philosophy of practice rather than of knowledge. The Stoic looked out upon the world from the inner fortress of the human will. That guarded or rather constituted his well-being. He cared for such knowledge, call it instruction rather, as would make good the principle that human well-being lay in the rightly self-directing will. He did not seriously care for metaphysics, or for knowledge of the natural world, save as one or the other subserved the ends of his philosophy as a guide of life. Thus the Stoic physics, so important a part in the Stoic system, was inspired by utilitarian motives and deflected from unprejudiced observation by teleological considerations and reflections on the dispensations of Providence. Of course, some of the Stoics show a further range of intellectual interest; Seneca, for example, who was a fine moralist and wrote beautiful essays upon the conduct of life. He, like a number of other people, composed a book of Quaestiones naturales , which was chiefly devoted to the weather, a subject always very close to man. But he was not a serious meteorologist. For him the interest of the fact lay rather in its use or in its moral bearing. After Seneca the Stoic interest in fact narrows still further, as with Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Like things might be said of the school of Epicurus, a child of different colour, yet birthmate of the Stoa. For in that philosophy, as in Stoicism, all knowledge beyond ethics had a subordinate role. As a Stoic or Epicurean, a man was not likely to contribute to the advance of any branch of science. Yet habits of eclectic thought and common curiosity, or call it love of knowledge, made many nominal members of these schools eager students and compilers from the works of others. We have yet to speak of the system most representative of latter-day paganism, and of enormous import for the first thousand years of Christian thought. Neo-Platonism was the last great creation of Greek philosophy. More specifi- cally, it was the noblest product of that latter-day paganism which was yearning somewhat distractedly, impelled by cravings which paganism could neither quench nor satisfy. 42 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I Spirit is; it is the Real. It makes the body, thereby presenting itself in sensible form ; it is not confined by body or dependent on body as its cause or necessary ground. In many ways men have expressed, and will express hereafter, the creative or causal antecedence of the spiritual principle. In many ways they have striven to establish this principle in God who is Spirit, or in the Absolute One. Many also have been the processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo- Platonism a very palpable although darkening statement of the same. All men, except fools, have their irrational sides. Who does not believe what his reason shall labour in vain to justify ? Such belief may have its roots spread through generalizations broader than any specific rational processes of which the man is conscious. And a man is marked by the character of his supra-rational convictions, or beliefs or credulous conjectures. One thinks how Plato wove and coloured his dialectic, and angled with it, after those tran- scendencies that he well knew could never be so hooked and taken. His conviction — non-dialectical — of the supreme and beautiful reality of spirit led him on through all his arguments, some of which appear as playful, while others are very earnest. Less elusive than Plato’s was the supra-rationality of his distant disciple, the Egyptian Plotinus (died 270), creator of Neo-Platonism. With him the supra-rational represented an elan , a reaching beyond the clearly seen or clearly known, to the Spirit itself. He had a disciple Porphyry, like him- self a sage — and yet a different sage. Porphyry’s supra- rationalities hungered for many things from which his rational nature turned askance. But he has a disciple, lamblicus by name, whose rational nature not only ceases to protest, but of its free will prostitutes itself in the service of unreason. The synthetic genius of Plotinus enabled him to weave CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 43 into his system valuable elements from Aristotle and the Stoics. But he was above all a Platonist. He presents the spiritual triad : the One, the Mind, the Soul. From the One comes the Mind, that is, the Nous, which embraces the totality of the knowable or intelligible, to wit, the Cosmos of Ideas. From that, come the Soul of the World and the souls of men. Matter, which is nothing, gains form and partial reality when informed with soul. Plotinus’s attitude toward knowledge of the concrete natural or historic fact, displays a transcendental indifference exceeding that of Plato. Perceptible facts with him are but half-real manifestations of the informing spirit. They were quite plastic, malleable, reducible. Moreover, thoughts of the evil of the multiple world of sense held for Plotinus and his followers a bitterness of ethical unreality which Plato was too great an Athenian to feel. Dualistic ethics which find in matter the principle of unreality or evil, diminish the human interest in physical fact. The ethics of Plotinus consisted in purification and detachment from things of sense. This is asceticism. And Plotinus was an ascetic, not through endeavour, but from contempt. He did not struggle to renounce the world, but despised it with the spontaneity of a sublimated tempera- ment. He seemed like a man ashamed of being in the body, Porphyry says of him. Nor did he wish to cure any contemptible bodily ailments, or wash his wretched body. Plotinus’s Absolute, the First or One, might not be grasped by reason. Yet to approach and contemplate It was the best for man. Life’s crown was the ecstasy of the supra-rational and supra-intelligible vision of It. This Plotinean irrationality was lofty ; but it was too tran- scendent, too difficult, and too unrelated to the human heart, to satisfy other men. No fear but that his followers would bring it down to the level of their irrational tendencies. The borrowed materials of this philosophy were made by its founder into a veritable system. It included, potentially at least, the popular beliefs, which, however, interested this metaphysical Copt very little. But in those superstitious centuries, before as well as after him, these cruder elements were gathered and made much of by men of note. There 44 THE "MEDIAEVAL MIND book i was a tendency to contrast the spiritual and real with the manifold of material nonentity, and a cognate tendency to emphasize the opposition between the spiritual and good and the material and evil, or between opposing spiritual principles. With less metaphysical people such opposi- tion would take more entrancing shapes in the battles of gods and demons. Probably it would cause ascetic repression of the physical passions. Both tendencies had shown themselves before Plotinus came to build them into his system. Friend Plutarch, for instance, of Chaeroneia, was a man of pleasant temper and catholic curiosity. His philosophy was no great matter. He was gently credulous, and interested in anything marvellous and every imaginable god and demon. This good Greek was no ascetic, and yet had much to say of the strife between the good and evil principle. Like thoughts begat asceticism in men of a different temperament ; for instance in the once famous Apollonius of Tyana and others, who were called Neo- Pythagoreans, whatever that meant. Such men had also their irrationalities, which perhaps made up the major part of their natures. They did indeed belong to those centuries when Astrology flourished at the imperial Court, 1 and every mode of magic mystery drew its gaping votaries ; when men were ravenously drawing toward everything, except the plain concrete fact steadily viewed and quietly reasoned on. But it was within the schools of Neo-Platonism, in the generations after Plotinus, that these tendencies flourished, beneath the shelter of his elastic principles. Here three kindred currents made a resistless stream : a transcendental, fact-compelling dialectic; unveiled recognition of the su- preme virtue of supra-rational convictions and experiences ; and an asceticism which contemned matter and abhorred the things of sense. What more was needed to close the faculties of observation, befool the reason, and destroy knowledge in the end? Porphyry and Iamblicus show the turning of the tide. The first of these was a Tyrian, learned, intelligent, austere. His life extends from about the year 232 to the year 300. 1 From the reign of Augustus onward, Astrology flourished as never before. See Habler, Astrologie im Alterthum, p. 23 sqq. (Zwickau, 1879). CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 45 His famous Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle was a corner-stone of the early mediaeval knowledge of logic. He wrote a keenly rational work against the Christians, in which his critical acumen pointed out that the Book of Daniel w r as not composed before the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. He did much to render intelligible the writings of his master Plotinus, and made a compend of Neo- Platonism in the form of Sentences. These survive, as well as his work on Abstinence from Eating Flesh , and other treatises, allegorical and philosophic. He was to Plotinus as Soul, in the Neo-Platonic system, was to Mind— Soul which somehow was darkly, passionately tangled in the body of which it was the living principle. The individual soul of Porphyry wrestled with all the matters which the mind of Plotinus made slight account of. Plotinus lived aloof in a region of metaphysics warned with occasional ecstasy. Porphyry, willy nilly, was drawn down to life, and suffered all the pain of keen mentality when limed and netted with the anxieties of common superstitions. He was forever groping in a murky atmosphere. He could not clear him- self of credulity, deny and argue as he might. Nor could asceticism pacify his mind. Philosophically he followed Plotinus’s teachings, and understood them too, which was a marvel. Many of his own, or possibly reflected, thoughts are excellent. No Christian could hold a more spiritual conception of sacrifice than Porphyry when thinking of the worship of the Mind — the Nous or Second God. Offer to it silence and chaste thought, which will unite us to it, and make us like itself. The perfect sacrifice is to disengage the soul from passions . 1 What could be finer? And again says Porphyry : The body is the soul’s garment, to be laid aside ; the wise man needs only God ; evil spirits have no power over a pure soul. But, but, but — at his last statement Porphyry’s confidence breaks. He is worried because it is so hard to know the good from evil demons ; and the latter throng the temples, and must be exorcised before the true God will appear. This same man had said that God’s true temple was the wise man’s soul ! Alas ! Porphyry’s nature reeks with contradictions. His letter to the Egyptian priest, 1 De abstinentia, ii. 34. 46 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I Anebo, consists of sharply-put questions as to the validity of any kind of theurgy or divination. How can men know anything as to these things? What reason to suppose that this, that, or the other rite — all anxiously enumerated — is rightly directed or has effect ? None ! none ! none ! such is the answer expected by the questions. But Porphyry’s own soul answers otherwise. His works — the De abstinentia for example — team with detailed and believing discussion of every kind of theurgic practice and magic rite, whereby the divine and demonic natures may be moved. He believed in oracles and sorcery. Vainly did the more keenly intellectual side of his nature seek to hold such matters at arm’s length ; his other instincts hungered for them, craved to touch and taste and handle, as the child hankers for what is forbidden. There is angel-lore, but far more devil-lore, in Porphyry, and below the earth the demons have their realm, and at their head a demon-king. Thus organized, these malformed devil-shapes torment the lives of men, malignant deceivers, spiteful trippers up, as they are. Such a man beset by demons (which his intelligence declares to have no power over him!), such a man, austere and grim, would practice fanatically the asceticism recognized so calmly by the system of Plotinus. With Porphyry, strenuously, anxiously, the upper grades of virtue become violent purification and detachment from things of sense. Here he is in grim earnest. It is wonderful that this man should have had a critical sense of historic fact, as when he saw the comparatively late date of the Book of Daniel. He could see the holes in others’ garments. But save for some such polemic purpose, the bare, crude fact interests him little. He is an elaborate fashioner of allegory, and would so interpret the fictions of the poets. Plotinus, when it suited him, had played with myths, like Plato. No such light hand, and scarcely con- cealed smile, has Porphyry. As for physical investigations, they interest him no more seriously than they did his master, and when he touches upon natural fact he is as credulous as Pliny. ‘The Arabians,” says he, “understand the speech of crows, and the Tyrrhenians that of eagles; and perhaps CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 47 we and all men would understand all living beings if a dragon licked our ears.” 1 These inner conflicts darkened Porphyry’s life, and doubt- less made some of the motives which were turning his thoughts to suicide, when Plotinus showed him that this was not the true way of detachment. There was no conflict, but complete surrender, and happy abandonment in Iam- blicus the Divine (Oeios) who when he prayed might be lifted ten cubits from the ground — so thought his disciples — and around whose theurgic fingers, dabbling in a magic basin of water, Cupids played and kissed each other. His life, told by the Neo-Platonic biographer, Eunapius, is as full of miracle as the contemporary Life of St. Anthony by Athana- sius. Iarnblicus floats before us a beautiful and marvel- lously garbed priest, a dweller in the recesses of temples. He frankly gave himself to theurgy, convinced that the Soul needs the aid of every superhuman being — hero, god, demon, angel. 2 He was credulous on principle. It is of first importance, he writes, that the devotee should not let the marvellous character of an occurrence arouse incredulity within him. He needs above all a “science” {eTnarrj^ri) which shall teach him to disbelieve nothing as to the gods. 3 For the divine principle is essentially miraculous, and magic is the open door, yes, and the way up to it, the anagogic path. All this and more besides is set forth in the De mysteriis, the chief composition of his school. It was the answer to that doubting letter of Porphyry to Anebo, and contains full proof and exposition of the occult art of moving god or demon. We all have inborn knowledge (e/i^vrov 7 v&ctls;) 4 of the gods. But it is not thought or contemplation that unites us to them ; it is the power of the theurgic rite or cabalistic word, understood only by the gods. We cannot understand the reason of these acts and their effects. 5 There is no lower depth. Plotinus’s reason-surpassing 1 De abstinentia , iii. 4. 2 Porphyry before him had spoken of angels and archangels, which he had found in Jewish writings. 3 For authorities cited, see Zeller, Gesch. der Phil, iii. 2 p. 686. 4 De mysteriis, i. 3. 5 Ibid. ii. 3, 9. 48 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I vision of the One (which represents in him the principle of irrationality) is at last brought down to the irrational act, the occult magic deed or word. Truly the worshipper needs his best credulity — which is bespoken by Iamblicus and by this book. The work seems to argue, somewhat obscurely, that the prayer or invocation or rite does not actually draw the god to us, but draws us toward the god, making our wills fit to share in his. The writer of such a work is likely to be confused in his statement of principles; but will expand more genially when expounding the natures of demons, heroes, angels, and gods, and the effect of them upon humanity. Perhaps the matter still seems dark ; but the picturesque details are bright enough. For the writer describes the manifestations and apparitions of these beings — their em^aveLai and cpaa/iaTa . The apparitions of the gods are ixovoeihr), simple and uniform : those of the demons are ttouciXci, that is, various and manifold ; those of the angels are more simple than those of the demons, but inferior to those of the gods. The archangels in their apparitions are more like the gods; while the apxovres, the “ governors,” have variety and yet order. The gods as they appear to men, are radiant with divine effulgence, the arch- angels terrible yet kind ; the demons are frightful, producing perturbation and terror — on all of which the work enlarges. Speaking more specifically of the effect of these apparitions on the thaumaturgist, the writer says that visions of the gods bring a mighty power, and divine love and joy in- effable ; the archangels bring steadfastness and power of will and intellectual contemplation ; the angels bring rational wisdom and truth and virtue. But the vision of demons brings the desires of sense and the vigour to fulfil them. So low sank Neo-Platonism in pagan circles. Of course it did not create this mass of superstitious fantasy. It merely accepted it, and over every superstition flung the justi- fication of its principles. In the process it changed from a philosophy to a system of theurgic practice. The common superstitions of the time, or their like, were old enough. But now — and here was the portentous fact — they had wound themselves into the natures of intellectual people; CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 49 and Neo-Platonism represents the chief formal facilitation of this result. A contemporary phenomenon, and perhaps the most popular of pagan cults in the third and fourth centuries, was the worship of Mithra, around which Neo-Platonism could throw its cloak as well as around any other form of pagan worship. Mithraism, a partially Hellenized growth from the old Mazdaean (even Indo-Iranian) faith, had been carried from one boundary of the Empire to the other, by soldiers or by merchants who had imbibed its doctrines in the East. It shot over the Empire like a flame. A warrior cult, the late pagan emperors gave it their adhesion. It was, in fine, the pagan Antaeus destined to succumb in the grasp of the Christian Hercules. With it, or after it, came Manicheism, also from the East. This was quite as good a philosophy as the Neo- Platonism of Iamblicus. The system called after Manes was a crass dualism, containing fantastic and largely borrowed speculation as to the world and man. Satan was there and all his devils. He was the begetter of mankind, in Adam. But Satan himself, in previous struggles with good angels, had gained some elements of light; and these passed into Adam’s nature. Eve, however, is sensuality. After man’s engendering, the strife begins between the good and evil spirits to control his lot. In ethics, of course, Manicheism was dualistic and ascetic, like Neo-Platonism, also like the Christianity of the Eastern and Western Empire. Manicheism, unlike Mithraism, was not to succumb, but merely to retreat before Christianity. Again and again from the East, through the lower confines of the present Russia, through Hungary, it made advance. The Bogomiles were its children; likewise the Cathari in the north of Italy, and the Albigenses of Provence. The insistence of the problem of evil and the drift to dualism were likewise marked in the Gnostic creeds, which consisted chiefly of Persian and Neo-Hellenic elements, but were affiliated with Christianity by the yearning for salva- tion and drawn to the Christian pale (though not within it) by the figure of the Saviour. The appeal of these oriental 1 Cf. Dollinger, Sektengeschichte. VOL. I E 5 ° THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I cults, speaking generally, was personal rather than civic. Careless of the State, they offered to the individual the means of purification from the defilements of matter and assured him of eternal bliss . 1 Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, Maniche- ism, and Gnosticism, these names, taken for simplicity’s sake, serve to indicate the mind and temper of the educated world in which Christianity was spreading. Obviously the Christian Fathers’ ways of thinking were given by all that made up their environment, their education, their second natures. They were men of their period, and as Christians their intellectual standards did not rise nor their under- standing of fact alter, although their approvals and dis- approvals might be changed. Their natures might be stimulated and uplifted by the Faith and its polemic ardours, and yet their manner of approaching and apprehending facts, its facts, for example, might continue substantially those of their pagan contemporaries or predecessors. In the fourth century the leaders of the Church both in the East and West were greater men than contemporary pagan priests or philosophers or rhetoricians. For the strongest minds had enlisted on the Christian side, and a great cause inspired their highest energies with an efficient purpose. There is no comparison between Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom in the East; Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the West; and pagans, like Libanius, the favourite of the Emperor Julian, or even Julian himself, or Symmachus, the opponent of St. Ambrose in the cause of the pagan Altar of Victory. That was a lost cause, and the cause of paganism was becoming more and more broken, dissipated, uninspiring. Nevertheless, in spite of the superiority of the Christian doctors, in spite also of the mighty cause which marshalled their endeavours so efficiently, they present, both in their higher intelligence and their lower irrationalities, abundant likeness to the pagans. It has appeared that metaphysical interests absorbed the attention of Plotinus, who has nevertheless his supreme irrationality atop of all. Porphyry also possessed a strong 1 See Fr. Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 5i reasoning nature, but was drawn irresistibly to all the things, gods, demons, divination and theurgy, of which one half of him disapproved. Plotinus, quite in accordance with his philosophic principles, has an easy contempt for physical life. With Porphyry this has become ardent asceticism. It was also remarked that Plotinus’s system was a synthesis of much antecedent thought; and that its receptivity was rendered extremely elastic by the Neo-Platonic principle that man’s ultimate approach to God lay through ecstasy and not through reason. Herein, rather latent and not yet sorely taxed, was a broad justification of common beliefs and practices. To all these Iamblicus gladly opened the door. Rather than a philosopher, he was a priest, a thaumaturgist and magician. Finally, it is obvious that neither Iamblicus nor Porphyry nor Plotinus was primarily or even seriously interested in any clear objective knowledge of material facts. Plotinus merely noticed them casually in order to illustrate his principles, while Iamblicus looked to them for miracles. Christianity as well as Neo-Platonism was an expression of the principle that life’s primordial reality is spirit. And likewise with Christians, as with Neo-Platonists, phases of irrationality may be observed in ascending and descending order. At the summit the sublimest Christian supra- rationality, the love of God, uplifts itself. From that height the irrational conviction grades down to credulity pre- occupied with the demoniacal and miraculous. Fruitful comparisons may be drawn between Neo-Platonists and Christian doctors. Origen (d. 253), like Plotinus of Coptic descent, and the most brilliant genius of the Eastern Church, was by some fifteen years the senior of the Neo-Platonist. It is not certain that either of them directly influenced the other. In intellectual power the two were peers. Both were absorbed in the higher phases of their thought, but neither excluded the more popular beliefs from the system which he was occupied in constructing. Plotinus had no mind to shut the door against the beliefs of polytheism ; and Origen accepted on his part the demons and angels of current Christian credence. 1 In fact, he occupied himself with them more 1 See Origen, De principiis, iii. 2. 52 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I than Plotinus did with the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. Of course Origen, like every other Christian doctor, had his fundamental and saving irrationality in his acceptance of the Christian revelation and the risen Christ. This had already taken its most drastic form in the credo quia absurdum of Tertullian the Latin Father, who was twenty-five years his senior. Herein one observes the acceptance of the miracu- lous on principle. That the great facts of the Christian creed were beyond the proof or disproof of reason was a principle definitely accepted by all the Fathers. Further, since all Catholic Christians accepted the Scriptures as revealed truth, they were obliged to accept many things which their reason, unaided, might struggle with in vain. Here was a large opportunity, as to which Christians would act according to their tempers, for emphasizing and amplifying the authoritative or miraculous, i.e. irrational, element. And besides, outside even of these Scriptural matters and their interpretations, there would be the general question of the educated Christian’s interest in the miraculous. Great mental power and devotion to the construction of dogma by no means precluded a lively interest in this, as may be seen in that very miraculous life of St. Anthony, written probably by Athanasius himself. This biography is more preoccupied with the demoniacal and miraculous than Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus; indeed in this respect it is not outdone by Eunapius’s Life of Iamblicus. Turning to the Latin West, one may compare with them that charming prototypal Vita Sancti, the Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus . 1 A glance at these writings shows a similarity of interest with Christian and Neo-Platonist, and in both is found the same unquestioning acceptance of the miraculous. Thus one observes how the supernatural manifestation, the miraculous event, was admitted and justified on principle in both the Neo-Platonic and the Christian system. In both, moreover, metaphysical or symbolizing tendencies had withdrawn attention from a close scrutiny of any fact, 1 The Athanasian Vita Antonii is in Migne, Pair. Graec, 26, and trans. in Nicene Fathers, second series, iv. The Vita S. Martini is in Halm’s ed. of Sulp. Severus (Vienna, 1866), and in Migne, Pat. Lat. 20, and trans. in Nicene Fathers, second series, xi. CHAP. Ill GREEK ANTECEDENTS 53 observed, imagined, or reported. With both, the primary value of historical or physical fact lay in its illumination of general convictions or accepted principles. And with both, the supernatural fact was the fact par excellence , in that it was the direct manifestation of the divine or spiritual power. Iamblicus had announced that man must not be in- credulous as to superhuman beings and their supernatural doings. On the Christian side, there was no bit of popular credence in miracle or magic mystery, or any notion as to devils, angels, and departed saints, for which justification could not be found in the writings of the great Doctors of the Church. These learned and intellectual men evinced different degrees of interest in such matters; but none stands altogether aloof, or denies in toto. No evidence is needed here. A broad illustration, however, lies in the fact that before the fourth century the chief Christian rites had become sacramental mysteries, necessarily miraculous in their nature and their efficacy. This was true of Baptism ; it was more stupendously true of the Eucharist. Mystically, but none the less really, and above all inevitably, the bread and wine have miraculously become the body and the blood. The process, one may say, began with Origen ; with Cyril of Jerusalem it is completed ; Gregory of Nyssa regards it as a continuation of the verity of the Incarnation, and Chrysostom is with him . 1 One pauses to remark that the relationship between the pagan and Christian mysteries was not one of causal antecedence so much as one of analogous growth. A pollen of terms and concepts blew hither and thither, and effected a cross-fertilization of vigorously growing plants. The life-sap of the Christian mysteries, as with those of Mithra or the Gnostics, was the passion for a symbolism of the unknown and the in- expressible. But one must not stop here. The whole Christian Church, as well as Porphyry and Iamblicus, accepted angels and devils, and recognized their intervention or interference in human affairs. Then displacing the local 1 See Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, ii. 413 sqq., especially 432 sqq. Also Taylor, Classical Heritage, pp. 94-97. 54 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOOK I pagan divinities come the saints, and Mary above all. They are honoured, they are worshipped. Only an Augustine has some gentle warning to utter against carrying these matters to excess. In connection with all this, one may notice an illuminat- ing point, or rather motive. In the third and fourth centuries the common yearning of the Graeco-Roman world was for an approach to God ; it was looking for the anagogic path, the way up from man and multiplicity to unity and God. An absorbing interest was taken in the means. Neo-Platonism, the creature of this time, whatever else it was, was mediatorial, a system of mediation between man and the Absolute First Principle. Passing halfway over from paganism to Christianity, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius is also essentially a system of media- tion, which has many affinities (as well it might !) with the system of Plotinus . 1 Within Catholic Christianity the great work of Athanasius was to establish Christ’s sole and all- sufficient mediation. Catholicism was permanently set upon the mediatorship of Christ, God and man, the one God-man reconciling the nature which He had veritably, and not seemingly, assumed, to the divine substance which He had never ceased to be. Athanasius’s struggle for this principle was bitter and hard-pressed, because within Christianity as well as without, men were demanding easier and more tangible stages and means of mediation. Of such, Catholic Christianity was to recognize a vast multitude, perhaps not dogmatically as a necessary part of itself ; but practically and universally. Angels, saints, the Virgin over all, are mediators between man and God. This began to be true at an early period, and was established before the fourth century . 2 Moreover, every bit of rite and mystery and miracle, as in paganism, so in Catholicism, was essentially a means of mediation, a way of bringing 1 In cap. iii. § 2 of the Celestial Hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius says that the goal of his system is the becoming like to God and oneness with Him Oj n-po? Oe'ov a$o/u.