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 HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY PERMISSION FROM THE FRENCH OF 
 
 A. FBEDEBIC OZANAM, 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF FOREIGN LITERATURE TO THE FACULTY OF LETTERS 
 AT PARIS. 
 
 ASHLEY C. GLYN, B.A., 
 
 OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LAW. 
 
 IN 
 
 TWO VOLUMES. 
 
 //*>? OP TUT? X 3*^ 
 
 LONDON: 
 WM. H. ALLEN & CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE, 
 
 PALL MALL, S.W. 
 
 1868. k 
 
 ' ! * 
 

 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER, 
 
 MILFOKD LANE, STRAND, W.C. 
 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 The following version in English, of an historical 
 work which is well known and valued in France, is 
 offered to a public which has welcomed the kindred 
 writings of the Comte de Montalembert. It treats 
 of a period which was the turning point in the history 
 of Western civilization, and although the standpoint of 
 the author may to a certain extent influence the method 
 of treatment, and cause many in this country to take 
 exception to details, yet it is submitted that all will 
 agree to its main argument, the position of the Chris- 
 tian Church as the great the only civilizing force that 
 survived the revolution which left the prostrate Empire 
 face to face with the invading hordes. This fact, which 
 is insisted on by the followers of Comte, will in these 
 days surely not be controverted by any of those whose 
 thought is governed by Christianity. 
 
 A few words may be said as to the career of the 
 author, Frederic Ozanam, whose name has not yet 
 become widely known in this country. He was born 
 August 23rd, 1813, at Milan, where his father, who had 
 fallen into poverty, was residing and studying medicine. 
 His mother, whose maiden name had been Marie 
 Nantas, was daughter to a rich Lyonnese merchant, 
 
vi translator's preface. 
 
 and it was to that city that his parents returned in 
 1816. The father obtained there a considerable repu- 
 tation as a doctor, and died from the effects of an 
 accident in 1837. His son pursued his studies at 
 Paris with great success, and was destined for the Bar. 
 He took a prominent place in the thoughtful and 
 religious party among the students, and his published 
 letters show how he became identified with the move- 
 ment set on foot by Lacordaire and others. He was 
 especially distinguished, however, by the foundation of 
 an association of benevolence, called the Society of St. 
 Vincent of Paul, which from its small beginnings in 
 Paris spread over France, and has at the present time its 
 conferences, composed of laymen, in all the larger towns 
 of Europe. M. Ozanam showed, even during his student 
 life, a leaning towards literary pursuits, and a distaste for 
 the profession of the Bar, to which he was destined ; but 
 he joined the Bar of Lyons, obtained some success 
 as an advocate, and was chosen in 1839 as the first 
 occupant of the professorial chair of Commercial Law 
 which had just been established in that city. The 
 courses of lectures given by him were well attended, 
 the lectures themselves were eloquent and learned, and 
 M. Ozanam seems to have preferred inculcating the 
 science of jurisprudence to practising in the Courts. 
 But in the course of the following year, 1840, he 
 obtained an appointment which was still more suitable 
 to his talent, the Professorship of Foreign Literature 
 at Paris, and which gave him a perfect opportunity for 
 the cultivation of his favourite pursuit, the philosophy 
 of history. Shortly after his appointment, M. Ozanam 
 married, and the remaining years of his life were spent 
 in the duties of his calling; in travelling partly for 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. Vll 
 
 the sake of health and pleasure, partly to gain informa- 
 tion which might be woven into his lectures; and in 
 visits to his many friends, chiefly those who had taken 
 an active part with him in upholding the interests of reli- 
 gion in France. He never entered upon active political 
 life, though he offered himself upon a requisition of 
 his fellow-townsmen as representative of Lyons in the 
 National Assembly of 1848. In politics M. Ozanam 
 was a decided Liberal, in religion a fervent Catholic. 
 His letters show a great dislike of any alliance between 
 the Church and Absolutism, and a conviction that re- 
 ligion and an enlightened democracy might flourish 
 together. He wrote in the " Correspondant " which em- 
 bodied the newer ideas, and was frequently animadverted 
 upon by the " Univers," which represented the more 
 conservative party in Church and State. His more im- 
 portant works were developed from lectures delivered at 
 the Sorbonne : and his scheme was to embrace the his- 
 tory of civilization from the fall of the Eoman Empire to 
 the time of Dante. But failing health, although much 
 was completed, did not allow him entirely to achieve 
 the great object which he had originally conceived 
 when a mere boy ; and the touching words in which he 
 expressed his resignation to an early death, when his 
 already brilliant life promised an increase of success, 
 and his cup of domestic happiness was entirely full, 
 may be found among his published writings. M. 
 Ozanam seems to have continued his literary labours 
 as long as rapidly increasing weakness would permit, 
 but after a stay in Italy, which did not avail to restore 
 his broken health, he reached his native country only 
 to die, September 8th, 1853, in the fortieth year of 
 his age, and the heyday of a bright and useful career. 
 
Vlll TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 He was lamented by troops of friends, old and young, 
 rich and poor the latter indeed being under especial 
 obligations to his memory. His friend M. Ampere be- 
 came his literary executor, and undertook the task of 
 giving his complete works to the public, for which end 
 a subscription was quickly raised amongst those who 
 had known and respected him at Lyons and elsewhere. 
 From the lectures which he had completed and revised, 
 from reports of others, and his own manuscript notes, 
 an edition of his complete works was formed in nine 
 volumes, comprising La Civilization au Cinquieme 
 Siecle, Etudes Germaniques, Les Poetes Franciscains, 
 Dante et la Philosophic Catholique au Treizieme Siecle, 
 and Melanges, to which were added two volumes of his 
 letters. 
 
 The work which has now been translated forms the 
 first two volumes of the above series, and was intended 
 by the author as the opening of the grand historical 
 treatise which he had designed. But it is also com- 
 plete in itself, and seems well worthy of an introduc- 
 tion into England. As it was delivered originally in 
 the shape of lectures, and preserves that form in the 
 French edition, it has been necessary, in order to pre- 
 serve the continuity of the historical narrative, to alter 
 the construction occasionally, and to pass over a sen- 
 tence here and there, which refers solely to the audience 
 of students to which the lectures were originally ad- 
 dressed. The last chapter but one being based upon a 
 lecture which the author had never revised, and which 
 stands in the French in the shape of rough notes, has 
 been rendered into connected English, regard being had 
 to the general style of the completed lectures. With 
 these exceptions the original form of the treatise has, 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. IX 
 
 as far as was compatible with the exigencies of our 
 idiom, been steadily maintained, and every idea has, in 
 accordance with the accepted canons of translation, been 
 scrupulously preserved. But the translator is fully 
 conscious of the defects of his work, and only trusts 
 that some portion of the beauty and earnest eloquence 
 of the original may show through the veil which has 
 been cast upon it. 
 
 A. C. G. 
 
 October, 1867, 
 
 a 3 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 I purpose to write the literary history of the Middle 
 Age, from the fifth to the end of the thirteenth century, 
 the time of Dante, before whom I pause as the wor- 
 thiest representative of that great epoch. But in the 
 history of literature my principal study will be the 
 civilization of which it is the flower, and in that civi- 
 lization I shall glance especially at the handiwork of 
 Christianity. The whole idea, therefore, of my book 
 will be to show how Christianity availed to evoke from 
 the ruins of Eome, and the hordes encamped there- 
 upon, a new society which was capable of holding truth, 
 doing good, and finding the true idea of beauty. 
 
 We know how Gibbon, the historian, visited Kome 
 in his youth, and how one day, as, full of its associa- 
 tions, he was wandering over the Capitol, he beheld a 
 long procession of Franciscans issuing from the doors 
 of the Ara Coeli Basilica, and brushing with their 
 sandals the pavement which had been traversed by so 
 many triumphs. It was then that, indignation giving 
 him inspiration, he formed the plan of avenging the 
 antiquity which had been outraged by Christian bar- 
 
Xll AUTHOR S PREFACE. 
 
 barism, and conceived the idea of a history of the 
 decline of the Koman Empire. And I have also seen 
 the monks of Ara Coeli crowding the old pavement of 
 the Capitolian Jove. I rejoiced therein as in a victory 
 of love over force, and resolved to describe the history 
 of progress in that epoch where the English philoso- 
 pher only saw decay, the history of civilization in the 
 period of barbarism, the history of thought as it 
 escaped from the shipwreck of the empire of letters 
 and traversed at length those stormy waves of invasion, 
 as the Hebrews passed the Eed Sea, and under a 
 similar guidance, forti tegente brachio. I know of no 
 fact which is more supernatural, or more plainly proves 
 the divinity of Christianity, than that of its having 
 saved the human intellect. 
 
 I shall be reproached mayhap with an inopportune 
 zeal, since the accusations of the eighteenth century 
 have fallen into oblivion, and public favour has re- 
 turned, and even with some excess, to the Middle Age. 
 But, on the one hand, little confidence can be placed in 
 these abrupt returns of popularity : they love like the 
 waves to quit the shores which they have been caress- 
 ing, and indeed on looking more closely upon the 
 movement of men's minds, we may already perceive 
 that many are beginning to stand aloof from those Chris- 
 tian ages whose genius they admire, but whose auste- 
 rity they repudiate. In the depths of human nature 
 there lies an imperishable instinct of Paganism, which 
 reveals itself in every age, and is not extinct in our 
 own, which ever willingly returns to pagan philosophy, 
 to pagan law, to pagan art, because it finds therein its 
 dreams realized and its instincts satisfied. The thesis 
 of Gibbon is still that of half Germany, as well as of 
 
AUTHOR S PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 those sensualistic schools which accuse Christianity of 
 having stifled the legitimate development of humanity 
 in suppressing the instincts of the flesh ; in relegating 
 to a future life pleasures which should be found here 
 below; in destroying that world of enchantment in 
 which Greece had set up strength, wealth, and pleasure 
 as divinities, to substitute for it a world of gloom, 
 wherein humility, poverty, and chastity are keeping 
 watch at the foot of the cross. On the other hand, 
 that very excess of admiration which is paid to the 
 Middle Age has its perils. Its results may well be to 
 rouse noble minds against an epoch, the very evils of 
 which men seek to justify. Christianity will appear 
 responsible for all the disorders of an age in which it 
 is represented as lord over every heart. We must 
 learn to praise the majesty of cathedrals and the 
 heroism of crusades, without condoning the horrors of 
 an eternal war, the harshness of feudal institutions, 
 the scandal of a perpetual strife of kings with the holy 
 see for their divorces and their simonies. We must 
 see the evil as it was, that is in formidable aspect, 
 precisely that we may better recognize the services of 
 the Church, whose glory it was throughout those 
 scantily studied ages not to have reigned, but to have 
 struggled. Therefore I enter upon my subject with a 
 horror of barbarism, with a respect for whatever was 
 legitimate in the heritage of the old civilization. I 
 admire the wisdom of the Church in not repudiating 
 that heritage, but in preserving it through labour, 
 purifying it through holiness, fertilizing it through 
 genius, and making it pass into our hands that it 
 might increase the more. For if I recognize the 
 decline of the old world under the law of sin, I believe 
 
XIV AUTHOR S PREFACE. 
 
 in its progress throughout Christian times. I do not 
 fear the falls and the gaps which may interrupt it, for 
 the chilly nights which succeed the heat of its days do 
 not prevent the summer from following its course and 
 ripening its fruits. 
 
 History presents no commoner spectacle than that 
 of generations that are feeble succeeding to those that 
 are strong; centuries of destruction following ages of 
 creation, and preparing unconsciously, and when bent 
 only upon ruin, the first foundations of a new construc- 
 tion. When the barbarians levelled the temples of 
 old Rome, they did but make ready the marble where- 
 with the Rome of the Popes has built its churches. 
 Those Goths were the pioneers of the great architects 
 of the Middle Age. For this reason, then, I thank God 
 for those stormy years, and that amidst the panic of 
 a society awaiting dissolution, I have entered upon a 
 course of study in which I have found security. I 
 learn not to despair of my own century by returning 
 to more threatening epochs, and beholding the perils 
 which have been traversed by that Christian society of 
 which we are the disciples, of which, if it want us, we 
 know how to act as champions. I do not close my 
 eyes to the storms of the present day ; I know that I 
 myself, and with me this work to which I can promise 
 no lasting existence, may perish therein. I write 
 nevertheless, for though God has not given me strength 
 to guide the plough, yet still I must obey the law of 
 labour and fulfil my daily task. I write as those 
 workmen of the primitive centuries used to work, who 
 moulded vessels of clay or of glass for the daily wants 
 of the Church, and who pictured thereon in coarse 
 design the Good Shepherd or the Virgin and the Saints. 
 
AUTHOR S PREFACE. XV 
 
 These poor folk had no dreams of the future, yet 
 some fragments of their vessels found in the ceme- 
 teries have appeared 1,500 years after them, to bear 
 witness to and prove the antiquity of some contested 
 doctrine.* 
 
 * This preface is an extract from the Avant-Propos to the 
 larger work on European Civilization, designed by M. Ozanam. 
 It is inserted as showing the scope of his plan, and also as 
 bearing upon as much of it as appears in the following pages. 
 
 -(Tr.) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 OF VOL. I. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF PKOGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 
 
 Subject proposed. The education of the modern nations ; 
 the two theories of progress. Progress by Christianity. 
 Principle of decline in Paganism ; true progress begins 
 with our era. Christian ideas of trut h, goodness, and 
 beauty, and their results. . Christian philosophy estab- 
 lishes the law of progress, which history shows to be 
 necessary to humanity. The process by which mankind 
 gained possession of the earth, and the knowledge of 
 God sketched. Objections to the doctrine of progress, 
 as tending to contempt for the past or to fatalism. 
 Distinction between humanity and man the individual 
 as to progress ; freedom of the latter ; his power of 
 resistance ; general progress of humanity established. 
 Two principles in man, perfection and corruption, 
 answering to civilization and barbarism in society; 
 progress therefore a struggle. Fall of the Empire; 
 respect of the provinces for Rome, and consequent 
 terror at the catastrophe. St. Augustine and the " City 
 of God." Christianity becomes master of the conscience. 
 Its mission-work ; it saves science, social institutions, 
 the arts ; develops the good instincts of the German 
 tribes. Good effects of the Empire of Charlemagne ; 
 its fall. The Normans and Hungarians complete the 
 purification of Europe. Rise of the modern nations, 
 France, Germany, Italy. The feudal system. The 
 Church encourages chivalry ; learning and civilization 
 fostered in the monasteries, in Ireland, France, and 
 Germany. John Scotus Erigena. Literary tastes of 
 Alfred the Great. The Greek language at St. Gall. 
 Gerbert. Vernacular preaching prescribed by the 
 Council of Tours. The monastic reform at Cluny. 
 
XV111 CONTENTS. 
 
 Hildebrand opens a third period. Henry IV. at Canossa. 
 Struggle between the Church and Empire. The Cru- 
 sades. Moral unity of the Christian commonwealth. 
 Gradual decay of feudalism. The Lombard republics. 
 Peter Damiani. Idea of political equality grows. Care 
 of. Gregory VII. for learning. St. Anselm ; the School- 
 men. Paris, Aix-la-Chapelle, Rome, the three capitals 
 of Christendom. The Nibelungen-lied ; the Cid. Chris- 
 tian poetry culminates in Dante. Progress in industry 
 fostered by the Church. Contrast between the towns of 
 antiquity and those of Christian times. Conclusion . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Two civilizations confront each other ; one pagan, the other 
 Christian. Paganism still rooted in the popular mind. 
 Some of the good things of the old system incorporated 
 with the new. The literature of the time. Claudian, 
 Rutilius Numatianus, Sidonius Apollinaris ; pagan 
 tone of their writings. The tradition of learning. 
 Donatus, Martianus Capella. St. Augustine ; his pro- 
 gress towards Christianity. Growth of monasticism; 
 the new faith takes gradual possession of the lay world. 
 The education of women. The old literature a strong- 
 hold of Paganism ; is gradually adopted, and purified 
 by the Christian Church, which soon has poets of its 
 own. St. Ambrose introduces hymnody into the Western 
 Church. St. Paulinus. Prudentius' rise above the 
 crowd of Christian versifiers 48 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The old faith still holds the affections of multitudes. Aspect 
 of Rome at the visit of Honorius, a.d. 404. Claudian's 
 panegyric. Christianity considered by many a passing 
 frenzy. Origin of the Roman religion ; it is modified 
 and corrupted by Greek and Eastern importations; it 
 possessed some fine ideas ; e. g., of justice, and regard 
 for the dead ; its gross anthropomorphism issuing in 
 adoration of the reigning Caesar, encouraged the two 
 passions terror and lust. Human sacrifice to the infer- 
 nal gods; worship of Cybele and Venus. Religious 
 aspect of the games of the circus and amphitheatre ; 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 their demoralizing tendency ; passion of the people for 
 them, making them cling to Paganism ; their influence 
 on Alypius. Philosophy a revolt against the pagan cult. 
 The Neoplatonists of Alexandria; Apuleius, Plotinus, 
 their great popularity in Rome ; system of Plotinus ; its 
 grandeur of theory, and distant resemblance to Chris- 
 tianity; it led back to pagan naturalism. Allegorical 
 interpretations given to the old myths. Apuleius, Jam- 
 blichus, Porphyry. Prevalent scepticism and cre- 
 dulity. Conservative feeling of the Roman patriciate, 
 represented by Symmachus ; his character and opinions 
 sketched. Hopeless corruption of society on the appear- 
 ance of Alaric 74 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 
 
 It did not fall by legislation, but by controversy and example. 
 Calumnies against and apologies for the new system. 
 St. Augustine's method of argument. Volusian. Pagan- 
 ism strong in rural districts after the Church had gained 
 the towns. St. Maximus of Turin ; the new religion 
 brightene the condition of the poor; its charity. St. 
 Jerome, Lseta, and Albinus. St. Augustine and the 
 town of Suffecta ; the martyrdom of Telemachus ends 
 the gladiatorial shows. Policy of the Church in pre- 
 serving beauty of worship, and adapting many temples. 
 Objections of Vigilantius answered by St. Jerome. 
 Efforts of Christianity against Roman and German 
 Paganism. Pagan instincts survive in the Middle Age ; 
 the old gods are believed in as daemons ; bloody spectacles 
 remain. Petrarch at Naples ; the Albigenses ; the Alex- 
 andrian Pantheism breaks out in the writings of John 
 Scotus Erigena, Amaury de Bene, David de Dinand ; the 
 occult sciences and magic flourish; sanguinary measures 
 against them. Astrology encouraged by Frederic II. 
 and the Italian republics. Struggle between truth and 
 error then, as ever, maintained 109 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 LAW. 
 
 The idea of law peculiar to Rome ; she governed thereby when 
 she had ceased to conquer. The two sources of law in 
 
XX CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 the fifth century first, the work of the jurisconsults, 
 from Augustus to the Antonines, modified by the " Law 
 of Citations ;" second, the constitutions of the Christian 
 princes, digested under Theodosius II. and Valenti- 
 nian III. The Law of the Twelve Tables ; homage paid 
 to it in theory ; its exaltation of Rome, and theocratic 
 character; patrician privileges under it, gradually in- 
 vaded by the plebs, and the provinces under the Empire. 
 The Praetor's edicts temper its harshness equitably. 
 Further reform from the Stoic jurisconsults. Legal 
 fictions. Analogy between the State law and State 
 religion. Non-natural interpretations. Legal knowledge 
 the property of adepts. Absolutism of the State be- 
 comes divinity of the Emperor ; his word becomes law ; 
 he possesses the supreme pontificate and the whole 
 Roman territory. The fiscal system ; its cruel exactions. 
 Principle of the inequality of man ; power of the father. 
 Subject position of wife and son. Slavery. Cruelty in 
 theory and practice. Cicero and Libanius cited. Strong 
 feeling against manumission. Cato, Columella, and 
 Gaius on slaves. The Law of Citations confirms 
 the old edicts as to slavery. The Theodosian Code 
 tempers them. Christianity accepted the Roman legisla- 
 tion, but set its face against inequalities and fictions. 
 Improvement in law very gradual under the Christian 
 emperors, until the Theodosian Code, which protected 
 slaves and redressed family inequalities. The Roman 
 law accepted by the barbarians " Breviarium Alarica- 
 num" and "Papiani Responsa " and formed the basis 
 of the Frankish capitularies 136 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PAGAN LITERATURE (POETRY). 
 
 The ancient literature had much to correct, as religion and 
 law had. Its decline began with the age of Augustus, 
 who closed the golden era of letters. Literature, stifled 
 beneath the growing despotism, was somewhat relieved 
 by the accession of Christian princes. Valentinian 
 threw open the tribunals. Constantine encouraged 
 poetry ; the historical form of Roman poetry. Claudian 
 the poet of the fifth century; his attachment to the 
 old cult ; popularity at Rome ; is patronized by the 
 Senate and Stilicho ; attachment to mythology ; sarcasm 
 
CONTENTS. XXI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 against Christianity ; panegyrizes Honorius ; his in- 
 tense love for Rome ; is to be ranked as a poet after Lucan. 
 Poetry in decline ; custom of public declamation con- 
 tributes to it. Metaphors become inflated and obscure, 
 and form elaborate and tricky. Rutilius Numantianus 
 also pays honour to Rome, and abuses Christian institu- 
 tions more openly. Sidonius Apollinaris and Fortunatus, 
 though Christian, still freely use pagan allusions. The 
 Drama was purified, but not suppressed. Two comedies 
 of the fourth century, " The Game of the Seven Sages," 
 and " Querolus ; " the plot of the latter shows the state 
 of society, especially among the servile classes ; family 
 life and property menaced. Theodoric opens the theatre 
 of Marcellus, a.d. 510. Terence played in Gaul in the 
 seventh and eighth centuries. B shops forbidden, A.r. 
 680, to attend theatres. Letter of Alcuin on the same 
 subject. The Drama in the eleventh century. Comedies 
 by Vitalis of Blois. Paganism was perpetuated in litera- 
 ture. Mythology in the mosaics of Ravenna and Venice, 
 and generally in manners and the arts, as well as in 
 poetry more or less to the time of the Revival . .159 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE LITERARY TRADITION. 
 
 Poetry the preaching of Paganism. This idea had been lost 
 under the Empire when it descended to panegyric. 
 How the tradition of literature was perpetuated. In the 
 earlier period of Roman history, teaching depended on 
 the father of the family. First schools of grammar and 
 rhetoric. Their progress, notwithstanding the jealousy 
 of authority. Measures of Caesar, Vespasian, and 
 Alexander Severus, in favour of public instruction. 
 Views of Pliny the Younger. Constantine ratines 
 the old and makes new laws in favour of liberal studies. 
 Edict of Valentinian and Gratian. Public teaching 
 more under control. Legislation of Julian. Theodosius 
 the Younger, and Valentinian III. Three periods in 
 the history of public instruction throughout the Empire. 
 Increase of private seminaries. Intellectual movement 
 in Gaul, Germany, Britain, and Spain. Origin of the 
 universities. Episcopal schools. Pagan character of 
 the tuition of the fifth century. Macrobius ; the 
 " Saturnales." The higher teaching comprised gram- 
 
XX11 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 mar, eloquence, and law. Grammar embraced philology 
 and criticism. Romanists and Hellenists. Anomalists 
 and analogists. High respect paid to Virgil. The 
 grammar of Donatus. The summary of Martianus 
 Capella. The encyclopaedia of antiquity. " The 
 Nuptials of Mercury and Philologia" formed the text- 
 books of the dark ages. Moulded Christian education 
 up to the time of the Revival 187 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 
 
 The ancient literature saved by means of commentators and 
 grammarians. It had to become Christian before 
 reaching the Middle Age. Question as to the pro- 
 priety of receiving profane letters into the Church, 
 complicated by their essentially pagan tone. Oppo- 
 sition of Tertullian. The charm of the old poetry 
 caused lapses to Paganism. History of Licentius. The 
 policy of the Emperor Julian. History of the rhetori- 
 cian Victorinus. Difficulties of the Church in adopt- 
 ing literature. The catechetical school of Alexandria. 
 St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Basil, and others, 
 show the accord between philosophy and the faith. The 
 Greek Church receives the ancient literature. Philo- 
 sophy to act as preparation for and demonstration of 
 Christianity. Another school thinks philosophy dan- 
 gerous. It is headed by Hermias among the Greeks ; 
 Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactantius among the Latins. 
 This school lasts, but is not dominant in the Church. 
 Results in mysticism and obscurantism. Hesitation of 
 St. Jerome ; his love for the old learning ; finally he 
 joins the more liberal school. St. Augustine ; his know- 
 ledge of the works of Cicero, Virgil, and Plato; he 
 declares for the old learning in the " Confessions " and 
 the " City of God ; " analysis of his work on " Order." 
 Philosophy and science lead to a knowledge of God. 
 Parallel between the Church and the old literature, and 
 the Israelites and the ^Egyptians ; the decision of Augus- 
 tine practically decides the question. Devotion to the 
 memory of Virgil in the Middle Age ; regarded as a 
 prophet, owing to the Fourth Eclogue. The Church 
 preserved the old literary tradition. Some of its evils 
 were perpetuated in spite of her efforts .... 209 
 
CONTENTS. XX111 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The vices of the old civilization ; Faith its regenerating prin- 
 ciple, Reason its auxiliary ; Christianity honours both 
 and places them in proper relation. The two orders of 
 truth, one above, the other within, the grasp of human 
 reason ; the latter had been mixed with error until the 
 appearance of the Christian revelation. Force of the 
 new faith in adverse circumstances. Revealed doctrine 
 defended scientifically. The Christian apologists, Justin, 
 Athenagoras, Tertullian. The Christian School of 
 Alexandria, Pantsenus, Clement, Origen. St. Gregory 
 Thaumaturgus ; his eulogy on the latter. Rise of 
 theology : St. Atbanasius, St. Basil, St. Gregory of 
 Nazianzum, St. John Chrysostom in the East; St. 
 Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine in the West ; 
 they devote themselves to exegesis, moral theology, and 
 dogmatic theology, respectively. Dangers to Chris- 
 tianity; first from Paganism, by persecution and the 
 Alexandrian philosophy ; secondly, internal perils, first a 
 return to Paganism through Gnosticism and Manichae- 
 ism ; rise of the former ; its connection with Buddhism ; 
 a sketch of its system. Valentinus, Basilides, 
 Carpocrates, and Marcion. Gnosticism merged 
 into the system of -Manes. Sketch of the Mani- 
 chaean doctrines and practice ; their essentially pagan 
 tendency. Augustine a Manichee ; he becomes their 
 chief opponent ; his work " De Moribus Manichaeorum." 
 Arianism; its rise in Platonism; the " Logos." Philo, 
 Numenius, and Plotinus ; the system of Arius. The 
 created Word ; it issues in Deism. Fascinations of the 
 Stoicism of Zeno, which paves the way for Pelagianism ; 
 both heresies destructive to Christianity; are opposed 
 respectively by St. Atlianasius and St. Augustine. The 
 faith handed on intact. The logical character of the 
 Middle Age ; its development owing to theology . .237 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Arianism powerful amongst the barlarians ; the Arian 
 kingdom of Theodoric; it prevails amongst the Goths 
 and Vandals ; appears again in Islam. Manichaeism 
 
XXIV CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 exists in Armenia and breaks out in the Albigensian 
 tenets. Theologians of the thirteenth century. Philoso- 
 phy ; it accompanies every religion, whether true or false ; 
 the two methods, dogmatism and mysticism. Thales 
 and Pythagoras ; Plato and Aristotle ; their magnificent 
 efforts to grasp the idea of God. The systems of 
 Epicurus, Zeno, and Pyrrho. Cicero struggles in vain 
 against Pyrrhonism. Christianity gives philosophy a 
 foundation of certitude ; instances of Descartes and 
 V Kepler. Metaphysical system of St. Augustine; his 
 early youth, profligacy, and lofty aspirations ; his love of 
 beauty and Manichasan phase ; is sent by Symmachus 
 to Milan : comes under the influence of St. Ambrose ; 
 history of his conversion ; the " Confessions " a treatise 
 of mystical philosophy ; was balanced by his dogmatic 
 philosophy ; the intellectual society of Cassiciacum ; 
 development of his treatises, " Contra Academos," 
 etc. ; he becomes Bishop of Hippo ; his mental energy 
 and versatility ; sketch of his psychology ; his proof of 
 the immortality of the soul ; the existence of God ; 
 physical proof of it ; the originality of his metaphysical 
 proof of the same ; avoids a pantheistic conclusion by 
 the dogma of creation ; general character of his meta- 
 physics ; he is followed in the same path by St. Anselm, 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Male- 
 branche 205 
 
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 VOL. I.- -ERRATA. 
 
 Page 168, for "turning" read "standing." 
 168, for "exalt" read "exalts." 
 211, for "Septints" read "Sophists." 
 213, for "Kings" read "beings." 
 
 253, for " inexpressibly true " read "inexpressible here." 
 262, for " endorsed " read " enclosed." 
 
 too often interrupted, I propose to myself a design, the 
 interest of which attracts me while its extent repels. 
 Hitherto we have studied in succession the origin of 
 the German, English, and Italian literature. It is 
 doubtless fascinating to watch the genius of a people 
 burst forth under a burning or an icy sky, on virgin 
 soil, or in historic land, yield to the impress of con- 
 temporary events, and put forth its first blossoms in 
 those epic traditions or in those familiar songs, which 
 still retain all the uncultured perfume of nature. But 
 beneath that popular poetry wherein the great nations 
 of Europe have shown all the variety of their re- 
 spective characters, we perceive a literature which is 
 learned but common to all alike, and a depository of 
 vol. i. 1 
 
2 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the theological, philosophical, and political doctrines 
 which moulded for eight hundred years the education 
 of Christendom. Let us study that common education, 
 and consider the modern nations, no longer in that 
 isolation to which the special historian of England or 
 of Italy condemns himself, but in the spirit of that 
 fruitful intercourse marked out for them by Providence, 
 tracing the history of literature up to the Middle Age, 
 by reascending to that obscure moment which beheld 
 letters escaping from the collapse of the old order, and 
 thence following it through the schools of the barbarous 
 epoch, till the new settlement of the nations, and its 
 egress from those schools to take modern languages in 
 possession. 
 
 This long period extends from the fifth to the thir- 
 teenth century. Amidst the tempests of our times, and 
 in face of the brevity of life, a powerful charm draws us 
 to these studies. "We seek in the history of literature 
 for civilization, and in the story of the latter we mark 
 human progress by the aid of Christianity. Perhaps 
 in a period in which the bravest spirits can only see 
 decay, a profession of the doctrine of progress is out of 
 place ; nor can one renew an old and discredited posi- 
 tion, useless formerly as a commonplace, dangerous now- 
 a-days as a paradox. This generous belief, or youthful 
 illusion, if the name suits better, seems nothing better 
 than a rash opinion, alike reproved by conscience and 
 denied by history. The dogma of human perfectibility 
 finds little adhesion in a discouraged society, but may- 
 hap that very discouragement is in fault. Though often 
 useful to humble man, it is never prudent to drive him 
 to despair. Souls must not, as Plato says, lose their 
 wings, and, renouncing a perfection pronounced im- 
 
OF PEOGEESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 3 
 
 possible, fling themselves into pleasures of easy achieve- 
 ment. For there are two doctrines of progress : the first, 
 nourished in the schools of sensualism, rehabilitates 
 the passions, and, promising the nations an earthly 
 paradise at the end of a flowery path, gives them only 
 a premature hell at the end of a way of blood ; whilst 
 the second, born from and inspired by Christianity, 
 points to progress in the victory of the spirit over the 
 flesh, promises nothing but as prize of warfare, and pro- 
 nounces the creed which carries war into the individual 
 soul to be the only way of peace for the nations. 
 
 We must try and restore the doctrine of progress 
 by Christianity as a comfort in these troubled days ; 
 we must justify it in refitting its own religious and 
 philosophical principles, and cleansing it from errors 
 which had placed it at the disposal of the most hate- 
 ful aims ; we must prove it by applying it to those ages 
 which seem chosen to bely it, to an epoch of worse 
 aspect, of misery unrivalled by our own for we cannot 
 join with those who accuse Providence itself in the 
 blame they cast on the present time. Traversing rapidly 
 the period between the fall of the Empire and the 
 decline of the barbarian powers, where most historians 
 have found only ruin, we shall see the renewal of the 
 human mind, and sketch the history of light in an age 
 of darkness, of progress in an era of decay. 
 
 Paganism had no idea of progress ; rather it felt 
 itself to lie under a law of irremediable decay. Mindful 
 of the height whence it had fallen, Humanity knew 
 no way to remount its steeps. The Sacred Book of the 
 Indians declared that in primitive ages, " Justice stood 
 firm on four feet, truth was supreme, and mortals owed 
 to iniquity none of their good things ; but as time went 
 
 1 * 
 
4 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 on, justice lost each foot in succession, and as each 
 fell, rightly earned property. diminished one quarter." 
 Hesiod amused the Greeks by his tale of the Four 
 Ages, the first of which saw modesty and justice fly, 
 "leaving to mortals only devouring grief and irre- 
 parable woe." The Komans, the most sensible of men, 
 placed in their ancestors the ideal of all wisdom ; and 
 the senators of the age of Tiberius, seated at the feet of 
 their ancestral images, resigned themselves to deterio- 
 ration in the words of Horace 
 
 JEtas parentum, pejor avis tulit 
 Nos nequiores mox daturos 
 Progeniem vitiosiorem. 
 
 And if here or there a wonderful foreboding of the 
 future breaks out, as in the case of Seneca, announcing 
 in grand terms the revelation reserved by science for 
 futurity, they were but the dawn-lights of Christianity 
 just arising upon the earth, and gilding with its rays 
 intellects which seemed most remote from its in- 
 fluence. 
 
 It is with the Gospel that the doctrine of progress 
 appeared, not only teaching, but enforcing human 
 perfectibility ; the saying Estote perfecti condemns hu- 
 manity to an endless advance for its end is in eternity. 
 And what was of precept to the individual, became the 
 law of Society. St. Paul, comparing the Church to a 
 mighty body, desires it to increase to a perfect maturity, 
 and realize in its plenitude the humanity of Christ ; and 
 a Father of the Church, St. Vincent of Lerins, confirms 
 this reading of the Sacred Text by inquiring, when he 
 had established the immutability of Catholic dogma, 
 " Will, then, there be no progress in the Church of 
 Christ ? Surely there will, and in plenty ; for who 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 0. 
 
 could be so jealous of the good of mankind, so accursed 
 of God, as to stay that progress ? But it must be ad- 
 vance and not change ; of necessity, with the ages and 
 centuries, there must be an increase of intelligence, 
 of wisdom, of knowledge, for each as for all." 
 
 The great Bossuet continued this patristic tradition, 
 and though so hostile to innovation, believed in an ad- 
 vance in the faith. 
 
 " Although constant and perpetual, the Catholic 
 unity is not without her progress ; she is known in one 
 place more thoroughly than in another, at one time 
 more clearly, more distinctly, more universally than at 
 another." We cannot wonder at this contrast between 
 the sentiments of antiquity and of Christian times. 
 Progress is an effort whereby man breaks loose from his 
 present imperfection to seek perfection ; from the real, 
 to approach the ideal ; from self-regard to that which 
 is higher than self; when he loves and is content with 
 his corruption, there can be no progress. The ancients 
 were, doubtless, aware of the divine spell of perfection ; 
 in many points they even came near to it, but perceived 
 only under an obscure and misty figure, though it 
 elevated souls for a time, weighed down by pagan 
 egoism, they fell back upon self; and that mankind 
 might come forth from itself not for a mere moment, 
 but for ever, the pure perfection of God's revelation 
 must shine upon his soul. 
 
 The God of Christianity stands revealed as Truth, 
 Goodness, and Beauty, drawing man to Him by faith 
 through Truth, by hope through Beauty, by love 
 through Goodness. Capable of grasping what is true 
 and good, the human mind catches only a glimpse of 
 what is beautiful. Truth we define, as the schools of 
 
6 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 old, to be the equation of .the idea and the object, 
 Mquatio intellectus et rei. We can express goodness, 
 after Aristotle, still farther back, as being "the end 
 to which all existences tend;" but beauty we cannot 
 define, or, rather, philosophers exhaust themselves in 
 attempts which fail to become classical. Plato pro- 
 nounces it to be the splendour of the truth ; according 
 to Augustine, Beauty is unity, order, harmony. But 
 absolute Beauty is precisely the absolute harmony of 
 the divine attributes ; lying so little within our cogni- 
 zance that we fail to reconcile the liberty of God with 
 His eternal necessity, or His justice with His mercy. 
 Thus these mysterious concords elude whilst they 
 charm us, and perfect beauty is ever longed for and 
 never present. 
 
 According to Christianity, man lives a double life of 
 nature and grace. In the supernatural order, truth 
 revealed to faith forms dogma ; good embraced by man 
 becomes morality ; beauty glanced at by hope inspires 
 worship : though everything seems immovable, yet, 
 even here, according to Vincent of Lerins, the law of 
 progress claims obedience. Dogma is changeless, but 
 faith is an active power: Fides qumrens intellectum. 
 Preserving truth, it meditates and comments upon it, 
 and from the Credo which a child's memory may hold 
 evolves the Summa of St. Thomas. Precepts are fixed, 
 but their practice is multifarious : the Sermon on the 
 Mount contained all the inspiration of Christian love, 
 but ages were required to draw from it the monasteries, 
 schools, and hospitals which civilized and covered 
 Europe. Worship lastly is unchangeable in its funda- 
 mental idea of sacrifice : and a little bread and wine 
 sufficed for the Martyr's liturgy in the dungeon, but 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 7 
 
 untiring hope inspires man to draw nearer to that 
 Divine beauty which cannot be gazed on face to face on 
 earth it brings in aid everything which seems to point 
 to heaven, as flowers, fire, or incense; gives to stone 
 its flight, and causes its cathedral spires to soar aloft, 
 whilst it bears prayer on its double wings of poetry 
 and music, higher than the churches or their towers. 
 But it reaches only a point infinitely below its aspira- 
 tion, and thence springs the melancholy which is 
 breathed forth from the hymns of our great festivals ; 
 therefore the devout man feels the weariness of the 
 world stealing upon him at the end of our sacred rites, 
 and says with St. Paul, Cupio dissolvi, " I desire to be 
 dissolved and be with Christ," the constant cry of the 
 soul which pines for a larger sphere ; whilst Christian- 
 ity represents her saints advancing from light to light, 
 and the bliss of the life to come as an eternal progress. 
 The supernatural order rules, enlightens, and fer- 
 tilizes the order of nature. Philosophy is nourished 
 by dogma ; the laws of religion afford a basis to political 
 institutions, and worship produces architects and poets; 
 yet the natural order, although subordinate, remains 
 distinct, with reason, however insufficient, as a light 
 peculiar to itself, manifesting truth, beauty, and good- 
 ness in social organization, and through the arts. 
 Science begins in faith and finds therein her principle 
 of progress, for there is a natural faith which is the 
 very foundation of reason, and gives science a group of 
 undemonstrable truths as a point of departure. Faith 
 is necessary to science, and Descartes, wishing to re- 
 build the edifice of human knowledge, allowed himself 
 the single certitude, Cogito ergo sum. At the same 
 time faith starts science on a boundless course by 
 
8 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 giving it the idea of the infinite, from which pitiless 
 and tormenting thought, the human mind, condemned 
 to despise that it knows, to rush with passion into 
 the unknown, will never be delivered until, arrived at 
 the end of Nature, it finds God. In the second place, 
 love becomes the principle of progress in social in- 
 stitutions. This order rests on two virtues, justice 
 and charity ; but justice involves love as necessary 
 to that recognition of the right of another which 
 narrows our own right and restrains our freedom 
 of action. And justice has its limits, but charity has 
 none : pressed by the command to do to others the 
 good desired for one's self, which is infinite, the lover of 
 mankind will never feel that he has done enough for 
 his fellows till he has spent his life in sacrifice, and 
 died, declaring, " I am an unprofitable servant." Lastly, 
 hope is the principle of progress in art. We know 
 how perfect beauty flies at the pursuit of the human 
 imagination, and no one has explained more vividly 
 than St. Augustine the agony of the soul before that 
 eternal flight of the eternally desired ideal. 
 
 " For my own part, my expression nearly always dis- 
 pleases me, for I long for the better one which in 
 thought I believe that I possess ; the idea illumines my 
 mind with the rapidity of the lightning flash, but not 
 so language : it is slow and halting, and whilst it is 
 unfolding itself, thought has retired into its mysterious 
 obscurity."* 
 
 His complaint is common to all who seek for a 
 
 beauty they have imaged, and are high-souled enough 
 
 to confess that they have never found ; it was that of 
 
 the dying Virgil bequeathing his "iEneid" to the flames, 
 
 * St. Augustine, De Erudiendis Rudibus. 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 9 
 
 of Tasso inconsolable over the defects of his " Jeru- 
 salem ; " but still hope, stronger than the acknowledged 
 impotence of these mighty minds, regains a hold on 
 their successors, and brings them back to the inter- 
 rupted task ; she inspires the generations of architects 
 and painters who build after the Parthenon, the Coli- 
 seum, and Notre Dame de Paris have been reared, or 
 paint Christs and Madonnas before time has effaced 
 the colours of Giotto and Kaphael, or those still more 
 hardy poets who dare to advance upon a world that yet 
 rings with the measures of Homer or of Virgil. It is 
 true that such inimitable examples trouble them at the 
 outset, making them hesitate like Dante at the threshold 
 of his poetic pilgrimage to Hell ; but hope drives them 
 on, and if more than once on his shadowy course the 
 poet feels his knees tremble and his heart quail, hope 
 revives him, and pointing to Beatrice, his ideal smiling 
 upon him from on high, forces his steps to their goal. 
 If it is thus that Christian philosophy understands the 
 law of progress, the question remains whether it is a 
 moral or necessary law, whether it bears resistance or 
 demands obedience ? History seems to answer that it 
 is necessary and perforce obeyed, less visibly so in 
 times of heathenism, when darkened dogma lent but 
 a feeble light to the progress of the mind, but dis- 
 tinctly when Christianity had placed religious* certainty 
 like a pillar of fire at the vanguard of humanity. 
 
 The course of ages affords no grander spectacle than 
 that of mankind taking nature in possession through 
 science ; it has been traced by M. von Humboldt with 
 an inspired hand, albeit with that of a septuagenarian, 
 and we may add two features, namely, that man, in 
 gaining creation, is reducing into possession both him- 
 
 M 
 
10 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 self and his God. We behold the ^Egyptian race con- 
 tracted at first in the Nile valley, the desert on either 
 side setting its limit to their habitable world ; then 
 raising their eyes to those stars whose revolutions 
 brought back the overflow of the sacred stream, they 
 marvelled at their ordered courses, counted them, noted 
 their rising and setting, till the ignorant people bound 
 to a corner of the earth gained knowledge of the sky. 
 The Phoenicians appeared, armed with astronomy and 
 calculation, braved not only the seas which washed 
 their shores, but the Atlantic to the Irish coasts, whence 
 their ships brought tin, and the world opened to their 
 mariners her Western side. Greece again turned her 
 mind to the East, whence danger had come to her with 
 Darius and Xerxes where Alexander, that bold youth, 
 or rather faithful servant of civilization, was to find 
 empire and double in a few years the Grecian world : 
 but her Aristotle was to carve out for her a vaster and 
 more lasting dominion, by laying hands on the invisible 
 as well as the visible, and by giving laws alike to 
 Nature and to Thought. Sages in many generations 
 continued his work ; Eratosthenes measured the earth ; 
 Hipparchus mapped out the heavens ; humanity became 
 self- regarding philosophers studied man in his essence, 
 historians in his deeds. Herodotus affixed to his tale 
 of the Median wars the history of Egypt and of Persia, 
 and Diodorus Siculus pushed his research to the re- 
 motest nations of the north. Eome added little indeed 
 to these discoveries, but she traversed the known world 
 throughout, pierced roads over it, rendered it available 
 to men, Pervius orbis ; the nations approached in- 
 capable of mutual love, circumstance compelled them 
 to mutual knowledge, and in the " Germania" of Tacitus 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 11 
 
 was written the history of the future. That ancient 
 science had only an imperfect knowledge of God ; Plato, 
 who made the nearest approach to the Father of all 
 things, did not conceive Him to be a Sole, Free, or 
 Creating Power, but opposed to Him an Eternal Matter. 
 Paganism threw a shadow likewise- over nature and 
 humanity,; as the majority of minds shrank from ex- 
 ploring the secrets of a physical world peopled by their 
 imagination with jealous divinities, so historians could 
 do little justice to races sprung from hostile gods, 
 destined some to rule, others to obey. Progress would 
 have stopped had not Christianity appeared to chase 
 away the superstitious awe which environed nature, and 
 restore mankind to itself in unity of origin and of 
 destiny. 
 
 With Christianity appeared conquerors destined to 
 leave the Eagles of Kome in their rear. In the seventh 
 century Byzantine monks buried themselves in the 
 steppes of Central Asia, and crossed the great wall of 
 China. Six centuries later monks also carried Papal 
 mandates to the Khan of Tartary, and showed to 
 Genoese and Venetian merchants the road to Pekin. 
 Following on their track, Marco Polo traversed the 
 Celestial Empire, and preceded by two centuries the 
 Portuguese mariners to the isles of Sunda. In another 
 region, Irish monks, impelled by the missionary fervour 
 that burnt in their cloisters, ventured upon the Western 
 Ocean, touched in 795 the frozen shores of Iceland, and, 
 pursuing their pilgrimage towards the unknown land, 
 were cast by the wind on the coast of America. When in 
 the eleventh century the Norsemen landed in Greenland, 
 they learned from the Esquimaux that to the south of 
 their country, beyond the bay of Chesapeake, " white 
 
12 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 men might be seen clothed in long white robes, who 
 marched singing and bearing banners. " And yet those 
 cloisters, whence issued the explorers of the globe, were 
 devoted to divine culture, and gave birth to the scho- 
 lastic theology which, starting from the idea of God, 
 spread over the individual and society a light unknown 
 to antiquity, so that those controversies, so often charged 
 with over- subtlety, held minds in suspense for five hun- 
 dred years, and were the discipline of modern reason. 
 
 The Middle Age was a better servant to the moral 
 than the physical sciences ; yet a word from Roger Bacon 
 and the inexact calculations of Marco Polo impelled 
 Columbus on the way to the New World ; his faith was 
 the better part of his genius its obstinacy repaired the 
 error of his conjectures, and in reward God gave him, 
 as he said, the Keys of Ocean, the power of breaking 
 the close-riveted fetters of the sea. An entire creation 
 unfolded itself with the new earth ; the tributes of plants 
 and of animals multiplied ; and when, some years later, 
 the vessels of Magellan effected the voyage round the 
 globe, man found himself master of his home. Science, 
 too, landed at the ports of China and India, forced their 
 impenetrable society, brought to light their sacred 
 writings, their epopees and histories, and the moment 
 approached in which she was to cause the hieroglyphics 
 of Thebes and the inscriptions of Persepolis to speak. 
 
 And whilst man was conquering his earth, lest he 
 should find a moment of repose Copernicus opened out 
 immensity by breaking up the factitious heavens of 
 Ptolemy; the stars fled back from the puny distance 
 awarded them by the calculations of the old astronomy, 
 but the telescope brought them back, and observation 
 grouped them under simpler and more learned laws. 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 13 
 
 Earth itself seemed to fade in presence of those masses 
 of heavenly bodies sown like islands in an ocean of light. 
 But man grows greater in realizing his nothingness, 
 and miserable are they who think such a vision is apt 
 to estrange him from God, as if their expectations had 
 been duped, and they had hoped to find Him seated, as 
 the ancients fabled, on a throne of matter ; for whatever 
 carries man away from the visible and finite, brings him 
 perforce nearer to the Being pronounced by the faith to 
 be infinite and invisible, and as in David's times the 
 stars were telling of the glory of the Creator, so to 
 Kepler and to Newton they sang no other song. If 
 thus the law of progress drags all human intelligence 
 in its train, society cannot remain unmoved. In the 
 great empires of the East, where an all-powerful autho- 
 rity crushed the will, there could be no* progress because 
 there was no contest. Liberty called the nations of 
 Ionian Greece to action, made and unmade potentates 
 as unsteady as the gods of Olympus; but there also 
 progress had little power, because the principle of order 
 was wanting. The two necessary constituents were 
 confronted in Borne ; one strong in the majesty of the 
 patrician order, the other energizing in plebeian perse- 
 verance, they were bound to meet in conflict : but the 
 struggle was ordered by rule, and from it proceeded 
 that Boman law which was the greatest effort of anti- 
 quity to realize on earth the idea of justice. But ad- 
 mirable as its system was for regulating contracts, it 
 was ill at ease in dealing. with persons. It sanctioned 
 slavery ; and without speaking of the state of the wife 
 and child, mere domestic chattels whom the family- 
 father could slay or sell, established such was its idea 
 of justice a class of men without God, or family, or 
 
14 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 law, or duty, or conscience. Cicero mentioned the word 
 charity (caritas), but, far from its reality, dared not con- 
 demn the gladiatorial conflicts. Pliny the Younger openly 
 praised them, and Trajan, best of Koman princes, gave an 
 hundred and twenty-three holidays, on which ten thou- 
 sand combatants slaughtered each other for the pastime 
 of the world's most polished race. "We, in fact, dare not 
 thoroughly realize all the horrors of that pagan society 
 which mingled with the most refined mental pleasures 
 the deepest glut of blood and lust. 
 
 It was the task of Christianity to revive in souls, and 
 infuse into institutions, two sentiments without which 
 neither charity nor justice can exist respect for liberty 
 and for human life. Not at one blow, but little by little, 
 the Gospel reconquered freedom for man. It destroyed 
 the very standing ground of slavery by giving the slave 
 the conscience which made him no longer a thing but 
 a person, and endowed him with duties and rights, 
 while following centuries worked out its ruin by the 
 favour shown to enfranchisement, and the transformation 
 of personal servitude into villenage, till a constitution of 
 Pope Alexander III. declared slavery no longer existent 
 in the Christian society. Lapse of time, as well as 
 genius and courage, were also wanted to re-establish 
 respect for life. Christianity might have thought its 
 labour half achieved when the laws of its emperors 
 punished the murder of new-born infants, and sup- 
 pressed gladiatorial shows ; but then the barbarians bore 
 down from their forests their twin-craving for gold and 
 carnage people armed itself against people, city against 
 city, castle against castle, and the distracted Church 
 was forced to throw herself between the combatants, 
 protesting her hatred of blood, ecclesia abhor ret a san- 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE 
 
 guine, while the barbarous instinct still burst forth ami 
 crusades, and ran riot at the Sicilian Vespers. Such 
 were the forces she had to contend with to prevent 
 slaughter ; and it was her work also to preserve life, to 
 cherish the exposed infant, the useless and infirm 
 burdens rejected by faithless society, but held in honour 
 by Christianity. It seemed still harder to keep alive 
 progress in Art; for what could be achieved after the 
 ancients, or how could simplicity and grandeur be 
 pushed beyond the limits they had reached ? Yet such 
 beauty, if inimitable, is also inspiring, and leaves in the 
 soul a desire, a passion of reproduction. Although the 
 human mind could never surpass the works of antiquity, 
 it could add monument to monument, and increase the 
 adornment of its earthly abiding place. Beneath the 
 Borne of the Caesars, of marble and gold become, as 
 Virgil says, the most beautiful of objects was dug the 
 subterranean city of the Christians; and the chapels 
 hollowed out in these vaults by obscure and tardy pro- 
 gress were one day to pierce the earth, soar higher than 
 the temples and theatres of Paganism, and in St. Peter's 
 and St. Mary Major give to the ruins of Forum and 
 Coliseum a living beauty* And yet if the ancient art 
 possessed a special power of rendering the finite and 
 visible with purity of form, calm of attitude, and truth 
 of movement, it had not the gift of reproducing what 
 was infinite and invisible. Who but admires the bas- 
 reliefs with which Phidias adorned the frieze of the Par- 
 thenon their simplicity of gesture, their vigour and 
 grace of form ; and yet in the quarrels of the Lapithse 
 and Centaurs, we wonder at the calm on the features of 
 the combatants, slaying without passion or dying with- 
 out despair, as if art was straining to express some 
 
16 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 heroic ideal, inaccessible to human feeling. A contem- 
 porary witness, however, undeceives us by betraying the 
 impotence of that Grecian art, which could give to stone 
 life but not expression. Xenophon has shown us 
 Socrates loving to visit artists, and aid them with his 
 advice, and how one day, on a visit to the painter Parr- 
 hasius, the following conversation took place : 
 
 Socrates. "Is not painting the art of reproducing 
 what one sees ? You imitate with colour the depths 
 and heights, light and shadow, softness and hardness, 
 culture and rudeness, freshness and decay; but, still, 
 that which is the most lovable, which most wins our 
 confidence and kindles our longings, dost thou copy 
 that, or must we look upon it as inimitable ? " 
 
 Parrhasius. " How can it be represented, since it 
 has neither proportion nor colour, and cannot, in short, 
 be grasped by vision ? " 
 
 Socrates. " But does not one mark in the expres- 
 sion now friendship, now dislike ? " 
 
 Parrhasius. " Doubtless one does so." 
 
 Socrates. " Surely, then, such passions should be 
 shown in the expression of the eye, for pride, modesty, 
 prudence, vivacity, meanness, all manifest themselves 
 in the face, as in the gait, attitude, or gesture." 
 
 The same Christian presentiment which revealed to 
 Socrates the nothingness of the false gods, and the per- 
 versity of the heathen morality, laid bare the want in 
 Greek art. Christianity gave to the meanest of its 
 faithful the sense of things which could not be seen 
 nor measured ; and the labourer of the Catacombs, 
 adorning, in the lantern's flicker, and under the dread 
 of persecution, the tombs of the martyrs, represented 
 Christ, the Virgin, the Apostles, or Christians at 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 17 
 
 prayer, with rude execution and faulty proportion, but 
 with the light of heaven in their eyes. A conscious- 
 ness of eternity animated these paintings ; it passed 
 into the frescoes which in the barbarous epoch adorned 
 the churches of Rome and Ravenna, so that the whole 
 progress of Italian painting from the thirteenth to the 
 fifteenth centuries was absorbed in kindling Christian 
 beauty of expression beneath the surface loveliness of 
 the ancient forms. 
 
 Thirdly, classic art bore a character of unity. One 
 sole form of civilization, the Graeco-Latin, was known 
 to antiquity, and beyond its light there was nothing 
 but barbarism. Cultured society glutted itself with 
 that very barbarism in the form of slaves unable to 
 participate in its mental delights. Art was but the 
 pleasure of a minority. Whilst the wealthy Roman, 
 retained by official duty at York or at Seleucia, had 
 Propertius and Virgil read aloud to him under a por- 
 tico which recalled his mother city, the Briton or Par- 
 thian was profoundly ignorant of his master's favourite 
 authors. Christianity shed its inspiration over every 
 nation which received it; revived the old idioms of 
 the East, and enriched them with the beauties of her 
 Greek, Syrian, Coptic, or Armenian liturgies ; it burst 
 forth in the Western languages, flowing as in five 
 mighty rivers through the literature of Italy, France, 
 Spain, Germany, and England. And thus two ad- 
 vantages accrued to the modern world : on the one 
 hand, beauty, preserving its one type, found new and 
 infinite manifestations in the genius, passion, and lan- 
 guage of so many different races ; on the other, mental 
 pleasures were diffused, and art achieved its aim of 
 educating not a few but the many, of delighting not 
 
18 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the happy hut the toilworn and suffering, and so 
 shedding, as it were, a heavenly light on the intoler- 
 able weariness of life. 
 
 Thus mankind seems inevitably drawn towards a 
 perfection never to be wholly compassed, but to which 
 each succeeding age brings it nearer : a necessity which 
 has scared many wise minds, and raised two objections 
 against the doctrine of progress. Some repel it for its 
 arrogance in supposing the men of each generation 
 better than their forefathers, and thus bringing past 
 time and tradition into contempt ; others, as tending 
 to fatalism, for if the last age must be best, as there 
 are some in which virtue and genius were certainly 
 darkened, progress is reduced to the simple uninter- 
 rupted increase of material benefit. But these difficul- 
 ties vanish before the distinction between man the 
 individual and mankind. God did not create mankind 
 without an eternal plan, which, being sustained by His 
 Infinite Power, cannot remain void of effect. The will 
 which moves the stars rules also the march of civiliza- 
 tion; humanity accomplishes its necessary destiny, 
 but, being composed of free persons, with an element 
 of liberty, so that error and crime find their place in 
 its course, and we behold centuries which do not 
 advance, but even recede days of illness, and years 
 of wandering. Who can say that the wretched carvings 
 which degrade the Arch of Constantine excel the metopes 
 of the Parthenon? or that the France of Charles VI. 
 was more powerful than that of Philip Augustus or 
 St. Louis? We may go farther, and pronounce the 
 fourteenth century with its Hundred Years' War, the six- 
 teenth with its anarchy in the conscience and absolutism 
 on the throne, the eighteenth with its license of mind 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 19 
 
 and morals, frenzies of modern society some recovery 
 of which was seen in the wondrous outbreak of 1789, 
 which, although turned from its proper course, brought 
 back the nations to the Christian tradition of public 
 right. In such times of disorder, God leaves individuals 
 masters of their actions, but, keeping His hand on 
 society, suffers it not to collapse, but waits till, arrived 
 at a certain point, it can be brought back, as by a 
 by-path, in darkness and pain, to the perfection of 
 which it had been forgetful. So mankind never entirely 
 and irremediably errs ; the light burns somewhere which 
 is to go to the front of the straying generation and 
 bring it along in its wake. When the Gospel failed 
 in the East, it dawned on the races of the North; and 
 when the schools of Italy closed before the Lombard inva- 
 sion, the literary passion was kindled in the depths of 
 Irish monasteries. Sometimes progress, interrupted in 
 politics, finds scope in art ; and wearied art commits to 
 science the guidance of the human intellect. If, as 
 under Lous XIV., public spirit is silent, the voices of 
 orators and poets attest that thought is not rocked to 
 sleep. If, in our own age, eloquence and poetry seem 
 to have fallen from the height to which the seventeenth 
 century had borne them, scientific genius has mounted 
 no less high, and the times of Ampere, Cuvier, and 
 Humboldt are not open to the charge of stagnation. 
 
 But while humanity works out its inevitable destiny, 
 the individual remains free, able to resist the cogent 
 but not necessary law of progress, the interior impulse 
 or the example of society, which draws him to a higher 
 aim. And two qualities there are, namely, inspiration 
 and virtue, which are personal, and do not yield to the 
 direction of a period. The "Divine Comedy" sur- 
 
20 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 passed the "Iliad" by all the superiority of the 
 Christian faith ; but Dante was not more inspired than 
 Homer. Leibnitz knew infinitely more than Aristotle, 
 but was his thought more intense ? The heroism of 
 the early Christians was not surpassed by that of the 
 missioners of the barbarous epoch, and these again 
 have found rivals in those intrepid priests of our day 
 who court martyrdom in the public places of Tonquin 
 or the Corea. The great souls of the Middle Age, 
 St. Louis, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, loved God 
 and man with as much passion, and served justice 
 and truth with as much perseverance, as the noblest 
 characters of the seventeenth century. Time, or increas- 
 ing light and softening manners, only brings knowledge 
 within reach, makes virtue of easier attainment, and 
 adds to the debt of gratitude which accrues to us with 
 the heritage of our forefathers ; and thus the doctrine 
 which is accused of despising the past, brings all the 
 future, as it were, forth from its recesses, recognizes no 
 progress for new ages without the tradition of those 
 which went before, and destroys also both arrogance 
 and fatalism, in seeing in the march of progress the 
 history not of man alone, but of God, respecting man's 
 liberty, working out His purpose by man's free hands, 
 unrecognized by His creatures, and often in spite of 
 their plans. 
 
 So far is such a view from favouring Materialism, 
 that it has rallied round it the greatest Christian 
 spiritualists, such as Chateaubriand and Ballanche, to 
 speak of the dead, and M. de Bonald, who recognizes 
 " in these very revolutions, these scandals of the world, 
 the means in the hands of the Supreme Governor of 
 bringing to perfection the constitution of society." We 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 21 
 
 might rather incur the reproach of pushing our respect 
 for spirit to the neglect of matter, of forgetting the 
 useful beneath the true, the good, and the beautiful, 
 and in our consideration of science, social institutions, 
 and the arts, passing over the industry which is so 
 dear to our contemporaries. For industry must not 
 be despised, when, in subordination to higher things, 
 it brings light to the study of nature, inspires public 
 good, and corrects the grossness of matter by purity of 
 form. When science, art, and public spirit throw thus 
 upon industry their triple ray, it becomes instinct with 
 life, and is of true service to mental progress a sight 
 afforded by those Italian republics which were as 
 resolved to compass immortality as to amass wealth, 
 as bold in their monuments as in their navigation. 
 But if the development of the industrial principle 
 overwhelms and arrests instead of humbly waiting 
 upon intellectual progress, society is degraded, and 
 falls for a season into the way of decline. 
 
 We have hitherto treated of progress with facility 
 by choosing those great historical spaces in which it 
 is easy to select events, and group them at will. We 
 must now reduce ourselves to a narrower sphere, and 
 treat of an epoch which seems entirely to militate 
 against our theory the period from the fall of the 
 Western Empire to the end of the thirteenth century, 
 the moment which it is customary to hail as the 
 reawakening of the human mind. Had only one good 
 principle been implanted in man, progress would have 
 been but its calm and regular development.; but as 
 there are two principles in him, perfection and corrup- 
 tion, corresponding to civilization and barbarism in 
 society, progress becomes a struggle with consequent 
 
22 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 alternations of victory and defeat. Every great era of 
 
 history takes its departure from ruin, and ends in a 
 
 conquest. The first period upon which we enter opens 
 
 with the most stupendous of all catastrophes, that 
 
 of the Koman Empire. We can hardly realize the 
 
 majesty of that dominion which secured by its laws 
 
 the peace of the world, by its schools the education 
 
 of the nations, and adorned its provinces by covering 
 
 them with a crowd of roads, aqueducts, and cities. 
 
 Doubtless Eoman avarice and cruelty caused these 
 
 benefits to be dearly purchased, but the opinion the 
 
 prostrate races had formed of their ruler was so high 
 
 that the crash of her fall struck terror into the hearts, 
 
 not only of consulars in the peaceful seclusion of their 
 
 villas, or of philosophers and literati fascinated by a 
 
 civilization to which the human mind had devoted all its 
 
 light, but even to the Christians and the very recluses 
 
 of the Desert. They were forced to expect the approach 
 
 of the day of doom in witnessing the fall of an order 
 
 which alone, according to Tertullian, warded off the 
 
 consummation of time. At the news of that night of 
 
 fear, in which Alaric entered Eome with fire and sword, 
 
 St. Jerome shuddered in the depth of his Bethlehem 
 
 solitude, and exclaimed, " A terrible rumour reaches 
 
 us from the West, telling of Rome besieged, bought 
 
 for gold, besieged again, life and property perishing 
 
 together; my voice falters, sobs stifle the words I 
 
 dictate, for she is a captive, that City which enthralled 
 
 the world." 
 
 Quis claclem illius noctis, quis funera fando 
 Explicet, aut possit lacrymis aequare dolorem ? 
 
 But the catastrophe which terrified the whole world 
 afforded no astonishment to St. Augustine. Whether 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 23 
 
 his great genius was less bound by an antique 
 patriotism, or whether love had raised it to calmer 
 heights, he was able to measure with a firmer glance 
 the portentous events around him. Amidst the pagan 
 fury which charged upon the Church the disasters of 
 the Empire, he wrote his " City of God," in which, 
 deducing from the origin of Time the destinies of 
 Eome and the world, he marked with luminous pen 
 the outlines of that Christian law of progress which we 
 have feebly sketched. At the beginning, he wrote, two 
 principles of love built two cities : the love of self, 
 in contempt of God, reared the city of the world ; the 
 love of God, scorning self, raised the heavenly city. 
 The earthly republic was visible, as in Babylon or 
 Eome, and was doomed to perish ; the unearthly state 
 was invisible, and though for a time confounded with 
 the worldly commonwealth, could not share in its ruin. 
 The growth was continuous, from the patriarchal 
 family, through Israel, to the Christian Church ; per- 
 secution gave it increase, heresy distinctness, torment 
 fortitude ; its course on earth was as a week of labour ; 
 its Sabbath was to be spent in Heaven, in no sterile 
 and dreamy repose, but in the everlasting energy of 
 a loving intelligence. The sequel justified the fore- 
 bodings of St. Augustine ; upon the ruins of the 
 vanquished empire Christian civilization arose as a 
 conqueror, excelling in its depth, and the difficulty and 
 scope of its task, all the conquests of old. 
 
 Christianity firstly took for her object the conquest 
 of the conscience ; and of this Eome had never dreamed. 
 In laying the hands of her legions on subject provinces, 
 and that of her proconsuls on their populations, she 
 had never troubled herself with souls and their immortal 
 
24 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 destinies. She disciplined the barbarians, and did 
 better service by instructing them, but never thought 
 of converting them; her Paganism made conscience 
 a slave to deified passions, and conversion involved 
 the government of carnal impulse by a purified reason. 
 But Christianity held for nothing the mere possession 
 of soil, and the enforced submission of nations ; it 
 claimed dominion over the intellect and the will, and 
 announced to brutalized minds, which knew only of 
 murderous and lustful divinities, a spiritual dogma ; 
 to men of violence it had to give a law of mercy and 
 pardon ; to immolators of human victims to propose 
 a worship comprised in prayer, preaching, and a 
 bloodless oblation. Nor did the novelty of these 
 doctrines touch hearts perforce, neither could the subtle 
 persuasion of her priests triumph easily over the 
 ignorant; for we see Kathbod, Duke of Frisia, when, 
 hesitating under the arguments of St. Wulfram, he 
 had caused the equivalent for the Walhalla of his 
 ancestors to be proposed to him, declaring that, for 
 his part, he would rather rejoin his forefathers than 
 go with a crowd of beggars to inhabit the Christian 
 heaven. 
 
 But the conquest of mind could be effected by mind 
 only, and force of arms, far from serving, could hardly 
 avoid compromising, the cause, as was often the case. 
 Instruments were wanted in which mental power could 
 alone appear ; and by such feeble and despised means 
 as women, slaves, and the sick, was the conversion of 
 the barbarians accomplished. It was effected by Clo- 
 tilda among the Franks, Theodolinda among the 
 Lombards, Patrick was found working in Ireland, 
 and, lastly, two men, absent from the sphere of action, 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 25 
 
 who put no foot on the hostile soil, directed from the 
 heart of Italy the conquest of the North. The one, 
 St. Benedict, in his desert at Monte Cassino, formed 
 the monastic host, and armed them with obedience and 
 toil ; the spirit with which he inspired them, at once 
 charitable and sensible, full of intrepidity and perse- 
 verance, impelled them to the heart of Germany, to the 
 recesses of Scandinavia, where they cut down with the 
 forests the superstitions which they enshrined. The 
 other, St. Gregory, though hardly able, during his 
 twelve years' pontificate, to leave his couch of suffering 
 for three hours each day, organized the invasion of 
 civilization upon barbarism, reformed the Frankish 
 Churches, and reconciled to Catholicism the Lombardic 
 and Visigothic Arians. 
 
 Lastly, Rome, with her admirable sagacity, had been 
 content with a limited empire ; but the Church, with 
 greater confidence, desired a boundless ruie. From 
 the cliffs of Britain, Roman generals had discerned and 
 coveted the Irish shores. Doubtless Probus, when he 
 had ravaged Germany up to the Elbe, dreamt of its 
 reduction to a province. The prudence of the Senate 
 had arrested these schemes of aggrandizement, but 
 Christianity disdained its counsels of prudence. A 
 young Gaul named Patricius, kidnapped by Irish 
 pirates, and sold on their island, succeeded in escaping, 
 and having regained Gaul, buried himself in the 
 monastery of Lerins. Some years later he appeared 
 in Ireland as papal emissary, and in his turn reduced 
 his captors to the light and golden yoke of the Gospel. 
 At the end of thirty-three years Ireland was converted, 
 and gave to the Faith a race capable of the extremes 
 of labour and devotion. . The evangelization of Ger- 
 
 vol. i. 2 
 
26 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 many cost more labour, and three hundred years of 
 preaching and martyrdom were wanted to gain the 
 old Koman stations on the Khine and the Danube ; and 
 then inch by inch to grasp Thuringia, Franconia, and 
 Frisia. Every age the Christian colonies were multi- 
 plied; they were buried in nameless solitudes, to 
 perish age by age under a wave of Paganism, devoted 
 alike to its false gods and to national independence. 
 The struggle lasted till St. Boniface, after constituting 
 at last the ecclesiastical province of Germany, died 
 in Frisia, pardoning his barbarous murderers. The 
 Koman had known how to die, and that had borne him 
 on to the conquest of half the world ; but the Christian 
 alone could die without revenge, and this power gained 
 for him the whole. 
 
 Such being the progress of Christian conquest in the 
 Merovingian period, let us examine its results. What 
 at once strikes us in them is the fact that the Church, 
 though loving the barbarians to the point of dying for 
 them, and even by their hands, did not detach herself 
 from the old civilization, which she preserved by 
 breathing her spirit into its ruins ; and in this again 
 the supernatural order sustained the natural order, and 
 gave it life. 
 
 Dogma firstly was the salvation of science. Whereas 
 the pagan myth had loved darkness, had shrouded 
 itself in mysteries and initiations, and shrunk from 
 discussion, Christian doctrine loved the open light, 
 preached on the housetops, and provoked controversy. 
 St. Augustine said, "When the intelligence has found 
 God, it still goes in search of Him," and added, finally, 
 " Intellectum valde ama " Love understanding ; and 
 so, as revelation stood in need of intelligence, philo- 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 27 
 
 sophy began again. It was open to the Church to 
 commit the writings of the pagan philosophers to the 
 flames, or to have suffered the barbarians to destroy 
 them ; yet she guarded them, and set her monks, as to a 
 holy task, to copy the writings of Seneca and of Cicero. 
 St. Augustine brought Plato into the schools under his 
 bishop's robe. Boethius opened the door to Aristotle 
 by translating the introduction of Porphyry, which 
 became the text-book of philosophic teaching. The 
 Franks, Irish, and Anglo-Saxons, the children of 
 pirates and ravagers of towns, grew pale over the 
 problem as to the real or only mental existence of 
 genus and species, the question which carried in 
 embryo the whole quarrel between Eealists and Nomi- 
 nalists, the Scholasticism of the Middle Age, and, to 
 speak more exactly, the philosophy of all time. 
 
 Secondly, the religious law saved social institutions : 
 it was a Christian opinion that God had let a reflex of 
 His justice shine out in Eoman law, which was also 
 believed to present a marvellous agreement with the 
 Mosaic institutions ; and this idea was the origin of a 
 compilation published towards the end of the fifth cen- 
 tury, " Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum." 
 The Church preserved Roman law, gathered from it the 
 wisest dispositions in the body of the law ecclesiastical, 
 and put it forth as the common law of the clergy and 
 of Roman subjects under barbarian control. She taught 
 it to the barbarians themselves, as evidenced by the 
 Lombardic, and, more especially, the Visigothic code. 
 But of all of the political works to which the clergy of 
 the time applied its hand, the consecration of royalty 
 was the greatest. Born in the forests of Germany, 
 
 fenced by a profoundly heathen tradition, and full of 
 
 o * 
 
28 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 bloodthirsty instincts, Christianity threw upon it the 
 toga of the Eoman magistrate, and taught it to rule by 
 justice rather than by force. Later, to complete its 
 purification, the Church restored to it the consecration 
 of the kings of Israel, desiring to mould the warrior 
 chiefs into shepherds of the people, who by a gentle 
 sway would temper the reign of justice with charity. 
 
 Thirdly, Christian worship saved art. When the 
 religion emerged from the Catacombs and built its 
 churches, its first model was the Basilica, the tribunal 
 of the magistrates the most august object that anti- 
 quity could show. It proceeded to cover their walls 
 with mosaic, the lines of which, if they do not recall 
 its harmony and just proportion, often rival the simple 
 grandeur of Grecian art. The bishops and civilizing 
 monks of France and England drew to their side the 
 most perfect artists of Italy to build basilicas after the 
 ancient form, and to animate them by fresco and glass- 
 painting. To these churches, already instinct with 
 life, voice was to be given ; their chants were to rise 
 as one sound, that the concert of the lips might sym- 
 bolize the union of souls. Schools of church music 
 were accordingly opened, deriving their form and rule 
 from that of St. John Lateran ; but music, the seventh 
 of the liberal arts according to the ancients, presup- 
 poses the knowledge of the rest, and it was not reached 
 till the dusty ways of the trivium and quadrivium had 
 been followed to their end. And as melody could not 
 be divorced from poetry, so the doors of the ecclesias- 
 tical school could hardly be closed on the poets. Indeed 
 they had already effected an entrance, quoted as they 
 were on every page by St. Basil, St. Augustine, and 
 St. Jerome. Some sterner spirits did try to stop Virgil 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 29 
 
 upon the threshold ; but others, more accommodating, 
 pointed out that the sweet singer of Mantua had an- 
 nounced the advent of Messiah, so Virgil passed in 
 with the Fourth Eclogue in his hands, and brought all 
 the classic poets in his train. 
 
 But it was but part of the task of the Church to 
 have preserved antiquity. She was also bound to col- 
 lect the fertile elements which existed in the chaos of 
 barbarism ; for there is no ignorance, however thick, 
 which is not streaked by some light; no violence so 
 undisciplined as not to acknowledge some law; no 
 manners so trifling as not to be redeemed by some ray 
 of inspiration. Christianity developed in the Germans 
 that balance of intellect which a false philosophy had 
 never warped. It stamped upon their manners and 
 hallowed in their laws the two fine feelings of respect 
 for the dignity of man and the weakness of woman. In 
 the warrior- songs wherewith this unlettered race cele- 
 brated the deeds of their ancestors, there is more inspi- 
 ration to be felt than in all the declamations of the 
 Latin Decline. The Church shrank from breaking 
 the harp of Gaulish bard or Scandinavian scald ; she 
 only purified it by adding another chord for the praise 
 of God and of His saints, and the family joys which 
 Christ had blessed. The last effort of the labour 
 which steeped the world of barbarism with civilization, 
 and brought from the barbarians new life for the world 
 of civilization, was seen in Charlemagne. 
 
 A second era opens upon us here with a ruin, and 
 that of a Christian power, and at first sight nothing 
 could seem more disastrous; for no empire has ever 
 appeared better founded in itself, or more necessary to 
 society, than that of Charlemagne. That great man 
 
30 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 had not received in vain the title of Advocate of the 
 Church ; for he protected her by his sword from out- 
 ward assault, and caused her canons to be respected 
 within the fold. He revived the universal monarchy 
 of the Caesars, and united the pacified nations by his 
 beneficent policy. The school was raised in the palace, 
 and the learned crowded round the conqueror who had 
 laid might under tribute to mind. But so grand an 
 order w r as not destined to a long continuance, and 
 Charlemagne himself before his death had to lament 
 its decay. Thirty years after his death, the great 
 organism of his empire broke into three parts at the 
 treaty of Yerdun. The Norman torrent rolled upon it, 
 rushing up the Weser, the Rhine, the Seine, and the 
 Loire ; the pirate bands ascended the rivers, sacked the 
 cloisters, and cast into the same fire rich copies of 
 the Bible and manuscript copies of Aristotle and 
 Virgil. At the same time the Hungarians, dragging 
 with them the Slavonic tribes, invaded Germany, Bur- 
 gundy, and Italy. Brothers of the Huns, they passed 
 over Europe like a tempest, and the herbage, tram- 
 pled by their cavalry, did not bud anew. At sight of 
 so much misery, the world thought herself lost, and 
 again imagined herself to be touching the end of 
 time. The deacon Floras, at Lyons, sang thus of the 
 fears of his contemporaries : 
 
 " Mountains and hills, woods and streams, and ye, 
 oh deep dales, weep for the race of the Franks ! A 
 mighty race flourished under a brilliant dynasty. 
 There was but one king, one nation. Its children 
 lived in peace and its foes in fear ; the zeal of its 
 bishops was emulous in giving their people holy 
 canons in frequent councils. Its young men learnt to 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 31 
 
 know the holy books ; the hearts of its children drank 
 deep of the fount of learning. Happy, indeed, had it 
 known its felicity, was the empire which had Rome 
 for her citadel, the bearer of the keys of heaven for 
 her founder ; but now this majesty has fallen from its 
 lofty height, and is spurned by the feet of all. Ah ! 
 who does not recognize the fulfilment of that Gospel 
 prophecy, ' When the Son of Man cometh, think ye 
 that He will find upon earth a remnant of His 
 Faith?' " 
 
 But when all seemed lost, salvation was imminent. 
 Providence loves such surprises, and shows thereby the 
 power of its government and the impotence of our 
 own. Suddenly that very people who had seemed 
 unloosed for the Church's destruction, became its 
 regenerators and guardians. The German invasions 
 had not sufficiently renovated Roman Europe. The 
 north-west corner of France and the south of Italy 
 had felt too little that fertilizing influence which alone 
 can restore an exhausted soil. The Normans poured 
 over these regions like a deluge, but as one which 
 brings life. From the blazing ruins of the monasteries, 
 monks, escaping the massacre, went forth, preached to 
 the pirates, and often converted them. The Normans 
 entered into Christian civilization, and brought to it 
 their genius for maritime enterprise ; for government, 
 as shown by the conquest of England ; for architec- 
 ture, to be exhibited in Sicily, in the gilded basilicas of 
 Palermo and Monreale, or in Normandy itself, by the 
 abbey towers and spires which line the Seine banks 
 from its mouth to Paris, and make it a fit avenue of 
 monuments for a royal people. A little later the 
 Hungarians and Sclaves fell, still stained with blood, 
 
32 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 at the feet of St. Adalbert, and the scourges of God 
 became his willing and intelligent servants. They 
 brought to the Church the aid of their invincible 
 swords, covered its Eastern side from Byzantine cor- 
 ruption and Moslem invasion, and thus at last assured 
 the independence of the West. 
 
 Moreover, that dismemberment of the Empire which 
 drew groans from Floras the deacon, prepared remotely 
 for the emancipation of the modern nations. France, 
 Germany, and Italy arose, though it is true that the 
 disruption of the monarchy, when pushed to an extreme, 
 ended in the feudal subdivisions. The vices of the 
 feudal system are well known, but it had at least the 
 virtue of attaching men to the soil who were devoted to 
 a nomad life and greedy of adventure. It held them 
 by the double bond of property and sovereignty. Mere 
 property in the soil would not alone have restrained 
 the descendant of the barbarians, preferring by far 
 movable wealth, gold, splendid weapons, and herds of 
 cattle. But when the lord became at once proprietor 
 and sovereign, master alike of the fief and of its in- 
 habitants, his pride was moved, he learned to love his 
 land and his men and to fight in their defence. The 
 Church saw that this habit of drawing the sword for 
 others raised the character, she recognized in feudal 
 devotion a remedy for the evils of the system and 
 proposed an heroic ideal to that warlike society in 
 chivalry, the armed service of God and of the weak. As 
 feudalism divided mankind by the subdivision of terri- 
 tory and the inequality of right, so chivalry united it 
 by brotherhood in arms and equality in duty. 
 
 Thus Christendom expanded, and slowly elaborated 
 an organization compatible with her great principle. 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 33 
 
 But how could leisure for thought be found in that 
 age of iron, and who was forthcoming to save the title- 
 deeds of the human intellect, when the monks had but 
 time to lay the relics of the saints on their shoulders 
 in their flight from death ? for many a chronicle breaks 
 off at the Norman invasion, and many churches refer to 
 that epoch the loss of their charters and of their 
 legends. Two islands of the West had escaped the 
 sovereignty of Charlemagne wonder as we may how 
 Great Britain and Ireland, enfeebled as they were by 
 intestine war, could have avoided absorption into an 
 empire which reached from the mouth of the Khine to 
 that of the Tiber, from the Elbe to the Theiss. But 
 it was needful that amid the decay of the Carlovingian 
 dominion a less troubled society should afford a refuge 
 to science and literature, and during the eleventh 
 century the monasteries of Ireland continued to sup- 
 port a whole people of theologians, men of letters and 
 skilled in dialectic. From time to time their surplus 
 population flowed over on to the coast of France, where, 
 according to a contemporary, a troop of philosophers 
 were seen to arrive. Amidst the nameless stood John 
 Scotus Erigena, notorious to the point of scandal, bold 
 to temerity, erudite enough to revive the doctrines 
 of Alexandria, but halting upon the very brink of 
 Pantheism, soon enough to exercise an incontestable 
 influence over the mystics of the Middle Age. England 
 on her side, watching from afar the fall of the Carlo- 
 vingian dynasty, inaugurated the reign of Alfred the 
 Great ; the heroic youth reconquered the kingdom of 
 his fathers, and with the hands that had expelled the 
 Danes, reopened the schools. At the age of thirty- 
 six he placed himself under a master to learn Latin, 
 
 2f 
 
34 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 translated the pastoral of St. Gregory for the use of the 
 clergy, the " Consolatio " of Boethius and the histories 
 of Orosius and Bede for public instruction, "trem- 
 bling," as he said, " at the thought of the penalties 
 which the powerful and the learned would incur in 
 this world and the next if they have neither known 
 how to taste wisdom themselves nor to give it to others 
 to enjoy." 
 
 Whilst these lights were shining in the north, 
 Germany was also preserving the sacred fire, in the 
 three monasteries of New Corbey, Fulda, and St. Gall. 
 These powerful abbeys, protected from the barbarians by 
 strong walls, by public respect against rapacious princes, 
 embraced schools, libraries, and studios for copyists, 
 painters, and sculptors. Look at St. Gall, where we 
 may almost feel a first breath from the Kevival : its 
 inmates are not confined to transcribing pagan authors 
 under obedience, or collecting the Latin Muses with 
 troubled and remorseful curiosity. The ancients are not 
 merely honoured there, but loved with that intelligence 
 which gives back to the past its life : its monks en- 
 gaged in learned discussions, argued against all comers 
 on grammar or on poetry, and even gave their opinion 
 in Chapter in verses from the "iEneid." Latin litera- 
 ture hardly sufficed for the appetite of these recluses : 
 they aspired to penetrate into Greek antiquity, and did 
 so under the guidance of a woman. The chronicle of 
 St. Gall has preserved the graceful tale, which in no 
 way detracts from the gravity of monastic manners. It 
 relates how the Princess Hedwige, affianced in her 
 youth to the Emperor of the East, had learnt Greek. 
 On the rupture of their engagement Hedwige gave her 
 hand to a landgrave of Suabia, who soon left her a 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 35 
 
 widow, free to live in prayer and study. She took up 
 her residence near the abbey, and caused herself to 
 be instructed by an old monk in all the learning of the 
 time. One day the old man was accompanied by a 
 young novice, and on the landgravine inquiring what 
 whim had brought the child, the latter replied that 
 though scarcely a Latin he wished to become a Greek 
 
 Esse velim graecus cum vix sit, Domna, Latinus. 
 
 The verse was bad, but its author was pretty and 
 docile. Hedwige made him sit at her feet, and gave 
 him as a first lesson an anthem from the Byzantine 
 liturgy ; and continued her care for him till he under- 
 stood the language of St. John Chrysostom, and was 
 able to teach it to others. By this noble hand Greek 
 literature was restored to St. Gall, and Hedwige, 
 pleased with the lessons she had given and received, 
 loaded the learned abbey with gifts, the most remark- 
 able among which was an alb of marvellous workman- 
 ship, embroidered with the nuptials of Mercury and 
 Philologia. 
 
 Thus literature did not entirely perish, though it 
 languished in Italy, Spain, and France, the Latin 
 countries. But even there teaching was continuous, 
 and its most famous inheritor was one who belonged to 
 those three countries by birth, by education, and by 
 fortune, Gerbert, the monk of Aurillac, who was taught, 
 not, as has been thought, by the Arabs of Cordova, but 
 at the episcopal school of Yisch, in Catalonia, and sub- 
 sequently borne aloft by the admiration of his contem- 
 poraries to the very chair of St. Peter. His illustrious 
 name alone sufficiently acquits Southern Europe of the 
 charge of barbarism, and dispenses us from a mention 
 
36 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of the less famous workmen who laboured with silent 
 perseverance to keep unbroken the chain of tradition. 
 Assuredly tradition, without which progress is impos- 
 sible, must be guarded, but it must also be enlarged. 
 As antiquity possessed no forms of sufficient variety or 
 life for the genius of the new era, modern languages 
 were to arise. Alfred, master of Latin at the age of 
 thirty- six, was at home at twelve in the war- songs of 
 the Anglo-Saxons ; by writing it in prose and forcing 
 it to translate the firmness and precision of ancient 
 thought, he fixed that most poetical and therefore most 
 indefinite of idioms. The monks of St. Gall at the 
 same time made it their task to pass into that Teutonic 
 dialect the rude accents of which the Emperor Julian 
 had compared to the cry of the vulture not only the 
 hymns of the Church but the Categories of Aristotle, 
 and the Encyclopaedia of Martianus Capella. Though 
 the growth of the Neo-Latin languages was more 
 gradual, yet from the ninth century downwards the 
 traces of their existence were multiplied. The Council 
 of Tours prescribed preaching in the vernacular, 
 and we have proof that it was obeyed in a recently 
 discovered homily, the date of which cannot be 
 later than the year 1000. Its syntax is barbarous, 
 and presents a confused mixture of French and 
 Latin words ; yet from the chaos in which this old 
 preacher struggled was to proceed the language of 
 Bossuet. 
 
 The cause of civilization was to conquer, but only 
 after running the greatest risk, especially from the con- 
 dition of the Church, then degraded at Kome by the 
 profanation of the Holy See, and invaded in every part 
 by feudal customs, which changed bishoprics into fiefs, 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 37 
 
 and bishops into vassals. Salvation was, however, to 
 spring from the Church, and out of the quarter in which 
 the spiritual life had sought refuge, for it was the 
 monastic reform of Cluny which decided the destiny of 
 the world. A French monk named Odo, a student of 
 Paris, had buried his learning and his virtues in a 
 monastery, situated four leagues from Macon, in the 
 depths of a silent valley, only troubled from time to 
 time by the shouts of hunters and the baying of their 
 hounds. He introduced a severe rule, which, however, 
 did not exclude the literary passion or artistic culture, 
 and which, by its intrinsic force, brought under the 
 government of Cluny a number of religious houses in 
 France, in Italy, and in England. Unity in the 
 hierarchy, in administration, and in discipline was 
 thus established in these monasteries, ready to extend 
 thence into the general Christian society when the time 
 arrived. The day soon came ; it was the Christmas 
 Day of the year 1048. The Bishop Bruno, nominated 
 by the Emperor Henry III. to fill the chair of St. Peter, 
 happened on his way to Italy to visit the Abbey of 
 Cluny ; when there an Italian monk named Hildebrand, 
 the son of a carpenter, drawn to Cluny some years before 
 through zeal for reformation, dared to present himself to 
 the new Pontiff, and tell him that an emperor's nomi- 
 nation could confer no right in the spiritual kingdom of 
 Christ : he adjured him to proceed to Rome, throw off 
 his empty title, and restore to clergy and people their 
 liberty of election. Bruno, to his great credit, listened, 
 desired to take him with him, and on his arrival in Rome 
 placed himself at the discretion of the clergy and the 
 people. He was chosen pope, and Hildebrand, from 
 his position beside the pontifical throne, already gave 
 
38 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 evidence of what his future course was to be under the 
 name of Gregory the Seventh. 
 
 Gregory VII. inaugurated a new period which 
 began by a reverse. At the outset that great pontiff 
 is seen by the mere force of his word to reduce the 
 sensual and bloodthirsty Henry IV. to seek penitence 
 and pardon at the Castle of Canossa, and then it in- 
 deed appeared that barbarism had been conquered, and 
 that Europe was willing to submit to the laws of a 
 theocracy, which risked the loss of temporal power, but 
 was destined to revive spiritual life throughout the 
 world. But some years later the same emperor took 
 Kome, enthroned an Antipope in the Vatican, and force 
 again coerced conscience, whilst Gregory VII. uttered 
 at Salerno his dying words, " I have loved righteousness 
 and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile." More 
 terrible than ever seemed the catastrophe in which, not 
 an empire alone, but that principle which alone could 
 give empires vigour, was perishing ; yet this time 
 Christians did not look for the world's immediate ex- 
 tinction, and one of the bishops in attendance on the 
 dying Pope answered him, " My Lord, you cannot die 
 in exile, for God has given you the earth for a possession 
 and its nations for an inheritance." 
 
 And, indeed, from the tomb of Gregory VII. pro- 
 ceeded that mediaeval progress which is too well known, 
 too incontestable, too much enlightened by modern 
 science, to make more than a sketch of its principal 
 features necessary. The strife between the hierarchy 
 and the empire continued more formidably as the rival 
 powers found more illustrious champions on the one 
 side Frederic I. and Frederic II., as great in the field 
 as in the council chamber, on the other the Popes 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 39 
 
 Alexander III., Innocent III., Innocent IV., consum- 
 mate politicians and heroic priests. After two centuries 
 of warfare, the vanquished empire renounced its usur- 
 pations on the spiritual order; the Popes, in aiming 
 at aggrandizing the Church, had achieved her freedom ; 
 the two powers separated force returned to its own 
 province, and the rights of conscience were saved. At 
 the same time the Papacy executed another design 
 of Gregory VII. It gathered into one the nations of 
 the West, long given up to ceaseless conflicts, without 
 justice and barren of result, and poured them over the 
 East. There, if fight they must, they might wage a 
 sacred war, justified by a most holy cause, and with the 
 victory of right and liberty as its result and reward. 
 The nations, borne far away from that powerful German 
 empire and its usurped dominion over them, freed 
 themselves from vassalage and regained their autonomy. 
 Foucher, of Chartres, pictures the crusaders, whether 
 German, French, or English, living together on terms 
 of brotherly equality. The modern nations gained their 
 spurs in Palestine, and to the visible unity of the 
 empire succeeded the moral unity of the Christian 
 commonwealth. 
 
 And feudalism succumbed to the same blow. Under 
 the banner of the cross the middle class fought with the 
 same title as the nobles, that of soldiers of Christ ; they 
 gained the same indulgences, and if they fell, equally 
 with them earned the martyr's palm. The merchants of 
 Genoa and of Venice planted the scaling-ladder on the 
 walls of Saracen towns, and led the assault with as 
 firm a hand and as fierce a bearing as the barons of 
 France. In vain did feudalism create in the Holy Land 
 her principalities and her marquisates. SJae returned 
 
40 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 thence in her agony, returned to find in Europe a triple 
 contest to maintain ; against the Church, which reproved 
 private war ; against royalty spreading its jurisdiction 
 daily to the prejudice of seignorial rights ; and, lastly, 
 against the nascent power of the commonalty. The 
 Commonwealths of Italy, allied to the Papacy by a 
 community of peril, were bound to espouse its cause, 
 and the first example is seen in the republic of Milan, 
 whose glorious history is well known. In 1046 a noble 
 named Gui had obtained by bribery the archbishopric of 
 that city, and was maintained in it by a corrupted clergy 
 and a tyrannical aristocracy. Two schoolmasters, the 
 priest Landulf and the deacon Ariald, undertook to 
 relieve the profaned see of St. Ambrose, so banding 
 together, first their own pupils, and then gradually the 
 bulk of the populace, they bound them in solemn league 
 against the simoniacal and incontinent clergy. Rome 
 roused herself at the sound of the dispute, and Peter 
 Damiani, charged as Papal Legate with the reform of 
 the Church of Milan, heard the complaints of the 
 people, and obliged the archbishop and his clergy to 
 sign a public condemnation of concubinage* and 
 simony. But their engagement was soon trampled 
 under foot, and Ariald died at the hands of his enemies, 
 but left an heir of his design in the warrior Harlembert, 
 who was beloved by the multitude and powerful by his 
 eloquence as well as by his prowess. He was declared the 
 champion of the Church, received from the Pope the 
 gonfalon of St. Peter, rallied the discouraged party of 
 reform, bound it by a new oath, and sustained an 
 
 * The clergy of Milan seem to have been actually married. 
 Ariald says of them, " Et ipsi sicut laici palam uxores ducunt." 
 Vit. Beat. Arialdi. Bolland, xxvii.; Jun. (:7V.) 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 41 
 
 obstinate war against the nobility, whom he expelled 
 from the city, and at length died in triumph in repelling 
 an assault, fighting at the head of his men with the 
 standard of St. Peter in his hand. But the reigning 
 Pope was Gregory VII., and he consummated the work 
 of the deacon and the knight. Simony and concu- 
 binage were conquered, the nobility reduced to a mere 
 share in the government, and the commonalty of Milan 
 gained that strong plebeian organization which for two 
 hundred years was the support of popes and the dismay 
 of emperors. 
 
 Whilst the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany formed 
 themselves into republics, and treated on equal terms 
 with monarchs, the communal spirit had passed the 
 Alps, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees. After the admir- 
 able work of Augustin Thierry, there is no need for us 
 to show how the spirit of liberty revivified the remi- 
 niscences of the Roman municipality or the traditions 
 of the German guild ; if it did not succeed in rendering 
 the cities paramount, it made them sharers in sove- 
 reignty. Their deputies took part in States General, 
 and the Christian principle of natural equality produced 
 equality in the political order. 
 
 In the midst of this strife and agitation, literature 
 found ample place, and filled it with special distinction. 
 It is not true that literature only loves peace ; she loves 
 war, too, when civilizing in its results when the sword 
 is drawn in the cause of intellect, and when not in- 
 terests but contrary principles are encountered ; when 
 minds, divided between those principles, are bound to 
 exercise the power of choice and consequently of thought. 
 The ages of Pindar and of Augustus sprang from Sala- 
 mis and Pharsalia ; the quarrel over investitures awoke 
 
42 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the scholastic philosophy; and Gregory VII. wished 
 not only for a chaste hut also for a learned clergy. At 
 a council at Kome, in 1078, he renewed the canons 
 which instituted in each episcopal see chairs for in- 
 struction in the liberal arts. It is not easy, as some 
 have imagined, to enslave a people by putting it under 
 priestly guidance. Wherever a priest has stood, the 
 succeeding generation will find a theologian ; in the 
 third the theologian will bring forth a philosopher, who 
 in his turn will produce a publicist, and the publicist 
 will bring liberty. Those who know little of the Middle 
 Age will only see in it one long night, during which 
 priests are keeping watch over troops of slaves ; yet one 
 of these slandered priests was called Anselm, and he 
 was troubled with the desire of finding the shortest 
 proof of the existence of God. The thought alone 
 sufficed to make him a great metaphysician, to bring 
 him disciples, to rouse up opponents, and plunge the 
 Christian mind into the controversy which was to range 
 Abelard against Bernard, and drive many an intellect 
 to the last excess of temerity. Amidst, but rising 
 above, the tempest, appear the two Angels of the Schools, 
 St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, charged with 
 the task, if death had not checked it, of laying the last 
 stone to the edifice of Christian dogma and mysticism 
 respectively. These two Saints did not dread enervat- 
 ing theology by recognizing philosophy as a distinct 
 science, nor profess that haughty contempt for reason 
 which has been lately too much affected. From the 
 heights of eternal truth they did not despise the wants 
 of their time, but embraced them with a disinterested 
 view ; and St. Thomas wrote on the origin of laws, on 
 the legitimate share of democracy in political constitu- 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 43 
 
 tions, on tyranny and insurrection, pages which have 
 startled a later age by their boldness. Never was 
 thought more free than in the supposed era of its 
 bondage, and, as if liberty alone was little, she had 
 power. Her universities were endowed by Pope and 
 Emperor ; she possessed laws, magistracies, and a 
 studious but turbulent people. An historian of the 
 epoch gave Christendom three capitals Kome, the seat 
 of the Hierarchy ; Aix-la-Chapelle, the seat of Empire ; 
 and Paris, the seat of Learning. Life flowed in full 
 tide through the learned literature, but it did not gush 
 less aboundingly, and flourished with greater grace and 
 freedom, in the vulgar tongues. It brought forth from 
 them two kinds of poetry, one common to all the 
 Western nations, though ripening earliest on its native 
 soil of France, which sang of the heroes who are the 
 type of chivalric life, and that respect for women which 
 is its charm ; the other the national lay which is proper 
 to each people, and records its individual genius and 
 tradition. Germany had her Nibelung en-lied, still 
 steeped in barbarous colouring and pagan association ; 
 in it we behold long cavalcades riding through nameless 
 forests, bloodstained banquets, the children of light at 
 issue with those of darkness, and the hero-conqueror 
 of the Dragon perishing for the sake of an accursed 
 treasure and an abandoned woman. The mists of the 
 North lent their shadows to these sombre fictions, but 
 the Southern sunshine gave warmth and colour to the 
 epic of the Cid. Spain in its essence lived in this hero, 
 the terror of infidels but a rebel to his king religious, 
 but with so proud a piety that the Almighty Himself is 
 said to have treated him with distinction, and warned 
 him, through St. Peter, of his departure from the world. 
 
44 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 Italy chose a still better part, and found inspiration in 
 holiness. The land which Gregory had ploughed pro- 
 duced from its furrows a double harvest of Saints and 
 of artists ; here St. Anselm, St. Francis, St. Thomas, 
 and St. Bonaventura, with a number of tender and 
 ardent souls clustered around their greater intellects; 
 there a whole generation of architects and painters, 
 who, with Giotto at their head, formed rank at the tomb 
 of St. Francis ; the bond uniting faith and genius was 
 never more visible, and the national poem of Italy was 
 naturally counted a sacred epopee. Thus did Dante 
 think, and from his meditations proceeded that patriotic 
 and theologic poem, written for a country whose pas- 
 sions it stirred for the Christian world, whose Belief 
 it glorified for the Middle Age, whose crimes, virtues, 
 and learning it pictured for modern times, which it 
 surpasses in the grandeur of its presentiments ; a poem 
 that rang with the groans of earth and the hymns of 
 heaven. 
 
 . . . . Poema sacro 
 A cui ha posto man cielo e terra. 
 
 It is also our duty to discuss the growth of industry 
 and material prosperity, the humbler tasks which are 
 imposed upon the majority. We may say that in many 
 ways the Middle Age preserved, expanded, and in- 
 creased the material wealth of the ancient world. We 
 have seen already how the crusades gave back to the 
 Latins all those ways of commerce which had of old 
 been opened on the side of the Levant ; how apostolic 
 zeal impelled men beyond these and to the very ex- 
 tremity of Asia ; we have beheld the monks reaping the 
 tradition of Koman agriculture, reconquering foot by 
 
OF PROGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 45 
 
 foot, by spontaneous toil, lands which the indolence of 
 slaves had left waste, and carrying the precepts of the 
 Georgics to the banks of the Weser and the Elbe.) We 
 must point also to the ancient cities saved from the fury 
 of the barbarians or rising again from their ashes, 
 thanks to the courage of their bishops or the respectful 
 immunities which surrounded the reliquaries of their 
 saints, as well as to the new cities multiplying around 
 the abbeys ; for, like all civilizing influences, the Church 
 loved to build. But it was not as Eome built, for 
 Christianity has, so to speak, changed the aspect of 
 towns as well as the manners of men : of old every soul 
 was turned outwards a man lived in the public place, 
 or in the richly decorated atrium, where he received his 
 clients ; the rest of his house was neglected, and the 
 narrow chambers opening on the peristyle were good 
 enough for his women, children, and slaves. But 
 Christianity turned the heart of man towards inner 
 joys, pointed out happiness at the domestic hearth, and 
 made him embellish the place in which he passed his 
 life with his wife and family ; thence came the splendid 
 woodwork and tapestry, the richly carved furniture, in 
 which lay the pride of our ancestors. At first sight 
 the modern towns seem far inferior to the cities of old. 
 The ancients built small temples, it is true, but their 
 amphitheatres were immense, their baths stupendous, 
 their porticoes and colonnades without number. The 
 Christian city was grouped humbly round the cathedral 
 on which every effort had been expended ; if there was 
 any other public building it would be the town-hall, the 
 school, or the hospital. The ancients built for pleasure, 
 and in that department we must despair of rivalry : our 
 towns are built for work, for sorrow, and for prayer, 
 
46 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and it is in the knowledge of these that the eternal v 
 superiority of Christian times consists. 
 
 We may finish here with Dante, the worthy follower 
 of Charlemagne, and of Gregory VII., coming as a 
 conqueror to inaugurate a new era of progress, by his 
 own defeat to point to a new epoch of ruin. For the 
 great poet who carried on to the Middle Age the legacy 
 of his triumphant thought, was also great in his 
 failure, exiled from his country, which denied him 
 sepulture, and destined to be followed by that four- 
 teenth century which was to see the fall of the Italian 
 republics, France in the flames of war, and the schools 
 in decline. But neither this dreary age nor any other 
 could prevail against the design of God and the voca- 
 tion of humanity. 
 
 We have traversed a space of eight hundred years, a 
 considerable portion of human destiny, and have en- 
 countered three epochs, each commencing with a season 
 of decline : but each decline veiled a progress, assured 
 by Christianity, to be worked out obscurely and silently 
 as if beneath the surface, till it came to the light of 
 day, and burst forth in a juster economy of society, 
 in a brighter flash of intellect. We have reached the 
 term of the Middle Age, but must beware of supposing 
 that humanity had but to descend, even but one 
 short slope, before reascending to higher altitudes, 
 which would not yet be the last. We have given full 
 credit to the Middle Age, and may now avow what was 
 wanting to that period so full of heroism, but also 
 instinct with pagan associations and savage passions. 
 From these came perils to the faith, which never had 
 to enter upon conflicts more terrible, disordered man- 
 ners, mad impulses of the flesh, lust for blood, and all 
 
OF PEOGRESS IN THE AGES OF DECLINE. 47 
 
 that caused saints, preachers, and contemporary mo- 
 ralists to despair. As severe judges, they acknowledged 
 the vices of their epoch, and many even ignored the 
 very good which they themselves produced. The 
 scandals which deceived them show us that the 
 Middle Age did not fully achieve Christian civilization, 
 and from the error of these great souls, we may learn, 
 amidst our own deterioration, not to deny an invisible 
 progress. Fallen upon evil days, we must remember 
 that the Faith in progress has traversed darker times, 
 and like iEneas to his despairing comrades, let us say 
 that we have passed so many trials that God will also 
 end our present probation, 
 
 passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem! 
 
48 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Before entering upon a study of the barbarous epoch, 
 we must know in what the wealth of the human mind 
 consisted at the moment of the invasions ; how much 
 of it was to perish in that great catastrophe, as an 
 empty ornament buried in the grave of antiquity ; and 
 how much was to survive as the heritage of the modern 
 nations. We shall start from the death of Theodosius 
 at the dawn of the fifth century, and, leaving aside 
 the East as exercising but a remote influence on the 
 period, confine ourselves to the destinies of humanity 
 as worked out in the provinces of the West. 
 
 At the moment when all civilization seemed doomed 
 to extinction, we find two forms of it, one pagan, the 
 other Christian, confronting each other with their re- 
 spective doctrines, laws, and literature, disputing for the 
 possession of the fresh races who were pressing upon 
 the threshold of the Empire. Paganism, indeed, had 
 taken no speedy flight before the laws of the Christian 
 emperors and the progress of philosophy. At the 
 close of the sixty years during which the edicts of 
 Constantius, renewed by Theodosius, had been pressing 
 hard upon the superstitions of idolatry, in the West 
 at least the temples were still open, and the sacrificial 
 flames still unextinguished. When Honorius came to 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 49 
 
 Rome in 404 for the celebration of his sixth consulate, 
 the shrines' of Jove, of Concord, and of Minerva still 
 crowned the Capitol, and the statues of the old deities 
 on their pediments were still presiding over the 
 Eternal City. Votive altars covered with inscriptions 
 testified that the blood of bulls and goats had not 
 ceased to flow, and to the middle of the fifth century 
 the sacred fowls were fed whose presages governed 
 Rome and the World. The pagan festival?, and their 
 appropriate games were still marked in the calendars. 
 We hardly realize antiquity in its nature- worship, 
 which, amidst the songs of poets and the apologies of 
 sages, resulted in the celebration of the two great 
 mysteries of life by religious prostitution and human 
 sacrifice, or how in the theatre and amphitheatre dedi- 
 cated as temples to Bacchus and Sol, the gods were 
 honoured by mysterious rites, comprising nameless 
 horrors which outraged the plainest laws of modesty, or 
 by the mutual massacre of myriads of gladiators rush- 
 ing to death amidst the applause of earth's most 
 polished race. It was lust and bloodshed which in 
 despite of imperial edicts kept the crowd spell-bound 
 at the altars of their idols. 
 
 Philosophy had done no more towards redeeming 
 the higher minds of the ruling class, the heirs of 
 the old senatorial families. The prodigious labours 
 of the Alexandrian philosophers, however admirable for 
 erudition, subtlety, and boldness, had only tended to 
 revive Paganism, by lending to the worship which the 
 Roman aristocracy could only defend as a State insti- 
 tution the gloss of a refined interpretation. The old 
 system was to fall by the hand of Christianity, before 
 the spiritual weapons of controversy and charity, 
 
 vol. i. 3 
 
50 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 preaching and martyrdom. We shall glance at the 
 learned discussions in which St. Augustine exhausted 
 his zeal and eloquence to attract the choice intellect 
 of a Volusian, a Longinian, or a Licentius, but will 
 mark more closely the rise of that instruction which 
 was devoted to the ignorant and the insignificant, to 
 whom Paganism had never preached, enter the families 
 in which war, as it were, was levied against some 
 idolatrous parent till he was brought a happy cap- 
 tive to the waters of Baptism, and listen to the shouts 
 of the circus when the monk Telemachus threw him- 
 self between the fighting gladiators and died under the 
 stones of the spectators to seal by his blood the aboli- 
 tion of those detestable games. 
 
 But error yielded slowly, like night leaving its 
 mists behind. The Pantheism of Alexandria was des- 
 tined to a new birth, to carry its temerity into the very 
 chairs of the Scholastic philosophy. In the full blaze 
 of classic antiquity in the schools of Jamblichus, of 
 Maximus of Ephesus, and the last pagan philo- 
 sophers, flourished magic and astrology and the occult 
 sciences, supposed to have been spawned in the dark- 
 ness of the Middle Age. Moreover, the ignorant 
 country-folk (pagani) shrunk from parting with a 
 religion which appealed to their passions. The pil- 
 grims from the North wondered in the eighth century at 
 seeing the squares of Rome still profaned by pagan 
 dances. The Councils of Gaul and Spain long pursued 
 with anathema the sacrilegious art of the diviners, and 
 the idolatrous practices of the Calends of January. 
 Latin superstitions joined hands with those of Germany 
 to make a last stand against conquering Christianity. 
 Everything pagan in character, however, did not 
 
THE FITFH CENTURY. 51 
 
 deserve to perish, for even in a false religion there 
 is a meritorious craving for commerce with Heaven, 
 of fixing it in times and places, and under definite 
 symbols. The Church had the faculty of appreciat- 
 ing this want, which is a right of human nature. She 
 spared the evangelized nations useless violence, and re- 
 conciled art and nature to Christ by dedicating to Him 
 the temples and festivals, flowers and perfumes, hitherto 
 lavished on false divinities. The heretic Vigilantius 
 was scandalized at this wise economy, but St. Jerome 
 undertook to justify it, and in his reply we see the germ 
 of that tender policy which inspired St. Gregory to 
 instruct the English missioners to leave to the newly 
 made Christians their rustic festivals, innocent ban- 
 quets, and earthly joys, that they might be the more 
 willing to taste of spiritual consolations. Thus the 
 whole of the Church's struggle against Koman poly- 
 theism was but an apprenticeship to another conflict 
 which she was destined to wage against the Paganism 
 of the barbarians, and in her last efforts to convert 
 the ancient world we foresee the genius and patience 
 she was to display in the education of the new nations. 
 The preparation for the future amidst the ruins of 
 the past, the conjunction of perishable elements with 
 an immortal principle, which affords so strong a contrast 
 in the history of religion, is more manifest in that of 
 Law, which in the fifth century the emperors organized 
 by giving force to the writings of the old jurisconsults, 
 and codifying the decisions of Christian princes. The 
 lawyers of the classic age had never abjured the law 
 of the Twelve Tables, and all the efforts of the school 
 had failed in obliterating the pagan character impressed 
 on the constitution of the State and of the family. 
 
 3 * 
 
52 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 The pagan doctrine was to deify the City, to make an 
 apotheosis of public power, to render it sovereign in the 
 conscience without any further appeal to abstract justice. 
 The Emperor had inherited a divine right over the 
 goods, the persons, and the souls of men. He was above 
 the law, which was the creature of his will ; as depo- 
 sitary of military power (imperium) he was master of 
 every life, as Vicar of the rights of the Eoman people 
 he was strictly the only proprietor of the soil of the 
 provinces, of which the natives had but a precarious 
 possession. It was not surprising that he should 
 extract the taxes by exhausting the one and torturing 
 the other; and there was no excess of persecution 
 or of exaction that did not find principles to justify 
 it. 
 
 The iniquity of the public law had descended into 
 that of civil life. The father, as representative of Jove, 
 surrounded by his tutelary gods, the images of his 
 ancestors who lent him their majesty, exercised right of 
 life and death over his wife, could expose his children 
 or crucify his slaves. Philosophers admired this family 
 constitution, with its priestly and military power 
 installed at every hearth, as a domestic empire on 
 the model of which was framed the empire of the 
 World. 
 
 But the violence of authority had provoked a resur- 
 rection of liberty. The human conscience, outraged in 
 its last refuge, began a memorable resistance by op- 
 posing to the civil law that of the tribes and the 
 prsetorial edicts, the responsa of the jurisconsults and 
 the constitutions of princes to the Code of the Twelve 
 Tables, lastly succeeding in introducing into the impe- 
 rial councils such firm and subtle minds as those of 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 53 
 
 Gaius, Ulpian, and Papinian, who tempered the severity 
 of the old legislation. But the struggle lasted for 
 eight centuries, and the victory of equity could only be 
 effected by the triumph of Christianity. A new faith 
 was necessary to deal its death-blow to the respect for 
 the old laws, embolden Constantine to decree the civil 
 emancipation of woman, the penalty of death against 
 the murderer of a son or of a slave, to elicit from 
 Valentinian III. and Theodosius IV. the noble decla- 
 ration that the prince is bound by the laws a short 
 speech, but marking the greatest of all political revo- 
 lutions, causing the temporal power to descend to a 
 lower but securer place, and inaugurating the consti- 
 tutional principle of modern society. The Roman law, 
 as reformed by Christian emperors, survived the crash 
 of the empire, penetrated gradually the barbarian mind, 
 and earned Bossuet's panegyric, " that good sense, the 
 master of human life, reigned throughout it, and that 
 a more beautiful application of natural equity had never 
 been seen." 
 
 But the crown of pagan society, and its incomparable 
 lustre, was derived from its literature. Kome doubtless 
 knew no longer the inspiration of her great centuries, 
 yet the reigns of Constantine and of his successors, so 
 often accused of hastening the Decline, seemed for a 
 space to give a new flight to the eagles, a fresh burst to 
 the genius of Rome. Ammianus Marcellinus com- 
 posed history with the dash and bluff sincerity of a 
 soldier. Vegetius, in his " Treatise on the Military 
 Art," gathered up the precepts of the science before it 
 passed away to the Goths and the Franks, and the 
 contemporaries of Symmachus rank him with Pliny 
 in the exquisite urbanity of his correspondence, and 
 
54 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the elegance of his panegyric. Among the poets, three 
 may be distinguished as worthily sustaining the old 
 age of the Pagan Muse. 
 
 Of these Claudian stood first. Born in Egypt, he 
 had early drunk deep at the sources of Alexandrian 
 learning, from which the great poets of the Augustan 
 era had drawn, and had found a stray chord of that 
 Latin lyre broken on the day on which Lucan caused 
 his veins to be opened. Since the " Pharsalia," Home 
 had heard nothing comparable to the songs which told 
 of the disgrace of Eutropius or the victories of Stilicho. 
 But Claudian was so steeped in pagan memories that 
 he could only move in a cloud of fables, so to speak, 
 out of sight of his. Christian age, out of hearing of the 
 voices of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine thundering 
 at Milan and Hippo, not even thinking of defending the 
 menaced altars of his gods. He was singing of the 
 Kape of Proserpine as the cultus of the Virgin Mary 
 was taking possession of the Temple of Ceres at Ca- 
 tania, and was inviting the Graces, the Nymphs, and 
 the Hours to deck with their garlands Serena, the 
 lovely wife of Stilicho, who in her hatred of idolatry 
 had torn the necklace from the image of Cybele to 
 adorn her own neck. He dared to introduce the Christian 
 princes into Olympus, and bring upon the scene Theo- 
 dosius, Jupiter's greatest foe, talking familiarly with 
 Jove himself. Eutilius Numatianus, though also a 
 pagan, wrote under less illusion, and with a more 
 accurate feeling as to the spirit of his age. He was 
 no mere poet by profession, but a statesman, a prefect 
 of Eome, though on leaving the city in 418 to revisit 
 his native Gaul, then under the ravages of the bar- 
 barians, he wrote of his journey in verses so graceful 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 55 
 
 as to deceive the ear into a remembrance of Ovid. The 
 ardour of his patriotism, his passionate worship of 
 Eome, as the greatest deity of antiquity, saved him 
 from illusion, and raised him high above his literary 
 contemporaries. 
 
 " Hear me, listen, Eome, ever beauteous Queen of 
 a world that is for ever thine own : thou who art one 
 amongst the Olympians, hearken, Mother of men and 
 of gods ; when we pray in thy temples we are not far 
 from heaven. For thee the sun doth turn on his 
 course, he rises upon thy domains, and in their seas 
 doth he plunge his chariot. From so many diverse 
 nations thou hast moulded one sole country ; from that 
 which was a world hast thou made a city ( Urbem fecisti 
 quod prills orbis erat). He who can count thy trophies 
 can tell the number of the stars. Thy gleaming 
 temples dazzle the eye. Shall I sing of the rivers, that 
 the vaults of air bring to thee the entire lakes that 
 feed thy baths ? Shall I tell of the forests imprisoned 
 beneath thy ceilings, and peopled with melodious birds ? 
 Thy year is but an eternal spring, and vanquished 
 Winter respects thy pleasures. Eaise the laurel from 
 thy brow, that the sacred foliage may bud forth anew 
 around thy hoary head ! It is thy children's tradition 
 to hope in danger, like the stars which set but to rise 
 again. Extend, extend thy laws, they will live through 
 centuries become Eoman perforce, and alone among 
 things of earth dread not thou the shuttle of the 
 Fates."* 
 
 Finely and truly drawn. The old Eoman magis- 
 trate, with a lawyer's insight, foresaw that Eome, 
 
 * Rutil. Numat. 1. i. 66-133. 
 
56 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 betrayed by her arms, would still reign by her laws ; 
 and, pagan as it was, his faith in his country did not 
 deceive him. 
 
 Sidonius Apollinaris was pagan neither in creed or 
 in name, but he was in education and in habit of mind. 
 Christian, like Ausonius, but like him reared in the 
 schools of the grammarians and rhetoricians of Gaul, 
 he could not construct an hexameter or hang together 
 dactyls or spondees without stirring up every mytho- 
 logical association. Whether he was composing tjie 
 panegyric of the Emperor Avitus, or that of Majorian 
 after the deposition of Avitus, or that of Anthemius 
 after the fall of Majorian, he treated always of the 
 same deities, who were never weary of taking part in 
 the triumph of the victor. Happily, his panegyrics 
 failed before the complaisance of the gods, for Sidonius 
 was converted, became a bishop, and was destined to 
 become a saint. But though he mastered his passions 
 he could not stifle his recollections. M. Ampere has 
 ably shown* the struggles of that mind divided 
 between victorious faith and mythology, which still 
 so thoroughly possessed it, that in writing to St. 
 Patientius, Bishop of Lyons, in praise of a distri- 
 bution of corn to the poor, he could find no higher 
 congratulation possible than in calling him a second 
 Triptolemus. 
 
 Such was the sequel of the old poetry, though 
 Sidonius found one more disciple in the sixth century 
 in the person of Fortunatus, and the writings of 
 Claudian found copyists and imitators in the monas- 
 teries of the Middle Age. But antiquity was to pro- 
 
 * Histoire Litteraire de la France, t. ii. 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 57 
 
 pound a harder lesson to the ages which followed. 
 Eome in losing genius had still retained tradition, had 
 formed a magistracy of instruction and provided the 
 schools of the Capitol with thirty-one professors of 
 jurisprudence, of rhetoric, and of grammar. The youth 
 pressed into these schools with ardour and in such 
 numbers, that an edict of Valentinian was necessary 
 for a sort of police regulation of the studies. Gratian 
 had desired that the provinces should enjoy the same 
 benefit, and that every great town should possess public 
 chairs with rich endowments. The favour of law 
 multiplied these laborious grammarians, who made it 
 their profession to explain and comment, and conse- 
 quently religiously to preserve the classic texts. The 
 learned Donatus, whose lectures St. Jerome had attended, 
 fixed the principles of Latin grammar. Macrobius, in 
 his commentary on the dream of Scipio, and in the seven 
 books of the " Saturnalia," brought all the memories 
 of Alexandrian philosophy and of Greek poetry to 
 elucidate the thought of Cicero and of Virgil. Lastly, 
 Marcianus enveloped in a spirited and graceful allegory 
 the seven liberal arts wherein all the learning of the 
 ancients had just been comprised. We must not 
 wonder that the science of antiquity could be compressed 
 within the narrow compass of seven arts; upon that 
 condition and under that form, the heritage of the 
 human mind was destined to traverse the barbarous 
 epoch, and the treatises and commentaries whose dry- 
 ness we despise were to save Latin literature. The text- 
 book of Martianus Capella was to become the classic 
 summary of all secular instruction during the sixth 
 and seventh centuries, to be multiplied under the pens 
 of monks, and be translated into the first stammering 
 
 3 t 
 
58 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 utterances of the modern languages. Donatus became 
 so popular that his name was a synonym of grammar in 
 the schools of the Middle Age; no student was too poor to 
 possess a Donatus, and there was a Provencal grammar 
 under the name of Donatus Provincialis. The Middle 
 Age was right in attaching itself to the masters who 
 gave it that example of toil which is more necessary 
 than genius, for genius is but a thing of the moment ; 
 and God, who never wastes it, seems to will that the world 
 should know how to dispense with it. Yet He never 
 lets labour fail, but distributes it with a liberal hand, as 
 a punishment or as a blessing, effacing the distinction 
 between ages and between men. Genius ravishes 
 intelligence for a brief space, raising it, indeed, above 
 the common condition of life, but work comes to recall 
 it from its lofty forgetfulness and reduce it to the level 
 of mortals. When we see Dante borne by the flight of 
 his thought to the highest sphere of his Paradise, to the 
 threshold of the infinite, we may well hesitate in our 
 belief of the destined equality of all souls ; but when 
 in the intervals of his song we mark him exhausting 
 his sweat in study, paling over the labour like the 
 meanest scholar of his century, we take courage in 
 finding equality re-established and humbler spirits 
 avenged. 
 
 We see, then, that antiquity was not to be entirely 
 buried beneath the ruins of the Roman Empire; we 
 must now find the new principle which preserved it, 
 how the Christianity which has been held so inimical 
 to the old civilization laid upon it a hand which was 
 beneficent though it might be severe, as upon the sick 
 whom we treat with rigour and weaken but to save. The 
 close of the fourth century still rang with the pathetic 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 59 
 
 accents of the Fathers. M. Villemain has done justice 
 to those masters of Christian eloquence in a work 
 which can never be revised, and we must shrink from a 
 subject which, in the words of one of old, he has made 
 his possession for ever. The East we leave aside. The 
 West had mourned the death of St. Ambrose in 393, 
 and St. Jerome in his seclusion in the Holy Land only 
 acted on events through the authority of his untiring 
 correspondence. St. Augustine remained to fill with 
 his presence the opening years of the fifth century, and 
 with, his thought those which followed. This is not 
 the place to relate his history, or to depict his tender 
 but impetuous heart, or his soul tormented by its 
 cravings after light and peace; and who, indeed, is 
 ignorant of his career, his birth under the African sky, 
 his education at Madaura and Carthage, his long aber- 
 ration, and the Providential guidance which brought 
 him to Milan and to the feet of St. Ambrose, the conflict 
 of his will groaning under the strokes of grace, the voice 
 which cried out to him, Tolle, lege ! In the writings of 
 this great mind we shall study that which is even 
 greater Christian metaphysics taking its first form, 
 and Christianity defending itself with redoubled vigour, 
 that it might remain what God had made it, namely, a 
 religion, instead of being degraded by the sects to a 
 philosophy or a mythology. 
 
 A thirst for God tormented the soul of St. Augustine 
 like a malady depriving his day and night of their 
 repose. This want had cast him into the assemblies of 
 the Manichees, in which he had been promised an 
 explanation of the origin of evil ; had impelled him 
 towards the Neoplatonic school, to learn the nature of 
 the Supreme Goodness ; and, lastly, had flung him 
 
60 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 upon his knees under the fig-tree in his garden to 
 embrace Christianity, as he wetted the pages of St. 
 Paul's epistles with his tears. Henceforward his life was 
 but one long struggle towards "the Beauty, ever ancient 
 yet ever new, which to his reproach he had begun to 
 love so late." Shortly after his conversion, in the retreat 
 that he had given to his tempest-tost mind under the 
 shades of Cassiciacum, he wrote those " Soliloquies" in 
 which he supposes his reason to demand from him the 
 aim of his knowledge. " Two things," he replied, 
 " namely, God and the soul." But to what notion of 
 Him did he aspire ? Did it suffice to know God as he 
 knew Alypius, his friend ? Nay ; for knowledge does 
 not alone imply a grasping by means of the senses ; 
 a seeing, touching, or feeling. But would not the 
 theology of Plato or Plotinus satisfy his curiosity ? 
 Assuming them to be true, Augustine wished to go 
 beyond them. But mathematical truths are perfect in 
 their clearness. Would he not be content at knowing 
 the attributes of God as the properties of the circle or 
 of the triangle are known? "I agree," he replied, 
 " that the verities of mathematics are very clear, but, 
 from the experience of God, I expect a different happi- 
 ness and a different joy." 
 
 Boldly, but with firm steps, he began his course on 
 the road towards the knowledge of God. He deter- 
 mined to leave Italy that land of temptation and it 
 was while he was awaiting a favourable wind at Ostia, 
 and leaning one day with his mother from the window 
 of their house in contemplation of the sky, that he fell 
 into that wonderful train of thought which has been 
 handed down by him in the ninth book of his " Con- 
 fessions " : 
 
THE FIFTH CENTUKY. 61 
 
 "We were alone, talking with infinite sweetness, 
 forgetful of the past looking beyond the future, of what 
 the eternal life of the blest would be. . . . Raised 
 towards God by the ardent aspiration of our souls, we 
 traversed the whole sphere of things corporeal, and the 
 sky also, in which the sun, moon, and stars spread 
 abroad their light. And in our full admiration of thy 
 works, Lord, we mounted yet higher, and reached the 
 region of the soul ; then passed higher yet, to repose in 
 that Wisdom, itself Uncreated, by whom all things 
 were made, which has ever existed and will ever be ; 
 in whose Eternal Being is no past, present, or future. 
 And as we spoke thus, with this thirst for the wisdom 
 of God, for a moment, by an effort of the heart, we 
 touched upon It, and then groaned as we left the 
 first-fruits of our souls clinging there whilst we de- 
 scended to earth at the sound of our voices." Regret- 
 fully do we abridge that wonderful narration. They 
 are indeed happy who have had such experiences, with 
 a mother like his ; who, with her, have found their God 
 and never again lost sight of Him. 
 
 These few words comprise the whole of his metaphy- 
 sical system. In them he introduces the novelty of his 
 doctrine as compared with that of Plato or of Aristotle, 
 the idea of Omnipotence, which, if not unknown to 
 antiquity, was at least contradicted by the theory of an 
 Eternal Matter, by refusing to the Supreme Worker the 
 privilege of producing the clay which His hands were 
 permitted to fashion. Philosophy of old had lived 
 upon an equivocal axiom : Ex nihilo nihil. To estab- 
 lish the counter-dogma of Creation, Augustine found it 
 necessary to dive deep into the secrets of Nature, and 
 thence to re-ascend to God (1) by the idea of Beauty, 
 
62 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 as shown in his work "De Musica;" (2) by the idea of 
 Goodness, as in the " De Libero Arbitrio ; " (3) by the 
 idea of Truth, as in the treatise " De Vera Religione." 
 M. l'Abbe Maret has thrown light upon the vast work 
 which he pursued in spite of the demands of theolo- 
 gical controversy, amidst a people whom he was called 
 upon to instruct and to govern, in the presence of the 
 Donatists and before the approach of the Vandals. 
 The "Theodicea" of St. Augustine was, however, 
 achieved, to be elaborated to the highest degree by 
 St. Anselm, and finally enriched by the arrangement 
 and additional corollaries of St. Thomas Aquinas. But 
 the Bishop of Hippo was the acknowledged master of 
 the generation of philosophers who filled the Middle 
 Age with their discussions. Popular tradition gave 
 testimony to this fact, and we read in the " Golden 
 Legend" how a monk in ecstasy on beholding the 
 heaven and the hosts of the elect, wondering at not 
 seeing St. Augustine, inquired for the holy doctor. 
 "He is higher far," it was answered; "gazing ever 
 on the Holy Trinity, and discussing It throughout 
 eternity." 
 
 Mysteries, indeed, failed to discourage the genius of 
 St. Augustine. From the time in which he uttered 
 that great speech, Intellectum valde ama, he became of 
 necessity the guide of all the theologians who, like 
 St. Anselm, were willing to put faith in quest of intel- 
 ligence. Fides queer ens intellectum not the idea of 
 God alone, but the whole cycle of Christian dogma, 
 was embraced in his meditations. No depths were too 
 obscure for his search, no controversy too perilous for 
 his intellect. His age was endangered by two forms of 
 heresy ; one of pagan parentage, the other the offspring 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 63 
 
 of the philosophic schools. On the one hand, the 
 Manichees were restoring the doctrines of Persia and 
 of \Endia, the strife of the two principles, emanation 
 and metempsychosis errors which had power to fasci- 
 nate even nobler minds, as in the case of St. Augustine 
 himself for so many years, to seduce the vulgar and 
 form in Borne a powerful sect which terrified St. Leo 
 the Great by its orgies. Four hundred years of preach- 
 ing and martyrdom thus seemed fated to result in a 
 rehabilitation of pagan fables, and Christianity to dis- 
 solve at the breath of Manes into a mere mythology. 
 
 On the other hand, the Arians, in denying Christ's 
 divinity, the Pelagians, in suppressing grace, severed 
 the mysterious ties which linked man to God. The 
 supernatural element disappeared, whilst the Platonic 
 Demiurgus replaced the Consubstantial Word, and the 
 Faith was reduced to the level of a philosophy. St. 
 Augustine prevented this issue, and as his early life 
 had been spent in struggling free from the Manichaean 
 net, so its later years were devoted to combating 
 Arius and Pelagius. Like all the great servants of 
 Providence, he fought less for his own time than for 
 posterity. The moment was approaching wherein 
 Arianism was to enter as a conqueror through all the 
 breaches of the Empire, in the train of the Goths, 
 Vandals, and Lombards ; and in those days of terror 
 bishops would have had little leisure to study by the 
 light of conflagrations the disputed questions of Nicsea, 
 had not Augustine kept watch over them. His fifteen 
 treatises on the Trinity comprised all the objections 
 of the sectarians and all the arguments of the orthodox ; 
 and it was to him the victory was due in the con- 
 ferences of Vienna and Toledo, when the Burgun- 
 
64 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 dians and Visigoths abjured their heresy. In later 
 days, when the Manichaeism preserved in the East 
 by the Paulicians had regained its sway in the West, 
 when its disciples, under the names of Cathari or 
 Albigenses, had mastered the half of Germany, of 
 Italy, and of Southern France, and gravely imperilled 
 Christian society, it was not the sword of Simon de 
 Montfort which suppressed it for fire and sword 
 cannot conquer thought however false, (rather many 
 noble hearts must have wavered at the sight of the 
 violence which degraded the crusade, and was con- 
 demned by Innocent III.) but the sound doctrine 
 of St. Augustine, as expressed by his firm yet loving 
 intellect, resettled their faith, and regained the Chris- 
 tian world for orthodoxy. In that conflict, the excesses 
 of which we must detest, but need not to exaggerate, 
 victory was due to truth rather than to force. 
 
 Christianity must be the soul of a society which 
 it fashions after its own image, and in the fifth 
 century that great work seemed near its achievement. 
 The Papacy, fully acknowledged in its authority since 
 the time of St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, which had 
 presided at Nicsea,* and to which the Council of 
 Sardica had referred all episcopal judgments, found 
 in St. Leo the Great a mind capable alike of defending 
 its rights and understanding its duties. While the 
 Greek mind was divided between Nestorius and 
 Eutyches, Leo intervened with the judicious force 
 of a lawful authority, and caused the Council of 
 Chalcedon to save the faith in the East. His more 
 especial task lay in preserving Western civilization, 
 by appeasing Genseric at the very gates of Rome, 
 * Probably in the person of Hosius of Cordova. (7V.) 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 65 
 
 Attila at the passage of the Mincio, and by forming 
 the monastic legions which were to execute the 
 designs of the Papacy. Souls worn out by vice and 
 public misfortune were driven into seclusion by the 
 fame of the institutions of the deserts, and the popular 
 histories of their saints written by St. Athanasius, 
 St. Jerome, and Cassian. The wealthy but menaced 
 cities of Eome, Milan, and Treves still possessed 
 amphitheatres for the pleasure of the mob, but side 
 by side with monasteries, in which were moulded a 
 race better able to cope with the dangers of the future. 
 The austere men, the enemies of light, as the pagan 
 Rutilius disdainfully calls the monks whom he found 
 in the islands which fringed the Italian coast, were 
 soon to be the only guardians of enlightenment. The 
 great abbeys of Lerins, of the island of Barba, of 
 Marmontiers, were open a century before the time 
 of Benedict, not to introduce the religious life into the 
 West, but to perpetuate it, in tempering its rigour. 
 
 But as Christian people could not emigrate entirely 
 into the cloister, we must mark how the new faith 
 gradually took possession of the lay world, and, by 
 correcting its laws and manners, formed a more gentle 
 society than that of St. Augustine's time, and equal 
 to it in polish. "We see in the clever letters of St. 
 Jerome to the Roman matrons, who claimed descent 
 from the Gracchi and Emilii, and spent their time in 
 learning Hebrew, speculating on the mystic words of 
 Isaiah, and diving into every controversy of their time, 
 to what a pitch the Church had brought female educa- 
 tion. It formed a better estimate of the sex which 
 antiquity had condemned to spinning wool, in hopeless 
 ignorance of things of divine or of political interest. 
 
66 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 St. Jerome never appeared more noble than in stooping 
 to teach Laeta how to train her child, by putting letters 
 of box-wood or ivory under its eyes, and rewarding 
 its early efforts by a flower or a kiss. Of old it had 
 been said, Maxima debetur puero reverentia, but the 
 saintly doctor went further, and made Laeta' s daughter 
 the angel of her house ; and it was her task to begin, 
 when a mere baby, the conversion of her grandfather, 
 a priest of the old gods, by springing upon his knee 
 and singing the Alleluia, in spite of his displeasure. 
 Christianity did not, as men say, wait for the favouring 
 times of barbarism, to build up in darkness the power 
 of popes and monks, but laid the foundations of its 
 edifice in the light of day, under the jealous gaze of 
 the pagans. The approaching invasions seemed more 
 fraught with danger than advantage to its interests. 
 The Canon law, whose birth we have noticed, found 
 an obstinate resistance from the passions of the bar- 
 barians, and the Gospel had to devote more than twelve 
 centuries to calming the violence of the conquerors, 
 and reforming the evil instincts of their race, in 
 restoring that clearness of intellect, that gentleness in 
 the commerce of life, that tolerance towards the erring, 
 and the many other virtues which throw over the 
 society of the fifth century some of the charm of 
 modern manners. 
 
 But Keligion had not consummated her work as long 
 as Literature resisted, and the century which saw the 
 fall of so many altars beheld that of the Muses still 
 surrounded by an adoring multitude. Yet Christianity 
 shrank from condemning a veneration for the beautiful, 
 and as it honoured the human mind and the arts it 
 produced, so the persecution of the Apostate Julian, in 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 67 
 
 which the study of the classics had been forbidden to 
 the faithful, was the severest of its trials. Literary- 
 history possesses no moment of greater interest than 
 that which saw the School, with its profane traditions 
 and texts, received into the Church. The Fathers, whose 
 Christian austerity is our wonder, were passionate in 
 their love for antiquity, which they covered, as it were, 
 with their sacred vestments, and thus guaranteed to 
 it the respect of the future. By their favour Yirgil 
 traversed the ages of iron without losing a page, and 
 by right of his Fourth Eclogue took rank among 
 the prophets and the sybils. St. Augustine would 
 have blamed Paganism less if, in place of a temple 
 to Cybele, it had raised a shrine to Plato, in which his 
 works might have been publicly read. St. Jerome's 
 dream is well known, and the scourging inflicted upon 
 him by angels for having loved Cicero too well ; yet 
 his repentance was but short-lived, since he caused 
 the monks of the Mount of Olives to pass their nights 
 in copying the Ciceronian dialogues, and did not shrink 
 himself from expounding the lyric and comic poets to 
 the children of Bethlehem. 
 
 While pagan eloquence, expelled from the Forum, 
 could find no outlet but in the lecture-halls of the 
 rhetoricians, or in the mouths of the mendacious pane- 
 gyrists of the Caesars, a new form of oratory had 
 founded its first chair in the Catacombs, and was 
 drawing inspiration from the depths of the conscience. 
 St. Ambrose organized it, and filled a chapter of his book, 
 "De Officiis," with precepts on the art of preaching, 
 which St. Augustine developed, not fearing, in his 
 treatise, " De Doctrina Christiana," to borrow from the 
 ancient rhetoric as much as was consistent with the 
 
68 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 gravity of the Gospel message. We may listen, in 
 Peter Chrysologus, Gaudentius of Brescia, Maximus of 
 Turin, to orators at once learned and popular, but 
 their light was outshone by another preacher, who 
 addressed himself not to some thousands of souls, but 
 to the entire West. Amidst the confusion of the 
 invasions, Salvian undertook the task of justifying the 
 action of Providence. Eloquence never raised a more 
 terrible cry than that which told from his lips the agony 
 of the Eoman world, pointing to the mockery which 
 accompanied its fall, to its vain struggles beneath the 
 hand of God, and His treatment of fire and sword 
 which failed to effect its cure. Secamur urimur non 
 sanamur. 
 
 The ancients, in writing history, had aimed at 
 literary beauty, and thus loaded the narrative with 
 ornament and declamation. The Christians only 
 looked for truth, they wished for it in facts, and 
 applied themselves to re-establishing order in time, 
 which led to the dry but scrupulous chronicles of St. 
 Jerome, of Prosper of Aquitaine, and the Spaniard 
 Idatius. They sought for truth in the unravelling of 
 causes, and, so to speak, made the Spirit of God to 
 wander over the chaos of human events. The philo- 
 sophy of history, so finely sketched by St. Augustine in 
 his " City of God," was developed by the pen of Paulus 
 Orosius. He was the first to condense the annals of 
 the world into the formula Divind providentid agitur 
 mundus et homo. His works became the type of the 
 chronicles which multiplied in the Middle Age. 
 Gregory of Tours could not treat of the Merovingian 
 period without ascending to the origin of things ; and 
 Otto of Freysingen, in his fine work, " De Mutatione 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 69 
 
 Kerum," continued the chain of history to which Bossuet 
 was to add the last and most elaborate link. 
 
 Poetry, in the last place, was destined to surrender 
 the language which had been lavished on the false gods 
 to the praises of Christ. When the Empress Justina 
 was threatening to deliver over the Basilica of Milan to 
 the Arians, St. Ambrose, with the Catholic people, passed 
 day and night in the sacred place, and, to wile away the 
 tediousness of the vigils, introduced the hymn-tunes 
 which had already found a place in the Eastern Church. 
 The sweetness of the sacred chant soon gained the ear 
 of the West, and Christianity possessed a lyric poetry. 
 Contemporaneously it beheld its epic take its rise in the 
 verses of Sedulius and of Dracontius, and could even 
 say with one of old, Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade. 
 Not that modern genius could hope to rival the match- 
 less perfection of the Homeric forms, but because 
 humanity thus found the true and oecumenical epopee 
 whereof every other was but a shadow, the themes of 
 which were the Fall, Eedemption, and Judgment, 
 which was to traverse the ages, and culminate in Dante, 
 Milton, and Klopstock. 
 
 Moreover, in the fifth century, two Christian poets 
 rose above the crowd. One was St. Paulinus, who laid 
 aside the honours of his rank and fortune to dwell at 
 the tomb of St. Felix of Nola, and who celebrated the 
 peace of his seclusion in verses which were already 
 quite Italian in their grace. As he depicts the basilica 
 of the Saint blazing with taper-light, its colonnades 
 hung with white draperies, its flower- strewn court, with 
 the troops of devout mountaineers from the mountains 
 of the Abruzzi bringing their sick on litters, or driving 
 their cattle before them to receive a blessing, we might 
 
70 CIVILIZATION IX FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 fancy ourselves present at a pilgrimage of the Neapolitan 
 peasantry at the present day. The other was the 
 Spaniard Prudentius, who, at the end of a life full of 
 honours, and long service to his duty, devoted to God 
 the remnants of a tuneful voice and a dashing style. 
 Beneath a method which the authors of the golden age 
 would not have disowned, a modern cast of thought is 
 apparent, whether the poet is borrowing the most genial 
 accents of our Christmastides to invite the earth to 
 wreathe its flowers round the cradle of the Saviour, or, 
 as in the hymn of St. Laurence, is drawing the veil 
 with a Dantean hardiness from the Christian destinies 
 of Rome, or, as in his reply to Symmachus, makes a 
 prayer to Honorius for the abolition of the gladiatorial 
 shows the peroration of his invective against Pagan- 
 ism : 
 
 Nullus in urbe cadat cujus sit poena voluptas ! 
 Jam solis contenta feris infamis arena 
 Nulla cruentatis homicidia ludat in armis ! * 
 
 It is not sufficiently known, but we perhaps may learn, 
 how the poetical vocation of the Middle Age was sus- 
 tained by those writers who filled the libraries, shared 
 with Virgil the honours of the " iEneid," and moulded 
 the best imaginations of the time, until the mind grew 
 weary of the chaste beauty of a poetry that had no 
 pages for expurgation. 
 
 Our work would be incomplete if, amongst these 
 germs of future greatness, we should forget Christian 
 art, which had emerged from the Catacombs to produce 
 in the light of day the basilicas of Constantine and 
 Theodosius, the sepulchral bas-reliefs of Rome, of 
 Ravenna, and of Aries, and the mosaics with which 
 
 * Prudentius contra Symmach. l.ii. 1126 et seq. 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 71 
 
 Pope Sixtus III. embellished, in 433, the sanctuary of 
 St. Mary Major. The cupola already swelled over the 
 tomb of St. Constance, and the Latin cross extended its 
 arms in St. Peter's and in St. Paul's. The empire was 
 still standing, and its every type was to be found in 
 that Komanesque and Byzantine architecture which was 
 soon to cover with monuments the shores of the Loire, 
 Seine, and Bhine, and which from the broken arch of 
 its vault was to produce all the beauties of the Pointed 
 Gothic. 
 
 We have thus traced the rise of the modern faith, 
 of modern society, and of modern art, all of which 
 were born before the inroad of the barbarians, and 
 were destined to grow sometimes through their aid, 
 sometimes in their despite. The Barbarian mission 
 was not that of inaugurating a craving for the in- 
 finite, a respect for women, or a sad-coloured poetry. 
 They came to break with axe and lever the edifice 
 of pagan society, in which Christian principles were 
 cramped; yet their blows were not so crushing as to 
 leave no remnants of the old ramparts, in which 
 heathenism still might lurk. We shall find that half 
 the vices attributed to the barbarians were those 
 of the Boman Decline, and a share of the disorders 
 charged upon nascent Christianity must be laid to 
 the account of antiquity. In this category must be 
 placed the vulgar superstitions, the occult sciences, 
 the bloody laws put in force against magic, which 
 do but repeat the old decrees of the Caesars ; the 
 fiscal system of the Merovingian kings, which was 
 entirely borrowed from the imperial organization ; the 
 corruption, lastly, of taste and the decomposition of 
 language, which already prognosticated the diversity of 
 
72 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the new idioms. Beneath the common civilization 
 which was destined to knit into one family all the races 
 of the West, the national character of each struggles to 
 the surface. In every province the Latin tongue found 
 an obstinate resistance in native dialects, the genius of 
 Eome in native manners. The distinctive elements in 
 the three great Neo-Latin nations could already be 
 recognized. Italy had statesmen in Symmachus and 
 Leo the Great, and was soon to possess Gregory the 
 Great, Gregory VII. , and Innocent III. Spain claimed 
 a majority among the poets, and gave them that dashing 
 spirit which has never failed from Lucan to Lope de 
 Vega. The " Psychomachia" of Prudentius was a pre- 
 lude to the allegorical dramas, to the "Autos Sacra- 
 mentales" of Calderon. Gaul, lastly, was the country 
 of wits, of men gifted with repartee. We know the 
 eloquence of Salvian, the play of words so dear to 
 Sidonius Apolliuaris, but that sage of the Decline was, 
 moreover, full of the ancient heroism, when called 
 upon to defend his episcopal see of Clermont from the 
 assaults of the Visigoths. And these were the very 
 features in which Cato summed up the Gallic character : 
 Rem militarem et argute loqui. 
 
 Such is the plan of our course, for it is not neces- 
 sary to follow out in detail the literary history of the 
 fifth century, but only to seek light for the obscurity 
 of the succeeding ages. As travellers tell of rivers 
 which lose themselves amongst rocks, to appear again 
 at some distance from their hiding-place, so we shall 
 ascend above the point at which the stream of tradition 
 seems to fail, and will attempt to descend with it into 
 the gulf, that we may be certain that the issuing 
 stream is indeed the same. As historians have opened 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 73 
 
 a certain chasm between antiquity and barbarism, so 
 let ns undertake to re-establish the unfailing com- 
 munication granted by Providence in time, as well as 
 in space ; for there is no study more fascinating than 
 that of the ties which link the ages, which give to the 
 illustrious dead disciples century after century down 
 the future, and thus demonstrate the victory of thought 
 over destruction. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
74 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 In the fifth century Paganism, at first sight, seemed 
 but a ruin. It is commonly supposed that the fall of 
 superstition was imminent before the preaching of the 
 Gospel, and that Christians have claimed an easy 
 miracle in the destruction of an old cult which had 
 long tottered beneath the blows of philosophy and the 
 popular reason. Yet eighty years after the conversion 
 of Constantine Paganism survived, and a greater lapse 
 of time, a stronger expenditure of effort, was required 
 to dispossess the ancient religion of the Empire, still 
 mistress of the soil through its temples, of society 
 through its associations, of some higher souls by the 
 little truth it held, of the mass by the very excess of 
 its errors. 
 
 When the Emperor Honorius, in 404, celebrated his 
 sixth consulate at Rome, the poet Claudian, charged 
 with the task of doing public honour to the heir of so 
 many Christian emperors, invited him to recognize in 
 the temples which surrounded the imperial palace his 
 heavenly body guard, and pointed to the sanctuary of 
 the Tarpeian Jove which crowned the Capitol, and the 
 sacred edifices which rose on every side toward the 
 sky, upholding on their pediments a host of gods to 
 
PAGANISM. 75 
 
 preside over the City and the World.* We cannot 
 accuse the poet of reviving in hyperbole the lustre of 
 an extinct Paganism. Several years later a topogra- 
 phical survey of Rome, in numbering the monuments 
 which the sword and fire of the Goths had spared, still 
 counted forty-three temples and two hundred and 
 eighty chapels. The Colossus of the Sun, a hundred 
 feet in height, still reared its front by the side of the 
 Flavian amphitheatre, which had reeked with many a 
 martyr's blood. Statues of Minerva, Hercules, and 
 Apollo decorated the squares and cross streets, and the 
 fountains still gushed under the invocation of the 
 nymphs. f Time had gone by filled with the spirit of 
 Christianity, the era of St. Augustine and of St. 
 Jerome, but in 419, under Valentinian III., Rutilius 
 Numatianus .still sang of the pagan city as mother of 
 heroes and of gods. "Her temples," said he, "bear 
 us nearer to heaven." It is true that imperial edicts 
 had closed the temples and forbidden the sacrifices, 
 but the continued renewal of these laws during fifty 
 years shows their constant infringement. In the 
 midst of the fifth century the sacred fowls of the 
 Capitol were still fed, and the consuls, on entering 
 office, demanded their auspices. The Calendar noted 
 the pagan festivals side by side with the feasts of the 
 Saviour and the Saints. Within the City and beyond, 
 throughout Italy and the Gallic provinces, and even 
 the entire Western Empire, the sacred groves were 
 still untouched by the axe, idols were adored, altars 
 were standing, and the pagan populace, believing alike 
 
 * Claudian, De Sexto Consulate* Honorii, v. 43. 
 f Descriptio Urbis Romse, incerto auctori qui vixit sub Honorio 
 vel Valentiniano III. 
 
 4 * 
 
76 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 in the eternity of their cult and of the Empire, were 
 waiting in scornful patience till mankind grew weary 
 of the folly of the cross.* 
 
 Hitherto, indeed, the fortunes of Eome had seemed 
 mingled with those of her gods, and from the three 
 great eras of her history had been gradually evolved 
 the pagan system which we remark in the fifth 
 century. The kingly epoch had furnished the antique 
 dogmas on which reposed the whole theology of Rome. 
 Supreme over all things stood an immutable power, 
 unknown and nameless ; beneath were other deities 
 known to men, but perishable in nature, borne along 
 towards a fatal revolution which was to destroy the 
 universe and raise it up anew ; lower still came souls, 
 emanations of the Deity, but fallen and doomed to an 
 expiation on earth and in hell, until they became 
 worthy of a return to their first abode. A close com- 
 merce between the visible and invisible worlds was 
 in consequence maintained through the media of 
 auguries, sacrifices, and the worship paid to the Manes. 
 Rome herself was a temple in near relation to heaven 
 and hell, square in form, facing towards the East, 
 according to the ancient rites. Each patrician's house 
 was a sanctuary, wherein the ancestral images from 
 their place of honour watched over the fortunes of 
 their descendants. The laws of the City, hallowed 
 by the auspices, expanded into oracles, magistracies 
 became sacerdotal, every important act in life a reli- 
 gious transaction. A people so permeated with respect 
 for their gods and their ancestors, under their eyes as 
 
 * Salvian.De Gubernatione Dei ; Polemius S}dvius, Laterculus, 
 seu Index Dierum Fastorum ; Beugnot, Histoire de la Chute du 
 Paganisme en Occident. 
 
PAGANISM. 77 
 
 was the firm conviction in council or in war, was fit 
 for great achievements. These obscure but potent 
 doctrines had disciplined the old Komans, and sus- 
 tained the edifice of the commonwealth ; as the cloacae 
 of Tarquin, those sombre but gigantic vaults, had 
 purified the soil of the City and supported its monu- 
 ments.* 
 
 Doubtless the Greek mythology modified the austerity 
 of this primitive belief. It had, however, appeared 
 during the most flourishing ages of the republic, with 
 the first examples of that bold policy which was to 
 advance by enlarging the circle of its law and of its 
 worship, and receive into the bosom of Rome the con- 
 quered nations and their gods. The divinities of 
 Greece followed the car of Paulus-Emilius and of Scipio 
 to the Capitol ; but though the victor descended when 
 his hour of triumph was past, the captive gods remained 
 to attract every art around their shrines. Sculptors and 
 poets reared an Olympus of marble and gold in place of 
 the deities of clay to which the old Eomans had done 
 homage. Religion lost her power over morality, but 
 over the imagination she reigned supreme. At length 
 the advent of the Caesars opened Rome to the worship 
 of the East. As the respect for primitive traditions 
 was withering away, so society, rather than remain 
 godless, sought new idols at the world's extremity. It 
 was in Isis and Serapis, in Mithra and his mysteries, 
 that troubled hearts now sought repose. Vespasian and 
 his successors have been often blamed for their sanction 
 to the barbarous rites which the Senate had for long 
 
 * Ottfried Miiller, Die Etrusker; Creuzer, Religions de 
 lAntiquite, translated by M. Guigniaut; Cicero, De Legibus, 
 ii. 8. 12. 
 
78 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 contemptuously repelled, but the emperors did but 
 renew the old policy, and as sovereign pontiffs of a city 
 which boasted of giving peace to the world, it was their 
 duty to reconcile all religions. They realized the ideal 
 of polytheism, in which there was room for all the false 
 gods, but no place for the True. 
 
 Thus was that mighty religion rooted in the history, 
 the institutions, the very stones of Rome ; and, in jus- 
 tice to Paganism, it had stronger ties in the souls of 
 men, for the ancient society would never have survived 
 so many ages had it not possessed some of those truths 
 which the human conscience never entirely lacks. The 
 Roman religion placed one supreme deity above all 
 secondary causes ; he was proclaimed upon his temples 
 as very good and very great. The feciales called him to 
 witness before hurling the dart which carried with it 
 peace or war. The poet Plautus showed the messen- 
 gers of this god visiting cities and nations to procure 
 " written in a book the names of those who sustained 
 wicked lawsuits by false witness, and of those who per- 
 jured themselves for money; how it is his task to be 
 judge of appeal in badly judged causes, and if the guilty 
 think to gain him by presents and victims, they lose at 
 once their money and their trouble."* Such language 
 was that of a poet rather than a philosopher, but it 
 was addressed to the mob, and gained their applause 
 in touching, like so many nerves, the group of beliefs 
 which lay at the root of the public conscience. It was 
 mindful also of the dead, and had touching prayers in 
 their behalf. " Honour the tombs, appease the souls 
 of your fathers. The Manes ask for little : to them 
 devotion stands in the place of rich offerings." Ex- 
 
 * Plautus, Rudens, prolog, v. 1 et seq. 
 
PAGANISM. 79 
 
 piatory sacrifices for ancestors were handed down as a 
 charge upon the inheritance from father to son, cere- 
 monies whose power was to be felt in hell, to hasten 
 the deliverance of souls who were undergoing purgation, 
 and bring the day in which they were to seat themselves 
 as its tutelary deities around the family hearth.* The 
 whole funeral liturgy bore witness to faith in a future 
 life, to the reversibility of merits, to the solidarity of 
 the family organization. The thought of a God and 
 remembrance of the dead were as two rays, unkindled 
 by philosophy but proceeding from a higher Source, 
 with capacity of still guiding, after the lapse of ages of 
 pagan darkness, some chosen spirits in the right way ; 
 so they throw light on the obstinate resistance offered 
 to Christianity by some honest but timid souls, who- 
 answered, like Longinian, to the arguments of St. Au- 
 gustine, that they hoped to reach God by way of the old 
 observances, and through the virtues of antiquity.! 
 
 But that small and well-meaning band judged wrongly 
 of the religion whose doomed altars they were defend- 
 ing. If Paganism possessed elevating influences, so 
 also did elements exist in Chaos. Side by side with 
 doctrines which might have sustained life in the indi- 
 vidual intellect and in society, a principle was working 
 which must ever impel towards ruin the person of man 
 and civilization itself. The evil leaven of heathenism 
 laboured to extinguish reason in man by separating it 
 from the supreme truth whence all its light is derived. 
 Whereas religion is bound to strain every nerve in 
 snatching the human soul from the distractions of 
 sense, to give it an upward flight in raising the veils 
 
 * Ovid, Fast. lib. ii. 35 et seq. 
 
 j Epistola Longiniani Augustino, apud Ep. St. Aug. 234. 
 
80 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 which hang over the spiritual world, Paganism diverted 
 it from the sphere of ideas by promising to find its 
 god in the regions of sense. It pointed, firstly, to 
 Him in Matter itself, whose hidden forces it bade the 
 faithful to deify. The Eomans adored the water of 
 their fountains, stones, serpents, and the accustomed 
 fetishes of the barbarian. Mankind till then had paid 
 honour to an unknown power, conceived to be greater 
 than himself; his second and more culpable error lay 
 in adoring himself, in deifying that humanity which he 
 recognized as weak and sinful. The priests, sculptors, 
 and poets of Paganism borrowed for their gods not 
 only the features but the frailties of mortals, and thence 
 rose the fables which throned in heaven the passions 
 of earth; thence came the whole system of idolatry 
 hardly to be realized in the intensity of its madness. 
 It was no calumny of Christian apologists, but the 
 avowal of the wise ones of the old cult, that the idols 
 were as bodies into which the powers of heaven de- 
 scended when conjured by the prescribed rites; that 
 they were held captive there by the smoke of victims, 
 nourished by their fat smeared upon the statues, their 
 thirst slaked when priests poured over them cupfuls of 
 gladiatorial blood. Men of sober reason spent whole 
 days in paying to the Jupiter of the Capitol the 
 homage which as clients they owed to a patron some 
 in offering him perfumes, others in introducing visitors 
 or declaiming comedies to him.* But Rome began to 
 crave for a more concrete God than the Capitolian Jove, 
 
 * Photius, Biblioth. 215 ; Tit. Liv. lib. xxxviii. c. 43 ; Cicero, in 
 Verr. act ii. orat. iv. ; Minutius Felix, Octavius, 23 ; Tertullian, 
 Apolog. 12 ; St. Cyp. De Spectaculis ; Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, 
 1. vi. c. 17 ; Seneca, quoted by St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, 1. vi. 
 c. 10. 
 
PAGANISM. 81 
 
 and found a living and most terrible deity in the person 
 of her Emperor. Earth could offer nothing more divine 
 in the sense of a majesty at once recognized and obeyed, 
 and Paganism did but push its principles to their con- 
 sequence in deifying the Caesars ; but reason fell to the 
 lowest depth of degradation, and the ^Egyptians gro- 
 velling before the beasts of the Nile outraged humanity 
 less than the age of the Antonines, with its philoso- 
 phers and jurisconsults rendering divine honours to the 
 Emperor Commodus.* 
 
 Again, Paganism perverted the Roman will by turn- 
 ing it from the supreme good by means of the two 
 passions fear and desire. Man craves for God, and 
 yet dreads Him, as he fears the dead, the life to come, 
 and all invisible things. Drawn irresistibly towards 
 Him, he takes flight and avoids His very Name, and the 
 fear which severs him from his last end is the chief 
 cause of all his aberrations. At first sight, Paganism 
 seemed a mere religion of terror, which in disfiguring 
 the idea of God, only made Him more obscure, more 
 threatening, more crushing to the imagination of man. 
 Nature, which it proposed as an object of adoration, 
 seemed but a third force, governed by no law, subject 
 only to the tremendous caprices which revealed them- 
 selves in the lightning flash and the earthquake, or the 
 volcanic phenomena of the Roman Campagna. Amidst 
 the thirty thousand deities with which he had peopled 
 the world, the Roman, far from being confident in their 
 protection, was full of disquietude. Ovid represents 
 the peasantry assembled before the image of Pales, and 
 the following is the prayer which he makes them 
 utter : 
 
 * Lampridius, Commodus Antoninus. 
 
 4 f 
 
82 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 " goddess, appease for us the fountains and their 
 divinities, appease the gods dispersed in the forest 
 depths ; grant that we may meet no Dryads, nor Diana 
 surprised at the bath, nor Faunus, when towards mid- 
 day he tramples the herbage of our fields." * 
 
 If the bold peasants of Latium thus shrank from an 
 encounter with wood-nymphs, it is no marvel that they 
 adored Fever and Fear. This feeling of terror per- 
 meated the entire religion, and gave rise to numberless 
 sinister rites, and the machinery in sight of which 
 Lucretius might well say that fear alone had made the 
 gods. It produced those frenzies of magic which were 
 but a despairing effort of man to resist these cruel deities, 
 and conquer them not by the moral merits of prayer 
 and virtue, but by the physical force of certain acts and 
 fixed formulas. There is no sight stranger but more 
 instructive than of that system of incantation and 
 senseless observance by means of which earth's wisest 
 race sought to lay nature in fetters ; t but which sooner 
 or later burst most terrible in power through its bonds, 
 and took vengeance on man through death. As, then, 
 death remained the ultimate ruler of the heathen world, 
 so human sacrifice was the last effort of the pagan liturgy. 
 It was principally by the infernal gods, by the souls of 
 ancestors wandering pale and attenuated around their 
 burial-place, that blood was demanded. Under Tar- 
 quin the First, children were sacrificed to Maria, the 
 mother of the Lares. In the brightest age of the re- 
 public and of the empire, a male and female Gaul and 
 a pair of Greeks were buried alive to avert an oracle 
 
 * Ovid, Fast. iv. 747 et seq. 
 
 t Cato, De re Rustica, 132, 141, 100 ; Plin. Hist. Nat. lib. 
 xxviii. c. 2. 
 
PAGANISM. 83 
 
 which had promised the soil of Eome to the barba- 
 rians ; the spell pronounced over the heads of the 
 victims devoted them to the gods of hell ; and Pliny, a 
 contemporary of these cruelties, was only struck by the 
 majesty of the ceremonial, and the force of its for- 
 mulas. When Constantine, and with him Christianity, 
 had mounted the imperial throne, the pagan priests still 
 offered, year by year, a cup of blood to Jupiter Latialis. 
 Vainly did the Romans forbid to their conquered nations 
 the slaughter of which they gave the example, and in 
 the third century human sacrifice still lingered in Africa 
 and Arcadia, as if all the laws of civilization were 
 powerless to stifle the brutish instincts which Paganism 
 let loose in the depths of man's fallen nature.* 
 
 But mankind, in flying from the true good, followed 
 one which was false. The terror which drove him from 
 God plunged man into lustful indulgence, and the 
 religion of fear became the sanction of carnal pleasure. 
 We must glance at the excesses of this error, if only to 
 disabuse the minds who, repelled by the sternness of 
 the Gospel, turn regretfully to antiquity, asking in what 
 respect the Koman civilization was inferior to that of 
 Christian times. Though Nature is constantly affording 
 a spectacle of decay, she is prodigal also in the prin- 
 ciple of life. She shows man that same power which 
 exists in him for the perpetuation of his race and is 
 open to be abused by him to his loss, and exhales from 
 every pore a dangerous spell, as it were, which is liable 
 to cause him to forget his spiritual destinies. Far from 
 
 * Macrob. Saturn, i. 7; Valer. Max. ii. 4, 7; PJin. Hist. Nat. 
 lib. xxviii. cap. 2 ; Plutarch, Qusest. Rom. 83 ; Suetonius, Vita. 
 Oct. 15 ; Tertullian, Apologet. 9 ; Prudentius contra Symma- 
 chum, i. 555 et seq. ; cf. Tzchirner der fall des Heidanthums, 
 p. 54 et seq. 
 
84 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 guarding man therefrom, Paganism plunged his being 
 into the intoxications of sense, and brought him to 
 adore the propagating principle in nature. Phidias 
 and Praxiteles were the servants of its brilliant worship, 
 and an obscene symbol was selected as a summary of 
 its mysteries. The feasts of Bacchus saw it led in 
 procession through the towns and villages of Latium, 
 amidst ceremonies in which matrons of noble birth 
 played their part. Songs and pantomime accompanied 
 the rite, and robbed the women who joined in it of all 
 excuse on the score of ignorance of its meaning ;* and 
 though these infamies have been veiled by the name of 
 symbolism, doubtless where the priests placed symbols, 
 the populace found incentives and examples. The gods 
 were honoured by imitation, and their adulteries served 
 to reassure the consciences which scrupled. At length, 
 from venerating love as the life-principle which circu- 
 lated in nature, they came to deify the nameless lusts 
 by which nature itself is outraged, and the immolation 
 of beauty and modesty ranked as the worthiest tribute 
 to the apotheosis of the flesh. Prostitution became a 
 religion, and its temples at Cyprus, at Samos, and at 
 Mount Erjrx, were served by thousands of courtesans.! 
 Lust also claimed its human victims, and terror and 
 passion, the twin scourges of the old society, drove man- 
 kind to the same abyss. Far distant from the supreme 
 good, man had deified the two forms of evil, destruction 
 and corruption, with a cult of which self-destruction 
 was the essence. In the face of an error so monstrous, 
 
 * St. Aug. De Civ. Dei, vii. c. 21, 24 ; cf. Aristophan. Acharn. ; 
 cf. Ovid, Fast, vi.: Herodotus, ii. 4-8. 
 
 t Plaut. Amphitryo ; Terence, Eunuch, iii. 5; Ovid, Meta- 
 morph. ix. 789 ; Herodotus, i. 128-18'J ; Justin, xviii. 5 ; cf. 
 Tzchirner, p. 16 et seq. 
 
PAGANISM. 85 
 
 of a worship which outraged the intellect in sanctioning 
 murder and feeing impurity, St. Augustine declared that 
 Christians honoured human nature too much to sup- 
 pose that she herself could have sunk so low, finding it 
 more pious to believe that the Spirit of Evil alone had 
 conceived such horrors, and had dishonoured man that 
 it might enslave him.* 
 
 But these abominations, calculated as they were to 
 raise every soul against Paganism, helped to subjugate 
 men by depraving them, and thus preserved for more 
 than a century the dominion of which the old religion 
 had been robbed by law. Imperial edicts had pro- 
 scribed the superstitions, dispersed the priests of 
 Cybele and the priestesses of Venus, but all the lustful 
 and bloody features of the old cult survived in the 
 amphitheatre. St. Cyprian had called idolatry the 
 mother of the games, and it was needful for a religion, 
 whose object it was to throw a divine halo over pleasure, 
 to lay prompt hold upon the public amusements. Eome 
 had borrowed from Etruria gladiatorial combats to 
 appease the dead, histrionic dances to cajole the anger 
 of heaven. The Eoman people held its festivals for 
 the gods and its ancestors, and laboured to reproduce in 
 symbolic representation the delights of the Immortals. 
 The races of the Circus signified the movement of the 
 stars, the dances of the theatre the voluptuous im- 
 pulses which enslave every living being. In the conflicts 
 of the amphitheatre were depicted in miniature the 
 struggles of humanity.! The dedication of the Circus 
 to the sun was marked by an obelisk raised in the 
 
 * St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, 1. vii. c. 27, 117; cf. Dollinger, 
 Heidenthum und Judenthum, Eng. Trans. Book ix. 2-4. (TV.) 
 
 t Varro, cited by St. Aug. De Civit. Dei, 1. iv. c. 1 ; Tertullian, 
 De Spectaculis, 4 ; St. Cyprian, Epistola ad Donatum, 7 et 8. 
 
86 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 midst of the enclosure ; on the line dividing it were 
 built three altars in honour of the Cabires ; and every 
 column and monument, as well as the post around 
 which the chariots turned, had its tutelary god. Before 
 the opening of the races, a procession of priests bore 
 round the Circus images of the gods reposing on 
 richly embroidered couches, and numbers of sacrificial 
 acts preceded, interrupted, and followed the sports. 
 When the napkin, falling from the hands of the 
 magistrate, gave the signal for the charioteers, the 
 darlings of Eome, to enter the arena, and the intoxi- 
 cated and panting multitude pursued, with cries loud 
 and long, the chariots which they favoured or scorned, 
 divided into furious factions, and ended in coming to 
 blows, then were the gods content, and Komulus 
 recognized his people his children, indeed who had 
 lost their world-wide dominion, who were bought and 
 sold for money," but could still forget everything in the 
 Circus, and find therein, according to the expression of 
 a contemporary writer, their temple, their forum, their 
 country, and the theme of all their hopes. The 
 Calendar of 448 still marked fifty-eight days of public 
 games in that year of terror in which Genseric and 
 Attila were awaiting in full panoply the hour appointed 
 by Heaven.* 
 
 The theatre was the domain of Venus, for when 
 Pompey restored in marble the wooden benches on 
 which the Komans of old had sat, he dedicated his 
 edifice to the goddess who perturbed all nature by the 
 power of her fascinations. It also was a temple, with a 
 garland- crowned altar in the midst, set apart for a per- 
 
 * Tertullian, De Spectaculis, vii. 16 ; Ammianus Marcellin. 
 xiv. 26 ; Polem. Sylv. Laterculus. 
 
PAGANISM. 87 
 
 formance of the myths in which the gods appeared as 
 exemplars of the deepest immorality. It was there 
 that the mimes, youths withered from infancy, played 
 in pantomime the loves of Jupiter or the frenzies of 
 Pasiphae. But the prosaic common-sense of the Eomans 
 was ill-content with the pleasure of dramatic illusion ; 
 they spurned a vainly-excited emotion, so, to soothe 
 their leisure, the ideal had to cede to reality : women 
 were dishonoured on the stage, or, if the drama was 
 tragic, the criminal who played the part of Atys was 
 mutilated, or the personator of Hercules was hurnt. 
 Martial boasts of an imperial festival in which Orpheus 
 appeared charming the mountains of Thrace with his 
 lyre, drawing trees and rocks after him enamoured by 
 his melody, and finally torn limb from limb by a bear, 
 while the cries of the actor, who thus threw some life 
 into the languor of the old tragedy, were drowned by 
 songs and dances.* Three thousand female dancers 
 served like so many priestesses the theatres of Eome, 
 and were kept in the city when, on the occasion of 
 a famine, all the grammarians were expelled. The 
 sovereign people could not do without its lovely cap- 
 tives ; it covered them with applause and with flowers, 
 but caused them to uncover their bodies before the 
 image of Flora. Yet the senators on the front ranks 
 showed no indignation, and the rhetorician Libanius 
 wrote an apology for dancers and mimes, justifying them 
 by the precedent of the pleasures of Olympus, and 
 praising their continuance of the education given to 
 the people formerly by the priest ; whilst the pagan 
 party was powerful enough to obtain a prohibition of 
 
 Martial, Lib. de Spect. ep. 7; cf. Dbllinger, Heidentlium 
 und Judcnthum, Eng. Trans, vol. ii. pp. 281 284. (Tr.) 
 
88 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 baptizing actors, except in danger of death, lest as 
 Christians they might escape the public pleasures of 
 which they were the slaves.* 
 
 Paganism did not afford the gods any sweeter pleasure 
 than that of contemplating the perils of men from the 
 depths of their own repose, so the amphitheatre had more 
 tutelary deities than the Capitol, and Tertullian could 
 say that more demons than men assisted at the spectacle. 
 Diana presided at the chase, and Mars at the combats ; 
 and when the magisterial edicts had sanctioned the 
 sports, the men who were the destined prey of the wild 
 beasts appeared in garments sacred to Saturn, whilst the 
 women were crowned with the fillets of Ceres, as victims 
 in a sacrifice.! After the earth had been loaded with 
 the corpses of gladiators in one of these popular shows, 
 a gate of the arena opened and disclosed two personages, 
 one bearing the attributes of Mercury struck the bodies 
 with the end of his flame-coloured caduceus, to assure 
 the people that the victims no longer breathed, and the 
 other, armed with Pluto's hammer, despatched those who 
 still survived. This apparition reminded the spectators 
 that they were assisting at funereal games, and that the 
 blood which was spilt was rejoicing the manes of the 
 old Komans in their infernal dwelling-place. It was the 
 spirit of Paganism which permeated that mighty people, 
 as the magistrates, priests, and vestal virgins bent in 
 applause from the height of the Podium, that they 
 might do high honour to their ancestors, and eighty 
 
 * Tertullian, De Spect. 10 ; Apologetic, 15 ; Martial, Spectac. 
 xxi. ; Prudentius, Hymnus de Sancto llomano ; Sidon. Apollin. 
 xiv. ; Libanius, Oratio pro Saltatoribus ; Theodosian Code, 
 1. xv. tit. 13, L. Unic. ; ibid. tit. 17, 1, 5, 12 ; Miiller, De Ingenio, 
 Moribus et Luxu aeri Theodosiani ; De Champagny, Monde 
 Romain, 1. ii. p. 177 et seq. 
 
 f Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 12 ; Acta Sanctae Perpetuae. 
 
PAGANISM. 89 
 
 thousand spectators joined in the action with a shudder 
 of joy. The wise offered no resistance to this brutal- 
 izing of the mass. Even Cicero, though troubled by a 
 momentary scruple, dared not absolutely condemn prac- 
 tices so rife with instruction for a people of warriors ; 
 and the younger Pliny, though a man of benevolence 
 and wisdom, congratulated Trajan on having provided 
 " no enervating spectacle, but manly pleasures, destined 
 to rekindle in the souls of men contempt for death and 
 pride in a well-placed wound." Yet, as if to humiliate 
 such bloodthirsty wisdom, the military worth of the 
 Komans diminished as the games of cruelty were 
 multiplied. The Eepublic had never witnessed the suf- 
 ferings of more than fifty pairs of gladiators in a day, 
 but five hundred figured in the games given by the 
 Emperor Gordian ; and the Goths were at the very gates 
 of Eome as the prefects were engaged in supplying the 
 arena and finding a sufficient number of prisoners 
 ready to devote themselves for the pleasures of the 
 Eternal City.* 
 
 Paganism had thus, as if in a forlorn hope, taken its 
 last stand in the public amusements. Thence it defied 
 the eloquence of the Fathers, disputed souls with them, 
 moulded society after its own fashion, and therein it 
 might be known by its fruits. Pagans themselves 
 acknowledged that the passion for the Circus hastened 
 the decline of Eome, and that nothing of mark could 
 be expected from a people which passed days in 
 breathless interest over the issue of a chariot race. 
 And how much more did the fault lie with the theatre, 
 
 * Tertullian, Apologetic, 15; Prudent, contra Symmachum, 
 lib. i. 279 ; Cicero, Tusculan. Qusest. 11-17 ; Plin. Panegyric, 
 33 ; Xiphilin, in Trajano : Capitol, in Gordiano ; cf. De Cham- 
 pagny, le Monde Romain, ii. 180 et seq. 
 
90 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and what eyes could have borne with impunity the ges- 
 tures and scenes in which Rome found her recreation? 
 Christian priests knew the result, and one of them 
 declared that he could point to men whom the incita- 
 tions of those spectacles had torn from the nuptial 
 couch and thrown into the arms of courtesans. Yet 
 fathers of families took their wives and daughters to 
 witness them; nor could they see anything that the 
 temple services had not already made familiar. But the 
 amphitheatre was resistless in its attractions, and the 
 greatest school ever opened for the demoralization of 
 man. Alypius, the friend of St. Augustine, a philoso- 
 pher, a man of learning, and with Christian leanings, was 
 drawn one day, through want of moral courage, to the 
 scenes which his better nature loathed. At first he 
 vowed to see nothing, and closed his eyes, when suddenly, 
 at the sound of a death- shriek, he opened and turned 
 them upon the arena, and did not withdraw them till 
 the end. He drank in cruelty with the sight of blood, 
 quenched his thirst in the Fury's cup, and intoxicated 
 his spirit with the reek of the slaughter. No longer the 
 same man, he became like the most ardent of that 
 barbarous crew. He shouted, and felt his veins on fire, 
 and brought away a passion to return, no longer with 
 those who had taken him, but with others dragged 
 thither by himself. To such a depth of irresolution, 
 lust, and savageness had Paganism, ever corrupting itself 
 and man with it, reduced earth's most civilized people.* 
 Behind the popular creed stood Philosophy, which 
 from having combated now sought to defend it, and 
 succeeded with sufficient art to rally around the old 
 
 * St. Chrysostom, Homil. 37, in Matthseum;. St. Aug. Con- 
 fess, vi. 8. 
 
PAGANISM. 91 
 
 religion the most enlightened members of Roman so- 
 ciety. It had at the outset announced itself to be a 
 revolt of reason against Paganism, and our respect is 
 due to those early sages who remounted to the sources 
 of tradition, to explain the secrets of nature, in spite of 
 the superstitious terrors which barred their approach, 
 and with still greater courage busied themselves in the 
 solitudes of the conscience, still desolate from the lack 
 of Christian enlightenment. They had sought the 
 First Cause to which Socrates, in teaching all the Divine 
 attributes which Creation makes known, had nearly ap- 
 proached. But the mere glimpse of the True God 
 caused the thrones of the false deities to totter, and 
 these philosophers, in exposing the foundations of the 
 pagan society, dreaded the collapse of the whole super- 
 structure. Loving truth insufficiently, whilst they de- 
 spised humanity, they devoted their genius to rehabili- 
 tating errors which, as they said, were necessary to the 
 peace of the world. Cicero publicly derided the augurs, 
 but in tracing the plan of an ideal republic in his 
 " Treatise on Law," he placed therein augurs, whose 
 decisions were to be obeyed on pain of death. Seneca 
 ridiculed the worship of idols, but did not shrink from 
 drawing the conclusion that even the wise ought to 
 practise it, and thus honour custom and truth. The 
 Stoics justified public worship for reasons of state, and 
 protected the current mythology by an allegorical in- 
 terpretation.* Nature they defended as an active prin- 
 ciple, energizing under many forms, and which was 
 
 * Cicero, De Legibus, ii. ; De Natura Deorum, ii. 24 ; Seneca, 
 cited by St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, vi. 10 ; Diogenes, Laert. 
 vii. 147 ; St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib vi. and vii. through- 
 out; Ravaisson, Essai sur la Metaphysique d'Aristote, t. ii. 
 p. 161. 
 
92 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 open to veneration under many names to be called 
 Jupiter in the life-giving aspect, Juno in the air, 
 Neptune in water, or Vulcan in fire explanations 
 which were but as preludes of the prodigious work by 
 which the school of Alexandria was to undertake the 
 reconciliation of the imperial religion with reason. 
 
 History has made the school of Alexandria well 
 known, and we can trace its rise in the East, how it 
 passed into the West and established a school at Kome, 
 which concurred in the political restoration of Paganism 
 set on foot by Augustus, was for three ages upheld by 
 the Caesars, and was prolonged to the fifth century 
 through the obstinacy of the patrician order in defend- 
 ing its interests and its deities. Neoplatonism appeared 
 at Rome under Antoninus, in the person of Apuleius, 
 a learned but superstitious and adventurous African, 
 who had visited the schools and sanctuaries of Greece 
 and of Etruria, and returned to travel from town to 
 town, haranguing the people and laying claim to a 
 combination of the wisdom of philosophers, and the 
 piety of the initiated in the Mysteries. The Imperial 
 City admired his eloquence, and the provinces delighted 
 in his opinions, which had such power in Africa that 
 St. Augustine, after the lapse of two centuries, de- 
 voted twenty-five chapters of " The City of God " to 
 their refutation. Meanwhile the declamations of 
 Apuleius had prepared men's minds for a teaching of 
 greater gravity and deeper scope. Plotinus, the chief 
 of the Alexandrian philosophers, came to Rome in 
 244, passed twenty- six years there, and reckoned among 
 his auditors senators, magistrates, and matrons of 
 noble birth, to whom this ^Egyptian of half-frenzied 
 countenance, who expressed himself in semi-barbarous 
 
PAGANISM. 93 
 
 Greek, seemed a messenger of the gods. A praetor 
 was seen to lay down his fasces, dismiss his slaves, and 
 relinquish his property, that he might abandon himself 
 to wisdom. So rapid was the increase of his disciples, 
 that Plotinus was bold enough to demand from the 
 Emperor Gallian a plot of land in Campania on which 
 he might found a city of philosophers, to be governed 
 by the rules of Plato. Although the design failed, 
 and the republic of sages was never constituted, yet he 
 left behind him a host of followers, who carried his 
 doctrines into the senate and the camp, the schools and 
 the social life of Home. Porphyry was the most faithful 
 and learned of his disciples, and wrote books at Rome, 
 in Sicily, and at Carthage, his three places of residence, 
 which were translated into Latin, finally popularized 
 the Neoplatonic views, and were handed down into the 
 fifth century. Under Yalentinian III., Macrobius, in 
 the full blaze of Christianity, wrote a commentary on 
 " Scipio's Dream," in which he found occasion to set 
 forth the system of Plotinus as an ancient doctrine, 
 common to the first minds of Greece and Rome, whether 
 poets or metaphysicians, as capable of reconciling every 
 school of thought, and justifying every fable of my- 
 thology. Such being the propagandists of Neoplatonism 
 in the West, it remains to note by what occult influence 
 a philosophy intrinsically abstruse, and charged with 
 Greek subtleties, could seduce the good sense of the 
 Latins.* 
 
 The contradiction which lay at the root of the old 
 philosophy was the very point of the Alexandrian 
 doctrines. Beginning with a departure from Paganism, 
 
 * St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, viii. and ix. id. epist. 118; 
 Porphyry, De Vita Plotini ; Macrobius, in Somnium Scipionis. 
 
94 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 they returned to it by long byways, charmed the 
 reason by a promise of sublime dogmas, and satisfied 
 the imagination by conceding all its fables. This was 
 calculated to soothe many a spirit tormented by a double 
 craving after faith and reason, but too weak to embrace 
 the austere belief of the Christians. Plotinus incited 
 a society, trembling at the earliest disasters of the 
 Empire, which seemed to cause all pleasures of earth to 
 slip from their grasp, to take refuge in God. It was 
 necessary, he said, and St. Augustine praised the say- 
 ing, to fly towards the spiritual abodes in which dwelt 
 the Father and every good thing. He spared no effort, 
 however costly, to achieve his lofty aim, and as the 
 giants piled mountain on mountain to reach the sky, 
 so did Plotinus labour to reach a knowledge of God by 
 a fusion of the three great systems of Zeno, of Aris- 
 totle, and of Plato. With Zeno, he gave to the world 
 a soul, which made of it one single existence ; with 
 Aristotle, he placed above the world an Intelligence 
 whose sole function was self-contemplation ; and, with 
 Plato, he fixed at the summit of all things an Invisible 
 Principle, which he called the One, or the Good. But 
 though he named it he pronounced it indefinable, and 
 so veiled it from the gaze of mankind. The One, the 
 Intelligence, the World- Soul, were not three Gods, but 
 three Hypostases of a Sole God, who proceeded from 
 his unity to think and to act.* 
 
 As the three Hypostases produced themselves in 
 eternity, so was the World-Soul engendered in time. It 
 gave forth space first, then the bodies destined to people 
 
 * St. Aug. De Civit. Dei, 1. ix. 17 ; Porphyry, De Vit. Plot, 
 c. 14; Plotinus, Eimeades, i. 1. vi. c. 8; ibid. in. lib. v. c. 4; 
 Itavaisson, Essai sur la Metaphysique d'Aristote, t. ii. p. 381. 
 
PAGANISM. 95 
 
 space, such as the demons and the constellations, lastly 
 men, animals, plants, and the bodies we think inani- 
 mate. But nothing in nature is really inanimate, for 
 everything lives and thinks according to one life and 
 one thought ; for the Neoplatonists saw in the infinity of 
 productions an emanation from the Divine Substance 
 communicating itself without impoverishment the sun 
 pouring forth a wasteless light, the fountain which fed 
 the river reseeking its source, and the whole universe 
 aspiring to return to its primaeval unity.* 
 
 Nor was the destiny of man's soul different. Con- 
 tained at first in the Divine Spirit, it had lived a pure 
 life therein, till the sight of the world of matter beneath 
 tempted it to essay an independent existence. Detached 
 from the Divine Parent, it fell to inhabiting bodies 
 formed after its own image, and human life became a 
 Fall, of which the soul could repent, and raise herself 
 so as to pass after death into a higher sphere. But too 
 often she comes to delight in her exile, abandons her- 
 self to the senses, and, on reaching death, is degraded 
 to animating the bodies of brutes or of plants, whose 
 lives of sensuality or of stupidity she had been imi- 
 tating. Thus, in proportion to her wallowing in evil, 
 does the soul sink deeper into matter, till by a supreme 
 effort she tears herself from the mire and begins to 
 aspire ; but, whatever may be the length of probation, 
 its end is certain, for a time must come when good 
 and evil alike shall find themselves confounded in the 
 bosom of the Universal Soul.f 
 
 * Plotin. Ennead. iv. lib. iv. c. 36; ibid. lib. iii. cap. 9, &c; 
 Jules Simon, Histoire de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, t. i. p. 342. 
 
 t Plot. Enn. v. 1. i. 1. iv. c. 4 ; ibid. 1. 1. ii. c. 1. Ravaisson, 
 ibid. p. 445 ; Jules Simon, ibid. p. 589. 
 
96 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 This was assuredly a grand and elevating doctrine. 
 When it spoke of a Supreme God, and declared Him 
 to be One, Immaterial, and Impassible, it seemed as 
 if nothing were left but to break the old idols. Some 
 of these, doctrines surprised Christians, who thought 
 them to have been pilfered from the Gospel, as some, 
 nowadays, have accused Christianity of enriching itself 
 from the spoils of Neoplatonism. Yet, without denying 
 that something might have been borrowed from the 
 new religion, published two ages before, all the specu- 
 lations of Alexandria had their issue in Paganism. 
 The Principle placed by Plotinus at the summit of all 
 things had nothing in common with the God of the 
 Christians. They acknowledged in the First Cause 
 perfections which brought Him near to the intellect 
 and to the heart; he robbed his First Principle of 
 every attribute, denied him thought and life, forbade 
 either definition or affirmation concerning him. His 
 god was an abstraction, which could neither be known 
 nor loved, an illogical and immoral being fit character 
 for the deities of Paganism. A similar abyss separated 
 the trinity of Plotinus from our own, in which the 
 Unity of Nature subsists through the equality of Three 
 Persons, whereas the philosopher destroyed the Divine 
 One-ness in his three unequal Hypostases. In his 
 scheme, the First Principle alone was perfect and in- 
 divisible ; the second and third detached themselves 
 from it by a sort of deterioration, and leant towards 
 the imperfect world which they had engendered. Nor 
 was this divided god a free agent, but produced by 
 necessity, by the inevitable outflow of his Substance, 
 a world as eternal as himself. The Pantheism of 
 Plotinus deified matter and justified magic, because, as 
 
PAGANISM. 97 
 
 he said, the philtres and formulas of the magician tend 
 to reawaken the attractions whereby the Universal Soul 
 governs all things ; and it sanctioned idolatry because 
 the sculptor's chisel, in causing marble to assume a 
 character of expression and beauty, prepares for the 
 Supreme Soul a receptacle in which she reposes with 
 greater satisfaction.* 
 
 Such was the issue of the boldest flight of meta- 
 physics in the old school, and its accompanying 
 morality proceeded to the same extremities. Since 
 it was the property of the divine nature to produce 
 and animate everything, the human souls which it 
 had generated could not arrest their own descent to 
 matter. In their first fall there was no free will, and, 
 consequently, no moral guilt. If new sins caused them 
 to sink lower, this was but necessary to people the 
 lower regions of the Universe, and fill the ladder of 
 emanations to its last degrees. Evil thus became 
 necessary, or, rather, evil only existed as a lesser good 
 in the succession of existences that were farther and 
 farther removed from the divine perfection which had 
 produced and was to reabsorb them. An ultimate 
 reception into the Unity, in utter unconsciousness of 
 their past, was thus to be the end of both the just and 
 of the unjust. Plotinus therefore returned, through 
 the doctrine of Metempsychosis, to the old fables, and 
 though severe in his personal character, disarmed 
 morality by a suppression of the idea of individual 
 permanence, without which a future life affords in 
 
 * Plot. Enn. in. viii. 9 ; ibid. vi. viii. 7 ; ibid. ix. 6 ; ibid. 
 ix. 4; ibid. iv. iv. 40: ibid. iii. 11. M. Ravaisson has clearly- 
 brought out the points on which the doctrine of Plotinus departed 
 from Christian thought, and was lost in pagan naturalism. 
 Essai sur la Metaphysique d'Aristote, t. ii. p. 465. 
 
 VOL. I. 5 
 
98 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 prospect neither hope nor fear ; whilst the doctrine of 
 the emanation of the soul from the Divine Substance 
 tended to that worst form of idolatry, the deification 
 of man. The essence of Paganism was breathed forth 
 in the haughty satisfaction with which the dying 
 philosopher answered one of his disciples; "I am 
 labouring," said he, " to disengage the divine element 
 within me."* In looking closely at the distinctive 
 dogmas of Plotinus, his unrevealed unity, and im- 
 perfect trinity, the emanations which composed the 
 substance of the Universe, the fall and rise of souls, 
 we see traces of the mysteries of an old theosophy 
 long prevalent in the East. The Etruscans had com- 
 municated it to the ancient Eomans, and their 
 descendants of the Decline might have recognized 
 with surprise, in the writings of the ^Egyptian philo- 
 sopher, doctrines which formed the basis of the 
 national religion. They saw them now clothed in 
 eloquence, fortified by the subtleties of logic, brightened 
 by the fires of mysticism ; but the Neoplatonists gave 
 them, besides, sufficient justification for the rest of 
 their creed, even to its most extravagant fables. 
 Thus Apuleius had distinguished the incorporeal deities 
 who were incapable of passion from the daemons en- 
 dowed with subtle bodies, but having souls full of 
 human feeling ; and mythology had taken refuge in 
 the distinction.! It was no longer the gods, but 
 daemons, who loved the odours of sacrifices, whom 
 the poets had brought upon the scene, whom Homer 
 had, without profanation, introduced on the battle- 
 field. Porphyry imagined thousands of explanations 
 
 * Porphyry, De Vita Plotini. 
 
 f Apuleius, De Deo Socratis, 3, 6, 7, 14. 
 
PAGANISM. 99 
 
 for the myths of Egj^pt and of Greece,* and Macrohius 
 made it his one aim to justify the old fables through 
 philosophy ; " for," said he, " the knowledge of things 
 sacred is veiled ; nature loves not to be surprised in 
 her nudity. When Numenius betrayed, by a rash 
 interpretation, the mysteries of Eleusis, we are told 
 that the outraged goddesses appeared to him in the 
 guise of courtesans, and accused him of having drawn 
 them from their shrines, and made them public to the 
 passers-by: for the gods have ever loved to reveal 
 themselves to men, and to serve them under the 
 fabulous features in which antiquity has presented 
 them."t The Neoplatonists were equally ingenious 
 in rehabilitating the observances which shocked the 
 reason or outraged nature. Plotinus, being more of a 
 philosopher than a theologian, had only justified the 
 old superstitions incidentally ; but his disciples, im- 
 patient of the hesitating methods of philosophy, craved 
 for a speedier commerce with heaven by means of 
 theurgy, by sacrifices, spells, and magical arts. Jam- 
 blichus wrote a proof of the divinity of the idols, 
 undertook the defence of Venus and Priapus, and 
 approved the veneration of the obscene symbols. The 
 Emperor Julian professed to reform Paganism. He 
 could, with a word, have shorn it of its abominations, 
 but he authorized the mutilation of the priests of 
 Cybele, "for thus does it behove us," he said, "to 
 honour the Mother of the Gods."! The most learned 
 plunged deepest into superstition, and men whose 
 
 * Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. 
 f Macrobius, in Somnium Scipionis, 1. i. c. 2. 
 X Jamblichus, De Mysteriis, sect. i. c. 11 ; Jules Simon, 
 Histoire de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, t. i. 
 
 5 * 
 
100 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 minds had fed on Plato and Aristotle, wasted their 
 vigils in the hope of evoking at their will gods, 
 daemons, and departed souls : or, assembled round a 
 vervein-garlanded tripod, questioned fate as to the end 
 of the emperor and his destined successor. Thus was 
 the prophecy of St. Paul accomplished, and the heirs 
 of that Alexandrian philosophy which professed to have 
 gathered up the scattered lights of antiquity only 
 restored its frenzies of vice. 
 
 In this manner was heathenism reinvigorated by the 
 Neoplatonists, precisely as was congruous to a worn- 
 out society, tired of doubt, incapable of faith, but a prey 
 to every superstition which was offered to it. From 
 the pagan aristocracy, whose views they seconded, 
 their welcome was assured, and their school of philo- 
 sophy, which had blossomed into a religious sect, 
 became the bulwark of a political party. In fact, the 
 senatorial families who were attached to the old creed 
 had not followed the court to Constantinople, Milan, 
 or Ravenna, but remained at Rome, to adorn with 
 their patrician majesty the capital which the Caesars 
 had repudiated. In it at least they hoped to guard 
 the sacred hearth of the Empire, and avert the anger 
 of the gods by their fidelity to the ancient rites. They 
 drew to their side and covered with patronage and 
 applause the men who defended by their learning the 
 old interests and the old altars. By the aid of an 
 allegorical interpretation the nobility tasted the sweet- 
 ness of believing otherwise than the common people, 
 and yet preserving the customs of their ancestors; 
 whilst, strong in the teaching of Porphyry and Macro- 
 bius, they looked with pity on the mad crowd who 
 were drawn to Baptism, and cared not to conceal their 
 
PAGANISM. 101 
 
 contempt for the Christian rulers, to whose charge 
 they laid all the disasters of the state. Disquieted 
 within, bearing a threatening attitude to those without, 
 the pagan world looked to them as champions, who, 
 looking again to the future, were ready to support any 
 ruler who would resume Julian's incompleted task. 
 At court they had followers of mark enough to gain 
 the highest dignities of the state ; from the offices of 
 the priesthood they drew a certain amount of influence 
 and a considerable revenue ; their palaces comprised 
 whole towns, and their demesnes were provinces from 
 which they could summon at will an army of slaves 
 and clients ; and by the public games which they pro- 
 vided they wielded their last weapon for kindling the 
 passions of the people. At the opening of the fifth 
 century, the best representation of the Eoman aristo- 
 cracy, the man best fitted to grace it by his eloquence 
 and learning, was Symmachus, the prefect of Rome. 
 His versatile genius, capable alike in the sphere of 
 politics as in that of learning, was the wonder of his 
 contemporaries; and men of taste, comparing his letters 
 to those of Pliny, desired to see them written on rolls 
 of silk. He had sung of the vine-clad volcanoes of 
 Baiae in graceful verse, and taken a high rank among 
 orators by right of his panegyrics, in which he had 
 exhausted on Christian princes the language of idolatry. 
 So active an intellect could not but live in close rela- 
 tion to the finest wits of the time. In his letters to 
 Ausonius he compared him to Virgil, and the poet's 
 reply put Symmachus side by side with Cicero. He 
 was the chosen patron of all new lectures and decla- 
 mations. One day he was observed in high spirits 
 at having just been present at the first appearance 
 
102 CIVILISATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of the rhetorician Palladius, who had charmed the 
 auditory by his florid eloquence; another time, when 
 the city of Milan had applied to him for a professor of 
 eloquence, he sent for a young African noted for his 
 learning and genius, proposed him a subject, heard 
 with approval, and dispatched him to Milan. The 
 youth was Augustine, and Symmachus little knew the 
 injury he was doing to his gods in sending such a 
 disciple to the Bishop Ambrose. His well-founded 
 authority in literature was enhanced by his brilliant 
 political position. Successively governor of Lucania, 
 proconsul of Africa, prefect of Eome, and lastly 
 consul, as a versatile politician but pure adminis- 
 trator, Symmachus had become the crown of the 
 Eoman nobility, and the soul of that senate which he 
 did not hesitate to name the best part of the human 
 race. He beheld in it the last asylum of the doctrines 
 to which he had devoted all his genius and all his 
 fame. Like the patricians of old, whose example he 
 followed, he aspired to reunite all religious and civil 
 honours in his own person, and add the fillets of the 
 priest to the fasces of the consul. To his post in the 
 college of pontiffs he brought a scrupulous ardour 
 which withered the timidity of his colleagues, and 
 groaning over the abandonment of the sacrifices, was 
 as eager to appease the gods by victims as to defend 
 them by the powers of his eloquence. 
 
 This zealous pagan, so justly respected for his learn- 
 ing, certainly merited to be the spokesman of the 
 cause of polytheism when it made its last public 
 protest in demanding the restoration of the altar of 
 victory. This altar had stood in the midst of the 
 senate house, had given it the character of a temple, 
 
PAGANISM. 103 
 
 and served to recall the ancient theocratic system of 
 law and the alliance of Kome with the gods. The 
 Christian emperors had removed it as a scandal, and 
 the pagan senators declared that they could no longer 
 deliberate in a place which had been thus profaned, 
 and shorn of the auspices of the divinity who, for 
 twelve hundred years, had preserved the Empire. 
 Symmachus took charge of the complaint, and showed 
 in his protest how much faith the mind of an idolater 
 could preserve. His eloquent plaint began and ended 
 in scepticism, and in face of the religious differences 
 which sundered his contemporaries, his view grew dark 
 and uncertain. 
 
 " Every one," said he, " has his peculiar custom and 
 rite ; surely it is just to recognize one and the same 
 divinity beneath these different forms of adoration. 
 We contemplate the same stars, the same heaven is 
 common to both, and we are enfolded by the same 
 earth. What does the manner matter in which each 
 seeks for truth? One sole way cannot suffice for 
 arriving at that great mystery ; and yet how healthy 
 are such disputes for the slothful."* 
 
 This revealed the hidden sore of paganism, and 
 showed that the efforts of philosophy had only issued 
 in a declaration of the inaccessibility of truth. Yet 
 the spirits which were too worn out for faith had force 
 left still for persecution ; and the same Symmachus, 
 who was so uncertain about the gods, to whom the 
 supreme reason of things was veiled by an eternal 
 mist, who deemed religious controversy an unworthy 
 waste of a statesman's time, hunted down with inde- 
 
 * Villemain, Tableau de l'Eloquence Ckretienne au Quatrieme 
 Siecle ; Symmach. 1. x. epist. 61. 
 
104 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 fatigable energy a vestal who had fallen. He consulted 
 with the imperial officers, importuned the prefect of 
 the city and the president of the province, and took no 
 repose until he had seen the culprit buried alive, 
 according to the custom of his ancestors; for the 
 bloody instincts of his creed were preserved as fresh 
 beneath the robe of the senator and the polish of the 
 man of culture as beneath the rags of the populace 
 who crowded the amphitheatre. In a.d. 402, Sym- 
 machus desired to celebrate his son's prsetorship by 
 games, and before the time fixed had drained the 
 provinces of their rarest products in the way of race- 
 horses, wild beasts, comedians, and gladiators; but 
 amidst these cares an unlooked-for calamity overtook 
 him, which he confided in a letter to Flavian, his 
 friend. All the philosophy of Socrates was not enough, 
 he said, to console him for twenty-nine of the Saxon 
 prisoners whom he had purchased for the arena having 
 impiously strangled themselves rather than serve the 
 pastimes of the sovereign people.* 
 
 Such was the effect of heathen wisdom on a naturally 
 upright and benevolent soul in the fifth century, that 
 advanced age in the world's life, bright moreover with 
 all the lights of antiquity. A contemporary historian, 
 himself a pagan, has undertaken a general description 
 of the aristocracy, and represents the last guardians of 
 the traditions of Numa as no longer believing in the 
 gods, but not daring to dine or bathe before the 
 astrologer had assured them of the favour of the 
 planets. The sons of those Komans who had gone 
 forth with the eagle's flight, as it were, to conquest 
 
 * Symmach. lib. ix. epist. 128, 129 ; lib. xi. epist. 46. 
 
PAGANISM. 105 
 
 under the frigid or the torrid zone, thought they had 
 rivalled the doings of Caesar if they coasted the bay of 
 Baiae, cradled in a sumptuous bark, fanned by boys, 
 and declaring life unbearable if a ray of sun stole 
 through the awning spread overhead. They exposed 
 to public gaze all the infamy of their domestic orgies, 
 and appeared abroad surrounded by a legion of 
 slaves, headed by a troop of youths who had been 
 mutilated for their hideous pleasures. What respect 
 could these voluptuaries have for their fellow-creatures ? 
 Little did they recognize the sanctity which lies in the 
 blood and tears of men, and whilst they had only a 
 laugh for the clever slave who skilfully killed his 
 fellow, they condemned another to the rods who had 
 made them wait for hot water.* 
 
 Such men as these loved the creed which left their 
 vices at peace. In despair of truth they only asked for 
 repose in error, and St. Augustine had sounded the 
 depth of their hearts, or rather of their passions, 
 when he put into their mouths this language, that 
 of materialists of every age : " What matter to us 
 truths which are not to be reached by human reason ? 
 What is of importance is that the State should stand, 
 should be rich, and, above all, tranquil. What touches 
 us supremely is that public prosperity should serve to 
 augment the wealth which keeps the great in splen- 
 dour, the small in comfort, and, consequently, in 
 submission. Let the laws ordain nothing irksome, 
 forbid nothing that is agreeable ; let the ruler secure 
 his people's obedience by showing himself no gloomy 
 censor of their morajs, but the purveyor of their plea- 
 sures ; let the markets teem with beautiful slaves ; let 
 
 * Ammian. Marcellin. xiv. 6 ; xxviii. 4. 
 
 5 i 
 
106 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUET. 
 
 the palaces be sumptuous and banquets frequent, at 
 which every one may gorge, drink, and vomit till day- 
 break ; everywhere let the sound of dancing be heard 
 and joyous applause break over the benches of the 
 theatre ; let those gods be held true who have assured us 
 such happiness ; give them the worship they prefer, the 
 games they delight in, that they may enjoy themselves 
 with their adorers. We pray them only to make our 
 felicity lasting, that we may have no cause for fear from 
 plague or foe."* 
 
 But the foe was at the gate, and the hour approach- 
 ing in which doctrines which had been handed down 
 from school to school, and found their place in the 
 Eoman senate, were to undergo their supreme probation 
 before the barbarians, that the world might see what 
 philosophic Paganism could do towards saving the 
 Empire, or, at least, making its fall dignified. In 
 a.d. 408, Alaric presented himself before Kome, and the 
 smoke of the enemy's camp could be seen from the 
 temple of the Capitolian Jupiter. At this pressing 
 moment the first act of the senate, assembled in delibe- 
 ration, was to put to death Serena, the widow of Stilicho 
 and niece of Theodosius a victim whom the gods 
 required ; for it was said that this sacrilegious Chris- 
 tian had once entered the Temple of Cybele and carried 
 off the necklace from the image. Serena was strangled 
 after the old fashion (more majorum), but that last 
 human sacrifice did not save her country. Alaric 
 demanded all the gold, silver, and precious stones of 
 the city, and only left the Komans their dishonoured 
 lives ; whereupon the prefect, Pompeianus, caused the 
 Etruscan priests, who boasted of having saved the little 
 * St. Aug. De Civitate Dei, ii. 20. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. Ill 
 
 y it calamity had befallen the Empire whose frontiers 
 id been delivered to the barbarians by the outraged 
 )ds, and heaven kept back its very rain on account of 
 le Christians. Pluvia desit causa Christiani.* 
 
 The Christian apologist answered with inimitable 
 juity and vigour, refusing in the first place to condemn 
 itirely the old civilization, acknowledging a modicum 
 truth in the doctrines of the philosophers, of good in 
 le Roman legislation, and, as we shall see hereafter, 
 reserving the literature whilst they rejected the fables 
 - antiquity with a thorough discernment, thus doing 
 onour to the human mind, and teaching it to recognize 
 le divine ray within it. Having thus rubbed off the 
 olish of Paganism, they presented it to the eyes of the 
 eople, naked and bloodstained, in the full horror of 
 s impure and murderous observances ; instead of the 
 losses which are so pleasing to our modern delicacy, 
 istead of explaining away the crime of idolatry by 
 3knowledging it as a necessary error, the apologists 
 indled conscience against a hateful worship by showing 
 1 it the work of the devil and the reflexion of hell, 
 'his system of argument, at once full of charity 
 >wards human reason, but without pity for Paganism, 
 as presented in its entirety in 'the writings of St. 
 .ugustine.t 
 
 The Bishop of Hippo had become the light of the 
 niversal Church ; Asia and Gaul pressed him with 
 uestions ; the Manichaeans, Donatists, and Pelagians 
 
 * Symmach. epist. 16; St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, lib. i. 
 ip. I et seqq. 
 
 t St. Justin, Apolog. 1 et 2 ; Minutius Felix, Recenseamus, si 
 lacet, disciplinas philosophorum, deprehendes eos, etsi sermonibus 
 ariis, ipsis tamen rebus in banc unam coire et conspirare sen- 
 sntiam. 
 
112 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 left him no repose. But it was the pagan controversy 
 which absorbed his life, overflowed into his letters, and 
 inspired his greatest works. In a.d. 412, Africa was 
 governed by Yolusian, a man of noble birth, and attached 
 to the old religion, who was drawn towards the Church 
 by the genius of Augustine, but brought back to his 
 superstitions by the idolatrous examples all around him. 
 One day, as he was whiling away his leisure in conver- 
 sation with some men of letters, had touched on many 
 points of philosophy, and deplored the contradictions of 
 the sects, the discussion turned upon Christianity. 
 Volusian set forth his objections, and at the close of the 
 usual cavils against Holy Writ and the mysteries, 
 showed the real cause of his repugnance by accusing 
 the new religion of preaching pardon of injuries which 
 was irreconcilable with the dignity of a warlike state, 
 and so hastening the decline of Kome, of which the 
 calamities produced by the rule for a century of 
 Christian princes was sufficient evidence. A disciple of 
 Augustine, who had taken part in this discussion, re- 
 lated it to his master, and implored him to answer it. 
 He complied, and without neglecting the theological 
 objections, mainly directed his attack to the political 
 questions. Beginning by expressing surprise that the 
 mildness of Christianity should give scandal to men 
 accustomed to praise clemency with the sages of old, he 
 denied that the faith had suppressed justice in insisting 
 upon charity. Christ had not forbidden war, but had 
 only desired it to be just in its cause, and merciful in 
 its process ; if the state had possessed such warriors, 
 magistrates, or taxpayers as the Church required, the 
 Republic would have been intact. If the Empire had 
 been carried off by a wave of decay, yet St. Augustine 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 113 
 
 could point to a period long anterior to the Christian 
 era, and show how in the time of Jugurtha the public 
 morals were entirely corrupted, and how Kome might 
 have been sold if a purchaser could have been found ; 
 and then in horror at the profligacy which was sapping 
 the core of humanity when the new faith appeared, 
 the Bishop of Hippo exclaimed, " Thanks to the Lord 
 our God, who has sent us against so great evils an un- 
 exampled help, for whither were we not carried, what 
 souls would not the horrible wave of human perversity 
 have carried off, had not the Cross been planted above 
 us, that we might seize and hold fast to that sacred 
 wood. For in that disorder of manners, detestable as 
 they were, that ruin of the old discipline, it was time 
 that an authority should come from on high to announce 
 to us voluntary poverty, continence, benevolence, justice, 
 and other strong and shining virtues ; it was necessary 
 not only that we might honourably order this present 
 life and assure a place in this earthly city, but to lead 
 us to eternal salvation, to the all-holy Kepublic, to that 
 endless nation of which we are all denizens by the title 
 of faith, hope, and charity. Thus, as we are living as 
 travellers on earth, we should learn to tolerate, if not 
 strong enough to correct, those who wish to establish 
 the Eepublic on a basis of unpunished vice, when the 
 ancient Eomans had founded and aggrandized it by 
 their virtues. If they had not that true piety towards 
 the True God which would have conducted them to the 
 eternal city, they kept at least a certain native righteous- 
 ness which sufficed to form the city of earth, to extend 
 and to preserve it. God wished to manifest in that 
 glorious and opulent Empire what civil virtues could 
 effect, even when divorced from true religion, that with 
 
114 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the addition of the latter men might become members 
 of a better city, which had truth for its sovereign, 
 charity for its law, eternity for its duration."* 
 
 Noble words, and yet Augustine did not aim at 
 perfection of eloquence, according to the standard of 
 the rhetoricians, but at convincing Volusian, whose 
 yielding convictions only waited for the last assault. 
 It was this hope that impelled him from the first blow 
 of controversy to the depths of the subject, and brought 
 forth the first idea of his " City of God." This was 
 in 412, and the twenty-two books of that work, com- 
 menced the following year, interrupted and continued 
 by snatches during fourteen years, were not concluded 
 until 426. St. Augustine did but develope therein the 
 doctrine of the above letter, which he did not exceed 
 in eloquence ; and it is thus that immortal books 
 are born, not from the ' proud dream of the lover of 
 vain-glory, nor from leisure nor solitude, but of the 
 travail of a soul which has been flung into the strug- 
 gles of its age, has sought for truth and found inspi- 
 ration. We shall have occasion soon to study and 
 analyze the " City of God," and note the commence- 
 ment of a science unknown to the ancients the philo- 
 sophy of history, but we may pause for a moment 
 now before the greatest work undertaken for the refu- 
 tation of Paganism. Its plan gave the author an 
 occasion of attacking and destroying in succession 
 the mythological theology of the poets, the political 
 theology of statesmen, the natural theology of the 
 philosophers of old time; and whilst he dissipated 
 
 * Volusianus Augustino, inter August, epist. 135 ; Marcellinus, 
 Augustino, epist. 130 ; August. Volus. epist. 137 ; Marcellino, epist. 
 138. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 115 
 
 the last scruples of the scientific, *he left no pretext for 
 repugnance on the part of men of letters. That religion 
 which they charged with a reaction towards ignorance 
 and barbarism gave ample evidence of rivalling by its 
 beauty the good things of profane antiquity ; for what 
 was the elegance of Symmachus in comparison with the 
 thunders of the apologists for Christianity ? * 
 
 Yet the new faith would not have changed the world 
 had it appealed only to men of learning and science. 
 This had been the crying fault of philosophy. Plato 
 had written on the door of his school, " Let none but 
 geometers enter here," and Porphyry, seven hundred 
 years later, confessed that he knew of none among so 
 many sects which could teach a way of salvation for 
 every soul. But Christianity had found a universal 
 path of safety : the teaching of the poor was its special 
 novelty, and persecutors long Teproached her with re- 
 cruiting in the workshops or in the cottages of weavers 
 or of fullers. At the beginning of the fifth century, the 
 working-classes in the towns, who occupied, according 
 to a poet, the upper floors of the houses, were almost 
 entirely devoted to the new religion. But idolatry 
 was still mistress of the rural districts : votive garlands 
 still adorned the sacred trees ; the traveller came across 
 open temples in which the sacrificial embers were 
 burning, or statues with portable altars at their feet, 
 or encountered some haggard peasant with a tattered 
 mantle over his shoulders and a sword in his hands, pro- 
 fessing to be a votary of the great goddess Diana, and 
 
 * St. August, epist. 138, Marcellino : " Verum tamen cognosce 
 quid eos contra moveat, atque rescribe, ut vel epistolis vel libris, 
 si adjuverit Deus ad omnia respondere curemus." De Civil. 
 Dei, Prefatio ad MarceUinum. 
 
116 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 to reveal futurity by hter aid.* Yet the Church believed 
 that these rude men, who toiled and suffered and led 
 that pastoral life from which the Saviour had drawn 
 His parables, were not far from the kingdom of God, so 
 she collected labourers and shepherds into her temples, 
 and did not disdain arguing before them as St. Paul 
 before the Areopagus. 
 
 The homilies of St. Maximus of Turin form the chief 
 example of this popular controversy. The inhabitants 
 of the rugged valleys of Piedmont defended step by step 
 the superstitions of their forefathers, and the bishop 
 provoked the dispute by making his first onslaught 
 on the fatalism which attracted the souls of the indo- 
 lent, by discharging them from all moral responsibility. 
 
 " If everything is fixed by destiny, why, pagans, 
 do you sacrifice to your idols ? To what purpose those 
 prayers, that incense, those victims, and those gifts 
 which you lavish in your temples ? That the gods may 
 not injure us, is the answer. How can those beings 
 who are unable to help themselves, who must be 
 guarded by watch-dogs that robbers may not carry them 
 
 * Porphyr. apud S. August. De Civit. Dei, 1. x. c. 32 ; Origen 
 contra Celsum ; Prudent, contra Symmachum, 1 : 
 Omnis qui celsa scandit ccenacula vulgus, 
 Quique terit silicem variis discursibus atram 
 Et quern panis alit gradibus dispensus ab altis, 
 Aut Vaticano tumulum sub monte frequentat. . . 
 Coetibus aut magnis Lateranas currit ad sedes. 
 Sanct. Severi. carmen Bucolicum : 
 
 Signum quod perhibent esse cruris Dei 
 Magnis qui colitur solus in urbibus. 
 
 St.Maxim.de Turin, Serm. 101. Et si ad agrum processeris, 
 cernis aras ligneas et simulacra lapidea. . . Cum maturius vigil- 
 averis et videris sauciuin vino rusticum, scire debes quoniam ut 
 dicunt aut Dianaticus aut Arus-pex est, &c. Idem. Serm. 102, 
 hoinilia 16, tractatus 4 ; Beugnot, Hist, de la Chute du Paganisme. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 117 
 
 off, who cannot protect themselves against spiders, rats, 
 or worms, injure you ? But, they reply, we adore the 
 sun, the stars, and the elements. They worship fire, 
 then, which can be quenched by a drop of water or fed 
 by a stick of wood ; they worship the thunder, as if it 
 was not as obedient to God as the rains, the winds, and 
 the clouds; they adore the starry sphere which the 
 Creator has made with so marvellous an art for an 
 ornament of beauty to the world. Lastly, the pagans 
 reply, the gods whom we serve inhabit the heaven." 
 
 The preacher followed them into this last refuge and 
 scourged with his satire the crimes of these divinities 
 Saturn devouring his children, Jupiter married to 
 his sister, the adulteries of Mars, then he continued: 
 
 " Is it on account of her beauty that you give Yenus 
 alone among the goddesses an abode in a planet ? What 
 do you make up there of that shameless woman among 
 a crowd of men ? What do you say of the host of 
 children you pagans have given to Jupiter ? and if once 
 they were born of the gods, why do we not see the 
 same thing now ? or is it that Jupiter has grown old, 
 and Juno past childbearing ?" 
 
 We cannot wonder that this system of preaching did 
 not shrink from bold images, familiar expressions, or 
 from sarcasm, if it was necessary to subdue a coarse- 
 minded audience. Christianity stooped thus to the 
 language of the vulgar to instruct and reawaken 
 thought in minds held incapable of reasoning, to 
 break the bonds of superstition, and release the souls 
 of men from the terrors which peopled nature with 
 malevolent deities, and from the pleasures by which 
 
 * S. Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 5, 155; St. Maxim, de Turin, 
 tractatus 4 ; cf. St. Cyprian, ad Demet. de Idolorum vanitate. 
 
118 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 men repaid themselves for the horror caused by their 
 gods. Whereas eloquence subdued the more intel- 
 ligent, the grosser minds were carried away by example ; 
 the waters of baptism fell upon their brow to sanctify 
 its sweats, and these poor people returned calmed and 
 purified to their ploughs and their flocks, dreading no 
 longer an encounter with Satyrs or Dryads in the 
 depth of the forests. Yet the earth had not lost its 
 enchantment, for at every step they could recognize the 
 footprint of the Creator, and they laboured upon its soil 
 as in the vineyard of the Heavenly Father. Bacchic 
 orgies no longer profaned the manners of which Virgil 
 had sung as pure andpeaceful ; Christianity had given 
 to the men of the fields the happiness which to the 
 poet of the " Georgics " had been only a dream. They 
 could realize their happiness now, and love the poverty 
 which the Gospel had blessed ; self-respect was present 
 in every hovel ; and as at length the Supreme Cause of 
 all things, the truth of which philosophers had been 
 ignorant, had been manifested to the ignorant, they 
 could afford to spurn their superstitious fears, inex- 
 orable fate, and the din of greedy Acheron.* 
 
 The conquest of conscience, commenced by contro- 
 versy, was consummated by charity. It was not a 
 charity of that peaceful nature which knew no enemy, 
 and dreamed only of delivering the captive, building 
 schools and hospitals, and covering the old Koman 
 world with its peculiar institutions, as a wounded body 
 is swathed in bandages, but charity, as it were, in 
 arms, attacking Paganism with the novel weapons of 
 gentleness, forgiveness, and devotion. We must enter 
 the recesses of those Koman families which were still 
 * Virgil, Georgic. lib. ii. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 119 
 
 divided between the old and the new belief, and see how 
 their Christian members were skilled in laying siege to 
 a pagan soul with tender violence, counting no time 
 lost if it was led at last to the altar of Christ. St. 
 Jerome shows us this very spectacle in bringing us into 
 the house of Albinus, who was a patrician and pontiff 
 of the old religion. His daughter, Laeta, was a Chris- 
 tian, and had borne to a Christian husband the young 
 Paula, whose education occupied Jerome in his desert 
 retreat. The latter wrote to Laeta, " Who would have 
 believed that the grand-daughter of the pontiff Albinus 
 would, from a vow made at a martyr's tomb, have 
 brought her grandfather to listen smilingly as she stam- 
 mered a hymn to Christ, and that the old man should 
 one day cherish on his knees a virgin of the Lord ? " 
 Then he added, in touching consolation to Laeta : 
 
 " A holy and faithful house sanctifies the one infidel 
 who remains firm in his principles. The man who is 
 surrounded by a troop of Christian children and grand- 
 children, must be already a candidate for the faith. 
 Laeta, my most holy sister in Jesus Christ, let me say 
 this, that you may not despair of your father's salva- 
 tion." 
 
 He ended by adding advice to encouragement, and 
 entered into and directed the last attack of the domestic 
 plot, to which the old man's obstinacy was destined to 
 yield. 
 
 " Let your little child, whenever she sees her grand- 
 father, throw herself on his breast, hang on his neck, 
 and sing him the Alleluia in spite of himself."* 
 
 * St. Jerome, epist. 107, ad Laetam. " Quis hoc crederit ut 
 Albini pontificis neptis de repromissione martyris nasceritur? 
 Cum aviim viderit, in pectus ejus transiliat, collo dependeat 
 nolenti alleluia decantet." 
 
120 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 To such pious manoeuvres, repeated doubtless in 
 every patrician house, that proud and opiniated spirit 
 of the old Romans, which had formed the last rampart 
 of Paganism, surely though slowly succumbed. 
 
 But kindness and consideration were naturally easy 
 when the conversion of a parent was the aim, and a 
 greater merit lay in preaching truth to enemies and 
 conquering fanatical crowds by generosity. When St. 
 Augustine took possession of his see at Hippo, the 
 imperial laws put sword and fire at his disposal against 
 the pagans, but he at once forbade violence, and was 
 even unwilling that they should be forced to break the 
 idols raised upon their lands. 
 
 " Let us begin rather," he said, " by destroying the 
 false gods in their hearts." Once the Christians of the 
 little town of Suffecta, forgetful of his instructions, 
 destroyed a statue of Hercules. The pagan populace, in 
 a fury, took up arms, and rushing upon the faithful, 
 killed sixty of them. St. Augustine might have 
 obtained the execution of the homicides, not only by 
 setting the edicts of Theodosius in motion, but under 
 the whole system of Roman law against murder and 
 violence in arms ; but he wrote to the pagans of 
 Suffecta, reproaching them, indeed, with the shedding 
 of innocent blood, and threatening them with the 
 Divine justice, but refrained from summoning them 
 before the tribunals of earth. 
 
 " If you say that the Hercules was your property, be 
 at peace, we will restore it ; stone is not wanting to us ; 
 we have metal, many kinds of marble, and workmen 
 in abundance. Not a moment shall be lost in carving 
 out your god, in moulding and gilding it. We will also 
 be very careful to paint him red, that he may be able 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 121 
 
 to hear your prayers ; but if we give you back your 
 Hercules, restore to us the number of souls of which 
 you have robbed us."* 
 
 Language so full of sense, so hardy, and yet so 
 tender, was calculated to touch men's hearts; for 
 human nature loves that which excels it, and the 
 doctrine of pardon towards enemies ended in gaining 
 the world which it had at first astonished. 
 
 As the imperial edicts had no power to demolish the 
 idols, still less could they close the arenas. Constan- 
 tine, by a constitution of a.d. 325, promulgated in the 
 first fervour of his conversion, had, indeed, forbidden 
 those games of bloodshed ; but the passions of the 
 populace, stronger than law, had not only protected 
 their pleasures, but insisted on making the princes 
 accomplices in them, so that the victories of Theodosius 
 still provided gladiators for the amphitheatres of Borne, 
 Vainly did the eloquence of the Fathers ring against 
 these bloody amusements; vainly did the poet Pru- 
 dentius, in pathetic verse, press Honorius to command 
 that death should cease to be a sport, and murder a 
 public pleasure. But charity accomplished what no 
 earthly power had dared commence. An Eastern monk, 
 named Telemachus, one of those useless men, those 
 enemies to society, as they were called, took up his 
 staff one day and journeyed to Borne, to put down the 
 gladiatorial combats. On the 1st of January of the 
 year a.d. 404, the Boman people, piled tier upon tier 
 on the benches of the Coliseum, were celebrating the 
 sixth consulate of Honorius. The arena had already 
 been reddened with the blood of several pairs of 
 
 * St. August. Serm. 61, epist. 50, Senioribus Colonise Suffectanse. 
 vol. I. 6 
 
122 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 gladiators, when suddenly, in the thick of an assault 
 of arms which held every eye fixed, and kept every 
 mind in breathless suspense, a monk appeared, rushed 
 forward with outstretched arms, and forced the swords 
 asunder. At the sight, the astonished audience rose 
 as one man, roaring in question as to what madman it 
 could be who dared to interrupt the most sacred plea- 
 sures of the sovereign people. Then curses, threats, 
 and finally stones, rained from every circle. Telemachus 
 fell dead, and the combatants he had striven to part 
 finished their bout.* This blood was needed to seal 
 the abolition of the games of blood, for the martyrdom 
 of the monk forced the irresolution of Honorius, and an 
 edict of the same year, which seems to have extorted 
 obedience, suppressed the gladiatorial shows, and with 
 them idolatry lost its chief support. The Coliseum 
 remains to this day, and the mighty breach in its side 
 symbolizes the assault of Christianity upon Koman 
 society, which it entered only by dismantling it. 
 To-day we must bless the ruin which it made, as on 
 entering the old amphitheatre we discern therein only 
 the signs of peace, plants growing, birds building their 
 nests, children playing innocently at the foot of the 
 wooden cross which rises in the midst as the avenger 
 of humanity which was outraged, the redemptress of 
 humanity which fell. 
 
 We may marvel that, before so much love and so 
 much light, the world did not yield at once, to the entire 
 discomfiture of Paganism. But one portion of the latter 
 
 * Lex Unica, Cod. De Gladiatoribus ; Symmachus, lib. x. 
 epist. 68 ; Prudent, contra Sym. ii., on the Martyrdom of St. 
 Telemachus ; Theodoret, Sed. Hist. v. 20 ; Marty rologium Ro- 
 manum ad diem 1 Jan. 
 
 L' 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 123 
 
 survived in spite of Christianity, and as if to keep it 
 strung to an eternal resistance, while another remained 
 in the very bosom of the Church which showed her 
 wisdom in respecting the legitimate wants of man and 
 the innocent pleasures of the nations. For Paganism 
 has two constituent parts, the one being an absolutely 
 false religious idea, the other the true idea of the 
 necessary relation of man with the invisible world, 
 and the consequent methods of fixing that relation 
 under sensible forms in temples, festivals, and symbols. 
 Eeligious thought cannot be confined to the solitary 
 domain of contemplation, but proceeds thence to grasp 
 space by the temples which it causes to be reared, time 
 by the days which it keeps holy, and nature in her 
 entirety, by selecting as emblems such things as fire, 
 perfume, and flowers, her brightest and purest products. 
 These truths ought not to perish, and the policy of 
 the Church had to solve the difficulty of crushing 
 idolatry without stifling beauty of worship. The zeal 
 of the Fathers was displayed on every page of their 
 writings, and they have been charged with pushing it 
 to the point of Vandalism in demanding the destruction 
 of the temples. But St. Augustine took a most effec- 
 tual step towards obviating that passion for iconoclasm 
 which seizes whole nations at some moment of intense 
 public emotion, and forbade Christians to turn articles 
 which had been devoted to the service of the false 
 deities to their personal use. He desired that the 
 stone, wood, and precious metals should be purified in 
 the service of the state, or in honour of the true God, 
 and his maxims saved many a building in Italy, Sicily, 
 and Gaul which remains to us instinct with the genius 
 of antiquity. The Pantheon of Agrippa became the 
 
 6 * 
 
124 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Basilica of All the Martyrs, "and in Eome alone eight 
 pagan sanctuaries stand in our day under the invocation 
 of a saint as protector of their ancient walls. The 
 Temple of Mars at Florence, and that of Hercules 
 at Milan, were converted into Baptisteries. Sicily 
 defended for long her ancient altars; but when the 
 Council of Ephesus had given to the veneration of the 
 Mother of God a new and brilliant lustre, the Sicilians 
 surrendered, and the soft touch of the Virgin opened 
 more temples than the iron hand of the Caesars. The 
 Mausoleum of the tyrant Phalaris was made sacred to 
 our Lady of Mercy, and the temple of Venus, on Mount 
 Eryx, formerly served by a college of harlots, became 
 the Church of St. Mary of the Snows.* 
 
 And if the people hankered after those lofty porticoes 
 beneath which their fathers had prayed, still more 
 difficult was it to rob them of those festivals which had 
 lightened the severity of their labour, and broken in 
 upon the monotony of their life. So Christianity 
 hallowed in place of suppressing them, and from the 
 end of the fourth century solemnities in honour of the 
 martyrs took the place of those of the false gods. The 
 bishops encouraged an admixture of sober joy with the 
 gravity of these pilgrimages, permitted fraternal love- 
 feasts on their celebration, and transported thus into 
 the Church the fairs which had tempted the multitude 
 to the worship of Bacchus and Jupiter. Yet the per- 
 severance of the clergy failed to displace the days which 
 custom had consecrated, and the cycle of the Christian 
 
 * St. Augustine, epist. 47, Publicolse ; Marangoni delle cose 
 gentilesche e profane trasportate ad use et ornamento delle 
 chiese, pp. 256, 257, 282 ; Beugnot, De la Chute du Paganisme en 
 Occident. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 125 
 
 year was forced to conform in many particulars to the 
 pagan calendar. Thus, according to the authority of 
 Bede, the procession of Candlemas consigned the 
 Lupercalia to oblivion, and the Ambarvalia only 
 yielded to the rustic pomps of the Kogations. As 
 the peasants of Enna, in Sicily, could not detach 
 themselves from the joyful festivals they always held 
 after harvest in honour of Ceres, the Feast of the 
 Visitation was retarded on their account, and they 
 offered on the altar of Christ the ripe wheat-ears with 
 which they had garlanded their idols.* 
 
 In fact, if Christianity prohibited the adoration of 
 Nature, she never cursed or condemned that which con- 
 stituted the visible beauty of the universe. It beheld, 
 not only in the heathen religion, but in the public ritual, 
 a symbolism which employed creatures as the signs of 
 a sacred language between God and man. The seven- 
 branched candlestick had lighted the tabernacle of 
 Moses, the gums of Arabia had burnt on the altar, 
 and year by year the Hebrew people had gathered palm- 
 branches and foliage for the Feast of Tabernacles. 
 The rites which were so common to every worship 
 were to pass into the new religion. The poet Pruden- 
 tius was already inviting Christian virgins to the tomb 
 of St. Eulalia, and bidding them bring baskets of 
 flowers in honour of the youthful martyr ; and at the 
 same period was the custom introduced of burning 
 tapers before the places where the saints reposed. The 
 priest Vigilantius cavilled at this practice, and taxed it 
 
 * Theodoret, cited by Baronius, ad. ann. 44, 87 ; St. August. 
 epist. 29 ; St. Gregory Nyssan. in Vita St. Gregorii Thaumaturgi. 
 The Councils instantly reproved the disorders which crept into 
 these new festivals. Concilium Carthagin. in. canon 30 ; Tolet. 
 in. cap. xxiii ; Marangoni, p. 282. 
 
126 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 with idolatry ; but St. Jerome replied, and his clever 
 genius embraced at once the whole scope of the question. 
 
 " You call these Christians idolaters. I deny it not, 
 for all who believe on Christ have come from idolatry ; 
 but because we rendered this worship once to idols, 
 must it be forbidden now to offer it to the true God ? 
 All the churches of the East burn candles at the mo- 
 ment of the reading of the Gospel, not truly to dissi- 
 pate the darkness, for at that hour the sun is shining 
 with all its brightness, but as a sign of joy, in memory 
 of those lamps which the wise virgins kept burning in 
 honour of the Eternal Light, of which it is written, 
 ' Thy word, Lord, shall be a lamp unto my feet, and 
 a light unto my paths.' "* 
 
 St. Jerome summed up on this point the whole policy 
 of the Church, whereby she achieved the conversion of 
 the Koman world, as well as the civilization of the bar- 
 barians. Two centuries later, when the Anglo-Saxons 
 poured in crowds to baptism, and demanded permission 
 to burn their idols, Pope Gregory the Great moderated 
 this zeal, and wrote to his missioners, directing them 
 to destroy the images but to preserve the temples, and 
 consecrate them, that the people, having acknowledged 
 the true God, might the more readily come to worship 
 Him in places to which they had become accustomed. 
 He also advised them to replace the old pagan orgies 
 by orderly banquets, in the hope that if they allowed 
 the people some sensible gratifications, they might rise 
 more easily to spiritual consolations.! The enemies of 
 the Koman Church have triumphed over these pass- 
 
 * Marangoni, p. 378 ; Prudentius, Peri-Stephanon Hymn. 
 Sanctse Eulaliae ; St. Jerome contra Vigilantium. 
 f St. Greg lib. xi. epist. 76. 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 127 
 
 ages, in which they have only seen the abomination 
 brought into the sacred place ; but we must rather ad- 
 mire the utterances of a religion which has penetrated 
 into the depths of humanity, and knowing what con- 
 flicts with passion she must of necessity demand from 
 it, shrinks from imposing needless burdens. This 
 course has shown that true knowledge and love of human 
 nature whereby alone it can be won. 
 
 But there was that other principle in Paganism with 
 which the Church could not treat, which she had 
 to attack without respite, and which on its own side 
 offered a resistance as imperishable as the passions in 
 which it was rooted. At first, the old religion had 
 hoped to preserve itself intact, and spring over the 
 period of the invasions like iEneas traversing burning 
 Troy with the gods he had saved. Pagans counted 
 with joy a multitude of sympathizers amongst those 
 Goths, Franks, and Lombards who had covered the 
 face of the Western Empire. Roman polytheism, 
 faithful to its maxims, held out the hand to the poly- 
 theism of the barbarians, and as the Jupiter of the 
 Capitol had admitted the strange divinities of Asia to 
 share his throne, he could hardly reject Woden and 
 Thor, who were compared to Mercury and Vulcan. 
 They were, it was said, the same heavenly powers 
 honoured under different names, and the twin cults 
 were bound to sustain one another against the jealous 
 God of the Christians. Thus the wave of invasion seemed 
 to leave a sediment which revived the genius of 
 Paganism, and in the midst of the sixth century, when 
 Rome had passed fifty years under Gothic domination, 
 the idolatrous party boldly attempted to reopen the 
 Temple of Janus and restore the Palladium. So, at the 
 
128 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUBY. 
 
 opening of the seventh century, St. Gregory the Great 
 awakened the solicitude of the Bishops of Terracina, 
 Corsica, and Sardinia towards the pagans in their 
 respective dioceses. About the same time, the efforts 
 of St. Komanus and St. Eloi barely achieved the con- 
 version of Neustria, and in the next century Austrasia 
 was so much troubled by the corruption of the clergy 
 and the violence of the nobles, that multitudes aban- 
 doned the Gospel and restored their idols. In truth, 
 the two systems of Paganism were mingled, and the 
 struggle sustained by the Church for three centuries 
 against the deities of Rome was but an apprenticeship 
 to the longer conflict she was destined to wage against 
 the idols of the Germans. In that case, also, she con- 
 quered by a charity whose only term was martyrdom, and 
 by a controversial method which carried its considera- 
 tion for rude minds to the last degree. The Church 
 treated these barbarians with the same respect as the 
 people of Italy or of Greece, and the entire polemical 
 system of the old apologists reappeared in the homilies 
 of the missioners who evangelized Frisia and Thuringia. 
 The Bishop Daniel, in expounding the proper method 
 of discussion with the pagans of the North, renewed 
 the arguments of St. Maximus of Turin. " You must 
 ask them," he said, " if their gods breed still, and if 
 not, why they had ceased to do so." * 
 
 But Charlemagne was now about to appear, to 
 assure to Christianity dominion, but not repose. Van- 
 quished Paganism was transformed, and instead of a 
 
 * Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. 28 ; Beugnot, Hist, de la 
 Chute du Paganisme ; Procopius, de Bello Gothico ; St. Gre- 
 gory, Epist. As to conversion of the Germans, compare the 
 author's work, " Civilization Chretienne chez les Francs." 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 129 
 
 worship became a superstition. Yet, under the new 
 form, it retained its essential faculty of leading men 
 astray through their fears and their lusts. The con- 
 verted races agreed to hold that their former gods were 
 so many daemons, but upon the condition of reverencing 
 and invoking them, and attaching an occult virtue to 
 their images. Thus the Florentines had dedicated the 
 Temple of Mars to St. John ; but a certain awe still 
 attached to the image of the fallen god. In the year 
 1215, a murder committed upon the spot brought the 
 Ghielphs and Ghibellines to blows, upon which Villani,* 
 an able historian, but one apt to be carried away by the 
 opinions prevalent in his time, concluded "that the 
 enemy of the human race had retained a certain 
 power in his ancient idol, since at its feet the crime 
 had been committed which had brought upon Florence 
 so many evils." These malevolent phantoms were 
 but slowly dissipated, for imaginations could not shake 
 themselves free of a spell which had bound them for so 
 many ages. The ancient gods still kept their place in 
 imprecations and oaths, and to this day the Italians 
 swear by Bacchus. Pagan associations were as firmly 
 and still more dangerously perpetuated in the sensual 
 festivals, with their orgies and obscene songs, which the 
 canons of the councils held in Italy, France, and Spain 
 did not cease to condemn. The pilgrims from the 
 North were astonished, on visiting Kome, at seeing the 
 calends of January celebrated by bands of musicians 
 and dancers, who paraded the town with sacrilegious 
 songs and exclamations which savoured of idolatry. 
 When the Italian cities were hastening, in their newly 
 acquired liberty, to form themselves in the image of 
 
 * Villani, Cronaca, lib. i. 42, 60 ; ibid. lib. v. 38. 
 
 6f 
 
130 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Rome, they established consuls and wished for public 
 games. Horse and foot races were celebrated, and the 
 lustful memories of old time came to mingle with these 
 recreations, and races of courtesans were given in 
 imitation of the festivals of Flora. If the Italy of the 
 Middle Age did not actually revive the gladiatorial 
 conflicts, she did not renounce bloody spectacles. At 
 Ravenna, at Orvieto, and at Sienna, custom had fixed 
 certain days upon which two bands of their citizens took 
 up arms and slaughtered each other for the amusement 
 of the mob. Petrarch, in 1346, grew indignant at 
 beholding a renewal at Naples of the butcheries of the 
 Coliseum. He relates how, one day, he was drawn by 
 some friends to a spot not far from the city, where he 
 found the court, the nobility, and the multitude ranged 
 in circles assisting at the warlike sports. Noble youths 
 were being slaughtered there under the eyes of their 
 fathers, their glory consisting in the coolness with 
 which they received the death-blow ; and one of them 
 rolled in a pool of blood at the very feet of the poet. 
 Petrarch, horror-stricken, struck spurs into his horse 
 and fled, vowing to quit before three days were past a 
 land which was stained with Christian blood.* 
 
 If pagan instincts thus lurked in the bosom of 
 Catholic society, we may expect to see them burst forth 
 as soon as Paganism reappeared openly in the heresy 
 of the Albigenses. From Bulgaria to Catalonia, from 
 the mouths of the Rhine to the pharos of Messina, 
 millions of men arose, fought, and died for a doctrine, 
 the essence of which lay in replacing the austerity of 
 
 * Muratori, Dissert. 29 de Spectaculis et Ludis Publicis Medii 
 M\i, pp. 832, 833, 852 ; Petrarch, Familiarium, lib. v. epist. 8 
 (pointed out to the author by M. Eugene Rendu). 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 131 
 
 Catholic dogma by a new mythology, in recognizing 
 two eternal principles of Good and Evil, and dethroning 
 the sole God of the Christians.* This popular hea- 
 thenism surprises us in an epoch wherein the Church 
 seemed absolute over the conscience ; but, more strange 
 still, it possessed a learned element, as if the human 
 reason, once set free by the new faith, had fallen back 
 into its old slavery, whilst in every age men of learning, 
 ingenuity, and perseverance conspired to renew the 
 traditions of the school of Alexandria, and restore error 
 by philosophy and the occult sciences. 
 
 Up to the seventh century we can trace the pagan 
 doctrines in the Gallo-Koman schools, which even 
 contained men who were professedly heathen ; and the 
 writers of that epoch were still combating the false 
 learning of those who boasted of extending the dis- 
 coveries of their predecessors, but were in reality 
 attached to their errors. But these dying sparks were 
 to be extinguished in the obscurity of the barbarous 
 era. It was in the midst of the Carlovingian Eevival 
 that a theologian of depth, who had studied in the 
 monastic schools of Ireland, John Scotus Erigena, 
 began to profess, with force and brilliancy of exposition, 
 a philosophy which was thoroughly imbued with the 
 Alexandrian opinions. He tempered its excesses, in- 
 deed, by contradictions which saved his own ortho- 
 doxy, but failed to satisfy the logic of his disciples a 
 logic which three hundred years later impelled Amaury 
 de Bene and David de Dinand to teach publicly the 
 pantheistic tenets of the unity of substance, the identity 
 
 * Schmidt, Hist, et Doctrine de la Secte des Catkares ou 
 Albigeois. 
 
132 'civilization in fifth century. 
 
 of spirit and matter, and of God and nature.* The 
 Church perceived the greatness of the danger, and the 
 new sect succumbed to the condemnations of her 
 doctors and her councils ; but these pantheistic prin- 
 ciples, yet alive, lay hidden amongst the disciples of 
 Averrhoes, to appear again with a more menacing 
 attitude in the persons of Giordano Bruno and of 
 Spinoza. 
 
 And whereas a false system of metaphysics was 
 enticing many minds back to pagan antiquity, a 
 greater number still were being drawn thither through 
 those occult sciences which formed the living sore of 
 the Middle Age. Christianity has been charged with 
 breeding, in her favouring obscurity, astrology and 
 magic, as well as the sanguinary legislation by which 
 their excesses were repressed ; but it is forgotten that 
 the classic ages of the hidden sciences were the most 
 brilliant periods of Paganism, that they flourished at 
 Home under Augustus, were elaborated at Alexandria, 
 and could claim Jamblichus, Julian, and Maximus of 
 Ephesus, the most illustrious of the Neoplatonists, 
 amongst their neophytes. It was in vain that Origen, 
 who had detected the secrets of the adepts, unveiled a 
 portion of their artifices, by what illusions they caused 
 the thunders to mutter, daemons to appear, death's- 
 heads to speak ; for the vulgar believed in the mysteries 
 which afforded the charm of fear. But the Caesars 
 were troubled by that divining art which boasted of 
 having announced their advent, but also foretold their 
 
 * St. Ouen, Prefatio ad vitam Sancti Eligii ; Prologus ad vitam 
 Sancti Maximum Miliacensis apud MabilJon ; Acta S. O. S. B. 
 i. 581 ; John Scotus de Divisione Natures ; Amaury de Bene 
 and David de Dinand ; Martin Polon. Chronic, lib. iv.; St. Thomas, 
 in Secund. Sentent. dis. xvii. qusest. 
 
THE PALL OF PAGANISM. 133 
 
 fall, and we find the astrologers suffering banishment 
 as mathematicians under Tiberius, persecuted for three 
 centuries, and finally proscribed by constitutions of 
 Diocletian and of Maximian.* It was the legislation of 
 the pagan emperors, carried on by Valentinian and 
 Valens, and received into the codes of Athalaric, of 
 Liutprand, and of Charlemagne, which founded the 
 penal laws against sorcery which prevailed in the 
 Middle Age ; and thus did the torch of the ancient 
 wisdom kindle the piles with which the Church has 
 been reproached. 
 
 But penal fires could effect nothing against the fas- 
 cinations of the forbidden fruit. In the thirteenth 
 century, an age when Christian civilization was in its 
 bloom, the doctrines reappeared which tended to deify 
 the stars, by submitting human wills to their influence. 
 Astrology had made its peace with the law, and placed 
 itself beside the thrones of princes, or even in the 
 chairs of the universities; armies refused to march 
 unless preceded by observers who would mark the 
 height of the stars, and rule the conjunction under 
 which camps should be traced or battle given. The 
 Emperor Frederick the Second was surrounded by 
 astrologers, and the republics of Italy had theirs as 
 well, so that the rival factions disputed for heaven in 
 addition to earth.t On the other hand, there was a 
 renewal of the radical vice of Paganism, of the despair- 
 ing struggle between man and nature, the attempt to 
 
 * Origen, Philosophumena, editit Miiller, lib. iv. 62, 63, 71, 
 75 ; Suetonius in Tiberio. Cod. Justin, ix. 18, de Maleficis et 
 Mathematicis, ibid. vi. 4, 5, 9. 
 
 f Libri Histoire des Sciences Mathematiques en Italie, ii. 52 ; 
 Muratori, Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, viii. 228, xiv. 930-1 ; 
 Villain, Cronaca, vi. 83. 
 
134 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 conquer the latter, not by science or by art, but by 
 superstitious operations and formulas ; the adepts in 
 magic renewed the idolatrous observances, not only in 
 the secrecy of their laboratories, but in the numerous 
 writings to which fear and curiosity afforded a circula- 
 tion, in the shade of school or of cloister. Albert the 
 Great recognized their influence, and in his summary 
 of the processes by which those erring spirits boasted 
 of predicting and governing the future, we may wonder 
 at superstitions which the ancients themselves decried 
 and repudiated; for instance, "Those abominable 
 images which they call Babylonian, which appertain to 
 the worship of Venus, and the figures of Belenus and 
 of Hercules, whom they exorcise by the names of the 
 fifty- four daemons attached to the service of the Moon : 
 upon them they inscribe seven names in direct order 
 to obtain a happy issue, and seven inversely to avert 
 an unlucky event. In the first case, they incense them 
 with aloes and balm ; in the second, with resin and 
 sandal- wood.* 
 
 So much could error effect in the time of St. Louis 
 and St. Thomas Aquinas, though theologians exhausted 
 their arguments against the magicians and astrologers, 
 and Dante fixed them in the lowest circle of his Hell. 
 The occult sciences threw their spell over mankind, 
 until they faded before the broad light of the sixteenth 
 century. Yet Paganism did not expire with them, but 
 continued to seethe like the lava of a volcano, terrifying 
 the Christian world by chronic eruptions. No, Pagan- 
 ism could not be extinct in the hearts of men as long 
 as a terror of God and the voluptuous influences of 
 nature reigned therein together, nor could it be stifled 
 * Albcrtus Magnus, Oper. lib. v. Speculum Astronom 
 
THE FALL OF PAGANISM. 135 
 
 in the schools as long as Pantheism held its own, and 
 new sects rose to announce the apotheosis of humanity 
 and the rehabilitation of the flesh. And the old error 
 still ruled in Asia, in Africa, and in half of the islands 
 of ocean, maintaining itself by threats and in arms, 
 and now making martyrs at Tonquin and in China, 
 as of old in Kome and Nicomedia : it still contends 
 with the Church for six hundred millions of immortal 
 souls. 
 
 A celebrated man, the object of our just regrets, but 
 often liable to erroneous conclusions, has written, " How 
 dogmas end." But the study we have made may teach 
 us that dogmas do not end. Humanity has only recog- 
 nized two of them, though under diverse forms that 
 of the true God and that of the false deities. The latter 
 was the masters of pagan hearts and the old society, the 
 idea of the former went forth from among the Judaean 
 hills to enlighten Europe first, and thence, little by 
 little, the remainder of the world. The struggle 
 between these two dogmas is the key of history, and 
 affords to it all its grandeur and its interest ; for what 
 can be a prouder position or a more touching issue for 
 the human race than to stand as prize in the combat 
 between Error and Truth ? 
 
136 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 ROMAN LAW. 
 
 We have seen what roots the old religion of Eome had 
 struck out, how their dislodgment was the work of 
 centuries, and how the highest degree of wisdom, of 
 courage, and of tact was necessary to stifle error with- 
 out doing violence to human nature, to destroy Pagan- 
 ism without breaking the innocent symbols of the 
 commerce between heaven and earth. But its religious 
 belief did not make up the essence of the Roman 
 civilization ; its primitive dogma had come from the 
 Etruscans Greece had brought to it its fables the 
 conquered East had yielded her mysteries; but that 
 which was the exclusive property of Rome was her 
 genius for action, her destiny was to realize on earth 
 the idea of justice and found the empire of Law.* 
 
 A time arrived when Rome no longer remembered 
 the art of conquest, but she was never to forget the 
 secrets of government. The moment even of her 
 deepest decline, when the barbarians revenged them- 
 selves upon her in every place, ordered her proceedings, 
 and debated with her the figure of her ransom when 
 they seemed to have entirely fettered her action was 
 the period in which all her power was reflected and 
 gathered up into the codes of that legislation which 
 
 * Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ; 
 Hae tibi erunt artes. 
 
B0MAN LAW. 137 
 
 was sooner or later to achieve the conquest of the bar- 
 barians, to retain the world under her tutelage after the 
 fall of her empire, and compel the descendants of the 
 Visigoths, Burgundians, and Franks to seat themselves 
 in the schools, and grow pale over the text of the 
 Koman law. We must study now this great victory of 
 thought over strength, and find the hidden force which 
 bore up the Eoman constitution at the beginning of 
 the fifth century, and what were to be its respective 
 losses or gains under the mighty blows which demolished 
 the empire of the West. 
 
 In the first place stood the mass of jurisprudence of 
 the classic epoch, comprising the works of the entire 
 succession of jurisconsults from Augustus to the reigns 
 of the Antonines. In order that no doubt might arise 
 as to the binding force of these decisions, a well-known 
 constitution, issued under Theodosius II. and Valen- 
 tinian III., in a.d. 426, laid down that in future the 
 writings of Papinian, Paulus, Gaius, Ulpian, and Mo- 
 destinus should alone have force of law ; that in case of 
 difference of opinion the view supported by the majority 
 should prevail, or, in the case of equality, the position 
 taken by Papinian.* It might seem a rash measure to 
 canonize, as it were, opinions, controversy, consulta- 
 tions, often contradictory and full rather of subtlety 
 than genius, but there may be seen in it that great 
 principle of Tradition providentially preserved at Kome, 
 and it is a happiness for posterity that those maxims 
 which the disasters of the Empire might well have 
 crumbled into dust were thus preserved, and invested 
 with the character of inviolable law. 
 
 * Cod. Theod. Kb. i. tit. 4; Lex prima de Responsis pru- 
 dentum. 
 
138 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 On the other hand stood the ever-increasing collec- 
 tion of the constitutions of princes, and especially of 
 Christian princes. In 429, Theodosius the Younger 
 and Valentinian III., to remedy the confusion which had 
 sprung up among them, appointed a commission of 
 nine jurisconsults, or men of official rank, to make a 
 regular compilation, in sixteen hooks, under their re- 
 spective titles, of those legislative enactments which bore 
 on public or civil life, and to leave the primitive text, as 
 far as necessary correction and clearness would allow, 
 free from contradictory comments. Thus the whole 
 series of legislation of the Christian emperors was pre- 
 served to us, and respect was shown, notwithstanding 
 the thoroughness of the reaction which had followed 
 them, even to the works of Julian. 
 
 Accordingly the Koman society possessed, in 430, two 
 systems of law, and the barbarians found face to face, on 
 the one hand ancient Paganism tempered by the phi- 
 losophy of the jurisconsults themselves, acting, as we 
 shall see, under Christian influences, and on the other 
 Christianity tempered by the timidity of the emperors, 
 who only embraced reforms already rough-hewn by their 
 philosophic lawyers, and measured out carefully the 
 blows they were bound to strike at the old institutions : 
 here pagan law just gilded by the rising of Christianity 
 there the beginning of Christian jurisprudence still 
 entangled in the last shades of the darkness from which 
 the world was issuing. 
 
 "We must examine these two principles in order, and 
 the result which they had brought about. We see, on 
 opening tfce text-books of the classic jurisprudence of 
 the vaunted epoch of the Antonines, that all the lawyers 
 whose writings Valentinian had codified, recognized still 
 
ROMAN LAW. 139 
 
 as a thing of the remote past but as supreme and 
 permanent, the law of the Twelve Tables. They cite, 
 comment on, and often evade it, but still did it homage 
 in refusing to ignore, contravene, or abjure the edicts 
 graven on its bronze by the iron hand of the decemvirs : 
 it was still thus a master from whose scourge they sought 
 in vain to escape. Let us sketch in a few words, not the 
 precepts but the tendency of that ancient pagan and 
 theocratic law- system whose authority, secular in its 
 essence, the jurisconsults did not as yet dare con- 
 temn. It was a half- sealed book, a collection of tradi- 
 tions, sacramental formulas, and sacred rites, enveloping 
 the law under the same veils as a religion a mass of 
 mysteries whose secret the patricians alone possessed, 
 who as descendants of the gods could alone know and 
 enounce law (jus ; fas, what is permitted ; fatum, the 
 right, the Divine will). Law, in its primitive aspect, was 
 the true and only recognized religion of Eome. Its first 
 act was to deify Home herself, who became not only the 
 shrine and dwelling-place of an unknown genius to 
 whom altars were raised, and whose name was known 
 only to the initiated, but herself the mighty goddess 
 who had altars not only in her peculiar territory, but 
 amongst her conquered nations, and even in Asia, on the 
 shores of the Troad. As divine, her will was justice ; the 
 law decided through her curies was legitimate if ratified 
 by consent of the gods in the taking of the auspices, and 
 which assumed a commerce between earth and heaven. 
 To give an act life and a divine character, its accom- 
 plishment must be surrounded by rites and ceremonies. 
 God Himself intervened in the judgments and under 
 the strokes of the magistrate to give peace to His earth ; 
 execution was an act of sacrifice ; the tribunal, as a 
 
140 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 sacred place, was to be turned to the East, to be closed 
 when the sun, type of the ray of intellect by which 
 judgment is enlightened, had set on the earth. This 
 powerful theocratic imprint was everywhere to be seen, 
 and underlay all the civilization of Paganism. As 
 Kome was supreme in her sphere, so was every father a 
 god in his own family, a genius sent for a time here 
 below. His will had all the features of law and resist- 
 less destiny, admitting no limit, stretching to the right 
 of life and death over his dependants, over his wife, 
 whom he could judge ; his son, whom he could expose ; 
 his slave, whom he could put to death. 
 
 Authority, the presence of irresistible will in all 
 human actions, marked Koman law, gave to it mystery, 
 and also provoked the greatest awakening of liberty 
 which had yet been seen. Rome's very function, in thus 
 overstraining her principle of authority, was to give a 
 greater volume to the outburst of freedom, and the 
 most remarkable sight her history offers to us is that of 
 the rigour of the private prison, the sale of the debtor 
 cut piecemeal, Virginia's blood spirting over the de- 
 cemvirs, acting as God's incentive to that very people 
 to show us as an example their eight-century-long 
 delivery. This was first seen when the plebs, straining 
 to enter upon the sacred enclosure, long defended by 
 the patrician order, tore from their grasp in succession 
 the connubium, the magistrate's offices, the auspices ; 
 lastly, the very secrets of the Law, and when the freed- 
 man Flavius stole from Appius the Actions of Law, 
 the formulas of which that patrician had drawn up.* 
 
 The movement, begun under the Republic, lived on 
 under the Empire, which did not close, as has been 
 * Dig. lib. i. tit. ii. 7, de Origine Juris. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 141 
 
 erroneously supposed, the history of liberty ; but the 
 game changed, and whilst under the Kepublic we see 
 the patrician city stormed and carried by the plebs, the 
 Empire shows us every province, the whole West, be- 
 sieging the imperial city to gain a place at the sanctuary 
 of law and public justice. The emperor, often himself 
 a foreigner, like Galba or Trajan, sprung from Spain, 
 acted as their representative, as invested with procon- 
 sular rank, and so becoming familiar with the provinces 
 whose natural protector he was. Caracalla, after a long 
 period of resistance and partial concession, threw down 
 every barrier, and in proclaiming Rome the common 
 capital, with as many citizens as she had subjects, im- 
 pelled the Empire to its definitive destiny.* 
 
 Such was the history of the enfranchisement of the 
 plebs and of the Western provinces, and as races and 
 men were pressing with such energy into the precinct 
 so obstinately guarded, Justice also began to find her 
 place there through the efforts of the praetor. 
 
 Every year that magistrate, on entering office, pro- 
 claimed by edict the principles on which he would 
 administer justice. He was used to interpret the iron 
 law of the Twelve Tables with equity and clemency, to 
 supply its lacuna, to throw light on its obscurity, and 
 softness over its rigour ; and in this commenced* that 
 struggle entered on by the magistrate against a text he 
 was obliged to apply, regretting its harshness, yet sub- 
 mitting to its authority while blunting its sharp edge. 
 The praetor and jurisconsults, who also had the right 
 of extenuating law principles, then created the Useful 
 Actions, in order to supply what was clearly wanting in 
 the primitive system; and the emperors, opening their 
 * Dig. lib. i. tit. v. de Statu hominum. 
 
142 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 minds to the light, called to their aid such men as 
 Gaius, Ulpian, and Paulus, who were influenced by 
 the Stoic philosophy, and supported it by their autho- 
 rity, not in Eome alone but throughout the Empire. 
 The effort of human reason developed under their 
 sanction a new law-system, in which the law of the 
 gens stood opposed to the civil law ; to the civil family, 
 composed only of agnats, or relations on the male side, 
 the natural family (cognatio), comprising those related 
 through females only ; to the property of the Quirites, 
 the property by natural right, called in bonis; to 
 succession to legitimate descendants only as established 
 by the Twelve Tables, the right of succession in all 
 alike to whose being nature had given the same author. 
 This was the work of many centuries, at last effected 
 by the conscience-cry of the plebs and the help of 
 philosophy in the shape of the Stoic lawyers. It was 
 one of the greatest spectacles reason could offer, not only 
 as showing, as in the jurisprudence of the Antonines, 
 a triumph of good sense, of lucidity of thought, a 
 perfect purity of form, an edifice giving with unexpected 
 felicity space and clearness of arrangement to the former 
 chaos of public and domestic relations, but as a first- 
 fruit of satisfaction to humanity, as tempering woman's 
 lot by dower ; paternal authority, by suppressing its right 
 of life and death ; the condition of slaves, by declaring, 
 through Antoninus Pius, to whoever could escape from 
 his master's rod and embrace the prince's statue, the 
 protection of a magistrate, who must descend from the 
 tribunal, cover him with a fold of his robe, and compel 
 his owner to transfer him to another more humane than 
 himself.* 
 
 * Inst. Just. De his. qui sui vel alieni juris sunt, 2. 
 

 ROMAN LAW. 143 
 
 While recognizing the services of human reason and 
 the merits of this ancient jurisprudence, we see beneath 
 the surface what was wanting to this first effort of man's 
 intelligence, the vices still inevitably lurking in it, 
 which gave it up to the time of which we treat that 
 pagan character so difficult to eradicate. Fiction 
 appears everywhere ; a superstitious respect for a past 
 openly belauded, but secretly disdained. The entire 
 labour of the praetor was lavished on a succession of 
 subterfuges by which to evade a law he dared not 
 overturn, to escape from their inflexible Twelve Tables, 
 not one of whose long- traced lines he dared efface. If, 
 for instance, they only granted succession to relations 
 on the male side, to grant it to those of defunct 
 female descent a fiction was necessary by supposing 
 in the formula of deliverance the new possessor to be 
 the heir. As the old law willed that certain chattels, 
 called mancipia, could only pass by mancipation, 
 or by usucaption, had an article of that class been 
 delivered to a claimant by simple tradition, and been 
 lost before possession had been acquired by usucaption, 
 property in it, according to strict law, was gone, yet 
 the praetor allowed a revendication, by supposing a 
 previous usucaption after the forms of the publician 
 action. Roman law, again, taking no cognizance of 
 foreigners, afforded them no action to enforce respect 
 of their rights. The actio furti would not, for in- 
 stance, lie, as, according to strict civil law, it was not 
 open to a foreigner ; but the praetor would grant it by 
 the fiction of supposing him a Roman citizen.* 
 
 Such things were calculated sooner or later to bring 
 into contempt so essentially simple a system of law. 
 * Gaius, Com. iv. 54 et seq. 
 
144 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 This faithless superstition and dishonest interpretation 
 represents what was passing in Paganism at large 
 maintenance of form and absence of faith. The old law 
 stood on the same footing as the mythology. It was a 
 mere fable {carmen serium) ; serious in the sense of 
 having much which was evil on its pages, and also 
 a mere song, in that its inspiration had ceased. Men 
 listened to its frequent repetition, and then passed on 
 to other and graver occupations. Not an education of 
 some years alone, but that of an entire life, was neces- 
 sary to find the way through its mazes, which again 
 began to contain a mystery in which very few were 
 adepts ; only it was no longer the patricians who held 
 the deposit, but the school, the family of juris- 
 consults, the few devoted by the state to the study of 
 law, and who alone, in diving into its recesses, could 
 exercise that species of priestly office which Ulpian 
 defined, Jus est ars boni et cequi cujus merito quis nos 
 sacerdotes appellet.* Ammianus Marcellinus, living at 
 the close of the fourth century, leaves us the following 
 picture of the lawyers of his day : " You would think 
 they professed the drawing of horoscopes or unfolding 
 the Sibylline oracles, to see the deep gravity of their 
 faces, in loudly boasting of a science wherein one can 
 merely grope." So the chief vice of Paganism had 
 not vanished ; still there appeared the adepts, few in 
 number and without the vulgar herd ; philosophy had 
 succeeded the old religions, detesting, like them, the 
 common people that is to say, the multitude, humanity 
 itself. Its second vice was the maintenance of the 
 absolute sovereignty of the state over not property only, 
 but life, souls, and consciences, carrying out the old 
 * Dig. de Justitia et Jure, lib. i. tit. i. 1. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 145 
 
 principle according to which Eome was divine and so 
 was her will ; and to its legitimate laws human will 
 could find no place of resistance, as no one cculd be 
 right in contradicting the gods. But a considerable 
 change had still come about, for the name of the 
 genius hitherto dwelling in mystery on the Capitol was 
 at last revealed. It was sometimes named Tiberius, 
 or Nero, or Heliogabalus, and its works were known as 
 well. The Empire became an idolatry, of which the 
 Emperor was priest and god. Altars were raised to 
 him in his lifetime ; his images were sent in all directions, 
 to be greeted with light and perfume, and thousands of 
 Christians died rather than cast on the fire at their feet 
 some grains of frankincense. He was a true god, in fact, 
 while living as after death, ordaining this, willing the 
 contrary on the morrow, exercising a tyranny the more 
 intolerable from its being exercised in a moral 
 sphere, and suffering no other will ; declaring to the 
 Christians by the organ of the jurisconsults that 
 their existence could not be permitted, " non licet esse 
 vos ;" crushing the state-right itself in placing the prince 
 above the law, princeps legibus solutus ; to which privi- 
 lege it was determined that the sovereign, acceding to 
 her the half of his rights, could also raise his Empress. 
 The will of one thus placed above all law naturally 
 became imperious and irresistible, and the conclusion 
 of the jurisconsults, quod principi placuit legis habet 
 vigor em utpote cum lege regia populus ei et in eum 
 omne suum imperium et potestatem conferet* led to 
 that formula so insulting to humanity wherewith princes 
 so often have terminated their acts, " for such is our good 
 pleasure." Not only did the prince's pleasure become 
 
 * Dig. de Constit lib. i. tit. 4. 
 VOL. I. 7 
 
146 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 the world's law, but he owned beside the pontifical office, 
 the absolute power of making and unmaking legisla- 
 tion, and nearly the whole Koman territory. The soil 
 of the provinces had been divided into two great parts : 
 the tributary, under the Emperor, and the stipendiary, 
 depending on the Eoman people. In course of time the 
 former succeeded to the latter, and thus the whole pro- 
 perty in the provinces devolved on the sovereign so 
 thoroughly that no private person was considered an 
 actual proprietor, but only a stipendiary maintained 
 and guaranteed till further notice in its use by the 
 Imperial will.* Hence no subject could complain when 
 the most sacred treasury sacratissimum csrar'mm claimed 
 some portion of his goods, or when taxes, indictions, or 
 superindictions were imposed, or the land itself dis- 
 trained, as the prince only took his own. On this prin- 
 ciple stood the fiscal system of Eome, full of exactions, 
 which reduced the groaning provinces to such a pitch of 
 distress that the curia responsible for the levy of the 
 impost was gradually deserted by the decurions, whose 
 place was filled by men of evil life and broken fortunes, 
 by concubinous priests and their bastard offspring, 
 since the honour had come to be looked on rather as a 
 disgrace. The provincials, tortured, forced to sell wife 
 and child to satisfy these requirements, began to aban- 
 don their lands, and to call upon the barbarians in aid, 
 assured of finding in them less exacting masters, and 
 preferring to render them one or two thirds of the soil 
 than be subject to a system which carried off the total 
 of their revenues. All the confusion at the beginning 
 of the Lower Empire, the responsibility of which has 
 been fixed upon the Christian emperors, flowed natu- 
 * Gaius, Comm. ii. 7. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 147 
 
 rally from principles long before established. "When 
 Aurelian took to himself the diadem of Persia and the 
 pomps of the East, th n Diocletian established that 
 hierarchy of officials which was to crush the Empire 
 with its weight, and the government in the days of its 
 strength sowed the seeds of its ruin. 
 
 A third radical vice in Paganism, an unmistakable 
 sign of its last catastrophe, was that terrible inequality 
 which no effort of reason could justify. At the root 
 of its legislation, written though it were by the im- 
 mortal pen of a Gaius or an Ulpian, lay that heathen 
 emanation principle which supposed that some men 
 sprang from the head, others from the belly or feet of 
 the all-pervading deity. This kept women in perpetual 
 tutelage, not in the legitimate guardianship of her 
 agnate alone, but in a dative tutelage restraining her 
 capacity in the most trifling actions of civil life. It sub- 
 jected the child to not only the paternal right of life and 
 death, but to that of sale. He was open to exposal on 
 his birth, condemned to a continual minority, whatever 
 his age or dignity might be, deprived of every kind of 
 property, up to the time of Constantine, except the 
 "peculium castrense," or military pay. It kept up 
 the servile system, the well-known horrors of which 
 existed not only in the heroic and mythical ages, but 
 throughout those centuries of light and philosophical 
 wisdom that were for so many a time of freedom. The 
 opinions of Greek philosophers on the subject were not 
 doubtful. Plato did not admit slavery into the Ee- 
 public, but dared not condemn it in his native city ; and 
 Aristotle gave human nature itself for its cause, saying 
 that some were made for rule and others for obedience. 
 Cicero held the same view. Cum autem hi famulantur 
 
148 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 qui sibi moderari nequeant nulla injuria est* " There 
 is no injustice in making slaves of those who know not 
 self-government." In his admirable treatise De Officiis, 
 the masterpiece of ancient morality, he relates, without 
 commentary, certain cases of conscience proposed by a 
 philosopher named Hecaton. Is a master in a famine 
 time bound to feed his slaves ? Economy says No ; 
 humanity Yes. Hecaton decides against it.f Suppose 
 one's self adrift in a small boat with a bad slave and a 
 good horse on board ; a storm comes on, which of the 
 two should be thrown overboard ? Hecaton and Cicero 
 will not pronounce upon it. Such was the philosophy 
 of the best epoch of Eome, which time did not do 
 much to modify. To come down to Libanius : in his 
 discourse on slavery he takes care not to repeat Chris- 
 tian complaints about it, nor to let slip any of the old 
 pagan traditions on the subject. Slavery is an evil com- 
 mon to all mortals ; all men serve either their passions 
 or their business or their duty the peasant is the 
 slave of wind and rain, the professor of his audience. 
 Slaves in name are least slaves in reality, but 
 happiest of all in knowing nothing of hunger, 
 that pitiless master ; happy in their state of care- 
 less lethargy, leaving their master the care of finding 
 them food ; and it is thus that passion and selfish- 
 ness have argued in every age as to slaves of every 
 colour. 
 
 The opinion of the philosophers became the doctrine 
 of the jurisconsults, whose duty it was to inspire theory 
 and reduce it to practice. The ancient law had a 
 punishment of death for the slaughterer of a steer ; but 
 
 * Cic, quoted by Nonius, de Rep. lib. iii. c. xxiii. 
 f Cic. de Officiis, 1. iii. c. xxiii. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 149 
 
 when Q. Flaminius, the senator, to amuse an aban- 
 doned youth, who was his companion, and was regret- 
 ting at never having seen any one put to death, cut the 
 head off one of his slaves, it was silent, having no 
 penalty for that kind of fault. They had instituted a 
 fine for the murder of a slave,* but hastened to remedy 
 their weakness by taking back from liberty what they 
 had granted to slavery ; and by the laws Mlia iSentia, 
 Junia Norbana, and Fusia Caninia, they calmed the 
 terrors of the serious, who feared revolution on seeing 
 at some funeral games a few freedmen, clad in. their 
 caps of liberty, taking their place among citizens, by 
 restraining the frequency of enfranchisement, and 
 closing the city of Kome to the freed. Different orders 
 were distinguished in the Servile ranks, such as deditii, 
 who could never become citizens, and the Latini Juniani, 
 who could only become citizens in certain cases. The 
 senatus - consult of Silanian, drawn up under 
 Claudius, had ordained torture to all his slaves upon 
 the violent death of any man ; and Tacitus paints 
 the terrified stupor of the city when it was one day 
 announced that a senator had died by violence, and 
 that his four hundred slaves were to be put to the 
 torture. t Hanging a slave was forbidden, but he 
 might die under the torment, and then his price must 
 be paid to the master. Nourishment was due to him, 
 and Cato tells us how a prudent head of the family 
 should arrange the matter. M Pour two amphorae of 
 sweet wine into a cask ; add two of very sharp vinegar, 
 and as much boiled wine, to the dilution of two-thirds, 
 with fifty amphorae of fresh water. Stir up the whole 
 
 * Tacit. Annal. 1. xiv. c. cxlii. et seq. 
 
 f Wallon : Histoire de 1'Esclavage dans l'Antiquite. 
 
150 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 with a stick for five consecutive days, and then pom* 
 in sixty-four measures of sea- water."* Paganism 
 appears clearly here, and the bitter beverage that Cato 
 used to give his slaves reminds us of a certain 
 sponge of vinegar and gall which another Koman, a 
 soldier, was to offer on the lance's point to that 
 other slave who was dying on a cross for the redemp- 
 tion of slaves. 
 
 As to their housing, Columella prescribed " ergastula 
 sabterranea" in which openings were to be contrived out 
 of reach of the hand,t either for the purpose of pre- 
 venting escape, or of cutting off the sight of the world, 
 which was denied them. Those employed at the mill 
 carried a large wheel round their necks to prevent their 
 raising to the mouth a handful of the flour that they 
 spent the day in grinding. This deprives the Chinese 
 of the honour of having invented their peculiar mode of 
 torture, and it was the mildest method of treatment, as 
 the law of Antonine had not taken away the right of 
 making eunuchs of slaves, and they were to be counted 
 by troops, greges puerorum, as well as crowds of 
 gladiator-slaves who assembled in the lanista, and 
 took the terrible oath to let themselves be burnt, 
 fettered, scourged, and slaughtered, uri, vinciri, ver- 
 berari, ferroque necari, if not men at least merchandise, 
 subject-matter for contracts of sale and purchase, and 
 therefore obliging, in some manner, the attention of 
 the jurisconsults. Gaius, in examining the difficulties 
 which might arise in certain cases, in declaring a con- 
 tract to be one of sale, or merely of hiring, proposed 
 the following question : " If I tender you a number 
 
 * Cato, cle Re Rustica. 
 f Colum. 1. vi. 3. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 151 
 
 of gladiators at the rate of twenty denarii ahead for 
 those who survive, as wages for their toils, and a 
 thousand ahead for the dead and wounded, is there a 
 sale or a letting ? The prevailing opinion is that, as 
 to the survivors, it is a hiring ; as to dead or wounded 
 a sale, the event deciding it, as if each slave was con- 
 ditionally an object either of sale or hire, for there is 
 no doubt that either contract may be subject to con- 
 ditions."* It is a question which is the most wonderful, 
 the calm of the lawyer, or the horror of the prevailing 
 manners. And those manners did not soften j we find 
 Trojan, on his return from Dacia, putting to death 
 ten thousand gladiators. Fear was expressed lest oxen 
 should fail, but no one seemed to fear a scarcity of 
 gladiators. The Keman law of the classic period, as 
 modified by the legislation of the Antonines, was certainly 
 like the Coliseum, a splendid monument, wherein men 
 were thrown to lions ! At the beginning of the fifth 
 century, all this jurisprudence still had force, and had 
 just been invigorated by the law of Citations, under 
 Valentinian III., but happily for a Christian period, a 
 rival system was rising in the code inaugurated by 
 Theodosius. 
 
 Christianity had early penetrated the Empire, coming 
 as a doctrine that hated fiction, unable by reason of its 
 liberty to suffer enslavement of conscience, or by its 
 charity all those social inequalities which were an 
 outrage to nature. Yet it did not aspire to change 
 violently the world's aspect, but rather to win its point 
 slowly and with patience, and like the Saviour to destroy 
 slavery in becoming itself a slave, formam servi acci- 
 piens. While Plato daily thanked the gods that he 
 * Gains, lib. iii. 146. 
 
152 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 had been born male rather than female, free and not a 
 slave, a Greek instead of a barbarian, it proclaimed by 
 St. Paul that there was no longer male nor female, free 
 nor slave, Greek nor barbarian, but one body in Christ 
 Jesus,* a saying strong enough to effect as ages passed 
 the great changes which God had determined. It could 
 not tolerate imperial pretensions over the conscience of 
 mankind, and whilst praying for its persecutors pro- 
 claimed that God rather than man was to be obeyed. 
 Finally it repulsed all the pagan fictions, but yet in its 
 contempt for a law which was reserved for a little band 
 of experts, and hidden perforce from the multitude, it 
 did not profess to despise the Koman law-system. As 
 was declared in the Apostolic Constitutions, " God did 
 not will that His justice should be shown forth only by 
 us, bui let it shine in the Eoman laws ; " and St. 
 Augustine said, " Leges Bomanorum divinitus per or a 
 principum emanarunt." It received these laws with 
 admiration, recognizing in them the light which lightens 
 every man coming into the world that he might know 
 and adore his God, and was forced to toil with patience 
 to reform in accordance with its principles the legisla- 
 tion whose vices we have examined. Its presence was 
 early suspected and soon perceived, but this is not the 
 place for showing how the new society toiled in its 
 catacombs, hidden deep under another hostile society 
 whose reform it had entered upon ; how in every rank of 
 public and domestic life, in the senate and the foulest 
 ergastula, it knew how to mould disciples and to en- 
 lighten and modify the manners of the time. It has been 
 pointed out how St. Paul, by his speech on Areopagus, 
 his dispute with Stoics and Epicureans, his apology at 
 * 1 Corinth, vii. 22, xii. 13 ; Romans i. 14. 
 
ROMAN LAW. 153 
 
 Corinth before the Roman magistrate, Annseus Gallio, 
 must have roused the opinions of his contemporaries 
 and of those Greeks and philosophers so greedy of 
 novelty; in particular, Gallio must have informed his 
 beloved brother Seneca, who dedicated to him his 
 treatises De Ira and De Vita Beatd, of the fame and 
 doctrines of that Grsecized Jew who went to make 
 proselytes at Rome in the very palace of Nero. Seneca's 
 own doctrines bear witness to the necessary contact 
 between Pagan and Christian philosophy. His stoicism 
 put in the place of the ancient fatum, the third arbiter 
 of our destinies, a Providence, a Divine Father, to 
 honour and obey ; it gave him faith in the soul's immor- 
 tality, and the conflict here below between spirit and 
 flesh, an enemy to be conquered only by Divine help, 
 namely grace, and filled him with a singular pity for all 
 human sorrow, and especially for his enslaved fellow- 
 creature. It is pleasant to believe that this Stoic bore 
 the impress of a Christian philosopher, who was at 
 Rome in the time of Seneca, and was destined to die 
 there more gloriously than himself. 
 
 It seems inevitable that the Christians, daily increas- 
 ing in numbers, filling the forum, the senate, and the 
 army, with the apologies of Quadratus, Bishop of Athens, 
 of Athenagorfis, St. Justin, Tertullian, and the senator 
 Apollonius, circulating through every rank of society, 
 should influence the Stoic philosophy and the juris- 
 consults through it. Their admission to the councils 
 of Alexander Severus, who adored amongst his lares 
 the image of Christ, and inscribed in golden letters on 
 his palace walls the maxims of Christianity, points to 
 the growing force of the new religion. The plagiarism 
 of the jurisconsults from its sources, though denied 
 
154 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 on account of their inveterate hostility, was but the 
 last resource of a baffled enemy, trying to disarm truth 
 by borrowing its principles, which were attracting every 
 heart. Julian meant this in advising the pagans about 
 him to imitate the Christian priests and open hospitals ; 
 and the jurisconsults laboured to disarm the Gospel by 
 infusing it into Koman law, that there might remain no 
 excuse for reforming a society open to legitimate pro- 
 gress, or to destroy a religion so capable of wholesome 
 reform. 
 
 When Christianity ascended the throne with Con- 
 stantine, far from exacting too much and assuming 
 empire as a conqueror, it continued its course with the 
 same calmness. Constantine acted with caution, re- 
 taining the title of Supreme Pontiff, and still issuing 
 edicts as to the manner of consulting the auspices. The 
 tactics of his successors were similar : one advanced, 
 another drew back, but all hesitated, and the Theodosian 
 Code still preserved slavery, divorce, concubinage, ine- 
 quality between man and wife, and father and son, 
 though three great novelties found place in it. In the 
 first place an effort was made to give to law a character 
 of publicity and sincerity. Under Constantine the 
 sacramental formulas relating to wills, stipulations, 
 and other acts of civil life, the sacramental syllables, 
 called by the Christian emperors auciipatio syllabaram, 
 as well as the whole system of juridical subtleties, fell 
 to the ground ; and by determining the names of the 
 jurists whose decisions should have force, and uniting 
 in one code, as was the case under Theodosius and 
 Valentinian, the scattered edicts of the Christian princes, 
 a popular and accessible form was given to the law. 
 Secondly, the temporal and spiritual orders were sepa- 
 
ROMAN LAW. 155 
 
 rated, and in this respect advance was less easy, for, 
 as Constantine had retained the title of pontiff, his 
 successors were willing to believe that the religion of 
 the Empire alone had changed, and not their old su- 
 premacy over the conscience. The Church had to labour 
 perseveringly in preventing their usurpation of the right 
 of convoking and presiding in her councils, saying in 
 the words of Lucifer of Cagliari, "What! are we to 
 respect your diadems, bracelets, and earrings, and 
 despise the Creator?" The declaration wrung from 
 Theodosius and Valentinian, " It is worthy of a prince's 
 majesty to pronounce himself bound by the laws," 
 ended the struggle by the victory of the Church, and 
 then the monarch became subject to law, and the tem- 
 poral power took up the less splendid but firmer position 
 assigned it in the Gospel: "Let him who would be 
 first be the servant of all." In the last place, the hands 
 of the emperors touched with healing the three great 
 wounds humanity bore in the injury done to women, 
 children, and slaves. Constantine gave mothers a larger 
 share in succession to their children, forbade exposing 
 infants, and punished the child murderer in the same 
 measure as the parricide. He abolished crucifixion as 
 a punishment for slaves, issued an edict against the 
 gladiatorial combats, "not willing," as he said, " such 
 bloody sights in the midst of the Peace of the Empire," 
 and condemned to death the master who had killed a 
 slave. " Let masters use their right with clemency, 
 and let that man be held a murderer who shall have 
 slain his slave voluntarily by blows of rods or of stones, 
 or by mortally wounding him with a dart, who shall 
 have hung him by a halter, or by cruel order had him 
 thrown into an abyss, or made him drink poison, or 
 
156 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 caused savage beasts to tear his body, or branded his 
 flesh with burning coals, or in frightful torment caused 
 life to flee from his bloody and foam-flecked limbs with 
 a fierceness worthy only of barbarians." * This eloquent 
 law, dated a.d. 319, well expresses the Christian in- 
 dignation at the horrors of slavery, and shows the 
 Church, just clothed with the purple, hastening to make 
 a law in favour of her enslaved children. 
 
 In this manner did the Theodosian Code remedy the 
 triple outrage offered by the old system to liberty, 
 truth, and humanity, in slavery and domestic inequality. 
 It was no wonder that the reading, by the Prefect of 
 Kome and the consuls, of the edict inaugurating the 
 Theodosian Code throughout the Empire was received 
 by the senate with magnificent applause. t The last 
 minutes of its sittings contained this ratification, and 
 its acclamations must have penetrated to the camp of 
 the barbarians, already established in a.d. 438, on 
 Eoman territory. At the very moment when the Van- 
 dals were masters of Africa, the Burgundians and 
 Visigoths of Gaul and Spain, and Attila was advancing 
 at the head of his Huns, by a sublime coincidence 
 the legislation was proclaimed which was destined to 
 master the future. Its fame was to reach those bar- 
 barians, whose kings would seek to know the great idea 
 of Eoman law which was never to abandon them. The 
 edict of Theodosius, in the year 500, proclaimed the 
 
 * Cod. Just. ix. 14, de Emendatione Servorum. Cod. Theod. 
 lib. ix. tit. xii. c. 1. 
 
 f The senate exclaimed, " May God preserve you, Augustus ! 
 (27 times). You have taken all doubt from the edicts (2 -'3 times). 
 You labour for public justice and for our peace (25 times). From 
 you we hold our honours, our patrimony, all our possessions 
 (28 times). Spare this code the danger of interpolations '' 
 (25 times). 
 
ROMAN LAW. 157 
 
 Theodosian Code the law of the Ostrogoths ; Alaric 
 gave his subjects, a few years later, the " Breviarium 
 Alaricamrm," extracted from the same code ; and in 
 534 the " Papiani Kespohsa," in great measure col- 
 lected from it again, appeared for the use of the 
 Eoman subjects of the Burgundians. Nor was its 
 destiny to end there ; it was taught throughout Gaul, 
 particularly in the schools of Clermont, during the 
 sixth and seventh centuries. Carried into England to 
 the school of York, into Germany in the peaceful 
 train of conquering Boniface, it was to serve as basis 
 to the capitularies of Frankish kings, and thus pene- 
 trating into all the barbarian legislation, to give it 
 temper, enlightenment, and system. 
 
 It is true that the barbarian chiefs were no less 
 taken by its faults than by its merits, and did not 
 shrink from assuming the heirship of the Eoman 
 emperors with regard to their subjects' goods. In this 
 spirit Frederick Barbarossa caused his lawyers to 
 decide, at Koncaglia, that as Trajan's heir he was 
 absolute master of his subjects' property; the same 
 doctrine was adopted by Louis XIV. in speaking of 
 his royal goods, " of which part are comprised in our 
 demesne, the rest left by our good pleasure in the 
 hands of our subjects;" and such pagan traditions have 
 been handed down to become, under other forms, the 
 gravest danger of the present day. 
 
 The last traditions of divorce in the family were to 
 disappear in the great struggle of the Papacy against 
 Philip Augustus and Henry IV. Slaves gradually 
 were to become serfs, and serfs freemen. Lastly, the 
 great principle of the separation of the spiritual and 
 temporal orders was to gain its victory at the moment 
 
158 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 when Gregory VII. gave out his dying cry, " I fought 
 for justice, and therefore am dying in exile." He died, 
 but the principle which he supported so vigorously 
 gained a stronger life, for the ideas which save the 
 human race are those which suffer all that is mortal in 
 them to perish. 
 
 Roman law was to rule the world on condition of 
 the fall of the Roman Empire ; nothing less was 
 required to dissipate the mist of legal fiction and the 
 remnant of that deep discord which was rooted in the 
 old system. The swords of Attila and Odoacer were 
 to banish the lingering phantom of the imperial 
 throne, and to give breathing space to the world, to 
 revive the soul of the old law on that principle of 
 natural equity which began its struggle in the blood of 
 Virginia and on the Sacred Hill, continued it by 
 tribune's word and praetor's edict, found a new power 
 in the Stoic philosophy, and its ultimate triumph in 
 Christianity. When stripped of its trappings of gold 
 and purple, of imperial pomp and human circum- 
 stance, it issued forth lord of the world at the moment 
 of its apparent dissolution. 
 
159 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 PAGAN LITERATURE. I. POETRY. 
 
 The deeper we penetrate Koman society of the fifth 
 century the more obvious appears its necessary, but 
 not total dissolution. In religion and law we have 
 already seen the mixture of perishable elements and 
 the immortal principles which were to survive gaining, 
 rather than losing, from the destruction of the former. 
 Literature would seem to afford a different spectacle ; 
 that if the idea of holiness was veiled from antiquity 
 by carnal and bloody thoughts, that of justice troubled 
 by the arrogance of the strong and their oppression of 
 the weak, it at least had nothing to correct, nothing to 
 lose, without irreparable loss for the future, and that in 
 respect to art, those men of the North, Celts, Germans, 
 Sclaves, just coming from their forests, could do nothing 
 better than learn at the feet of Latin masters their 
 eloquence and poetry. But it was not so ; the fifth 
 century preserved the traditions of art, but overlaid by 
 all the defects and vices of the Decline, and we shall see 
 what forces had to be overcome in order to set her free. 
 The Latin decline in literature began with the reign 
 of Augustus, simultaneously with the end of liberty. 
 The historical commonplace, that inspiration can only 
 flourish with freedom, seems, indeed, contestable, and 
 expressly belied by facts, as in the case of this very age 
 
160 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of Augustus, that of the Medicis, and of Louis XIV., 
 and every other in which a huge despotism, covered with 
 a shadow, deadly to liberty, beneficial to genius, the 
 whole aspect of things. But the defenders of this posi- 
 tion forget that the great princes who have given name 
 to these golden ages of letters have not opened, but 
 closed them, and, therefore, left, as it were, their in- 
 scription on their sepulchres. Augustus began by sell- 
 ing to Antony the head of Cicero ; and so calming, as, 
 according to his contemporaries, he calmed everything 
 even eloquence he rather extinguished it, and though 
 surrounded forthwith by poets, they had received their 
 training in the midst of the civil war, within hearing of 
 Philippi and Actium. Later, the Medicis embraced 
 Italian literature, still quivering with Guelph or Grhibe- 
 line passion and the breath of Dante, to leave it to 
 slumber for three centuries at the feet of women. 
 Louis XIV. was heir to a century still seething with the 
 tempest of the League and the generous errors of the 
 Fronde, but entered upon another destined to waste 
 itself in the antechambers of courtesans and courtiers ; 
 so that all these Maecenas patrons of literature's golden 
 age did but raise a common though splendid sepulchre 
 for both liberty and genius. 
 
 Advancing into the ages of the Empire, servitude be- 
 comes heavier, and its shadows more obscure. Yet the 
 reigns of Christian emperors, often accused of hastening 
 the Decline, in giving some liberty to men's minds, re- 
 stored a particle of inspiration to literature. Symma- 
 chus, an unsuspected witness, tells us that Valentinian, 
 after Julian's philosophic reign, restored public judicial 
 debates, and as a pagan author, praises him for putting 
 an end to the silence. If eloquence could revive at all, 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 161 
 
 it would have been at these Koman tribunals, haunted 
 by such great memories, still instinct with the genius 
 of Cicero : but it was not destined to gain recognition 
 beyond their precincts. 
 
 Poetry, favoured by Constantine's liberality, regained 
 an inspiration to which she had been a stranger nearly 
 three hundred years. The fifth century offering to our 
 view at first sight only palace intrigues, and the 
 quarrels of eunuchs, was of all centuries the most 
 capable of inspiring a great epic poem. Kome had 
 always loved the heroic songs which brought back to 
 life the glory of her great men and military achieve- 
 ment ; but ehe required a form of poetry known to, 
 but not preferred by, Greece the historic form, 
 rather than the mythical epopee, and from the 
 " Annals " of Ennius to the " Pharsalia " of Lucan 
 and the "Punic War" of Silius Italicus claimed as 
 especially her own the poets who followed the course of 
 her history, and expressed it in language worthy of its 
 glory. The scene was now enlarged, the struggle 
 grown more terrible. The barbarians were at her gates. 
 Though always conquered and repulsed by the prowess 
 of Constantine, the sense of Julian, the genius and 
 firmness of Theodosius, no one could tell which way 
 the balance held by Fate would incline. And another 
 mightier and more lasting conflict was proceeding ; and 
 as the poet showed us from Trojan ramparts the pha- 
 lanxes of heaven joined in battle far above, so we see 
 far over these earthly contests the great duel between 
 Paganism and Christianity being fought out ; no 
 one unenlightened by Christian principle being on 
 the morrow of Julian's death able to predict the 
 issue. Here, as in the " Iliad," a world- struggle was 
 
162 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 in progress, not between East and West alone, but be- 
 tween two halves of the human race, and it was again 
 as if the immortals had descended from the clouds to 
 fight under the light of day in the thickest of the 
 battle. But the poet was wanting to describe it, or 
 rather he was there, but mistook its meaning. 
 
 The poet of the fifth century was Claudian, a native 
 of the learned city of Alexandria, and of that Egypt 
 under whose vaunted sky the labourer, served by the 
 waters of Nile, need never call the clouds to his help. 
 He sang passionately of his city, wherein the whole 
 learning of ancient time was stored parent of Calli- 
 machus and Apollonius, at whose schools Virgil and 
 Horace had not disdained to study, and the poet him- 
 self had been formed and trained. In 395 he appeared 
 in still pagan Eome amidst universal homage from 
 the partisans of the old cult, who were overjoyed at 
 hearing the brilliant youth belaud their gods at the 
 moment when their fall had been proclaimed. Public 
 admiration bore him to the highest honours, and leave 
 was obtained from Christian emperors to erect him a 
 statue in Trajan's forum beside the great poets of anti- 
 quity, bearing on the base an inscription ascribing to 
 him Virgil's intelligence and Homer's muse.* 
 
 In obtaining such favours for him a more powerful 
 protector was joined with the senate in the person of 
 Stilicho, to whose suite the poet was attached. He sang 
 of his victories, combats, repose, pleasures, vices, and 
 crimes, and accompanied the tutor of Honorius, the 
 conqueror of the Goths, to the end of his career, and 
 
 * Eli> tv\ Bipyikioio voov kcu fiovcrav 'Ofirjpov 
 KXavdiauov Pco/i?; kcli (Baai\T)$ ede<xap. 
 
 Ohkllj : /merit. Lat. Col. No. 1182. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 163 
 
 when lie perished at the assassin's hand was sprinkled 
 with his Mood. Claudian thereupon, in disgrace and 
 persecuted, addressed a poem to Adrian, the praetorian 
 prefect, to implore him to show pity, to stay his hand, 
 and suffer him to breathe freely in retirement, and, with 
 the deplorable license of flattery, comparing the prefect 
 to Achilles, reminded him that he did not show fury 
 over the remains of Hector. 
 
 Manibus Hectoreis atrox ignovit Achilles.* 
 
 This man's genius lay precisely in his errors. Born in 
 a Christian age, he lived by power of an intense imagi- 
 nation, surrounded by the associations of pagan anti- 
 quity, and like the gods who walk the earth in mist, so 
 he could only speak in an atmosphere of fable which hid 
 the truth. At this epoch temples were everywhere being 
 closed, except at Rome, where, however, the Galilaean 
 Fisherman had conquered Jupiter Olympus ; yet he 
 began a Gigantomachia, to celebrate Jove's victory over 
 the giants. As the time was approaching for the temple 
 of Ceres at Catania to receive the image of the 
 Blessed Virgin on its altar, he was composing a poem 
 in three books on the Rape of Proserpine. The 
 genii of the levelled temples, the inspiration of the 
 Delphic tripod, had passed on to his lips to bring forth 
 no eloquent defence or apology of his menaced gods 
 that would link his fame to that of Symmachus, and 
 confute those of the most glorious confessors, but only 
 to teach us, with great noise and parade, how the 
 infernal god carried Ceres' lovely daughter from the 
 meadows of Enna : 
 
 * Claudiani Epistola, i. 13. 
 
164 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Inferni raptoris equos, efflataque curru 
 Sidera Taenario, caligantesque profundae 
 Juuonis thalamos, audaci prodere cantu 
 Mens congesta jubet * 
 
 But it was not mere fancy ; in Claudian's errors and 
 forgetfulness there was plenty of political significance. 
 The pagan society that had received the new comer with 
 transport and loaded him with favours, in making him 
 the poet of its predilection, and which consisted chiefly 
 of the senatorial families, had embraced the policy, 
 according to the speech of Sallust the rhetorician to 
 Julian, of treating Christianity as a passing whim of 
 some infatuated minds, which would soon fade and 
 leave them to return to the religion of their ancestors. 
 Pagans, formerly so disturbed at these Christians, 
 whom they had treated to menace, to the arenas, execu- 
 tioners, or lions, whom they had accused of treason and 
 a desire to undermine the Empire, contented themselves 
 now with the calmer method of ignoring them as of 
 little account at present, and to be non-existent to 
 posterity. Claudian passed without recognition amidst 
 the Christian glories of the century, in ignorance of 
 St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, who did him on the 
 contrary the honour of quoting from his writings, never 
 attacking Christianity directly but once in his private 
 life, when he hurled the following epigram at Jacobus, 
 a military prefect, for the great crime of disapproving 
 his poetry : 
 
 * My mind, swollen (with poetry), bids me set forth in bold 
 verse the horses of the hellish ravisher, the stars, the Tsenarian 
 chariot, and profound Juno's misty couch. De Baptu Proser- 
 pina, lib. i. 1-4. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 165 
 
 Per cineres Pauli, per card limina Petri, 
 Ne laceres versus, dux Jacobe, meos. 
 
 Sic tua pro clypeo sustentet pectora Thomas, 
 Et comes ad bellum Bartholomaeus eat. 
 
 Sic ope sanctorum, non barbarus irruat Alpes ; 
 Sic tibi det vires sancta Susanna tuas.* 
 
 So the use of sarcasm against Christianity is not 
 modern, and in writing a history of Voltairianism we 
 have to go back long before Yoltaire. 
 
 But the Koman aristocracy rarely allowed its poet 
 such compromising liberties, for it had other services to 
 extract from him. Claudian had been made the poet 
 laureate of its solemnities, of its interests, and of its 
 passions. He was its spokesman ; not, indeed, in prose, 
 which might have incurred blame through excess, but 
 in the language of the gods, which could be accused of 
 no liberty, and in which he might recall, from time to 
 time, expressions of Virgil or of Homer. He wag 
 spokesman in those great events which were stirring 
 every mind, the war against Gildo or Alaric, the 
 fall of Kufinus or Eutropius ; and then it was that he 
 appeared at Eome, Milan, or Eavenna before Honorius, 
 Stilicho, and the high dignitaries of the Empire, to speak 
 in the name of the great senatorial assembly and the 
 aristocracy of Rome ; to treat these Christian poten- 
 tates as he would have treated Augustus and his court ; 
 to envelop them in a cloud of words breathing, as it were, 
 idolatrous incense and the perfume of sacrifice ; and 
 entangle them in a sort of complicity with the Paganism 
 
 * By the ashes of Paul, by hoary Peter's shrine, hurt not, O 
 Jacob, my verses. If, instead of shield, Thomas protect thy 
 breast and Bartholomew goes with thee to battle as companion ; 
 if by the aid of the saints the barbarian may not cross the Alps ; 
 so may also holy Susanna give thee her strength. Claud! 
 Epig. 27. 
 
166 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 which they were not strong enough to disperse. Had 
 he to praise Theodosius, he represented him, after giving 
 his last advice to Stilicho, as taking flight for heaven, 
 like Eomulus of old, traversing the milky way, cleaving 
 to right and left the shadows which pressed respectingly 
 on his course, leaving far behind him Apollo, Mercury, 
 and Jupiter, and taking his place on the highest 
 summit of the empyrean, whilst his star rose in the 
 east, to take another loving glance at his son Arcadius, 
 and set regretfully on the dominions of Honorius, in 
 the Western Empire. Thus did the poet of this century 
 sing of the apotheosis of the greatest defenders and 
 crowned servants of Christianity. Still bolder and freer 
 was his tone in addressing the young Honorius, not 
 hesitating on the occasion of his marriage to Mary to 
 picture Love and Cupid coming to pierce the heart of 
 the prince with their darts, and departing to boast of 
 his exploits to Venus in her Cyprian palace, of which 
 he gave a sounding description. The goddess, borne 
 by a triton, crossed the seas, arrived at Ravenna, and 
 entering the palace of the espoused, found them reading 
 the ancient poets. The odes of Sappho (the reading 
 of which pagans forbade to their children) was what 
 Claudian placed in the hands of the young bride of 
 Honorius.* 
 
 But there was a greater solemnity for him. In the 
 year 404, when Honorius had reigned nine years, pre- 
 ferring the Christian city of Ravenna to Rome, which 
 was still bound to the false gods, and having issued 
 three edicts against Paganism, he decided, after long 
 hesitation, to go to Rome, to celebrate his sixth consu- 
 late. He took possession of the old palace of Augustus, 
 * De Nuptiis Honorii et Mariae. v. 235. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 167 
 
 on the Palatine, and gathered around him that divided 
 Senate, the majority of which was still deploring the 
 overthrow of the altar of Victory. In that great 
 assembly, wherein* the Christians preponderated by 
 influence, if not by number, Claudian came forward 
 charged to make known the wishes of the Senate and 
 people, and from a parchment on which his verses were 
 written in letters of gold related a dream: "Balmy 
 sleep gives back to our calmed hearts all the thoughts 
 that during the day have troubled our souls. The 
 hunter dreams of the woods, the judge of his tribunal, 
 and the skilful rider thinks in sleep to pass a fancied 
 goal. Me, also, does the worship of the muses pursue 
 in the silence of night, and brings me back to an accus- 
 tomed task. I dreamt that in the midst of heaven's 
 starry vault I was bringing my songs to the feet of 
 mighty Jove, and, as sleep has its sweet illusions, 
 thought I saw the hallowed choir of the gods applaud- 
 ing my words. I sang of the vanquished giants, 
 Enceladus and Typhceus, and of the joy with which 
 heaven received Jupiter, all radiant with triumph. But 
 no vain image deceived me. No ivory gate sent me 
 forth a deceitful vision. Here is the prince, the world's 
 master, high as Olympus. There in truth that assembly 
 which I saw, an assembly of gods. Sleep could show 
 me nothing more excellent, and the Court has rivalled 
 heaven."* Nothing at once more polished or more 
 pagan could be said. After this brilliant exordium 
 he continued. First he vowed a temple to Fortune 
 
 * En princeps, en orbis apex requatus Olympo ! 
 En, quales memini, turba verenda, Deos ! 
 Fingere nil majus potuit sopor ; altaque vati 
 Convention coelo praebuit aula parem. 
 
 Claud, de Seat. Consul. Honor. Prefatio, 1-25. 
 
168 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 (Fortuna redux), since Eome and the consulate had 
 recovered their majesty. When Apollo abandoned 
 for a moment his splendid home at Delphi the laurel 
 became but a common shrub, the oracles were dumb ; 
 but as the god's return gave voice to caves and forests, 
 so did Mount Palatine revive at the presence of the 
 new deity and remembered the Caesars who for so 
 many ages had dwelt therein. " Truly no other home 
 suits as well the masters of the world, no other mount 
 exalt so highly the imperial power or more dominion 
 to the supreme law, turning as it does over the 
 forum and the vanquished rostra. Behold the sacred 
 palace everywhere environed by temples. How the 
 gods guard it round ! Before me I behold Jove's sanc- 
 tuary, the mighty steeps of the Tarpeian rock, sculp- 
 tured porticoes, statues that rise toward heaven, holy 
 buildings whose crowded roofs darken the sky. I 
 perceive the columns studded with many a ship-beak 
 in iron and numberless arches charged with spoils. 
 Bespected Prince, dost thou not recognize thy house- 
 hold gods ? " 
 
 Agnoscisque tuos, princeps venerande, penates.* 
 
 There was more than imagination or empty pomp in 
 such verses. They read a bold lesson to the prince 
 who had deserted Eome to hide himself in Bavenna, 
 and it was not without temerity that Claudian called 
 him back to his pagan penates, to Mount Palatine as a 
 place still defended by the divine sentinels which are 
 standing around. 
 
 But a fine sentiment of Boman patriotism pushed 
 to a singular degree in a native of Alexandria explains 
 
 * Claud, de Sext. Cons. Honor, v. 39-53. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 169 
 
 and gives a reason for the poet's unusual audacity. It 
 was a proof of the deep feeling of unity with which 
 Rome had infected all the nations under her sway. 
 Claudian had digested the whole of Eoman antiquity, 
 and was penetrated with the spirit of Latin heroism. 
 He filled his verse with the names of the Fabricii, 
 Decii, and Scipios ; not as mere verbiage to stock the 
 edifice of an empty poetry, but as living thoughts 
 restoring, if but for a moment, the faded past. Not 
 Jupiter, in whom he only half believed, nor Ceres, nor 
 Proserpine, but Eome was the true divinity of Clau- 
 dian ; Kome as she was pictured on her monuments 
 and seen in the public places or in the temples which 
 even in Asian cities had been dedicated to her name. 
 " Rushing forth on a chariot, followed in breathless 
 course by her two. outriders, Terror and Impetuosity, 
 with helmeted head and bare shoulder, in her hand the 
 sword of victory, turned now against Parthian, now 
 against German." Such was the deity of his dreams, 
 and in admiration of her stern beauty he was never 
 weary. 
 
 At other times, quitting his rich and florid mytho- 
 logy, he seized the very idea of Rome in her career of 
 conquest and legislation, expressing it with an accuracy 
 worthy of a historian or a lawyer. " She is the mother 
 of arms and of law ; she has stretched her empire over 
 the world, and given to law her earliest cradle ; she 
 alone received the vanquished to her bosom, and gave 
 her name as consolation to the human race, treating it 
 not as its queen, but its mother. She made citizens of 
 those she had conquered, and bound earth's extremities 
 by a chain of love. By her peaceful genius, we find all 
 of us our country under foreign skies, and change our 
 
 vol. i. 8 
 
170 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 dwelling with impunity. Through her it is but play to 
 visit the frozen shores of Thule and penetrate regions 
 whose very name caused our fathers horror. Through 
 her we drink at will of the Khine or Orontes ; through 
 her we are but one people, and her empire will know 
 no end. The Sibyl has given her promise, Jupiter 
 thunders but for her, and Pallas covers her with her 
 whole aegis."* 
 
 I have treated of Claudian in detail, as being the next 
 in the rank of poets to Lucan, and do not shrink from 
 putting him above Statius and all subsequent poets, on 
 account of a singular brilliancy of imagery, an astonish- 
 ing richness of metaphor, and a warmth of tone which 
 often called forth the true light of poetic diction. But 
 I cannot veil his faults, in devoting such great qualities 
 to the service of a religion which no longer inspired 
 any mind ; for Paganism had its time of inspiration in 
 days when it was sustained by a kind of faith, as when 
 Homer pictured a Jupiter the movement of whose eye- 
 brow made the world tremble, with such deep religious 
 truth that the poet himself seemed awed by the mighty 
 image he had just evoked. Yirgil, too, in less degree, 
 lighted upon some measure of the same inspiration, 
 when he called us to assist at the foundation of the 
 Eoman Destiny, at that assembly of gods wherein 
 it was decided that the stones of the Capitol should 
 never be displaced. But Claudian scarcely believed in 
 these gods ; he used them as so many actors to pour 
 
 * Heec est in gremium victos quae sola recepit, 
 Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit, 
 Matris non dominse ritu; 
 Hujus pacificis debemus legibus omnes 
 Quod cuncti gens una sumus. 
 
 Claudian, de Consul. Stilichon. lib. iii. 136-158. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 171 
 
 forth school harangues, and only brought forward 
 Jupiter, Juno, and Pluto to treat of some common- 
 place about glory or pardon, farewell or despair. It 
 was worse when he disposed them as so many slaves in 
 the train of his protectors ; made them march behind 
 the chariot of Stilicho, or hurled them in pursuit of 
 such of his enemies as Eufinus ; and in this all the 
 badness and servility of that pagan society, whose 
 disorders we have glanced at, was at once betrayed. 
 Like his friends, the Koman senators, he offered vows 
 in secret for the triumph of Arbogastes or Eugenius, 
 whom he disowned on their fall finding, when one had 
 died on the battle-field; and the other had, like Brutus 
 at Philippi, fallen on his own sword, nothing but poetic 
 insults for their memory. When Eufinus, again sur- 
 rounded by his enemies, was torn in pieces, his head 
 carried one way, his arms another, and the fragments 
 of his body a third, Claudian showed a savage joy, and 
 could not gloat sufficiently over the blood which he saw 
 flow with the same pleasure as Diana felt when her dogs 
 tore Actseon limb from limb, and exclaimed, "Happy 
 was the hand which first was plunged into such blood 
 as that."* 
 
 Mankind could scarcely inspire the poets of this time 
 more than the gods. The familiarity of Augustus, the 
 elegant and prudent commerce he sustained with his 
 poets, was efficient to encourage the muses of Virgil 
 and Horace ; he wished for flattery, but the more 
 delicate it was, the more did it please him. Far dif- 
 ferent was the courtiership of the Lower Empire to 
 which our poet cringed. Stilicho was a Vandal, and 
 Eutropius an eunuch, but Claudian was their hired 
 
 * In Rufinum, lib. ii. 40 G. 
 
 8 * 
 
172 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 servant, owing them verses in return for every benefit 
 they conferred. All antiquity then was sacrificed to 
 Stilicho ; he was compared to the Scipios, who had 
 patronized poetry, hut he was raised to a higher place. 
 Serena, his wife, was invited to give her auspices to the 
 poet's marriage, and in an invitatory epistle in verse, 
 by which he announced it to the great princess, he 
 reminded her that Juno assisted at those of Orpheus, 
 and hints that the queen of earth will not suffer herself 
 to be excelled in generosity by the queen of heaven.* 
 In such phrases he addressed a Christian guilty of the 
 unpardonable crimes in his pagan eyes of burning the 
 Sibylline books, and of snatching from the goddess in 
 the temple of Ceres her necklace, whilst repulsing with 
 a kick the ancient vestal who reproached her with the 
 sacrilege. 
 
 Thus all the poet's Paganism was incapable of ex- 
 tracting from him a word of ill-will towards the enemies 
 of his religion, and he includes them all in a generous 
 forgiveness. This leaning towards panegyric was a sign 
 of a degradation of morality ; not only did it take from 
 the poet all moral dignity, but was inimical to the spirit 
 of poetry. The panegyrist, in fact, cannot take the 
 truly great and heroic as the object of his verse. He 
 must praise and immortalize everything take his hero 
 at his birth, and follow him through his childish 
 games ; and when Honorius could not lead his armies 
 in person, find a reason for his inaction in declaring 
 the boy of nine to be busied in philosophic study at the 
 
 * Sed quod Threico Juno placabilis Orphei, 
 Hoc poteris votis esse, Serena, meis. 
 Illius expectat famulantia sidera nutum; 
 Sub pedibus regitur terra fretumque tuis. 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 173 
 
 moment when he was sought for that he might be made 
 Augustus. Such is the law of panegyric. 
 
 The publicity with which these compositions were 
 declaimed, and the custom of public readings of them, 
 brought the poets of the Decline to the oblivion which 
 was their destiny. It has been ingeniously shown how 
 this custom, unknown to the time of Virgil the self- 
 conceited habit introduced by Pollio, and encouraged 
 later by Nero, of bringing a multitude together at the 
 recital of a poem contributed profoundly to stifle 
 genius by degrading it to a mere literary game and 
 pastime for men of culture. "When a whole people is 
 addressed, there must be some common thoughts, 
 which must be eloquent to gain hearers simple to 
 gain appreciation. But when only a cloyed and cap- 
 tious handful of so-called fine spirits, who boast of 
 never admiring, because that faculty seems redolent of 
 simplicity, is in question, then, instead of mere emo- 
 tion, there must be astonishment. It is the principle 
 of periods of decline to strain every nerve to astound 
 by the deep science of the matter and the excessive 
 refinement of the form. As to the former, it is at such 
 times that we meet with those myth-loving poets, 
 astronomers, geographers, naturalists, who will put 
 into their Latin verse everything whether the pheno- 
 mena of Aratus, the astronomy of Ptolemy, or descrip- 
 tions of the earth by some other ancient except poetry 
 itself. As to the latter, everything is sacrificed to 
 minute detail to culture, refinement to the budding 
 of a happy phrase, hid in some word as in a germ, 
 which is developed, enlarged, watered, cherished, till 
 at last it displays its whole foliage to some delighted 
 assembly. 
 
174 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 This was the method of Claudian, whereby he 
 struggled to show himself the most learned man of 
 antiquity. His whole art lay in detaching phrases, in 
 rounding periods, refining and polishing the points 
 which were to hold the memory and be learnt by rote, 
 for whereas few knew separate scraps of the " iEneid" 
 or " Iliad," of which the whole or none must be known, 
 no one who had ever heard it forgot the opening of 
 Claudian' s poem against Eufinus : 
 
 Ssepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem, 
 Curarent superi terras, an nullus inesset 
 Rector, et incerto fluerent mortalia casu. 
 
 I pass over the stirring lines which follow, in which 
 he developes at length the Stoic thesis, and which 
 ended in these verses, to which he was bound to come 
 at any price : 
 
 Abstulit hunc primum Rufini poena tumultum, 
 Absolvitque deus. 
 
 One of the chief secrets of the literature of the 
 Decline was this cutting the line and arresting the 
 sentence after the first hemistich, instead of finishing 
 together the poetic period and the idea ; another pro- 
 cess to excite surprise was hit upon, the finishing the 
 idea before the line, which was thought an achieve- 
 ment. Herein lay all Claudian's defects. He was 
 great in promises, as in beginning his invective against 
 Rufinus by invoking heaven and earth. His works 
 were full of that flourish, that passion for erudition 
 and exaggeration of form, as well as the hidden un- 
 belief suddenly revealed in his pretension of judging 
 and absolving the gods, of whose justice he was not 
 sure. The faults of Claudian himself, and of the 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 175 
 
 Decline, lay in that master-vice of scepticism which 
 had strangled faith, and with it inspiration. We might 
 still after Claudian treat of poets animated by the 
 breath of heathenism, were it good to lengthen the 
 history of a death-struggle. 
 
 Some fire still burned in the breast of Eutilius 
 Numantianus, who also honoured in Eome the mistress 
 of law and arms, the uniter of the world into a single 
 faith. Many a feature might be added to our sketch 
 of pagan society from the bold heathenism of this poet's 
 writings. Claudian had scarcely ventured on one 
 stealthy epigram against Jacobus, but Eutilius, on his 
 return voyage from Eome to Marseilles, having passed 
 the island of Capraria, which he found tenanted by 
 monks, shows us what he thought of these men of 
 black robe and stern countenance, whom he qualified 
 as hating the light : " Called from a Greek word monks, 
 as wishing to live without witnesses ; flying the gifts of 
 fortune to avoid the blows, making themselves wretched 
 that they may not know misery. What can that fury 
 of the troubled brain be which carries so far the terror 
 of evil as not to undergo what is good?"* These 
 words of Eutilius were to be repeated later by the 
 Provencal poets, by the calumnious minstrels of the 
 langue d'oil in their perpetual strife with the clergy, 
 
 * Processu pelagi jam se Capraria tollit ; 
 Squalit lucifugis insula plena viris. 
 Ipsi se monachos graio cognomine dicunt, 
 
 Quox soli nullo vivere teste volunt. 
 Munera fortuna3 metuunt dum damna verentur. 
 Quisquam sponte miser, ne miser esse queat ? 
 Quaenam perversi rabies tam stulta cerebri, 
 Dum mala formidas hec bona posse pati ? 
 
 Eutil. Itin. 439. 
 
176 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and so to be handed from age to age, to our fathers, to 
 ourselves, who, perhaps, may think them new. 
 
 It would be more interesting to follow this pagan 
 poetry at the moment in which it fell in some manner 
 under Christian influence, in the writings of Ausonius 
 in the fourth and Sidonius Apollinaris in the fifth 
 century. The latter followed his master Claudian ; 
 like him framing epithalamia, panegyrics, and sonnets 
 on pagan models, evoking with his pen Thetis and 
 Peleus, Venus and Cupid, and composing pieces to be 
 learnt by heart. In one of these he shows Rome 
 appearing helmetless, dragging painfully her lance and 
 buckler in the assembly of the gods, and complaining 
 that she, the former mistress of the world, should now 
 be under the domination of the Caesars, but at least, 
 she exclaimed, if I must serve, let heaven send me a 
 Trajan ! Jupiter accordingly sent her Avitus, who 
 reigned but one year, and amid thorough disorder, but 
 he was the father-in-law of Sidonius. The poet excused 
 the imperfection of his verse by the presence of the 
 barbarians those men of six feet high, with hair greased 
 with rancid butter, who surrounded him importunately, 
 stunned him with rude songs wild as their own forests, 
 and took from him the liberty of mind necessary 
 to inspiration. Fortunatus was not so sensitive, but 
 though he lived at the court of these terrible patrons, 
 he had not forgotten his Claudian. In leaving Italy 
 he had brought carefully under his mantle the roll of 
 his master's poetry, had studied and assimilated it, 
 and when the great event of a marriage between 
 Sigebert and the beautiful Brunehaut came to pass, 
 was happy in finding an occasion for his recollections, 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 177 
 
 in bringing Cupid from Cyprus to the wedding, to 
 affiance these barbarians, in making Love sing the 
 praise of the prince and Venus of the princess, another 
 Venus, fairer than the Nereids, to whom the river gods 
 were happy to offer their nymphs. 
 
 Ipsa sua subdunt tibi flumina nymphas. 
 
 Venus and Amor little knew that the lovely Spaniard, 
 the young princess of the barbarians, the world's 
 delight, would one day be dragged by the hair at the 
 tail of a wild charger, amidst the yells of a barbarian 
 army. As the pagan divinities and Jupiter himself had 
 lost their power of foretelling such a future, so also had 
 the epopee left these undiscerning deities for the camp 
 of the once despised barbarian ; and was to be found then, 
 as ever, to her shame, on the side of the victors. As 
 with Greek against Trojan, as with the Koman against 
 the world, so now with the barbarian against Eome. It 
 lurked in those songs of the people which told of the 
 beautiful Sigurd, conqueror of the dragon, and grouped 
 around his myth the heroes of the invasion ; in those 
 which pictured Attila, the world's subduer, dying of 
 hunger, a despairing captive in the depths of a cavern, 
 gold-surrounded but shut in by iron doors, while his 
 enemy bade him " Surfeit thyself with gold take thy 
 fill of money." It was with Theodoric hunting wild 
 beasts in the forest, and then having become Christian 
 in his old age, appearing on earth from time to time, in 
 the belief of the Swabian peasantry, to announce to 
 men the disasters of the Empire. Such was the destiny 
 of the poetry which Home had thought all her own. 
 
 The theatre had not fallen before the vices of the de- 
 generate Komans of the Decline, or the scandal of the 
 
 8f 
 
178 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 gladiatorial and mimetic shows, or before the rivalry from 
 the readings, or an exhausted treasury. It had not suc- 
 cumbed to the decrees of Christian emperors, for though 
 they had at first expressly suspended theatrical repre- 
 sentations, a law of Arcadius in 399, levelled against 
 certain impurities therein, disclaimed any intention of 
 suppressing them, lest the people should be dispirited. 
 It remained, and Claudian reckoned among the inaugu- 
 rators of the consulate of Mallius, actors of the sock 
 and of the buskin, devoted respectively to tragedy and 
 comedy : thus at the end of the fourth century we find two 
 contemporary comedies : one the " Game of the Seven 
 Sages," from the pen of Ausonius, a subject dear to the 
 Middle Age, and often repeated, consisted of monologue 
 in which each of the seven successively enunciated his 
 wise maxims with all fit dramatic surroundings; the 
 other, " Querolus," was also a work of the fourth 
 century, and has been brought forward in the skilful 
 comments of M. Magnin as a strong proof of the con- 
 tinuity of theatrical tradition. 
 
 The prologue commences by asking silence and a 
 hearing from the audience for a barbarian who wished 
 to revive the learned games of Greece and Latin anti- 
 quity, for he followed the steps of Plautus in imitating 
 the " Aulularius." The first who entered on the scene was 
 an entirely pagan personage in the shape of the family 
 Lar, and he appeared, as will be seen, before a society 
 in full decay. The plot was as follows : An old miser 
 named Euclion, having hidden his money in an urn, 
 filled it for better concealment with ashes, and inscribed 
 upon it that it contained the remains of his father ; he 
 then departed with light heart on a long journey. On 
 the way he died, having made one of his parasites co-heir 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 179 
 
 with his son, and charged him to tell the latter that all 
 the gold the old man had amassed was to be found in a 
 certain urn. The parasite arrived and, fully resolved to 
 reap the sole profit of the legacy, passed himself off as 
 a magician, and was introduced by Querolus, the miser's 
 son, into his house. There he was left alone, and 
 having ransacked the premises and found only one urn, 
 the inscription of which told him that it held ashes, in 
 a rage threw it out of window : it broke at the feet of 
 Querolus, and thus betrayed the secret. The parasite 
 was imprudent enough to claim his share, and brought 
 forward the will, but Querolus replied, "Either you knew 
 what the urn held, in which case I shall treat you as a 
 thief, or you did not, in which case I shall have you 
 punished as a violator of tombs." And so the comedy 
 ended. But it affords another page to add to those 
 already cited, and complete what our classic education 
 often slurs over the reverse side of that splendid 
 Roman antiquity ; for not only does Querolus lash with 
 his satire everything public, official, and solemn in 
 the old society, and expose the perfidy and cupidity 
 of the pagan priests by showing, for instance, how 
 they denounced all the offerings and other impostures 
 which were essential to the system of worship ; not 
 only does he ridicule the whole crew of divines, augurs, 
 and astrologers who fattened on public credulity, but 
 he shows us the honest man of Paganism one to be 
 honoured by mortals and protected by the gods. 
 
 The Lar set forth the plot in these terms : " I am," 
 he said, "the guardian and inhabitant of this my 
 assigned house ; I temper Fate's decrees for it ; if any 
 good luck is promised I press it on, if bad, I soften 
 the blow. I rule the affairs of this Querolus, who is 
 
180 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 neither agreeable nor the reverse. At present he is in 
 want of nothing ; soon we shall make him very rich, 
 and he will deserve it, for if you think that we don't 
 treat worthy people according to their worth you are 
 mistaken." 
 
 Knowing Querolus' had temper, he promises himself 
 a laugh at his expense. Soon Querolus enters, and 
 asks why the bad are always happy and the good un- 
 fortunate, and the Lar tells them he will explain it. 
 Querolus declares that he does not count himself 
 among the unhappy, whereupon he puts this question 
 to him, 
 
 The Lar. " Have you never stolen, Querolus ?" 
 
 Querolus. " Never since I have lost the habit of doing 
 so. When I was young I admit that I did play some 
 young man's tricks." 
 
 Lar. "Why then give up such a laudable crime? 
 and what shall we say as to lying ?" 
 
 Querolus. " Well, who does tell the truth ? That 
 little sin belongs to every one. Pass on to the next 
 thing." 
 
 Lar. " Certainly, as there is no harm in lying ; but 
 how about adultery?" 
 
 Querolus. " Oh ; but that's no crime." 
 
 Lar. " When did they begin to permit it, then ? 
 Tell me how often you have sworn, and be quick 
 about it." 
 
 Querolus. "All in good time. That's a thing I've 
 never been guilty of." 
 
 Lar. "I allow for a thousand perjuries. Tell me 
 the rest, or at least how often you have sworn love to 
 people you hated." 
 
 Querolus. " What a wretch I am to have such a 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 181 
 
 pitiless judge. I confess I have often sworn and given 
 my word without giving my faith." 
 
 The Lar, content with this confession, tries to re- 
 assure Querolus by proving once more that the gods 
 overlook the peccadilloes of good fellows. And this, be 
 it remarked, shows us the more innocent side of that 
 society, so we can judge of the dangers which must 
 have surrounded it. The Lar, wishing to reward 
 Querolus for his candour, promises to grant his wishes 
 but to warn him of their peril. His wish was the 
 glory of battle but not the blows. He longed for 
 Titus's cash-box but not for his gout. He wanted to be 
 a decemvir, but not to pay the fee for the honour ; to be 
 lastly a simple citizen, but powerful enough to rob his 
 neighbours without any one gainsaying it. To which 
 the Lar answers, "It is not influence, but sheer rob- 
 bery, that you are hankering for." 
 
 Such was the visible and glaring disorder ranged at 
 the gates of that wealthy and learned society. But we 
 must examine what lay beneath and within it amongst 
 the redoubtable and implacable slave-caste. One of 
 them named Pantomalus appears in " Querolus," and 
 shows us of what sort they were, and in what their 
 wishes and thoughts consisted in the fifth century. 
 " It is acknowledged," he says, " the slave-masters are 
 bad, but I have found none worse than mine ; not that 
 he is actually cruel, but so exacting and cross. If there's 
 any theft in the establishment he flies out as if it was a 
 crime. If one happens to throw a table, chair, or bed 
 on the fire, see how he scolds ; he calls it hastiness. He 
 keeps the accounts from end to end with his own hands, 
 and if anything is wrong pretends that we must make 
 it up. How unjust masters are ! They find us taking 
 
182 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 our nap in the daytime, the secret of which is that we 
 are up all night. I don't know what nature has made 
 better than the night. It is our day. Then we go to 
 the baths with the pretty female slaves. That is free- 
 dom in life. We shut our masters up at home, and 
 are sure of their being out of the way. We have no 
 jealousies ; there is but one family among slaves ; for 
 us it is one long festival, wedding games and baccha- 
 nals, and therefore few of us want to be freed. What 
 freedman could stand such expense or be sure of such 
 impunity ? " 
 
 We see then that family life at this time was menaced 
 as well as property ; deep-seated perils were shaking that 
 world with its thin crust of marble and gold ; domestic 
 danger was besieging those haughty patricians who 
 owned the world, in the very days which they passed on 
 the benches of the Circus applauding the course of the 
 chariot. 
 
 One of two things either the poet wished to crush 
 the slave with his own vices, and answer the complaint 
 of Christianity by showing him to be unworthy of en- 
 franchisement, which would be an eternal proof of the 
 pitiless cruelty of Paganism towards the portion of 
 mankind which it held in fetters, or to show the peril 
 society was running, in which case we must admire the 
 boldness of the Fathers in reading, whilst tolerating 
 slavery, such severe lessons on the equality of all men 
 before God ; and even now may ask ourselves whether 
 the fears of those are well-founded who wish to relegate 
 to times of security such dangerous truths, as if the 
 truths of the Gospel were not made for a period in 
 which suffering and sacrifice alike are frequent. 
 
 The dramatic shows lasted through the following cen- 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 183 
 
 turies. In 510 Theodoric rebuilt the theatre of Mar- 
 cellus at Borne, and' the Senate undertook the expense 
 of providing actors. In Gaul Chilperic repaired the 
 stage at Soissons, and Terence was acted there in the 
 seventh and eighth centuries. Of this we have proof 
 in a fragment which has been preserved to us. It 
 opens with a prologue, in which Jerome, the manager 
 of the theatre, announces to the audience the perform- 
 ance of a comedy by Terence. A buffoon (delusor) 
 then appears, who expresses disgust at the idea, and 
 wishes them to pack off such a broken-down poet. 
 Terence thereupon enters in person, and encounters the 
 young man who had insulted him, whereupon there is 
 a dialogue and the commencement of a new and bar- 
 barous comedy. The clown replies to Terence, " I am 
 worth more than you. You are old, I am young. You 
 are only a dry old stick ; I am a green tree." The latter 
 asks where his fruit is, and the two begin to use strong 
 language, then threats, and the pageant breaks off just 
 as they are coming to blows.* 
 
 A council held at Eome in 680 forbade bishops to 
 attend at the shows of mimes, and a letter of Alcuin a 
 little later exhorts certain abbots, priests like himself, 
 to abstain from theatrical amusements. In the eleventh 
 century, at the marriage of Beatrix, mother of the 
 Countess Matilda, mimes were still playing after the 
 old method. Later Vitalis of Blois composed two 
 comedies; one called " Geta," the other "Amphitryon." 
 Thus "Amphitryon" was played for the men of the 
 twelfth century, as Moliere was to bring it again under 
 the eyes of the staid and learned court of Louis XIV. 
 So hard was it to subdue that lusty spirit of antiquity, 
 * Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes, premiere series, t. i. 517. 
 
184 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 which was to reappear in every age, not only in the 
 centuries of the Revival, but in those of purer and 
 severer character, which seemed farthest removed from 
 the taste of the ancients. 
 
 In fact, mythology was not, as has been supposed, a 
 posthumous resurrection, a wonder of the Kevival, an 
 effort to bring back a departed element into literature. 
 Tasso, Camoens, and Milton are not open to the accusa- 
 tion of having revived the pagan muses ; it was rather 
 Paganism perpetuating itself in literature, as in religion 
 by superstition, in law by the oppression of the weak, 
 by slavery, and by divorce ; and as astrologers con- 
 tinued the science, so did mythologists continue the 
 literature, of heathendom. 
 
 Mythology had entered deep into the manners of anti- 
 quity. Kome, disputed for by Belisarius and Totila, 
 still kept the vessel in which Caesar was fabled to have 
 touched the shores of Italy. The teeth of the Eryman- 
 thian Boar were still shown at Beneventum, and upon 
 the ornaments borne by the Emperor at Rome on days 
 of feasting were embroidered the Labyrinth and the 
 Minotaur, to signify that his thoughts should be im- 
 penetrable to his subjects. In the mosaics which 
 beautify the churches of Ravenna and Venice a number 
 of subjects borrowed from the old fables are to be found. 
 Thus, in the baptism of Christ, the Jordan is depicted 
 as an old man, nude, crowned with rushes, pouring 
 from an urn the waters of the river. The earth was 
 represented as a female, sometimes nude, sometimes 
 covered with flowers ; the sea under the features of a 
 man vomiting forth water. The Caroline books alluded 
 to these abuses, and condemned them in vain, so that 
 under Charles the Great artists employed all their time 
 
PAGAN LITERATURE. POETRY. 185 
 
 in painting Actaeon, Atys, and Bellerophon, until 
 mythology triumphed everywhere. Later, in describing 
 the palaces of the time and their mosaics, they inform 
 us that the principal group represented Amor dis- 
 charging his arrows, and around him were the beautiful 
 women of old whom he had struck. At Florence, 
 during festivals, bands of youths paraded the city, the 
 handsomest at their head, who was called Love. At 
 marriages during the Middle Age it was customary to 
 play little pastoral dramas, in which Cupid appeared 
 levelling his shafts at the ladies present. The first 
 Spanish dramatic poem by Kodrigo de Cota (1470) was 
 a simple dialogue between an old man and Love. It 
 cannot be supposed that, since mythology still held the 
 manners and the arts, that it would relax its hold on 
 poetry, and we find the barbarians composing works of 
 entirely pagan character, and revelling, in the seventh 
 and eighth centuries, in all the impurity of Catullus. 
 The fables of Ovid were translated in verse, and I have 
 seen at St. Gall a complaint of (Edipus, rhymed like 
 the chants of the Church, and so noted that the music 
 was joined to the text, which proves it to have been the 
 work of a man who laboured for the public. Mythology 
 even returned in the works which came from the pen of 
 men of heroic courage and virtue, as St. Columba and 
 St. Boniface. The mythology of Dante's Hell has been 
 condemned as a pedantic contrivance to bring science 
 into his art, fit only to astonish the mind ; but he did 
 but follow in this the inspiration, tastes, and prejudices 
 of the men of his time, and, far from being pedantic, 
 he obeyed the feelings of a people which still believed 
 in such things as the hidden virtue of the statue of 
 Mars, the geese of the Capitol, and the ancilia. The 
 
186 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUBY. 
 
 ancient deities had but changed their form and become 
 daemons or fallen angels ; in this sense the poet used 
 them, according to his belief in them ; and it is not till 
 we come to his Purgatory and Paradise that we feel 
 that poetry was entering its true destiny. 
 
 We must traverse the Middle Age, the Eevival, the 
 quarrels of the Jansenists and Molinists, of ancients 
 and moderns, to find the end of mythology ; and can we 
 say even now that we have found it ? All this time 
 had to elapse that, in religion, faith might rise in 
 triumph above the creed, in law the spirit of equity 
 might conquer the arbitrary and changeful letter, that 
 in literature thought might become mistress of form 
 and independent of tradition. 
 
 The literature of the fifth century then preserved the 
 tradition of its art, as treasure in a vase which must 
 ultimately be broken ; but we must confess that the 
 receptacle was sculptured with art, and its fair exterior 
 was calculated to excite the desire of many. When it 
 had been shattered, and its contents were in dispute, 
 the majority thought themselves rich in having picked 
 up a morsel of the painted clay, but few were found 
 to grasp the treasure which had been hidden within. 
 
187 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE LITERARY TRADITION. 
 
 We have seen what poetic inspiration could effect in 
 the fifth century, how the majesty of the epopee was 
 sustained as by a last effort in the poems of Claudian, 
 how the drama remained popular, and how the comedy 
 of Plautus lived again in the merry scenes of " Querolus." 
 The tales which had charmed the polished imagination 
 of antiquity did not weary the barbarian world, and the 
 fables which had been expelled from their religious 
 shrines long took refuge in the manners, arts, and 
 poetry of the Christianized nations. But the old in- 
 spiration was burning itself out day by day. The 
 ancient poetry had been essentially religious in origin 
 and principle, the only form of preaching known to 
 Paganism ; it was the accompaniment of the mysteries, 
 and the histories, destined afterwards to be gathered 
 up into the epic celebrations of god-born heroes, were 
 originally a part of divine worship. Hymns to the 
 immortals had been the earliest form of poetry. The 
 theatre had only opened for tragedy on the feasts of 
 Bacchus, and as a form of public worship. The destiny 
 of poetry was lowered when it went forth from the 
 temples to be given to the people in the works of Homer 
 and Hesiod, to enter with Virgil into familiar inter- 
 course with Augustus, to sit as a courtier at the feet of 
 
188 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Nero, and lastly, to justify all misgivings on its behalf, 
 in stooping under Claudian to the domestic life of 
 Stilicho and the other minions of Honorius. Inspira- 
 tion it had no longer, but tradition still lived tenaciously 
 in the ancient literature ; its genius had departed, but 
 its methods survived. Genius is but a lightning-flash, 
 playing on the human mind, but in such vivid beauty 
 that man would fain fix it there for ever ; science grasps 
 by one intense effort the passing words, holds them in 
 meditation, and thence unfolds the ideal of an eternal 
 beauty. Thus the tradition of the beautiful is preserved 
 through those masterpieces of genius which became the 
 property and educating principle of the human mind. 
 No century can be so unhappy as not to find pleasure and 
 consolation even in its most barren period from some 
 productions of literature's golden age. We must sum 
 up the services and show the conservative spirit and 
 method of tradition, and now, especially, observe the 
 labours whereby it was perpetuated in antiquity, and by 
 dint of which it passed into the bosom of the Church. 
 
 The traditions of literature lived through the old 
 times, as indeed ever, principally in schools and by 
 teaching. What was the Koman method of teaching. 
 Was it and this, like all great questions, is a perpetual 
 one carried on under a principle of authority or one of 
 liberty ? 
 
 In the earliest period of Koman history teaching 
 seems to have been free, or rather it fell under that 
 omnipotent domestic authority which hitherto the legis- 
 lature had not dared to touch. The father at his family 
 hearth amidst his household gods was a type of Jupiter, 
 and his rule at home symbolized, and was the secret in 
 Roman eyes, of that universal empire destined to be 
 
THE LITEEAEY TRADITION. 189 
 
 borne by them abroad to the world's extremity. The 
 law did not trouble itself to know what masters he 
 seated at his side, or to what schools his sons were 
 sent ; and when Crates of Mallos opened the first school 
 of grammar and Carneades of rhetoric, fathers pur- 
 chased in open market the expensive services of some 
 of these philosophers at the cost of about four hundred 
 thousand sesterces a year. But teaching spread so 
 rapidly that in Caesar's time no less than twenty public 
 schools were to be counted, and the number of rhetori- 
 cians, the dangerous facility of their art, undertaking 
 as it did to prove the pro and con., the true and the 
 false, began to startle the old Roman gravity and 
 provoked from the censors, Cnaeus Domitius and 
 Licinius Crassus the following decree : " We have 
 learnt that certain teachers, calling themselves Latin 
 rhetoricians, have introduced a new kind of discipline. 
 Our ancestors have laid down what it pleased them that 
 their children should learn and what schools they 
 should frequent. These innovations, as contrary to the 
 customs of our fathers, displease us and do not appear 
 to us proper. Therefore we have thought it necessary 
 to make known to those who keep and those who 
 frequent these schools that they are displeasing to us." 
 In this decree appears the severe censorship of old 
 Rome, but it was powerless, for the schools of the 
 rhetoricians were soon reopened on every side. Later 
 Roman policy perceived that private tuition could not 
 be stifled, but might be directed, usefully aided, and 
 enlightened by the foundation of a public instruction. 
 Caesar was the first to grant it privileges, and whilst 
 honouring to keep it within bounds. Vespasian fixed 
 the salaries of the public professors at a hundred 
 
190 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 thousand sesterces, and the imperial schools of the 
 Capitol, destined to be the haunt of the youth of the 
 whole world, were founded. Adrian built the Athe- 
 naeum, and granted honourable privileges to public 
 instruction, and Alexander Severus founded burses (sti- 
 pendia) for poor scholars of good family. Thus the 
 imperial system of teaching was constituted, its 
 professoriate became a magistracy, a literary tradition 
 was infused into many of the public institutions of 
 Eome, and liberty flourished under its shade ; for at this 
 epoch we find from the letters of the younger Pliny 
 families associated in one city, under the auspices of 
 a man of influence, to found there the first literary 
 resort open to the children of the town. One day at 
 Comum the young son of one of the inhabitants came 
 with his father to visit Pliny in his library. " Do you 
 study? " asked Pliny. " Yes," was the youth's answer. 
 " Where ?" " At Milan." "Why not here ?" (The 
 father) " There are no masters." " And why? is it not 
 your interest, as fathers of families, to keep your children 
 near you. What can be more consoling, more cheap, 
 and more satisfactory as regards their morals ? Is it 
 so difficult to get funds to engage masters ? I, though 
 childless, am ready, for love to this city, which I look 
 on as daughter or a mother, to undertake a third of the 
 sum required. I would promise the whole did I not 
 think it would be dangerous, as it is in many places 
 where professors are paid from public funds. Those 
 who are careless of the money of others keep good 
 watch over their own, and will always take care that 
 what they spend shall not fall into unworthy hands. 
 Let your children, educated on their own native soil, 
 learn early to love it, and may you be able to attract 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 191 
 
 professors of such mark that one day the neighbouring 
 cities may send their children to your schools." * 
 Nothing can be more modern in spirit, more judicious 
 and benevolent than this, worthy in fact of times much 
 nearer our own ; but still antiquity opened no slave- 
 schools no such idea of literary benefits for high and I 
 low ever entered its philosophy. 
 
 To come to the Christian emperors. Constantine, 
 instead of extinguishing the old lights, became their 
 protector, and as a benefactor to public tuition wrote to 
 the poet Optatianus, " I wish my century to afford an 
 easy access to eloquence, and render a friendly testi- 
 mony to serious studies." Three of his laws, dated 
 ann. 321, 326, 336, re-enacted the old imperial consti- 
 tutions, and granted to public professors of medicine, 
 grammar, and literature in general, exemption from 
 municipal taxes, military service, and every call on 
 property and residence which the imperial tax-system 
 required ; extending the same privileges to their wives 
 and children, that many might be called to liberal 
 studies, " quo facilius liberalibus studiis multos insti- 
 tuant." t The law also guaranteed them against 
 personal injury, punishing by a fine of a hundred 
 thousand pieces of gold any one who publicly insulted 
 them, or if a slave was the offender, by beating with 
 rods before the person aggrieved, that the latter might 
 enjoy the sight of the penalty.! A decree of Gratian 
 and Valentinian in a.d;76 took the more solid measure 
 of fixing the salary of all professors throughout Gaul, 
 desiring that in each metropolis a yearly stipend of 
 
 * Plin. Jun. lib. iv. 12. 
 
 + Cod. Theod. lib. xiii. tit. iii. 1. 3 ; De Medicis et Profes- 
 soribus. 
 1 Ibid. lib. i. 
 
192 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 twenty-eight annones, or twenty-four times the military 
 allowance, should be given to the rhetoricians, and 
 twelve to the Greek and Latin grammarians. At 
 Treves rhetoricians received thirty annones, Latin 
 grammarians twenty, and Greek grammarians, if found 
 able, twelve only.* In the West Greek teaching was 
 sacrificed to the Latin, but the contrary was the case 
 in the East. 
 
 Thus were established the privileges, payment, and 
 right of public instruction. But it was more important 
 to think of the pupils than the masters, and the police 
 of the schools were settled by an enactment of 
 Valentinian dated 370. " Those who come to Home to 
 study must be furnished with a certificate of consent 
 from the magistrates of their province. They must 
 announce their intended subject of study on arrival, 
 and make known their lodging to the office of the 
 Censorship, the functionaries of which must strictly 
 admonish them to worthy behaviour, to fear a bad 
 name, and avoid those associations which are the first 
 step towards crime ; consociationes quas proximas esse 
 putamus crimlnibus. They must warn them against 
 too great a passion for public spectacles, and against dis- 
 orderly banquets. They shall have power to punish the 
 disobedient by scourging, to send them back from Kome 
 to their province. All who do not fall under censure 
 may pursue their studies till twenty years old, then the 
 magistracy must insist on their departure and provide 
 for it in spite of them. A report must be sent from 
 the offices at Eome every month to the provincial 
 magistrates, and a yearly memorandum to the emperor, 
 of those who are most worthy of employment." 
 
 * Cod. Theod. lib. ii. 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 193 
 
 As the tree grew and its foliage became thicker there 
 was less room for the sun to reach it, and so private 
 tuition gradually lost its freedom. A law of Julian, in 
 362, considering that masters ought to excel in morality 
 and in eloquence, ordained that postulants for the 
 honours of teaching must submit to be examined by a 
 municipal commission chosen from the curia, whose 
 judgment was then to be ratified by the prince. This 
 was aimed at the Christians, to exclude from the chairs 
 those whom he hated as Galilaeans, but the decree was 
 to recoil one day on its authors. In 425, a decree of 
 Theodosius the Younger and Valentinian III. gave per- 
 mission to private professors to teach in families, but 
 forbade their keeping public schools, to debar them 
 from that road to fortune and even dignities, and at 
 the same time interdicted public professors from 
 domestic tuition on pain of losing their privileges.* 
 
 We have to consider, then, three periods in Eoman 
 instruction. At first an absolute liberty for private 
 tuition, but no official teaching; secondly, private 
 teaching still existing, but the public system all-power- 
 ful ; and during the golden age of the Empire, its longest 
 and brightest period, an official instruction honoured 
 and sustained by state aid, side by side with a general 
 liberty which enabled every capable man to give proof 
 of his learning by undertaking the education of his 
 young fellow- citizens. But neither the measures of 
 Julian nor those of Theodosius the Younger received 
 their full accomplishment, for on every side private 
 schools were opened which caused alarm and disquie- 
 tude to the legislators. The year 425 approached too 
 
 * Cod. Theod. 1. xiv. tit. xi. 1. 3 ; de professoribus publicis 
 Constantinopolitanis. 
 
 VOL. I. 9 
 
194 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 nearly those formidable invasions which had already 
 carried off Spain, and were destined to sever Gaul and 
 all the provinces in turn from the power of the Koman 
 Caesars. The laws never were in full vigour, and as, 
 under the continual menace of invasion and before the 
 tide of barbarism, the impoverished cities were little able 
 to provide the large charge imposed by Antoninus and 
 renewed by Gratian, public teaching had to disappear 
 in favour of the private schools. Toulouse, at the end 
 of the sixth century, possessed barely thirty gramma- 
 rians, left at perfect liberty to assemble in delibera- 
 tion amongst themselves, but hardly calculated to 
 excite the jealousy of the Merovingian executive, 
 since the object of their gatherings was only to know 
 whether the adjective must always agree with its sub- 
 stantive, or if the verb had always a frequentative form, 
 making lego, legito, as legitimate as moneo, monito. 
 
 Instruction thus constituted had a power of exten- 
 sion to the very ends of the Empire. We have marked 
 its establishment at Treves, and at Xanten on the 
 Khine an altar has been found attesting the restoration 
 of a school in that northern region by Marcus Aurelius 
 and Lucius Verus. At Autun, Clermont, Bordeaux, 
 Poitiers, Auch, Toulouse, and Narbonne flourished 
 numberless schools, whose professors and grammarians, 
 Greek and Latin, Ausonius lauded to the skies, and 
 even Homer found in one of them a new Aristarchus to 
 throw light on the obscure and doubtful passages'. 
 Britain offered the same spectacle, since the conquering 
 Agricola introduced eloquence and Eoman manners 
 hand in hand, in the belief that, by throwing the toga 
 over its haughty islanders, he would enervate their cou- 
 rage and disarm their opposition. 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 195 
 
 When Britain ceased to form part of the Empire, 
 Eoman culture survived in such a manner that the tra- 
 ditions of the "iEneid" were confounded with the 
 fabulous tales of Cambria. The same songs celebrated 
 the fame of Merlin, the enchanter, and of Brutus, the 
 founder of the British realm, or vaunted the greatness 
 of the old Latin city of Caerleon, with its baths and 
 palaces, its schools and its forty philosophers. 
 
 The same movement of intellect was seen in Spain. 
 In the days of the republic Sertorius had founded a 
 school of the liberal arts at Huesca, and later a legion 
 of brilliant minds, such as Quintilian, Seneca, and 
 Lucan came out of that province to Eome. So many 
 poets and actors, indeed, did it produce in the time of 
 Theodosius, that, unable to gain a livelihood in their 
 own country, they passed the Pyrenees to seek their 
 fortunes beyond. 
 
 Moreover, when all intercourse seemed suspended 
 between the central seat of empire and the provinces, 
 the learned tradition survived through the most uncon- 
 genial time, and lightened the obscurity of the darkest 
 age. The imperial schools subsisted to the end of the 
 seventh century, not only in Gaul but in Italy, Spain, 
 and on every point of the old Roman world. In Italy, 
 till the eleventh century, lay teachers pursued their 
 course side by side with the ecclesiastical schools, as if 
 to unite the end of the old imperial system to the origin 
 of that of the universities, and especially the university 
 of Bologna, which, in spite of difference from one 
 another, and from the old schools of the Empire, per- 
 petuated the public method of antiquity through a 
 privileged professoriate and an universally accessible 
 system of instruction. 
 
 9 * 
 
196 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 As Alexander Severus had founded burses for poor 
 scholars, so numberless colleges were opened during the 
 Middle Age for students, who sat on straw at the feet of 
 their masters to receive their tuition. On one side, the 
 spirit of the universities was derived from antiquity, 
 while the new principle brought forth in the schools 
 and the laws of the emperors was entirely modern and 
 moulded by Christianity then a power in the world, 
 and straining to penetrate its institutions. Antiquity 
 loved seience, but as a miser loves his gold ; it loved it 
 more than humanity, and feared by spreading to dis- 
 honour it. Christianity loved science also but as 
 it said, Venite ad me omnes ; and it loved mankind 
 more. It honoured public eloquence, and encouraged 
 it by the canons of its councils, as the favoured weapon 
 which had brought the world under its dominion, and 
 it distributed the gift with profusion. Therefore, from 
 the time of Charles the Great, every province opened 
 schools for the children of its peasants and serfs, and 
 the bishop kept a higher school, supported by the alms 
 of the rich proprietors of his Church, the benches of 
 which were open to all. Around sprang up in numbers 
 colleges and hospices for needy students and pilgrims 
 from afar. Pious legacies for these purposes were 
 encouraged, and we have ten or twelve enactments of 
 St. Louis relating to the foundation of scholarships and 
 colleges. Christendom's greatest minds, like Albert 
 the Great and St. Bonaventura, did not think their 
 vigils wasted in multiplying abstracts of Holy Scripture 
 for poor students, biblia pauperum, and feared not, in 
 opening the gates of knowledge to their widest, to 
 encourage by too liberal a training vocations that would 
 be useless or dangerous to society. Christianity had 
 
THE LITEEAKY TRADITION. 197 
 
 no such scruple. It made science shine as its God 
 makes the sun to beam upon the good and the evil, 
 leaving all responsibility to those who abused the light; 
 but not dreaming of extinguishing it. 
 
 What, then, was the nature of the teaching afforded 
 by those schools whose origin, number, and duration 
 have just been considered ? In the fifth century its 
 spirit was still profoundly pagan, and proof of this is 
 given in writings of Macrobius, the learned author of 
 a M Commentary on Scipio's Dream." He compiled, 
 also, under the title of " Saturnales," a sort of encyclo- 
 paedia of the old learning of antiquity, as it had been 
 handed down in literary tradition, and, to give to so 
 dry a study the advantage of the dialogues introduced 
 by Cicero into Latin literature, supposed a group of 
 men of birth and letters, such as Symmachus, Fla- 
 vianus, Caecina Albinus, Avienus, Eusebius the rheto- 
 rician, and Servius the grammarian, to have assembled 
 during the Saturnalia at the house of Praetextatus, to 
 pass the time in social festival and philosophical dis- 
 cussion. The mornings were devoted to serious 
 pursuits, and in the evening a more playful mood 
 and mirthful sallies enlivened the board. This 
 assembly of sages, enjoying the repose so rare in the 
 Rome of Theodosius, agitated, as it was, by incessant 
 business and political anxieties, sought their natural 
 recreation in the sciences, whose elements they had 
 acquired in their youth, and show us, by the tenor 
 of their conversation, what constituted the education 
 of the man of culture at the end of the fourth century. 
 The discussion was opened upon the origin of the feast 
 of the Saturnalia, which Praetextatus, as being the best 
 versed in matters religious, was asked to expound. He 
 
198 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 did not " seek for its cause in the hidden nature of any 
 deity, but drew his explanation from some fabulous 
 stories or the philosopher's comments upon the same 
 for the secret causes which spring from the pure source 
 of truth cannot be revealed even through the mysteries, 
 and even he who can raise his spirit to their contem- 
 plation must keep the result in the depths of his 
 intelligence"* and herein again appeared the old 
 jealousy of heathenism, and its determination of 
 having two theologies, as it had two kinds of science 
 and politics one theology for the learned patrician, 
 another for the ignorant plebeian. Prastextatus only 
 gave out half his idea, for fear of betraying the secret 
 of the mysteries, but he went very far in his avowal 
 by urging, in conclusion, that the gods of different 
 name really made up but one deity, the Sun, to whom, 
 by physical and allegorical interpretation, must be 
 referred all that was said of those gods who, of old, 
 had crowded the heights of Olympus and Parnassus. t 
 In this attempt to serve Paganism he destroyed it, and 
 forgot, in giving his gods a refuge in the Sun, that 
 Christians saw, in his deified luminary, the first of 
 the servants of the Almighty. Prastextatus would have 
 been surprised could he have met at his table another 
 writer of the time, who, in an admirable and too 
 little known essay, gave speech to the constellation 
 which the ancients adored, making it reprove with 
 energy the worship whereby it was insulted by setting 
 up it, the eternal slave of God, as His rival and 
 enemy. So deeply was the theology of Prastextatus, 
 the essence of this teaching, tainted by a Paganism 
 
 * Macrobius, Saturnales, lib. i. 17. 
 f Ibid. lib. i. 1-7. 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 199 
 
 not yet transformed and purified by the wisdom of 
 Alexandria. 
 
 In his discourse he had named Virgil, and Evangelius 
 the rhetorician present to act as critic and general 
 opposer, seized the occasion of saying that many 
 intentions had been assigned to the poet which he had 
 never entertained.* Symmachus replied by an eulogy 
 upon Virgil ; and Praetextatus himself undertook his 
 defence, regarding him as of all the ancients the most 
 versed in priestly law and the lore of religious anti- 
 quities, showing how Virgil had distinguished the 
 parts of the sacred rites, had never confounded dif- 
 ferent kinds of gods and victims, and had known the 
 worship proper to deities at home and from abroad. t 
 Flavianus claimed further for him an intimate ac- 
 quaintance with the science and rules of auspices 
 and omens, and then the whole literary clique pointed 
 out how he had scattered philosophic theories through- 
 out his poems, the knowledge of astronomy displayed 
 in them, what he borrowed from the Greeks, stealing 
 the gold from Homer himself with consummate art, 
 sometimes showing and at others hiding it, and how 
 he had profited by the treasures of Ennius.J Lastly, 
 they placed him above Cicero, as having known all 
 the depths of pathos and exhausted the resources of 
 eloquence, and being equally great as an orator and as 
 a poet. In such grave debates the mornings of these 
 days were passed, and in the evenings another portion 
 of the teaching given by grammarians and rhetoricians 
 was reproduced. Proof of this lies in the jokes and 
 
 * Macrobius, Saturnales, lib. i. 24. 
 f Ibid. lib. iii. 
 
 I Eusebius, lib. r iv. ; Eustathius, lib. v. ; Furius Albin. 
 Severin, lib. vi. 
 
200 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 wagers the feasters proposed to each other, as indicated 
 by Seneca the rhetorician. In the schools of his 
 time, wherein discussions on agrarian law or imperial 
 interest were no longer permitted, we find, among 
 questions thought fit to exercise the eloquence of the 
 Eoman youth, and to occupy the leisure of the idle 
 patricians, such an one as this "Which is the first, 
 the egg or the chicken ?" Was the world the creation 
 of chance or of some supreme wisdom? If of the 
 latter, it needed a good beginning, and would a logical 
 nature commence with that of the hen or of the egg ? 
 We may leave the question where it was left in the 
 dialogue of the " Saturnales," * for it is enough to 
 give an idea of the futility of that teaching, so grave 
 and learned in pretension, which claimed to be a sum- 
 mary of the relics of antiquity. Yet Macrobius lived 
 to posterity, and was to be found in a work by Alard 
 of Cambray, entitled "Extracts of Philosophy and 
 Morality," named after Solomon, Cicero, and Virgil, and 
 was popular enough to be quoted by a poet, not in 
 Latin only, but in the vulgar tongue. 
 
 If such was the spirit of Eoman instruction, what 
 were the sciences expounded in detail by the voice of 
 its masters? It comprised three subjects, grammar, 
 eloquence, and law ; grammar and rhetoric were taught 
 in all the cities of Gaul, as at Kome. Law had special 
 chairs, though there was no official instruction on it in 
 the provinces generally. Under Justinian, its schools 
 were placed at Kome, Constantinople, and Berytus. 
 As the science of law was to be studied at Kome, so 
 had the other indispensable accessories to a thorough 
 literary education been professed there, since Cicero, 
 
 * Saturn, lib. vii. 1-16. 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 201 
 
 like Plato, demanded that orators should be made 
 out of musicians and geometers, thinking that with- 
 out such experiences eloquence would consist merely 
 of empty declamation, sallies of humour, sonorous 
 tirades, instead of entering the depths of its subject 
 through a well-grounded system of teaching; and so 
 geometry, dialectics, astronomy, and music formed 
 part of the galaxy of science taught to the youth of 
 Rome. 
 
 Grammar, which formed a summary of the whole, 
 was not confined to the elementary art of speaking and 
 thinking correctly. Suetonius and its other professors 
 expressly declared that, far from narrowing its sphere to 
 the study of language, it comprised a criticism of all 
 the great works of antiquity, and a reading and inter- 
 pretation of its poets, its function being not merely to 
 read, but to analyze and compare. It had two parts, 
 philology and criticism. In France, it extended into 
 the domain of rhetoric, comprising the humanities, 
 and a critical reading of all the great orators and poets 
 of antiquity. 
 
 With the ancients, philology was no such rudimentary 
 science as might be supposed in hearing Varro and the 
 old jurisconsults derive lucus from non lucendo, and 
 testamentum from testatio mentis. "We have no idea, 
 while smiling at this, of the learning and labour neces- 
 sary for the unravelling of the chaos of the old lan- 
 guages. One section derived the diverse and confused 
 elements of which Latin was formed from the old 
 national idiom, whilst the other found them in the 
 Greek, and hence arose for many centuries the disputes 
 of the rival schools of Romanists and Hellenists. 
 Another problem worked out with different results, 
 
 9t 
 
202 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 was to find which was the oldest and most masterful 
 principle in the universe authority or liberty, the finite 
 or the infinite. Those who believed in the principle 
 of mobility referred everything to usage gradually 
 corrupting words, to irregularity and anomaly, while 
 the believers in the infinite, immovable, and eternal 
 principle proposed to subject everything to a fixed law, 
 which subjugated custom to reason, and ruled through 
 analogy; and thus arose two other sects, the anom- 
 alists and analogists. Thus every controversy was 
 carried into the sphere of grammar, in which all the 
 treasures of antiquity were reunited. In the laborious 
 agony of the Latin language, the origin of institutions 
 whose traces had long been lost were to be found, and 
 through the dry and ungrateful study of etymology the 
 secrets of those which had remained a sealed book in 
 the hands of the jurisconsults were again laid bare. 
 In the matter of criticism, we see grammarians early 
 taking in hand the works of the old poets, as Naevius, 
 Ennius, and Pacuvius, which, before Lucretius and 
 Virgil appeared to efface all other models, had been 
 commented on and criticised in a thousand ways. The 
 figure of Virgil, long surrounded by clouds, stood out 
 in such radiant beauty that posterity took it for that of 
 a god, as which the poet was honoured in the lararium 
 of Alexander Severus; his name was placed on the 
 calendar, and his birthday, the eve of the ides of 
 October, marked and honoured like that of the em- 
 peror ; while the Mantuan women told of his mother's 
 marvellous dream, of the budding laurel, and would, 
 when near childbirth, bear votive offerings to their 
 poet's oratory. His fame grew from day to day, and 
 upon it the Roman scholiasts concentrated all their 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 203 
 
 labour. Donatus, Servius, Charisius, Diomed, and 
 many others might be instanced, but Servius especially, 
 preserved through the Middle Age to our own day, 
 saw in Virgil not merely a poet, but an orator, phi- 
 losopher, and theologian, finding so rich and various a 
 store of teaching in the sixth book of his " iEneid," 
 that he did not wonder that whole treatises had been 
 composed in comment upon it. 
 
 But the ancient teaching, and especially the labours 
 of the grammarians, were concentrated to a special 
 aim, of which their prodigious activity, never greater 
 at Rome than in this century, was the proof. It seemed 
 that they were struggling to save, verse by verse, frag- 
 ment by fragment, the remnants of that splendid 
 language, to rescue portions of so many authors des- 
 tined to perish, save in the morsels which the gram- 
 marians had preserved. Donatus and Priscian were 
 the two most eminent of the time ; the latter was so 
 honoured in the East that Theodosius the Younger 
 copied, with his own hand, the eighteen books of his 
 " Grammatical Institutions." The former had St. 
 Jerome for a disciple, and was so perseveringly com- 
 mented upon in every generation, that his name became 
 a synonyme for grammar itself. His work lived as the 
 ground-plan and type of all modern grammars, and by 
 its clearness and brevity held the Middle Age, though 
 it was as the bed of Procrustes for the different idioms 
 which adopted it, too short for some, too long for others. 
 Thus the " Donatus Provincialis," omitting the article 
 which existed in Provencal, said that there were but 
 eight parts of speech, and in the French adaptation, 
 there being no declensions in that language, it was some- 
 
204 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 what hard for the author to find place for all the nouns 
 in his scheme. 
 
 But all the labours spent on grammar and criticism 
 were summarized, in these essential points, under a 
 taking form, in the work of Martianus Capella, written 
 at Kome about 470, and under this guise the treasures 
 of antiquity were to traverse with some safety the 
 stormy period in which what was less valuable was 
 destined to perish. The author was an old African 
 rhetorician, plunged in all the contention of the Bar, 
 and who, in his own words, had not found wealth in 
 pleading before the proconsul. He composed, for the 
 instruction of youth, a book entitled " De Nuptis Mer- 
 curii et Philologiae," of the nuptials of Mercury, the 
 god of eloquence, with Philologia, the goddess of 
 speech, a vicious title, as all are that require an explana- 
 tion. The two first books related, in prose mingled 
 with verse of frequent elegance, how Mercury, seeing 
 that the gods had yielded all things to the laws of love, 
 determined to act in like manner. He went to consult 
 Apollo, who points out to him in oracle a virgin for a 
 wife, who read the stars by her glance, and in spite of 
 his lightnings revealed the secrets of Jupiter. The 
 latter, being warned of it, called a meeting of the gods, 
 to announce that a mortal was to be called to take a 
 place in their midst, and demand a decree to naturalize 
 in heaven the virgin of earth. But Philologia, from the 
 depths of her retreat, lost nothing of what passed ; and, 
 knowing some noble alliance was in store for her, com- 
 bined, by Pythagorean processes and calculation, the 
 numerical value of the letters of her name with those of 
 Mercury, and finding a perfect harmony between them, 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 205 
 
 decided on submitting to fate. Her mother, Phronesis, 
 and her handmaids, Periagia and Epimelia, hastened to 
 complete her attire. Scarcely had they finished, when 
 the Muses appeared to sing at her door, and Athanasia 
 hurried in to wish her joy ; but, as before becoming 
 immortal all that was perishable must be put off, 
 the goddess of immortality placed her hand on the 
 breast of the virgin, who instantly vomited a frightful 
 quantity of books, parchments, letters, hieroglyphics, 
 figures of geometry, and even notes of music ; no one 
 being able to tell, as the poet says, what a chaos 
 escaped from the half-opened lips of Philologia : and 
 then, nothing hindering her upward flight, she was 
 assumed into heaven. Her dowry was fixed, and 
 Apollo appeared with the seven virgins assigned by 
 Mercury as her companions Grammar, Ehetoric, 
 Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and 
 Music being the seven liberal arts of antiquity, 
 which allegorical personages, each with its accom- 
 panying attributes, briefly summed up, now in verse, 
 now in prose, the group of sciences committed to the 
 share of each. Geometry was not understood in the 
 modern sense, but embraced geography ; music was 
 not confined to music proper, but it united the art 
 of melody with that of composition, the secrets of 
 harmony and the rules of versification. 
 
 Such was this encyclopaedia of antiquity, which 
 sought to reduce all sciences to the arbitrary number 
 of seven : the old world had not dreamed of straiten- 
 ing its wealth to so narrow a compass, that task was 
 left to a deeply imperilled society, which, like a 
 traveller, clutched its treasure lest any should be lost 
 by the way. The mythological machinery in which 
 
206 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 science was enveloped saved it by making it popular ; 
 for we know the barbarian passion for the mythical, 
 and how readily their conquering hordes would open 
 their ears to the new fables related to them by the 
 Komans, to the graceful myths of the grammarians 
 and men of letters. The nuptials of Mercury and 
 Philologia were to be the delight of Gauls and Germans, 
 who would desire them to be embroidered on the 
 tapestry of their churches and the saddles of their 
 horses, so easily would they have been gained over to 
 the worship of false gods, had not Providence im- 
 pelled them to other temples and far different priests. 
 The legendary scenery in which Martianus had con- 
 cealed the graceless subject of his poem was especially 
 calculated to charm them ; and he once also formed a 
 natural mnemonic, whereby the meaning he had wished 
 to convey was deeply imprinted on their minds. His 
 book became the text and groundwork of elementary 
 education during the sixth and seventh centuries, was 
 translated into German in the eleventh; and in the 
 ninth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, was commented upon 
 by Scotus Erigena, Eemy of Auxerre, and Alexander 
 Nicasius. It gave, in one word, law to the whole 
 Christian education of the Middle Age, and fenced 
 whole generations of intellects around with the limits 
 of the trivium and quadrivium, until the Kevival 
 came to burst these barriers and give a larger sphere 
 to genius, which languished in such confinement and 
 aspired to the infinite. In going over the catalogues of 
 the monastic libraries of the time, and especially those 
 of Bobbio ; of York, in the time of Alcuin ; and of St. 
 Gall, at the same period, we find therein, next to the chief 
 Latin poets Virgil, Horace, and Lucan grammarians 
 
THE LITERARY TRADITION. 207 
 
 and commentators, the last writers of antiquity, 
 perhaps, whom we should count worthy of the pre- 
 servation, which, however, our ancestors did right in 
 affording them. 
 
 It was only on the condition of bringing the heavy 
 hammer of the old grammarians to bear on their iron 
 nature that Vandals, Suevi, Alani, and Sarmates could 
 digest their knowledge, and become capable of study- 
 ing a language so little made at first sight for their ears 
 or their spirit. It was only by constant repetition that 
 their lesson was retained. Without the labours of 
 those commentators who guarded Virgil's works down 
 to their last verse, syllable, and lacuna, poetasters 
 would have arisen, undertaking to finish his incomplete 
 rhythms. It needed the Argus-like jealousy of these 
 watchful guardians to prevent the profane from actually 
 laying hands upon them, and so justifying the suspi- 
 cion of Pere Hardouin and his successors. 
 
 Their labours, so repulsive at first sight, were 
 destined to mould both our ancestors and ourselves. 
 Impelled to the lowest depth, it was to become the 
 effort whereby genius was to rise again under that ad- 
 mirable law of the Almighty which makes it the prize 
 of labour. 
 
 Long ages indeed, and many a generation, passed 
 away in their course before the spark was struck out, 
 to fall at once into eclipse, till other generations came 
 to dash in their turn against the cruel rock of labour, 
 and to end by finding another stone from whence the 
 fire of ignition must spring. The schools of the Middle 
 Age were for a time buried as in the earth out of sight, 
 but the day came when a blaze of light arose from beneath 
 their blows, where Dante and Petrarch, the precursors 
 
208 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 and prophets of the Kevival, hurried to kindle their 
 torches. It must now be seen how this century, so 
 pagan in its memories, so filled with traditions of 
 mythology, became Christian, and after what repeated 
 efforts its heathenism was transformed and thrown into 
 the great movement which bore away the age in its 
 current. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 
 
 Whilst poetical inspiration was dying out, the tradition 
 of literature was gaining a lasting power, under the 
 shelter of the schools which the imperial policy had 
 endowed and multiplied, by making a magistracy of 
 their professors, and organizing science as an institu- 
 tion. The Roman law, in respecting the liberty of 
 instruction, gave to it an authority that the culture of 
 minds might not be left to chance. It sustained the 
 right of a father to send his son to the schools of the 
 mercenary grammarians, evidenced by their purple 
 hangings, or to buy a professor of rhetoric in the slave- 
 market ; and at the same time founded a public system 
 as a model and rule for the others, thereby preserving 
 from destruction the wealth of human intelligence, and 
 handing it down under a severe and scrupulous control. 
 We have seen with what ardour that tradition was 
 taken up and cultivated in the fifth century by a whole 
 people of grammarians, rhetoricians, and scholiasts, 
 who extracted from the ancient text-books the rules of 
 language and the principles of every branch of science, 
 until the whole cycle of human knowledge was enclosed 
 in the encyclopaedia finished at Rome in 470 by Mar- 
 tianus Capella. Whilst the Empire was tottering, its 
 literature must be saved at any cost, and though 
 
210 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Claudian, Kutilius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and the rest 
 of the poets, in deed or in name, would have wondered 
 had they been told that posterity would prefer to them 
 such obscure bookworms and word- splitters as Donatus, 
 Servius, and Macrobius, yet posterity was wise ; for in 
 the works of the latter they found the ancient language, 
 the essence of the knowledge, ideas, and experience of 
 the old world, and the text of the classics, preserved 
 with scrupulous accuracy, transmitted with a care that 
 had not let a page perish ; and, lastly and especially, an 
 example of labour of thorny and disinterested study on 
 the part of men who could not foresee their recompense. 
 This was the most precious fruit gathered from it by a 
 barbarian age. Horace speaks of the lyre of Orpheus 
 civilizing the nations, but his imagination led him 
 astray. Doubtless the Muses have their share in the 
 march of civilization, and the nations have ever loved to 
 see poets in their van, especially in ages of difficulty ; 
 but whereas these guides have often failed, toil has never 
 been lacking to a people struggling for improvement. 
 The period we are traversing is eminently one of labour, 
 and will teach us the difficulty and merit of the task of 
 binding to the study of mouldy texts on the benches of 
 the crowded school the descendants of the barbarians 
 whose fathers had found their home in the German 
 forests; men who had to be civilized by a process full 
 of anxious labour, of which the light of genius was to 
 be the result and the recompense. The traditions 
 of ancient literature, in order to reach the Middle 
 Age, must pass through the ordeal of Christianity ; 
 the School must desire to enter the Church, the Church 
 to receive the School. It was no easy question to solve, 
 but a problem which was to be for long ages the tor- 
 
HOW LITERATURE' BECAME CHRISTIAN. 211 
 
 ment of the human mind, as to which the treaty con- 
 cluded seemed never to be definitive, so often has it been 
 reopened and recontested, even to our own day ; it was 
 the immortal problem of the connection between science 
 and faith, the alliance of the Gospel with profane 
 literature, the agreement of religion with philosophy 
 questions which are proposed anew every day to our- 
 selves, and were the special difficulties of the times of 
 which we are treating. 
 
 Moreover, they were rendered especially obscure and 
 dangerous in the fifth century by the profoundly pagan 
 character of the schools. We know all that the Alexan- 
 drian Syncretists attempted in order to reunite religion 
 and literature, how under the influence of its doctrines 
 poetry became a means of popularizing the worship of 
 the false gods, eloquence a propagandism, and philoso- 
 phy a theology ; that whilst Claudian reproduced in verse 
 the history of the Eape of Proserpine, and brought the 
 deities of Paganism into the councils of Christian princes, 
 Acacius, the rhetorician, was triumphantly telling 
 Libanius by letter that he had preached in the temple 
 of iEsculapius, and in making the innovation of praising 
 the gods in a prose discourse, pronounced before pagans, 
 had not forgotten to insult the Christians, the very 
 neighbourhood of whom was an outrage to the immor- 
 tals. Jamblichus, Maximus of Ephesus, and all the 
 later disciples of Plotinus, who had embraced or adopted 
 these doctrines, and plunged in all the errors of theo- 
 logy, spent their time in invoking gods and demons. 
 The last bulwark of Paganism, both in West and East, 
 was among these poets and philosophers, and Libanius, 
 congratulating himself on the fact, tells us that the 
 Greek Septints still had many allies at Rome. Au- 
 
212 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 sonius also bears witness to this fact, and among the 
 public professors of Bordeaux specifies one named 
 Phaebitius, priest of Balenus, who vaunted his descent 
 from the caste of Druids. So essentially pagan was 
 the school, that it was a question to what point a 
 Christian might continue to teach literature, and Ter- 
 tullian did not scruple to maintain the negative ; " for," 
 he said, " they must of necessity teach the names of the 
 gods, their genealogies and the attributes given them 
 by mythology, and observe the pagan festivals and their 
 solemnities, on which their emoluments depend. The 
 first fee paid by the pupil is conserved to the honour 
 and name of Minerva ; presents are given in the name 
 of Janus ; if the sediles sacrifice, it is called a ferial 
 day ;"* and concludes by defying any teacher of letters 
 to disengage himself from these bonds of idolatry. But 
 a stronger tie was found in the charm of these dis- 
 credited fables, which had raised the shoulders of 
 Cicero and embarrassed Yarro. 
 
 In the presence of Christianity they seemed to revive ; 
 before its severe doctrine, so filled with austerity and 
 mortification, their carnal and seductive spirit rose again, 
 to throw its power on the side of graces, muses, and 
 pleasure. Literature had to be shorn of their fascina- 
 tion before it could become Christian to resist such 
 tendencies before it could enter the pale of the newj 
 truth, which commanded an abandonment even of the 
 charms and illusions of the mind. It was not to be 
 wondered at, that many apostasies came to pass at this 
 time among men of learning ; and it was the influence' 
 of the Muses, or of Homer himself, which was guilty 
 of that of Julian. When he assumed the purple, it was 
 * Tertul. Idolatria, cap. x. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 213 
 
 no marvel that men of letters in crowds rushed into the 
 temples in his train. The terrible edicts put forth by 
 Theodosius against apostasy make us feel how deeply 
 the evil had corroded Christendom. Licentius, pupil 
 of St. Augustine, a youth in whom he had placed all 
 his sympathy, who had passed many months with him 
 in the elevated and familiar intercourse of Cassiciacum, 
 was pursued and tormented, though a Christian, by the 
 daemon of poetry, and escaped to compose a piece upon 
 Pyramus and Thisbe. It was touching in the extreme 
 to see the efforts of the saint on his behalf. At first 
 he bantered Licentius, and tried to draw him from the 
 influence of his Muse ; then, thinking advice the wiser 
 course, begged him to continue and complete his fable, 
 but, when he had represented the two kings dying at 
 each other's feet, to give way to his rapture, and extol 
 the conquering love which leads souls to the light, which 
 gives them life, and never suffers it to die. Advice like 
 this seems instinct with supreme wisdom, but it was 
 dangerous. St. Augustine returned into Africa ; Licen- 
 tius was attracted by the honours and pleasures of 
 Eome ; he found jovial mirth there, and was soon sur- 
 rounded by all the pagan aristocracy. He dreamt one 
 night that the gods appeared to him, and promised, if 
 he returned to their allegiance, that he should become 
 consul and sovereign pontiff; and under the joint 
 effects of the dream, the festivals, and poetry, he em- 
 braced Paganism. 
 
 Such was the irresolution of the souls of the poets, 
 philosophers, and men of letters, whose eternal curse 
 was a kind of incorrigible weakness, a softness of 
 heart open to seduction, an activity of mind which 
 perceives at a glance strong points and weak, and 
 
214 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 at the same time is incapable of decision and of choice, 
 through excess of knowledge ; for fine intellects are 
 often served by feeble wills, and we may find in all 
 ages the irresolute souls who have not the courage of 
 faith. 
 
 To meet this, St. Paulinus wrote to Jovius, to engage 
 him on the side of Christianity, and to conquer his 
 doubts. " You breathe the perfume of all the poets, 
 carry in your breast the streams of eloquence which 
 have flowed from the orators, bathe in the fountains of 
 philosophy, and taste the honey of Attic literature. 
 Where is your business, when you read and read again 
 Demosthenes or Cicero, Xenophon, Plato, Cato, or 
 Varro, and all the rest whose names I hardly know, 
 but whose works you know by heart. You are always 
 able to give yourself up to such as these ; but when the 
 knowledge of Christ, which is the wisdom of God, is in 
 question, then you are a slave to business. You can 
 find time to be a philosopher, but not to be a Christian. 
 Eather change your thoughts, carry your eloquence into 
 another sphere ; you need not abandon your philosophy, 
 if you will but hallow it by faith, and employ it wisely 
 by uniting it to religion. Become the philosopher and 
 poet of the Almighty, no longer eager to find, but to 
 imitate Him. Show your knowledge in your life rather 
 than in your words, and produce great actions rather 
 than wise discourses." Such firm and manly language 
 was necessary for that effeminate generation of men of 
 talent and sense, but whose minds were crippled by 
 weakness, and had to be dragged, as it were, under the 
 yoke of the holy and fertile austerities of the Faith. 
 
 But these efforts were blessed, and a certain number 
 of hardier souls had early the courage to bury them- 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 215 
 
 selves in the mysteries, which gave a recompense to 
 their boldness. Quadratus, Athenagoras, St. Justin, 
 pupils of the most brilliant schools of Greek phi- 
 losophy, were among the first of these ; and the 
 rhetoricians, Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactatius, fol- 
 lowed them. They began, on entering the Church, by 
 shutting their schools, and abjuring a vocation of 
 which they were ashamed, as irreconcilable with the 
 literature of Christianity ; but soon the further sacri- 
 fice was demanded of them, of remaining in their places, 
 to preserve science amidst all its dangers, in spite of 
 the requirements and newly-arisen difficulties of their 
 faith. St. Basil, accordingly, in the fourth century, 
 found a Christian master in the person of Preheresius. 
 The two men named Apollinaris, one a poet, the other 
 a rhetorician, reproduced the form of the epic in a 
 versified New Testament, and the Platonic dialogue, by 
 adapting it to that method, that the precious treasure 
 of the literary tradition might be preserved ; and 
 Julian showed his fear of these Christian masters in 
 that masterpiece of hypocrisy in which he enacted : 
 "As we are now, thanks to the gods, enjoying liberty, 
 hold it absurd to lead men to teach the works of 
 poets whom they condemn ; for do not Homer, Hesiod, 
 Demosthenes, and Virgil, recognize the gods as authors 
 of their knowledge ? Were not many of their works con- 
 secrated to Mercury and the Muses ? If these masters 
 think them to have been in error, let them confine 
 themselves to interpreting Luke and Matthew in the 
 churches of the Galilaeans." This persecution, held by 
 Christianity to be the most hateful to which it was ever 
 exposed, attests in the loud protests raised against it 
 on every side to the number of the Christian masters, 
 
216 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 some of whom closed their schools, while others main- 
 tained them, and sought to elude the rigour of the new 
 enactment. 
 
 But the time came when such a resistance was use- 
 less, when everything yielded to the subduing power of 
 the Church, and the last rhetoricians were obliged to 
 give up the contest. Witness the history of Victorinus : 
 " He was an African, who had for long been a teacher 
 of rhetoric at Eome, had seen the noblest senators 
 among his pupils, and had received as reward of merit 
 a statue in the Forum of Trajan. He had remained 
 an idolater till his old age, but was at last converted. 
 Having read Holy Scripture, and carefully examined 
 all the Christian books, he said in secret one day 
 to a Christian friend of his, named Simplician, ' Know 
 that I am a Christian.' ' I cannot believe it,' was the 
 answer, 'till I see you at church.' Victorinus said, 
 scornfully, 'Do walls make one a Christian?' They 
 held similar conversations from time to time, as Vic- 
 torinus feared giving offence to certain influential friends 
 of his among the idolaters. At length, strengthened 
 by reading, he began to fear lest Jesus Christ should 
 deny him before the holy angels if he dared not confess 
 Him before men ; so he sought Simplician at a time 
 when he least expected him, and said, 'Let us go 
 to church, for I wish to become a Christian.' Sim- 
 plician, in a transport of joy, brought him there ; he 
 was admitted as catechumen, and shortly after, to the 
 great surprise of Eome, and disgust of the pagans, 
 gave in his name for baptism. When the time for 
 his profession, made at Rome from an elevated place, 
 so as to be in sight of all the faithful, approached, th< 
 priests offered to receive it privately, as was the cas< 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 217 
 
 with some whom shame otherwise might overcome ; hut 
 he preferred pronouncing it in public. When he rose 
 to recite the Creed, as every one knew him, a general 
 murmur went round, every one saying, in accents of 
 joy to his neighbour, Victorinus ! Victorinus ! Then as 
 the desire of hearing it from his lips caused an intense 
 silence, he pronounced the symbol in a firm tone, each 
 of the congregation following him from the heart with 
 joy and love."* 
 
 Thus the School entered the Church, but did the 
 Church receive it with open doors, or did a new diffi- 
 culty arise to prevent literature from reconciling itself to 
 a system so foreign to its spirit ? It would seem, at 
 first sight, that Christianity ought not to give help to 
 the alliance of learning and faith, for the latter pre- 
 sents itself as a dominant principle, ready to crush 
 human science. Such is the language of St. Paul, 
 glorying in the fact of Christianity being reputed as 
 folly by the Greeks, delighting that in its turn it had 
 confounded the haughty wisdom of antiquity; happy in 
 its having few sages of its own, but rather choosing the 
 ignorant and the insignificant to confute by their aid 
 the learned and the influential. The apostle rightly 
 charges them to join the battle, with no speeches 
 learned in the schools of eloquence and philosophy, but 
 tells them, with Cicero, that though philosophy is the 
 ornament of human minds, no rule of life must be sought 
 for in it, but rather on the stronger and surer ground 
 of ancient custom, mos majorum; for every error has in 
 its turn been brought forth by philosophy. We think 
 the Apostle right at the sight of philosophy bringing 
 Gnosticism into Christianity, reducing it to a mere 
 
 * Fleury, torn. iv. lib. xv. p. 14. 
 VOL. I. 10 
 
218 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 mythology, in opposing to each other two eternal worlds 
 of matter and spirit, renewing all the errors of Pan- 
 theism and Oriental Dualism. Philosophy held a frag- 
 ment, but not the whole of Truth. Christianity also 
 taught that the Word was the Light which lightened 
 every man who came into the world, and that the reason 
 which had so divine an origin could not be trampled 
 under foot. So St. Paul did not fail to add that the 
 philosophy of old had known God, that His works, 
 manifested to man, had sufficed to show him his Crea- 
 tor, and that the crime of its experts had consisted 
 not in ignoring, but in hiding the truth, in keeping it 
 from sight, lest they should suffer the fate of Anaxa- 
 goras and Socrates ; of having abandoned by their 
 cowardly retreat the truth they were bound to serve. 
 Hence flowed the two principles maintained by St. 
 Paul, and by Christianity after him, the insufficiency 
 of reason and its power, the danger and the usefulness 
 of literature principles which were one in essence, but 
 which had separated and formed the guiding influences 
 of two different schools. 
 
 However, the agreement wished for by the Apostle 
 seemed to have been understood. The East, enlight- 
 ened by the luminaries of Alexandria, Greece en- 
 chanted by the eloquence with which Athens was still 
 resounding, those speculative races occupied with the 
 beautiful and the true, could not suffer the heritage of 
 so many masterpieces, and of the instruction which 
 they had received from their ancestors, to be snatched 
 from them. Early were combined efforts made to 
 bring together in a lasting peace the two rivals, faith 
 and knowledge ; and this was the motive for the foun- 
 dation of the catechetical school of Alexandria, which 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 219 
 
 could trace its origin almost to apostolic times, of 
 which one of the first known masters was St. Pantse- 
 nus, in the second century. At the same time great 
 schools of theology rose at Antioch, Csesarea, Nisibis, 
 and Edessa, the work of which was to throw on the 
 darkness of ancient philosophy the rays of Christianity, 
 and reciprocally to illustrate the mysteries of the faith 
 by all the legitimate light of human reason. Of this 
 great scheme, St. Clement of Alexandria gives us an 
 example in his three works, "An Exhortation to the 
 Greeks," " The Paedagogue," and " The Stroma ta." 
 It is impossible here to examine these admirable trea- 
 tises in detail, or do more than sketch their principal 
 thoughts. The saint wished that philosophy and pro- 
 fane science should become like Hagar to Sara, a 
 handmaid to the Faith, but that the servant should be 
 treated as a sister, and thus expresses it : " No, phi- 
 losophy does no harm to the Christian life; those have 
 slandered it who represented it a treacherous and im- 
 moral attendant, for it is a light, an image of the 
 Truth, a gift from God to the Greeks, which, far from 
 seducing us from the Faith by an empty fame, gives it 
 another bulwark, and becomes its sister science, afford- 
 ing it a further demonstration. For it was the school- 
 master of the Greeks, as the Law was of the Hebrews, 
 both being means to bring them unto Christ." * 
 
 The method of St. Clement was also that of Origen, 
 whose efforts tended to compare and balance the philo- 
 sophical doctrines of his time, to bring out, not their 
 contradictions, but their harmony, as fundamental 
 verities on which the edifice of the faith might rest. 
 And so also taught Gregory of Nyssa, Eusebius, 
 
 * Clem. Alex. Stromat. lib. i. 1, 5, 6. 
 
 10 * 
 
220 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Synesius, Nemesius, and all those Orientals who were 
 still held spell-bound by the Platonic doctrine. 
 
 But it is in the works of St. Basil in particular, 
 the friend of St. Gregory of Nazianzum, the rival of 
 Julian, the pupil of the school of Athens, when it was 
 just newly lighted by Christianity, that the true and 
 wholesome doctrines on the share of the Church in the 
 profane legacy of antiquity were to be found; he im- 
 provised, and afterwards committed to writing, for the 
 benefit of the schools, that homily on the right use of 
 the pagan authors, which, beginning by establishing 
 the necessity of subordinating everything to a future 
 life, recognizes promptly that the future itself can gain 
 lustre from the literature which adorns the present; 
 for, as he says in his beautiful language, which in its 
 comparisons well recalls that of Plato : "As dyers dis- 
 pose by certain preparations the tissue which is des- 
 tined for the dye, and then steep it in the purple, so, in 
 order that the idea of good may be traced ineffaceably 
 in our souls, we shall first initiate them in the outer 
 knowledge, and then will listen to the hallowed teach- 
 ing of the mysteries ; and as the real property of trees 
 is to bear fruit in their season, and yet they clothe 
 themselves with flowers and green branches, so the 
 holy truth is the fruit of the soul, and yet there is 
 some grace in clothing it with a different wisdom, like 
 the foliage which covers the fruit, and lends it the 
 charm of its verdure."* He then applies these maxims 
 in considering how much of the old learning could be 
 received, and how much must be cast away, as with 
 the poets the pictures of vice and of the nature of the 
 
 * St. Basil, Ad adolescentes, quomodo possint ex Gentilium 
 libris fructum capse, c. iv. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 221 
 
 false gods, the voluptuous sentiments which too often 
 formed the essence of the work, the fierce Paganism 
 which knew neither sister nor mother, nor any loving 
 influence; at the same time separating and prizing 
 whatever might tend to virtue in them. Homer was, 
 according to him, to be looked upon less as the narrator 
 of the fabulous loves of the gods, than as the learned 
 oracle who covered in allegoric form the wisest doctrines 
 of antiquity, and showed, under Ulysses, the symbol of 
 worth ; for what could be grander than the idea of that 
 man arriving naked on the Phaeacian shore, but en- 
 veloped as in a cloak by his courage, virtue, and wisdom, 
 so that the young princess, daughter of Alcinous, could 
 not look upon him without respect ; then appearing in 
 their popular assembly to confound it by his heroic 
 aspect, all battered, as it was, by battle and shipwreck, 
 so that no Phaeacian among them all but longed to be 
 Ulysses, even in his piteous plight ? Thus it pleased 
 the Christian bishop to dive into the most mysterious 
 depths of Homer's thought, to show the sweetness 
 which it contained, and to run through the other poets 
 of old time Hesiod, Theognis, Euripides, Plato 
 to repeat whatever he found therein that could elevate 
 the human mind. He had no wish to deny the good 
 in pagan virtues, for he did not fear them, and cited 
 boldly and joyfully the examples of such as Aristides 
 and Themistocles, for he knew well that Christianity 
 need not fear the comparison. 
 
 In this way the Greek Church accepted in part the 
 literature of old, as both a preparation for Christianity, 
 and as its proof; as a* preparation, because philosophy 
 had acted as schoolmaster to the heathen world, and 
 it was fit, according to St. Basil, to steep in the science 
 
222 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of antiquity the young souls that aspired to become 
 Christian, that they might then be imbued with the 
 principle of the Faith, as a means of proof, because 
 Faith, its mistress, would act herself upon the intellect 
 which sought the light that it had perceived afar off 
 in the bosom of the Almighty. And the schools and 
 their science came forward to lend their aid to religion, 
 and surround with a new and ever-enlarging light the 
 elements of Christianity. And so the alliance was 
 completed. It has been thought that Clement of 
 Alexandria did but enslave philosophy, and that the 
 chart of the human mind remained torn until the day 
 when Luther brought it anew out of the convents of 
 Germany a strange error, for at the very hour when 
 Faith seemed to bind philosophy in her fetters, she is 
 seen, if closely watched, to deliver it from the tyranny 
 of the schools, and their masters from that word ahrbs 
 spy, ipse dixit, the last argument of antiquity, which 
 had been repeated from one generation to another with- 
 out any making the necessary effort to break its yoke. 
 The eclectism which Alexandria named, but never 
 grasped, is found in. the writings of the Fathers. 
 Truth must be sought not in one school, but in all ; 
 Aristotle and Plato must be weighed in an even 
 balance. The eye must be turned from the fascinating 
 page of error ; and the mind, absolute master of what 
 lies within human scope, acknowledge an authority in 
 things divine. 
 
 And whilst faith freed the human mind from its old 
 tyrants, it snapped also the old bonds of everlasting 
 doubt, which lay at the bottom of those schools that 
 were for ever beginning anew their search after God 
 and the soul, which they never found. It was the 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 223 
 
 glory of Christianity to have bidden the quest to cease ; 
 it gave itself to the world, rather than the world to it, 
 and, forbidding the light to be longer withheld, said to 
 it, " Christ is here, go no further in pursuit of Him." 
 By taking from man uncertainty, the Church gave him 
 liberty, and broke the chain which was hindering him 
 from carrying his investigations with ambitious ardour 
 to the extreme limits of the finite and the infinite. 
 
 But side by side with this school, which was to last 
 fourteen centuries, another, less in number and in 
 influence, but of equal vitality, was forming itself. 
 Struck with the danger, it found it easier to fell litera- 
 ture than to prune it ; finding philosophy dangerous, 
 and rightly in the hands of the Gnostics, the Epicu- 
 reans, and the Stoics, it declared it impotent, and 
 sought to bring man to faith through despair of 
 reason. It resolved to disgust men with it by proving 
 it incapable of anything, and by bringing forward as a 
 proof of this its perpetual contradictions. This work 
 was undertaken by the whole line of apologists, begin- 
 ning among the Greeks with Hermias, but was taken up 
 especially among the Latins, whose spirit had always 
 been practical rather than speculative, to whom lite- 
 rature had always been somewhat an exotic, and whom 
 Cicero had found so wedded to the business of life, 
 that he had been forced to apologize for his philo- 
 sophical labours, and to evince, or at least to feign, a 
 profound contempt for Greek subtlety. In the train 
 of Hermias, who undertook to prove the contradictions 
 of the various schools of philosophy, followed Tertul- 
 lian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, eager to repel all pos- 
 sibility of accord between religion and letters, and 
 disclaim the services of Dialectic itself. Tertullian 
 
224 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 contemptuously pitied Aristotle as architect of the art 
 of construction and destruction, of that logic of thorny 
 argument which was a mere nest of eternal contro- 
 versy, and source of division among men ; which 
 returned upon every question ceaselessly as if discon- 
 tented at having settled it. He was indignant at 
 the efforts of some of his contemporaries to bring 
 about an union between philosophy and the Faith. 
 " What is there in common," he exclaimed, " between 
 Athens and Jerusalem ; between the Academy and the 
 Church ; between Heretics and Christians ? Our 
 doctrine comes from the Porch, but the Porch of 
 Solomon, and teaches us to seek God with a simple 
 heart. Let those who wish to give us a Stoic, or 
 Platonic, or logical Christianity come to terms with 
 it, for we have no want of science with Christ, nor 
 of study with the Gospel, and when we believe we 
 search no more." * 
 
 This proud, self-confident language points to the 
 fall into error, its fitting punishment, which we soon 
 perceive in its authors. Lactantius reproduced the 
 same views up to a certain point, when he finally modi- 
 fied them in assigning to philosophy a subordinate place 
 in his scheme. It was not only a small number of 
 Christian orators of the third, fourth, or fifth century 
 who spoke thus ; they had disciples and imitators in all 
 subsequent ages ; in the Middle Age, among the schools 
 of Mysticism, some of which were destined to go to the 
 last extremity of opposition to human reason ; in the 
 seventeenth century, in the person of Huet, who de- 
 voted his labours to the establishment of a kind of 
 universal scepticism ; and in the person of the great 
 * Tertull. de Preescriptione Haereticorum, cap. viii. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 225 
 
 Pascal himself. The school has even its disciples 
 among ourselves. It has never closed its doors, its 
 adopted thesis has never lacked supporters, for some 
 have ever heen found ready to throw the gauntlet down 
 to reason, and to attempt, by the production of an arti- 
 ficial Pyrrhonism a system of organized doubt to 
 overturn the labours of the human mind, and to give 
 faith a freer and wider sphere. 
 
 Against these men are ranged the general tradition 
 of the Church, the great and glorious names of 
 Christendom, and especially their own errors. Their 
 excesses were not without peril in the midst of that 
 doctrine which abhorred extremes, and was ever charac- 
 terized by wisdom and moderation. The eagerness to 
 burn what had been once adored, without distinguishing 
 the precious metal from the idol perhaps an excusable 
 exaggeration in newly-made Christians became more 
 perilous in the reasonings and dogmatizings of these 
 doctors, as showing a want of faith, or at least a faith 
 which trembled before reason and the ancient literature, 
 as if the Church had anything to dread in philosophy, 
 or her faith was destined to pale like a torch of night 
 before the light of day. 
 
 And this weakness betrayed itself by remarkable 
 lapses. Tertullian gave up science for ever to follow 
 in the train of the heretic Montanus and the two 
 women who believed in him. The Mystics of the 
 Middle Age were travellers on the road which led 
 to the heretical excesses of the fifteenth century, and 
 Pascal himself followed one of the tracks of error. 
 We must remember that, however stubborn their doc- 
 trine might be, it never had the character of authority 
 or general prevalence, and its most illustrious follower 
 
 10 | 
 
226 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 of our day has finally abjured it, and redeemed the 
 rashness of trampling reason under foot by his 
 pregnant saying, that "Plato wrote a human preface 
 to the Gospel."* 
 
 But the union of science and the faith, of religion and 
 literature, was no easy question, presented as it was 
 in the fifth century with a host of partisans on either 
 side, with the East in its favour and the West in oppo- 
 sition ; and its solution was entirely doubtful until the 
 West decided it in the person of her two great doctors, 
 St. Jerome and St. Augustine. Up to this time, whilst 
 the masters of the West had abjured their literary 
 heritage, those of the Greek Church had inclined to 
 avail themselves of their right. The hesitation of 
 St. Jerome was natural before the formidable duty of 
 deciding under the eyes of the whole Church, bent upon 
 the question in anxious attention. Moreover, he was 
 imbued with his readings of grammarians, rhetoricians, 
 and philosophers, though burning with faith. Plato 
 had been his meditation, the declamation of oratorical 
 controversies after the school-methods his exercise. 
 When the Spirit of God came upon him he fled into the 
 desert, but having carried his library with him, he read 
 Cicero as he fasted, and devoured Plautus whilst he 
 bewailed his sins. He came to himself and took up 
 the sacred writings, to be disgusted at their unpolished 
 style. Towards the middle of one Lent he fell danger- 
 ously ill, and was transported in a dream to the foot of 
 the throne of Jesus Christ. " Who art thou?" asked 
 the Saviour. "I am a Christian," answered St. 
 Jerome. " No," replied Christ, " you are not Chris- 
 tian, but Ciceronian." Confounded by the reproach, the 
 * De Maistre. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 227 
 
 Saint promised, with many tears, to abandon for ever 
 his profane studies.* 
 
 It was a grave engagement, and he seemed to contract 
 it anew in a letter written soon afterwards to Eustochius. 
 About the same time he sent to Pope Damasus an 
 elaborate commentary on the parable of the prodigal 
 son, in which he denounced the priests and bishops 
 who knew Yirgil by heart, who used to recite bucolic 
 poems and love- songs, and occupied their leisure in 
 declaiming entire tragedies. " For all," said he, 
 " these muses of poets, this eloquence of orators, wis- 
 dom of philosophers, are but daemons' delights ; truth 
 doubtless may be found in them, but it must be sought 
 with prudence, that the faithful may not be scandalized." 
 These harsh maxims, however, were written in' the 
 years 383, 384, in the first fervour of conversion ; the 
 Saint was accusing himself, his hard blows were brought 
 from the depths of his remorse to punish his own 
 faults, but wisdom and good counsel came to him from 
 the solitude of his desert retreat, to change his tone. 
 He continued his writing, Virgil still filled the fourth 
 part of his correspondence, Plato and all the ancients 
 threw over it their eloquence in turn, for his fine intel- 
 lect could not separate itself from the influence of 
 the old literature, which overflowed his mind and 
 escaped inevitably into his writings. Some were 
 scandalized at this, and Magnus, a rhetorician of Kome, 
 who was somewhat jealous of Jerome, reproached him 
 with having filled his works with pagan memories, 
 of having profanely stained the whiteness of the 
 Church's robe, and of being unable to write a page or a 
 letter to a woman without allusion to those whom he 
 * St. Hieronymi. epist. xviii. ad Eustoch. 
 
228 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 called our Cicero, our Horace, and our Virgil. But 
 St. Jerome retorted, " that his critic could never have 
 applied such a reproach to him had he known the 
 sacredness of antiquity. St. Paul, pleading the cause 
 of Christ before the Areopagus, had not scrupled to use 
 the inscription on a pagan altar in defence of the faith, 
 and to invoke as a witness the poet Aratus. The 
 austerity of his doctrine did not hinder the Apostle 
 from citing Epimenides in his Epistle to Titus,* and 
 a verse from Menander in another place. It was 
 because he had read in Deuteronomy the Lord's per- 
 mission to the Israelites to purify their captives, and 
 then take them to wife. What wonder, then, that I, 
 struck by the science of the age in the beauty of 
 its features, and the grace of its discourses, should 
 wish to transform it from the slave it is now into an 
 Israelite."! 
 
 And St. Jerome was so regardless of his dream, and 
 the promise given never again to open profane books, 
 that he made his monks copy the " Dialogues of Cicero," 
 and carried a copy of Plato with him on a journey to 
 Jerusalem, so as to lose no time on the road. He taught 
 grammar at Bethlehem, and expounded Virgil, the lyric 
 and comic poets, and historians to children confided 
 to him for training in the fear of God, and did not 
 hesitate to plead that it had been but a dream, to the 
 accusations of Kufinus. " Rufinus," he said, "has 
 accused me of the promise I made in a dream, and has 
 brought proofs of my perjury from my writings. But 
 who can forget the days of his infancy ? My head is bald 
 twice over, and yet in sleep I think I see myself young 
 
 * Titus, i. 12. 
 
 f St. Hieron. Ep. lxxxiii. ad Magnum. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 229 
 
 again, with long hair and well-draped toga, declaiming 
 before the rhetorician. Must I drink the water of 
 Lethe ? I should give this answer, if there was any 
 question of an engagement undertaken in the fulness 
 of my wakeful senses. But I send him who reproaches 
 me with a dream to those prophets who teach that 
 dreams are vain and deserve no faith."* It is a grave 
 and remarkable fact that St. Jerome wrote this between 
 a.d. 397 and a.d. 402, when old and full of experience 
 of life ; when he had played his part and taken his 
 side advisedly in the great questions in debate around 
 him ; when he had gained a greater wisdom, and freed 
 from the excesses of his youth had learnt in the moral 
 order to pardon much to human wills, and to be tolerant 
 of the intellect of mankind. 
 
 What was the doctrine of St. Augustine on the subject, 
 the result of the mental labour of which that great 
 soul gave us the sight, and by which, in greater 
 measure than St. Jerome, he was to decide the vexed 
 question of the whole of Christian antiquity ? We need 
 not speak of his early passion for ancient literature, 
 the tears which Dido's fate caused him, or the ardour 
 with which he devoured the "Hortensius " of Cicero, 
 and later, the works of the Neoplatonists, but stop at 
 the period when, upon his conversion, he abjured all his 
 errors, and follow him into his retreat at Cassiciacum, 
 where he passed many months of peace with his friends 
 Trygetius and Licentius, devoting the mornings to dis- 
 cussion of grave questions of philosophy, commenting 
 on Cicero, and reading every day the half of one of 
 Virgil's cantos. He was in no haste to abjure all that 
 he had once admired, and ignored the declamations of 
 * St. Hieron. contra Rufinum, lib. i. 30. 
 
230 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, and all those other men 
 whom the Church has never counted in the number .of 
 her saints. In the " Confessions," that deep outpouring 
 of a devout soul, he recalls the time when the Neo- 
 platonic books first fell into his hands: " Thou didst 
 send me, Lord, several works of the Platonists, translated 
 into Greek and Latin, and in them I read, though in 
 other terms, that in the beginning was the Word, and 
 the Word was in God, and the Word was God, and that 
 It was the true light which enlightened every man 
 that came into this world. But that He came to His 
 own, and that they received Him not, and that to those 
 who did receive Him He gave power to be made 
 children of God, that the Word was made Flesh, and 
 
 dwelt among us, I read not in those books ; that 
 
 He existed before time, beyond time, in an immutable 
 eternity, that to be happy, souls must partake of His 
 fulness, I found indeed in the writings of those 
 Platonists; but I did not find that He died in time 
 for the wicked. Thou hast hidden these things from 
 the wise, my God, and hast revealed them to babes, 
 that all who suffer and are heavy laden may come to 
 Him for comfort."* 
 
 This was the measure and the secret of the question 
 which for so many centuries has tormented the world. 
 Philosophy was not without power to lead men to the 
 feet of God, but Keason could not bring the human 
 mind to comprehend the God-man, or the charity and 
 mystery of His infinite love. St. Augustine was con- 
 tinually repeating this in the Church at his first 
 conversion, when writing his " Confessions," and when 
 he had become the great doctor of the Western Church. 
 
 * St August. Confess, lib. vii. cap. ix. 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 231 
 
 He spoke with respect of. the Platonists on every page 
 of his " City of God," and finished it with this fine 
 saying : " I could have pardoned the pagans if, instead 
 of raising a temple to Cyhele, they had reared a shrine 
 to Plato wherein his hooks should be read." 
 
 The door, thus opened to Philosophy, could not be 
 closed to the rest of human learning ; and thus, in his 
 work " On Order," in tracing the plan of Christian edu- 
 cation, St. Augustine followed the changeless law of God, 
 written by Him on the hearts of the wise, and divided 
 it into two parts, discipline of life, and discipline of 
 knowledge; the first proceeding from a principle of 
 authority, the second from that of reason. 
 
 "Keason is an effort of the soul, capable of bringing 
 man to a knowledge of himself, and even of God, 
 were he not arrested by the preoccupation of the senses. 
 It seeks intercourse with men in whom reciprocally it 
 resides, from whence springs Literature, and Grammar, 
 which embraces whatever the former hands down 
 through the memory of man, and is in consequence 
 history. Reason then bending to its work, and taking 
 account of the definitions, rules, and divisions pro- 
 duced, forms Dialectic ; and to it, as it is not in itself 
 sufficient for persuasion, adds Rhetoric. Having com- 
 passed man, it goes in search of God, or of steps by 
 which to reach Him ; and thence comes the idea of 
 Beauty, which, grasped by hearing, sound, rhythm, and 
 number, forms Music, and by sight, symbol, dimen- 
 sions, and numbers becomes, again, Geometry and 
 Astronomy. But what is seen by the eye is incom- 
 parable to the harmony discovered to the Soul. In th^ 
 course of study everything is reduced to number, of 
 which the shadow rather than the reality is perceived ,; 
 
232 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and thereupon Eeason takes courage, and begins to 
 suspect that a number must exist of capacity to 
 measure all the rest. From its efforts in this direction 
 Philosophy is born, and with it the two questions of 
 the Soul and God, our nature and our origin, one 
 rendering us worthy of happiness, the other giving 
 bliss itself." Such was his order of study, a system of 
 wisdom by which the soul was to be rendered worthy 
 of knowing the sovereign order of things, of distin- 
 guishing the two worlds, and rising in thought to the 
 Father of the Universe. 
 
 Moreover, it is remarkable that this scheme was 
 nearly the same as that of the ancients, but renewed 
 and regenerated by the loftier spirit of Christianity. 
 It contained their entire encyclopaedia of the seven 
 arts, modified by the conjunction of arithmetic with 
 geometry, and giving to philosophy, which in the 
 system of Martianus Capella had been confounded 
 with dialectic, a distinct place. But it was far grander 
 in conception, regarding the sciences, as it did, as so 
 many steps fitted to lead mankind from the earth it 
 dwelt on to the presence of its Supreme Governor. 
 St. Augustine did not shrink from the objections 
 hurled at his method, that it degraded the sacred 
 science which man could gather from faith alone, and 
 replied, with conscious superiority, that God could have 
 used the ministry of angels, but He willed to honour 
 humanity in giving forth His oracles in a human temple, 
 and charity itself would perish if man had nothing to 
 learn from man, if one soul could not pour its over- 
 flowings into others. 
 
 " If those, then, who are called philosophers, and 
 especially Platonists, hold doctrines which are true and 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 233 
 
 in agreement with the faith, not only must not their 
 tenets be held in suspicion, but must be reclaimed 
 from their wrongful possessors. For as the ^Egyptians 
 had not only idols which the people of Israel were 
 bound to fly from and loathe, but vases and ornaments 
 of gold and silver and garments which they carried 
 with them in their flight, so the Gentile science is not 
 entirely composed of superstitious fictions which the 
 Christian must abhor, but contains liberal arts, ser- 
 viceable to the truth, wise moral precepts not created 
 by them, but drawn like so much gold and silver from 
 the mines of Providence, which are dispersed over the 
 world ; and these the Christian may carry away when 
 he has purged them from their surrounding dross." * 
 
 Thus the question was solved, and the dispute 
 closed for many centuries. On the word of St. Au- 
 gustine, and upon the same motives, following ages 
 accepted their inheritance from antiquity; but the 
 Church held it as a wise trustee receives the property 
 of minors, with a privilege of inventory. The same 
 reason determined Cassiodorus, Bede, Alcuin, who all, 
 by a phenomenon of the intellect which it is well to 
 mark, actuated rather by comparisons than by reasons, 
 by images rather than great motives, repeated the 
 metaphor that Christendom was bound to act like the 
 children of Israel on coming out of Egypt, and to carry 
 off the gold and silver vessels of their enemies. With 
 this saying the science, art, and tradition of antiquity 
 passed into the Middle Age, the great problem was 
 solved, and the literary and intellectual knot was 
 formed which bound the two periods into one. 
 
 It remains to show how Virgil, deified by pagan 
 
 * St. Augustine. 
 
234 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 science, raised to the rank of Pontiff, Flamen, and 
 inheritor of the priestly tradition, became also the 
 representative of the religion of the future, the bar- 
 barous ages having, in order to save him, thrown over 
 his body the end of the prophet's robe. Thanks to his 
 " Fourth Eclogue/' the Christian world regarded him 
 as a foreteller of the new religion ; and this interpreta- 
 tion, first given by Eusebius in the fourth century, 
 continued through the mediaeval time, placed him 
 among the prophets, and afforded to his works an 
 increase of respect. A tradition relates how St. Paul, 
 the fierce contemner of the profane sciences, on his 
 arrival at Naples, went to visit the tomb of Virgil, and 
 having opened the " Eclogues," and read the Fourth, 
 burst into tears ; and the memory of this was preserved 
 in a sequence chanted long in the Cathedral of Mantua, 
 which recalled the legend in the following graceful 
 lines : 
 
 Ad Maronis mausoleum 
 Ductus, fudit super cum 
 Piae rorem lacrymse : 
 Quern te,'inquit, reddedissem, 
 Si te vivum invenissim, 
 Poetarum maxim e. 
 
 Popular tradition was also desirous of adding to this 
 more ancient legend, and for long the shepherd who 
 guided travellers to the poet's tomb used to show a 
 little chapel near to it in which he said Virgil heard 
 mass. 
 
 Thus the pagan civilization did not perish entirely, 
 or deserve to do so. One portion of it was preserved 
 by the Church, another remained in spite of her. 
 So great was the necessity for the culture which we 
 have seen, although stricken by a mortal malady, con- 
 
HOW LITERATURE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 235 
 
 tinued for the education of races yet to come. "We 
 might easily believe in the fitness of its dissolution, in 
 order that Christianity alone might hold the ground. 
 But no. Christianity itself gathered up all that was 
 lofty, equitable, generous, and beneficent in the old 
 order, and at the same time, and in spite of her efforts, 
 mythology was perpetuated in literature, though pro- 
 scribed by the Church ; in religion itself a superstitious 
 element appeared, and gave the hand to the defunct 
 Paganism of old, and in the order of law there remained 
 an odious system of taxation, which kept alive political 
 oppression, divorce which brought domestic tyranny in 
 its train, and the confusion between the power of the 
 priesthood and of the Empire which went far towards 
 engendering the bloody struggles of the Middle Age. 
 
 The Church, then, preserved the ancient literature, 
 which also in spite of her kept alive, amidst a mytho- 
 logical Pantheism all the voluptuous and carnal feelings 
 which were to reappear in full fury in moments of dis- 
 order and intellectual anarchy. Antiquity gave, in a 
 word, its vices as well as its enlightenment to the dark 
 ages, and, when tempted to accuse our ancestors and 
 reproach them with their barbarism, we may well 
 recognize in them the heirs of the refinements of the 
 Decline; for there is a singular analogy between the 
 vices of an used-up society and those of a savage state, 
 and a moment comes in which the impotence of the 
 aged is brought near to the weakness of babes, and we 
 know not whether we are treating of a people which is 
 perishing, or of one rising into life. 
 
 It has been wished to separate arbitrarily antiquity 
 from modern times, by assuming a kind of abyss at the 
 year 476, and saying, Here is modern history to the 
 
CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 right, to the left antiquity, and the two have nothing 
 in common ; but God, who is stronger than the 
 chroniclers, suffers no such break, for He sets order 
 and unity everywhere, in time as in space, and makes 
 even the disordered passions of man the bond- slaves of 
 His design. The times which we divide so arbitrarily 
 are bound by two ties, the golden chain of weal, wrought 
 by God Himself, and the iron chain of evil, which He 
 tolerates ; and history has no other end but to weld 
 together all these links, and thus establish that dogma 
 of continuity, so fundamental in Christianity, to which 
 human society is aspiring. This task is assigned to 
 us, for we are not as independent as we would think, 
 but are bound to our forefathers by our responsibility 
 for their sins, no less than by our gratitude for their 
 benefits. 
 
237 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 In the pagan civilization of the fifth century we have 
 seen the works whereupon antiquity had expended her 
 light and her strength. The human mind could go no 
 farther than that mighty labour of the Alexandrian 
 philosophy towards attaining to truth, or than the 
 admirable perseverance of the Roman Law in establish- 
 ing the reign of justice. We have not hidden the 
 grandeur and merit of these efforts, and as mere admi- 
 ration profits but little, have followed their effects down 
 into Christian ages, and have seen the institutions, 
 knowledge, literature, and even the industry of the old 
 world entering, so to speak, into the construction of 
 modern society to be the teaching principle for those 
 barbarians who had encamped on its ruins. There is 
 assuredly no spectacle in which the power of human 
 reason breaks forth more, and none in which it more 
 plainly manifests its insufficiency. For all that pagan 
 civilization, to the preservation of which Greek genius 
 and Roman common sense had been alike devoted, 
 perished without hope ; and while the statues of Aris- 
 totle and Plato before the schools did not hinder their 
 successors from giving themselves up to all the aberra- 
 tions of theurgy and superstition, the wisdom of Paulus, 
 Gaius, Ulpian, or Papinian had not closed the doors 
 
238 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 of the Empire against the vices of the Decline. In that 
 learned and polished society we have seen fetichism 
 reduced to a dogma, philosophers believing in a con- 
 stant presence of the deities in their idols, religious 
 prostitution, and human sacrifice; in the political 
 order, gladiators, eunuchs crowding the imperial serag- 
 lios, and slavery, profound excesses which Christianity 
 was bound to dissipate; literature itself degraded, 
 reduced to be a domestic pleasure for some few 
 favourites, or at the service of a corrupted aristocracy. 
 Moreover, Alaric was at the gates of Eome, afar off too 
 was heard the tramp of the horses of the Yandals, 
 Huns, and Alani, who were rising in masses round 
 their chief, and were about to bring Attila to the foot 
 of the Alps. 
 
 So it would have perished, had it not been for the 
 new principle of Faith which came to penetrate and 
 regenerate it. Eeason is powerful, no doubt, and is 
 always present in man, for there has never been an age 
 so unfortunate as not to give some sign of its presence 
 and influence ; but it is bound within us held in in- 
 active captivity till awoke by the Word from without, 
 which calls it from its repose ; then it becomes conscious 
 of and holds intercourse with itself; and that it may fully 
 realize its own existence and its faculties, using the 
 same language which has come to its ear from without, 
 becomes self-regarding, and names itself in saying, "I 
 think, therefore I exist." 
 
 Therefore, as the Word which provokes the reason 
 comes from something external to the reason, it comes 
 as an authority and impulse, an invading force from 
 without, and as a forerunner of some other reasonable 
 existence, which draws it to itself by an irresistible 
 
THEOLOGY. 239 
 
 influence. The soul, when addressed, is bound to 
 respond, and as the first effort of persuasion is to pro- 
 voke the adhesion of our intellects, to draw them into 
 the path of that other intelligence which approaches 
 them, so is that adhesion to the spoken word, called 
 in the order of nature human faith, to which divine 
 and supernatural faith are correspondent in the order 
 of theology. 
 
 Thus Keason and Faith are two primitive principles, 
 distinct from but not hostile to one another, for neither 
 can dispense with the other, reason being aroused only 
 by the persuasion which provokes its energy, and faith 
 only yielding itself when the object proposed is reason- 
 able. These principles were brought into the world by 
 Christianity, which gave to reason a perpetual honour 
 and sanctification in recognizing in it the Word which 
 enlightened every man that came into the world, and 
 having thus surrounded it with a divine glory, and 
 acknowledged in it a ray from the Almighty Himself, 
 could never again trample it under foot. But it estab- 
 lished also the necessity of an exterior word to pro- 
 voke responsive action, which was expressed in a series 
 of revelations, the first of which was to be traced to the 
 world's commencement, and having given mankind its 
 elementary education, was renewed through Moses, and, 
 lastly, sanctified, extended, and fixed for ever in the 
 Gospel dispensation. And so Christianity realized, in 
 a diviner form, and proclaimed, with a deeper truth, 
 what had been always a necessity to society, and had 
 ever existed in the depths of human nature the per- 
 petual agreement of reason and faith and raised, at 
 the same time, reason and nature above themselves. 
 
 And in the Christian view, this external and open 
 
240 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 word of revelation, which had kept the light of the 
 ages alive from their commencement, had uttered two 
 varieties of truth the first of an order to which reason, 
 unaided, could never attain, for religious truth is the 
 expression of the relation between the finite and the 
 infinite, and one of its elements, the infinite, being 
 beyond the power and scope of human thought, it 
 results that a portion of it is by nature inaccessible, to 
 expound which a revelation, withdrawn from all supple- 
 ment and development by the human intellect, was an 
 imperative necessity ; the second variety embraced 
 those natural truths to which the reason of man could 
 attain, and which Christianity attested to have been 
 actually compassed by science, avowing, with St. Paul, 
 that the ancients had known God, but had lacked 
 courage to glorify Him as God ; truths grasped only 
 by a few, and still mingled with obscurities, doubts, 
 and errors, which had cost the human race more than 
 three thousand years of painful wandering before the 
 genius of Plato and Aristotle laboriously produced 
 them, still enveloped in error and false principles, but 
 which revelation established by a short, sure, and 
 supremely popular method, making them no longer the 
 monopoly of a minority, but the possession of each and 
 of aU. 
 
 Never had a stronger appeal been made to the inner 
 power of the human soul than that addressed to it 
 from the height of Calvary, and when that word which 
 called for faith from the human race, consummatum 
 est, went forth from the lips of Him who had come to 
 bring it life and deliverance, the unexampled prodigy 
 was manifested of a power of faith which no one could 
 have pictured excited in that decaying world in which 
 
THEOLOGY. 241 
 
 all good feeling seemed corrupted, if not extinct. A 
 German theologian, in criticising the text of the Gospel, 
 has declared that the marvel of it broke upon him in a 
 vivid manner on reading the passage which relates how 
 Christ, walking by the Lake of Genneseret and meeting 
 some fishermen, said to them, " Follow me," and that 
 had he been in their place he would never have done 
 so ; that he cannot comprehend the inconsequence and 
 logical deficiency of those boatmen who abandoned 
 their nets and fishing-boat to follow the first passer-by 
 who promised them life eternal. That was, indeed, the 
 prodigy, and it appears less in those two or three Gali- 
 lasans than in the numberless multitudes of the Greek, 
 Koman, and Asiatic world who tore themselves, not 
 from their boats and the daily labour and sweat of their 
 brow, but from the pleasure and luxury of an existence 
 of delight, which the ancient world understood very 
 differently from ourselves, to throw themselves into the 
 difficulty, privation, and sacrifice of a Christian life a 
 life far harder than death itself; for, though the faith 
 of the martyrs may move us, that of those who lived 
 in the midst of a world which no longer knew them, 
 devoted to the hatred and execration of the whole 
 human race, must touch us more. But that their num- 
 ber grew, and their energy lasted, and that the early 
 ages passed entirely under the dominion of their faith, 
 is attested by the writings and letters of the chief pas- 
 tors of the Christian commonwealth, as St. Ignatius, 
 St. Clement, and St. Polycarp. 
 
 But faith could not dispense with reason, for the 
 Apostle himself had said, " Let your submission be 
 complete, but rational." Rationabile sit obsequium 
 vestrum. The moment came when it was necessary that 
 
 VOL. I. 11 
 
242 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 the revealed dogmas and heaven-born principles must 
 be arranged and defended as with a bulwark by all 
 the lights of knowledge. The provocation came from 
 without, and the attacks of pagan philosophy compelled 
 the early Christians to defend themselves, to prove 
 their doctrines by an appeal to history, philosophy, and 
 eloquence ; and this gave rise to the works of Justin, 
 Athenagoras, Tertullian, and the many other apolo- 
 gists. But although those early labours imposed by 
 polemical necessity were little, yet the combat with 
 external enemies was to bring out the necessity of ren- 
 dering an account to the disciples of the school they 
 were forming of the dogmas they wished to defend, 
 and so gave rise to the catechetical school of Alexan- 
 dria, whose illustrious children, Pantaenus, Clement, 
 Origen, were to be seen devoting their lives to the 
 exposition of the Scriptures and of dogma. We have 
 scarcely arrived at the third century, and yet Origen 
 had not bound himself merely to the task of collating 
 and comparing different texts, of publishing editions 
 in some measure polyglot, in which the translations 
 of many Jewish authors were confronted with the 
 primitive text, but, grasping these eternal sources of 
 verity, had developed them and drawn thence theology, 
 not only in its first elements, but in its complete form, 
 as we find expressed in his eulogy by St. Gregory 
 Thaumaturgus, resulting in the unison and powerful 
 harmony of that novel science which was moulding 
 itself into what was to be theology. 
 
 " In the first place, he taught them logic in accus- 
 toming their minds not to receive nor to reject proofs 
 at hazard, but to examine them carefully without 
 stopping at their surface-appearance, nor at sayings 
 
THEOLOGY. 243 
 
 whose lustre dazzled or whose simplicity disgusted, and 
 not to reject what at first may seem a paradox but 
 afterwards is shown to be most true, but in a word to 
 weigh everything healthily and without prejudice. He 
 also applied their minds to physics, that is, to the 
 consideration of the power and infinite wisdom of the 
 world's Author which are so fitted to humble us. He 
 also taught them the mathematical sciences, especially 
 geometry and astronomy, and lastly morality, which he 
 did not confine to empty discourses, to definitions and 
 barren divisions, but taught practically, making them 
 mark in themselves the motions of passion, that the 
 soul, seeing itself as in a mirror, might tear up its 
 vices by the roots, and strengthen the reason which pro- 
 duced the virtues. To discourse he joined example, 
 being himself a model of every virtue. And last of 
 all he brought them to the study of theology, saying 
 that the most necessary knowledge was that of the 
 First Cause. He made them read whatever the ancients, 
 whether poets or philosophers, Greeks or barbarians, 
 had written on the subject, except when they expressly 
 taught atheism. He made them read it all, that, 
 knowing the strong and the weak in each opinion, 
 he might guarantee them against prejudices. But he 
 was their guide in the study, leading them as it were 
 by the hand, that they might not stumble ; showing 
 them what every sect had which was useful, for he 
 knew them all perfectly. He exhorted them not to 
 cling to any philosophy, whatever the reputation, but 
 to God and His prophets. And then he explained to 
 them the Sacred Scriptures, of which he was the most 
 learned interpreter ; and in this exposition he gave 
 them an idea of the order and gist of the whole Chris - 
 
 11 * 
 
244 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 tian doctrine, and so raised their souls to the under- 
 standing of revealed truth."* 
 
 Thus theology was already in existence, and the 
 time which elapsed from the fourth to the end of the 
 fifth century was its golden age. It was then that 
 these great men appeared who were the glory and 
 admiration of the East St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. 
 Gregory Nazianzen, and St. John Chrysostom, not to 
 be treated of here, as we have separated Oriental civili- 
 zation from our task, though their writings, translated 
 into Latin and inherited by the monasteries of the 
 Middle Age, form part of the education of our times. 
 
 In the" West these men continued the development 
 of the new science. St. Jerome, who attached himself 
 to fixing the sense of the sacred text by Latin transla- 
 tions of the Bible, and so commenced true exegesis; 
 St. Ambrose, who founded moral theology ; and St. 
 Augustine, who undertook dogmatic theology. Time 
 would fail to give the history of these great men in a 
 work confined to that of ideas. We must rather see, 
 within our narrow limits of the theological history of 
 the fifth century, at the price of what struggles and 
 by what genius Christianity succeeded in keeping its 
 ground in spite of the heresies which threatened it, on 
 the one hand, with sinking into a mere mythology (a 
 new form of Paganism), on the other, with the danger 
 of becoming pure rationalism, but one more philosophic 
 system to add to history. The weighty subject for our 
 present attention is to find how amid perils so various 
 Christianity was enabled to remain as it was, a verity 
 revealed but reasonable, full of mystery in that it 
 
 * St. Gregorii Thaumat. " Oratio panegyrica et charisteria ad 
 Originem," passim. 
 
THEOLOGY. 245 
 
 touched the infinite, but at the same time intelligible 
 to the human mind. 
 
 Paganism had hurled two menaces against the 
 nascent faith, persecution and the Alexandrian schools. 
 These two dangers, which first engage the Christian 
 historian's attention, were, however, insignificant. The 
 former multiplied believers, and the apologies of the 
 latter failed to replenish the deserted fold of heathenism. 
 But at the moment in which the old religion, conquered 
 in every field, powerless to defend itself, seemed in 
 its agony, it was on the point of revival, or at least of 
 dragging its opponents after it, by conforming to Chris- 
 tianity. However exorbitant such an expression may 
 seem, it is no vain utterance of words, but an historical 
 reality. For the epoch in which our work is placed 
 was that of a general syncretism, in which every doc- 
 trine, every error, and some few truths were struggling 
 to bind themselves into a single and comprehensive 
 system. So true is this that the Koman world, so 
 long enclosed in its pride, which had cast such scorn on 
 its vanquished peoples, had gone to seek on its knees, 
 one after another, all the gods of the Orient to enshrine 
 them in its temples. We have seen Cybele arriving 
 from Phrygia, Osiris and Serapis from Egypt, Mithra 
 from Persia ; and when Heliogabalus, that madman 
 whose frenzy proceeded from a deeper source than has 
 been supposed, who was possessed by idolatry as by a 
 daemon, that young priest of the Syrian god Heliogaba- 
 lus, or the Sun, was transplanted suddenly to the throne 
 of the Caesars, and wished to celebrate his own bridal 
 with the Koman Empire, he ordered three beds to be 
 prepared in the Temple of Minerva, and the image of 
 the Sun, the divinity of Asia, that of Astarte, the 
 
246 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 African Venus, and of Pallas, the deity of Europe and 
 of the "West, to be laid upon them together. In the 
 marriage which he desired to solemnize between the 
 gods of the three quarters of the world, Heliogabalus 
 did but express, with singular force, the spirit which 
 was tormenting his age the necessity for Paganism to 
 gather up all its forces to resist an enemy which it had 
 tried in vain to stifle by punishment, and must now 
 attempt to conquer by a novel method. And if this 
 tendency was thus manifest at Home, what must it 
 have been at Alexandria? that city, along whose 
 streets, of two leagues in length, amidst colonnades of 
 rich workmanship raised by the Ptolemies, thronged 
 Romans, Greeks, ^Egyptians, and all the navigators 
 who came from the East, traversed the Red Sea, and de- 
 scended the Nile to this emporium of the world. Here 
 reigned all the doctrines of Greek philosophy, regene- 
 rated by the sages of the Museum, by Callimachus, 
 Lycophron, and the rest who had sought out the 
 origin of those fables which men had but weakened 
 by adornment. Those memories of Chaldsea and of 
 Persia, those traditions of Zoroaster and the naturally 
 nearer traditions of ancient Egypt, that multitude of 
 philosophies and apocryphal predictions which filled 
 the first ages of the Alexandrine science, witnessed to 
 the effort made to lay hold again on the ancient sacer- 
 dotal traditions, in order to revive that hieratic science 
 which was half extinct. 
 
 "Whilst all these doctrines were approaching each 
 other, a great movement was at work behind them, 
 which perhaps explains this sort of revival in the first 
 Christian ages ; for the time had arrived for a new form 
 of heathenism to seize upon Eastern Asia. The sect 
 
THEOLOGY. 247 
 
 of Bhuddha, born about five centuries and a half before 
 our era, for long firmly enclosed within the limits of 
 Hindostan, and in the bands of a philosophic school, 
 had taken flight with its brilliant mythology, at once 
 popular and learned, and capable of fascinating and 
 subduing the minds and imaginations of entire nations. 
 Having burst over the borders of the country to which it 
 had once been confined, Bhuddhism at the year 61 B.C. 
 made a new appearance on the scene, and invaded 
 all Northern Asia, so as to extend from the sea of 
 Japan to the coasts of the Caspian, filling all the inter- 
 vening countries and rekindling the religious zeal of 
 their countless populations. This great movement evi- 
 dently could not but influence the pagan development 
 of the West, and was destined to stir nations who 
 remained at a certain point strangers to it. As it was 
 in the East and among the Tartar tribes that the agi- 
 tation began which, spreading from man to man, was to 
 end in throwing the Huns, Alani, and Goths upon the 
 Rhine banks, and even beyond the Pyrenees, so an 
 Orientalized Paganism put forth its last effort to pene- 
 trate the faith of Christendom. 
 
 It effected its entrance through the Gnostic sects. 
 The Gnosis was the designation of a higher science or 
 initiation reserved for a handful of chosen spirits. It 
 was one of the chief characteristics of Paganism to 
 divide the human race, to refuse recognition to its pri- 
 mitive equality, to make certain classes to spring from 
 the head of the Deity, others from the stomach, legs, 
 or feet, and to measure out enlightenment, like justice, 
 with a grudging, unequal, and jealous hand. The Gnosis 
 possessed the other pagan principle of confounding 
 
248 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 creation with the creature, and by whatever means it 
 tried to explain the commencement of things ultimately 
 to unite them in one substance. It represented God 
 as a pleroma, a plenitude of existence which overflowed, 
 a vessel surcharged, which let its superabundance drip 
 over in a multitude of emanations, firstly in the form, 
 of JEons, semi-divine essences which descended in 
 steps of successive existences to the lowest ranks of 
 creation. These divine outpourings, which had as it 
 were a perpetual migration to accomplish, had names, 
 were divided into gods and goddesses, and became in 
 consequence mythological personifications ; so that the 
 Gnosis tells at length of the adventures of Sophia, the 
 divine wisdom, one of the first emanations of God, 
 which, wandering on the brink of chaos, fell into the 
 abyss, and could only escape by the intervention of 
 Christ-. She then was to be raanifested in a female 
 devotee, who was shown as the destined propagator of 
 the Gnostic doctrine ; and accordingly Simon Magus led 
 about with him a woman called Helen, as the incarnate 
 soul of the world. The pagan influence breaks out 
 again in these poetical adventures lent to the divine 
 emanations, but especially in the eternity of matter, a 
 principle common to every scheme of Gnostic doctrine, 
 which thus seated a resisting power by the side of the 
 Divine Power, an evil face to face with a good principle, 
 assigned two causes instead of one, and sowed the seeds 
 of dualism by its own pantheism. Such is an abridg- 
 ment of the doctrine of Valentinus, one of the first 
 Gnostics, as developed by Basilides and corrected by 
 Carpocrates and Marcion. Its sects multiplied and 
 brought about their division, and thence their ruin. 
 
THEOLOGY. 249 
 
 Like all false doctrines, it perished by that propagation 
 which is the salvation of truth, but by which errors 
 disappear in their variations. 
 
 At the end of three centuries, when the sects who 
 sought to bring Paganism into Christianity seemed 
 near their end, their errors were reunited and strength- 
 ened in the new doctrine of the Manichseans. Manes 
 was a Persian by origin, and two distinct but recon- 
 cilable traditions as to his life, and the circumstances 
 under which his system was founded, have come down 
 to us. One relates that he was born in Persia, and in 
 the course of long travels in Hindostan, Turkistan, 
 and China, encountered Buddhism in its rise, or at 
 least in the ardour of its first propagandism. The 
 other tells how the true author of the system was not 
 Manes, but a certain Scythianus, who had a disciple 
 named Terebinthus, or Buddha, the latter having a 
 slave called Manes, who received from the widow of 
 Buddha his liberty, and doubtless his doctrine also. 
 Both accounts agree in assigning to Manes a birthplace 
 in Persia, a long period of travel, and the work of 
 uniting the belief of his own country with the Oriental 
 dualism, and the other dogmas which the disciples of 
 Buddha had circulated through the East. 
 
 It is not astonishing, then, that this heresy, pre- 
 senting as it did some features of the Oriental mytho- 
 logy, was not wanting in a certain grandeur. It 
 admitted two Principles the one, God, or Spirit ; the 
 other, Satan, or Matter ; the former dwelling with His 
 iEons, or primitive emanations, in the immeasurable 
 world of light ; the latter in the sphere of darkness, 
 equally eternal, but limited by the realms of light, over 
 which it cast its shadow, as a cone of obscurity veils in 
 
 11 t 
 
250 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 part the face of a star.* The powers of darkness, 
 beholding the splendour of the Deity, undertook the 
 conquest of those fields of light of whose beauty they 
 were enamoured. Thereupon God, the author of Good, 
 sent forth as* a guardian of the frontiers of His king- 
 dom a new emanation, the Soul of the World. Planted 
 between the limits of the light and the darkness, it fell 
 to pieces before the inevitable assault of the powers of 
 the latter.f Then God sent His Spirit in aid of the 
 World- Soul given over to the fury of the shadowy 
 forces. It came and took from its shattered fragments 
 each of the members of primitive man, and therewith 
 made the world. It chose the brightest and most 
 spiritual constituent to create therefrom the sun, the 
 moon, and the stars ; from its aerial but more material 
 parts it made the atmosphere and the purer existences ; 
 from its entirely material elements the animal and 
 sensible portions of this world. But the latter was 
 under the empire of those dark powers to whom Matter 
 appertained, and so the World- Soul, dispersed every- 
 where, existing in every atom of the visible world, was 
 held in a sort of captivity. The divine essence spread 
 through it had to struggle against its shackles with a 
 long effort for deliverance, and this, alike of heavenly 
 origin, and a suffering prisoner, was no other than 
 Jesus patibilis, whose conflicts formed the true and 
 only Passion endured by the Word which went forth 
 from God.t 
 
 Moreover, the soul of the primitive man, which 
 
 * St. Aug. de Vera Religione, c. xcvi. 
 
 f St. Aug. de Agone Christ, lib. i. 4 ; Id. de Moribus Manich. 
 lib. ii. passim. 
 
 I St. Aug. de Haeresibus, c. xlvi. 
 
THEOLOGY. 251 
 
 resided in the sun and moon which it had helped to 
 create, had become a power which had taken the name 
 of Christ, who, according to the Manichaeans, dwelt in 
 the heavens now in the sun, now in the moon but 
 seeking from the former to attract to Himself the 
 spiritual particles which were wandering through 
 matter. He had become incarnate in a human body, 
 but which was unreal, and had vanished at the moment 
 in which the Jews stretched it on the Cross. Thus, 
 therefore, He had not come into the world to shed the 
 blood which He did not possess, but to infuse into it a 
 truth which would raise the divinely emanated souls of 
 men to the light, and bring them to Him. There were 
 three categories of souls. The pneumatic, or most 
 perfect souls were able to discard the flesh and purify 
 themselves in the Sun. The psychical souls were pas- 
 sionate and weak, but not evil ; their struggle, though 
 real, could not affect their triumph, and they were forced 
 to pass through another existence in another body. The 
 hylic souls were entirely material, daemon-possessed, 
 and reprobate, without any hope of future immortality. 
 Those who between these two extremes were struggling 
 to return to God had to traverse, according to the 
 dogma of Metempsychosis, a fresh series of existences 
 in other men, or beasts, and even plants, before their 
 return to Him. Such, according to the Manichaean 
 conception, was the law of the Universe ; its end being 
 to reunite all the dispersed particles of the divine 
 power, and bring them back to their source ; for the 
 soul that, triumphing over every obstacle, arrived at 
 the close of life, was at once transported to the presence 
 of the Supreme Power in the realms of light. 
 
 The Manichseans reduced their moral system to the 
 
252 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 three seals of the lips, the hands, and the breast. The 
 object of the seal of the lips was to close them against 
 blasphemy, and particularly all animal food, the use of 
 which was forbidden as a Satanic corruption, tending 
 naturally to weigh down the divine particles within, 
 and bind them to earth. The seal of the hands for- 
 bade on the same motive the slaughter of animals, or 
 the gathering of plants, which were purer still, as 
 being so many vents, whereby the perfumes and exha- 
 lations of earth rose to heaven, to restore in their light 
 mists the portions of divinity which longed to remount 
 to their source. The seal of the breast was to close 
 the heart to all passion, for Manes forbade marriage 
 and the procreation of- children, as tending by the in- 
 crease of the human race, in long series of generations, 
 to lengthen the divine captivity and send new souls to 
 languish and groan upon earth, and so commit the 
 greatest crime against the Soul of God whose deliver- 
 ance mankind was bound to further.* 
 
 Such were the fundamental principles of the system, 
 and in them its utter immorality is manifest. These 
 distinctions of souls into three classes, the division of 
 mankind into two parts, the elect and the hearers, the 
 denial of any enlightenment to non-Manichaeans, made 
 the system an outrage to the human conscience. Thus, 
 giving alms to any one external to the sect was for- 
 bidden, as affording him a means of insinuating as 
 nourishment to his impure and material body substances 
 which, if placed on Manichaean lips, would be cleansed 
 and raised towards God;t and the contempt thrown 
 
 * St. Aug. De Moribus Manich. lib. ii. ; De Hasresibus, 
 passim. 
 
 f St. Aug. De Moribus Manich. lib. ii. liii. 
 
THEOLOGY. 253 
 
 over the whole of nature degraded the Divine work- 
 manship, and resulted inevitably in an interdiction of 
 all property as one more bond to fix man to the cor- 
 rupted earth, whose curse extended to those also who 
 tilled it with harrow and plough, whose plants were 
 full of hallowed life, and those who reaped them guilty 
 of a crime. It tended to the destruction of the family, 
 for marriage was under a ban, and the giving of chil- 
 dren to the state and fresh shoots to the Manichaean 
 Church accounted the greatest of sins, and its doctrine, 
 owing to human nature's inextinguishable passions, had 
 for a result, by inevitable though unavowed conse- 
 quence, the ruin of man himself. To this pointed 
 those maxims, inexpressibly true, which established dis- 
 tinctions between the requirements of nature and the 
 prohibitions of law, the forbidden and the tolerated 
 among the pleasures of sense, and which inaugurated 
 a state of manners to the real and frightful corrup- 
 tion of which contemporary evidence bears witness. 
 We have thus sufficiently shown the profoundly pagan 
 character of the Manichaean errors ; but on closer con- 
 sideration of its origin, of the country and personal 
 adventures of its chief apostle, we can easily recognize 
 in it traces of the Persian dualism, the opposition of 
 Ormuzd and Ahriman, and the eternal struggle on their 
 respective frontiers of the realms of light and of dark- 
 ness. This was the essence of the religion of Zoroas- 
 ter, but in the battle between these principles there 
 was a third, of mediating character, called Mithra, the 
 worship of whom had attained such singular popularity 
 on its importation into the Western Empire that Corn- 
 modus even dared to immolate a man, and Julian at 
 Constantinople established games in his honour, while 
 
254 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 numberless monuments bear witness to the worship of 
 him at Milan, in the Tyrol, throughout the two pro- 
 vinces of Gaul, and in the remotest parts of Germany. 
 But Manichaeism had an element ignored by the system 
 of Zoroaster, which in approaching nearer the infancy 
 of the world had never hurled an absolute curse at the 
 flesh, nor believed in the entire degradation of created 
 matter, nor the captivity of the divine essence, nor 
 dreamt of prohibiting marriage and procreation of chil- 
 dren doctrines which sprang from that worship of 
 Buddha, the energetic and passionate propagandism of 
 which we have observed in the early centuries of the 
 Christian era. But it is difficult to decide whether 
 Manes drew his system originally from these Buddhist 
 sources, or found the teaching which he handed down to 
 his disciples held by former Gnostic sects, themselves 
 impregnated with the Oriental doctrine. Yet, however 
 this may be, it was instinct with Paganism, and from 
 that one cause, perhaps, the Manicheean belief exercised 
 so incredible an influence over the minds which had 
 seemed entirely severed from the errors of the pagan 
 world. 
 
 At the end of the fourth century, under Theodosius, 
 when Christianity had enjoyed a century of sway over 
 the mind of man and the provinces of the Empire, 
 Manichaeism became bolder than ever, and the idolatry 
 of old seemed to have found its avenger. Its tenets 
 spread with marvellous rapidity in both East and West, 
 and made a conquest of St. Augustine himself, who for 
 nine years was one of the hearers of Manes, and strug- 
 gled vainly against the problem of the origin of evil, 
 which he used to turn in every sense on his tear- 
 bedewed couch, to return always to the same question, 
 
THEOLOGY. 255 
 
 "How was evil created." Finding no solution in the 
 early notions of Christianity which he had received 
 from his mother, he suffered his mind to be drawn to- 
 wards the fables of Manichaeism, and hung upon the 
 lips of the eloquent preachers who told of the strife of 
 the two principles, of the agony of Jesus patibilis, the 
 sufferings of all creation, even, as he says, to the tear 
 shed by the fig when dissevered from the branch to 
 which it had clung. 
 
 Such were the errors to which this great intellect had 
 fallen a prey, until the wiser philosophy of the Platon- 
 ists and the eloquence of Ambrose snatched it from 
 these delusive fables, and made it their most formidable 
 opponent by assigning him the mission of refuting and 
 destroying them, by rehabilitating in the face of the 
 heathen world a philosophical, holy, and reasonable view 
 of the origin of evil. In default of an analysis of his 
 works on the subject, the following passage from his 
 book, "DeMoribusManichseorum," will suffice to show 
 their tendency : 
 
 " That which especially merits the name of being is 
 what always remains in its own likeness, is not subject 
 to change or corruption, or to lapse of time, but the 
 same in conduct in the present as in the past. For 
 the word Being carries with it the thought of another 
 permanent and immutable nature. We can name no 
 other such but God llimself, and if you seek a contrary 
 principle to Him, you will not find it, for existence has 
 no contrary but non-existence. 
 
 " If you define evil as that which is against nature, 
 you speak truly ; but you overturn your heresy, for all 
 that is contrary to nature tends to self-destruction, and 
 to make what is non-existent. What the ancients 
 
256 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 called nature we name essence and substance, and 
 therefore in the Catholic doctrine God is called the 
 author of every nature and every substance, and by it is 
 understood that He is not the author of evil. For how 
 could the author of being to everything which exists be 
 the cause by which anything already existent should 
 cease to be, lose its essence, and tend towards nothing ? 
 And how can your evil principle, that you pretend to be 
 the supreme ill, be contrary to nature, if you attribute 
 to it a nature and a substance ? For if it works against 
 itself it will destroy its own existence, which it must 
 succeed in doing to arrive at the supremacy of evil, but 
 which it cannot do according to you, as you predicate of 
 it not only existence but eternity of existence. 
 
 " Evil, then, is not an essence, but a deprivation and 
 a disorder. All that tends to existence tends to order. 
 For to be is to be one, and the nearer anything stands 
 to unity so much the fuller is its participation in exist- 
 ence, it being the work of unity to give concord and 
 arrangement to its constituent part : this order gives 
 existence, disorder takes it away, and everything that 
 has an internal principle of disorder tends to dissolution. 
 But the goodness of God forbids things to arrive at 
 that point ; and even to those creatures of His who miss 
 their end He gives such order that they are placed in 
 their most congruous place, so that by regular effort 
 they may again ascend to the rank whence they had 
 fallen. For this cause reasoning souls, in whom free- 
 will is powerful, if they distance themselves from God, 
 are arranged by Him as befits them in the lowest degrees 
 of creation, so that they become miserable by a divine 
 judgment, in accordance with their merits." * 
 * De Moribus Manichseorum, lib. iii. 2, et seq. 
 
THEOLOGY. 257 
 
 These theories, though abstract, afforded a vast 
 comfort to the human mind as it emerged from its 
 Manichaean frenzy, from the pagan fables which were 
 wafting it back to all the spells of Greek mythology, 
 into the light of a purer philosophy and possession of 
 the innate reason. In accepting them, the Christian 
 world divorced for ever the tales which too long tyran- 
 nized over the intellect, but yet while it escaped the 
 peril of becoming a mythology, it fell under the risk 
 of reducing its system to so rational a form as to sink 
 into mere philosophical speculation. 
 
 Among these new forms of heresy two stand out as 
 especially to be noticed. Arianism and Pelagianism, 
 infants of those two philosophical systems of antiquity 
 which had most attraction for Christian minds, were 
 most calculated to strike them by their metaphysical 
 character or pure morality, the doctrine respectively of 
 Plato and of Zeno. 
 
 The former gave a lofty notion of the Deity, whom it 
 represented as acting on the world by means of ideas, 
 which Plato abstained from denning, and, in calling 
 them only the principle of all knowledge, avoided ex- 
 plaining their place of residence, whether within or 
 external to the Deity, whether they were reduced to one 
 idea or the many, whether, reunited, they formed the 
 Aoyo;, or Divine Word, or continued in distinct and 
 personal existence. 
 
 On all these points the master kept silence, but as 
 the disciples did not imitate his reserve, these questions 
 have been the continued torment of the schools of 
 Platonism. An Alexandrian Jew named Philo, tor- 
 tured by the wish of adapting his Mosaic creed to the 
 doctrines of their philosophy, undertook to establish 
 
258 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 God's creation of the universe by the aid of a perfect idea 
 or archetype, wherein was reflected the creative law, 
 which was personified in the wisdom of Solomon and 
 the Word of the sacred writings. God, not being able 
 to act directly on matter, as too evil and weak for His 
 action, had created the "Word before the world to serve as 
 intermediary between the Divine Will and this imperfect 
 and corrupt universe. Therefore the Word was inferior 
 to God, and beneath it were produced a series of ema- 
 nations to which Philo gave a distinct personality, and 
 named them sometimes ideas, sometimes angels. 
 
 His doctrine was destined to inspire that of the 
 Alexandrian commentators Numenius and Plotinus, who 
 evolved a trinity formed of unity (to h), absolute intelli- 
 gence (voug), and the soul of the world (^yprf roS Travros), 
 which, far from inspiring the idea of the Christian 
 Trinity, did not appear in any precise form till 
 Christianity had promulgated its doctrines, and made 
 known the mysteries on which this philosophical triad 
 was designed. But a certain number of minds fell 
 into error on comparing the two dogmas, especially 
 those of a philosophical bent, who were fascinated by 
 the old lore and the Platonic doctrines, nourished on 
 Plotinus, and steeped in that Alexandrian speculation 
 which Tertullian had especially defied when he cast his 
 ban upon pagan philosophy and letters ; the Judaizers 
 also, who though believing in the Christian scheme, 
 found it heavy for their faith, and therefore sought to 
 rob it of its aureole ; and lastly the mighty multitude 
 who had entered the Church in the train of the emperors, 
 and sought to attenuate its mysteries by seeking refuge 
 in the reception of a dogma of higher morality than 
 any antiquity had known, but which would ill support 
 
THEOLOGY. 259 
 
 the miraculous element of Christianity. And these 
 three classes of minds became the components of the 
 Arian sect, Arius himself, on his appearance, speaking 
 only as their organ. 
 
 Arius rehabilitated Philo in professing that God was 
 too pure to act upon creation, and that the world could 
 not support the divine action, that it was necessary to 
 utter a middle existence, purer than creation, less holy 
 than God Himself, namely, the Word, created and not 
 eternal, enjoying a great but not infinite share of light 
 and wisdom ; holy, but not so immutable in sanctity as 
 to preclude the possibility of a fall, submitted in fact by 
 God, who foresaw the triumphant issue, to the supreme 
 probation of an incarnation, and assigned in recompense 
 as the Creator and Saviour of mankind. This Word, 
 united to a human body, became the man Jesus ; and 
 thus Christ had no real divinity, and as man had never 
 been in immediate relation with God, the original fall 
 had not the same gravity, nor redemption the same 
 effect ; it could not bring man, still too feeble, into com- 
 munion with the infinite Goodness and Wisdom, and so 
 became a bald teaching by the example of a divinely- 
 inspired man named Jesus, who was a mere prophet or 
 sage, with superior enlightenment to his fellows. 
 
 At the same time the doctrine of Zeno made many 
 converts. Its Stoic morality, so nobly stern and mor- 
 tifying to carnal impulse, had a great fascination for 
 manly and ascetic natures, like those of the men who 
 took refuge from the world in the deserts of the 
 Thebaid that they might bring their body into subjec- 
 tion. It need not astonish us to see St. Nilus putting 
 into the hands of his anchorites the manual of 
 Epictetus, or Evagrius of Pontus falling into heresy 
 
260 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 through the system of Zeno. It exalted human nature 
 as being that of God Himself, whence it followed that 
 the two laws of nature and of reason sufficed as a rule 
 of life, and that by their aid man could rise to the same 
 or even a higher level than the Deity Himself. "For," 
 said Seneca, " what difference is there between the wise 
 man and Jupiter? the latter can effect no more than 
 him ; the only advantage he has over him is that of 
 having been good for a longer time, but virtue itself is 
 not enhanced by a longer duration. The sage despises 
 material advantages as much as Jupiter, and excels him 
 in this respect, that the god abstains from pleasures 
 which he cannot, the sage from those he will not, avail 
 himself of." * And so man by his own strength rose 
 superior to his God ; and such dreams seduced many a 
 hermit's soul in the contemplative hours of his long 
 vigils; till, carried away by this stoicism, the monk 
 Pelagius arrived at the profession of the doctrine that 
 nature had never suffered original sin, but had remained 
 intact and always able to raise itself to God by its own 
 strength ; that grace was useless, and if it existed at all 
 was nothing but the possibility of well-doing, the fact 
 of human liberty, the divine law promulgated in the 
 gospel, a light innate to the intellect and shining there 
 without any impulse or aid to the will from without ; 
 prayer had no meaning, and with it vanished the con- 
 solation which feeble man found in recourse to the 
 Almighty. 
 
 Such were the essential errors of Pelagius, against 
 which St. Augustine declared war as Athanasius had 
 done against the heresy of Arius. The two systems, 
 near in point of time, filled a century and a half with 
 
 * Epist. ad Lucilium, lxxiii. 13. 
 
THEOLOGY. 261 
 
 controversy, which roused into activity the whole 
 Christian world, moulded its polemics, and gave in- 
 spiration to its genius. We need not speak of the 
 councils without number which forced men to occupy 
 themselves with the most difficult problems in the cycle 
 of Christian metaphysics, and roused their minds from 
 their sloth to precipitate them into that pregnant strife 
 which called for crucial proof of their subtlety and 
 skill in handling all the resources of dialectic, nor of 
 the mighty travail of the intellect which was destined 
 to give birth to modern theological science, but need only 
 mark that in repelling the double error, Christianity 
 repudiated as well the idea of being but a system of 
 philosophy, to remain a religion, as it had been first 
 announced. Lactantius summed this up in his me- 
 morable sentence, " Christianity can never be a philo- 
 sophy without religion, nor a religion without philo- 
 sophy." The faith is dogmatic, and therefore more 
 than an opinion, but a dogma that is entirely reason- 
 able. Had Pelagianism or Arianism triumphed, and 
 the Church creed become a philosophy, the consequences 
 would have been that as Arius suppressed the relation 
 of Christ with God, and Pelagius those of man with 
 Christ, in denying grace, original sin, and redemption, 
 so all the supernatural intercourse between God and 
 man being snapped, all religion would have perished, 
 for religion (religare) is but a bond between the two 
 extremes of God and man, the Infinite and the finite ; 
 and with the disappearance of the mysteries which 
 enshrined the two principles of faith and love, nothing 
 would have remained but a learned, subtle, but feeble 
 deism, impotent, as the mere scientific opinion ever will 
 be, to fertilize and regenerate humanity in its entirety. 
 
262 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Science has a sufficiently ample and glorious domain, 
 but it is not her mission to be popular and universal, for 
 limitation to a small minority of the race is the con- 
 dition of her existence. Even to-day, in the full light 
 of civilization and of Christianity, how many meta- 
 physicians in Europe are there who, by the effort of 
 their own unaided thought, can arrive at a precise 
 notion of God and of man's destiny ? And if so, how 
 much the more, when the world had but just emerged 
 from her proof by blood and fire, and was still groaning 
 beneath the sword of the barbarian ? What would 
 then have been the issue had not the principle of Faith 
 been endorsed in the flanks of that new society, and 
 the reconstructing influence been revealed at the period 
 of seemingly utter ruin ? More than knowledge was 
 wanting for the training of those bloody and coarse- 
 minded hordes which were vomited from every quarter 
 of the East, and to bring them to that Middle Age 
 whose entire civilization was to be but a development 
 of theology. 
 
 The most salient feature of these barbarous centuries 
 of the Middle Age, and that least open to doubt, is their 
 supremely logical character. From that proceeded the 
 intense fascination exercised by syllogistic reasonings 
 upon a period which could never lay down a principle 
 without seeking to deduce its consequences, nor realize 
 a great event without labouring to find its cause. From 
 this sprang all the great efforts and mighty achieve- 
 ments of the mediaeval epoch. Theology was destined 
 to bring about not only the marvellous intellectual 
 development of the thirteenth century, under the grand 
 intellects of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, 
 but also the Crusades, the struggle of the priesthood 
 
RSI 
 
 THEOLOGY. 263 
 
 and the Empire, the reign of St. Louis, and the consti- 
 tutions of the Italian republics. It was to influence 
 all the great political movements of the time, to pene- 
 trate the universities, to be found in the painter's studio 
 and in the poet's song, and, further still, to open the 
 fields of ocean, pregnant with stormy peril, to the 
 genius of Christopher Columbus, who, in obedience to 
 his own interpretation of a Scripture text, set foot on 
 his ship to find another road for a new Crusade which 
 might release the Sepulchre of Christ, rendered up, to 
 his despair, to Moslem oppression. 
 
 The logical principle of every great achievement of 
 that period was faith, the desire for belief, and the 
 power man finds in himself when he believes ; for, as 
 it is only on the condition of faith that mankind can 
 attain to love, the power of theology lies in its being 
 the native principle of both faith and love. For man- 
 kind only loves what it takes on trust, not what it can 
 easily compass ; the not understanding a thing is the 
 condition of loving it; and whatever is capable of 
 mathematical demonstration gives little warmth to the 
 heart. Who has ever been in love with an axiom, with 
 a truth which leaves no need of further search ? The 
 unknown is the most powerful constituent of love, for 
 nothing fascinates the human mind like mystery, and, 
 on the contrary, we soon weary of what we compre- 
 hend. How many illustrious men of letters or of 
 science have finished a long life of toil in weariness at 
 all they knew, and have acted like Newton, who, dis- 
 gusted with mathematics, forced himself to expound 
 the Apocalypse, attracted by speculations on that which 
 was indemonstrable? Mystery is the secret of love, 
 and in love there is faith. We need not wonder at the 
 
264 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 great works of the Middle Age, when we see how it 
 believed, still less when we see how it loved. It was 
 the power which inspired St. Francis of Assisi, and 
 all those generations of devoted men to whom no cost 
 was too dear to bring another soul to the threshold of 
 truth. It was in its faith and its love that the Middle 
 Age found its strength, and therefore our treatise on 
 the theology which produced them has been long. St. 
 Anselm has spoken of Faith seeking understanding, 
 Fides quarens intellectum, and in the words of St. 
 Augustine, Intellectum valde ama* 
 
 * St. Aug. Epist. cxx. ad Consentium. 
 
265 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 CHKISTIAN PHILOSOPHY (ST. AUGUSTINE). 
 
 We have seen amidst the ruins of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries theology arising as a new power, unknown to 
 antiquity, but destined to dominate the Middle Age. 
 Antiquity had possessed learned priesthoods, and had 
 made attempts at bringing its religious traditions to 
 order and light, but had no true theology in the sense 
 of a science founded upon a serious alliance of reason 
 and faith, because in Paganism there was no faith and 
 but little reason. These two principles, on the other 
 hand, were of the very essence of Christianity* faith 
 had given it three centuries full of martyrs, and reason, 
 applied to the understanding of dogma, had given it the 
 Fathers. We have also seen what a degree of rectitude, 
 perseverance, and toil was necessary to maintain the 
 dogmatic deposit free from the two perils of a return 
 to heathenism with the Gnostics and Manichees, or of 
 losing itself in philosophy under the guidance of Arius 
 and Pelagius. 
 
 And these questions had a right to occupy us in spite 
 of their difficulty, for the fifth century was labouring 
 far less for itself than for the ages to come, thereby 
 manifesting the admirable economy in the laws of Pro- 
 vidence, which causes nothing to be lost to the Christian 
 family, but that each generation should show itself bent 
 
 vol. i. . 12 
 
266 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 under the burden and heat of its own day, and weighed 
 down also by that of its successors. Arianism did not 
 perish at Nicaea or at Constantinople. Banished from 
 the Eoman Empire, it took refuge with and made rapid 
 progress amongst the barbarians, to return again with 
 the clouds of Goths, Alani, Suevi, and Vandals, which, 
 in the course of another century, were to break over 
 the Empire, and to become dominant in Italy, in 
 Southern Gaul, in Spain, and on the shores of Africa. 
 The greatest of the Arian princes, Theodoric, seemed as 
 if raised up for the purpose of founding a new empire 
 with an Arian civilization, which, however, was soon 
 destined to fall before the breath of Providence. 
 Behind these Arians were others, the Moslems, 
 possessing a newer edition of the same error the 
 unity of God, and Christ considered as a prophet, 
 under which novel appearance the heresy was to cover 
 the East, and even the West, till its recoil before the 
 little kingdom of the Franks, founded by bishops and 
 built upon theology, before the theologian monarch who 
 called himself Charles the Great, and before the age 
 which left upon the whole of Christendom so deep an 
 impress. 
 
 Neither had Manichaeism irretrievably disappeared, 
 though hurled back by the puissant eloquence of St. 
 Augustine to the boundaries of the Eastern Empire 
 and Persia, and into the mountains of Armenia. It 
 was there that Petrus Siculus, a Sicilian bishop, and 
 envoy of the Greek emperors, found in the ninth 
 century a powerful sect, possessed of a perfect hierarchy 
 and organization, and which sought to propagate itself 
 under the name of Bogomites, or as Paulicians in 
 Bulgaria. It was ManichaBism again which reappeared 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 267 
 
 during the eleventh century in France, Italy, and 
 Germany, in the errors of the Cathari, Patarini, and 
 Albigenses, and suddenly enveloping, as in a net, the 
 greater part of Southern Christendom, threatened the 
 Catholic civilization with the gravest perils. At the 
 rumour of these heresies, which alike denied the 
 Christian's God and attacked the principles of property 
 and the family, and consequently the very elements of 
 society, Europe roused herself and chivalry grasped the 
 sword ; and though we must ever deplore the excesses 
 and horrors of the Albigensian crusades, yet the smoke 
 of their conflagrations must not conceal the truth, that 
 if the victory won by the sword was tarnished by 
 cruelty, the triumph of thought and reason leaves no 
 room for regret. From that furious struggle proceeded 
 all the great theologians, in whom the age was so 
 wealthy St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, and 
 Italy's great poet, Dante; and from their theology, which 
 had profoundly agitated the human mind and fertilized 
 its thought, had penetrated during the long gestation 
 of the fourteenth century, in the mid-chaos of its 
 stormy years to the last ranks of Christian civilization, 
 went forth the marvels of the sixteenth century, its 
 grand expansion of human genius, which, in less than 
 a hundred years, discovered printing, sounded with 
 Copernicus the secrets of heaven, and brought to light 
 with Columbus a moiety of the world ; all long before 
 the appearance of the man to whom the honour of 
 having aroused the human intellect has been awarded 
 Luther, the German monk. Theology, then, was the 
 soul of the Middle Age, and in looking upon the work- 
 ing of all the great thoughts which gave birth to the 
 crusades, to chivalry, and the great movements which 
 
 12 * 
 
268 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 carried away our forefathers, we must confess that, 
 amidst the general confusion, it was the only influence 
 that made its impulse felt. Mens agitat molem. 
 
 Theology descends from faith to reason, and philo- 
 sophy ascends from reason to faith. This return of the 
 soul towards truths which it has perceived from afar 
 under mysterious shadows, only to desire their con- 
 templation anew, and face to face, is an irresistible and 
 imperishable want in human nature. And what re- 
 ligion, true or false, has not given faith a philosophy 
 to confirm it or to contradict ? Those two great verities, 
 God and the immortality of the soul, at once supremely 
 attractive and supremely terrible, have never ceased to 
 pursue humanity, and to strive by one way or another 
 to come under its cognizance. But every time philo- 
 sophy has pointed out two ways towards grasping the 
 ideas by whose aspect it has been attracted, one way by 
 the laborious reasoning process, which is continually 
 pausing to consider the steps it has made, the metho- 
 dical reasoning of logic, the science of binding ideas 
 together, as if to mount to the seat of the Deity by 
 piling Ossa upon Pelion; but these mountains are 
 heavy to raise, dialectic is no moderate effort for the 
 human mind, and its ambitious edifice often falls 
 before it has been half constructed. And, therefore, 
 man turns to the other path, and perceiving that now 
 and then unsought truth has beamed in upon him, 
 that inspiration has its instincts and contemplation its 
 lights, demands wherefore they are not his, and so he 
 seeks another method in the effort of will, in the puri- 
 fication of the heart, in the interior labour of love ; in 
 short, he puts his confidence in morality instead of in 
 logic, and thinks that in making himself more worthy 
 
CHEISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 269 
 
 of God he may arrive at the contemplation of Him. 
 These two methods, then, the former proceeding from 
 logical reason, the latter from morality and contem- 
 plative love, have constituted the two philosophies of 
 dogmatism and mysticism. 
 
 It is not our task to remount to the origin of mys- 
 ticism, nor to point to the highest antiquity of India, 
 to those motionless contemplators who lived whole 
 lives on the point whereon their resting-place had first 
 been fixed, forbade themselves any movement, and 
 with eyes strained forward, gave themselves up to the 
 last degree of privation and mortification, in order to 
 conjure their Deity to descend upon them; neither 
 those speculative philosophers who, in expounding the 
 text of the Vedas, drew in imagination from them many 
 systems to elucidate the revelation which they sup- 
 posed had been confided to their charge. We may 
 leave this too remote antiquity, and pause at the same 
 efforts appearing in Greece, whose mystics, with Pytha- 
 goras, made wisdom consist in abstinence and con- 
 tinence, and which, in the persons of Thales, the 
 sophists, and half the school of Socrates, contributed 
 to the dogmatic system. We may be content with the 
 results of Greek genius, that finest shoot of the 
 human mind, and ask what conclusion its mightiest 
 intellects, Aristotle and Plato, arrived at on the 
 weightiest problem of the reason, the knowledge of 
 God. 
 
 Plato, indeed, pushed the knowledge of God farther 
 than any other sage of antiquity. He conceived of 
 God as the Idea of Good, from whom all beings receive 
 their intelligence, and by whom they exist; his God 
 was good, and by his bounty had produced the world, 
 
270 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 not out of nothing, but from previously existent matter, 
 which he drew from the chaos in which it was labour- 
 ing, and which he was ever opposing as the rebellious 
 principle by which his works are modified, corrupted, 
 and spoilt. The God of Plato was a great conception, 
 but he was not a free agent nor a sole existence, but 
 living eternally side by side with undisciplined matter, 
 and, conquered in his efforts by its resistance, was but 
 half master, and though great and good, if not free 
 and sole, was not God. 
 
 Aristotle, on the other hand, in the fourteen books 
 of his "Metaphysics," put forth his utmost efforts to 
 surpass Plato, and brought together the mightiest 
 scientific apparatus that human hand has ever moved. 
 Yet the man who knew the history of all animals, who 
 had laid a basis for a republic, studied the laws of the 
 human mind, and classed thought in categories, felt 
 at last the necessity of recapitulating all his toil ; he 
 stretched his hands to right and left, and reassembled 
 the knowledge which he had gained in the study of 
 the universe in its totality, and from the most pro- 
 found notions as to substance and accident, poten- 
 tiality and action, movement and privation, hewed 
 steps, as it were, on the summit of which, breathless 
 and panting from the immense labour to which he had 
 condemned himself, he believed at last he had reached 
 God. He proclaimed him as a First Motor, necessary 
 and eternal, of a world as eternal as himself, as 
 guiding the universe without volition and without love, 
 submitted with a capacity of directing it to a kind of 
 physical attraction. He was powerful and intelligent, 
 and found his pleasure in self-contemplation ; but as 
 he was not good, did not love his works, but only 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 271 
 
 himself, was still more imperfect than the God of 
 Plato. 
 
 Such were the results obtained by the human in- 
 tellect, aided by the light thrown upon it during ages 
 of infinite laboriousness, and by the immense advan- 
 tages afforded in the congenial and brilliant epochs of 
 Pericles and Alexander. Epicurus and Zeno followed, 
 the former with his system of atoms, the latter making 
 God a corporeal substance a great animal, as it were; 
 and then Pyrrho, with his universal scepticism, which 
 Cicero struggled against in vain, by surrounding with 
 the brightest lustre those two fundamental verities of 
 all true doctrine the existence of God and the soul's 
 immortality. In vain, for, tainted himself by scep- 
 ticism, he ended by finding the former a mere proba- 
 bility, and the latter eminently desirable for men of 
 worth. And this was the issue of philosophy at the 
 dawn of Christianity. 
 
 Christianity appeared to refresh the forces of the 
 human mind, in giving it that certitude without which 
 its action is paralyzed ; for that which has been hurled 
 as a chief objection against Christian philosophy con- 
 stituted in fact its strength, its novelty, and its merit. 
 It has been constantly said that the Church only suffers 
 a verification of dogma already pronounced certain, 
 that she fixes the goal, and leaves only the road to it 
 open to search. Yet surely no great minds, no deep 
 thinkers, have entered upon the ways of science but 
 with a firm and settled idea as to their end; the 
 human intellect only resigns itself to the formidable 
 task of philosophic reasoning on condition of seeing 
 their result in the distance. When Descartes went on 
 his pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loretto as a Catholic 
 
272 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 pilgrim, he had a fixed determination of arriving at the 
 proof of the existence of God and the immortality of 
 the soul. It is in a settled certainty as to its aim that 
 genius finds its power. Kepler's dying speech was that 
 he knew that his calculations were inexact, but that, by 
 God's help, sooner or later, some one would come 
 forward to correct their errors, and prove the truth of 
 the conclusions. This was true genius, science, and 
 philosophy the light destined to guide the intellect of 
 mankind for the future. Christianity brought cer- 
 tainty to it, and to the gift added the liberty of 
 choosing among the different paths which led there, 
 and freeing human thought from mystic or dogmatic 
 schools, spoke at once to the mind and to the heart, 
 and imposed upon man the duty of arriving, by aid of 
 his faculties and feelings, at a supremely lovable and 
 supremely intelligible notion of God Himself. In this 
 lay the novelty of the Christian eclecticism, and the 
 road was followed by the Fathers of the Church in 
 succession ; but as the majority of those great minds, 
 being involved in pressing polemical struggles, had no 
 leisure to summarize and reduce into philosophical 
 form the issues of their thought, that labour was 
 reserved for St. Augustine, as being one out of the 
 three or four great metaphysicians assigned by the 
 Almighty to modern times ; it was his task to clear 
 the two roads open to Christian philosophy, and to 
 inaugurate its two methods of mysticism and dog- 
 matism. 
 
 No soul had ever been more troubled with an in- 
 satiable love for truth which could not be seen a 
 feeling happily described as a heavenly home- sickness, 
 a deep craving for the eternal fatherland whence man 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 273 
 
 came and whither he is tending. No soul, on the 
 other hand, ever seemed thrown upon this world at a 
 greater distance from its God. He was born on that 
 African coast, already given up to the last state of dis- 
 order, which required nothing less -than the Vandal 
 torrent to cleanse the impurity in which it was steeped. 
 His father was not Christian, and, greater danger still, 
 designed his son, not only for the study but the pro- 
 fession of the corrupt literature of the Decline ; to hire 
 out his eloquence, and teach the art of lying on lucra- 
 tive terms. 
 
 Amidst the traffic in rhetoric of the schools of 
 Madaura and Carthage, the young Augustine began 
 to grow skilled in tricks of speech, in the dangerous 
 art which holds thought cheap and seeks an empty 
 pleasure for the ear. His fellow-pupils, the students 
 of Carthage, had earned, from their wild reputation, the 
 nickname of ever sores (ravagers), and, according to 
 the Saint himself, were in the habit of attending the 
 lectures .of some favourite master through door or 
 window, breaking everything in their way. We can 
 judge of the peril Augustine encountered among such 
 wild freaks, and his "Confessions" show us, in fact, that 
 he resisted none of the temptations by which early youth 
 is generally assailed. But God had given him a rest- 
 less heart, which could find no repose but in Him, and 
 the secret disturbance of a soul which aspired to purity 
 revealed itself in the very midst of its pollutions. 
 When a mere child, he used to pray to God that his 
 masters might not flog him, and later, when it seemed 
 as if every remembrance of Him must have been 
 banished in those nights of wild debauchery, the idea 
 was still present, though unrecognized. His strong 
 
 12 f 
 
274 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 admiration of the beautiful began to reveal bis literary 
 vocation ; it drew tears from him on reading of the 
 woes of Dido, and took him as a spectator, not so much 
 to the games of the circus as to the representations of 
 the theatre, and especially to those tragedies which 
 placed beneath his eyes the heroic misery of the great 
 ones of antiquity. It pursued him as an insatiable 
 passion into the pulpit of the rhetorician, and caused 
 him constantly to ask his friends, " Quid amamus, nisi 
 pulchrum ? Quid est pulchrum ? " whilst his first 
 literary labour consisted of three volumes on Beauty. 
 
 But Goodness attracted him as well as Beauty ; 
 friendship, the communion of soul with soul, showed 
 itself with great force in his breast when, on the loss of 
 a beloved fellow-pupil, he bewailed him with an agony 
 which nothing could console. " My eyes looked for 
 him in every place, but no place gave him back to me, 
 and I loathed everything, because nothing could show 
 me him, nor say, * Behold, he is just coming,' as when 
 he lived and was absent from me. I bore then within 
 me a torn and bleeding heart, which hardly suffered me 
 to bear it, and yet I knew not where to lay it down, for 
 it would not repose in charming thickets, nor in the 
 country with its sports, nor in perfumed chambers, 
 banquets, or voluptuous delights, neither in books nor 
 in poetry."* Such was the affection of St. Augustine; 
 and if he could thus love a friend, what must have been 
 the nature of those other passions of his heart ? for 
 amidst the horror with which the wild disorder of his 
 youth inspired him, mark that he maintains that his 
 soul plunged into unlawful love because it was famish- 
 ing for some love, and divine nourishment had been 
 * Confess, lib. iv. cap. iv. 
 
CHEISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 275 
 
 withdrawn from it. At nineteen, the " Hortensius" of 
 Cicero fell into his hands, caused him a disgust for 
 fortune, and made him to swear to love nothing thence- 
 forth but the Eternal Wisdom ; " for already," he says, 
 " I was aiming to return, my God, to Thee."* But 
 he was but half satisfied with " Hortensius," and 
 troubled at not finding therein the name of Christ a 
 word which, with its sweet and tender influence, had 
 remained rooted in the depths of his heart. 
 
 The Manichaeans spoke of Christ, and that drew his 
 mind towards them, as, tormented by the thought of 
 God, he asked himself ceaselessly, "What is evil? 
 from whom does it proceed ? " A sect which promised 
 an explanation of the problem could not fail to fascinate 
 him. The Manichaeans brought him up to the point 
 of admitting, with them, a corporeal God and a 
 corporeal soul ; no notion of things spiritual entered 
 his intellect; be believed that Christ resided between 
 the sun and the moon ; that He had taken only a 
 fantastic body ; that primitive man had been broken 
 in pieces by the spirit of darkness ; that plants exhaled 
 in their perfumes different particles of the soul of the 
 World, and the fig plucked from the tree shed tears of 
 pain. All this St. Augustine believed, rather than 
 nothing, so deeply did his soul crave for sacrifice and 
 for entire self-devotion. But the Manichaeans them- 
 selves at last wearied him by the demands they in- 
 sisted on from his lofty reason, and the works of the 
 Neoplatonists having, at the same time, come in his 
 way, he again found a philosophy which told of God as 
 the Author of good. He gave himself up by preference 
 to their guidance, and under it began to conceive of 
 * Confess, lib. iii. cap. iv. 
 
276 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 God otherwise than under corporeal forms, as a hal- 
 lowed, invisible, impalpable Light; and yet these 
 notions had difficulty in penetrating his still hesitating 
 mind. " And I said, ' Has Truth, then, not existence, 
 seeing it not spread over finite nor over infinite space ? ' 
 and Thou didst cry to me from afar, ' I exist, I am that 
 which is ; ' and I understood in my very heart, and I 
 could no longer doubt more of Thy Truth than of my 
 life!"* 
 
 But at the moment of this revolution in his soul, St. 
 Augustine left Carthage, a.d. 383, and set sail for Rome, 
 leaving his mother kneeling on the shore as the scud- 
 ding ship bore far away that child of so many tears. 
 At Rome, the prefect of the city, who had been asked 
 for a professor of rhetoric for Milan, where the court 
 was then residing, summoned the young African, 
 whose fame had reached him, to his presence, heard 
 him, and entrusted him with the appointment. The 
 man who played the part of protector and Maecaenas 
 to St. Augustine was, by strange fatality, the pagan 
 Symmachus. Arrived at Milan, St. Augustine saw 
 St. Ambrose, heard him with admiration, and went 
 again to listen to him at the Church. At other times 
 he went to behold him working, reading, compiling 
 manuscripts, writing in his house, which was open to 
 all, and constantly thronged by the curious, though 
 Ambrose never raised his eyes, except on some demand 
 of charity. Augustine saw him in meditation, and 
 went out again in silence.* He had his mother also 
 at his side, for she, counting always upon his conversion, 
 had not feared to cross the sea to rejoin him, reassured, 
 too, by the speech of a bishop to her : "It is impos- 
 * Confess, lib. vi. cap. ill. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 277 
 
 sible but that your child of many tears should be 
 restored to you." His friends were with him ; his 
 pupils, who had followed him from Africa, unable to 
 detach themselves from their beloved master, and in 
 their midst his soul began to seek for the calmness and 
 repose of a better regulated life. They discussed toge- 
 ther the formation of a philosophical community, which 
 had been the dream of so many philosophers, and which 
 Pythagoras had attempted ; but their difficulty lay in 
 the admission of women, for Augustine had not resolved 
 on tearing himself from the pleasures of his youth, and 
 his old lusts still kept their grasp on "his garment of 
 flesh." When in this condition, he learnt the story of 
 Yictorinus, who had left everything at the summit of 
 his fame, and ripe in age, to follow Christ; and was 
 captivated by that other history of the two imperial 
 officers, who, whilst walking in the suburbs of Treves, 
 had entered a monastery, and struck with admiration at 
 their life, had decided to abandon everything to live in 
 perfection with its inmates. All these stories troubled 
 the mind of St. Augustine, and drew him on insensibly 
 towards Christianity, which St. Ambrose had lately 
 taught him, and whose marvels excelled so infinitely 
 those related by Plato and his disciples. At the con- 
 clusion of the conversation, in the course of which the 
 account of the two officers had been related to him, he 
 felt that decisive blow of which he has left us so vivid a 
 picture. We must give it here, in remembrance of that 
 memorable day at the close of August, 386, in which 
 this great soul was snatched from its errors, and 
 thrown at the feet of the Truth, into the bosom of that 
 doctrine which henceforth he was so gloriously to 
 serve. 
 
278 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 "I advanced into the garden, and Alypius followed 
 me step by step. I could not feel alone with myself as 
 long as he was with me, and how could he desert me 
 in the trouble in which he beheld me. We sat down 
 at the farthest spot from the house, and I shuddered in 
 my very soul with ardent indignation at my tardiness in 
 flying to that new life to which I had agreed with God, and 
 
 into which my whole being cried out to me to enter 
 
 I flung myself on the ground, why, I know not, under 
 a fig-tree, and gave free course to my tears, which 
 gushed forth in streams, as an offering agreeable to 
 Thee, my God. And I spoke thousands of things to 
 Thee, not in these words, but in this sense : ' Lord, 
 how long wilt Thou be angry with me ? Eemember no 
 more my old iniquities,' for I felt that they held me 
 still. I let these pitiable words escape me : ' When ? 
 On what day ? To-morrow ? The day after ? Why 
 not yet ? Why is not this very hour the last of my 
 shame ? ' So did I speak to Thee, and wept bitterly in 
 the contrition of my heart, when, behold, I heard pro- 
 ceeding from a house a voice like that of a child, or a 
 young girl, which sang and repeated as a burden, these 
 words, ' Take up, and read ! take up, and read ! ' 
 
 " Then I returned with hurried steps to the place 
 where Alypius was sitting, for I had left the book of 
 the Apostle there on rising from my seat. I took it, 
 and opened and read silently the first chapter on which 
 my eyes fell : ' Live not in rioting and drunkenness, 
 not in chambering and impurities, not in contention 
 and envy ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
 make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. * 
 I would read no farther, nor was there need for it, for 
 * Rom. xiii. 13, 14. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 279 
 
 instantly, as I grasped the thought, a light of certainty 
 spread over my soul, and the mists of doubt vanished. 
 Then I marked the passage with my finger or some 
 other sign, shut the book, and gave it to Alypius to 
 read." 
 
 All the darkness was, indeed, dispelled, and from 
 that day Augustine was in possession of the God whom 
 he had so long pursued, who had sought him, too, and 
 at last had gained him. So perfect was the com- 
 munion, so real the contemplation, that in that other 
 famous moment of which he leaves us the history, 
 in his intercourse with his mother, we feel that he 
 reached the farthest point open to mortal man in 
 relation with God. 
 
 A short time after this day of his conversion, when 
 Monica was on the point of giving back her soul to 
 God, though the approach of that hour was not yet 
 known, both mother and son were at Ostia, preparing 
 to embark on the vessel which was to bear them back 
 to Africa. As one evening the two were leaning on 
 a window in contemplation of the sky, they fell to 
 talking of the hopes of immortality, and then, said 
 St. Augustine, having traversed the whole order of 
 things visible, and considered every creature which 
 bore witness to God, far above stars and sun they 
 reached the region of the soul, and there found their 
 aspirations were not satisfied, and so they turned to 
 the Eternal and Creative Wisdom; and whilst we 
 spoke thus, continues the Saint, we seemed to touch 
 It ; and, in conclusion, he declares that had that 
 moment's contemplation lasted for eternity, it would 
 have sufficed, and far more than sufficed, for his ever- 
 lasting happiness. 
 
280 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Thus did St. Augustine, by the way of purification, 
 of illumination, of contemplation, reach the true idea of 
 God, and in this sense his " Confessions" become a grand 
 work of mystic philosophy ; and that he thus considered 
 them himself is evidenced by the concluding address : 
 " And what man can cause man, what angel his fellow- 
 angel, what angel can cause man to understand these 
 things ? It is Thou Whom we must ask, God ! Thou 
 Whom we must seek, at Whom we must knock, and it 
 is then only that we shall find, shall receive, and be 
 opened to. Amen." To him these " Confessions" were 
 nothing else than a mystic method of reaching God, 
 and in them we find every characteristic of mysticism, 
 and especially asceticism, the effort to create a moral 
 and not a logical method of purifying self, and so render- 
 ing it worthy of an approach to God, to which end 
 alone the long struggle against passion must ever tend ; 
 the careful cleansing of the intellect, in banishing every 
 error which had crept in, whether Pagan, Manichaean, 
 orNeoplatonic; and, lastly, the raptures of a heart hence- 
 forth free in its aspirations towards the Eternal One, 
 and able to enter into closest communion with Him. 
 These are the three degrees and phases through which 
 great mystics make every soul pass which is under their 
 guidance the life of purgation, the life of illumination, 
 the life of union. And, again, it contains another force ; 
 the soul, no longer given over to itself, as when a 
 guidance towards reason is in question, for love cannot 
 stand alone, but must have a proper surrounding, its 
 philosophy cannot go alone, but only in company, so 
 Augustine was accompanied by his mother, the guardian 
 angel of his convictions, and one of their living and 
 necessary elements the soul, as it were, of his loving 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 281 
 
 and inspiring philosophy ; it was his mother who 
 guided and stood by him from his dark youth to his 
 brilliant maturity, whilst his friends, such as St. 
 Ambrose, or the Church Universal, greedy of his 
 presence, brought him on to the threshold of truth. 
 
 This method, then-, condemns mankind to no un- 
 natural isolation, it appeals to nature in its entirety, 
 with all its splendours, errors, and illusions. By the 
 aid of Beauty St. Augustine returned to God ; the 
 things of earth, which had charmed and deceived him, 
 held amidst their seductive errors a true reality, making 
 itself felt as alone capable of filling his heart. At last 
 he cleft the veil and found the deep and creative 
 beauty which lay hid under the form of every creature 
 as a ray from the Creator, the symbolism which is 
 another note of mysticism seeking in natural objects 
 the reflection of the Deity and the footprints of the 
 Invisible. Mysticism, with these three characteristics, 
 is the same in every time ; and during the Middle 
 Age the mystic philosophy of St. Augustine blossomed 
 into that of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, of St. 
 Bonaventura, and the other great masters of the 
 Western Church. 
 
 But the fact that this doctrine has its dangers was 
 proved in the case of St. Augustine himself, and was to 
 be shown by many subsequent instances. Like love, 
 it brooks no control, and will be responsible to no one 
 for its raptures and abandonments, and so it lies open 
 to extravagance, to be drawn into paths in which the 
 ties of its wings may break, and its aspirations towards 
 the Sun end in a fall into the abyss. Control is essen- 
 tial to it, and so Christianity did not call for a mystic 
 philosophy to stand alone without guide or rule, but 
 
282 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 placed at its side a dogmatic system, as the mysticism 
 of St. Augustine was supported by bis dogmatism. 
 
 In the earlier portion of the intellectual history of 
 this Saint, it was God who was pursuing him pitilessly 
 in the doubt of his mind and the struggle of his heart, 
 as well as through the deep abasement of his carnal 
 nature ; and though he could fly from his country and his 
 mother, he could not escape from his God, Who found 
 him at Milan in that garden and under the fig-tree, 
 whither we have followed him ; but when He had once 
 possessed him, it was St. Augustine's turn to follow 
 after his God : he found Him, indeed, but never suffi- 
 ciently he for ever was wishing to enter into deeper 
 enjoyment of His perfection, and his whole philosophi- 
 cal toil lay in the attempt to return by dint of Keason 
 to that Being whom he had already grasped by Love. 
 
 At the moment of taking the great resolution of an 
 irrevocable self-devotion to God, he had also determined 
 to quit the school in which he now saw a mere traffic in 
 vanity. From one of his friends, Verecundus, he had 
 sought and found in his beautiful villa of Cassiciacum, 
 at some distance from Milan, the reposeful asylum so 
 necessary after the struggle through which he had 
 passed. Though out of health and with an affected 
 chest, the dauntless activity of his mind forbade repose. 
 Surrounded by his mother, his brother, son, and other 
 relations, as well as the friends who had followed him, 
 his days were passed now in reading a half-canto of the 
 "iEneid," now in commenting on the "Hortensius" of 
 Cicero, to which he used to refer the earliest motions of 
 his heart towards virtue, now in talking philosophy 
 with Trygetius, Alypius, Licentius, and others ; obscure 
 enough, indeed, by the side of the illustrious interlocu- 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 283 
 
 tors in the "Dialogues of Cicero," but touching in their 
 obscurity when viewed in the light of Christian phi- 
 losophy, which counts none insignificant, the meanest 
 becoming, as St. Augustine says, great when occupied 
 with great things. One day his mother came to take 
 part in these discussions ; the Saint took care not to 
 repulse her; and as she wondered at herself, as a 
 woman, being thus admitted to philosophize, her son 
 gloried, and rightly, in the idea. These conversations, 
 preserved by stenography, form the first of St. Augus- 
 tine's treatises on philosophy, and are found in his 
 books, " Contra Academos," " De Ordine," " De Vita 
 Beata," to which may be added the "Soliloquies," and 
 the works " De Quantitate Animse," " De Immortalitate 
 Animae," "De Libero Arbitrio ;" and though no single 
 volume amongst these furnishes a complete system of 
 his philosophy, which must be sought for throughout 
 the whole of his writings, this is due to the manner of 
 composition assumed by this most laborious of men, 
 whose time was disputed between an infinite variety of 
 occupations ; now engrossed in settling law-suits and 
 other difficulties between the worthy people of Hippo, 
 now called upon to direct the Church in her gravest 
 decisions; and amidst such calls he was able from 
 time to time to devote himself to some discussions on 
 philosophy. All that we possess from him has, more- 
 over, been written in haste, collected by reporters, and 
 hardly ever revised by its author. Treatises were com- 
 menced by him and never finished, and in others the 
 plan adopted at the outset was changed in the sequel. 
 But yet, beneath apparent disorder, is found the most 
 powerful internal arrangement ; and it is not the least 
 satisfaction to the mind which penetrates into the heart 
 
284 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of his works, to discover therein the strength and unity 
 of a genius ever master of itself, like the Christian 
 faith which inspired it, marching without the slightest 
 deflection in the straight road which was to lead it to 
 God. 
 
 Moreover, he never reached the point of despising 
 philosophy or of sacrificing reason to faith. Far from 
 it ; he wrote to Komanian urging him to embrace that 
 system into the bosom of which he had plunged his own 
 mind, and by which he had learnt to condemn Pelagius 
 and throw off the Manichsean errors* which had sus- 
 tained him through his researches, and promising to 
 show him God had, in fact, given him a glimpse of 
 Him, though veiled in lustrous mist. Whilst he pointed 
 to the weakness of the old philosophers, he gave them 
 credit for their glory. He admired the chief of the 
 Academy ; to him Plato's approach to God seemed near ; 
 but he did not deny the impotence of the essays of the 
 human mind. He declared that a handful of men, at the 
 expense of great genius, leisure, and toil, had grasped 
 the notion of God and of the soul's immortality, but had 
 found truth without love ; they had perceived the goal, 
 but had not taken the path which alone led up to it, 
 and so the truth they held was imperfect.! " It is one 
 thing to gaze down upon the land of peace, as from the 
 peak of a mountain, whose sides are covered with 
 forests haunted with wild beasts of prey and fugitive 
 slaves, without knowing the road to follow, another to 
 be upon the highway traced out by the Supreme 
 Master." This was the distinction he drew between 
 the philosophy of antiquity and that of Christianity, of 
 
 * Contra Academos, lib. i. cap. ii. 
 f De Vera Pteligione, initio. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 285 
 
 which he was one of the most illustrious representa- 
 tives the necessary union of reason and faith. God 
 Himself, he said, cannot despise reason, for how can 
 He despise that principle which distinguishes man 
 from His other creatures ? Nor does He desire that 
 we should seek faith that we may cease to reason, but, 
 on the contrary, that the possession of faith should 
 make us reason more should give it stronger and more 
 ample pinions, for, were we not reasoning creatures, 
 we should not know how to believe. Keason precedes 
 faith, to determine where authority lies ; it follows it 
 too, for when the intellect has reached God, it Seeks 
 Him still. 
 
 St. Augustine was far from wishing to discourage 
 .the reason by dwelling on the contradictions of the 
 old schools of philosophy, and rather blamed the new 
 Academy for seeking refuge in a state of doubt 
 between Epicurus and Zeno. He destroyed its 
 specially adopted doctrine of probability, showing the 
 disciples of the school that, in speaking of probability, 
 they held an idea of truth, and even supposed the pre- 
 sence of what they denied ; and in order to refute doubt, 
 he sought for certitude in thought by the psychological 
 method. 
 
 "In truth," he said, "those who doubt cannot 
 doubt that they are alive, that they remember, wish, 
 think ; for, if they doubt, it is from a desire for certainty, 
 and so they refuse to consent to anything without 
 proof. You, then, who wish to know yourself, do you 
 know if you exist ? I do know it. Whence ? I am 
 ignorant whence. Do you think yourself to be simple 
 or complex ? I know not. Do you know whether 
 you are in movement ? No. Do you know whether 
 
286 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 you think ? I know that I do. Then it is certain that 
 you think." * 
 
 This is, in fact, the Cogito ergo Sum, as expressed 
 in the second book of the " Soliloquies" of St. Augustine, 
 in a dialogue between his reason and himself, and in 
 which he thus lays down the very foundations of certainty. 
 It was in the deep trouble of his mind, when, as philo- 
 sopher, he beheld within himself the ruin of every 
 system of philosophy, on the point of giving up reason 
 in despair, he sought the corner-stone whereon to raise 
 the fabric of his knowledge, and found no other but the 
 Cogito ergo Sum. The advance of Descartes consisted 
 only in putting the same idea into higher relief, in 
 seizing it to hold it for ever, and so never to be drawn 
 into empty speculation again. He was to stop his 
 course at the point marked out by St. Augustine, by 
 whom, indeed, the seal was placed upon the page which 
 would draw succeeding generations to return upon it in 
 meditation, and extract from it so many others equally 
 immortal. 
 
 Thus the soul is at least sure of its own thought, 
 doubt, or volition, the witnesses of its own conscious- 
 ness ; it is aware of sensations also, and demands 
 w r hence they come. The Platonists alleged that the 
 senses were full of error, and compared them to the 
 oar, which appears broken when plunged into water, or 
 to a tower on the sea-coast, which seems falling when 
 observed from the sea ; but St. Augustine replied, with 
 all the superiority of philosophic truth, " The senses do 
 not deceive us as it is ; they would do so did they make 
 the oar look straight or the tower steadfast ; it is you 
 who deceive yourselves, in asking them to give judg- 
 * Soliloquia, lib. ii. cap. i. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 287 
 
 ments when they can only give impressions." * And, 
 taking higher ground, he perceived in the soul and 
 conscience something higher than the inner sense, the 
 most solid of sensations, namely, ideas, universal and 
 evident notions, everything, for instance, which consti- 
 tuted the elements of dialectical science. Thus the 
 same thing cannot be existent and non-existent. He 
 found therein numbers, which were the same in relation' 
 to everything, and of which no one could doubt ; mathe- 
 matical verities, and also moral principles, likewise the 
 same to all, which he sometimes called numbers, with 
 the Pythagoreans, more often ideas, after Plato ; and this 
 was all discussed by him at a time of absorption in all 
 the duties of a religious life. Thus the philosopher sub- 
 sisted in the Christian, and the excellent tradition of 
 disdaining nothing of real utility in the results of the 
 old reasoning was perpetuated. 
 
 " Ideas are certain principal forms, certain reasons of 
 things fixed and invariable, not formed themselves, and 
 therefore eternal, acting ever after the same method, and 
 contained in the Divine Intelligence : and as they are 
 never born, and can never perish, it is upon them that 
 everything which must have a birth and a decay is 
 formed. The reasoning soul alone can perceive them, 
 which it does through the highest part of itself, namely, 
 through the Eeason, which is to it as an interior and 
 discerning eye. And again, the soul, to be capable 
 of this vision, must be pure, and its interior eye 
 must be healthy, and like to that which it seeks to 
 contemplate. Who dares say that God created without 
 reason? For the same reason, the same type could 
 not equally subserve the creation of a man and a horse. 
 * Contra Acad. lib. iii. cap. xi. 
 
288 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Therefore every particular being had its particular 
 reason. But these reasons can only reside in the 
 thought of the Creator, for He did not regard a model 
 placed exterior to Himself, and so the reason of things 
 produced were of necessity contained in the Divine 
 Intelligence."* 
 
 Thus the Divine Eeason is present to the reason of 
 man through these eternal truths, by this sight of 
 numbers and the essential reasons of all things; and so 
 when speech external to ourselves gives names to these 
 things invisible and absolute truths, it does not itself 
 convey to us the idea of them, but only warns us to 
 consult that internal monitor whom we name the true, 
 the beautiful, and the just, in that language of ours 
 which, though neither of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, nor 
 barbarian tongue, has been understood by all the world 
 from the beginning; an eternal language taught us by a 
 Master who is no other than the Word, the true Christ, 
 present in the depths of human consciousness. 
 
 Such was the psychology of St. Augustine, which we 
 now leave aside to examine his treatment of those two 
 propositions as to the spirituality and immortality of the 
 soul which will bridge the space that divides us from 
 the second point in his metaphysical system the search 
 for God. For he let not the scruple of there being any 
 inconvenience or culpability in making self-knowledge 
 the preliminary step to a knowledge of God arrest his 
 course, but affirmed, on the contrary, that the science of 
 the human soul was a necessary and legitimate intro- 
 duction to the science of God. It was through his 
 adoption of the psychological method of the ancients that 
 he went far beyond Socrates : while the latter had said 
 * Liber de Diversis Qusestionibus, cap. xlvi. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 289 
 
 "Know thyself," the cry of the former was, Noverim 
 me, sed noverim te.* But in what manner would he 
 know God ? He wished for an essential knowledge of 
 Him, one deeper than of the truths of mathematics, 
 and shrank from a cold and freezing scientific ap- 
 preciation of Him, as he promised himself therefrom 
 happiness as well as enlightenment. The way along , 
 which he was to seek for God was that passed by 
 David as he uttered the sublime hymn of praise, Coeli 
 enarrant gloriam Dei ; by Xenophon in the memorable 
 Discussions of Socrates, to develop the old but eternal 
 proof of God's existence, as he says in the passionate 
 language of Christian love : 
 
 " Behold the heaven and the earth ; they exist, they 
 cry out that they have been made, for they vary and 
 they change. For that which exists without creation 
 has no particle which has not for ever existed ; so these 
 exclaim, ' We stand because we have been created ; we 
 did not exist before our creation, that we might create 
 ourselves, and this their voice is their evidence. It is 
 Thou who hast made them, Lord ; Thou art beautiful, 
 and so are they ; Thou art good, and they are good ; 
 Thou art, and they are." 
 
 In this lay his whole physical proof of the existence 
 of God ; but it was upon the metaphysical proof that 
 he innovated in conveying to it all the power of a 
 genius hitherto unique. 
 
 By his study of the soul, St. Augustine recognized 
 immutable principles of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, 
 to which he was bound to give the adhesion of his 
 mind and heart. But these principles did not merely 
 reveal themselves to him, but gave the impulse towards 
 
 * Soliloq. lib. ii. 1. 
 VOL. I. 13 
 
290 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 some unknown existences whose manifestations he 
 already felt. He did not resist it, and thence came the 
 reason for insisting on that idea of beauty which had 
 fascinated him from his infancy, and been the food of 
 frequent meditation which made him the first among 
 Christians to lay the foundations of an aesthetic philo- 
 sophy, to write treatises on Beauty, and utter the senti- 
 ment, Omnis pulchritudinis forma unitas est. This 
 road, then, led him to God through his idea of beauty, 
 but it did not suffice, and unwearied of the chase he 
 sought Him also by the path of goodness. 
 
 "You love," said he, " nothing but what is good; 
 you love the earth because it is so goodly, with its lofty 
 mountains, its hills and dales ; you love the human face 
 because it is comely in the harmony of form, colour, 
 and feeling ; you love the soul of your friend, which is 
 beautiful by the charm of ordered intimacy and faithful 
 love; eloquence, because it teaches sweetly; poetry, 
 which is lovely in the melody of its numbers and the 
 solidity of its thought ; in all that you love you find some 
 character of goodness suppress that which distin- 
 guishes all these things, and you will find the good itself. 
 We compare these various goodnesses ; and how, if not 
 by a perfect and immutable idea of good, by the com- 
 munication of which everything is good? If in each 
 of these particular excellences you behold only the 
 supreme excellence, you gain a sight of God." * 
 
 And so Goodness, by a similar way, leads to the 
 same goal as Beauty. But the perception of the philo- 
 sopher still distrusted this idea of what was beautiful 
 and good; it feared the empire of mere fame, and 
 dreaded yielding to the raptures of a spell-bound ima- 
 * De Trinitate, lib. viii. c. 3. 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 291 
 
 gination. Severe in its reason, it sought a conviction 
 of its own, and, to escape all possibility of delusion, 
 determined to seek God through the idea of a Truth 
 which was pure, absolute, and mathematical. In his trea- 
 tise, " De Libero Arbitrio," he therefore recommenced 
 the demonstration of the existence of God, and, that it 
 might be complete, plunged into the very abysses of 
 human nature. Considering man as possessing three 
 qualities of existence, of continuing life, and of intelli- 
 gence, he devoted his mind to the last, leaving the two 
 former out of the question, and found in it both the 
 external senses and that innermost feeling which is 
 their moderator and judge, and, in a word, Eeason. 
 " Keason," he said, "surpasses all the rest; if there 
 exists anything above it, that must be God." 
 
 Thus, by a third effort, and, as it were, by a third 
 assault, he made a breach in the metaphysical barrier, 
 and entered on possession of the Divine Idea ; but 
 knowing well the danger of confiding the notion of 
 which he now was master to human language, 
 declared, at the moment in which his possession 
 seemed sure, that perhaps it would profit more to 
 know less Scitur melius nesciendo * recognizing the 
 inexactness of all human speech in describing the 
 attributes of the Divinity. Eight and left, with the 
 dread of one long entangled in Manichseism, he beheld 
 the perils of Dualism and Pantheism. He avoided the 
 danger in declaring that evil formed no opposing force 
 to good ; that there were not two principles, but that 
 evil does not exist in itself, but only relatively as a 
 deprivation of, an apostasy from, or an inferiority in 
 * De Online, lib. ii. c. 44. 
 
292 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 good ; that beings have no existence that is not given 
 them by God; and that, in consequence, there is 
 nothing external to God thus dispelling at one blow 
 the perils of Dualism. But, then, did he not seem to 
 fall into Pantheism especially in such strong expres- 
 sions as that existences have no real existence ? No ; 
 there was no fear of his relapsing into his old error, 
 and seeing in all beings an emanation of the Divinity. 
 He drew himself from the toils by what was then a 
 novelty in philosophy, and severed his mind from 
 Pantheism by the dogma of Creation. The ancients 
 had held with Plato an eternity of matter existing at 
 the side of God, or had thought, with the philosophers 
 of Alexandria, that God had drawn, and was for ever 
 drawing, all existences from Himself by a continual 
 emanation. St. Augustine was the first to profess a 
 Creation from nothing; that, external to God, there 
 was nothing from which the world could have been 
 formed, and if it had flowed out from God, would 
 itself have been God.* 
 
 He thus establishes the doctrine of Creation, and, in 
 answer to the philosophical difficulties of the dogma 
 that creation was in time and God in eternity why 
 and when had God created what had been His occupa- 
 tion previous to creation replied, with calm superiority, 
 that God had created the world in freedom, but not 
 without reason, that He, as the good God, had created 
 it for a good purpose. 
 
 " We must not inquire when He created, nor whether, 
 in the creative action, He went forth from His immuta- 
 bility, nor as to what His previous work might be. He 
 * De Civitate Dei, lib. xii. 15, 16. 17. 
 
CHEISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 293 
 
 willed from eternity, but produced time with the world, 
 because He produced the world in movement, of which 
 time is the measure."* 
 
 He thus abandons his mind to the highest and 
 boldest considerations, with the utmost judgment and 
 accuracy, and without the least subtlety. Having es- 
 tablished time as being the measure of movement, he 
 thus concludes : 
 
 " Thus all my life is but succession dissipation. 
 But Thy hand, my Lord, has brought me together in 
 Christ, the Mediator between Thy unity and our multi- 
 fariousness, so that, rallying my existence, once dissi- 
 pated by the caprices of my early days, I dwell under 
 the shadow of Thy Oneness, without memory of what 
 is no more, with no anxious aspiration towards that 
 which has to come."t 
 
 And so his reason brings him back to love, as love 
 had brought him to reason ; and as all his mystic phi- 
 losophy, under the guidance of divine love, tended to a 
 rational and pure notion of God, so all his dogmatism, 
 under the reasoning principle, ended in love to the 
 Almighty. This impossibility of severing these two 
 great forces of the soul is the essential characteristic 
 of Christian philosophy. As antiquity pictures to us 
 the aged (Edipus weighed down under a sense of guilt 
 and by blindness, its punishment, supporting his pain- 
 ful steps by the aid of his two daughters, Antigone and 
 Ismene, so the human mind, like a blind and age- 
 stricken monarch groping from the beginning of time 
 in search of its God, has need, indeed, of its twin- 
 offspring, love and reason, to help it to its goal, the 
 
 * De Civitate Dei, lib. xii. 15, 16, 17. 
 f Confess, lib. xi. 24. 
 
294 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 knowledge of the Divinity ; and we must shrink from 
 depriving it of either. 
 
 But the philosophy which St. Augustine opened, that 
 new dogmatic system which compassed a true notion of 
 God as Creator, as One, and Free, loving and really to 
 be loved, did not stay its progress with its author. Truth, 
 we have said, lay scattered throughout his many writ- 
 ings, and if any reproach is due towards the great genius 
 of Hippo, it lies against the inevitable diffusion of his 
 thought in the midst of innumerable works, interrupted 
 as they were by the duties of a thoroughly occupied 
 life. But these germs were not useless; they bore 
 their fruit, and were carried over the stormy centuries 
 of the Middle Age, and cast upon fertile ground in 
 France, Italy, and Spain, the native lands of great 
 intellects in the future, and where another great meta- 
 physician and profound thinker was to appear in 
 St. Anselm, whose predestined labour was to bind 
 together in one group the proofs of God's existence 
 given by St. Augustine, and present them by a more 
 rigorous method and in an exacter form. St. Thomas 
 Aquinas was also, in his turn, to develop the theories 
 of St. Anselm, so that the seventeenth century, with 
 all its right to be captious in the matter of genius, 
 philosophy, and truth, could find no greater work than 
 that of bringing to its light, in another form, the doc- 
 trines of St. Augustine, by the aid of Descartes and 
 Leibnitz, who reproduced his metaphysics with certain 
 corrections and greater accuracy. This was alike the 
 labour of these great minds, and of Malebranche in his 
 treatise, " Becherche de la Verite," who, in the epigraph 
 of his works, gloried, like St. Augustine, in listening 
 to that internal master which speaks in the language 
 
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ST. AUGUSTINE. 295 
 
 of eternity, and who professed to behold everything in 
 God. 
 
 It is upon this great and potent system of Christian 
 metaphysics that, from the fifth century down to our 
 own times, the totality of modern civilization has 
 hinged. Its action, indeed, remains unrecognized 
 amidst the passions and disorders of the present day ; 
 but to the serious and enlightened nations of the 
 modern world metaphysics appear as the essence and 
 the guiding principle of all things, as moulding the 
 public opinion of Christian races, as governing every- 
 thing, and giving the first reason for the institutions 
 amongst which we live. Dante, on reaching the 
 summit of his Paradise, beheld God as a mathe- 
 matical point, without length or breadth, but as the 
 centre of the revolving heavens : 
 
 Da quel punto 
 Dipende il cielo ed tutta la natura. 
 
 Metaphysics, the idea of God, form the point whereupon 
 the whole heaven of our thought, of our nature, of our 
 education, all society, the entirety of the Christian 
 organism, is suspended. So, as long as no one has 
 shaken that point, nor laid violent hands on that Divine 
 idea, there need be no fear for our civilization. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 Woodfall and Kinder, Printers, Milford Lane, Strand, London, W.C. 
 
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY PERMISSION FROM THE FRENCH OF 
 
 A. FEEDEEIC OZANAM, 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF FOREIGN LITERATURE TO THE FACULTY OF LETTERS 
 AT PARIS. ^^^CX~ 
 
 [TmriYBRSITT] 
 
 ASHLEY C. GLYN, B.A., 
 
 OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LAW. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. II. 
 
 LONDON: 
 WM. H. ALLEN & CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE, 
 
 PALL MALL, S.W. 
 1868. 
 
LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY WOODIALL AND KINDER, 
 
 MILFORD LANE, STRAND, W.C. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 OP VOL. II. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHKISTENDOM. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Esteem shown for St. Augustine in the Middle Age, for his 
 services to Christian doctrine. Christianity established 
 as a society ; gifted with institutions fitted to achieve 
 the ends for which it was established ; how were these 
 institutions introduced ; the Papacy and Monasticism 
 acted with most force on the Middle Age. Theory 
 of Planck, Neander. and Guizot as to the rise of the 
 former. Christianity does not admit individualism ; less 
 a doctrine than a society. Sketch of its constitution. 
 Witness of St. Irenreus, Tertullian, and St. Cyprian. 
 Proofs drawn from the Catacombs as to the antiquity of 
 the Popedom. Action of the Popes in disputed ques- 
 tions. St. Leo the Great ; his learning, eloquence, and 
 courage; the heresy of Nestorius; Leo declares the 
 true doctrine ; the Council of Chalcedon ; Leo saves 
 civilization in the West from the barbarians. Attila 
 and Genseric. The patriotism of the Pope. The origin 
 of Monasticism examined. The anchorites of Buddhism 
 and Brahminism. The Therapeutse and Essenes; the 
 latter gave the idea of Christian monachism. Its 
 services at the collapse of the old society ; passed from 
 the East into the West, probably with St. Athanasius ; 
 the solitary developed into the ccenobitic life; the nou- 
 rishing monasteries of Gaul. Contrast between the 
 Christian and pagan asceticism 1 
 
 a 2 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The available forces of society at the time of the invasions. 
 Rise of the Canon Law. Incompatibility between 
 pagan laws and pagan manners; Christian manners 
 more congruous with legislation ; the feelings of inde- 
 pendence ; the dignity of man and respect for women ; 
 intensified by the Germans ; Christianity had already 
 made virtues of these instincts ; attitude of the Church 
 with regard to slavery ; the spirit of the new religion 
 favours gradual emancipation; improves the condition 
 of the working class; free labour shackled under the 
 old system ; cruelty of the old law of debtor and credi- 
 tor ; the Church encouraged labour ; was recruited 
 from the labouring classes at first; pagan objections 
 on this account ; the fossores of the Catacombs ; the 
 idea of labour reconstructed; it formed an essential 
 element in the monastic system. Associations of labour 
 in Roman antiquity ; the collegia ; their nature ; these 
 corporations strengthened and continued under the new 
 system ; their importance in the Middle Age, especially 
 in Italy ; relief of the poor ; vice of the old system of 
 public largess ; Christianity makes almsgiving the duty 
 of each individual ; encourages discrimination in private 
 charity ; its system of public benevolence ; hospitals 
 and refuges. Canon of the Council of Nice on the 
 subject. Fabiola and Psarnmachius. The charitable sen- 
 timent in the Middle Age ; it was not due to the bar- 
 barians. Contrast between the towns of ancient and 
 modern times . .83 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 
 
 The practical condition of woman degraded throughout an- 
 tiquity, notwithstanding legislative enactments. The 
 Roman theory of marriage belied by practice ; in- 
 equalit} r of the respective obligations of man and wife ; 
 facility of divorce ; consequent frivolity and immorality 
 of women ; Seneca's opinion of them. Christian the- 
 ology presupposes the dignity of the female sex ; the 
 first and second Eve ; the female martyrs ; elevation of 
 women in every-day life by the new idea of marriage ; 
 
CONTENTS. Vll 
 
 PAGE 
 
 the unity of the duties and condition of husband and 
 wife ; divorce ; inveteracy of the old habit ; legislation 
 against it therefore gradual; laws of Constantine, 
 Honorius, and Theodosius the Younger; firm oppo- 
 sition of the Church to divorce conferred domestic 
 dignity on women, and thus assured them respect; 
 the penance of Fabiola ; woman becomes foremost in 
 works of benevolence ; their new part in influencing 
 manners ; the Empress Pulcheria respected by Attila ; 
 these ideas were not owing to the barbarians ; instances 
 of their cruelty and polygamy ; they also upheld 
 divorce, and carried it on to later times. The share of 
 woman in the work of civilization ; Clotilda, Bertha, 
 and Theodolinda, forerunners of Blanche of Castille 
 and Joan of Arc. Their part in literature ; they are 
 highly educated; St. Jerome's schemes for their in- 
 struction ; influence of his mother over St. Augustine ; 
 St. Jerome's class of noble matrons ; Fabiola, Paula, 
 Marcella, etc. ; their intellectual aspirations suggest 
 the idea of the Vulgate ; their place in art ; paintings of 
 women in the Catacombs, and in poetry ; poems on the 
 martyrdom of St. Agnes, by Prudentius ; the vision of 
 Hernias ; formation of the female type which distin- 
 guished later ages ; the rise of Chivalry ; the Beatrice 
 of Dante and Laura of Petrarch ; the great intellectual 
 revolution of the fifth century ; letters become the pro- 
 perty of the many 56 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 
 
 The rise of a Christian literature ; it required a language and 
 adopted the Latin, which seemed little fitted for the new 
 ideas ; its terseness and harshness originally ; contrast 
 between its genius and that of Greek ; adapted to a hard 
 and practical race ; subsequent introduction of Greek 
 forms, encouraged by Cicero ; stress laid upon euphony 
 in public speaking ; poetry becomes Grsecized in the 
 hands of Virgil, Horace, and Catullus. The golden 
 age of Latin ; its speedy corruption and the causes of 
 it; the Eastern genius of contemplation; the Greek 
 tendency to speculation and the Latin love for action 
 dominated antiquity ; these three elements passed on to 
 modern times by means of the Vulgate ; history of the 
 work undertaken by St. Jerome, and examination of its 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 effects on literature. The Hebrew contributed the idea 
 v of eternity, the Greek metaphysical accuracy ; recep- 
 /tion of new expressions into Latin ; prominent part 
 played by Africans in the literary history of the hfth 
 century; their defects, instanced by Tertullian's writ- 
 ings ; further corruption of the Latin ; the inscriptions 
 of the Catacombs ; poetry corrupted ; introduction of 
 the rhyme. Christianity achieved its purpose with the 
 Bible as its instrument, and by means of the people ; 
 Latin thus became the classical language of the Middle 
 Age, to which it was necessary, as the means of edu- 
 cating the new nations 90 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 
 
 The intense love of the ancients for eloquence, which was 
 expected to please the senses as well as to exercise the 
 thought ; the five divisions of rhetoric ; eloquence fell 
 off as interest in politics grew weaker ; reduced to the 
 Bar ; to panegyrists of the great and itinerant rheto- 
 ricians. Dion, Chrysostom, Apuleius ; the science dies 
 away ; interest of the new faith in restoring it ; differ- 
 ences between the new method and the old ; rules given 
 by St. Ambrose ; Augustine the real founder of Christian 
 rhetoric ; his method explained, with its difference from 
 that of Cicero. The treatises " De Inventione " and 
 " De Catechizandis Rudibus ; " the orators of the Greek 
 Church, St. Gregory, Basil, and Chrysostom; their 
 superior grace to the Latins owing to the greater re- 
 finement of their audiences ; character of the audiences 
 at Hippo ; the eloquence of St. Ambrose was, however, 
 polished ; analysis of that of St. Augustine, and 
 citation from his works ; other famous preachers, 
 St. Zeno of Verona, Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna, 
 Gaudentius of Brescia, and Maximus of Turin ; the 
 homiliana ; characteristics of the new eloquence ; its 
 capability of adaptation to varying circumstances . 117 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 
 
 History stood next to eloquence in the esteem of the 
 ancients ; the romantic and uncritical nature of Greek 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 and Roman history ; liberties taken by Herodotus and 
 Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus; history narrowed by 
 national egoism ; decadence of history at the fifth 
 century ; Ammianus Marcellinus ; interest of the new 
 faith in restoring history, and in making it universal. 
 Sources of early Christian history ; the acts of martyrs 
 and canons of councils. The new historical elements. 
 Chronicles ; their ambitious scope compared with those 
 of antiquity; the universal history of Eusebius, con- 
 tinued by St. Jerome ; the chronicles of Prosper of 
 Aquitaine and Idatius ; precision, brevity, and dryness 
 of these writings. The acts of martyrs drawn from 
 authentic sources ; brevity and sobriety of their de- 
 tails ; the acts of St. Perpetua, St. Polycarp, and St. 
 Cyprian ; examination of the latter ; the period of the 
 anchorites succeeds ; introduction of poetical and legen- 
 dary element ; lives of saints of the Thebaid ; story of 
 Paul and Antony ; moral of it ; the desire of knowing 
 causes as well as facts existed scantily throughout an- 
 tiquity. The treatise " De Civitate Dei ;" the commence- < 
 ment of the philosophy of history was undertaken in 
 answer to the complaints of the followers of the old 
 religion on the fall of the Empire ; the work analyzed ; 
 the history of Paulus Orosius ; Salvian ; " De Guber- 
 natione Dei ;" these works moulded later history ; their 
 authors the precursors of Bossuet. Fact, colour, and 
 philosophy remain the constituents of historical com- 
 position. Influence of thought over events as well as 
 feelings exemplified in the result of the part taken by 
 Augustine, Orosius, and Salvian in the face of contem- 
 porary events 145 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Prose the vehicle of Christian ideas for the first three 
 centuries ; contrast in this respect with the ancient 
 literatures ; feeble rise of Christian poetry ; it gains 
 strength from the time of Constantine ; its early ten- 
 dency ; the old forms retained to express new ideas ; 
 Sedulius and Juvencus ; aims and results of the new 
 poetry, which still treated principally of human affairs ; 
 lyric poetry; compositions of St. Ambrose; introduc- 
 tion of the rhymed sequence; St. Paulinus and Pru- 
 dentius ; history of Paulinus ; his conversion and 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 correspondence with Ausonius ; criticism of his poetry ; 
 similarity in idea with that of Dante ; the career of 
 Prudentius, as lawyer, poet, and controversialist; his 
 arguments against Paganism, and his patriotism ; his 
 excellence in lyric poetry ; the " Cathemerinon " and 
 " Peristephanon ; " his use of the Horatian metres ; 
 admiration shown for his writings in the Middle Age ; 
 they were undervalued at the time of the Revival ; 
 reasons for this ; Christian poetry was to be found 
 principally in Christian art 173 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 CHRISTIAN ART. 
 
 Symbolism a law of nature and of the human mind ; it 
 appears in Scripture, and in Christianity ; the early use 
 of allegory ; the shepherd of Hernias ; the discipline of 
 the Secret; the "Book of Formulas;" connection be- 
 tween religious symbolism and the arts ; rise of Chris- 
 tian art in the Catacombs ; description of the latter ; 
 their paintings ; frequent similarity to the old models. 
 Orpheus ; the Good Shepherd; significance of the latter; 
 the symbolical language ; the use of sculpture ; inscrip- 
 tions in verse; development of art after the period of 
 persecution ; supervision of sculpture ; bas-reliefs and 
 sarcophagi ; greater favour shown to painting ; evidence 
 of its early use in church-decoration; the Byzantine 
 method. Mosaic works ; it appears in all the principal 
 churches at Rome and elsewhere ; fidelity to the old 
 types ; instances of this ; exception taken to it by 
 Charlemagne ; architecture the dominant art ; the first 
 churches developed from the sepulchral chapels of the 
 Catacombs ; type preserved in baptisteries and burial- 
 places, and in the Byzantine style, as in St. Sophia; the 
 Roman basilicas used by the Christians, and imitated 
 by them ; idea and object of a church in the early ages ; 
 description of its appearance and arrangement; the 
 Byzantine cupola added to the basilican form ; the 
 Romanesque, or Lombard architecture ; its prevalence 
 in North Italy and Germany ; it gives place to the 
 Gothic style ; reaction in favour of the rounder form 
 at the Revival ; St. Peters at Rome . . . .202 
 
CONTENTS. XI 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Summary 7 of the progress effected in ideas; the material 
 world beneath their current ; appreciation by old Rome 
 of the idea of utility ; her care for material civilization ; 
 Aristides, the rhetorician, and Tertullian on the great 
 prosperity of the Empire ; channels of Roman com- 
 merce ; Rome adopted the Greek routes to the East, 
 the land-route by the Euxine, the sea-route by Alex- 
 andria; she created her own way to the North; the 
 means of communication ; connection maintained after 
 the invasion between Italy and Constantinople ; Eastern 
 produce still introduced into Western Europe , story of 
 Charlemagne and his courtiers ; commerce in the Middle 
 Age ; it is protected by the Church ; effects of the Cru- 
 sades upon it ; Amain, Genoa, and Venice foremost in 
 enterprise ; Roman agriculture ; completeness of the 
 system, which served to protect the frontiers ; causes of 
 its collapse; St. Benedict; the monks as cultivators; 
 flourishing state of agriculture under Charlemagne ; 
 the policy of Rome in establishing cities like herself; 
 magnificence of the provincial towns ; their buildings 
 respected by the barbarians after the first onslaught ; 
 letter from Cassiodorus to the prefect of Rome ; the 
 Church preserves cities ; temporal authority of the 
 bishops ; respect for patron saints ; the towns remained 
 cradles of industry ; encouragement of labour ; confra- 
 ternities and corporations ; their political influence in 
 the Middle Age, especially in France and Italy ; the 
 constitution of Florence ; sketch of the points of differ- 
 ence between the cities of Paganism and Christendom . 2:31 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 
 
 General uniformity of civilization in the fifth century; rise 
 of the new nationalities erroneously attributed solely to 
 the invasions ; existence of distinctive features in the 
 great provinces of the Empire before that era ; causes 
 which preserved a national spirit in the subject races 
 1st, a political cause ; diversity in some respects in the 
 order established by Rome ; harshness of the system of 
 
Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 taxation produces a feeling of hatred to the central 
 authority, and a national feeling ; St. Augustine and 
 P. Orosius as instances of this ; 2nd, a literary cause, 
 arising from diversity of language ; corruption of the 
 Latin through the admixture of older languages ; this 
 produced various dialects : the power of language in 
 defining nationalities ; 3rd, a religious cause ; the 
 variet}^ and to a certain extent autonomy of the national 
 Churches ; provincial councils ; national saints ; senti- 
 ment of religious patriotism; the social mission of 
 various nations. Characteristics of the three great 
 provinces 1st, Italy ; two principles persistent in her 
 character; the theological and governing spirit, traced 
 from the Etruscan and Roman elements respectively ; 
 the Papacy ; the same characteristics appear in the 
 Middle Age ; the mediasval Popes and Dante ; the com- 
 monwealths and Machiavel ; inferiority of the Italian 
 genius in later periods ; 2nd, Spain ; their character- 
 istics, gravity and bravery of character ; rapid advances 
 of culture in Spain ; defects in Spanish literature ; 
 scantiness of her sacred literature up to the fifth cen- 
 tury ; Spain profited by the labours of Africa; Juvencus, 
 Damasus, Dracontius, Prudentius; the " Psychomachia" 
 of the latter ; he was the precursor of Lope de Vega and 
 Calderon ; the " Autos Sacramentales ;" 3rd, France ; 
 strength of the Frank element in the nation ; its civili- 
 zation, nevertheless, essentially Latin ; impatience of 
 Gaul under the Roman yoke ; Gallic rebellions in the 
 time of Vespasian, Julian, and Honorius ; love of the 
 Gauls at the same time for Roman culture and tradi- 
 tion ; their taste for eloquence ; the rhetoricians ; their 
 acknowledged excellence ; Cato's estimate of the Gallic 
 character. Sidonius Apollinaris as a representative 
 Frenchman ; his versatile career ; a poet and orator ; 
 became a bishop ; the elaborateness of his style ; his 
 brave defence of Clermont, his episcopal town ; the 
 urbanity, lightness, and strong feeling of honour which 
 appeared in him marked the French character in ancient 
 and modern times ; summary and conclusion . . 246 
 
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 VOL. II. ERRATA. 
 
 Page 11, for "gift" read "first." 
 
 92, for "agriculturalist" read "agriculturist." 
 
 118, for "altering" read "allowing." 
 
 140, for "avidity" read "aridity." 
 
 229, for "has" read "had." 
 
 names of intuition and reasoning, love and intelli- 
 gence, mysticism and dogmatism, divided the world 
 of thought. We followed him along the ways which 
 lead to the knowledge of God ; and on scaling the vast 
 heights of speculation to which he had been our guide, 
 perceived that it was his metaphysical system which 
 enlightened, dominated, and influenced the lofty minds 
 of the Middle Age. For whilst the mysticism of the 
 "Confessions" was to inspire the contemplation of Hugh 
 and Kichard of St. Victor, and draw from Bonaventura 
 his "Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum," St. Augustine's 
 
 VOL. II. 1 
 
a CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 demonstration of God's existence was to be rigorously 
 drawn out to its conclusions by St. Anselm, and to 
 become an element in the "Summa Contra Gentes" of 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, in which that great master under- 
 took to prove, without recourse to Holy Writ, three 
 hundred and thirty- six theses upon God, the soul, 
 and their relations one with another. 
 
 But the remembrance of St. Augustine could not fill 
 the domain of theology without descending into those 
 arts which the Sacred Science inspired. Legend, as 
 we know, had, as it were, seized upon the great doctor 
 of Hippo, and woven around him an especial glory, as 
 for instance in the vision of the sainted host granted to 
 a monk in ecstasy, whose astonishment at not behold- 
 ing St. Augustine was dissipated by the intelligence 
 that his place was higher far, on heaven's very summit, 
 and veiled by the rays of that Divinity which it was the 
 work of his eternity to contemplate. Nor was it sur- 
 prising that monks should cling to his memory thus, 
 when even the Saracens, encamped on the ruins of 
 Hippo, showed their devotion to its bishop ; and con- 
 sidering that in our own day the Bedouins of the 
 neighbourhood of Bona come every Friday to the spot 
 which is marked by the ruins of the Basilica of St. 
 Augustine, to honour a hero whom they call mys- 
 teriously the great Roman, or the great Christian. 
 Painting, too, found in the history of this Saint an 
 inexhaustible store of subject, and, amongst others, 
 Benozzo Gonzali has depicted the incidents of his life 
 in ten paintings in the church of San Gemignano that 
 charming town of Tuscany which defies the curiosity 
 of the traveller from its rocky site paintings which, 
 with touching simplicity, unfold the various epochs in 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 6 
 
 his career, from the day on which he was taken by his 
 parents to school at Tagaste, praying God that he 
 might escape the rod. 
 
 Thus did the highest intellects of Christian Italy 
 aim to draw near to that genius of old time. Petrarch, 
 in writing his treatise on Contempt for the World, 
 tormented by a passion that robbed his mind of all 
 repose, imagined that he had St. Augustine for an 
 interrogator, and that the Saint warned him that he 
 was bound by two fetters of diamond, which he mistook 
 for treasures, but which in reality were crippling him 
 namely, glory and love. Petrarch ardently defended 
 his bonds, declaring that he bore them with joyful 
 pride, and wished no one to lay hands on that Platonic 
 love which had inspired his whole life, and raised him 
 above the crowd. But the other, with a higher wisdom, 
 derived from his Christian instincts, pointed to the 
 perils of an undefined passion, which, though ostensibly 
 ideal, would never have been conceived by him had not 
 the beauty of his Laura appeared in sensible form. 
 St. Augustine saw in it only a dangerous weakness, 
 and prayed God that he might stay with the poet as a 
 safeguard against himself, while Petrarch, at last yield- 
 ing to the argument of the holy doctor, exclaimed, " Oh, - 
 may thy prayer be granted ; may I, too, under Divine 
 protection, come safe and whole from these long wan- 
 derings, feel the tempest of my mind subside, feel the 
 world growing silent around me, and the temptations 
 of fortune come to an end !" 
 
 But Christianity had not appeared for the sole pur- 
 pose of promulgating the doctrine which shone with so 
 vivid a light upon the writings of Augustine, but rather 
 to found a society which might unfold itself, and receive 
 
 1 * 
 
4 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 within its ranks those multitudinous hordes of barbarians 
 who for many ages before its advent had been in motion 
 towards the rally-point which had been marked out for 
 them. We must learn if any and w r hat influences were 
 ready to subjugate, to instruct, and to organize them, 
 or whether the great institutions of Catholicism in- 
 sinuated themselves into the Church, as has been often 
 stated, in a time of congenial barbarism, and as if by 
 stealth, in the deep intellectual darkness under which 
 humanity was labouring. 
 
 There are two institutions amongst those which were 
 destined to act with energy on the Middle Age, which 
 arrest us at once, as their iu contestable preponderance 
 detaches them from the rest the Papacy and Monas- 
 ticism ; and it is our duty to seek out their origin, to 
 consider the forces they respectively wielded at the 
 moment when their exercise was called for, and to see 
 whether their powers were exerted for the salvation or 
 the corruption of the human race. 
 
 This is no place for renewing a worn-out controversy 
 as to the origin of the Papacy, for the equity of modern 
 criticism has reduced the passionate exaggerations of 
 our predecessors, and no enlightened mind of our own 
 day continues to regard it as a premeditated and wicked 
 usurpation on the part of certain ambitious priests. A 
 more impartial method points it out as an historical 
 labour of the ages, the temporary consequence of a 
 certain development which Christianity was destined to 
 encounter. The religion of Christ, they say, took its 
 rise in the conscience, in the inner solitude of man's 
 personality, and so the Christian of the apostolic age 
 was self-sufficient, was king and priest to his own con- 
 sciousness. It was later that he felt the want of com- 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 5 
 
 bination, and with it the need of a common authority 
 and a common rule ; and thus towards the end of the 
 first century the clergy was separated and distinguished 
 from the mass of the faithful. It was not until the 
 second century that the episcopal power was seen first 
 to arise, then to dominate, so that in the third age the 
 bishops of the different cities were naturally subordi- 
 nated to the metropolitans of the provinces, and thus 
 the authority of the bishops and the metropolitan arch- 
 bishops was formed, by necessary consequence, upon 
 the constitution of the Koman provinces. Lastly, when 
 Europe, Asia, and Africa began, in the fourth century, 
 to aspire to a separate existence, the capitals of these 
 three quarters of the world became the three Patriarchal 
 Sees Antioch for Asia, Alexandria for Africa, and 
 Kome for Europe ; whilst in the two succeeding ages, 
 when the barbarians had severed the West from the 
 East, the Bishop of Eome, the acknowledged Patriarch 
 of the West, became, without usurpation, tyranny, or 
 outrage to humanity, the supreme chief of the Latin 
 Church. Such was the theory in vogue at the opening 
 of the present century the view which claimed the 
 most enlightened spirits of Protestantism as disciples, 
 and formed the essence of the theology of its greatest 
 modern writers; a thesis which aroused Planck and 
 Neander, and was the corner-stone of the edifice of 
 ecclesiastical history raised by the respected hands of 
 Guizot; a view remarkable from its moderation, and 
 which we must now examine more closely, to find the 
 claim that it possesses to support a system of opinions 
 which have been widely embraced and even become 
 dominant. 
 
 In the first place, Christianity in no way admits of 
 
6 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 this individualism which is thus laid down as the point 
 of departure for the faith. For it is less a collection of 
 doctrines than a society. It has charity as well as 
 enlightenment for its special characteristic, and even 
 the last-mentioned quality is not communicated to man 
 solely by study and reading, but is the result of the 
 spoken as well as the written word, as in a popular 
 religion destined to make its earliest converts amongst 
 the poor and those who could not read. Enlightenment 
 as well as charity found its medium of communication 
 in the contact of souls. For this reason St. Paul 
 regarded the Faith as being the soul of a vast and single 
 Body, of which Christ was the Head and His followers 
 the members ; and as the limbs cannot will except 
 through their chief member, it followed that Christen- 
 dom must be a living and consequently an organized 
 body, and that from its beginning it must be manifested 
 not as a group of scattered and solitary consciences, but 
 as a true society, possessing a constitution with a chief 
 over all, with obedience and control among its lower 
 orders, and offering to the view all the necessary con- 
 ditions of a complete organization. And this idea is 
 evidenced by the earliest documents of Christianity, 
 though we need enter into no minute discussion on the 
 texts of the Acts of the Apostles to show how continual 
 witness is borne therein to the action of the Apostolic 
 College under the presidency of Peter, in conferring 
 the episcopal character, in instituting priests and 
 ordaining deacons, surrounded in the meanwhile by 
 the Christian people, from whom it was not separate 
 indeed, but still perfectly distinct. 
 
 Thus from this early period we find that priests 
 existed, and not bishops alone. And this has been 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 7 
 
 often controverted, because as the bishop had of neces- 
 sity passed through the priesthood, the name of priest 
 was often given to him ; but not a single passage can 
 be quoted in which a simple priest, on the other hand, 
 has received the title of bishop, whilst to avoid minute 
 discussions, which only cause a loss of time and light, 
 it is evident that St. Paul, in his epistles to Titus 
 and Timothy, confers upon them the right of judging 
 priests, whom the very fact of their yielding to this 
 jurisdiction proves to have filled a subordinate position. 
 And so from the beginning we have a hierarchy, not 
 only existent, but in strong organization. 
 
 "We might cite here as evidence for the end of the 
 first century, and the beginning of the second, the 
 epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch ; but from their 
 precise character the adversaries of the opinion we 
 maintain have accused them of being apocryphal, as 
 if unable to conceive the authenticity of documents 
 so expressly condemning their position. So we must 
 refrain from using this contested authority, and turn to 
 others which have never been disputed. We come then 
 to St. Irenaeus, to Tertullian, and St. Cyprian, the 
 most ancient of the writers who have treated of the 
 ecclesiastical organization, who flourished at the end of 
 the second century, and from their positions in the 
 Eastern and Western divisions expressed the opinion 
 of the Universal Church. These three great doctors 
 agreed on all essential points, and amidst the strife of 
 opposing doctrines, the din of heresies which were 
 tearing Christendom asunder and snatching at the 
 pages of Holy Writ, unanimously recognized the 
 necessity of tradition in the interpretation of Scripture, 
 
8 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and the presence of that tradition in the corporation 
 named the Church. * This corporation seemed to them 
 to have been filled with a light which was universal, as 
 the sun is one object, though it spreads its rays over 
 the face of the earth, to borrow its strength from the 
 Divine authority, to be the habitation of the Holy 
 Spirit, which afforded it a perpetual vitality, " like a 
 precious liquid which perfumes and preserves the vessel 
 in which it is contained." But the Spirit could only 
 be transmitted by the medium of the apostles, and the 
 episcopate was but a continuation of the apostolate ; so 
 that in the time of St. Irenaeus, at the end of the second 
 century, each of the great churches maintained the 
 succession of its bishops, but had never more than one 
 at a time. Thus was the distinction between the epis- 
 copate and the rest of the priesthood established. But 
 another and greater power was appearing contem- 
 poraneously, and as its bishop formed the bond of 
 unity for the particular Church, so all these episcopal 
 churches had need of a common centre. And therefore 
 St. Cyprian, in his treatise " DeUnitate Ecclesia," pro- 
 fessed that the unity of the Church must be visible, and 
 that therefore Christ had founded His Church upon 
 the Apostle Peter, in order that its unity thus per- 
 sonified might be patent. Nor did Cyprian confine 
 this primacy of Peter, or the unity which he repre- 
 sented, and whereby he gave strength to the Church, 
 to the time of the Apostle's life, but prolonged and 
 maintained it in the Petrine See, naming it, in a letter 
 
 * " Tradition reposes in the Church as one and universal, like 
 a single sun, a single tree, a single fountain. Beyond the Church 
 there are no Christians, no martyrs." 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 9 
 
 to Pope Cornelius, as the principal Church from whence 
 the unity of the priesthood was derived.* 
 
 Language nearly identical was used by Tertullian ; 
 but it may be objected to these witnesses that they 
 were Africans and Westerns subject, therefore, to the 
 indirect influence of Eome and of Latin ideas. Let 
 us look, then, to counterbalance them, for evidence 
 emanating from the Eastern Church. We shall find it 
 in the person of St. Irenseus, who wrote earlier, at the 
 end of the second century, and pointed to the episcopal 
 succession as remounting without break to the Apostles 
 themselves. For the sake of brevity, to save the task 
 of enumerating that succession in every town, he paused 
 before the Church of Rome, with which, he said, on 
 account of its higher primacy, all churches, that is to 
 say the faithful, throughout the world, ought to agree. 
 These passages are incontestable, generally recognized 
 and admitted even by Neander and Planck, reducing 
 them to maintain that in the time of St. Cyprian, of 
 Tertullian, and of Irenasus, the primitive spirit of the 
 Gospel had been lost ; that the doctrine of St. Paul 
 was veiled by the Judaizing influence which was domi- 
 nant, and aimed at organizing the Church after the 
 fashion of the synagogue, with a spiritual chief corres- 
 ponding to the high priest of the latter. So that we 
 Christians have not only to reply to the objection as to 
 why God waited four thousand years before sending His 
 Son into the world, but to another which would ask 
 why the whole order of the newly-granted revelation 
 was disturbed at the end of the second century, and 
 
 * Et ad Petri cathedram atque ecclesiam principalem unde 
 unitas sacerdotalis exorta est." (St. Cypr. Ep. 55 ad Cor- 
 nelium.) 
 
 1 t 
 
10 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 its believers compelled painfully to grope amidst 
 impenetrable darkness for the witness of those few 
 years during which alone the true doctrine prevailed. 
 
 But these theories are wanting in foundation, and 
 science itself demolishes them continually. For the 
 Catacombs of Kome are pregnant with novel proofs of 
 the ancient orthodoxy, and show us, with that rugged 
 symbolism which characterized Christian art in the 
 early centuries, Peter in every place teaching doctrine, 
 and exercising the governing functions, and that not 
 only in the short time that his life comprised, but as 
 it were by anticipation in ages yet to come. We may 
 allude especially to a crystal disk, lately found in the 
 Catacombs, carved with the oft-repeated type of Moses 
 striking the rock, from which the life-giving waters of 
 doctrine flowed, whereat all the people might quench 
 their thirst. But the figure as Moses was vested, not 
 in the costume of the East, but in the traditional 
 robes of the Popes, and bore the name Petrus 
 doubtless representing Peter, the guide, like Moses, 
 of the people of God, who was drawing forth, by 
 his episcopal staff, the waters which were to refresh 
 believing humanity. 
 
 Thus, then, was the primitive constitution of the 
 Church established : it possessed an authority founded by 
 the intervention of the Almighty ; its origin was divine, 
 as was the consecration of its career; it was also visible, 
 and the order descended from the Apostles to the 
 bishops, from the bishops to their ministers. But yet 
 there was scope for liberty in its organization. The 
 Sovereign Pontiff could do no act without having pre- 
 viously consulted his brethren in the episcopate ; the 
 bishop referred to his brethren of the priesthood ; and 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 11 
 
 the priest was of no authority at the altar without the 
 concurrence of the entire Church that is, of the whole 
 body of the faithful, who supported him with their own 
 prayers, and joined with him the intercession which 
 he offered. 
 
 Before the close of the second century, in those re- 
 mote times, the hierarchical constitution of the primi- 
 tive Church contained, as it were, a sphere allotted to 
 God, and another the privilege of the Christian people, 
 principles of authority and of liberty, and all the 
 essential elements of a newly-ordered society. When 
 she was still menaced by persecution, and hunted down 
 with remorseless perseverance, there was but little 
 reason for her to leave traces of her passage, or of her 
 institutions, which, much as they would have enlight- 
 ened us in these days, would have then served but to 
 betray her faithful children ; but from that time forward, 
 in spite of difficulty and peril still subsisting, the ques- 
 tion we have been examining grows bright with an 
 unmistakable clearness, and the Papacy is seen exer- 
 cising its influence harmoniously with the process of 
 time and the increase of danger. 
 
 Such, then, is the nature of the historical development, 
 not of the principle, but in the exercise of that chief 
 authority; and in proof that from the first it asserted 
 itself with singular energy, we find Tertullian reprov- 
 ing a Pope, his contemporary, for having assumed the 
 title of Episcopus Episcoporum and Pontifex Maximus. 
 Strong expressions no doubt, which or at least the gift 
 of them have seldom been claimed by Popes of modern 
 days, for they have found a preferable title, and a more 
 powerful guarantee, in being styled the servant of the 
 servants of God. The considerable discussions which 
 
12 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 arose later in the East, as well as the West, threw a 
 light upon the subject which divested it of all ambi- 
 guity. The minds of the faithful were troubled by- 
 three great questions : the celebration of Easter, the 
 administration of Baptism by heretics, and the case of 
 Dionysius, the Alexandrian patriarch. As the Churches 
 of Asia persisted in keeping the Paschal-time on the 
 fourteenth day, which was the time chosen by the Jews, 
 instead of on the first Sunday after the anniversary 
 of the Resurrection, they fell under the interdict and 
 excommunication of Pope St. Victor. Later, when the 
 Africans, headed by St. Cyprian, decided that baptism 
 given by heretics was invalid, and must be renewed, 
 Rome maintained its validity if given with the ap- 
 pointed ceremonies, and, therefore, that it could not be 
 repeated, and excommunicated the African Churches, 
 who at once made their submission. And again, when 
 Dionysius of Alexandria, in combating the heresy of 
 Sabellius, let faljL the expression that Christ was not the 
 Son, but the work of God, the Bishop of Rome sum- 
 moned him to explain. Dionysius accordingly did so, 
 justified himself, and withdrew the statement. Thus 
 in three important questions, which nearly touched 
 dogma, the Papacy was seen intervening in the pleni- 
 tude of a supreme authority. In the midst of the 
 light of that brilliant fourth century, which beheld so 
 many great occupants of the episcopal seat in the 
 Eastern and the Western Church, we find the ponti- 
 fical authority recognized and proclaimed in far stronger 
 terms by St. Athanasius, the great patriarch of Alex- 
 andria, who declared that it was from the See of Peter 
 that the bishops who preceded him had derived alike their 
 orders and their doctrine, by St. Optatus of Milivium, 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 13 
 
 by St. Jerome, by St. Augustine in a word by the 
 Church's greatest minds. And the exercise of that 
 power continued simultaneously, as when the Popes 
 Julius I. and Damasus deposed or reinstated the 
 patriarchs of Alexandria, of Constantinople, or of 
 Antioch ; when the legates of the Holy See took the 
 chief place at Nicaea, and a.d. 347 at Sardica, where 
 they declared that all episcopal sentences might be 
 carried to the chief see of the Church % of Rome; 
 and when in the assembly of Ephesus the reunited 
 bishops of the East, at the zealous instance of St. 
 Cyril, who was supported by the authority of Pope 
 Celestine, pronounced their decision in the case of 
 Nestorius. 
 
 No one can doubt, therefore, that in the fourth cen- 
 tury the Papacy was already in possession of its entire 
 authority; nor can we see in this fact the work of the 
 Christianized emperors of Rome, who desired to grant 
 the half of their purple and of their dignity to the 
 bishops of the imperial city. Hardly, in truth, had 
 Constantine embraced the faith than he transferred the 
 seat of his empire to Byzantium, and the interest of 
 his successors lay in enhancing the power of the 
 patriarchs of Constantinople, in elevating their autho- 
 rity over the Church, thus making them docile and 
 obedient to themselves. For this they toiled, and in 
 this they succeeded ; but the emperors did not spend 
 their cunning policy on behalf of the Roman pontiff 
 rather if they extended their care to him it would have 
 been devoted to his humiliation. Nor was it any 
 genius on the part of the Popes which raised their 
 place so high, for not a single great man filled the 
 
14 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 See of Eome during the first four centuries : they were 
 but martyrs, perhaps wise as men, and capable as 
 administrators those obscure pontiffs who were des- 
 tined to found so marvellous a power. Even Julius I. 
 and Damasus were as nothing in comparison with 
 the brilliant intellects which formed the boast of Asia 
 and of Greece ; for there was hardly a see in the East 
 that had not been distinguished by some powerful 
 mind. Alexandria had held Athanasius and Cyril; 
 Antioch and Constantinople had seen their respective 
 chairs filled by St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. John 
 Chrysostom : and as authority was seated in the West, 
 genius certainly was the property of the East. 
 
 The first man of genius who appeared at Home to 
 don the insignia of the pontificate was St. Leo the 
 Great, who was especially destined to contribute to the 
 papal see no new principle of authority, but an exam- 
 ple of the novel action which it would be called upon 
 to exercise on the barbarous nations. On the 29th of 
 September, a.d. 440, the clergy of Eome assembled upon 
 the death of Sixtus III., and elected in his place Leo, 
 then archdeacon of the Koman Church. The confi- 
 dence placed in him by the late pontiff, and by the 
 emperors, had made it a worthy choice ; and at the very 
 moment of his election the new Pope was in Gaul, 
 occupied in reconciling Aetius and Albinus, who had 
 turned their swords against each other. Leo was al- 
 ready eminent for the zeal of his faith, and known as a 
 champion against heretics, as a patron of Christian 
 literature, and the friend of Prosper of Aquitaine and 
 of Cassian. He was a man of learning and culture, 
 and his eloquence had gained him the title of the 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 15 
 
 Christian Demosthenes. When called to assume the 
 time-honoured authority of the Eoman pontiffs, he 
 showed prompt appreciation of the majesty of the 
 office, and we still possess the discourse in which he 
 rendered thanks to the people, and which he renewed 
 year by year on the anniversary of his election. He 
 expressed therein his gratitude to the clergy and people 
 who had chosen him, modestly lamented the weight of 
 the burden laid upon his soul, but turned confidently 
 to God and the love of the Church, which would help 
 him to sustain it, and above all trusted in the presence 
 of Peter, who sat motionless and invisible behind his 
 unworthy successors. Throughout he developed a doc- 
 trine which was the same as that of St. Cyprian, and 
 without being bolder than the view of St. Athanasius, 
 was more explicitly stated. 
 
 " The Saviour accords to St. Peter a share in His 
 authority, and whatever He may will to grant in com- 
 mon with him to the other princes of the Church, it is 
 through Peter that He communicates it, and everything 
 which He does not refuse ; but Peter did not give up 
 the government of the Church with his life. As im- 
 mortal minister of the priesthood he is the foundation 
 of the whole Faith, and it is by him that the Church 
 says daily, Thou art the Christ, Son of the living God, 
 and who can doubt that his care extends to all the 
 Churches? for in the prince of the Apostles yet lives 
 that love of God and of men, which neither fetters, nor 
 prisons, nor the fury of the multitude, nor the menaces 
 of tyrants can affright, and that dauntless faith which 
 can perish neither in the conflict nor in the triumph. 
 And he speaks in the acts, in the judgments, and in 
 the prayers of his successor, in whom the episcopate 
 
16 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 recognizes with one accord not the pastor of one city, 
 but the primate of all the churches." * 
 
 Doctrine cannot be expressed in terms more formal, 
 nor can ignorance go to a further excess than in the 
 case of those who, not aware of the above statement, 
 think it possible to date the rise of the papal primacy 
 from Gregory the Great or even from Gregory VII. 
 
 St. Leo had reached the pontificate late in life, and 
 under the most disastrous circumstances for the Church 
 and the Empire ; and Providence in no way lightened 
 the difficulties of his mission. It was his task, more- 
 over, to relieve Christianity from the heresies which 
 were tearing it apart ; for as if that form of probation 
 was never to be complete, the efforts made by Arian- 
 ism and Manichaeism to wither its doctrine were repro- 
 duced under other forms in the middle of the fifth 
 century. The conflict was then restricted to one point, 
 the dogma of the Incarnation, and the person of 
 Christ. Since the Council of Nice, it had been granted 
 that His person was divine ; but the issue now arose on 
 the method of understanding that mystery. In order 
 that His mission might be accomplished, it was neces- 
 sary that He should be God-Man man, for otherwise 
 humanity could not expiate its offence in His person ; 
 God, that the mystery of redemption might be accom- 
 plished. But minds trembled at the depths of this 
 mystery, and divided into two factions, one of which 
 attacked the Divinity, the other cavilled at the Hu- 
 manity. About a.d. 426, Nestorius, the Patriarch of 
 Constantinople, declared in a sermon preached before 
 the assembled people that it was heretical to call the 
 
 * " Non solum hujus sedis prsesulem, sed ut omnium episco- 
 porum noverunt esse primatem." 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 17 
 
 mother of Christ mother of God, as there were two 
 distinct persons in Christ, one divine and one human ; 
 that it was a man in whom the Word resided, as God 
 might abide in a temple, without more union than 
 existed between the sanctuary and the Divinity which 
 inhabited it. It was but a transformation of the doc- 
 trine of Arius, an attempt to deny the presence of God 
 in Christ, and to sever what He had united by repre- 
 senting the person of the Saviour as that of a mere 
 sage, a man of higher enlightenment, of more intimate 
 connection with God than His fellows, but distinguished 
 in no other respect from the rest of mankind; and the 
 theory tended from its rationalistic character to a denial 
 of the supernatural, and thence in unforeseen conse- 
 quence to the destruction of the element of mystery in 
 the faith and in time of religion itself. 
 
 But the Eastern Church also was aroused by the 
 teachings of Nestorius : the council held at Ephesus in 
 a.d. 431, at the pressing instance of Pope Celestine, 
 condemned the heresiarch, and the contrary doctrine, 
 that one person and two natures dwelt in Christ, was 
 recognized and denned. A little later Eutyches, the 
 archimandrite of a great monastery at Constantinople, 
 pushing his zeal in the controversy against Nestorius 
 to excess, maintained that in Christ there had been 
 only one person and one nature, that the human had 
 been absorbed in the divine nature, and therefore He 
 had not possessed a body similar to ours, or flesh cor- 
 responding in substance to that of man, but that as 
 God Himself and alone had laid aside impassibility, and 
 suffered death upon the cross. By supposing a suffer- 
 ing and dying Divinity, Eutyches made a step towards 
 Paganism, and confounded the attributes of the Deity 
 
18 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 with those of humanity. This doctrine attracted the 
 notice of Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople, who 
 deposed its author, whereupon Eutyches, looking to the 
 spot which every Christian held to be the shrine of all 
 wisdom and justice, appealed to Eome, and for greater 
 surety referred the matter also to the Emperor, with whom 
 the influence of Eudoxia and Chrysaphus was exerted 
 in his behalf. Their interference procured his vindica- 
 tion at the robber- synod of Ephesus, held a.d. 449, 
 which acquitted him on every point. But these intrigues 
 failed to deceive the insight of Leo, who had fixed his 
 attention upon those erring theologians, worthy fore- 
 runners of the men who maintained a mad dispute as 
 to the nature of the light of Thabor at the moment in 
 which the Turks were pouring through the breaches of 
 the city of Constantine. The Pope had already inter- 
 vened. With broad wisdom and true Eoman good sense, 
 he had written a letter fixing the truth of the contested 
 proposition, and, dispersing with perseverance every ob- 
 stacle opposed by intrigue, obtained the convocation of 
 a great council at Chalcedon, a.d. 451. He did not 
 select a spot remote from the Court, but a city of Asia, 
 at the very gates of Constantinople, as he was without 
 dread of any opposition which might be offered, and 
 confident in the influence of his eloquence and talent. 
 And, in fact, the letter written by him on the occasion is 
 still considered as a worthy monument of ecclesiastical 
 antiquity; it took its place at once in the cycle of dogma 
 venerated by the Greek Church, and was translated into 
 the languages of the East. "We may give a fragment 
 here to show the wise moderation with which Leo the 
 Great kept to the true course. 
 
 " We could not conquer sin and death, had not He 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 19 
 
 who cannot be retained by death, nor touched by sin, 
 taken our nature upon Him, and made it His own. 
 He is God, as it is written, at the beginning was the 
 Word. He is Man, as it is written, the Word was 
 made Flesh." 
 
 This firm and luminous exposition of doctrine, which 
 ran with so scrupulous an exactitude within the limits 
 of the truth, so charmed and swayed the minds of the 
 Orientals assembled at Chalcedon, that in the second 
 session, having read the Creed of Nicaea, and the letters 
 of Cyril and Leo, they exclaimed, 
 
 "It is the faith of the Fathers; it is the faith of 
 the Apostles. We all believe thus : anathema to 
 those who do not. Peter has spoken by the mouth 
 of Leo. Leo has taught in accordance with truth 
 and piety. It is the faith of all Catholics ; we all 
 think thus." 
 
 Thus was the great controversy decided, and Leo had 
 made an act of faith in preserving to Christianity its 
 character of a religion, and not suffering it to dege- 
 nerate into Paganism, or a system of philosophy. He 
 had made an act of faith in guarding its mysteries, lest 
 it should degenerate into a theory in the hands of Nes- 
 torius, a myth with the treatment of Eutyches ; for, as 
 a theory, it would only appeal to reason, as a myth, 
 charm the imagination ; but, as a mystery, it engaged 
 belief, for faith plunges into the unknown as a just 
 man yields himself to the shades of death, knowing 
 that in its darkness he will glide into a purer light, and 
 find in dissolution another life. The strong mind of 
 Leo, too, knew that in the obscure region of the faith 
 he would receive the supernatural existence given as a 
 grace from God to those who believe ; for as the power 
 
20 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of persuasion is accorded as well to those who are 
 strong in trust as to those who reason and dispute, so 
 the confident assertion of that Koman priest silenced 
 for a season the sophists of the East, and the Church 
 retired into the long repose of thought, of reason, and 
 of faith. 
 
 At the same time, St. Leo saved civilization in the 
 West from the menaces of the barbarians. The era of 
 invasion had arrived, and small were the resources of 
 the Empire to offer resistance to the formidable hordes 
 which swarmed on the steppes of Asia, and penetrated 
 beyond the Ehine until the Gallic provinces, Spain, and 
 Africa, fell under their dominion. Amidst the con- 
 fusion, it was seen that the official resources of civi- 
 lization had, indeed, dwindled away : the Emperor 
 Valentinian III., a feeble and bad prince, remained 
 at Ravenna, under the tutelage of his mother, Placidia. 
 He was served by two eminent warriors, Aetius and 
 Boniface, but they were traitors capable of sacrificing 
 their master to their mutual detestation. Aetius was in 
 constant communication with the Huns ; Boniface had 
 sold Africa to the Vandals : the former killed the latter 
 with his own hand, and was in return poniarded by 
 Valentinian himself, who again was destined to fall 
 under the dagger of Petronius Maximus, whose wife 
 he had dishonoured. Maximus succeeded to his throne 
 and to his spouse, until the widow of Valentinian, on 
 hearing of the crime committed by her new husband, 
 called Genseric to her aid, and opened to him the gates 
 of Rome. This was the signal for the death of Maximus, 
 who was stoned in attempting to fly. He was succeeded 
 by Avitus, Majorian, and Severus, whose short-lived 
 reigns were lost at the approach of the day of doom 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 21 
 
 which was to sound, a.d. 476, for the Empire of the 
 West. 
 
 The enemies of civilization, the double peril from 
 which the world must be saved, were Attila, who, with 
 his following of three hundred thousand strong, struck 
 terror into Germany, Gaul, and the whole world, and 
 Genseric, master of Africa and the South, who was 
 feared even by the warriors of Attila. One day the 
 latter sent a message to the two Cassars of Eavenna 
 and Byzantium, " Make ready your palaces, for I am 
 resolved to visit you ; " then, with his multitudinous 
 hordes, he passed like a torrent over Gaul, lost the 
 battle of Chalons, but neither hope nor fury, and, 
 a.d. 452, crossed the Alps, and appeared before 
 Aquileia. Carried by assault, after a short resist- 
 ance, the town was given over to pillage and destruc- 
 tion, and Pavia and Milan soon shared its fate. The 
 terrified emperor took refuge in Rome, but found 
 therein neither generals nor legions ; his only resource 
 was the presence of a few counsellors, amongst the 
 eloquent of the Senate, and the stronger influence 
 which resided in the person of Leo. The Pope was 
 deputed, in concert with Trygetius, ex-prefect of the 
 city, and Avienus, a man of consular rank, to stop 
 Attila, as swords and legions were lacking, by his 
 eloquence, at the passage of the Mincio. The inter- 
 view which followed has had no historians, for it did 
 not accord with the nature or with the duty of Leo the 
 Great to recount his own victory, nor with the taste of 
 Trygetius and Avienus to avow their impotence. One 
 thing is certain, that after an interview with Leo, 
 Attila retreated across the Alps into Pannonia, where 
 he died in the following year. Different legends were 
 
22 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 woven around this fact : one especially related how that 
 Attila had told his officers that their retreat was caused 
 by the presence of another priest of severe mien, who 
 stood behind Leo as he spoke, and signified that a 
 further advance would be followed by his death. This 
 tale, free from criticism, though apparently without 
 authority, has traversed the ages as history, and 
 received an eternal consecration from the hands of 
 Eaphael in the chambers of the Vatican. And when, 
 in later times, another horde of barbarians, in the 
 shape of the German Lutherans, entered Eome in the 
 train of the Constable de Bourbon, and set fire to the 
 Stanze of Eaphael, in order to efface the triumphs of 
 the papacy, flame and smoke alike respected the victory 
 of Leo the Great. 
 
 Leo thus resisted the danger which proceeded from 
 the North, but that from the South was still imminent. 
 Genseric, half Christian, and half civilized, served by a 
 hierarchy of functionaries formed after the method of 
 the Empire, with a fleet under his orders which could 
 annihilate distance and avenge the old disgrace of 
 Hannibal, was more formidable than Attila. Sum- 
 moned by the widow of Valentinian, he set sail, and in 
 reply to the inquiry of his pilot, bade him direct the 
 prow " Towards those whom the wrath of God was 
 menacing" a menace which, on that day, was hurled 
 at Eome. Three years had elapsed since the retreat of 
 Attila, and frequently had Leo reminded the Eomans 
 of their deliverance, had bade them attribute it not to 
 the stars or to chance, but to the mercy of God and the 
 prayers of the saints, and had adjured them to cele- 
 brate the anniversary in the Christian churches rather 
 than in the circus or the amphitheatres. But his 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 23 
 
 words were in vain, and with the foolhardiness of 
 mariners on the morrow of one tempest, and the eve 
 of another, they had forgotten his warnings, till they 
 learnt that Grenseric had just landed at the head of a 
 mighty army, was ascending the Tiber, and approach- 
 ing the gates. Again did Leo go forth to the bar- 
 barians, and obtained that they should content them- 
 selves with mere plunder, but spare the lives and 
 respect the persons of the inhabitants ; whereupon 
 Genseric entered the city, and remained there a fort- 
 night, historians attesting that he pillaged the town, 
 but refrained from shedding a drop of blood. And 
 surely the second miracle . was greater than the first, 
 inasmuch as there was merit and skill, less in arresting 
 the course of the barbarous Attila, struck mayhap by 
 the majestic aspect of an aged Christian, than in 
 restraining for fourteen days and nights that Vandal 
 multitude, partly Arian, partly pagan, bound to the 
 Eoman population amongst whom they had fallen by 
 no bond of identical belief, and in keeping them faithful 
 to the letter of a treaty which had been signed on the 
 eve of their entrance into a defenceless town. 
 
 It was the intense patriotism inspiring Leo which 
 alone gave him such strength in the presence of the 
 barbarians. This quality distinguished him amongst 
 all the doctors of the West; it was the knot which 
 bound together antiquity and modern times, perpe- 
 tuating in the Christian mind the legitimate traditions 
 of old. The Pope felt the passions of Cincinnatus and 
 the Scipios within him, and though he took a different 
 view of Koman greatness, was as devoted as they were 
 to the glory of the city, in which he was citizen as well 
 as bishop. He shows us this feeling in that sermon 
 
24 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 for the festival of the Apostles Peter and Paul, in which 
 he claims a providential destiny for the city in which he 
 was established as servant of the servants of God. 
 
 "In order that Grace and Eedemption might spread 
 their effects throughout the world, the Divine Provi- 
 dence prepared the Koman Empire, which pushed to 
 such a point its development, that in its bosom all the 
 nations of the world were united, and seemed to touch 
 one another. For it was part of the plan of the Divine 
 economy that a great number of kingdoms should be 
 confounded in one empire, that preaching, finding ways 
 open to it, might speedily reach all the various nations 
 whom one city held subject to her laws." * 
 
 This was akin to the doctrine which we have marked 
 in the writings of Claudian, and shall find also in those 
 of Prudentius and Eutilius a view which will run on 
 from age to age, and cause Dante to repeat that it was 
 with regard to the Christian greatness of Home that 
 God established the Koman Empire. And thus the 
 Eoman idea did not vanish, but was revived, at the 
 presence of barbarism, to resist and combat it ; and Leo 
 the Great commenced the glorious strife which Gregory 
 the Great and his successors were to carry on until 
 barbarism, purified, regenerate, victorious over its own 
 nature, was definitely to yield in the person of Charle- 
 magne, and to reconstruct the Empire of the West. 
 
 We have now sufficiently proved, that whatever 
 power of the papacy there was, none of it was due to 
 the period of barbarism ; that it was constituted in the 
 full light of the ancient order, under the jealous eye of 
 Paganism, the discerning gaze of the Fathers of the 
 
 * St. Leonis Magni, Sermo primus in Natale Apost. Petri et 
 Pauli. 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHKISTENDOM. 25 
 
 Church, and raised in the centuries which were greatest 
 in Christian theology ; that it owed nothing to obscurity. 
 It was endowed with its incontestable influence that it 
 might resist the menaces of the barbarians, and begin a 
 struggle, which lulled but for a moment under Charle- 
 magne, to be waged again; for when Gregory VII. 
 inflicted upon Henry IV. that penance which has 
 gained him so much obloquy, he was but continuing 
 the work of Leo against Attila, and saving civilization 
 by driving the barbarian back to his proper domain. 
 
 But there was another power, namely, Monasticism, 
 which took its part in the preservation of literature 
 and civilization. We shall not have to rebut on its 
 behalf the charge of novelty, which has been made 
 against the papacy, for monasticism has been accused 
 of too early rather than of too late an origin ; of being 
 born amongst the hoary religions of the East, of being 
 penetrated with their spirit, and of being surreptitiously 
 introduced into the Church to bring to her habits which 
 were not her own, and, therefore, of having been less 
 an aid than a peril, far less a glory than a scandal to 
 the Faith. We have already said that Christianity did 
 not create, but transformed humanity. Man already 
 existed, but under the law of the flesh ; the family, but 
 under the law of the stronger ; the city, but subject to 
 the law of interest. Then Christianity reformed man 
 by the revival of his spiritual constituent ; the family, 
 by protecting the right of the weak; the city, by arous- 
 ing a public conscience. It found temples, sacrifices, 
 and priests in the old society, and these, according to 
 its maxim of regenerating everything, but abolishing 
 nothing, it preserved and purified. It acted likewise 
 as to monasticism, for every great religion has had 
 
 VOL. II. 2 
 
26 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 its monks; as India with her ascetics, who abandon 
 everything, bury their existence in deserts, with no 
 possession but a rag upon the shoulder, and a wooden 
 platter in the hand, supporting life on grains or roots 
 dug from the earth, and with huddled limbs spend 
 day and night in contemplating the soul of God 
 captive in their bodies, from which it is seeking 
 release. Side by side with these Brahmin ancho- 
 rites are the coenobites of Buddhism, for in Tartary, 
 China, and Japan there are no priests, but only monks, 
 who live under the law of their respective communities. 
 These Oriental institutions have but the spirit of the 
 Paganism which inspires them; they are founded on 
 a confusion of the principle of the creature and the 
 Creator; and as the Brahmin supposes himself the 
 lord of the universe, and that all men live by his 
 permission, his contempt for his fellows is supreme ; 
 whilst the anchorite thinks that the supreme good is 
 an absorption in the incomprehensible Buddha, so that 
 pride and egoism are of the essence of the Indian 
 asceticism. Monasticism appeared under purer forms 
 amongst the Hebrews in the last days of the old order, 
 for Judaism had its ascetics also in the Essenes and 
 the Therapeutse : the first, residing on the shores of the 
 Dead Sea, were devoted to a life of activity; the second 
 were placed at Alexandria, and gave themselves up to 
 contemplation and prayer ; while both classes practised 
 celibacy and a community of goods, but rejected the 
 use of slaves. The hard spirit of Judaism appeared 
 in their hatred of foreigners, and their absolute separa- 
 tion from the remainder of mankind, whom they con- 
 sidered so impure, that the approach of a man who was 
 not an Essene had to be followed by a purification ; 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 27 
 
 whilst the sinner amongst them could hope for no 
 reconciliation, his fault was irreparable, and the offer- 
 ing him the hand or breaking bread with him was 
 forbidden. These orders survived the foundation of 
 Christianity, and were known to Pliny the Elder, who 
 instanced them as being a people distinguished from 
 all others, " Living without women, abnegating all 
 pleasure, leading an existence of poverty under the 
 palm-trees .... thus, for thousands of centuries, 
 remarkable fact, has this everlasting nation subsisted, 
 and yet no child is born of its bosom, so profound is 
 its hatred for other modes of life."* 
 
 It is in this quarter, and amongst the TherapeutaB 
 especially, that we must look for the origin of Christian 
 monasticism. "Whilst imperilled society was still 
 capable of regeneration, and martyrdom was the con- 
 dition of the consolidation of the faith, the saints 
 remained in the world to die in the circus or on the 
 pile at the hour appointed by their God. As long as 
 persecution lasted, the men were martyrs who would 
 have been anchorites, and it was not till the moment 
 which saw the dissolution of the Koman society that a 
 new order was organized to replace it, and the bands 
 were disciplined who, when Kome had fallen, were to 
 assume her task and reconquer the universe. St. Paul, 
 the first hermit, appeared a.d. 251. A little later he 
 was followed by St. Anthony, who formed a Rule, and 
 was succeeded by St. Pacomius, who assembled his 
 disciples into regular communities, governed by a 
 fixed law. Under this new rule they spread rapidly 
 over the entire East, and at length St. Basil became 
 the author of the ordinance which was soon vene- 
 * Plin. Maj. Hist Nat. lib. v. cap. xv. (s. xvii.) 
 
 
 
528 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 rated and adopted by all the Oriental monasteries. 
 Suspicious of a solitary existence, he reduced the scat- 
 tered ascetics to a life in community, and showed his 
 preference for coenobites rather than anchorites. "For," 
 as he said to a hermit, " whose feet wilt thou wash, 
 whom wilt thou serye, how canst thou be the last, if 
 thou art alone ?" 
 
 We must now mark the adoption by the West of that 
 monastic life which already flourished in the Eastern 
 Churches. We may probably see the precise period 
 of the propagation in the Latin Church of the coenobitic 
 life, and assign to it a more remote date than that 
 usually given at the foundation of Liguge. For it was 
 St. Athanasius, the friend and biographer of the 
 hermit St. Anthony, who brought with him into the 
 West the passion of imitating his life. In examining 
 the journeys of Athanasius to the West more closely, 
 we find that, exiled by Constantine, he came first to 
 Treves, a.d. 336, lived there for some time, and doubt- 
 less then found leisure for writing his life of Anthony, 
 whilst he saw around him evidence of the superior merit 
 of the coenobitic life, for monasteries had early been 
 founded at Treves which retained the life of St. 
 Anthony as their law and constitution. We have 
 already spoken of the tale, related by St. Augustine, in 
 his "Confessions," as making so deep an impression 
 on his mind, of the two officers of the Court, who, 
 whilst walking apart from their comrades in the 
 suburbs of Treves, came to a house tenanted by monks. 
 Entering, they perceived a book upon the table : it 
 was the "Life of St. Anthony." One of them began 
 to read it, and at the tale of that pure life of the 
 desert, spent in communion with God, and under a 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 29 
 
 cloudless sky, the poor officer, lacerated, doubtless, by 
 the injustice of the Court, was profoundly touched, 
 and, turning to his friend, remarked : 
 
 m Whither does all our toil lead us ? What end are 
 we pursuing? What hope have we except that of 
 becoming the friends of the Emperor? And what 
 danger we are incurring ! For it is our main duty to 
 become the friends of God, and from to-day.' He 
 began to read again, and his soul was transformed, 
 and his mind despoiled itself of the world. He read, 
 and the waves of his heart rolled tumultuously. He 
 trembled a moment, judged, decided, and already 
 subdued, said to his friend, ' It is over. I give up my 
 prospects, and resolve to serve God here and at once.' 
 His friend imitated his example, and when their 
 comrades rejoined them, and had learnt their decision, 
 they left them in tears, but weeping for themselves."* 
 
 This history shows the sudden power and irresistible 
 fascination by which the enthusiasm for a solitary life 
 was propagated in the heart of that dissipated, mourn- 
 ful, and worn-out society of the West, at the doors of 
 which the barbarians were already demanding admit- 
 tance. The companion of that officer followed his 
 friend into the same monastery, and thus arose the 
 coenobitic life in the Western Church. We need not 
 relate how St. Jerome formed and disciplined from his 
 retreat at Bethlehem the colonies of monks who soon 
 spread over the whole of Italy, nor how St. Augustine, 
 charmed by the Pythagoraean idea of a life in common, 
 which had been a part of the dreams with his friends 
 at Milan in former days, founded monasteries when 
 raised to the see of Hippo, and prescribed to them rules 
 * August. Confess, lib. viii. cap. vi. 
 
30 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 which bore the impress of the wisdom and tact which 
 characterized his genius. Gaul, however, was the 
 peculiar land of the ccenobitic life ; since St. Martin, 
 who had been educated in a monastery at Milan, 
 founded a similar institution at Liguge, near Poitiers ; 
 and a little later the great house of Marmoutiers, near 
 Tours, where he lived as bishop of the neighbouring 
 town, with some eighty monks, and whence he was 
 borne to his resting-place with an escort of more than 
 two thousand. We see without surprise the founda- 
 tion, in 410, of the great abbey of Lerins, which was to 
 produce so many illustrious names ; of another, also, 
 by St. Victor, at Marseilles, which received from Cas- 
 sian the traditions of the " Thebaid;" and again in the 
 Island of Barba, near Lyons ; whilst Vitrucius peopled 
 with his religious the sandbanks of Flanders. So, from 
 the opening of the fifth century, we see that the fron- 
 tiers which the warriors of Kome had abandoned 
 were guarded by colonies of different soldiery, by 
 the cohorts of another Rome, who would stop the 
 course of the barbarians, would fix them on the soil 
 they had gained, and thus advance far towards the work 
 of their civilization. We may state, in conclusion, the 
 three points of difference between Monasticism and the 
 Roman world, which gave it power over that old society, 
 poverty in the midst of a world which was dying in its 
 own opulence, chastity in a world which was expiring 
 in orgies, obedience in a world that disorder was decom- 
 posing. But between Christian and Indian asceticism 
 lay a deeper difference. Though the pagan hermits 
 were chaste, poor, and submissive, they lacked the 
 labour and prayer of their Christian followers. The 
 ascetics of India spurned work and remained motion- 
 
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 31 
 
 less, lest the occupation of their hands should trouble 
 their contemplation, but the recluses of Christendom 
 laboured either manually or mentally. The solitudes 
 of the " Thebaid " had their smiths, carpenters, curriers, 
 and even shipbuilders, whilst mental toil was dominant 
 in the monasteries of the West. St. Augustine estab- 
 lished it in the convents of Africa ; it flourished at 
 Liguge, Lerins, and elsewhere ; and literature found in 
 the cloister its secret asylum. To labour perseveringly, 
 not for self, nor even for wife or children, but for a com- 
 munity, was no light demand upon human nature, and 
 the founders of the spiritual life had only called for 
 this sacrifice and abnegation of leisure in the name of 
 charity. They had never imagined that men could be 
 united in a perpetual restraint, in a companionship 
 which had mortification and forgetfulness of self as 
 its essence, in the name of a pride which ambitioned 
 ascendancy, or of a sensualism which craved for a 
 gratification. To achieve this wonderful result a degree 
 of self-denial was necessary : it was the work of the 
 humility and charity which Christians laboured to 
 attain through prayer. The sages of Paganism and 
 the anchorites of India did not pray. Why should 
 they do so, in their life of contemplation and absorp- 
 tion, having the Deity within them, or being gods them- 
 selves ? But the motive to prayer with the recluse of 
 Christianity was, that he recognized a principle which 
 was greater and stronger than himself ; his devotion 
 was prompted by love, by aspirations to a better life, 
 and to God Himself. He did not despise his fellow- 
 men, but loved them with passionate effusion. Far 
 from forgetting his aged father or weeping mother at 
 the moment of his leaving them, or from becoming 
 
32 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 generally dead to humanity, the Christian monk re- 
 membered his parents and his fellow-men by day and 
 by night, in the moment of silent contemplation, or of 
 loving communion with the Almighty, and his prayers 
 were a method of doing service to mankind, and of co- 
 operating in the work which aimed at purifying and 
 sanctifying the Church. 
 
33 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 
 
 It was our task to look for the available forces of the 
 Christian society in the presence of that invasion whose 
 mutterings were, so to speak, already perceived ; to 
 know what institutions were ready to receive the first 
 onslaught of barbarism, to withstand it from the first, 
 and finally to overcome it. Amongst these, two merited 
 a nearer study, owing to the great destiny which follow- 
 ing ages had in store for them. We have examined 
 into the origin of the Papacy and of Monasticism, 
 and found that the first arose out of the constitution 
 of Christianity, and was the type of its visible unity ; 
 we have seen it increase in spite of danger, and as 
 occasion called, until it exercised, in the person of 
 Leo the Great, prerogatives as full as any that might 
 be claimed by Gregory the Great or Gregory VII., and 
 proved that the second was a phenomenon necessary 
 to all great religions ; and seen how, following the 
 example of the prophetic colleges, the Essenes, and the 
 Therapeutae, the great monastic colonies arose which 
 were to replace the faltering legions on the imperial 
 frontier, and increase so rapidly as to stud the banks of 
 every river ; and how the writings of St. Jerome exhaled 
 that aroma of the desert which was destined to attract 
 countless anchorites towards a solitary life, and drive 
 St. Columba into the mountains of the Vosges or the 
 
 2 t 
 
34 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 forests of Switzerland. Thus the two institutions 
 which have been represented as the work of the bar- 
 barians, the inevitable but irregular result of a period 
 of trouble and of intellectual darkness, preceded the 
 shadows which it was their mission to illumine. 
 
 It remains to examine the ecclesiastical legislation in 
 its totality, in the cases especially of the new organi- 
 zation of the family by Christian marriage, of property 
 by the laws relating to Church property, of justice by 
 the procedure in the episcopal courts, and the peni- 
 tential system of the Church, which embraced in some 
 way all the degrees of human morality. But as time 
 and space would be wanting for so vast an undertaking, 
 we must confine ourselves to marking the origin of the 
 Canon Law, that continuation in a purified form of the 
 Roman traditions. And as the old temples remained 
 standing, and Latin literature assisted to educate the 
 generations of Christians who "were thronging into the 
 Church, so also was the ancient legislation most effec- 
 tually preserved in the canonical institutions, which 
 seemed at first sight to veil and smother it. We must 
 study in the decrees of councils, or the mandates of 
 the series of Popes who had followed the martyrs, all 
 that survived of the traditional legislation of their 
 persecutors, and how Ulpian, the great enemy of 
 Christianity, was assured of living to posterity at the 
 moment when the Church, by an amnesty, caused 
 him to enter her fold, and occupy the highest place 
 amongst her jurisconsults. 
 
 Thus the new institutions were full of power, but 
 side by side with law was the prevailing state of man- 
 ners. Society is seated less upon the large, solid, and 
 perceptible bases called law, than on those other foun- 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 35 
 
 dations, hidden from the scope of science, which are 
 called manners. Pagan Rome had mighty institutions 
 also, but the progress of her legislation was the result 
 of the decay of her morality. Did, then, the Christian 
 society of the fifth century present the same contrast, 
 or did progressive morality accompany the course of 
 legislation ? We may stop at two points of superiority 
 in Christian manners, and dwell on the dignity of the 
 man, and his respect for woman. The barbarians have 
 been credited with the introduction of these two sen- 
 timents into modern civilization, and, in truth, those 
 wandering heroes of the battle and the chase, who 
 scorned to yield to any visible authority, and trusted in 
 nothing but their bows and arrows, did bring to the 
 new order of things with that haughty humour which 
 trampled under foot for long any legislative attempt to 
 render them amenable to civil servitude the feelings 
 of independence, of honour, and of personal invio- 
 lability. And those savage men also recognized a 
 certain divine quality in women ; they sought oracles 
 from them before the battle, came to them for the, 
 healing of their wounds when the conflict was past, 
 and knelt before the soothsaying Velleda. Thus they 
 were rich in a sentiment which was unknown to Roman 
 society, which was to adorn the Middle Age and 
 blossom into chivalry. Such, then, were the innovations 
 of the barbarians upon the old world ; but it remains 
 to be seen whether they had not been forestalled 
 whether their contribution of these two generous in- 
 stincts, which elevated the man, and surrounded the 
 woman with veneration, had not been anticipated by 
 a power which had already placed them in the category 
 of virtues. 
 
36 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 The chief, though deep-lying and secret, support of 
 modern society, lies in the noble feeling termed honour, 
 which is synonymous with the independence and invio- 
 lability of the human conscience, in its superiority to 
 all tyranny and external force in a word, the feeling 
 of personal dignity which, be it understood, antiquity, 
 with all its civic virtues, had suppressed. For, as we 
 know, the citizen was nothing in the presence of the 
 state ; conscience was silent before law ; the individual 
 had no rights distinct from those of the Common- 
 wealth. This was the general rule, and whilst under 
 the old order the dignity of the man was crushed by 
 the majesty of his country, humanity was debased in 
 the three classes of slaves, the working men, and the 
 poor, who formed its great majority. 
 
 We know what legislation had effected for the slave ; 
 but we hardly realize what was the practical lot of that 
 human creature, or rather chattel, which was used either 
 as a victim of infamous passions, or, as by Cleopatra, to 
 try the effect of poisons, or, as by Asinius Pollio, as food 
 for lampreys. Yet humanity had never quite lost its 
 rights, and Seneca had dared to give utterance some- 
 where to the rash opinion that slaves might be men 
 like himself. He had twenty thousand slaves of his 
 own, and his stoicism did not issue in the emancipation 
 of one. Moreover, his philosophy had passed into the 
 writings of the Koman jurisconsults, and yet they 
 laboured to diminish the number of manumissions as 
 being detrimental to the public security. A moiety of 
 the Roman population were held in a servitude wither- 
 ing alike to both mind and body. It was a received 
 proverb that Jupiter deprived those whose liberty was 
 forfeit of a half of their intelligence, and the slaves 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 37 
 
 believed themselves to have been fated to their eternal 
 condemnation, under the weight of which they were 
 crushed ; and this resulted in the frenzied passion and 
 gross profligacy to which they were abandoned, and 
 which Latin comedy has so freely treated. Plautus 
 himself had once turned the wheel as a slave, and we 
 can therefore receive his evidence as to the deep corrup- 
 tion of the servile condition. 
 
 Christianity found matters thus, and has often 
 been reproached with not immediately liberating the 
 slaves ; but it had two reasons for its course in the 
 first place, its horror for violence and bloodshed, 
 and because the Christ who died upon the Cross had 
 not pointed to the example of Spartacus secondly, 
 because the slave was not yet capable of liberty, 
 until he had been made a man, with a reconstituted 
 personality, restored self-respect, and a reawakened 
 conscience. This was the work begun by Christ in 
 taking the form of a servant and dying upon the 
 Cross, and every one, after His example, in becoming 
 a Christian, entered upon a voluntary servitude, Qui 
 liber vocatus est, servus est Christi. Every martyr who 
 died was truly and legally a slave servi poena, and so 
 from the earliest time the fetters which had been red- 
 dened with the blood of Calvary, were purified and 
 newly consecrated in that of the martyrs, and slaves 
 came spontaneously to steep their irons therein, and 
 disputed with their Christian masters the honour of 
 dying for the inviolability of conscience. Amongst 
 the martyred bands who braved death from the earliest 
 days of the faith, the fallen and accursed section of 
 humanity was amply represented. We have St. Blan- 
 dina at Lyons, St. Felicita in Africa, and at Alex- 
 
38 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 andria St. Potamiaena, who, when summoned by her 
 judge to respond to the passions of her master, ex- 
 claimed, " God forbid that I should ever find a judge 
 so wicked as to constrain me to yield to the lust of my 
 master." From that time forward the conscience was 
 reorganized, the person of man restored, and the slave 
 had bent under a voluntary service. Henceforth the 
 peril was rather that he should despise his master than 
 himself; and we find St. Ignatius exhorting the slaves 
 not to scorn their owners, nor to suffer themselves to 
 be carried away by a pride in their purified yoke. A 
 little later St. Chrysostom replied to those who inquired 
 why Christianity had not enfranchised all slaves at a 
 blow : 
 
 " It is that you may learn the excellence of liberty. 
 For as it was a greater work to preserve the three 
 children whilst they remained in the furnace, so there 
 is less greatness exhibited in the suppression of slavery 
 than in showing forth liberty even in fetters."* 
 
 Thus did the enfranchisement of humanity com- 
 mence, as has ever been the method of Christianity, 
 by action upon the soul, in giving to the slave his 
 moral liberty, and preparing the way for this long 
 laborious struggle for civil freedom ; for in proportion 
 as the slave rose in his own, so also did he gain the 
 esteem of his master. The dogma of the native equality 
 of all souls appeared ; slavery appeared rooted, not in 
 nature, but in sin ; and sin had been vanquished by 
 Redemption. No Christian could believe that he 
 possessed in his slave a being of an inferior nature, 
 upon which he had every right, even to that of life and 
 death ; and St. Augustine declared that no Christian 
 * St. Johann. Chrysos. in ep. i. ad Cor. homil. 19. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 39 
 
 master could own a slave by the same title as he owned 
 a horse, and that, being man himself, he was bound to 
 love his man as himself; and another doctor, com- 
 menting on the words which gave Noah dominion over 
 the animals, insisted that in giving man the power 
 of terrifying and coercing the beasts of the earth, God 
 refused to grant it over his fellows. Slavery then sub- 
 sisted amongst Christians, but as absolute power over 
 the person was for ever abolished, it lost the half of its 
 rigour, and the slave recovered a right in many things 
 which were held sacred. He had rights in the family, 
 to life, honour, and repose. The " Apostolical Con- 
 stitution," an apocryphal work, but which certainly 
 originated no later than the fifth century, decided that 
 the slave might rest on Sunday in memory of the 
 Kedemption, and also on Saturday in memory of the 
 Creation. The Church was skilful in finding pretexts 
 for granting a respite to the poor people, in favour of 
 whom Christ had said, " Come, all ye that labour, and 
 I will give you rest." The master began, in sight of 
 the Face which still glowed with the aureola of the 
 crown of thorns, to recognize in the wretch whom once 
 he had trampled under foot the image of his Lord. 
 St. Paulinus, on thanking Sulpicius Severus for the 
 gift of a young slave, took himself to task for having 
 accepted the services of a young man in whom he 
 detected a loftiness of soul. 
 
 " He has served me, an'd been my slave : woe to me 
 who have permitted it, that he who has never been the 
 slave of sin should serve a sinner. And I, unworthy 
 that I am, have suffered a servant of righteousness to 
 be my servant. Every day he washed my feet, and 
 had I permitted it would have cleansed my sandals, 
 
40 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUBY. 
 
 ardent to render every service to the body, that he might 
 gain dominion over the soul. It is Jesus Christ Him- 
 self whom I venerate in the youth, for every faithful 
 soul cometh from God, and every one who is humble of 
 heart proceeds from the very heart of Christ."* 
 
 It is obvious that when respect for the individual 
 was thus established, the very foundations of slavery 
 were sapped ; and in truth Christianity had but few 
 blows to deal in order to level successively the walls of 
 the half-ruined edifice. At first entire categories of 
 slaves, as for instance those of the theatre, were sup- 
 pressed. Before they were closed for ever, the gates of 
 the pagan theatres had to open wide to give forth the 
 crowds attached to their service, the numberless dancers 
 and mimes, and the rest who laboured under the most 
 shameful servitude that of pleasure. Troops of 
 gladiators also were enfranchised from slavery and 
 slaughter, and although certain Christians still publicly 
 paraded their following of slaves with insolence, it was 
 at the cost of a determined opposition on the part of 
 their faith ; whilst St. John Chrysostom waited for 
 them on the days of festival in the Basilica of Constan- 
 tinople, and with scornful brow and outstretched hands 
 demanded an account of their harshness, their prodi- 
 gality, and their sloth. " Wherefore so many slaves ? 
 One master should be content with one servant. Nay, 
 more, one servant should suffice for two or three 
 masters; and if that seems' a hard doctrine, think of 
 those who have none." t 
 
 He finally granted two slaves to each, but he could 
 not tolerate the rich men who used to walk in the 
 
 * St. Paulin. ep. xxiii. ad Severum. 
 
 t St. Johann. Ckrysos. in ep. i. ad Cor. homil. 40. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 41 
 
 public places and frequent the baths, driving men in 
 herds before them like shepherds ; and if it was ob- 
 jected to him that it was done in order to nourish a 
 number of unfortunates who would die of hunger if 
 they did not win their bread thus, would reply, "If 
 you wish to act out of charity, you should teach them a 
 trade and render them independent, and that is what 
 you refuse to do. I know well," he added, "that my 
 teaching is at your expense, but I am doing my duty 
 and shall not cease to speak." His words had other re- 
 sults than the mere accomplishment of duty, and recon- 
 quered a right for oppressed humanity, so that every 
 day beheld the manumissions multiplied which Con- 
 stantine had authorized on the festival days of the 
 Church ; and the proper joyfulness seemed impossible 
 if at the end of the service the hymn for the day was 
 not shouted by a crowd of men as they shook off their 
 fetters and cast them far away. 
 
 Thus the number of emancipations, once held so 
 dangerous to the state, was ceaselessly enlarged. But 
 now the Eomans were bound to accustom themselves to 
 enfranchise the captive barbarians if they wished to be 
 liberated in their turn. For the barbarians had crept 
 through all the chinks of the Empire, and were carrying 
 away women and children in troops, and selling the 
 senators themselves in the market-places. Christendom 
 roused itself at this new phase of slavery, and threw 
 its energy into the work of liberation, whilst the bishops, 
 treated formerly as madmen when they spoke of the 
 manumission of slaves, begged from the pulpit that 
 subscriptions should be opened and collections made 
 for the enfranchisement of the senators and patricians, 
 who were now the captives of some Sueve or Vandal. 
 
42 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 It was on such an occasion St. Ambrose uttered the 
 admirable words in which he advocated the sale of the 
 sacred vessels of the Church for the sake of these 
 prisoners, "for," he said, "the redemption of captives 
 is an ornament to the mysteries." 
 
 Such are the texts, and time would fail if more were 
 cited, which must be given in reply to the questionings 
 as to where and when Christianity first formally 
 preached the release of slaves. We may also point to 
 St. Cyprian, who found time during persecution, when 
 tracked by the satellites of the proconsul, to collect 
 money from the faithful, not for himself or his priests, 
 but for some man who had been captured on the 
 frontier by wandering Arabs ; and later to St. Gregory 
 the Great, freeing the slaves of his wide domains, and 
 giving the following motive for his procedure : 
 
 " Since our Eedeemer, the author of the entire 
 creation, willed to take the flesh of a man that the 
 power of His Divinity might break the chain of our 
 servitude, and restore our primitive liberty, it is a 
 wholesome act to pity the men whom He made free, 
 but whom the law of nations has reduced to slavery, 
 and to render them, by the benefit of manumission, to 
 the liberty for which they were born." * 
 
 These maxims were essential to the great labour of 
 the Middle Age for the emancipation of classes, that 
 transformation of slaves into serfs, of serfs into coloni, 
 of coloni into proprietors, of proprietors into the middle 
 class, of the latter into that third estate which was 
 destined one day to dominate the modern nations. 
 These principles animated the illustrious St. Eloi, when 
 
 * Decret. Grat. p. 11, caus. xii. qusest. 2; c, M. Wallon, His- 
 toire de l'Esclavage, torn. iii. p. 382. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 43 
 
 escaping from the palace of the Merovingian Kings, whose 
 servant and minister he was, he waited in the public 
 place, impatient for the time of sale of the captives, then 
 bought them and gave them immediate liberty in the 
 Basilica, declaring them freemen at the feet of the 
 Saviour. Later, Snaragdus, writing to King Louis 
 le Debonnaire, made it a case of conscience that he 
 should not suffer slaves to remain on his own domain, 
 and should abolish slavery, by edict, from the land of 
 every Christian. The efforts made for emancipation 
 will be felt in the Christian society to the end ; and 
 when, in the thirteenth century, the land of France had 
 no more slaves to set free, it was customary on great 
 festivals to recall these solemn acts of enfranchisement 
 by loosing crowds of caged pigeons in the churches, 
 that captivity might be ended, and prisoners delivered 
 still in honour of the Kedeemer. 
 
 We must secondly consider what Christianity effected 
 for the working men. Nothing can be more inimical to 
 slavery than free labour, and so antiquity, as it sup- 
 ported the former; trampled upon the latter, and saluted 
 it with the most opprobrious epithets. Even Cicero, 
 that man of ability and common sense, to whom men 
 of our own day so much love to recur, said somewhere 
 that there could be nothing liberal in manual labour 
 that commerce, if transacted in a small way, should be 
 considered sordid ; if of vast and opulent character, 
 could not be sufficiently blamed.* Brutus, however, 
 lent money, but at such terrible usury that all Greece, 
 in some manner, was his debtor. Atticus also lent at 
 a high risk, and realized enormous profits. Seneca had 
 successively involved his debtors in such cunningly 
 * De Officiis, lib. i. cap. 42. 
 
44 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 calculated toils that Britain, unable to free herself, and 
 stung by the exactions of the imperial proconsul, rose 
 in a revolt which was nearly proving fatal, and cost the 
 lives of eighty thousand Eomans. 
 
 Under burdens of this nature free labour was crip- 
 pled, and the result of this usury was the nexi and 
 other penalties which menaced the insolvent debtor. 
 For under the law of the Twelve Tables the man who 
 failed to satisfy his creditor was given over into his 
 hands to be sold as a slave, or might be cut into as 
 many pieces as there were creditors, that each might 
 claim his share. In the time of Seneca, although it 
 was no longer customary to cut him into morsels, the 
 insolvent was obliged to sell his children in public 
 auction ; and till the time of Constantine this mode of 
 discharging debts was in force. But if free labour was 
 thus treated by antiquity, Christianity rehabilitated it, 
 following the example of Christ and His Apostles, espe- 
 cially St. Paul, who chose manual labour, and was a 
 partner with the Jew Aquila, at Corinth, in the trade 
 of tent-making, rather than eat bread which had not 
 been won by the sweat of the brow. The early Chris- 
 tians were generally working men, and Celsus professed 
 great pity for "those woolcarders, fullers, and shoe- 
 makers, a coarse and ignorant rabble, who kept silence 
 before the aged and the heads of families, but secretly 
 perverted women and children into a belief in their 
 mysteries;" yet the Church was proud of that mob of 
 her first children for whom he could not evince a 
 sufficiently profound contempt, and even boasted of 
 having taught some true philosophy to shoemakers, to 
 cowherds, and labourers. Moreover, the labour which 
 was elevated by faith and doctrine, was enhanced still 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 45 
 
 more by the sacred objects to which it was applied. 
 Below the priests and deacons, but respected by all, was 
 placed the order of diggers (fossores), so called from 
 their work in providing beneath the quarries of puz- 
 zolane which old Eome had dug in the hidden recesses 
 of the Catacombs, the retreats which sheltered the 
 Christian community. They laboured with pickaxe and 
 lantern, as pioneers of the new society, in clearing the 
 way along which we are marching now, and were com- 
 prised in the ecclesiastical hierarchy as being the first 
 order among the inferior clergy, " charged after the 
 example of Tobias with the task of burying the dead, 
 that their attention to things visible might lead their 
 thoughts to those which are invisible ;" and their con- 
 dition is attested by numerous inscriptions and paintings 
 which show us the fossor, with the instruments of his 
 humble calling.* Christianity, therefore, regenerated 
 labour by the force of example ; and as it was not suffi- 
 cient to honour toil, it reorganized it by adding an 
 unselfish element, and teaching men to work in common 
 one for another. This aim appeared in the monastic 
 communities, and from the first St. Basil prescribed 
 manual labour to his monks, and bade them, " if 
 fasting made labour impossible, to live more generously, 
 as being the soldiers of Christ." St. Augustine, too, 
 replied in his work, "De Origine Monachorum," to those 
 haughty monks who, once in the cloister, held themselves 
 discharged from the burdens imposed upon the first 
 man, and argued that Christ had bade them to act like 
 the birds of the air, which toiled not, or the lilies of the 
 field, which did not spin, and yet were not less gloriously 
 
 * Dion Cassius, lib. xii. 2 ; cf. Tacitus, Aimales, xiii. 42. 
 
46 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 clothed than Solomon himself, * by pointing ont the 
 dignity and majesty of manual work, how supremely 
 excellent it was, in that it did not absorb the whole 
 being, but left scope for meditation. " True that the 
 birds do not sow nor reap," said he, " but as they do 
 not possess your palaces, your granaries, your servants, 
 why should you have them ? " He added that if a 
 multitude of slaves should come and demand admis- 
 sion to the monastery, its doors should be opened wide 
 to them, for such hardy people assured prosperity to a 
 Christian community, but that the men who entered 
 upon the monastic life must not think that they were 
 thus to escape their daily and accustomed toil, nor that 
 peasants were to look for a life f delicacy and repose 
 in the places in which senators buried themselves, that 
 they might labour with their hands. 
 
 It was thus, then, that labour was organized in the 
 early days of the Church. Roman antiquity had 
 established industrial institutions; corporations (col- 
 legia), formed from the association of the working 
 class ; and Roman legislation bore plentiful witness to 
 the existence of numbers of these societies for the 
 use of workmen in wood, in marble, gold, iron, and 
 wool. Their colleges appeared early to be in possession 
 of common property with their ordo, their curies and 
 especial magistrates, who were named duumviri, but 
 they were feeble, crushed by the dominant legisla- 
 tion, oppressed by heavy imposts, and corroded by the 
 corruptions of Paganism. Many of these institutions 
 which have been so immoderately belauded were, in 
 fact, only constituted for the purpose of mutual feast- 
 ing and pleasure-seeking upon fixed days, so lofty was 
 * Matt. vi. 28, 29. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 47 
 
 the essential idea of the corporations of labour in the 
 times of heathenism. But Christianity undertook and 
 succeeded in the task of regenerating them by an 
 infusion of novel principles ; and when the Empire 
 succumbed the collegia and scholce multiplied. "War- 
 like corporations rose speedily in Kome, in Kavenna, 
 and all the cities of the Exarchate and the Pentapolis, 
 broke the power of the Eastern emperors, saved the 
 Papacy from the perils which menaced it at the com- 
 mencement of the eighth century, and paved the way 
 for those powerful commonwealths which were destined 
 to so glorious a career. And the devotion which 
 impelled their members to die in battle when the 
 aggressions of Germany had to be resisted and the 
 Guelph liberties, which were also the liberties of religion, 
 had to be defended, was a true sign that Christianity 
 was on their side, and a better idea than that of enjoy- 
 ment was inspiring their deliberations ; whilst in the 
 passion of the Florentine and the other Italian cor- 
 porations for the arts and for poetry, for all that is 
 lovely and elevating, we may recognize at a later date 
 the mark of the Christian and civilizing mission with 
 which they were stamped for it was by the hands of 
 associated workmen that the Church of San Michele 
 was reared at Florence, to be a noble monument of 
 republican greatness. 
 
 In the third place, we must treat of poverty. Under 
 the old order the poor had been trampled on consist- 
 ently with the genius of an antiquity which regarded 
 them as stricken with the reprobation of God, and 
 even in the time of St. Ambrose Pagans and bad 
 Christians were accustomed to say, " "We care not to 
 give to people whom God must have cursed, since He 
 
48 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 has left them in sorrow and want." Poverty had first 
 to be treated as honourable, and this was effected by 
 giving to the poor the first place in the Church and in 
 the Christian community; and St. John Chrysostom 
 said of them : "As fountains flow near the place of 
 prayer that the hands that are about to be raised to 
 heaven may be washed, so were the poor placed by our 
 fathers near to the door of the Church, that our hands 
 might be consecrated by benevolence before they are 
 raised to God." * 
 
 Thus the poor were not only respected but necessary 
 to Christendom, and this explains the saying so often 
 misunderstood and so often perverted : " There always 
 will be poor men." No word has been said as to the 
 perpetuity of the rich, but poverty must always exist 
 in voluntary if not compulsory form, the reason of the 
 institutions in which every member abnegates his own 
 possessions, and vows himself to destitution ; and so 
 poverty has taken its proper rank in the divine economy, 
 and become the mainspring of Christian society. Yet this 
 was not enough, and want must also be succoured and 
 consoled. Antiquity could boast of a system of public 
 almsgiving, and could point to the corn laws of Caesar, 
 and the imperial largesses. Aurelian had had kindly 
 feelings towards the people,! and desired that the dis- 
 tributions should be daily made to the poor of a loaf 
 of bread of two pounds weight, of lard and of wine, 
 
 * St. Johann. Chrysos. De Verbis Apost. ; habentes eundem 
 spiritum, serm. iii. c. 2. 
 
 f Christianity first created the people. It had not existed at 
 Athens or Rome, or rather there had been three distinct peoples, 
 the citizens, foreigners, and slaves. The Church was the first 
 to speak with accuracy in addressing her instructions clero et 
 popvlo. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 49 
 
 till the praetorian prefect had remarked to him, if he 
 proceeded on thus, there could be no reason for not pre- 
 senting them with chickens and geese. And the func- 
 tionary was right ; for the paupers of Home fattened at 
 the cost of their brethren of the provinces, and the 
 Gauls, our ancestors, gave their blood and their sweat 
 to nourish the starving rabble inscribed on the register 
 of the census. 
 
 At Kome, almsgiving was not the duty of the indi- 
 vidual but the right of all. But Christianity inverted 
 the rule, and in its economy charity was not the right 
 of any person, but the duty of the whole community. 
 Benevolence became a sacred duty, a precept and not 
 merely a counsel, and St. Ambrose addressed the 
 wealthy amongst the faithful in these terms : 
 
 " You say, I shall not give, but mark, if you do give 
 alms to the poor, you give not what is your own, but 
 his. You pay a debt instead of giving a voluntary 
 largesse, and therefore the Scripture bids you to incline 
 your soul towards the poor man and render to him his 
 due." * 
 
 But if Christianity made almsgiving a duty towards 
 the poor, it was towards that nameless and universal 
 poverty which was in fact Christ Himself in the per- 
 sons of the destitute. He was the sole Creditor and 
 Judge of the tribunal to which the rich would be 
 summoned who had abused their trust ; and the 
 Church conferred no personal right on the individual 
 of reclaiming the share which might be rightly his. St. 
 Augustine said : " Surplus wealth is the competency 
 of the poor, and the possession of what is superfluous 
 is an usurpation of the rights of others. Give, then, 
 * Ecclesiastic, lib. iv. 8. 
 
 VOL. II. 3 
 
50 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 to your brother who is in need, and in giving to him 
 give to Christ." The Almighty, then, as the sole 
 master of everything, was the sole, the invisible, but 
 long-suffering creditor of the rich man, who was but his 
 steward ; the judge as to the wants of his fellows ; 
 disposing of his wealth and ruling its distribution on 
 his own responsibility. St. Ambrose desired that the 
 wealthy should discriminate those who were able-bodied 
 and could dispense with relief, as well as the rogues 
 and vagabonds, and the men who pretended that they 
 had been pillaged by thieves or ruined by creditors, 
 whilst they made a scrupulous search for hidden 
 misery, elicited complaints that had hitherto kept 
 silence, visited the pallet of unrepining agony, and 
 brought to light the hiding-places which had no echo 
 for the voice of sorrow.* 
 
 Upon such conditions as these did the charities of 
 the Church proceed; but besides what was done in 
 private she possessed a public system of relief. We 
 need not enter upon the organization of the various 
 societies for almsgiving which were initiated by the 
 collections made by the Thessalonians upon the ad- 
 
 * Here appears the misapprehended truth that in Christianity 
 its morality is sustained by its mysteries. How did the new reli- 
 gion reconcile the duty of charity and the right of property, the 
 precept of almsgiving and the right of refusing alms ? Christ 
 was present in man, and therefore the man who suffered must be 
 loved for Christ, who would vindicate the rights of the poor in 
 another world. Christian morality exists side by side with its 
 dogma. If the latter is subtracted, the former falls entirely, or 
 its fragments help to construct a morality of egoism, of tyranny, 
 of disorder, and of immorality. The abiding presence of Christ 
 in humanity is witnessed to by St. Martin and the beggar, St. 
 Elizabeth and the leper, and thence their miseries were alleviated 
 with a feeling of passionate transport rather than disgust, for 
 they were the sufferings of the Saviour. 
 
CHRISTIAN MANNERS. 51 
 
 vice of St. Paul, on the first day of every week. The 
 writings of St. Justin show us that the faithful never 
 separated on the Sunday till a collection had been made 
 for the poor, and we have it on the authority of St. 
 Cyprian and others, down to the time of St. Leo, that 
 these subscriptions were of regular continuance until 
 the establishment of the Eoman diaconates. There- 
 upon a vast system of public benevolence arose, as each 
 one of these deacons was bound to visit two quarters of 
 the great city and to inscribe the names of the poor 
 therein upon a register, mentioning their claims to relief 
 and taking all the precautions of a regular administra- 
 tion. We may give as one example that beautiful story 
 which tells how St. Laurence, when charged to surren- 
 der the treasures of the Church to the prefect of the 
 city, promised to do so within three days, and how 
 when the time had elapsed the functionary came to the 
 appointed spot and found ranged under the colonnades 
 a multitude of maimed and miserable paupers, whom 
 Laurence presented to him as forming the wealth and 
 the sacred vessels of the Eoman Church. 
 
 Moreover, Christianity instituted communities of 
 benevolence, as, for instance, the hospitals which arose 
 everywhere as open asylums for the miseries and in- 
 firmities of humanity. These establishments were 
 mentioned as of long foundation in one of the laws of 
 Justinian, and the same idea is expressed in a canon 
 which finds its place ordinarily at the end .of those 
 passed at the Council of Nicaea, and shows us the con- 
 dition of legislation and manners in the East from the 
 earliest days of Christianity : 
 
 " Let houses be selected in every town to serve as 
 retreats for strangers, for the poor and for the sick. If 
 
 3 * 
 
52 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 the goods of the Church suffice not for this expenditure, 
 let the bishop cause alms to be continually collected 
 through the agency of the deacons, and let the faithful 
 give according to their ability. And thus let him pro- 
 vide for the poor, the sick, and the stranger among our 
 brethren, for he is their mandatary and their steward. 
 That work obtains the remission of many sins, and 
 of all others is the one which brings man nearest to 
 God."* 
 
 Hospitals, accordingly, were opened from one end to 
 the other of the Eoman Empire, and as they multiplied 
 in the East, the West was not wanting in the work. 
 Two illustrious personages a Koman lady named 
 Fabiola, a descendant of the Fabii, and Psammachius, 
 the scion of a senatorial family devoted themselves to 
 God, sold their goods and raised, the one a hospital for 
 the sick at Eome, the other an asylum for the poor at 
 Ostia. On the death of his wife, Psammachius honoured 
 her memory by charity instead of strewing flowers upon 
 her tomb, and St. Jerome, writing from the wilderness 
 in praise of his good works, does not say that they are 
 sufficient : " I learn that you have founded at the port 
 of Ostia an asylum for destitute travellers, that you 
 have planted a shoot from the tree of Abraham on the 
 coast of Italy, and have raised another Bethlehem, a 
 house of bread, on the spot where iEneas traced his 
 camp. Who would have believed that the great grand- 
 son of so many consuls, bred in the senatorial purple, 
 would have dared to appear clothed in the black tunic 
 without reddening at the glance of those who were his 
 equals? Yet although you, the first amongst patricians, 
 have become a monk for the sake of the poor, find 
 * Concil. Nicsen. can. 70. 
 
CHEISTIAN MANNEES. 53 
 
 therein no subject for pride. Well may you humble 
 yourself, for you will never be more lowly than Christ. 
 I desire that you walk barefoot, make yourself equal 
 with the poor, knock modestly at the door of the indi- 
 gent, become an eye for the blind, a hand for the 
 maimed, a foot for the lame, a carrier of water, a cleaver 
 of wood, a lighter of fires; all this I wish for you ; but 
 then where are the buffetings and spittings, where 
 the scourge, where the cross, where the death?" He 
 lighted upon the secret of Christian benevolence, for it 
 was the memory of its first poor Man, dying upon the 
 cross, which was to impassion those servants of the 
 destitute who were to carry to such a pitch during the 
 Middle Age their enthusiasm for poverty. St. Francis 
 of Assisi was to afford a fresh example, and his devo- 
 tion, capable of inspiring the poetry of Jacopone da 
 Todi, was to inspire Giotto also to represent in his 
 matchless fresco the marriage of the Saint with Poverty. 
 Neither had the barbarians recognized this sentiment 
 any more than the love of work or pity for the slave. 
 It was true that they felt keenly on the dignity of man, 
 but it was of man when free, and lord of money and the 
 sword. They placed the slave in a happier position 
 than any he had known under the Koman law, but he 
 was still dependent on the caprice of a master who could 
 forfeit the life of a useless servant. And as for poverty, 
 they thought their Valhalla could only open to those 
 whose hands were filled with gold, whilst they scorned 
 labour no less as involving subjection and self-conquest 
 for the barbarian could conquer everything except 
 himself. Barbarism, indeed, failed to regenerate the 
 states of slavery, poverty, and labour, which antiquity 
 had blighted and dishonoured, and even Christianity 
 
54 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 only effected little by little, at the cost of many a long 
 struggle, the restoration of their proper dignity to those 
 three types of humanity which had been so long in- 
 sulted, disowned by the injustice of the old civilization, 
 and trampled in the dust by the scorn of the barbarians. 
 Long ages passed ere some few hospitals were reared 
 in the regions of barbarism. At Lyons, in the sixth 
 century, that great Hotel Dieu was opened which has 
 never since been closed, and the seventh age beheld the 
 commencement of the hospitals of Clermont, of Autun, 
 and of Paris. Speedily they were multiplied everywhere 
 with a grand prodigality, till the time came when every 
 Christian township had, beside its church, an asylum 
 open to misfortune. St. Gregory of Nazianzum, in 
 relating the foundation of the great hospital at Caesaraea, 
 raised by St. Basil, exclaimed that he was witness to 
 marvels surpassing those of antiquity, excelling the 
 walls of Thebes or Babylon with its hanging gardens, 
 the Monument of Mausolus or the Pyramids of Egypt, 
 those magnificent tombs which could not give life back 
 to one of their regal occupants, and reflected but a 
 gleam of empty glory upon their founders. And he 
 was right, for the old time had excelled us in raising 
 monuments for pleasure, and when we look at our 
 cities of dirt and squalor, with their houses crowded one 
 against another, and the hard and joyless existence 
 meted out to those who are imprisoned within their 
 walls, we may well think that could the ancients return 
 they would think us simply barbarous ; and did we show 
 them our theatres, those small and smoky rooms in 
 which we are pressed together, they would retire in 
 contempt and disgust. For they understood the art of 
 enjoyment far better than we do ; no sum was too great 
 
CHEISTIAN MANNEES. 55 
 
 if spent in rearing their coliseums, those theatres and 
 circuses in which an audience of eighty thousand came 
 and sat with ease; but we can crush them with the 
 monuments we have raised to sorrow and to weakness, 
 by pointing to the numberless hospitals that our fathers 
 consecrated to suffering. Yes, the ancients could 
 methodize pleasure, but ours is a different science : 
 they, too, knew how to die but let us avow it, the 
 pangs of death are short, we have the secret of true 
 human dignity, our service is long as long as life itself 
 and it consists in suffering and in toil. 
 
56 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 
 
 We have been seeking to know to what degree the 
 Christian society was prepared to receive the barbarians 
 and subject them to its institutions and its customs ; 
 how far, also, it excelled them in surpassing the gene- 
 rous instincts that those youthful races had preserved, 
 far away from Koman corruption, under the favouring 
 shade of their forests and their icy sky ; and we paused 
 to contemplate the two feelings, as to the dignity of 
 man and the respect due to woman, with the introduc- 
 tion of which the savage tribes have been credited, and 
 which form the essence of modern manners. But we 
 perceived that if the barbarians preserved these senti- 
 ments as instincts, Christianity had raised them to the 
 category of virtues. The former had recognized a dig- 
 nity proper to man, but to the man who was free and 
 armed, who scorned both obedience and labour; they 
 owned, in fact, that chivalrous sentiment of honour 
 which was destined to replace the old military discipline 
 of the Koman legions. But they knew nothing, for the 
 Gospel alone could read them the lesson, of the dig- 
 nity of that great majority of the human race which 
 was bound by servitude, by labour, and by poverty, to 
 obey, to work, and to suffer. In woman also they 
 

 THE WOMEN OF CHEISTENDOM. 
 
 r. 
 
 -: 51 
 
 
 recognized, side by side with the qualities of weakness, 
 an element of divinity. The power of delicately swaying 
 the strong is the chief weapon of the weak, and the 
 gauntlet of iron does not pluck a flower as it crushes a 
 sword ; so the barbarians beheld in their females the 
 necessary companions of their adventures and of their 
 perils, and could boast of warriors, virgins, and pro- 
 phetesses amongst them. But their renown was dis- 
 sipated when the danger that produced it had past ; 
 and, on the other hand, classic antiquity was absolutely 
 ignorant of the delicate influence of female tact. 
 
 As for the East, the laws of Manou contain exquisite 
 passages on the destiny of woman ; but side by side 
 with these they tell us that " women have long hair, 
 but narrow minds ; " and the Greeks pronounce that as 
 the gods had given strength to the lion, wings to the 
 bird, and reasoning faculties to man, having nothing 
 left for woman, they gave her beauty. As famous 
 amongst their women they can only cite the courtesans 
 Phryne and Aspasia, and the highest eulogium the 
 Roman passed on the female sex was in praise of their 
 fecundity. Such was the term allotted to female virtue 
 and greatness by the sole nation of antiquity which 
 honoured them at all. Yet we must remember that 
 Rome did admire Lucretia, Veturia, and Cornelia, for 
 she recognized the merit of domestic virtues and family 
 traditions. 
 
 Let us confess, in justice to Roman law, that it gave 
 a sublime definition of marriage. It is, it said, the 
 union of male and female on the condition of a common 
 life and a complete sharing in all rights, divine and 
 human Nuptice sunt conjunctio maris et femince et 
 consortium omnis vita, divini et humani juris com- 
 
 3 t 
 
58 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 municat'w* A law which was grandly expressed, but 
 was daily belied, not only by the prevailing manners, 
 but by other enactments, till, instead of the professed 
 equality, a Eoman marriage presented an aspect of 
 extreme inequality. And, firstly, an inequality in 
 respect to its duties ; for although there were modesty 
 and virtue of old, and Kome, in fencing them about 
 with oaths, the Divine Majesty, and the terrible image 
 of the domestic tribunal, had spared nothing to place 
 these qualities out of danger, yet she had neglected 
 male chastity, the surest guardian of the modesty of 
 woman. She had divided its duties unequally, and 
 though she required of the wife virginity before, fidelity 
 and constant purity during, marriage, these were mere 
 virtues of the gynseceum, which the husband need not 
 recognize. And society undertook to give to women 
 different and most dangerous lessons in admitting them 
 to the ceremonies of the pagan worship, and the mys- 
 teries of the Bona Dea. Marriage also brought about 
 a difference in social condition. The best position 
 afforded by the Eoman law to the wife on the day 
 whereupon the pair were united by the ceremonies of 
 the confarreation, under the auspices and with the con- 
 sent of all the gods,' was that of being treated as the 
 daughter of her husband, and of having a child's por- 
 tion on the day on which his property was divided. 
 This was the utmost the majesty of man could afford to 
 concede to woman to treat her as a child, and indulge 
 her with infantile pleasures, with playthings, and the 
 luxurious living which was fitted to charm an uncul- 
 tured imagination ; and thence proceeded the com- 
 plaints of philosophers as to the insolent luxury of the 
 * Digest, xxiii. tit. ii. lib. i. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 59 
 
 Roman ladies, as to those feeble creatures whose foot 
 could not touch the ground, who could only move a 
 step unless carried in the arms of eunuchs, and dangled 
 from their ears the value of many an estate : all this 
 because the woman was principally but a mere instru- 
 ment of pleasure. 
 
 But she was also a means of perpetuating the 
 family. A Roman of position always married for the 
 sake of getting children, liberorum qucerendorum causa, 
 and law itself favoured paternity and maternity by 
 giving privileges to those who had given three children 
 to the State, jus trium liberorum. But it was only on 
 the two conditions of pleasing her husband and propa- 
 gating his race that the wife held her place at the 
 domestic hearth, for if she became old and barren, or 
 wrinkles appeared on her forehead, the gates of the 
 conjugal domicile instantly opened, and the freedman 
 came to bid her go forth : College sarcinulas, dicet 
 libertus, et exi.* 
 
 So unequal an union could hardly be lasting, and 
 divorce was introduced into the Roman legislation, and 
 practised under every form and upon every motive. 
 There was the favourite divorce of men of position, on 
 account of weariness, practised by those who changed 
 their wives yearly. Another kind proceeded from 
 calculation, as proved by Cicero, who repudiated 
 Terentia, not because she had caused trouble to his 
 soul, but because a new dowry was a necessity for 
 the satisfaction of his creditors ; and, lastly, divorce 
 might have generosity for its motive, as in the case 
 of Cato, who, when he found that his wife Marcia 
 had taken the fancy of Hortensius, transferred her to 
 * Juv. Sat. vi. 147. 
 
60 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 him, under the title of spouse. But if this was the 
 position conferred upon wives at their marriage, woman 
 found her revenge in the iniquity of the law itself, and 
 made, in her turn, divorce her weapon to serve her 
 interests and her calculations. This occasioned the 
 notorious immodesty of the Koman matrons, who, in 
 the time of Seneca, reckoned their years hy the number 
 of their husbands, instead of the number of consuls.* 
 They also suffered divorce in order to remarry, and 
 married with a view to divorce ; and St. Jerome related 
 how he had been present at the funeral of a woman 
 who had possessed seventeen husbands. Women found 
 the equality in vice which their husbands refused them 
 in virtue, and were to be seen, like men, seated at 
 orgies, passing whole nights in glutting themselves 
 with wine ; like them, vomiting that they might feast 
 anew, and multiplying their adulteries, till continence 
 was but a synonym for ugliness.! They had a place 
 of honour in the amphitheatre, and gave the signal for 
 the butchery of the last gladiator as he fell wallowing 
 at their feet, and imploring their mercy. When, at 
 last, the passion for the fights of the circus had taken 
 possession of the whole Koman people, women followed 
 the knights and senators as they descended into the 
 arena, and the populace had the pleasure of gazing at 
 combats between nude matrons. And thus Seneca 
 could say with force for the horrors of the time and 
 the degradation of human nature favoured the illusion 
 "Woman is but a shameless animal, and unless she 
 is given plenty of education and much learning, I can 
 see in her nothing but a savage creature, incapable of 
 
 * Seneca, De Benefices, lib. iii. 16. 
 f Ibid. ep. xcvii. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 61 
 
 restraining its passions." * Yet this proud philosopher 
 was ungrateful, for he was the spouse of that Paulina 
 who desired to share her husband's fate, and caused 
 her veins to be opened with his. 
 
 Such was the history of marriage with the wisest, 
 most upright, and most practical nation of antiquity. 
 It was from this degraded state that Christianity had 
 to raise the sex, and at first sight it seems as if the 
 memory of original sin, as due to the first woman, 
 would have added to its bitterness. But St. Ambrose 
 did not thus regard it, and applied all his genius to 
 the task of proving that, in the Fall, woman was more 
 excusable than man, for the latter had suffered himself 
 to be led away by his sister, and his equal, whereas 
 the former was deceived by a fallen angel, a being 
 superior to mankind ; that her repentance also had 
 been more prompt, and her excuse more generous, in 
 merely laying the blame upon the serpent, whereas 
 man had replied to God, " It was the woman that thou 
 gavest me!" And what, again, were memories such 
 as these, compared with those thoughts which sur- 
 rounded the work of Eedemption ; for if woman had 
 been the cause of the first offence, had she not made 
 due reparation in giving birth to the Eedeemer ? and, 
 as the saint continued with eloquence, " Approach 
 then, Eve, henceforth to be called Mary, thou who 
 hast given us an example of virginity, who hast given 
 us a God, a God who has thus visited but one, but who 
 calls all to Himself." t 
 
 It was theology, then, which rehabilitated woman for 
 Christianity, and the worship of the Virgin, speedily 
 
 * Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis, c. xiv. 
 t St. Ambros. De Institutione Virginis, c. v. 
 
62 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 introduced, wrought the same effect in practical 
 manners as in dogma. That this worship commenced 
 in the Catacombs has been established by discoveries 
 made up to the present day ; and the Virgin and Child 
 figure in frescoes, of which, from the nature of the 
 cement on which they are painted, the third century 
 must be given as the latest date. Thus did the radiant 
 image which was calculated to gild with its rays the 
 weaknesses of women, illumine the shades of that 
 primitive and subterranean Christendom, and emerged 
 thence surrounded by a galaxy of those virgins and 
 martyrs to whom places were assigned on the altars of 
 the Church. It was supremely necessary that faith in 
 female virtue should be restored, and this Christianity 
 effected by founding the public profession of virginity, 
 and giving the veil and golden chaplet to those maidens 
 who remained in the bosom of their respective families, 
 but honoured by an open adhesion the virtue to which 
 antiquity had refused belief. It was needful, also, that 
 women should rival men in the stern qualities which 
 had been thought their monopoly, in the courage that 
 courted martyrdom, and the honour of dying frequently 
 the last of all. Such was the example given in the 
 earliest days by Thecla and Perpetua, and it is 
 supremely touching to note the respect with which 
 the martyrs in their prisons environed these nursing 
 mothers of Christendom, our mothers in the faith, 
 who showed them the way to glory, as angels from 
 heaven, wingless indeed, but excelling the angels by 
 their tears. The early ages of the Church afford many 
 a like spectacle, but nothing chronicled in the acts of 
 martyrs excels in beauty the reverence showed to 
 St. Perpetua by her brethren in suffering up to the 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 63 
 
 moment when she fell beneath the hand of the gladia- 
 tor, in the presence of the Roman people yelling with 
 delight. 
 
 But we must refrain from too near an approach to 
 the sanctuary, and rather than treat of women in their 
 privileged and exceptional positions as deaconess, 
 virgin, or widow, let us consider the place assigned 
 by Christianity to daughters of Eve, whom it had re- 
 deemed from their ancient curse, in the ordinary walks 
 of life. It was incumbent upon the Church, in order 
 to regain for woman her proper place in the family, to 
 remould from head to foot the institution of marriage, 
 and add to it all that Paganism had rejected. Under 
 the Christian order the propagation of children was no 
 longer the principal end of marriage, and St. Augus- 
 tine says beautifully and it is also, the teaching of 
 Tertullian that its chief object is to set forth the 
 example, type, and primitive consecration of human 
 society in that love which is its bond. And as that 
 type of all society must needs be a perfect unity, an 
 unity consequently in which every part is equal and 
 indissoluble, therefore it follows that in Christian matri- 
 mony everything is equally divided but nothing broken ; 
 the condition and duties of life are equally shared by 
 the two contracting parties ; each is bound to bring the 
 same hope, a heart in due subservience to the ties 
 which are to unite them for ever, as St. Jerome says, 
 with his rough and energetic language " The laws 
 of Caesar are one thing, the precept of Christ another ; 
 one thing the decisions of Papinian, another the com- 
 mands of Paul. The pagans give free scope to the 
 impurity of men, and content themselves with for- 
 bidding them to commit adultery with married women, 
 
64 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 or to violate freeborn maidens ; but they allow them 
 their slaves and the lupanar. But with us what is 
 forbidden to women is not permitted to men, and under 
 a common duty there must be equal obedience."* 
 
 Such teaching made Christianity burdensome to the 
 pagan world as well as to the Jews and the barbarians ; 
 and may we not add that it renders it distasteful to 
 men of our own day ? It was the magnificent equity 
 manifested in the voluntary humiliation of the mighty, 
 the spectacle of strength and weakness subjected to a 
 common yoke, which caused the world to shrink from 
 submitting to the faith. This appears even in the 
 Gospels, when the Apostles replied to Christ when He 
 used such language, " If it be thus it were better never 
 to marry;" and therefore the Fathers, from the first 
 days of the Church, laboured in instilling these stern 
 maxims into the rebellious hearts even of Christians, 
 and acted, so to speak, the office of police in those 
 Christian families into which concubinage was ever 
 stealthily creeping to banish the wife whom they de- 
 sired to install as queen over the domestic hearth, 
 unsatisfied till they were assured that henceforth the 
 house would recognize but one ruler, and that no 
 stranger would usurp the place marked out by God for 
 the wife. And as Christian morality was labouring to 
 establish an equality in duty between each married 
 couple, it was also necessary to maintain an equality in 
 their conditions ; for woman, destined formerly to serve 
 the pleasures, to please the senses, and to multiply the 
 posterity of her husband, was to be entrusted hence- 
 forth with a graver task. So the Church did not 
 shrink from raising her dignity by an austere method, 
 * St. Hieronymus, ad Oceanum de Morte Fabiolas, ep. xxvii. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 65 
 
 by despoiling her of all superfluous ornament, and 
 stripping off the wretched finery which was of no use 
 in winning the heart of her husband. Tertullian wrote 
 whole books against the attire of women, reproached 
 them with being loaded with jewels, and expressed fear 
 lest on the day of martyrdom the neck which was 
 covered with emeralds should leave no room for the axe 
 of the executioner. The early time of Christianity 
 was no golden time, but rather an age of iron, and 
 therefore the Church assigned such lofty duties to its 
 daughters, and entrusted them with the majestic 
 ministrations of charity. In his writings to his wife, 
 Tertullian shows us the Christian woman fasting, 
 praying with her husband, rising by night to attend the 
 religious assemblies, visiting the poorer brethren in 
 their hovels, haunting the prisons, and throwing herself 
 at the gaoler's feet to obtain the privilege of kissing the 
 martyr's chain. It was through these severe exercises, 
 these austerities and perils, that the dignity of the wife 
 was tempered, that she shared with her husband the 
 honours of life.* 
 
 But this was not all, and when unity in duty and 
 condition had been established, it was necessary to 
 make it lasting. The Eoman law admitted of divorce 
 without limit, and subject to no condition, by the simple 
 consent of the parties ; and so great was the strength of 
 the prevailing habit, the influence of the manners in 
 vogue, that the Christianized emperors dared not touch 
 the law of divorce, or rather did so with cautious 
 timidity, and then quickly withdrew the reforming 
 hand. An institution, enacted by Constantine in the 
 year 331, restricted it to three cases between the 
 * Tertullian, ad Uxorem, c. ix. 
 
66 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 husband and wife, but transgression was only punish- 
 able by fine. Yet even this legislation seemed too 
 rigorous, for Honorius, in 421, narrowed certain of these 
 provisions, whilst Theodosius the Younger went so far 
 as to restore divorce by mutual consent, in which aspect 
 it passed into the legislation of Justinian, who did 
 not dare to efface it entirely from his codes. But the 
 Christian doctrine could not relax its inflexibility, 
 although the wisdom of the emperors hesitated : it was 
 the occasion then or never to declare that Christianity 
 had its laws as well as Caesar, and St. Chrysostom ex- 
 claimed, " Do not cite to me the laws which ordain you 
 to notify your repudiation ; for God will not judge you 
 according to the laws of men, but according to His own." 
 
 In the year 416, the Council of Milevium forbade 
 parties who had been divorced to contract other mar- 
 riages, and thus for ever changed divorce into a simple 
 separation of body. This expressed the entire Chris- 
 tian theory as to marriage, the doctrine which has ever 
 since subsisted, and has resisted all the opposition 
 afforded it by the advancing centuries. 
 
 Marriage includes something more than a contract, 
 for it involves a sacrifice, or rather a double sacrifice. 
 The woman sacrifices an irreparable gift, which was the 
 gift of God, and has called forth the solicitude of her 
 mother, her first beauty, frequently her health, and that 
 faculty of loving which women have but once ; whilst 
 the man in his turn surrenders the liberty of his youth, 
 those incomparable years which can never return, the 
 power of devoting himself for the being whom he loves, 
 that is only found at the opening of life, and the love- 
 inspired effort for the creation of a glorious and happy 
 future. All this man can effect but once between the 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 67 
 
 age of twenty and thirty years a little earlier or a little 
 later perhaps never ; and therefore Christian marriage 
 is a double oblation, offered in two chalices, one con- 
 taining virtue, modesty, and innocence, the other a pure 
 love, devotion, the eternal consecration of a manhood 
 to a feebler being, whom yesterday he knew not, and 
 with whom to-day he thinks himself happy to pass his 
 existence : and the cups must be equally full, that the 
 union may be a holy alliance and blessed of Heaven. 
 
 It was only by thus making over to woman an abso- 
 lute dominion over the heart of man, and giving her an 
 undivided rule in domestic matters, that Christianity 
 could consent to open to her the gates of the house, 
 permit her to cross the limits of that gynseceum to 
 which the ancients had delegated her, and advance into 
 the city now disposed to reach her with respectful vene- 
 ration. For, when during the space of three centuries 
 mankind, Christian and pagan, had become accustomed 
 to seeing women standing as martyrs before the prseto- 
 rium, as virgins in the churches, speeding in every 
 direction to visit the poor, and hunting out misery for 
 relief, they suffered them to pass free from injury and 
 insult, as heavenly messengers who went through the 
 world only to do good ; and there was thus no longer 
 any danger for them in the streets of those tumultuous 
 towns along which formerly the matrons of Kome used 
 to be carried in their litters, borne in the vigorous 
 arms of German or of Gallic slaves, who protected them 
 from insult. Eespect was now assured them, and they 
 availed themselves of it to exercise that magistracy over 
 charity which they have preserved to our own day ; and 
 not the deaconesses alone, but simple Christian women, 
 devoted their lives, or the part which was left free from 
 
68 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the exigencies of family duties, to the service of the 
 poor and suffering, who had never yet had their tears 
 wiped away by hands so tender and benevolent. 
 
 St. Jerome relates how Fabiola, the descendant of the 
 Fabii, who in her ignorance of the principles of Chris- 
 tianity had unhappily availed herself of the right of 
 divorce, when touched by the death of her second hus- 
 band, resolved to do public penance, and presented her- 
 self one day at the Lateran basilica with ashes upon 
 her head, in the ranks of the avowed sinners, imploring, 
 amidst the tears of the people, the clergy, and the 
 bishop himself, that she might be permitted to expiate 
 her fault ; and how, upon receiving absolution, she sold 
 all her goods and raised out of the proceeds a hospital for 
 the poor, which she served in person. The daughter 
 of consuls and dictators dressed the wounds of the 
 maimed and miserable, of slaves whom their owners 
 had discarded, carried the epileptic sufferers upon her 
 own shoulders, staunched the blood of sores, and in 
 fine, as St. Jerome said, performed all the services 
 which wealthy and charitable Christians, who were 
 ready to give alms of their money, but not to sacrifice 
 their repugnances, were accustomed to transact by the 
 hands of their slaves. But a stronger faith conquered 
 all natural disgust, and therefore popular veneration 
 attached itself to the woman who had so scorned and 
 trampled upon her hereditary grandeur, that she might 
 become the serving-maid of misfortune ; and when 
 Fabiola died, St. Jerome related her triumphant 
 obsequies as forming a worthy parallel to the ovations 
 which old Eome had lavished on her great ones. 
 "No," said he, " Camillus did not triumph so glori- 
 ously over the Gauls, or Scipio over Numantia, or 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 69 
 
 Pompey over the nations of Pontus. They have told 
 me of the crowd which preceded the procession, and the 
 torrents of the people who came to swell it. Neither 
 the squares, nor the porticoes, nor the terraces of the 
 houses sufficed to contain the multitude. Home saw 
 all her diverse constituent races reunited into one body, 
 and crowds of enemies found themselves in agreement 
 for the glory of a penitent." * We see the female sex 
 already in possession of that tender empire of charity 
 which they have never suffered since to escape from 
 their hands. And a few years ago the spectacle offered 
 by an entire people accompanying the funeral procession 
 of Fabiola, was again to be witnessed, when the same 
 populace hurried to the obsequies of the young Princess 
 Borghese, and the horses of the bier were unharnessed 
 by the crowd, which insisted on carrying the corpse of 
 its benefactress to its last resting-place. This was a 
 point upon which the manners of our day touch the 
 usages of antiquity. Scarcely, in spite of the ages which 
 divide them, can we discover the least distance between 
 them, for all the differences of time vanish as they 
 enter the bosom of the Church, the domain of eternity. 
 Armed with the influences of benevolence, women 
 soon acquired a power over the tone of manners, an 
 empire more puissant than that of law. Soon they 
 had their share in swaying legislation itself, as ap- 
 peared in the fifth century in the case of Pulche- 
 ria, the daughter of Arcadius, who being a little 
 older than her young brother Theodosius II., felt 
 forcibly the difficulty of the epoch in which he was 
 called to reign. Therefore, devoting her youth and her 
 virginity to God, she undertook the guardianship of her 
 * St. Hieronymus, ep. lxxvii. de Morte Fabiolae. 
 
70 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 brother, and thus afforded the spectacle of a girlish 
 princess of sixteen years, grand-daughter certainly, and 
 sole inheritress of the genius and courage of Theo- 
 dosius, governing the Empires of the East and West, 
 which had no opposition to offer to her influence and 
 her talent, and struggling during a whole reign against 
 the intrigues of a court of eunuchs, and, notably, 
 against that eunuch Chrysaphus, who seemed to be 
 raised up as the evil genius of the Byzantine Empire. 
 On the death of Theodosius, the praetorians made over 
 the purple to Pulcheria herself, and she was proclaimed 
 Augusta, Imperatrix, and mistress of the world. But 
 she soon, in mistrust of her solitary greatness, gave her 
 hand, charged henceforth with the burden of empire, to 
 Marcian, an aged soldier, from whom she obtained a 
 promise of sisterly respect ; and the Koman world 
 enjoyed some years of greatness and glory under the 
 united sway of Marcian and Pulcheria. For when 
 Attila, thinking it was still the time when eunuchs 
 governed the court, demanded the accustomed tribute 
 from the Empire of the West, he received as the answer 
 of the Empress, " I have only gold for my friends, but 
 for my foes iron ;" and it was necessary to attain the 
 respect of the barbarian that the throne of Constantine 
 should be occupied by a woman, who was at once a 
 Christian and a saint.* We insist upon the workings 
 of Christianity in the manners of the fifth century, 
 because then, as ever, the Church was labouring not for 
 the present only, but for the ages which were to follow. 
 It was essential that the idea of the Christian family 
 
 * St. Leo bears her witness that in lending her influence to 
 the condemnation of Nestorius and Eutyckes, she had given peace 
 to the religious world. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 71 
 
 should be founded before the barbarians came to trouble 
 it with their disorders. For the instinct which they 
 brought might easily have perished had it not encoun- 
 tered examples which might develop and enlarge it. 
 Nor did they always show respect towards women, for 
 history relates that the Thuringians, who had invaded 
 Gaul in the commencement of the sixth century, and 
 had carried off three hundred young girls, fastened them 
 with stakes to the ground, and then drove their chariots 
 over their bodies. Moreover, as Tacitus informs us, the 
 barbarians practised polygamy, and their chiefs gloried 
 in the number of their wives. Amongst the Germans 
 it was customary to buy and sell concubines, and the 
 dying chief often caused the women who had shared his 
 couch to attend him on his funeral pyre. 
 
 Therefore Christianity had to teach the barbarians a 
 constant respect for women, and if it found some succour 
 it encountered more dangers in their native instincts. 
 Theodoric and Gondebald, too, hastened to borrow from 
 the Theodosian code that constitution concerning di- 
 vorce which had been enacted by Constantine, and by 
 the help of such texts the barbarian monarchs hoped 
 to introduce, if not simultaneous, at least successive 
 polygamy.* It was this instinct which caused the 
 Merovingian kings to indulge in a number of wives, 
 and it is well known how St. Columba, having reproached 
 Brunehault with her care in furnishing her son's 
 seraglio, was exiled and forced to find a resting-place 
 amongst the solitudes of Switzerland, in company with 
 bears and wild beasts, who were more amenable than 
 his fellow-men to his wonder-working hands. And the 
 
 * V. edict of Theodosius, c. liv.; and the laws of the Burgun- 
 dians, tit. iii. sect. 3. 
 
72 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 same question which was mooted during all the dark 
 ages was renewed in the time of King Lothaire, who 
 desired to repudiate his wife Teutberge, but was re- 
 sisted by Nicholas I. declaring as a sole answer to all 
 his importunities that he would never suffer such an 
 irregularity to gain ground, and encourage men who 
 grew weary of their wives. It also reappeared in the 
 struggle between Pope Gregory VII. and the Emperor 
 Henry IV., whose real aim in laying his hands on the 
 right of investiture was to annul his marriage with 
 Bertha, the daughter of the Margrave of Saxony ; again 
 between Innocent III. and Philip Augustus; and 
 finally, in the sixteenth century, between Henry VIII. 
 and Clement VII., affording the remarkable spectacle 
 of the Papacy consenting to see the schism of the 
 former rather than assent to his adultery, to lose a 
 province of the Christian empire rather than outrage 
 the dogma which had regenerated the Christian family. 
 It was the work of twelve centuries to struggle against 
 the violent instincts of the sons of the North, who had 
 abjured none of the passions of the flesh ; so long was 
 the strife needed in order to bring out in their full 
 bloom those delicate feelings which had existed indeed 
 deep in the bosom of the Christian society, destined to 
 a momentary eclipse, but to a later reappearance, and 
 which constitute in our own day all the purity and all 
 the charm of modern civilization. 
 
 It was, then, upon the condition of their exalted place 
 in the family life that women undertook so large a share 
 in the task of civilization, and therefore were these 
 honoured beings able to bring their barbarous husbands 
 one after another, and with them the people they ruled, 
 to the faith of Christ. It is enough to name Clotilda 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 73 
 
 and Clovis, Bertha and Ethelbert, Theodolinda and 
 Lothaire, appearing as conductors of their respective 
 nations, whom they drew, as if by enchantment, after 
 the sweep of their royal robes, and tracing out the way 
 in which their descendants were to march. And so 
 great was the confidence with which these queenly 
 women inspired these half-barbarous races, that the 
 Germans, Franks, Saxons, and Spaniards, who gloried 
 in spurning the idea of obedience, yet did not shrink 
 from submitting to a female sovereign. 
 
 Yet these premisses must not lead us to conclude 
 that Christianity threw down the barriers of nature, 
 by desiring to plunge women into public life, and so 
 establish that absolute equality which has been dreamed 
 of by the materialism of our own epoch. Not thus did 
 the Church understand the matter, for Christianity is 
 too spiritualistic for such an idea. The part to be 
 played by its women was in some sort to be analogous 
 to that of the guardian angels. They were to guide the 
 world, but to remain invisible. The angels became 
 rarely visible, and then only at moments of supreme 
 danger, as the angel Kaphael appeared to the young 
 Tobias, and so it is only on certain long predestined 
 occasions that the empire of women can be seen, and 
 the saving angels of Christian society are manifest 
 under the names of a Blanche of Castille or of a 
 Joan of Arc. 
 
 But we have paused to mark the rehabilitation of 
 woman in the prevailing order of manners, in order the 
 better to study her rank and influence in the world of 
 letters ; and pursuing this our proper sphere and duty, 
 we shall find ourselves in new paths, and so quit, to 
 return no more to it, the hackneyed theme of the 
 
 VOL. II. 4 
 
74 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 restoration of woman under Christian influences. As 
 the Church had every hope of female intelligence, and 
 was bound to refuse nothing that could tend to its 
 improvement, she took great care of their education. 
 And we possess some striking documents on this very 
 point amongst the correspondence of St. Jerome. He 
 showed in the two letters which he wrote to Laeta and 
 Gaudentius on the education of their two daughters, 
 that, like all great minds, he had no contempt for small 
 things, and bade them commence their educational 
 cares from the nurse's arms; and following the Koman 
 who attributed the earliest corruption of eloquence 
 to the bad lessons of nurses and pedagogues, so St. 
 Jerome wished for a modest and grave nurse, who had 
 often the name of God upon her lips. He desired that 
 they should refrain from piercing the ears of children, 
 or staining their faces with carmine and ochre, or 
 giving to their hair that red hue which was but a first 
 reflexion of hell, and begged that they should speedily 
 be taught to clear their intellects, and that letters of 
 ivory should be placed in their hands that they might 
 learn the formation of words; that a number of Greek 
 verses should be committed to their memory first, to 
 be followed by Latin studies ; and especially that they 
 should not be left ignorant of Holy Writ ; nor, lastly, 
 of the writings of the Fathers.* 
 
 Such was the severe and solid system of education 
 laid down by St. Jerome for the use of the daughters 
 of the Church ; nor need it surprise us to find him 
 offering his own services towards instruction, and 
 writing thus to Laeta from his desert retreat. " I will 
 carry her on my own shoulders, and will confirm her 
 * St Hieronym. ad Laetam, ep. cxii. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 75 
 
 stammering lips ; my task will be more glorious than 
 that of Aristotle, for he trained a king who was des- 
 tined to perish by the poison of the Babylonians, while 
 I shall raise a servant and spouse for Christ, an inheri- 
 tress of heaven."* After this it may seem surprising 
 that the women of the early ages of Christianity have 
 left such scanty writings, for we can only cite a few 
 excellent letters, which, however, will always do them 
 credit ; and some verses, like those of Faltonia Proba, 
 who composed a canto in honour of the faith. These 
 are the sole and feeble claims put forth by these 
 Christian women of primitive times to literary distinc- 
 tion ; or rather they gloried more in understanding that 
 in the world of letters, as in that of politics, their 
 influence was to be invisible their mission to inspire 
 far rather than to shine. 
 
 We never find that women inspired any serious 
 works in classic time : if we run through the familiar 
 letters of Cicero we see few, amongst those of Sym- 
 machus none, addressed to females. Seneca, indeed, 
 wrote in a consoling strain to his mother and to Helvia ; 
 that haughty spirit which so utterly disdained the 
 other sex, was once moved by their tears. But 
 Christianity brought with it an imitation of the 
 example given by the Saviour in teaching the woman 
 of Samaria. St. John corresponded with Electa, and 
 all the Fathers of the Church wrote for women. 
 Tertullian composed two books "Ad Uxorem Suam," 
 and the treatises " De Cultu Fasminarum " and " De 
 Yelandis Virginibus ; " that proud and captious mind 
 bent before the handmaids of Christ, and declared him- 
 self the last and the least of their servants. Similar lan- 
 
 * St. Hieronym. ad Gaudentium, ep. cxxviii. 
 
 4 * 
 
76 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 guage was used by St. Cyprian in his work " De Habitu 
 Virginum," while St. Ambrose composed three works 
 upon virginity, and addressing himself to the destined 
 readers of his books, said : " If you find some flowers 
 herein, they are those of your virtues, and from you 
 proceeds all the perfume of the book." * 
 
 Courtesy proper to so great a soul, but destined to 
 be even excelled by that of St. Augustine. Augustine 
 was especially the work of his mother, St. Monica, who 
 had twice, as it were, given birth to him once in the 
 sufferings of the body, the second time in the agonies 
 of the spirit ; and in the latter she had borne him for 
 eternity. We remember the tears she shed over the 
 errors of her son, and the joy she had experienced from 
 the bishops prophesying that the child of so much 
 weeping could not perish ; how her joy was the 
 chiefest on his conversion ; her place the highest at the 
 philosophical discussions of Cassiciacum ; and how, to 
 his good mother's question whether philosophizing 
 women had ever been read of in the books, Augustine 
 asked, in reply, whether philosophy was anything else 
 than the love of wisdom. Monica, who had long loved 
 her God, was far nearer philosophy than many. " For 
 after all, my mother," he said, " do you not fear death 
 far less than many would-be sages?" adding that he 
 would willingly become her disciple. He also, instead 
 of repelling, drew her on to take a part in their dis- 
 cussions, declaring that if his books fell into any 
 hands in the future, no reader should reproach him for 
 giving to his mother the expression of her opinion. 
 Whilst they were treating of the Supreme Good, 
 
 * St. Ambros. De Virginibus, ad Marcellinam sororem suam, 
 lib. ii. s. vi. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 77 
 
 Monica ventured the proposition that the soul had no 
 natural aliment but science, the intelligence but truth, 
 which was in accord with sentiments in the " Horten- 
 sius " of Cicero. Delighted with the coincidence, St. 
 Augustine declared that his mother had carried off the 
 palm in philosophy ; that he owed to her his thought 
 for truth, his desire to know nothing besides truth, and 
 referred to the inspiration which he had drawn from 
 her his entire vocation as a thinker. And, in fact, he 
 justified this idea in that ever memorable passage of 
 his " Confessions," in which he relates how that a few 
 days before the death of Monica, he was standing 
 with her near to a window at Ostia, discoursing of the 
 future life, of God and of eternity, and touched by a 
 momentary effort of the soul the things of which they 
 were speaking. Monica ended the interview by declar- 
 ing that no more work remained for her on earth ; and 
 she died shortly afterwards, with her task accomplished, 
 for she had moulded her son according to the method 
 which God had appointed to her.* St. Augustine 
 many a time in after life trod again the road which he 
 had followed with his mother in that last conversa- 
 tion; he came back again and again to God, and 
 reached a high point in the knowledge of Him ; but 
 it was always by the same track, repassing the same 
 places, into which, then but an inexperienced neophyte, 
 he had first adventured himself under his mother's 
 care. 
 
 But St. Augustine, as a genius, was of tender nature, 
 
 and he might well one day have been carried onwards 
 
 by a mother's hand. The case of St. Jerome seemed 
 
 different, and it is a marvel how that man of fiery and 
 
 * Confessiones, lib. ix. c. ix. 
 
78 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 untamed spirit, of ardent and undisciplined imagination, 
 then conquered by Christianity, was only developed 
 under the same influences by Christian women. We have 
 already noticed St. Jerome at Eome, but the fact is less 
 known that at that time he was fifty-two years of age and 
 had written little merely two or three letters and some 
 treatises of mediocre importance. These represented the 
 entire produce of that long life which had ripened in the 
 desert. But his reputation brought around him in num- 
 bers the most illustrious Christian matrons of Home, 
 such as Paula and her two daughters Eustochi^ and 
 Blaesilla, Felicitas, Albina, Marcellina, the widow Lsea, 
 and the virgin Asella Marcella, at whose house the others 
 assembled to listen to the great doctor. She had a pas- 
 sionate love of the Scriptures, and never could see 
 Jerome without plying him with questions, multiplying 
 objections, and never leaving him till her view was clear. 
 When he had left Rome she became the soul of that 
 little society of Christian women, answered their ques- 
 tions with the tact and delicacy which is the special 
 attribute of women, and saying always that such and 
 such was the doctrine of St. Jerome or some other doctor 
 never speaking in her own name. After his return to 
 Bethlehem, St. Jerome was still pursued by the ques- 
 tionings of these noble matrons, and, moreover, some of 
 them came and joined him, that they might recover the 
 light which they could not surrender. They followed 
 him into his desert solitude, and thus we see Fabiola 
 crossing the seas, ostensibly to visit the Holy Places, 
 but in fact to read the Book of Numbers again with 
 Jerome, and to receive his explanation of chapters which 
 she could not comprehend. Paula then also become a 
 widow, and her daughter Eustochia, renouncing the 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 79 
 
 glory and fortune which surrounded them, also crossed 
 the Mediterranean and arrived at Antioch, from which 
 city these women, of the class which once required 
 the support of their eunuchs' arms for a journey into 
 the streets of Kome, mounted upon asses, and set out 
 for Jerusalem over the rugged passes of Lebanon. On 
 their arrival at Bethlehem they founded a monastery 
 and three convents, and the rule of the latter made a 
 study of Holy Wrft incumbent upon every nun. These 
 institutions were in fact schools of theology and lan- 
 guage, since the interpretation of Scripture was neces- 
 sarily founded upon the study of foreign tongues ; and 
 these Koman ladies were adepts in Latin, in Greek, 
 and in Hebrew. Paula, in fact, used to chant the 
 Psalms in Hebrew, and on her deathbed answered St. 
 Jerome, when he asked if she suffered, in Greek. They 
 left him no peace, these two women, and pressed him 
 to read the whole Bible from end to end with them, 
 and to comment on its details. For long he refused, 
 and when at last he acceded, found that he had under- 
 taken a burdensome task, as they would not permit 
 him to ignore anything, and answered his plea of want 
 of personal knowledge by a demand for the most pro- 
 bable opinion. It was for them that he undertook his 
 great work in the translation of the Scripture, which 
 not only redounded then to his glory and influence, but 
 made him the master of Christian prose for succeeding 
 generations. The Vulgate was begun simply to satisfy 
 the keen impatience of Paula and Eustochia ; it was to 
 them that he dedicated the books of Joshua, Judges, 
 Kings, Kuth, Esther, the Psalms, Isaiah, and the twelve 
 minor Prophets, declaring in his preface that to them 
 was owing the influence which caused him again to 
 
80 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 take up the plough and trace so laborious a furrow, to 
 remove the brambles which ceaselessly germinate in the 
 field of Holy Scripture, and that to them must lie his 
 appeal from all who would doubt the exactness of the 
 version. " You are," he said, " competent judges in 
 controversies as to texts upon the original Hebrew ; 
 compare it with my translation, and see if I have 
 risked a single word." * Whilst as he was the object 
 of every kind of accusation, as his translation troubled 
 some as being a novelty, and reduced to despair all the 
 priests who possessed magnificent copies, parchments 
 lettered in gold, to whom he said in fact that newer 
 ones were required, and who preferred cavilling at the 
 exactness of the fresh translation to admitting so mor- 
 tifying a truth, he found a resource and comfort in the 
 prayers of Paula and Eustochia, and begged them to 
 take up his defence against the tongues of his revilers. 
 Thus did these women of Christendom emulate the 
 example of their German sisters ; like them they were 
 present at the conflict, but it was a struggle of the 
 mind ; they also predicted its sequel, assured it a happy 
 issue, and tended the wounds dealt in the controversy. 
 And in this manner was a Christian school of women 
 constituted which was destined to continue through 
 many centuries, and be the exemplar of that sight of 
 many persons of moral and social excellence who also 
 did not shrink from growing pale over the holy books 
 and writings of the great doctors of the Church, which 
 was the wonder of the seventeenth century; for the 
 women of the Church had already taken possession of 
 that double work of inspiring and of conciliating which 
 will be theirs until the end. 
 
 * See letter xcii. to Paula and Eustochia. 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 81 
 
 But if they gained every advantage in the order of 
 knowledge, there was danger of their losing ground 
 in that of art and that of poetry. For it seemed that 
 as women had been sources of frequent and perilous 
 inspiration to the sculptors and poets of Paganism, so 
 Christianity might seek to efface for ever the images 
 which appealed too forcibly to the imagination and the 
 awakened passions. Yet this was not the case, and a 
 visit to the Catacombs, those rugged homes of the most 
 austere Christianity, will show us, amidst the relics of 
 persecution and memories of the menacing guards, 
 who were perhaps then at the entrance, on the point 
 of laying hands upon the priest at the altar and 
 the faithful who surrounded him, in the light of 
 torches and lamps, a certain number of paintings 
 decorating the sanctuaries, and developing into gar- 
 lands around the altars. Of the subject of these 
 pictures we shall treat in another place ; but may 
 remark that the most frequent after the Good Shepherd 
 is that of the figure of a woman at prayer, alone, with 
 arms crossed, the head often veiled, dressed in the 
 simple fashion preached by Tertullian and St. Cyprian. 
 In other places, it appears as a martyr at the place of 
 execution, dressed like Felicitas and Perpetua, when 
 they stood in the arena, without veil or ornaments, 
 despoiled of those necklaces and emeralds which would 
 have balked the sword of the headsman, covered only 
 with the stola, a simple white robe, with a girdle of 
 purple descending to the feet as her sole adornment, 
 the eyes and hands alike raised towards heaven. It 
 was thus under the features of a woman that Prayer 
 was symbolized by the Christians, as if persuaded that 
 
 4t 
 
82 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the orisons, which were accompanied by the humility 
 and gentleness of so holy a being, would move the 
 Almighty more easily. She was again represented in 
 the company of two aged men, who stood on each side, 
 and supported her uplifted arms ; and sometimes two 
 names were written underneath the painting. The two 
 elders were named Peter and Paul; and the woman 
 who stood between them praying, with outstretched 
 hands, was named Mary. So this figure, which 
 appeared always side by side with that of Christ, 
 was the first representation of the Madonna, of that 
 long course of Byzantine Virgins which were destined 
 to inspire the painters of the Middle Age, the rege- 
 nerated woman who was to recreate art for the modern 
 world. 
 
 But it was not sufficient for Christian womanhood to 
 take up with a reforming hand painting and the plastic 
 arts ; it was also to enter the domain of poetry, then 
 overflowing with the ardours of Sappho and Alcaeus, 
 burning with the passion which had been kindled by 
 the women of old time poetry which was to be puri- 
 fied by being sprinkled with the blood of those virgin 
 martyrs who were to be for the future the heroines and 
 inspirers of the Christian bards. And it is a touching 
 fact, that the first woman who moved and drew forth new 
 accents from poetry for the Church, was a young girl, St. 
 Agnes, who was martyred at Rome at the close of the 
 persecution under Diocletian, a.d. 310. A sort of pre- 
 eminence was attached to her, as the youngest born of 
 the numerous family of martyrs. All the efforts of the 
 imagination of the time, added to love, respect, and 
 enthusiasm, were united, as it were, to compose her 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 83 
 
 crown. A short time after her death, one of the most 
 beautiful of Christian legends was related as to her. It 
 told how, as her parents, some little time after her 
 martyrdom, were spending a vigil in prayer at her 
 tomb, the virgin Agnes appeared in the brightest light, 
 amidst a multitude of virgins clothed like herself in 
 long robes of gold, and having a snow-white lamb at 
 her side, she addressed her weeping parents, and said, 
 " "Weep not, for you see that I have been admitted into 
 this company in the abodes of light, and that I am 
 united now with those whom I have ever loved." 
 
 Her life seemed to have attracted the notice and 
 charmed the respect of all the men of her age, and 
 no sacred topic has been more often celebrated in the 
 discourses of the eloquent, or the verses of poets. 
 Three times did St. Ambrose return to it, and at the 
 beginning of his work "De Virginitate," took pleasure 
 in honouring the action of the maiden who had braved 
 her executioners, and had advanced to the place of 
 slaughter with a more triumphant step than if she had 
 been about to bestow her hand on the most illustrious 
 scion of the consular houses. But the poets, especially, 
 claimed it as their own, and the Pope St. Damasus, in 
 the first place, who lived at the end of the fourth cen- 
 tury, sang in a short but forcible poem of the martyr- 
 dom and glory of St. Agnes. " How, at the mournful 
 signal given by the trumpet, she rushed from the arms 
 of her nurse, trampled under foot the tyrant's menace ; 
 and how, when her noble body was given over to the 
 flames, her young soul conquered their great terror, 
 and how she covered herself with her long hair for fear 
 lest her eyes, then about to perish, should not behold 
 the temple of God." 
 
84 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Viribus immensum parvis superasse timorem, 
 Nudam profusum crinem per membra dedisse 
 Ne Domini templum facies peritura videret* 
 
 And those beautiful verses are equalled by the hymn 
 composed by Prudentius, a poet of the beginning of 
 the fifth century, in honour of St. Agnes, in which he 
 narrates at length the history of the martyr, and crowns 
 her by the following invocation : 
 
 " happy Virgin, new-born glory, noble dweller 
 in the heavenly palace, lower towards our mire your 
 brow, now girt with a double diadem. The light of 
 your favouring countenance, if it penetrates therein, 
 will purify my heart. For every place on which you 
 deign to cast your eyes becomes pure; every place 
 on which your foot, so brilliant in its whiteness, has 
 alighted." Surely this poetry has recovered the ancient 
 fire, but the path along which it journeys is one which 
 leads to heaven, t 
 
 And yet another breath was to proceed from the 
 lips of women, to penetrate the depths of Christian 
 poesy, and reveal therein a fertility, of which succeed- 
 ing ages would reap the fruits, in the shape of Platonic 
 love. This sentiment only just began with Plato to 
 free itself from the obscurity and depravity of the 
 Greek idea of love; but when a Christian, who had 
 been touched by its inspiring influence, wrote for the 
 first time in prose, a prose instinct with poetry, when 
 Hermas composed his wonderful "Shepherd," Platonic 
 love found place in its pages, but suffered no surroundings 
 which were not chaste. He related that in his youth 
 he had loved, for her beauty and her virtue, a young 
 
 * Biblioth. Patrum. torn. iv. 543. 
 f Prudent. Peristephanon, xiv. 133. 
 
I Till IV 1 
 vv 
 
 THE WOMEN OP CHRISTENDOM. - ^ 85 
 
 Christian slave, the property of his tutor, and often 
 had said, "Happy should I be had I such a wife." 
 But some time after he wandered into the country, 
 alone with his thoughts, honouring the creatures of 
 God which seemed so fair ; and at last, falling asleep, 
 dreamed that he was on his knees at prayer in a wild 
 spot, and as he prayed the sky opened, showing to 
 him the maiden he had loved, who said to him, 
 
 " Hail, Hermas !" " My lady, what do you there?" 
 "I have been called hither to accuse you before God." 
 ** My lady, if I have sinned against you, when was it, 
 and where ? Have I not always regarded you as my 
 mistress, and respected you as my sister?" " An evil 
 desire has found its way into your heart ; pray to God, 
 and He will pardon you your sin." And the heaven 
 closed again.* Thus commenced the love which 
 questions even the legitimate object of marriage, which 
 desires nothing in its own interest, but is consistent in 
 its sacrifice and devotion, and becomes faulty in the 
 moment that it ceases to forget itself. 
 
 However, we soon recognize this as the essential 
 principle of Christian literature in the future. The 
 barbarians came, but Christendom had already secured 
 their daughters. Frank and Saxon virgins filled the 
 cloisters, and the saints of time wrote for them as the 
 Fathers had done for their sisters of the primitive ages. 
 Fortunatus, during his long sojourn at Poitiers, com- 
 posed poetry for St. Eadagonde, the wife of King 
 Clotaire, and St. Boniface, in the midst of his great 
 apostolic labours, addressed verses to the beautiful 
 Lioba, abbess of an English cloister, who was destined 
 later to follow in his steps, continue his missionary 
 * Hermas. Pastor. Visio prima. 
 
86 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 work, and raise convents in the forests of Germany to 
 serve for the education of the young barbarians. Alcuin 
 also was to number amongst his disciples the daughters 
 and nieces of Charlemagne, who demanded from him 
 a commentary on St. John, and did not neglect to 
 remind him that St. Jerome had not despised the 
 entreaties of noble ladies, but had written them long 
 letters in explanation of the obscure passages of pro- 
 phecy, adding that there was less distance between 
 Tours and Paris than between Bethlehem and Eome. 
 And so he was unable to resist them ; and from that 
 time we see posterity carried away by his example, 
 and Christian women gradually taking rank in theology 
 and literature. In the tenth century Hroswitha, in the 
 twelfth St. Hildegard, in later times St. Catherine of 
 Siena, shared the glory of the greatest writers, and, 
 lastly, St. Theresa, who stands on the threshold of 
 modern times, and at whose genius the world is still 
 wondering. 
 
 And thus their influence showed itself in continuance, 
 when amidst the light of the sixteenth century some of 
 the greatest minds appeared canvassing the respect of 
 a certain number of superior women, such as Jacqueline 
 Pascal, who shared her brother's toil, and thereby was 
 associated in his fame ; Madame de Longueville, who 
 lent so favouring an influence to the genius of Nicole ; 
 Madame de Sevigne, Madame de la Fayette, Madame 
 de Maintenon, and the other illustrious females who 
 were destined to consummate the intellectual education 
 of the world's most polished race. 
 
 If it effected so much for prose and for science, 
 respect for women was the generating principle of 
 poetry, the very soul of chivalry. Without the idea of 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 87 
 
 sacrifice, the whole essence of that poetry must have 
 vanished ; the knight was bound to serve his mistress 
 disinterestedly, and the poet of chivalry was only 
 suffered to sing of her upon the same condition. 
 The worship which effected a purification in the minds 
 of its votaries, became the dominating influence of all 
 the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; it 
 enkindled the first troubadours, the first minnesinger, 
 the early Italian poets, and was the presiding genius of 
 Dante and Petrarch. For what, in fact, was Beatrice 
 but a living personification of the divine intelligence, 
 a symbolical representation, but at the same time a 
 perfect and fascinating reality ? What was Beatrice but 
 an influence destined to purify the soul of Dante, and 
 to free it from all its earthly constituents. The mere 
 smile of the maiden as she passed sufficed to flood the 
 poet's heart with joy, to give him peace, to lower his 
 pride, to blot out his offences, and dispose him to 
 virtue. Doubtless, Dante attributed too great a power 
 to Beatrice ; but, at least, it was a power that he had 
 experienced. When he found her once more, as she 
 appeared to him on the topmost point of purgatory, in 
 the terrestrial paradise which he had reconstructed, it 
 was not to receive flattery and empty praise, but blame 
 for not having vowed to her a love that was pure 
 enough, for having suffered his soul to be weighed 
 down towards the perilous atmosphere of earth ; and as 
 the beautiful slave accused Hermas, so did Beatrice 
 accuse Dante ; and thus the unknown slave, whom 
 Hermas had casually loved, stood, as it were, in the 
 place of elder sister to Beatrice, to Laura, and the 
 noble women whose task it was to strike the most 
 brilliant chords of modern poetry. 
 
88 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 We have before us, then, a spectacle which is rare in 
 the annals of literature. Ages there are like the spring 
 time of the year, when the human intellect flourishes 
 throughout, but to reach down to the lowest roots, to 
 the earliest germs of these flowers of the mind, to know 
 from whence their life and sap may flow, is a pleasure 
 but seldom tasted. But this is what we have just 
 attained, and therefore we need pause no more to 
 contemplate the blossoms which poetry put forth in 
 the days of chivalry, the roots of which lay hidden 
 deep in primitive Christendom. 
 
 In studying Christian manners, during the fifth 
 century, we have witnessed the greatest intellectual 
 revolution that has ever taken place. For literature 
 is governed by intellect, but the mission of intellect 
 is to instruct or to charm. It is his audience which 
 moulds the orator ; the crowd for whom he sings 
 inspires and kindles the poet. Under the old order 
 philosophers only spoke for a handful of select spirits, 
 of the initiated, and of adepts ; though the orator 
 harangued the crowd which covered the market-places, 
 that crowd was only composed of citizens. At Athens, 
 the poets composed for the theatre, but it was only 
 frequented by men who were free. The women of 
 Kome attended the theatres, but the Latin poetry was 
 scarcely intelligible to the vulgar, and could only be 
 enjoyed by the cultured minority. Horace complained 
 of this, knowing that, like Virgil, he could only be 
 appreciated by, at most, the knights, and that his 
 genius could never make itself felt in the lower ranks 
 of the sovereign people. The literature of antiquity 
 had appealed to but few, but Christian culture, on the 
 other hand, was addressed to all. The Fathers com- 
 
THE WOMEN OF CHRISTENDOM. 89 
 
 posed for slaves and for women, and St. John Chrysos- 
 tom boasted, in the forcible language which we have 
 cited, that the Church taught shoemakers and fullers 
 to philosophize. They mounted the pulpit, not merely 
 to address those who had the freedom of the city, but 
 to all the freedmen, slaves, women, and children who 
 were assembled in the same Basilica. 
 
 The invasion and settlement of the barbarians has 
 been considered a grave event in the history of the 
 human mind : and it was so, for they appeared to 
 recreate the intelligence of humanity in affording to 
 all who could speak or write a new crowd of auditors, 
 bringing no wearied ears or dulled intellects, but 
 ready to open hearts free till then, and disposed to 
 shudder at and respond to everything that was truly 
 worthy of admiration. It was a grave event, for the 
 rush of that wave of fallow minds could not but modify 
 the intellectual conditions of the world. But still 
 not sufficient attention has been paid to a greater and 
 more important inroad accomplished before that of the 
 barbarians had begun the invasion of the world of 
 intellect by slaves, workmen, paupers, and women the 
 vast majority, in fact, of humanity who came, not to 
 demand empire, goods, or property, as did the bar- 
 barians later, but their rightful share in the enjoyment 
 of truth, of the good and of the beautiful, which has 
 been promised to and is the just due of all. 
 
90 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTEK IV. 
 
 HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 
 
 We have found that, at the moment in which the bar- 
 barians stormed the gates of the Empire, two kinds of 
 civilization existed face to face. On the one side stood 
 the civilization of Paganism, powerless to receive into 
 itself, to enlighten, and, above all, to soften the terrible 
 guests whom Providence had sent ; condemned, in con- 
 sequence, to perish, though not entirely and without 
 a struggle, nor without leaving to religion, legislation, 
 and literature dangers and advantages which the follow- 
 ing ages would reap ; whilst, on the other, Christian 
 dogma, then strong enough to proceed in victory from 
 the debates of theology, and to produce, in the writings 
 of St. Augustine, a philosophy of its own, was capable 
 of building up an entirely new Society. And the ele- 
 ments of this already existed in that hierarchy whose 
 antiquity we have demonstrated, anciVa that code of 
 manners which had been the meanls of receiving 
 slaves, the poor, and women into the life* of the spirit ; 
 whilst it was the case that this inroad of those whom 
 the old world had disowned, whom the ancient society 
 had despised, paved the way for, preceded, and sur- 
 passed in its proportions that other invasion of the 
 barbarians ; for it had already enlarged the audience 
 to whom human eloquence could address itself, and in 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 91 
 
 so doing had renewed the inspiration innate in litera- 
 ture. 
 
 We will now study the early efforts of the Christian 
 literature, and search out the method whereby the 
 regenerating principle, descending all the degrees of 
 thought, took possession of eloquence, of history, and 
 of poetry, and moulded them from the fifth century 
 into those very forms which, in the Middle Age, ap- 
 peared expanding with such vigour and brilliancy. 
 But it was necessary, first, that Christian literature 
 should find its proper language, and enter upon the 
 still more difficult task of composing it out of existing 
 but opposing elements. Latin was, of necessity, the 
 language of the Western Church, as being the natural 
 tongue of the dying society whose last moments she 
 was called upon to console, and the borrowed language 
 of that host of Germans, of Franks, and of Vandals, 
 who were already making their way on to the lands of 
 the frontier, into the ranks of the army, and even the 
 high offices of the Empire. But it remains to us to 
 discover the miracle whereby Latin, the old pagan 
 tongue, which preserved the names of its thirty thou- 
 sand deities, which was also tainted with the indecen- 
 cies of Petronius and of Martial, became not only 
 Christian, but the language of the Church and of the 
 Middle Age ; how the idiom which seemed destined 
 to perish with that world from whose side it had pro- 
 ceeded, remained a living language upon the tomb of 
 an extinct society, so that, throughout the mediaeval 
 period, it was continually used in preaching, in oratory, 
 and in teaching ; and noble races, even in our own day, 
 have refused to abjure the Latin language, as forming 
 a certain portion of their liberties. It is this trans- 
 
92 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 formation, then one without parallel in the history of 
 the human mind which we will now take into account, 
 as it amply deserves some measure of our attention ; 
 and our thorny task has been facilitated and smoothed 
 by the work of a contemporary historian, who has 
 shown how the same revolution was accomplished at 
 Alexandria* in the language of Greece. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, could seem, at first sight, worse 
 adapted for the ideas of Christianity than that old Latin 
 tongue which in its primitive harshness seemed only 
 fitted for war, for agriculture, and for litigation. Mark 
 its harsh, terse, and monosyllabic forms, befitting the 
 idiom of a people who had no leisure to lose them- 
 selves, like the Greeks, in long discussions, nor to 
 waste their time upon the marble steps of the Par- 
 thenon, or beneath the porticoes of the Agora. It 
 points, on the contrary, to men of business, less greedy 
 of ideas than of pelf, meeting each other by chance 
 on a dusty road, scorched by the rays of the sun, and 
 exchanging briefly, in the tersest and most elliptical 
 language, words expressive of their rights, of their 
 longings, and of their hopes. Thus, if war were in the 
 question, all the expressions referring to it were short 
 and forcible : Mars, vis war, strength ; <zs, the iron 
 from which weapons were forged. If they talked of 
 the country, we must not expect its beauties to be 
 celebrated in harmonious and ear-filling expressions, 
 but in monosyllables : flos, frux, bos flower, fruit, ox ; 
 everything which appertained to the agriculturalist was 
 ended by a short sound, as contracted as the moment 
 which was allotted to him for the sowing or reaping of 
 his crops. And the language of business had its germ 
 * M. Egger. 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 93 
 
 in those compressed expressions which seemed to con- 
 centrate the whole energy of a litigious and law-making 
 race : jus, fas, lex, res right, justice, law, thing ; the 
 essential roots, in fine, of the language of law. 
 
 Doubtless on a closer view one can discover the 
 affinity of Latin to the iEolian dialect, and see traces 
 of a remote parentage amongst the languages of the 
 East ; as, for instance, Sanscrit. But, on setting aside 
 these useful and luminous theories of science, in order 
 to consider that alone which characterizes the genius 
 of the people, it is impossible not to recognize in the 
 speakers of that harsh and concise idiom the same men 
 whom Plautus, at the opening of his "Amphitryon," 
 caused the god Mercury to address, and for whom he 
 wished no soft and fascinating day-dreams beneath cool 
 shades, nor delights of wit or of imagination, but a 
 speedy enrichment through a solid and enduring gain.* 
 So vulgar was the character of the people whose lan- 
 guage was destined to be the universal dialect of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 But as soon as the manners of Greece had invaded 
 Borne, her orators set themselves to model the Latin 
 tongue after Grecian forms. Thus an artificial culture 
 arose which, though confined to a small number of 
 enlightened minds, was pushed to an incredible pitch 
 of ardour and of perfection. Cicero trained himself 
 to declaim in the Greek language, as offering greater 
 wealth than his own in resource and ornament. Nay, 
 more, not content with stealing the figures, reasonings, 
 
 * Et ut res rationesque vestrorum omnium 
 Bene expedire voltis peregreque et domi, 
 Bonoque atque amplo auctare perpetuo lucro, 
 Quasque incepistis res quasque inceptabitis. 
 
 Plaut. Amjohitr. prolog, v. 5. 
 
94 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and hardy flights of the oratorical compositions of 
 Demosthenes and of iEschines, he sought also for the 
 secrets of their eloquence and the mysteries of the 
 harmony whereby the speakers of Greece used to 
 flatter the itching ears of its multitudes. So we see 
 Cicero making research with infinite art and prodigious 
 subtlety in the works of Aristotle, of Ephorus, and of 
 Theopompus, for the diverse measures which could be 
 introduced into an oratorical period, to render it richer 
 and more satisfying to the ear. Nor must we believe 
 that he suffered his speeches to be composed of long 
 and short syllables at haphazard : a certain number 
 of trochees, paeans, and other feet was indispensable, 
 and he continually expatiated on a speech which he 
 had heard in his youth, when Carbo, tribune of the 
 people, in the peroration to a fierce invective against 
 his political adversaries, won the popular applause by 
 a phrase which was crowned by the most harmonious 
 ditrochee that had ever been heard Patris dictum 
 sapiens temeritas filii comprobavit. The word com- 
 probavit, with its two long alternated by two short 
 syllables, had so ravished the ear of the audience that 
 the orator was surrounded by one long murmur of 
 approbation. To such a point were the refinements of 
 euphony insisted upon by this people, who also ex- 
 pected that a flute-player would always accompany the 
 orator in the tribune, and keep his voice to the proper 
 level. 
 
 A like measure of care, zeal, and laborious applica- 
 tion, was also bestowed upon poetry. The metres 
 of Greece had passed in succession, first into the epic, 
 and then into the dramatic poetry of the Latins ; and 
 finally Catullus and Horace had borrowed from the 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 95 
 
 lyric poets of the .ZEolian school the most subtle and 
 delicate combinations that were permitted by the har- 
 mony of their beautiful language. 
 
 Thus a time came when Greece possessed no treasure 
 upon which Kome had not laid her hand ; and the 
 hour, though it was but a brief one, arrived which saw 
 the perfect maturity of the Latin language, capable 
 then of pursuing with Cicero the loftiest flight vouch- 
 safed to the intellect of man, as far as the threshold of 
 the infinite ; capable also of diving with the juris- 
 consults into the lowest depths, the most delicate sub- 
 tleties, and the remotest windings of human affairs ; 
 and capable, moreover, with Virgil, of drawing from 
 syllables, till then harsh and inharmonious, sounds 
 which were destined to charm the ears of a long pos- 
 terity, to charm them even now ; poetic lamentations 
 which caused Octavia to faint away in the arms of 
 Augustus. 
 
 Such was the grandeur and beauty of that Latin 
 tongue, to which too high a tribute cannot be paid, in 
 that incomparable but fugitive period which we have 
 noticed. But this artificial culture could not be of 
 long duration, for languages contain an inherent law 
 of decomposition which wills that, on arriving at a 
 certain stage of maturity, like the fruits, they should 
 fall, open out, and render to the world seeds from which 
 newer languages might germinate. Whilst Eoman 
 society, in its most elegant and polished portion, clung 
 to all the delicate perfections of an exquisite language, 
 the people were without the capacity of raising them- 
 selves to so high a level, without the patience necessary 
 to a respect for the exigencies of patrician ears. For, 
 in fact, two kinds of rules exist in a literary language, 
 
96 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 those rules of euphony which regard art, and. those 
 of logic which look towards science ; and the people, 
 pressed with business, articulating carelessly and with- 
 out regard to purity, spoke as the occasion called, and 
 thereby violated the laws of euphony, whilst they out- 
 raged the rules of logic by erroneous constructions. 
 
 So it followed of necessity, that in a short time a 
 popular and imperfect language a dialect, in fact, of 
 some coarseness was formed beneath the learned Latin, 
 and circulated amongst the mighty multitude which 
 thronged in Eome and her provinces. Nor .are traces 
 wanting of the colloquial diction which prevailed in the 
 streets of the city, and which the comedians employed 
 as a means of bringing themselves within the sym- 
 pathies of their audiences; for it appears in the 
 works of Plautus, and in the inscriptions we may find 
 still stranger instances wherein the rules of grammar 
 were incredibly violated. For instance, cum conjugem 
 suam, pietatem causa, templum quod est in palatium, 
 with numerous other expressions of like nature. 
 
 Thus the Latin language was in process of decom- 
 position as early as the time of Cicero, who used to 
 point to the age of Scipio Africanus as its golden era. 
 To Cicero, as to many others, the century in which he 
 lived gave him a sad impression, as being smitten 
 with decay ; and so he placed the apogee in a time 
 remote from his own. It was, he said, the privilege of 
 the age of Scipio to speak as well as to live with purity ; 
 but since then speech had been corrupted by a host 
 of foreigners. Quintilian again said, later, that the 
 whole language had altered, and bears witness that 
 more than once, when a tragic spectacle had roused the 
 emotions of the audience, the exclamations which burst 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHEISTIAN. 97 
 
 from all sides of the theatre had comprised some barba- 
 rous elements, which, as it were, belied the purity of 
 the language which the poet had designed.* 
 
 Accordingly, from the earliest days of the Empire 
 corruption had set in, the Latin language was perishing, 
 and far from its desolation being the work of Chris- 
 tianity, it was only through the Church that it was 
 destined to revive. 
 
 Antiquity had been . divided by three influences, the 
 genius of the East, namely, that of contemplation and of 
 symbolism, which led through the observation of Nature 
 to a discovery of the language of the Creator, and that 
 of true poetry for poetry is nothing but a divine con- 
 templation of things of earth, an ideal conception of 
 the real ; secondly, the genius of Greece, specially 
 adapted to speculation and to philosophy, with the capa- 
 city of adapting expressions of refined accuracy to all the 
 shades of human thought, which sufficed for all the 
 wants of the past may we not say, also, for all those 
 of our own time? for it is from that language that we 
 ask for words to designate the discoveries of the age ; 
 and, lastly, the Latin genius, which was that of action, 
 of law, and of empire. In order that these three influ- 
 ences should subsist, it was necessary that the triple 
 spirit of the East, of Greece, and of Eome, should in 
 some measure form the soul of the nascent nations. 
 The Latin tongue offered to the Church a marvellous 
 engine of legislation and government, fitted for the 
 administration of her vast society; but it was also 
 required that the language of action should become that 
 of speculation, that its stiff and pedantic nature should 
 
 * "Tota ssepe theatra, et omnem circi turbam exclamasse 
 barbare scimus." Quint. Instit. Or. lib. i. c. 6. 
 
 VOL. II. 5 
 
98 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 be made supple and popular, that it should be endowed 
 with the qualities which it wanted in order to satisfy the 
 reason with a regularity and exactitude cognate to that 
 of the Greek terminology, and to charm the imagination 
 with splendours kindred to those of the Oriental sym- 
 bolism. This end Christianity effected by a work which, 
 though humble at first sight, like everything which is 
 truly humble, concealed one of the boldest and grandest 
 ideas that have ever been conceived, by the translation 
 of the Bible called the Vulgate. A certain man, who 
 was perfectly versed in Latin literature, steeped in all 
 the culture, and nearly all the passions, of the Roman 
 world, after having for some time mastered all the 
 enlightenment and gazed, though from some distance, 
 at the pleasures of that debased society, came to his 
 senses and fled in terror into the desert. He sought an 
 asylum at Bethlehem, amidst its solitudes, which were 
 but beginning to be peopled by the first monks ; and 
 therein Jerome forced himself to repel the memories 
 which he had carried from Rome, and the voluptuous 
 images which troubled his thoughts even in the place 
 of his meditation and fasting. The works of Cicero 
 and of Plato were never absent from his hands, and yet 
 they recalled and echoed too loudly the sounds of that 
 old world which he longed to forget. To subdue him- 
 self, and conquer the ijesh, as he tells us, he undertook 
 the study of Hebrew, and put himself under the 
 tuition, and even at the service, of a monk, a converted 
 Jew, who, greedy of interpretation, taught him, in a 
 quarry and by night for fear lest his countrymen 
 should detect him the secrets of the sacred language. 
 "And I," said he, " all nourished as I still was with 
 the flower of Cicero's eloquence, with the sweetness of 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 99 
 
 Pliny and Fronto, and the charm of Virgil, began to 
 stammer harsh and breath-disturbing words, stridentia 
 anhelantiaque verba. I tied myself down to that diffi- 
 cult language, like a slave to a millstone, buried myself 
 in the darkness of that barbarous idiom like a miner in 
 a cavern, in which, after a long time, he at last perceives 
 a gleam of light ; so in its obscure depths I began to 
 find unknown joys, and later, from the bitter seedtime 
 of my study I gathered in the fruits of an infinite 
 sweetness." 
 
 Such was the language of St. Jerome we may 
 recognize it by the savage energy of its eloquence. 
 The harvest which he desired to reap, the fruits of his 
 bitter study, were the sacred books which he proposed 
 to translate from the Hebrew, and thus to rectify what- 
 ever errors might have crept into the visions framed 
 upon the Septuagint, as well as to deprive the Jews of 
 all subterfuge, and cut from under their feet the objec- 
 tions upon which they stood as to the supposed dis- 
 crepancy between the Hebrew original and the Greek 
 version. It was this motive that impelled St. Jerome 
 to undertake the translation of the Bible, and nothing 
 less than an inspiration of faith, a strong conviction of 
 duty, was necessary to enable him to brave the intrinsic 
 difficulty of the work, and the opposition offered by 
 certain Christians who possessed the older translations, 
 and were quite content to keep them ; for, as Jerome 
 said, there were people who prided themselves on having 
 fine manuscripts, without caring for their accuracy. 
 But his native genius and enthusiasm was hardly 
 sufficient to carry him through all the difficulties and 
 disgusts of his long labours. He was sustained by the 
 friendship and the docility of St. Paula, of Eustochia, 
 
100 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and the other Eoman ladies who shared in his toil; 
 and with their encouragement and help he advanced in 
 his work, following a system of translation which he 
 arranged himself, and which consisted in the continued 
 practice of two rules. The first and the most common 
 was to preserve, as far as was possible, without injuring, 
 the sense, the elegance, and euphony of the language 
 into which the translation was made. For thus, he 
 said, had Cicero translated Plato, Xenophon, and 
 Demosthenes ; thus the Greek comedians had passed 
 on to the Latin stage under the auspices of Plautus, 
 Terence, and Catullus ; and in this manner did he pro- 
 pose to transfer the beauties of the Hebrew language 
 into the Latin text without marring the grammatical 
 purity of the latter. But the second rule, to which he 
 sacrificed the former, was to the effect that when it was 
 a question of preserving the sense in translating an 
 obscure passage, nothing besides should be considered, 
 and that the language used in translating must be 
 violated rather than that any of the energy of the 
 original should be lost, for the Divine text must be cor- 
 rectly rendered at any cost. This, then, St. Jerome 
 desired, proposed to himself, and pursued with a mar- 
 vellous boldness. He did not ignore the barbarisms 
 that of necessity crept into his style, and entreated 
 Paulinus not to suffer himself to be repelled by the rude 
 and simple language of Scripture. In another place he 
 begged that his reader should not demand of him an 
 elegance which he had lost through contact with the 
 Hebrews. 
 
 Thus was produced the translation of the Old Tes- 
 tament into Latin, named the Vulgate, which was one 
 of the greatest achievements of the human mind, and 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHEISTIAN. 101 
 
 has not been sufficiently studied under that point of 
 view. Through its means the whole current of the 
 Eastern genius entered, so to speak, into the Eoman 
 civilization ; and yet not so much by the small number 
 of untranslatable Hebrew words, which St. Jerome 
 preserved, and which need not be taken much into 
 account. For it was not by a mere adoption of the 
 Alleluia and the Amen that the Latin tongue was 
 enriched, but by the bold constructions which it appro- 
 priated, the unexpected alliance of words, the wonderful 
 abundance of images, by that Scriptural symbolism in 
 which events and persons are figures of other events ; 
 and of other persons ; in which Noah, Abraham, and 
 Jacob have their chief value as types and foreshadow- 
 ings of Christianity ; in which the solemn nuptials of 
 Solomon represented the nuptials that were to be between 
 the Messiah and the Church ; in which, finally, every 
 image of the past had reference to the future. And 
 this gave rise to a phenomenon which has somewhat 
 escaped observation in the depths of the Hebrew genius 
 the parallelism which is of its essence, and which was 
 now added to the newly gained riches of the language 
 of Christendom. 
 
 The Greeks nearly always founded their compositions 
 upon the number three. Thus their odes were formed 
 of a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode ; and the 
 Greek grammar comprised three tenses the past, the 
 present, and the future. But the Hebrew arrangement 
 was different, and we find the verses of their psalms 
 always divided into two nearly equal parts, counter- 
 balancing and responding to one another. That lan- 
 guage, with the peculiarity which was also common to 
 the other Semitic languages, possessed only two tenses. 
 
102 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Hebrew has in it no present, and rightly, for what 
 is the present but an invisible point of intersection 
 between the past and the future, which can always 
 be divided between the one and the other, and is, 
 therefore, non-existent as the present. It comprised 
 only a past and a future tense, like the Hebrew people 
 itself, which has no present destiny, and recognizes only 
 that of the past, which it calls tradition, and that 
 which is yet to come, which it knows as prophecy. 
 Hence, in its language and its poetry, the novel 
 characteristic of the people effected that the two periods 
 of time, tradition which had been, and prophecy 
 which would be fulfilled, stood face to face, calling and 
 responding the one to the other ; and that the idea of 
 the present was effaced by these two tenses, which 
 were continually changing their names and positions 
 between themselves. For often did the prophets make 
 use of the past to express futurity ; Isaiah related the 
 passion of Christ as an accomplished event, whilst, on 
 the other hand, Moses, speaking of the alliance con- 
 cluded between the people of Israel and its God, placed 
 his facts in the future. This predestined peculiarity 
 of the Hebrew language, which, as it were, effaced time, 
 and produced that sentiment of unity which was at the 
 root of Eastern ideas, entered with it into the Latin 
 tongue, and imprinted on it a stamp, which was to 
 mark the whole literature of the Middle Age, for it 
 was the notion of eternity which came into the Latin 
 at the time of which we are treating, penetrated it 
 thoroughly, and remained rooted in its soil. 
 
 We come to a second point. Only a portion of the 
 Old Testament had been written in and translated from 
 the Hebrew ; but the remainder, with the whole New 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 103 
 
 Testament those Apostolic epistles which contained 
 the most essential analysis of Christian theology, and the 
 works of the early Fathers was in Greek. It had been 
 of necessity translated in primitive times into Latin, for 
 the purposes of religion ; but now it also passed beneath 
 the hand of St. Jerome, as the Pope Damasus required 
 that he should completely revise the Scriptures of the 
 New as well as those of the Ancient Covenant. Con- 
 sequently, the theological treasures of Greek Christianity 
 passed in their turn into the Latin language ; and here 
 again we may take small notice of the new words, 
 which must, perforce, have been borrowed from the / 
 Greek as, for instance, all that related to the liturgy 
 and to the hierarchy episcopus, presbyter, diaconus, 
 the name of Christ, the Paraclete, the words baptism, 
 anathema, and many others ; for such gains cannot be 
 counted as conquests to a language, and merely resemble 
 the stone which the avalanche gathers up in its course, 
 but which is no part of itself. 
 
 The lesson gathered by the Latin tongue from the 
 school of the Greek Christianity did not consist either 
 in those oratorical artifices and tricks of number and 
 rhythm which had struck Cicero, but rather in supply- 
 ing from its stores the insufficiency of her own phi- 
 losophic terms, an insufficiency which Cicero himself 
 had lamented, when, in his attempts at translating the 
 writings of Plato, and endowing his own language with 
 the treasures of Greek thought, he found himself occa- 
 sionally conquered and despairing. But Christianity 
 did not feel his despair, nor accept the defeat; and 
 when once the Latin tongue had been bold enough to 
 translate the epistles of St. Paul, which contained the 
 most difficult propositions and the boldest flights of 
 
104 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Christian metaphysics, there was nothing thenceforth 
 .that it could not attempt. The Church created certain 
 words which were necessary to Christian theology 
 spiritualis, carnalis, sensualis as designating states 
 referring respectively to the soul, the flesh, or the 
 senses ; and also verbs expressive of certain ideas which 
 had been unknown to the ancients, as, for instance, 
 the verb salvare. Cicero himself having somewhere 
 said that no word existed to render the Greek acoryp, to 
 express the idea of a Saviour, therefore a Christian 
 innovation was necessary to coin salvator ; and thus 
 justificare, mortificare, jejunare, and many new verbs 
 were in time produced. 
 
 But this was not sufficient, and a deeper descent 
 than any that the ancients had dared, into the delicacies 
 of the human heart, was needed. Seneca had doubtless 
 pushed his scrupulous analysis far; but Christianity 
 transcended it, and discovered virtues in the deep 
 recesses of feeling with which the ancients had never 
 credited humanity. Christians were the first to use 
 the term compassio, which had been unknown to the 
 Romans, though it is true that they were unable some- 
 times to frame Latin words, and often confined them- 
 selves to a mere translation of the Greek, as in the 
 case of eleemosyna, alms. They were bound to prose- 
 cute vigorously the work of creating resources before 
 unknown to their language, and were not hindered by 
 a fear of forming new expressions. 
 
 The Latin language had always preserved a concrete 
 character ; it had no love for abstract expressions, and 
 no means of extracting them from its own resources. 
 Thus the ancients expressed gratitude by gratus 
 animus, and used for ingratitude the words ingratus 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 105 
 
 animus, but Christianity was bolder, and coined the 
 word ingratitudo. Facilities appeared for the con- 
 struction of many analogous terms, for multiplying 
 and filling the Latin dictionary with names for abstract 
 ideas, and thus appeared the words sensualitas, gratio- 
 sitas, dubietas. But these expressions were not merely 
 superfluous and adapted to encumber with vain redun- 
 dancies a language which already sufficed for itself ; 
 they rendered what before had been expressed by a 
 periphrasis, or, owing to the unwillingness of men to 
 enounce anything that is not comprised in a single 
 word, had not been expressed at all. Through their 
 aid close reasonings and subtle distinctions could be 
 sustained in Latin, now the language of Christianity, 
 which in following the thorny disputes on Arianism 
 had been obliged to mould itself after the supple 
 delicacy of the Greek, and to acquire the same readi- 
 ness in serving the intellect by providing it instantly 
 with the word which it required to express a definite 
 thought. And thus Latin gained the richness which 
 had been peculiar to the Greek, and the power of 
 creating words to meet its requirements. 
 
 But Christianity only achieved this revolution in 
 the Latin tongue on condition of doing great violence 
 to the beautiful idiom of Cicero and of Quintilian, 
 in forcing upon it the unheard-of expressions which 
 we have just noticed, and making sensualitas, impassi- 
 bilitas, and the other words required by the oecu- 
 menical discussions, possible in a language formerly so 
 exquisite. The Bible had commenced and been chiefly 
 instrumental to the change by introducing into Latin 
 the poetic wealth of the Hebrew on the one hand, and 
 the philosophic wealth of Greek on the other. But in I 
 
106 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 this task the Bible and the Church itself had two 
 auxiliaries, firstly in the Africans, and secondly in the 
 populace, who, in the epoch of which we are treating, 
 were semi-barbarians. 
 
 Let us mark the fact, which has been too little 
 studied, of the invasion by the Africans of Latin, and 
 especially of Christian, literature in the time which 
 we are discussing. It has been often remarked that 
 Latin literature made in some measure the tour of the 
 Mediterranean ; going forth from its cradle in Etruria 
 and Magna Graecia, it crossed the Alps, and found in 
 Gaul writers of the class of Cornelius Gallus, Tro- 
 picus Pompeius, and their contemporaries. It then 
 passed into Spain, to find there poets and historians, 
 though of a less pure taste, and finally a little later 
 into Africa, where it gave birth to the latest, but not 
 least laborious generation of its children, who brought 
 to the study of letters all the fire of their climate. 
 Amongst the latter may be numbered Cornutus, the 
 disciple of Seneca, who flourished in the time of Nero ; 
 Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, the poet Neme- 
 sianus, and many others, and finally that Martianus 
 Capella, whose learned allegory on the marriage of 
 Philologia and Mercury we have already noticed. The 
 speciality of African genius was, however, manifested 
 by Apuleius, who showed strikingly, in his romance of 
 the Golden Ass, a taste for obscure metaphors, archaic 
 expressions, and daring hyperboles. He loaded his 
 poetry with adornments proper to prose, and filled his 
 prose with poetical turns, thus trampling remorselessly 
 upon all the rules of Latin taste. It seemed in truth 
 as if these writers of Africa had bound themselves 
 to avenge the misfortunes of Hannibal upon the Ian- 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 107 
 
 guage of his conquerors ; and yet we must recognize 
 amidst all the irregularities of their style a certain 
 fire which smacked of the heat of their sun and of 
 the sand of their deserts. And this was still more 
 apparent when the African School had become Chris- 
 tian, and had produced the first and most illustrious 
 of the Fathers, such as Tertullian, called always by 
 St. Cyprian the Master, St. Cyprian himself, Arnobius, 
 -and above all St. Augustine. 
 
 Thus we see that Christian literature of the primi- \ 
 tive ages was African by origin and in character, and J 
 Tertullian, the chief of the school, showed all the 
 failings of the African genius. He .was wanting in 
 repose a cardinal fault in the presence of the calmness 
 which is generally the marked characteristic of the 
 literary works of antiquity. His impetuous thought 
 always snatched, not at the most accurate, but the most 
 forcible expression. Had he a truth to present, he was 
 certain to present not its most attractive but its most 
 wounding side. Rash and aggressive, he defied the 
 intellects which were to follow him ; but still the dark- 
 ness of his style only veiled its brilliance, and the 
 pomp of his verbiage never served to cloak poverty 
 of idea. He broke the ancient moulds only because 
 they could no longer contain the fast-flowing lava. His 
 energetic expressions, which seemed so many chal- 
 lenges, often obliged unwilling reason to own its defeat ; 
 and the man who argued so barbarously achieved in 
 the end the highest triumph of human eloquence, in 
 saying what he meant, rudely perhaps, but thoroughly 
 and without compromise, after a method alike forcible 
 and enduring. Thus on one occasion, in order to 
 express the totality of the Roman civilization, he 
 
108 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 coined the monstrous but pregnant word Bomanitas, 
 and again, in defining the Church, said in a jargon 
 which assuredly no Roman would have owned, "Corpus 
 sumus de conscientia religionis et disciplines divinitate 
 et spei fcedere." (The Church is a mighty body 
 resulting from the consciousness of the same religion, 
 from the divinity of the same discipline, from the 
 bonds of the same hope.) Wishing again to pursue 
 to the last details the decomposition of the human 
 organization, he used the following strong expressions : 
 Cadit in originem terram, et cadaveris nomen, ex isto 
 jam nomine peritura in nullum inde jam nomen et omnis 
 vocabuli mortem, and bequeathed to Bossuet the fol- 
 lowing immortal phrase : Ce je ne sais quoi qui n'a 
 de nom dans aucune langue. These Africans, there- 
 fore, if barbarians, were at least gifted with eloquence^) 
 and if they broke down the edifice of polished Latinity J 
 which had been reared by the ancients, it was because 
 they knew that they could build up a grander fabric 
 from the ruins. 
 
 However, it was not the Africans alone who lent their 
 aid to Christianity in the great work of destruction and 
 reconstruction ; for they only formed the vanguard of 
 the advancing columns which now formed in truth the 
 bulk of the Roman people, and which had been recruited 
 from all the barbarous nations. From the remotest 
 time, long before Goths or Vandals came in question, 
 the mission of Rome began and accomplished itself day 
 by day. When in the fifth century of its existence, for 
 example, the slave Herdonius, with a multitude of his 
 fellows, found himself master of the Capitol, the city 
 was already in the power of the barbarians. Her popu- 
 lation was composed of slaves, freedmen, and merce- 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 109 
 
 naries, strangers who took liberties with her language ; 
 and Scipio himself, the man whom Cicero placed at its 
 golden age, said to the people from the tribune, with 
 the audacity of a dauntless warrior : " I see that you 
 are all Numidians, Spaniards, and barbarians of other 
 kinds, whom I brought hither with your hands bound 
 behind your backs, freedmen but of yesterday, and 
 voters of to-day." Thus the mass which was named 
 the Roman people was but a great and increasing in- 
 gathering of barbarism, and it was also recruited by 
 Christianity ; for the religion which did not despise the 
 mean and ignorant, which had been the first to ap- 
 proach them, opened widely its doors for their entrance, 
 showed no repugnance at their coarseness, and per- 
 mitted her Catacombs to be covered with inscriptions 
 which bristled with barbarisms and solecisms : " Quam 
 stabilis tibi hcsc vita est Kefrigero deus animo homi- 
 nis Irene da Cdlda." 
 
 We see, then, that the language of the inscriptions of 
 the Catacombs was identical with the language of that 
 people whom we have before noticed as taking no heed 
 of rules of euphony or of logic, and using a very 
 different pronunciation from that of the chosen and 
 elegant few who used the idiom of Cicero and of 
 Horace. They even corrupted the popular Latin of 
 the Psalms, and St. Augustine tells us that in the 
 churches of Africa the clergy were unable to bring their 
 congregation to chant Super ipsum efflorebit sanctificatio 
 mea. They persisted in saying floriet, nor could all 
 their Christian docility uproot the solecism. The same 
 authority also tells us that in order to be understood by 
 the people, it was necessary to say, " Non est abscondi- 
 tum a te ossummeum" instead of "os meum" and that 
 
110 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 he preferred that rendering, as it was more essential to 
 he understood than to use good Latin ; and even St. 
 Jerome, fond as he still was of the beautiful diction of 
 the poets and the classic memories of Cicero and of 
 Plautus, granted that the Scriptures ought to be in a 
 simpler style, which would put them within the grasp 
 of an assembly of the unlearned. 
 
 But it was in the domain of poetry especially that 
 the intervention of the people became marked and fer- 
 tile. Side by side with that learned versification which 
 only the minority could justly appreciate, stood another 
 poetry ; and whilst the cultivated courtiers of Augustus 
 were delighting in the dactyls and spondees which fell 
 from the lips of Virgil, the Roman populace, too rude 
 for such mental pleasures, possessed their own popular 
 verses in those atellans and old Saturnine rhythms of 
 which we now know so little. We are certain of but 
 one peculiarity in the poetic taste of the ancient Ro- 
 mans, but that is a most interesting fact, namely, that 
 they delighted in seeing their verses in rhyme. Of this 
 traces appear in the works of Ennius, the poetical 
 writings of Cicero, and even in the measures of Virgil, 
 the hemistich often rhyming with the end of the verse ; 
 and we find it used with care and a certain affectation 
 in the pentameters of Ovid, who seemed to take delight 
 in bringing the consonant terminations of his lines into 
 apposition, as if it were a certain method of extracting 
 applause. So that this taste, which could be not en- 
 tirely suppressed in the elaborate poetry of the Augus- 
 tan age, seemed to proceed from the instincts of the 
 people, who formed a species of poetry which was 
 germane to the rude qualities of their language, as we 
 find many rhyming couplets amongst the ancient relics 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. Ill 
 
 of the popular Latin melodies, for instance in the 
 Roman war song, 
 
 Mille, mille Sarmatas occidimus ! 
 Mille, mille Persas quoerimus ! 
 
 Christianity, always considerate of popular tastes, had 
 no need to outrage this one, and we find even in the 
 poetic attempts which first fell from Christian hands 
 that the rhyme was developed to a point which reminds 
 us of modern habits. We will cite here, for the first 
 time, a poem which is scarcely known, but which seems 
 decisive on this point a poem bearing the authorship 
 of St. Cyprian, but which can hardly be his, though cer- 
 tainly dating from his era, which was also that of the 
 persecutions. Its subject is the Resurrection from the 
 Dead, and the first fourteen verses form a singular train 
 of monorhymes : 
 
 Qui milii ruricolas optavi carmine musas, 
 Et vernis roseas titulari floribus auras, 
 iEstivasque graves maturavi messis aristas 
 Succidi tumidas autumni vitibus uvas, &c. 
 
 After fourteen lines which rhyme in as, follow five 
 in o, and six in is, as if the Christian poet, seeking to 
 impress their meaning upon his auditors, could find no 
 method surer than this reiterated rhyme to lay hold 
 of the memory and charm the imagination. 
 
 A little later the Christian Commodianus, who also 
 lived during the persecutions, composed eighty chapters, 
 Adversus Gentium Deos, which aspired to be in verse. 
 But they were not equal to those which we have just 
 quoted, and had nothing in common with the old heroic 
 verse except the number of the syllables, which the 
 author, in order to obtain the necessary dactyls and 
 spondees, made long or short arbitrarily. The last 
 
112 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 twenty-six lines formed a long succession upon a single 
 rhyme, 
 
 Incolae coelorum futuri cnm Deo Christo, 
 Tenente principium, vidente cuncta de coalo, 
 Simplicitas, bonitas habitet in corpore vestro. 
 
 Wretched lines intrinsically, but yet curious as 
 showing the prominence given to the rhyme, which, 
 from being a mere accessory to the poems of the age of 
 Augustus, formed the sole object of the new poetry, in 
 which the imitation of the old heroic verse was but a 
 discredited tradition. 
 
 But St. Augustine entirely discarded the methods of 
 the ancient poetic art and the harmony of the Latin 
 metres, upon which he had formerly composed a 
 treatise in five books ; and for the sake of his flock, in 
 order to fix in their minds the principles of the con- 
 troversy against the Donatists which had so long 
 troubled the African Church, composed a psalm Contra 
 Donatistas of not less than two hundred and eighty-four 
 verses, divided into twenty couplets of twelve verses 
 each, accompanied by a refrain, and not including the 
 epilogue. These verses were all composed of sixteen 
 or seventeen syllables divided in the middle by a caesura, 
 and all ending with the same rhyme, 
 
 Omnes qui gaudetis de pace modo verum judicate. 
 Abundantia peccatorum solet fratres conturbare. 
 Propter hoc Dominus noster voluit nos preemonere, 
 Comparans regnum coelorum reticulo misso in mare. 
 
 From this we may see that all the artifices of the 
 ancient poetry had disappeared; all that referred to 
 quantity, dactyls, or spondees, was effaced, leaving only 
 the two constituents of all modern popular poetry the 
 number of its syllables and rhyme. 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 113 
 
 Moreover, it is a striking fact that the plan of follow- 
 ing the same rhyme for twenty, thirty, or forty verses, 
 until it was fairly exhausted, was precisely the earliest 
 method adopted for the chivalrous poems of the Middle 
 Age, for the poems and romances of the Carlovingian 
 period. In them also the same assonance returned 
 over and over again, until the patience of both the 
 orator and the audience was wearied, as if the human 
 mind found a singular charm in the novel artifice 
 which had taken the place of the canons of the 
 ancient poetry. And to look closer, it appears as if 
 the attractions of rhyme consisted in the expectation 
 which it roused and satisfied, in the experience which 
 it produced, and the memory which it recalled, in the 
 return of an agreeable consonance, the reawakening of a 
 pleasure once enjoyed when most pleasures pass by to 
 return no more. Such was perhaps the psychological 
 principle of that new art which was introduced with the 
 popular element into the Latin tongue, and became the 
 ruling canon of all modern versification. 
 
 These, therefore, were the achievements of Christianity, 
 with the Bible for her instrument, with Africans, bar- 
 barians, and the populace, who were recruited from the 
 latter, for her servants. Nothing less than this great 
 transformation of the Latin language was needed in 
 order to mould from it the classic tongue of the Middle 
 Age, and to reunite the scattered elements of the ancient 
 civilization. 
 
 For, in the first place, the Middle Age was a period 
 of contemplation, full of that ascetic and ccenobitic life 
 which was already flourishing on every hand, and which 
 could only find adequate expression in a language 
 which sparkled with the fires which had lightened 
 
114 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the anchorites of the East. And the Middle Age had 
 to find in the idiom which it used a vehicle for that 
 symbolism which had become its want ; for no epoch 
 has striven more to represent ideas by figures, and to 
 discover in every being the mark of a divine thought ; 
 and thus throughout, in its poetry and its architecture, 
 in its works by brush or by chisel, did the Middle Age 
 preserve a character of allegory, and the chant of the 
 Psalms alone could give to its Gothic cathedrals a 
 worthy voice. Latin was the necessary language of the 
 Liturgy, which formed the poetic song of the mediaeval 
 period. 
 
 And, secondly, the Middle Age was rich in the genius 
 of speculation, in an activity of mind which never 
 ceased to analyze and to distinguish. It produced 
 those legions of logicians and controversialists whose 
 dauntless subtlety never wearied in fathoming the 
 regions of the intellect ; and as to render their thoughts 
 a supple language like that of the Greek metaphysic 
 was required, so the mediaeval Latin became the 
 language of the schools. 
 
 In the third place, the Middle Age possessed the 
 genius of action ; it was pressed upon by the idea of 
 law, so that the majority of its great wars began, so 
 to speak, by lawsuits. It was filled with Pleadings for 
 and against the priesthood, or the Empire, or divorce. 
 Litigation lay at the root of all its armed quarrels ; it 
 was a juridical epoch, and 'produced the Canon Law ; 
 and as it required a language adapted to the rendering 
 of all the subtleties and the satisfaction of all the needs 
 of the jurisconsults, therefore the Latin of the Middle 
 Age became the language of the law courts. And most 
 of all, those ages represented the childhood of the 
 
HOW THE LATIN LANGUAGE BECAME CHRISTIAN. 115 
 
 Christian nations ; therefore their common infancy 
 called for one language as the instrument of its educa- 
 tion, and demanded that it should be simple, expressive, 
 and familiar, capable of lending itself to the meagre 
 intellects of the Saxons, Goths, and Franks, who then 
 formed the bulk of the Christian world. For this 
 reason the Church, with reason, preferred the idiom of 
 the people to the idiom of the learned few, and prepared 
 in advance a language which would be accessible to 
 those sons of the barbarians who soon were to throng 
 her schools. 
 
 Thus all the modern languages, one after another, 
 were destined to gather energy and fertility from the 
 ancient Latin ; and not only those of them which have 
 been styled Neo-Latin, such as Italian, Provencal, and 
 Spanish, but the Teutonic dialects also were not free 
 from the tutorship exercised by the language of the 
 Komans. Long were they subject to its happy in- 
 fluence, and the English, which amongst all the 
 languages of the North preserved the most of its effect, 
 was also the tongue which acquired a peculiar clearness, 
 energy, and popularity. 
 
 But the Latin which thus moulded our modern 
 languages was not that of Cicero, nor even that of 
 Virgil, deeply studied as these authors were in the 
 Middle Age, but the Latin of the Church and of the 
 Bible, the religious and popular idiom whose course we 
 have been tracing. It was the Bible the first book 
 that the new languages essayed to translate, that 
 was taken up by the French in the twelfth, by the 
 Teutonic tongues in the eighth and ninth centuries 
 which, with its beautiful narrative, with the simplicity 
 of its Genesis and its pictures of the infancy of the 
 
116 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 human race, was found speaking the very language 
 which was needed by the infant races who were about to 
 enter upon civilized and intellectual life. Our fathers 
 were accustomed to cover the volume of Holy Writ with 
 gold and precious stones. They did more, for when 
 a council assembled, the Scriptures were placed upon 
 the altar in the midst of the conference, over which 
 they were to preside, and whose deliberations they 
 were to conduct. And when processions marched under 
 the open sky, amid their ranks, as Alcuin tells us, the 
 Bible was ever borne triumphantly in a golden shrine. 
 Assuredly our ancestors were right when they covered 
 it with gold and carried it in triumph, for the first of 
 the books of antiquity is also the chief book of modern 
 times ; it is, in fact, the author of all our literature, 
 for from its pages proceeded all the languages, and all 
 the eloquence, poetry, and civilization of the later ages. 
 
117 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 
 
 The Latin language perished by the dissolving process 
 which sooner or later awaits every learned idiom, which 
 begins by sapping its principles and ends by resolving it 
 into a number of popular dialects. But the decaying 
 language was in this case to subsist for the use of 
 Western Christendom. We have glanced at the ex- 
 traordinary transformation whereby the Latin tongue 
 was adapted to its new destiny, and seen how the living 
 forces of the Bible entered into the ancient idiom 
 of Cicero to add to it breadth, the boldness of the 
 Eastern symbolism, and the wealth of the Greek 
 metaphysic ; how the great work was seconded even by 
 barbarous influences, by those African writers who 
 remorselessly violated the ancient forms, as well as by 
 the various crowd of foreigners who outraged the laws 
 of language as unscrupulously as the frontiers of the 
 Empire, who, in debasing the purity of the idiom, re- 
 duced it to their own rude level, and rendered it accessible 
 to the multitude of Goths, Franks, and Saxons, whose 
 speech it was one day destined to become. Thus was 
 formed the Latin of the Church, a curious idiom which, 
 though at once old and new, was frequently sublime in 
 its very rudeness, which also possessed a native grace, 
 ornaments, and great writers of its own, was sufficient 
 
118 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 for all the requirements of the liturgy, of the schools, 
 and of the feudal and canon law ; popular enough to 
 serve for all matters of business as well as for the 
 teaching and education of the barbarians, and gifted 
 with a fecundity which brought forth the whole modern 
 family of the Latin languages. 
 
 Christian civilization, therefore, had found its proper 
 tongue, and we now must examine its production of the 
 three constituents of all literature eloquence, history, 
 and poetry. We will treat firstly of Christian eloquence. 
 Antiquity had loved to excess the pleasures of speech, 
 pleasures we may call them, for under its order 
 eloquence was bound to charm the senses and not 
 merely to satisfy the intellect. To the Greeks and 
 Komans a speech was a spectacle, and the tribune a 
 stage. As the Greek theatre was a species of temple, 
 wherein the actor, clothed in majestic and ennobling 
 costume, represented the gods and heroes of old, and 
 was bound to preserve a kind of statuesque dignity, so 
 was the Greek and Eoman orator expected to manifest 
 on the tribune, by the taste of his dress and his whole 
 attitude and adornment of person, the correctness of a 
 figure by Praxiteles or Phidias. His voice was raised 
 and carefully sustained by the flute-player, who was 
 his constant companion, whilst the exacting ear of his 
 audience forbade his altering it to rise or fall beyond a 
 certain number of tones selected to satisfy the musical 
 craving of their fastidious and sensual organizations. 
 Therefore, although it was customary to divide rhetoric 
 into the five provinces of invention, disposition, elocu- 
 tion, action, and memory, Demosthenes, that great 
 master of the art, declared that action comprised the 
 whole matter, and that an audience was conquered at 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 119 
 
 once if the eye and ear were won. If such was the case 
 with the sensual Greeks, equally must it have been so 
 with the Komans, the most essentially materialistic race 
 that has ever existed. 
 
 But the time came when the political interest, which 
 had been the sustaining influence of these great dis- 
 plays, failed, and as the Greek stage had refused to 
 produce any great tragedians when inspiration had 
 departed from a conquered patriotism, so did eloquence 
 wither on the disappearance of the mighty topics which 
 had been provided by the centuries of liberty. At the 
 time of which we are speaking only three roads were 
 open to eloquence ; the first of which was that afforded 
 by the Bar, which had, under Valentinian, reconquered 
 the right of public speaking. This was one of the 
 benefits conferred by the Christian emperors, and the 
 forums of the great cities, such as Milan, Borne, and 
 Carthage, could show a certain number of orators 
 famed for their skill in pleading. But the Bar was not 
 the path to fortune. Martianus Capella, who was the 
 boast of his contemporaries, and remarkable alike for the 
 extent of his erudition and the suppleness of his style, 
 confessed that the Bar of Carthage had never enriched 
 him, and that he was dying of hunger whilst sur- 
 rounded by applauding crowds at the tribunal of the 
 proconsul. 
 
 The second employment open to eloquence lay in 
 panegyric of the emperors, of their ministers and 
 favourites, and even of the favourites of their ministers. 
 But the talent was degraded by thus crouching at the 
 feet of the degenerate and contemptible greatness of 
 that period, and in danger of losing the nobility of 
 heart, the pectus quod disertos facit, which provided its 
 
120 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 healthiest inspiration. For what could he hoped for 
 from men who could only praise Maximian, the col- 
 league of Diocletian, by comparing him to Hercules, 
 scorning a parallel with Alexander as far too weak; 
 who, if Providence sent them a man of mark, could in 
 the degradation which a course of miserable flatteries 
 had brought upon their intellects and imaginations, 
 find nothing new to say in praise of him ; like Pacatus, 
 who, in celebrating the merits of Theodosius, could 
 only remark that Spain in giving him birth had excelled 
 Delos, the cradle of Apollo, or Crete, the country of 
 Jupiter. 
 
 It is elsewhere, then, that we must seek for the 
 last remnants of the ancient eloquence, and, perhaps, 
 it may be found in another form less known, but, per- 
 haps, more in use amongst the ancients, namely, in the 
 declamatory discourses pronounced by itinerant rhetori- 
 cians, who were in the habit of strolling from city to 
 city with speeches prepared to serve for exordium or 
 for peroration, or of extorting the applause of their 
 audience by improvisations made at the request of a 
 town, and with certain precautions. This was an 
 ancient usage, and showed how devoted Greece had 
 been to those pleasures of the ear for which her poetry 
 alone was not sufficient ; and we find men like Hippias 
 and Gorgias, in the early days of Athenian history, 
 making it their business to teach methods of proving 
 the just or the unjust, and advertising their art in 
 sustaining a thesis or maintaining a declamation as a 
 means of drawing attention to their school. 
 
 Therefore, although liberty, and with her the serious 
 motives of eloquence, had disappeared, this occupation 
 still remained. "We see, for instance, Dion Chrysostom, 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 121 
 
 the rhetorician, pursued by the hatred of the Emperor 
 Domitian, taking refuge in an exile more remote than 
 that of Ovid, in the town of Olbia on the shores of 
 the Black Sea, inhabited partly by Greeks, partly by 
 Scythians, and, on his arrival, being surrounded by 
 a crowd of men who spoke a language which was 
 barely Greek, inhabited the ruins, and were ceaselessly 
 menaced by Scythian invasion, but who pressed round 
 the orator who had appeared amongst them, led him 
 to the temple of Jupiter, assembled in masses on 
 the steps, and conjured him to address them until 
 Dion was obliged to discuss some common subject, and 
 mingle with his oration the praises of their native 
 town.* And this passion, so strong in the East, was 
 not less so in the West. Of this Africa, in the second 
 and, perhaps, the third century, affords a notable in- 
 stance in the person of Apuleius, who used to travel 
 throughout the towns of Numidia and Mauritania with 
 a collection of various discourses ready to be delivered 
 upon emergency, which he called his " Florida." Once, 
 on arriving at Carthage, he congratulated himself in his 
 speech on the immense audience which had assembled 
 to hear him, and begged them not to confound him 
 with those miserable strolling orators who veiled the 
 hand of a mendicant under the cloak of a philosopher. 
 He went on to compare himself with the rhetorician 
 Hippias ; and although he was unable to make his gar- 
 ments, his wig, and his pot of oil with his own hands, 
 " Still," said he, " I do profess to be able to turn the 
 same pen to every description of poem, whether those 
 whose cadence is marked by the lyre, or those which 
 are recited by the wearers of the sock or the buskin ; as 
 
 * Dionis Borysthenica, orat. 36. 
 VOL. II. 6 
 
122 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 well as satires, enigmas, stories of every class, dis- 
 courses which men of eloquence would praise, and 
 dialogues approved by philosophers, all in either Greek 
 or Latin, with the same application and the same 
 style." * 
 
 To such a pitch had the effrontery and, at the same 
 time, the degradation of the art of speech been pushed 
 that this man, finding out that he had flattered himself 
 too grossly, excused himself on the plea that his self- 
 praise was merely a device to fix the attention of the 
 proconsul, with whose eulogium his oration was to 
 terminate, and thus fell into a double obloquy from 
 his vanity and his meanness. 
 
 If eloquence was thus lost, it mattered little whether 
 lessons in rhetoric were still given in the schools, or if 
 the youth of the time continually repeated the same 
 exercises, composed the same harangues, or renewed 
 the laments of Thetis or the death of Achilles, or those 
 of Dido on the departure of iEneas. These themes, 
 preserved throughout the times of barbarism, are to be 
 found in the writings of Ennodius, who composed many 
 of them, and later in those of Alcuin, who recom- 
 mended and used them himself in tuition. But it was 
 evident that they contained no intellectual vitality. 
 
 But Christianity could not suffer eloquence to perish. 
 She more than any system was bound to hold it in 
 honour, as representing the Word, the creative spirit of 
 the universe, which had also redeemed and was one day 
 to judge His work. That same divine eloquence was 
 to be perpetuated in the Christian Church by means of 
 preaching, and no form of outward respect was too 
 honourable for its enshrinement. The ancients had 
 * Apuleius, Florida, lib. ii. initio. 
 
CHKISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 123 
 
 given a truly magnificent pedestal to human eloquence. 
 They had raised for it a tribune in the midst of the 
 Agora or Forum ; thence it might preside over those in- 
 telligent and passionate cities the conquest of which was 
 the guerdon of victorious oratory. It was difficult to 
 find a more honourable post for a mere human thing ; 
 but Christianity effected this by planting her eloquence, 
 not on a tribune, but within her temples, side by side 
 with her altars. The Church raised for it a pulpit, a 
 second altar, as it were, hard by the sanctuary, and 
 offered a spectacle, unseen by Paganism, of an oratory, 
 prosaic in form and simple in matter, delivered in the 
 pause of her mysteries. It was true that thereby the 
 conditions of eloquence were changed ; it ceased to be 
 a means of enjoyment, and became a medium of in- 
 struction. Its end was no longer to enchain the senses, 
 but to enlighten the mind and to touch the heart, 
 and, therefore, action disappeared almost entirely from 
 Christian oratory ; for who could expect it from those 
 bishops who sat motionless on their pontifical seats, in 
 the depth of the apses, to address a multitude com- 
 posed of paupers, slaves, and women, little skilled in 
 the antique delicacies of Greek and Roman declama- 
 tion ? * 
 
 And, secondly, elocution was doomed to lose much of 
 its importance. Disposition of the subject was to be 
 neglected, for the Christian art was to be entirely de- 
 voted to invention and to a profound and exhaustive 
 grasp of the subject-matter. But as art diminished 
 so did inspiration increase ; and as in the fifth century 
 
 * Eloquence became preaching, and the bishop became the 
 orator, who spoke to fulfil a duty, no longer as a service rendered 
 to the intellect, but as a call of charity. 
 
 6 * 
 
124 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 inspiration had quitted rhetoric and left only a phantom 
 of art, so, if art was absent, inspiration had returned 
 to the eloquence of the Church, and method was soon 
 to follow it, attracted sooner or later by the presence of 
 the inspiring influence, as the sun on his rising calls 
 all the harmonious voices of creation to salute him. 
 
 From the first appearance of a Christian school of 
 eloquence we may trace in it an inherent and profound 
 separation from the theories and methods of that of 
 antiquity, and also an element of originality which 
 touched mankind and was its true secret. St. Paul 
 came into the midst of those intensely refined Greeks 
 only to trample on the base resources of human oratory, 
 to hold cheap the sublimities of speech, and to profess 
 the knowledge of a single thing, Christ and Christ 
 crucified. Yet we, like St. Jerome, cannot fail to per- 
 ceive that the man who even thus appears uncultured 
 had resources within himself of which his auditors of 
 Areopagus were ignorant, and that his harsh, unex- 
 pected, and unpolished words struck home like thunder- 
 bolts. But as the Christian society was enlarged, the 
 system of preaching was extended, and a want of orga- 
 nization was felt. A ministry of such scope and con- 
 tinuity soon found its laws, and St. Ambrose, in his 
 work "De Officiis Ministrorum," founded, in some 
 measure, on the " De Officiis " of Cicero, traced out 
 the various functions of the priesthood, including that 
 of preaching. Ambrose has been erroneously placed 
 in the category of the Fathers who were estranged from 
 art and inimical to literature, whereas he had so well 
 preserved the tone of the masterpieces of antiquity 
 upon which his mind had fed, that he sought for artistic 
 rules in Holy Scripture itself, and laboured to prove, in 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 125 
 
 a letter written to a certain Justus, that it was possible 
 to find throughout a respect shown to the three points 
 considered by the old rhetoricians essential to a com- 
 plete discourse, namely, a cause, a matter, and a con- 
 clusion. Moreover, his esteem for the canons and 
 graces of the ancient eloquence appeared to some extent 
 in the rules he laid down for the Christian orator. 
 They were as follows : " Let your discourse be cor- 
 rect, simple, clear, lucid, full of dignity and gravity, 
 with no affectation of elegance, but tempered by a 
 certain grace. What shall I say of the voice? It 
 suffices, in my opinion, that it should be pure and 
 distinct; for its harmony must depend rather upon 
 nature than our own efforts. The pronunciation should 
 be articulate and strong, free from the rude and coarse 
 intonation of the country, without assuming the 
 emphatic rhythm of the stage, but always preserving 
 the accent of piety." * This shows that St. Ambrose 
 was no mean authority, but a member still of the 
 school which took into account not merely the thought 
 and the expression of the orator, but also his gestures 
 and the disposition of his drapery. 
 
 But the true founder of Christian rhetoric was 
 St. Augustine, to whom the function appertained, espe- 
 cially in the capacity of his former profession as a, 
 rhetorician. This is evidenced "by the fourth book of 
 one of his most important treatises, " De Doctrina 
 Christiana et de Catechizandis Kudibus." Having 
 devoted the first three books to an exposition of the 
 method and spirit in which the Scriptures ought to 
 be studied, he showed in the fourth the proper manner 
 of communicating to others the science which had 
 * St. Ambrose, De Officiis Ministrorum, lib. i. c. 22-25. 
 
% 
 
 126 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 been mastered, and thus collected in his theory of 
 Christian preaching all the precepts of a novel rhetoric : 
 " And in the first place, he declared that he knew well 
 the rhetoric of the schools, but did not propose to 
 relate or to discredit its precepts for as it had for its 
 object persuasion of what was true and what was 
 false, who would dare to affirm that truth should 
 remain unarmed against falsehood?"* But he did 
 innovate in adding, what the ancients had not dared 
 to say, that eloquence could exist without rhetoric, 
 and could be achieved by listening, by reading the 
 works of eloquent authors, and exercising the mind 
 in dictation and composition. On these conditions 
 the subtleties of the schools could be dispensed with, 
 and by this path a man could attain to the ineffable 
 gift of persuasion and of eloquence. 
 
 But having made this just division between eloquence 
 and rhetoric, St. Augustine suddenly returned to the 
 precepts of the ancients, and selected from them, 
 leaving aside whatever was unnecessary for the sim- 
 plicity of the new era. He gave the principal share 
 to invention, as befitted a Christian epoch in which 
 the empire over mere form had been assured to ideas, 
 and, adapting from the beautiful treatise of Cicero, 
 t " De Inventione," insisted that wisdom was the very 
 foundation of eloquence, and of far surpassing value ; 
 for that whereas wisdom, without eloquence, had 
 founded states, eloquence, deprived of wisdom, had 
 more than once brought them to destruction. Apply- 
 ing these precepts, he continued, that though it was 
 better that preachers should speak eloquently, it sufficed 
 if they spoke words of wisdom, precepts admissible 
 
 * St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, lib. iv. c. 2. 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 127 
 
 alike in their liberality and their fitness ; for had the 
 Church been as severe as antiquity in matter of art, 
 had she given the right of speech only to the eloquent, 
 few indeed would have been entitled to spread her 
 doctrines, few able to receive them, and thus the teaching 
 of Christianity, instead of being the light and consola- 
 tion of all, would have remained the pleasure and 
 privilege but of a few. Great, therefore, and pregnant 
 in consequences, was the fiat which opened the pulpit 
 not only to the man who had been exercised during 
 long years in oratorical struggles, like Demosthenes 
 and Cicero, but to the humblest priest who had the 
 faith which could inspire him, and the good sense 
 which would keep him in the right track. 
 
 St. Augustine preserved, like Cicero, the distinction 
 between the three parts of oratorical invention, for, 
 said he, it is an eternal truth that a speaker is bound 
 to convince, to please, and to touch. Nor can we 
 wonder that he wished to retain for the Christian 
 orator his mission of convincing, of stirring, and 
 touching the rebellious will, nor especially that he per- 
 mitted him to please ; for we know the insight of St. 
 Augustine, that finished expert in the mystery of the 
 human heart ; and we know also that the secret of 
 pleasing is the secret by which souls are won. But 
 even in this case he calls only for what is essential, 
 declaring that if the key will really open, it matters 
 little whether its substance be of gold, of lead, or of 
 wood, only that it must be efficient to unlock the bar- 
 riers of the heart to all the light of truth and the gentle 
 evidence of the divine influence. 
 
 In elocution also he preserved, as being founded 
 upon nature, a distinction of three styles the simple, 
 
128 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the temperate, and the sublime. The subject of 
 Christian oratory must ever be sublime, but it was 
 not so with the style of the orator. A simple style, 
 said Augustine, is the one which the auditor can listen 
 to for the longest time ; and more than once in his 
 long career he remarked that admiration for a brilliant 
 period sometimes extracted less applause from the 
 audience than the pleasure of having clearly and easily 
 grasped a difficult verity which a simple sentence had 
 brought down to its level. Such were his recommen- 
 dations in the matter of elocution. With regard to 
 oratorical rhythm, he declared that although he aimed 
 at preserving it without affectation in his own dis- 
 courses, yet he really held it in slight esteem, and 
 rejoiced at not finding it in the sacred books, delighting 
 rather on the frank, uncultured, and highly spiritual 
 beauties of Scripture, which was, as it were, released 
 from these usages of a sensuous antiquity. 
 
 However, there was a certain danger in the contempt 
 evinced by Augustine for the delicacies of style, some 
 traces of the Decline, and of the vicious taste of his 
 age. But however deficient he might be in his views 
 upon elocution, and though his rules as to invention 
 were but a repetition of the canons of the Ciceronian 
 rhetoric, he recovered himself singularly when he 
 entered into the hidden depths of the philosophy of 
 eloquence, and promulgated the true mystery of the 
 new school which he was about to found. This he 
 effected in another work, which is interesting both 
 from the circumstances which produced it, and as 
 giving us an insight into the soul of its author. A 
 deacon, named Deo-Gratias, who had been entrusted 
 with the instruction of the catechumens, wrote him a 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 129 
 
 letter relating the disgust, trouble, and discouragement 
 encountered in his difficult duty ; and the saint endea- 
 voured to raise his courage by representing, in masterly 
 analysis, all the trials which must befall the man whose 
 duty it was to expound the word to his brethren, and 
 pointing at the method by which he might vanquish 
 his difficulties, and triumph, sooner or later, over the 
 repugnance shown by his own heart or by his hearers. 
 The two secrets of the eloquence, which had its essence 
 in the study of the human heart, were love towards 
 the men who had to be instructed, and the love of that 
 truth which was nothing less than God Himself. For 
 St. Augustine found in charity the craving to com- 
 municate to our fellows the truth which has convinced 
 ourselves, and in the impulse which causes us to open 
 to others the hand which we deem to be filled with the 
 stores of truth, beauty, and righteousness, a provocative 
 to eloquence which had been unknown to the ancients : 
 " For," said he, " like as a father delights in becoming 
 childish with his child, and stammering out with it its 
 first words not that there is an intrinsic attraction in 
 thus murmuring confused utterances, though it is a 
 happiness looked for by all young fathers so it should 
 be a pleasure for us, as fathers of souls, to make our- 
 selves little with the little ones, to murmur with them 
 the first words of truth, and to imitate the bird in the 
 gospel which gathers her young under her wings, and 
 is only happy when she is warmed by their warmth, 
 and can warm them by her own." And, in fact, no one 
 could better understand than Augustine that mys- 
 terious sympathy between the speaker and his audi- 
 ence, by means of which the one enlightens, sustains, 
 and guides the other, whilst both work at the same 
 
 6t 
 
130 CIVILIZATION IK FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 time, and by the same effort, to discover and to glorify 
 the same verity. 
 
 But if the love of humanity was one principle of 
 the new kind of eloquence, there was also that real 
 sacred love of truth, of the supreme ideal, which ought 
 to fill the whole mind of the orator, never perhaps to 
 be grasped in its full perfection, sometimes lost to view, 
 but capable when seen from time to time of sustaining 
 and quickening his zeal. And this influence, better 
 known to Augustine perhaps than to any of the 
 eloquent ones of classic time, is thus described by 
 him : " For my own part, my discourse generally dis- 
 pleases me, as I covet a better rendering, which I often 
 seem to hold in my mind before I begin to express by 
 myself in the sound of words ; and so, when all my 
 efforts remain inferior to my conception, I grieve at 
 finding that my tongue is not sufficient for my heart. 
 An idea flashes through my mind with the rapidity 
 of lightning, but not so language, which is slow and 
 tardy, and permits the thought to return into mystery 
 whilst it is unfolding itself. Yet as the flying thought 
 has left some fair traces imprinted upon the memory, 
 which last long enough to lend themselves to the 
 sluggishness of the syllables, upon them do we form 
 the words that are named the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 
 or any other tongue ; for these same traces of the idea 
 are neither Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor of any other 
 nation, but as the features are marked upon the face 
 so is the idea in the mind. . . . Hence it is easy to 
 conjecture the distance of the sounds which escape 
 from the mouth from that first glimpse of thought. . . . 
 But in our eager desire for the welfare of our hearts, 
 we long to speak as we feel. . . . And because we do 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 131 
 
 not succeed we torment ourselves, and, as if our labour 
 was useless, are devoured by discouragement, which 
 withers our speech and renders it more impotent than 
 it was when, from a feeling of futility, discouragement 
 first came upon us."* We need not insist upon the 
 merit of this, for eloquence was certainly renovated 
 when not only the influences which could inspire it, 
 but all the accompanying discouragements and melan- 
 choly were thus appreciated ; and this was the method 
 used by the chief Christian orators in reconstructing 
 the theory of eloquence. It would now remain to us 
 to observe the practical working of the new rules in 
 their discourses, but this matter has already been 
 treated by M. Villemain with a superiority which 
 forbids a further analysis, and our subject simply 
 demands an examination of the chief features of the 
 changes gradually produced by the action of these 
 rules, and the adaptation of eloquence from the shapes 
 it had assumed in the classic period to the form which 
 prevailed in the Middle Age. 
 
 The Christian eloquence of Greece seemed to have 
 been born from the scoff hurled by Julian at Chris- 
 tianity, when in a moment of passionate contempt he 
 bade the Galilseans go to study Luke and Matthew in 
 their churches. It was then that Gregory of Nazian- 
 zum replied to him : " I abandon to you everything 
 else, riches, authority, birth, glory, and all the .good 
 things of this life, of which the memory passes like 
 a dream, but I lay my hand upon eloquence and regret 
 not the labours and journeyings over land and sea 
 which it has cost me to acquire it." t The Christians 
 
 * St. Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus, cap. ii. 
 f St. Greg. Naz. Op. tit. i. p. 132, orat. iv. 
 
132 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 were far from wishing to abandon their share in the 
 empire of eloquence, and then in fact arose the great 
 school in which, side by side with St. Gregory of 
 Nyssa, flourished St. Basil and St. Chrysostom, whose 
 conversion caused constant regret to the rhetorician 
 Libanius, who lamented daily that he, Chrysostom, 
 had been stolen from him to whom he had intended 
 to bequeath his school ; but from our point of view, 
 Chrysostom was no great loser. 
 
 The Latins were not, like the Greeks, masters in the 
 art of disposition, or gifted with their brilliancy and 
 grace of elocution, nor ready with those comparisons 
 which, though old enough, were always fresh drawn from 
 the sea, the port, the theatre, and the palaestra. They 
 had not the same pure instinct in the choice of expres- 
 sions, and a certain barbarism was apparent in their 
 subtleties and coarseness, as well as in the laboured 
 refinement which was the offspring of bad taste. The 
 fact was that the Latin Fathers did not address so 
 polished an audience, but a variously mixed multitude ; 
 whereas the Greek Fathers at Antioch, Caesarea, and 
 Constantinople, had before them a select remnant of 
 the ancient society. The congregation which crowded 
 around the chair of the Bishop of Hippo was princi- 
 pally composed of fishermen and of peasants ; and 
 the multitudes of Milan even and Rome comprised 
 a vast number of freedmen and mercenaries, who 
 by the guttural sound of their voices recalled the 
 forest from which they had sprung. Therefore other 
 methods of conquest were necessary for these mingled 
 populations upon whose rude natures the external 
 graces of speech would have been wasted, and as the 
 eloquence which moved them must be familiar, plain, 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 133 
 
 and pathetic, these three qualities generally formed the 
 dominant characteristics of the oratory of the Latin 
 Fathers. 
 
 But we see in the eloquence of St. Ambrose a more 
 faithful adhesion to the traditions, and a kind of 
 lingering perfume, as it were, derived from the ancient 
 art. Whereas in his teaching he gave a large share to 
 grace of form and even of costume ; so also did his 
 language contain a spice of the Attic honey. It is told 
 how, when still an infant, as he was one day sleeping 
 in his cradle in the court of the prsetorium at Treves, a 
 swarm of bees settled upon his lips, as of old upon the 
 lips of Plato. The tale gained credit with the growing 
 fame of his eloquence ; an eloquence which kept the 
 people of Milan at once in perseverance and in duty, 
 in firmness and in submission, whilst for two days the 
 soldiery of the Empress Justina besieged the basilica, 
 in order to make it over to the Arians ; an eloquence 
 which was of so winning a nature that mothers hid 
 their daughters when St. Ambrose glorified virginity ; 
 and the power of which was able to arrest the guilty 
 Theodosius upon the threshold of the sanctuary ; its 
 sweetness to ravish St. Augustine, still half Mani- 
 chsean, still undecided, but more than half gained by 
 the spells of so skilled a speaker. 
 
 But although the character of the oratory of St. Am- 
 brose stood so high, we pass it over to come to that 
 of St. Augustine, which filled a higher place in the 
 opinion of posterity. It was true that the latter was 
 less ornate, less antique in form, less moulded upon 
 Greek models, and its author had not, like St. Ambrose, 
 translated from their original Greek many of the writ- 
 ings of the Fathers. Augustine has left us about three 
 
134 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 hundred and ninety- eight sermons, not including 
 several treatises, which were preached before being 
 written, and they show the characteristics which we 
 have noticed as recommended by the saint himself, 
 and which gave to preaching a novel form, by their 
 familiar, simple, and attractive style. For, in fact, 
 the discourse of the Bishop of Hippo was simply a 
 discussion with his people, who often interrupted him, 
 and to whom he replied. Often, also, he related his 
 most private and domestic affairs, as, for instance, in 
 two sermons he described to his audience the life in 
 community which he led with his clergy ; how their 
 union was in imitation of the primitive community at 
 Jerusalem ; how none amongst them possessed any 
 property of his own ; and the bishop himself combatted 
 any objection that might be raised against it. It was 
 a common complaint at Hippo that the Church was 
 poor because the bishop refused to receive either dona- 
 tions or legacies, and that nobody cared to offer more. 
 To this Augustine replied that he had, in fact, refused 
 heritages and legacies from certain fathers who had 
 disinherited their children in order to enrich the 
 Church : " For with what excuse could I, who, if 
 both were living, would be bound to labour for their 
 reconciliation, receive an inheritance which was in 
 itself evidence of a passion which refused to pardon ? 
 But let a father who has nine children count Christ 
 for a tenth, then I will accept the portion. When a 
 father disinherits a son to enrich the Church, he must 
 find some one else than Augustine to receive the 
 legacy, or rather may God grant that he finds 
 nobody." * Still, these minute explanations of even 
 * St. Augustine, De Vita Clericorum suorom, serm. 355. 
 
CHKISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 135 
 
 his household expenses did not hinder his expounding 
 to his people the hardest passages of Holy Writ, of 
 initiating them into the mysteries of allegorical expla- 
 nation, of relating the history of its persons and its 
 events, of showing the figurative which underlay the 
 apparent sense, and refuting the opposition made by 
 the Manichaeans between the Old and the New Testa- 
 ments. He kept up also the struggle against Arianism, 
 and, in the presence of his rude people, handled all the 
 difficulties and objections, penetrated and dispersed the 
 mists of controversy, and compressed into his rustic 
 and simple sermons, with an admirable art, the 
 momentous considerations and mighty views which 
 were spread throughout those theological treatises 
 which he had composed for the whole Christian 
 Church. He succeeded in teaching his humble hearers 
 how the Trinity was imaged in the triple unity of the 
 memory, the intellect, and the will, and thus the idea 
 which was exhaustively developed in his philosophical 
 writings was laid in summary before fishermen and 
 peasants. He led them into the domain of psychology, 
 and the inner details of human thought, in asking, 
 " Have you a memory ? but if not, how do you retain 
 the words which I speak to you?" "Have you an 
 intellect ? but if not, how do you comprehend what I 
 say ?" " Have you a will? but if not, how can you 
 answer me?" And then, having caused them to 
 disengage from the chaos of their coarse perceptions 
 the three constituent faculties of the soul, he showed 
 to them their co-existent unity and variety ; and, little 
 by little, that crowd understood, followed, and antici- 
 pated him, until he exclaimed in delight at their 
 appreciation, " I say it sincerely to your charity, that 
 
136 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 I feared to delight the subtle minds of the skilful, and 
 to discourage the slow, but now I see that, by your 
 application in listening and your promptness in under- 
 standing, you have not only grasped my words, but 
 have forestalled them. I render thanks to God."* 
 
 It was indeed an achievement to elevate to the 
 regions of metaphysic, and endow with intellectual 
 power, those rough and uncultured minds, and, as 
 Plato had inscribed on the door, "None but geometers 
 enter here," it was a glorious contradiction to write, in 
 the words of Christ, Venite ad me omnes " All you 
 who labour, who dig the earth, who fish in the sea, 
 who carry burdens, or slowly and painfully construct 
 the barks in which your brothers will dare the waves, 
 all enter here, and I will explain to you not only the 
 yvuQi creaviov of Socrates, but the profoundest of mys- 
 teries, the Trinity." And this was the secret of that 
 simple eloquence. 
 
 At other times he delighted in giving more polish 
 to his discourse, and some place to the ancient art 
 (though always using the same form of a familiar dis- 
 cussion), in unrolling before his hearers the greatest 
 memories of Holy Writ in succession, and using also 
 those literary reminiscences which would appeal to the 
 minds of the small number of cultivated men to be 
 found among his flock. As one instance of these dis- 
 courses, we may cite the homily on prayer, spoken on 
 the occasion of hearing the news of the capture of 
 Rome by Alaric, one of the most curious, if not the 
 most eloquent, of his sermons. We must mark the 
 echoes awakened throughout the world, at Hippo as 
 at Bethlehem, by that tremendous catastrophe, whilst 
 * St. Augustine, De Trinitate, serm. 52. 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 137 
 
 crowds of fugitives were landing for refuge upon every 
 coast, who had purchased their bare lives by the aban- 
 donment of gold, silver, and treasure. Hearts began 
 to quail before such disasters, and even the fishermen 
 and peasants of Africa began to say, like Symmachus 
 and his followers, that everything was collapsing in 
 that Christian age, and that the new religion had 
 ruined that greatness of Home which the old divi- 
 nities had guarded so well. St. Augustine, provoked 
 by these complaints, answered with a mixture of irony, 
 playfulness, and sternness, " You say, behold how all 
 things are perishing in these Christian times. Why 
 do you murmur ? God has never promised that these 
 things of earth should not perish, nor did Christ 
 promise it. The Eternal One has promised eternal 
 things. Is the city which gave us temporal birth still 
 standing ? Let us thank God and pray that, regene- 
 rated by the spirit, she may pass on with us to eter- 
 nity. But if the city which gave us temporal life is 
 no more, that city is standing which engendered us 
 spiritually ! . . . What city ? The holy city, the 
 faithful city, the city which has its pilgrimage upon 
 earth, but its foundations in heaven. Christians, let- 
 not your hope perish, nor your charity be lost ; gird 
 your reins. Why do you fear if the empires of earth 
 fail ? The promise has been given you from on high 
 that you should not perish with them, for their ruin 
 has been predicted. And those who have promised 
 eternity to the empires of this earth have but lived to 
 flatter men. One of their poets makes Jupiter to 
 speak and say to the Romans, 
 
 1 His ego nee metas rerum, nee tempora pono ; 
 Imperium sine fine dedi.' 
 
138 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 " Truth has answered ill to these promises. That 
 endless empire which thou givest them, Jupiter, thou 
 who hast never given them anything, is it in heaven 
 or on earth? Doubtless on earth, but were it even 
 in heaven, has it not been written that heaven and 
 earth will pass away ? If that which God has made 
 is to depart, how much more quickly that which 
 Romulus founded ? Perhaps, if we had found fault 
 with Virgil about these lines, he would have taken us 
 aside and said, ' I know it as well as you do, but what 
 could I say when bound to charm the ears of the 
 Romans ? ' and yet I took the precaution of putting 
 these words in the mouth of their Jupiter 'a false 
 god could be but a lying oracle ' whilst in another 
 place, speaking in my own name, I said 
 
 ' Non res Romanae perituraque regna, 
 
 ' for see I then affirmed that their empire would 
 perish.' " It is plain that St. Augustine only quoted 
 Virgil here in order to oppose the poet in one place to 
 the poet in another, and thus to shake the extravagant 
 respect still shown to him by the cultivated minority. 
 
 Knowing, moreover, that a certain number of his 
 hearers lamented his severe treatment of the cala- 
 mities of Rome, and murmured when he spoke of the 
 recent events for there were two parties in Africa, 
 one Roman faction, and one opposed to Rome, to the 
 latter of which St. Augustine stood in the relation of 
 chief he at once forestalled their objections ; " I know 
 that some say of me, if he would only say nothing 
 about Rome. As if I came to insult others and not to 
 move the Almighty, and to exhort you to the best of 
 my power. God forbid that I should insult Rome. 
 
CHBISTIAN ELOQUENCE. \N*- 139 
 
 Had we not many brothers therein, can we not still count 
 many there ? Has not a great part of the city of God 
 which is sojourning on earth its place there ? What 
 can I say, then, when I do not wish to be silent, 
 except that it is false that our Christ has lost Kome, 
 and that she was better guarded by her gods of wood 
 or stone ? Do you speak of more precious ones ? Then 
 by her gods of iron, add to them those of silver and 
 gold, and mark to whom learned men have committed 
 the guardianship of Eome. How could those gods who 
 failed to preserve their own images have saved your 
 houses ? Long ago did Alexandria lose her false 
 deities, long ago did Constantinople give up hers, and 
 nevertheless, reconstructed by a Christian emperor, she 
 has increased and still increases. She stands and 
 will stand as long as God has determined, for even to 
 that Christian city we can promise no eternal exist- 
 ence." 
 
 This last fragment has much grandeur, whilst the 
 opposition of the new destinies of Constantinople to 
 those of the elder Eome, and the view of a mighty but 
 perishable empire attached to the former city, shows 
 the accuracy of the glance flung by St. Augustine 
 down the stream of history, and would make us con- 
 clude that he saw in ages to come another horde of 
 barbarians, led by a second Alaric, announcing to 
 Constantinople that her day had arrived. 
 
 We may find many equally eloquent passages in the 
 sermons of this saint, and entire fragments gleaming 
 with beauties analogous to those which are so common 
 in the writings of St. John Chrysostom and of St. 
 Basil, of which the following extract from a sermon on 
 the Resurrection may form an example : 
 
140 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUBY. 
 
 " You are sad at having carried a beloved one to his 
 sepulchre, sad because suddenly you have ceased to 
 hear his voice. He lived and is dead ; he ate and eats 
 no more ; mingles no more in the joys and pleasures 
 of the living. Do you weep, then, for the seed which 
 you cast into the furrow ? If a man was so utterly 
 ignorant as to mourn for the grain which is brought 
 into the field, placed in the earth, and buried beneath 
 the broken clod ; if he said to himself, ' Why then have 
 they hidden this wheat which was gathered with such 
 care, threshed, cleansed, and preserved in its granary ? 
 We beheld it, and its beauty caused us joy : but now 
 it has vanished from our eyes ! ' Did he weep thus, 
 would they not say to him, ' Be not afflicted, this 
 hidden corn is truly no longer in the granary, no longer 
 in our hands ; but we will come again and visit this 
 field, and you will then rejoice at beholding the rich- 
 ness of the crop standing in the furrows whose avidity 
 you now deplore.' . . . These harvests may be 
 seen year by year, but that of the human race will only 
 
 be seen once at the end of the ages In 
 
 awaiting it, we, creatures as we are, unless we are dull, 
 will speak of the resurrection. Sleep and awakening 
 are daily occurrences; the moon disappears, and is 
 renewed month by month. Why do the leaves of the 
 trees go and come again ? Behold it is winter, as- 
 suredly these withered leaves will bud forth again in 
 spring. Will it be the first time, or did you see it 
 last year ? You have seen it. Autumn brought winter, 
 spring brings summer. The year begins again in its 
 appointed time, and do those men that are made in the 
 image of God die to rise no more ? " * 
 
 * St. Augustine, serm. 105, c. 7, et seq. 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 141 
 
 We will show in conclusion how St. Augustine could 
 raise himself to that third degree of eloquence which 
 was called the sublime ; and how, after traversing the 
 region of simple and familiar language, and using a 
 style which was rich in ornament and condition, he had 
 a method still by which he could assure himself of 
 victory in the depths of the heart. For this purpose 
 we will cite two facts, recounted by the saint himself 
 by necessity, and in no way to vaunt his eloquence. 
 From time immemorial there had existed at Caesarea, 
 in Mauritania, a custom called the Caterva, a small, 
 but serious and bloody encounter, which took place 
 yearly, and in which the inhabitants of the city were 
 divided into two armed bands, fathers against sons, or 
 brothers against brothers, and fought to the death for 
 five or six days, until the town flowed with blood. No 
 imperial edict had availed to uproot the hateful custom, 
 which fact will not surprise those who recollect that 
 mediaeval Italy knew several similar usages which it 
 required persevering efforts to repress. St. Augustine 
 attempted to abolish a practice against which the edicts 
 of emperors had been directed in vain ; he harangued 
 the people, and was deafened by their applause, but 
 not thinking the victory gained as long as he merely 
 heard applause, he spoke till tears began to flow, and 
 then felt that he had conquered. In fact, he said, " I 
 have spoken on it for eight years, and it is now eight 
 years since the annual custom was celebrated." * 
 
 Another time a less dangerous custom, but one 
 
 which it was less easy to uproot, was in question. 
 
 At Hippo semi-pagan banquets had been instituted, 
 
 which were called Laetitia, and were celebrated in the 
 
 * St. Aug De Doctrin. Christian, lib. iv 24. 
 
142 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 church. The inhabitants seemed little disposed to 
 abandon the custom, when the ancient bishop, Valerius, 
 called Augustine to share with him the burden of the 
 episcopate and the ministry of the word, and charged 
 him to attack the profane usage against which his own 
 efforts had been useless. It was the occasion of another 
 triumph for Augustine. As soon as it became known 
 that he would preach on the subject, the townspeople 
 agreed to pay no heed to his discourse. However, some 
 came to hear him from curiosity. He spoke on it three 
 times on three different days, and on that which saw 
 him in possession of the field, he appeared so to speak 
 in his full panoply, for he sent for all the books of 
 Holy Scripture, read out the passage in the Gospel as 
 to the Saviour casting the merchants out of the temple, 
 that in the Exodus which told of the Jews adoring 
 false gods, and lastly the passages of the Epistle of 
 St. Paul to the Ephesians, in which the Apostle con- 
 demned banqueting and drunkenness, and then, having 
 returned the volumes to their guardian, " I began," 
 he said, " to represent to them the peril which was 
 common to the flock which had been committed to us 
 and to ourselves who would have to render an account 
 to the Prince of Pastors, and implored them by the 
 sufferings of Christ, by the crown of thorns, His cross 
 and His blood, that if they wished to destroy them- 
 selves they would at least have pity on us, and would 
 consider the charity of their old and venerable bishop, 
 Valerius, who had out of love for them imposed upon 
 me the formidable task of preaching the word of truth. 
 And it happened that whilst I reproached them thus 
 the Master of Souls gave me inspiration according to 
 the want and peril. My tears did not provoke theirs, 
 
CHRISTIAN ELOQUENCE. 143 
 
 but whilst I spoke I own that, anticipated by their 
 weeping, I was unable to restrain my own, and when 
 we had wept in company, I finished my discourse with 
 a firm hope of their conversion."* 
 
 These are worthy examples of the victories of speech, 
 and humble and obscure as their subjects may have 
 been, every spiritual conquest begins from humility 
 and obscurity, and the eloquence which vanquished the 
 inhabitants of Caesarea and of Hippo was destined to 
 conquer on wider battle-fields. 
 
 Christian orators of the school of St. Ambrose and 
 of St. Augustine were numerous in the fourth and 
 fifth centuries, and we need only point to St. Leo, so 
 eloquent in unfolding the destinies of Christian Borne 
 and in inviting St. Peter to take possession of that 
 capital of every system of Paganism; St. Zeno of Ve- 
 rona, whose sermons are both interesting and instruc- 
 tive, being addressed to catechumens at the moment of 
 their admission to baptism; St. Peter Chrysologus 
 of Kavenna, Gaudentius of Brescia, and Maximus of 
 Turin. But that the discourses of St. Augustine with 
 those of Gregory the Great remained as the principal 
 and favourite models of the Christian oratory during the 
 Middle Age is proved by the fact of the sermons of 
 St. Caesarius of Aries being confounded with those of 
 Augustine himself, and by their still being placed in 
 the appendices to the works of the latter, from the 
 close resemblances of their minds and the close adhe- 
 rence of the disciple to the master. And in its turn 
 the collection of the discourses of St. Caesarius became 
 the manual of all who were incapable of original 
 preaching, and were moulded into the homiliana or 
 * Epist. xxix. ad Alypium. 
 
144 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 homily-books which served as repertories for the num- 
 berless missioners who were sent to all the extremities 
 of the world to win the barbarians to the faith. 
 
 The new era, therefore, was in possession of the elo- 
 quence which it wanted, which could be simple, to 
 meet the requirements of St. Eloi, St. Gall, and St. 
 Boniface in touching the souls of neophytes, who 
 were still filled with the memories of their coarse 
 Paganism and of the bloody deities of the Valhalla. 
 It could be familiar and rustic in the mouths of the 
 preachers of the Carlovingian period, who had to in- 
 struct and enlighten the swineherds and shepherds, for 
 whom they so carefully procured the Sunday rest, that 
 one day at least might be free for an advance in a 
 knowledge of their religion. And it was bound to 
 remain in sufficient loftiness and power to preserve the 
 high thought of the Christian metaphysic, to render all 
 its delicacies and subtle details, and impress them one 
 after another upon intellects which seemed the least 
 fitted to grasp them, and able also at a given moment to 
 stir the blood of nations. We do not wonder, after our 
 study of the divine marvels of eloquence, at the work 
 achieved by it in the eighth and the ninth centuries, 
 for it is harder to create societies than to guide and to 
 arm them when made. And when we find Christian 
 preaching able to rescue whole nations from Paganism, 
 to bring them into new ways and uproot their most 
 inveterate passions, it is hardly strange that it should 
 have the power in later times of reconciling the Lom- 
 bard cities and John of Vicenza on the field of Verona, 
 or of driving with St. Bernard the whole assembly of 
 Vezelay under the banner of the Cross. 
 
145 
 
 CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 C HEIST UN HISTORY. 
 
 We have seen how exhausted eloquence was freshened 
 at the springs of Christianity. History was, after elo- 
 quence, the chief occupation of the genius of the 
 ancients. Amongst those nations who through their 
 uncertainty of a future life sought for an immortality 
 here on earth, sculptors and historians hecame 
 powerful to give glory, to rescue heroes from the 
 lapse of time, and to cause them to survive for 
 eternity in living marble or on the ineffaceable page of 
 history. But as history thus became, like sculpture, an 
 art to the ancients, so also it possessed the charac- 
 teristic of an art, seeking beauty rather than truth; 
 aspiring rather to please than instruct mankind, and 
 imitating the methods of poetry or of eloquence. 
 Herodotus, in describing the strife between Asia and 
 Greece, was ever mindful of Homer ; the names of the 
 Muses were conferred on his books, and they were read 
 at the Olympic Games amidst the acclamations of 
 assembled Greece. Thucydides witnessed the spectacle, 
 and seeing the impossibility of competing with such a 
 rival upon his own ground, inserted in his work on the 
 Peloponnesian war thirty-nine harangues of his own 
 composition, which continued to be the admiration of 
 his contemporaries and the principal object of the study 
 
 VOL. II. 7 
 
146 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and imitation of Demosthenes. And the same in- 
 fluence was at work amongst the Latin writers. Livy 
 celebrated the epopee of Rome in his first books, and 
 devoted the later ones to relating the chief instances of 
 political eloquence ; Sallust and Tacitus used the same 
 licence ; and all alike manipulated the events of the 
 past with the freedom of Praxiteles or of Phidias, in 
 chiselling the marble into form. History thus was 
 especially poetical and oratorical in its nature ; and it 
 was not till later that it strove to become critical and 
 gave rise to men like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or 
 Diodorus Siculus, who, though obscure in comparison 
 with their predecessors, dived into the recesses of 
 antiquity and the hidden causes which they had neg- 
 lected, but always to be confronted by an insurmount- 
 able obstacle. For all the efforts of the old historians, 
 confined as they were by a narrow spirit of nationality, 
 issued, even while like Diodorus Siculus they aimed at 
 a general view, in the apotheosis of a single people ; 
 they invariably appealed to secondary causes, whether 
 political or military, and therefore Polybius, one of the 
 most gifted with insight amongst them, gives us indeed 
 an admirable idea of the warlike superiority of Rome, 
 but goes no farther, and does not raise a corner of 
 the veil which would open out the general advance of 
 humanity. Ancient history had, in short, two defects; 
 it did not love truth sufficiently, and carried away by 
 national egotism, it failed to compass universal destinies. 
 Moreover, in the fifth century, history properly so 
 called was no more; the " Scriptores rei Augustae" had 
 succeeded amidst the general decline to the biographer 
 Suetonius, and the last historical pages of the Latin 
 tongue were scarcely read. History only lived under 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 147 
 
 the pen of a soldier, Ammianus Marcellinus, who, being 
 a pagan and a man of slender learning, could only 
 follow the course of events with a troubled eye, but who 
 wrote from the heart, and forced the Koman patriciate, 
 who had summoned him to read his composition, to 
 applaud the withering description of their vices. Such 
 was the last echo of the plaudits of Olympia, the last 
 imitation of the triumphs of the historians of old. 
 Herodotus and Thucydides had as their successor an 
 obscure and uncultured soldier, whose chief honour in 
 that evil age lay in the possession of a shred of probity. 
 But history was of necessity to be regenerated by 
 Christianity, for the new religion was historical as 
 opposed to the religions of fable, and was impelled to 
 re-establish and to rearrange history on those motives, 
 in order to dissipate the myths which the nations had 
 woven round their cradle, and which charmed them 
 still ; to refute the charge of novelty which was hurled 
 every day against its children, by attaching the New 
 to the Old Testament, and thus reascending with 
 Moses to the origin of the world ; and, lastly, to resume 
 the broken links of human society and bring to light 
 the providential designs of God, which were to issue 
 not in the inevitable and imperishable superiority of 
 a single nation, but in the common salvation of the 
 whole human race. Thus the history that Christianity 
 desired, unlike that favoured by antiquity, which erred 
 in its leaning to what was beautiful, and in fixing 
 itself in the narrow limits of nationality, aimed at being 
 true, and also as far as possible universal, and these 
 characteristics we shall find marked in the different 
 forms taken by history with the Christian writers of the 
 fifth century. 
 
148 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUEY. 
 
 It is the fashion to throw doubt upon Christian 
 antiquity, and to represent it as without books and 
 monuments, and possessing only uncertain traditions. 
 Doubtless Christianity is a religion of tradition, but it 
 is also a religion of scripture. The Apostles and their 
 disciples wrote ; the bishops of the first three centuries 
 followed their example, and each Church had its 
 archives, which it could not always save from its perse- 
 cutors. The acts of martyrs and canons of councils 
 were the sources which supplied the ecclesiastical 
 history at the period of which we are treating. At this 
 time, then, we find history decomposed and reduced to 
 its elements, but a reconstruction was imminent in the 
 midst of the decay, and the separate constituents were 
 but waiting for the breath which would quicken and 
 reunite them. We find amongst distinct and differing 
 writers three forms of historical work firstly chronicles, 
 which re-established the order of time; secondly, the 
 acts of saints, which gave life to the foremost figures of 
 the new era ; thirdly, the first essays of that philosophy 
 of history which unrolls the whole order of the divine 
 economy, penetrates deeper than life itself, and arrives 
 at the idea presiding over the succession of ages and of 
 men, embracing and sustaining the totality of passing 
 things, which would be unworthy of the attention given 
 to following them, or the effort of memory in retaining 
 them, was there not beyond the crowd of years which 
 press upon us behind or before the idea of an invariable 
 agency which impels and sustains, advances and causes 
 to advance. 
 
 We find, firstly, chronicles, and this was a new fact. 
 Doubtless the ancients had possessed some chronicles 
 as, for instance, the works of Eratosthenes and Apollo- 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 149 
 
 dorus, but they had found the task tardy and unsatis- 
 factory ; and the calculation of time and the art of 
 verifying dates, as historical criticism was never a domi- 
 nant feature of the genius of antiquity, had not been 
 thoroughly cultivated. Certain efforts had been made 
 to fix the time and place of particular events those 
 made, for instance, by Polybius, or to arrive at a par- 
 ticular study of certain causes, but they had never been 
 extended to the universality of human destiny. 
 
 The early Christian apologists, Justin, Clement, and 
 Tatius insisted at once, and not without sufficient 
 motives, on the antiquity of Moses and the superiority 
 of his wisdom to that of the sages and heroes of 
 Greece. Julius Africanus wrote a chronography from 
 the commencement of the world to the time of the 
 Emperor Heliogabalus ; St. Hippolytus, in his work 
 upon Easter, gave a chronology down to the first year 
 of Alexander Severus, and a paschal cycle for the cele- 
 bration of the feast calculated for sixteen years. And 
 the same idea occupied Eusebius, who undertook an 
 universal history, which was translated and augmented 
 by St. Jerome, and applied himself to placing side by 
 side and harmonizing the profane and sacred chronolo- 
 gies. To effect this, he skilfully chose as a fixed point 
 of departure the fifth year of the reign of Tiberius, 
 which was the date of the advent of Christianity, and 
 going back to the Olympiads and the Assyrian era, 
 counted two thousand and forty-four years as the time 
 back to Ninus. Then, by the aid of the sacred books, he 
 also reckoned two thousand and forty-four years between 
 the fifth year of the reign of Tiberius and the time of 
 Abraham, and thus found points common to the two 
 antiquities, and a possibility of agreement between 
 
150 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 those two pasts which had seemed eternally estranged. 
 Eusebius, or rather St. Jerome, who translated, cor- 
 rected, and completed his work, carefully collected 
 complete lists of the kings of Assyria, Egypt, Lydia, 
 and the different cities of Greece ; of kings, dictators, 
 and emperors of Home, as well as of the Jewish pa- 
 triarchs, judges, and kings, and fixed accurately the 
 length of their respective reigns. This first part of 
 his book was merely introductory, and contained little 
 besides names and numbers ; but when he had, as it 
 were, laid down the mathematical elements of history, 
 and taken his vast domain into possession, the syn- 
 chronical tables were unfolded, in which he marked by 
 periods of ten years the succession of kings and chiefs 
 in different nations, from Ninus and Abraham to Con- 
 stantine. This, by the side of the shapeless attempts 
 of antiquity, was a bold and able array indeed. It 
 confronted, in the first place, the Assyrians and 
 Hebrews with the kings of Sicyon and of Egypt, then 
 gradually the picture was enlarged as the Argives, 
 Macedonians, Athenians, Lydians, Persians, and lastly 
 the Eomans struggled forward into light and life. But 
 the advent of the last was a signal for the retreat of 
 the rest ; and whereas at first his tables showed the 
 Hebrews and Greeks side by side with the Eomans, 
 gradually the Greeks disappeared when Corinth lost her 
 liberty, the Hebrews on the destruction of Jerusalem 
 by Titus, until Rome occupied the page alone, invading 
 and devouring the space once held by other nations. 
 And thus the rise of Christianity was entangled in the 
 history of Rome, and amongst the annals of the latter 
 were placed the story of the persecutions, of the mar- 
 tyrs, and of the rise and succession of heresies, for the 
 
CHBISTIAN HISTORY. 151 
 
 plan of Eusebius and St. Jerome did not neglect the 
 history of human thought, but carefully placed side by 
 side with the memories of kings and the mention of 
 the events which marked the destinies of the nations, 
 those of poets, philosophers, and all who devoted their 
 mind or their blood to the service of humanity. So 
 that the two great aims of history, verity and univer- 
 sality, were achieved as far as was possible in the first 
 attempt at founding a science which all the Benedictine 
 erudition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
 has not sufficed to complete. 
 
 An example of such brilliancy called forth imitators, 
 and St. Jerome continued the chronicle of Eusebius 
 from 325 to 328. Prosper of Aquitaine, a theologian 
 and poet, took up the history until 444 ; and the 
 Spanish bishop Idatius, in his retreat in the depths of 
 Gralicia, amidst barbarians, and at the world's extremity, 
 brought it down to the year 469. The latter writer 
 mingled with it in terse but moving terms his sad 
 experience of that time of universal ruin, and trem- 
 blingly pointed to the last blows which were being dealt 
 to the perishing empires, under which, for a moment, 
 the Church also seemed to totter ; and told, with the 
 brevity as it were of a funeral hymn, how, after the 
 barbarians had ravaged the provinces of Spain, and 
 famine and pestilence had followed to complete the 
 work, the wild beasts came forth from their dens, 
 penetrated into the towns, and gaining ferocity from 
 their feasts upon the unburied corpses, engaged the 
 living whom they met in bloody and mortal combat. 
 
 The very precision of these chronicles gave them 
 interest, but their dominant characteristics were brevity 
 and dryness. They simply registered events, without 
 
152 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 thinking of the tears which their narration would force 
 from the eyes of men ; and being written upon papyrus, 
 which was destined to become so rare, they possessed a 
 monumental character as if they had been written upon 
 marble or upon iron. Yet the world had reached an 
 epoch in which history, as known to the ancients, was 
 impossible. No hand, then, was bold enough to wield 
 the pen of Tacitus or of Livy ; that of Prosper of 
 Aquitaine or of Idatius must have seemed lighter, 
 and there was no monastery so wanting in intelligent 
 men as not to hold at least one monk who would write 
 year by year of the events which had brought joy or 
 mourning to the neighbourhood. It was done briefly, 
 with a strange admixture of the particular griefs of the 
 compiling monk and of the general sorrows of humanity. 
 And thus we find, in some Frankish annals of the year 
 710, the entry, "Brother Martin is dead," the brother, 
 probably, of the poor writer; whilst some years after- 
 wards the great victory of Charles Martel over the 
 Saracens, on the plains of Poitiers, was inscribed in the 
 same annals with a similar terseness, as if in fact it 
 was only by compressing itself that history could 
 survive those difficult times, like the seed which always 
 finds a breeze strong enough to carry it to the place 
 which God has fixed. 
 
 Such, then, was the first form of history, of such 
 nature the benefits which flowed from it. But it is 
 certain that had the chronicle alone survived, all the 
 beauty, all art and vitality of history would have been 
 extinguished. This was not for the interest of Chris- 
 tianity, which had every reason for showing the living 
 forces of humanity, the combat of the spirit with the 
 flesh, the strife of the passions, and the ideal life in the 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 153 
 
 persons of her saints; and therefore her children 
 laboured with respect and love to describe in full the 
 career of those amongst them who had cast into the 
 world the seed of an elevating eloquence or a faith- 
 bearing death. For this reason the acts of martyrs 
 early became a portion of the offices in their honour, and 
 were read publicly upon their feast-days ; and from the 
 primitive times we find in the Roman Church, under 
 the Popes St. Clement, St. Antherius, and St. Fabian, 
 " notarii," who were charged to collect reports of the 
 martyrs' acts, which they drew sometimes from their 
 indictments purchased from the recorders. These were 
 solid foundations for the Christian hagiography, as the 
 indictments, which were really authentic, left no place for 
 interpolation, and the brevity, simplicity, and sobriety 
 of their details attested the good faith of their com- 
 pilers. It is to this category that the acts of the 
 martyr St. Perpetua, the letter of the Church of Lyons 
 upon its martyrs, and the admirable letter from the 
 Asian Church which related the death of St. Polycarp 
 and the acts of St. Cyprian, respectively belonged. 
 The latter was a legal document, which might well, 
 from the absence of comment and of any expression of 
 personal commiseration, have been the report of the 
 pagan official attached to the tribunal of the proconsul. 
 However, the fidelity with which the greatness of the 
 martyrdom and the emotion and pity of the bystanders 
 are depicted, point to a Christian hand, faithful and 
 incorruptible, but neglecting no means of making his 
 narration vivid, and giving to it the colour and beauty 
 that one might have thought it had lost for ever. It 
 was in the following terms that the editor of the Acta 
 related the interrogation of St. Cyprian : " Galerius 
 
 7 t 
 
154 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Maximus, proconsul, says to the Bishop Cyprian, ' You 
 are Thascius Cyprianus ? ' Cyprian answers, ' I am 
 he.' Galerius Maximus replies, ' It is you who have 
 made yourself bishop of those sacrilegiously-minded 
 men?' 'It is I.' The proconsul says, 'The most 
 sacred Emperors have commanded you to sacrifice.' 
 The Bishop Cyprian answers, ' I will not do it.' 
 Galerius Maximus says, ' Think of your safety !' The 
 Bishop Cyprian responds, ' Do what you have been 
 commanded, there is no room for deliberation in so just 
 a cause.' " 
 
 Every one might suppose these words to have been 
 written under the very dictation of their utterers ; 
 nothing was added to give scope to the feelings of their 
 chronicler. Their freedom from abuse of the pro- 
 consul or the emperor, which might have been ex- 
 pected from a hagiographer of the barbarous epoch, 
 points to the austere and dignified period of primitive 
 Christendom. The judge pronounced sentence with 
 unction, and the crowd of the brethren who surrounded 
 the bishop exclaimed, "Let them behold us also with 
 him," and he was then conducted to the place of exe- 
 cution with such a following of his deacons and the 
 faithful as almost made his persecutors tremble. It 
 was necessary that he should undergo his sentence, but 
 they left him surrounded by those who had always 
 looked upon him as a father, and now a saint. 
 Putting off his tunic and dalmatic, he ordered that 
 twenty-five pieces of gold should be given to his execu- 
 tioner. Then the brethren brought him the pieces of 
 linen, and as he could not bandage his own eyes, this 
 last office was performed by a priest and a sub-deacon, 
 after which he suffered with the majestic dignity of a 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 155 
 
 prince surrounded by his people. When night came 
 he was carried to his resting-place with lights and 
 music and all the pomp of a triumph. Such was the 
 energetic life of that ancient and powerful Church of 
 Carthage which even in the third century had become 
 formidable to Paganism. 
 
 Up to this period, then, we have absolute certainty, 
 and these recitals were followed by others which offered 
 the same guarantees, namely, the lives of certain men 
 of ever illustrious name, such as St. Ambrose, St. 
 Augustine, and St. Martin of Tours, which were written 
 by " their disciples, friends, and fellow-labourers, St. 
 Paulinus, Possidius, and Sulpicius Severus. But to the 
 epoch of the martyrs and the Fathers succeeded that of 
 the anchorites. The distance of their desert retreats, 
 the remoteness of the period, and the transmission of 
 their histories from mouth to mouth left room for the 
 introduction of an imaginative and poetical element. 
 These stories of solitude fascinated the soul of St. 
 Jerome, who undertook to collect them and so form a 
 series of Christian pictures. It is not known whether 
 his design was carried out, but three of these lives, 
 namely, those of St. Paul, St. Hilarion, and Malchas, 
 have come down to us. We will pause at the first to 
 gain an idea of the tales which were peopling the 
 Thebaid, were to be repeated throughout the East and 
 West, and were destined to stir all souls which longed 
 for peace and repose in self-sacrifice. 
 
 St. Jerome tells the wonderful story thus: That a 
 young Christian of sixteen, living under his sister's 
 roof in a town of the Lower Thebaid, during the reign 
 and persecution of Valerian, and dreading the fanaticism 
 of his pagan brother-in-law which threatened him daily, 
 
156 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 determined on quitting the hospitable roof and finding 
 a retreat in the mountains. After a long wandering he 
 at last reached a spot wherein an almost inaccessible 
 precipice offered a single opening into a somewhat 
 spacious chamber hollowed in the rock and open to 
 the sky ; a vast palm-tree stretched its branches over 
 the cavern and formed a roof, whilst a clear and re- 
 freshing stream flowed at the foot of the tree. Paul 
 halted and took up his abode there, and lived no 
 surprising fact with his sobriety of manners, and con- 
 sidering the manners of the East till the age of a 
 hundred and thirteen years. As his last hour was ap- 
 proaching, the anchorite Antony, who was then ninety 
 years of age, and had served God in the same desert 
 for many long years, fell under the temptation of 
 crediting himself with being probably the oldest and 
 most perfect monk in the world. But the following 
 night he was warned from on high to seek for an older 
 and more perfect anchorite than himself, and the road 
 which he was to take was indicated. So on the morrow 
 he set forth ; and the old man, already bent double with 
 age, tottered painfully on his staff under the burning 
 heat, until at the end of four days and four nights he 
 fell exhausted at the entrance of a rock-hewn cave and 
 cried so loudly that Paul, its inmate, heard him and 
 appeared on the threshold. Paul, after some hesi- 
 tation at breaking the impassable barrier which had up 
 to that time guarded his solitude, brought the anchorite 
 Antony into his home, and asked the first man whom 
 he had seen for so long whether they still built roof by 
 roof in the cities, whether the old empires subsisted, 
 and the idolatrous altars still smoked. When Antony 
 had . satisfied him on all these points and had become 
 
CHEISTIAN HISTORY. 157 
 
 hungry, a raven alighted on the palm-tree bearing a 
 loaf baked upon coals, and Paul said to Antony, 
 " Behold the providence of God ! Daily, until this day, 
 I received half a loaf, but to-day Providence perceived 
 that we should be two to break bread, and He has sent 
 me an entire loaf!" Paul then informed Antony that 
 he had expected his arrival, "for the hour of my 
 departure from this world has arrived, and thou art 
 only come to provide for my burial." And he asked 
 him to wrap his body in the cloak which had been given 
 him by St. Athanasius. Antony returned to his own 
 cell to fetch the garment, saying to himself: "Wretch 
 that I was, I have seen Elias; I have seen John in the 
 desert; I have seen Paul in Paradise." But on returning 
 to the abode of Paul with the garment of St. Athana- 
 sius, he found that the hermit had just expired, his 
 lifeless corpse in the attitude of prayer, in which death 
 had surprised him. Antony then took thought as to 
 burying him ; but how could he open the ground ? He 
 sat down in despair, resolved rather to die than resign 
 the corpse as a prey to wild beasts. Then two lions ap- 
 peared, and Antony took no more notice of them than 
 if they had been doves. They dug a trench and then 
 came to lick Antony's feet, and taking pity upon them 
 he exclaimed, " Lord, without whose will the leaf 
 is not severed from the tree, nor does the sparrow 
 fall to the earth, give these Thy creatures what Thou 
 knowest to be good for them." Having then blessed 
 the lions he dismissed them and departed, carrying 
 with him the tunic of palm-fibre which Paul had 
 made for himself, and which he wore from that time 
 forth upon the days of great festival, such as Easter 
 and Pentecost. 
 
158 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 We need not wonder at the artlessness of the 
 narrative, for even the great mind of St. Jerome could 
 believe in the superiority over creation which manhood 
 regained, in the re-establishment of the empire over 
 every creature given to our first parents in that 
 primitive order wherein whatever lived in the world 
 was made to serve the wants of the world's masters, 
 and in the reconciliation of all things through 
 Christianity. We are now in the Middle Age, sur- 
 rounded by the ideas and influences which gave to the 
 men of that barbarous epoch their courage, their zeal, 
 and their power, and the achievement of St. Paul in 
 the desert was to be related of St. Gall, whom the 
 legend makes to appease the bears of the Alps, or of 
 St. Columba, who attracted about his steps the wild 
 beasts of the Vosges, or of St. Francis of Assisi, who, 
 as he crossed the plains of Umbria, was followed by 
 the lambs and swallows as if they wished to gather 
 up his words, whilst the wolves fled away from him. 
 Truly, the conviction was necessary for the men who 
 had to conquer nations which were fiercer than wolves, 
 and we must feel less surprise at beholding the 
 docility of the lions who came to dig the grave of the 
 anchorite Paul than at seeing the most independent 
 and implacable of men, accustomed to serve no master, 
 to pardon no injury, to seek no counsel but that of the 
 sword, learn at the voice of these monks and mis- 
 sioners, not only to obey, but to pardon. 
 
 Such was the commencement of a method peculiar 
 to the Middle Age, and destined to form for the future 
 the two parts of every historical work on the one 
 hand chronology, or the simple truth bare and dry in 
 form ; on the other, legend, containing the life, colour, 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 159 
 
 and movement of history, but often touched by the 
 licence of poetry. 
 
 But, to analyze more deeply, if the ancients had 
 been content with obtaining an approximative verity in 
 facts and a certain beauty of colour and movement, 
 the times of Christianity had a higher ambition, for 
 they panted to know causes, with the longing which 
 besets both great souls and those which are feeble but 
 spiritual. For first causes are immaterial, and there- 
 fore the periods of materialism aim at nothing but a 
 knowledge of facts, whilst the periods of spiritualism 
 seek to arrive at causes which move in a higher sphere 
 than facts, in the region of spirit. Nothing similar to 
 this had been known to the ancients. Content with 
 collecting facts and visible causes, they had never risen 
 to the superior and invisible causes which rule the 
 universe, and therefore their efforts in constructing a 
 philosophy of history had been scanty. Doubtless the 
 wont of referring every phenomenon to a superior 
 principle had not entirely abandoned them, and 
 Herodotus himself, in describing the fall of empires, 
 showed a certain mysterious power, which he called 
 to Bslov, which nourished a secret jealousy against 
 everything which elevated itself, and sooner or later 
 overthrew that earthly greatness which had risen too 
 high; but this was the whole of his philosophy of 
 history. His successors explained the succession of 
 events even more insufficiently, and therefore Chris- 
 tianity had an effort to make, and then, as ever, great 
 facts were needed to produce a potent inspiration. For 
 surely no mighty event has ever happened in the world 
 without producing an imperishable book, though not 
 always one of the sort that might have been expected ; 
 
160 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and thus in our opinion it was the Battle of Actium 
 which inspired the " iEneid," and drew it like Venus 
 from the waves in her shining beauty. 
 
 And now another event, the greatest since the day of 
 Actium, had just happened in the world : Alaric had 
 entered Kome with his barbarians, and had encamped 
 for three days within its walls. It was the most 
 formidable event ever chronicled in the annals of the 
 world, yet there was no elegy ready to be poured forth 
 over the watchfires kindled by the barbarians at the 
 foot of the Capitol ; no orator was there to protest, 
 at least on the third day when Alaric had departed, 
 that the danger had passed ; there was no disciple of 
 Symmachus or Macrobius, no successor of those pagan 
 rhetoricians who had been so excellent in the craft of 
 eloquence, to make the world echo with his ardent pro- 
 testation. No, the cry wrung from humanity by that 
 great and terrible spectacle was to proceed from Africa, 
 and the book produced by the sack of Kome under 
 Alaric was " The City of God," the first real effort to 
 produce a philosophy of history. Nothing less than 
 that mighty collapse was required to turn the attention 
 of the world to the Supreme Hand which could shake 
 it thus. 
 
 The Goths, on entering Kome, had set fire to the 
 gardens of Sallust and a large portion of the city, 
 but had halted in terror and respect for they were 
 Christians, although Arians before the Basilica of the 
 Apostles. They had respected the keepers of the sacred 
 vessels, and the crowd of the faithful and of the un- 
 believing who had sought for life and liberty under the 
 aegis of the sacred relics. Yet the humiliations of the 
 Eternal City had unloosed the passions of the pagans, 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 161 
 
 and many of those who owed their safety to the tomhs 
 of Peter and Paul reproached Christianity with the 
 ruin of Eome, and asked the Christians where their 
 God was ; why He had not protected them, but had 
 suffered the good and the evil to he confounded ; why 
 He had not rescued the just from spoliation, death, and 
 captivity, but had abandoned their very virgins to the 
 mercy of the barbarians. These lamentations came 
 in the mouths of a multitude of fugitives to trouble 
 Augustine in the repose of Hippo, and to them in an 
 inspired moment did he resolve to reply. He did this 
 by pointing out to the pagans that the troubles of 
 Eome were the necessary consequence of war, and how 
 the intervention of Christianity was manifested in the 
 power that had conquered the barbarians on the 
 moment of their victory, and triumphed over their 
 unshackled liberty. To the question as to why the 
 same ills had befallen the righteous and the sinners, 
 he answered that they were sent as a probation to the 
 one, but as a punishment to the other, like mud and 
 balm stirred by the same hand, the one of which 
 exhales a fetid odour, the other an excellent perfume. 
 Moreover, it mattered little to know who it was that 
 suffered, but much to understand the manner in which 
 the misfortune was borne non quis sed qualis. For 
 the Christian knew of no other evil but sin, and the 
 captivity which did not dishonour Eegulus could not 
 disgrace a brow which had been marked with the 
 character of Christ. Many, doubtless, had died, but 
 who was to escape death ? And when the resurrection 
 day arrived the eye of God would discover those 
 bodies which had remained unburied. He had con- 
 solation also for the outraged virgins, and then turning 
 
162 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 upon the pagans, said, " What you really regret is, not 
 that peace in which you could enjoy your temporal 
 goods with sobriety, piety, and temperance, but a 
 tranquillity which you laboured for at the cost of 
 a profusion of unheard-of luxuries, and which tended 
 to produce from the corruption of your manners evils 
 worse than the utmost fury of your enemies." 
 
 After this triumphant invective against the friends 
 and defenders of those false gods which the pagans of 
 all times have ever regretted and redemanded, Augus- 
 tine entered upon the discussion, and confuting those 
 doctrines of the pagan world, and of Rome in par- 
 ticular, which accounted for the destinies of a state by 
 the power of its deities, he undertook to prove that 
 those gods could effect nothing, either for the present 
 life or for that of eternity. The gods of Kome had 
 spared her neither crimes nor misfortunes ; plentiful 
 were the examples they had given her of the first, for 
 was not mythology filled with recitals of their scan- 
 dalous doings, and had not the infamies of Olympus 
 taken their place in its worship ? Had not Rome 
 followed these examples in the rape of the Sabines, the 
 ruin of Alba, the fratricidal strife of the two orders, 
 the civil wars, proscriptions, and frightful corruption of 
 manners ? The gods who had left Troy to perish 
 could not have saved Rome ? Had not she honoured 
 them, indeed, when she was taken by the Gauls, 
 humbled at the Caudine Forks, conquered at Cannse ? 
 Sylla put to death more senators than the Goths had 
 pillaged, and still the altars smoked with Arabian 
 incense ; the temples had their sacrifices, the games 
 their delirious audience, and the blood of the citizens 
 flowed at the very feet of those deities who were so 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 163 
 
 powerless to save them. He then maintained, upon 
 the authority of Cicero, that Eome had never known 
 the republican idea, which, according to the definition 
 of the latter, was nothing else but the association of a 
 people for the furtherance of justice, and the satisfac- 
 tions of its legitimate wants. 
 
 We wonder at the boldness with which the African 
 reconstructed the history of Eome in the light of its 
 failures and chastisements ; yet his enlightenment could 
 not but show him also its value and its glory, and he 
 explained the greatness of Kome by its place in the 
 divine economy ; for the true and supreme God, who 
 had ordered not only the heaven and the earth, but the 
 organs of the minutest insect, the plumage of the bird, 
 and the flowers of the field, could not exclude the 
 guidance of the nations and the destiny of empires 
 from the laws of Providence. His justice shone forth 
 in the government of the world, and especially in the 
 career of Rome. The Eomans of old only existed for 
 glory, which they loved with a boundless attachment : 
 "For it they wished to live; for^it they did not hesi- 
 tate to die, and by that all-absorbing passion they 
 stifled all the rest. Finding it shameful to serve and 
 glorious to rule, they strained to render their country 
 free, and then to make her mistress of the world." 
 Therefore God, desiring to found a mighty Empire 
 in the West, that all the nations, being subject to 
 one law, might end by forming a single city, having 
 need of a people strong enough to vanquish the martial 
 races of the West, selected the Eomans, and thus 
 recompensed their imperfect virtues by a terrestrial 
 prize. " They had spurned their own interest for the 
 public welfare, and provided for the safety of their 
 
164 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 country with a mind which was free, and exempt from 
 the crimes which their laws condemned, seeking by 
 every method honour, power, and glory. Therefore 
 God, who could not grant them eternal life, willed 
 that they should be honoured by all nations ; they 
 subjected to their rule a vast concourse of nations ; 
 their glory, perpetuated by history and literature, filled 
 the whole earth; they have no cause to complain 
 of the divine justice, for they have received their 
 reward." 
 
 The pagan deities could effect nothing for eternity, 
 and every explanation of the things of time must have 
 some reference to eternity. A summary of political 
 and military events is not the sole function of history, 
 but to collect ideas, and teach the revolutions of the 
 human mind ; and this St. Augustine bore in mind in 
 his examination of the principles and transformations 
 of Paganism. Following Varro in his poetical, civil, 
 and physical theologies, he refuted all the attempts 
 at saving the false gods by means of an allegorical 
 interpretation which could not justify an obscene and 
 sanguinary symbolism. Socrates, Plato, and the Neo- 
 platonists, amongst the philosophers, had gained a 
 glimpse of the truth, but had not glorified it ; they 
 had rehabilitated the plurality of gods, theurgy, and 
 magic, whilst every system of error had found its 
 proselytes amongst the disciples of the school of Alex- 
 andria, who, vanquished at last by a consciousness of 
 their own impotence, had avowed with Porphyry that 
 no sect had yet found the universal way of deliverance 
 for the souls of men. 
 
 Having thus established the inefficiency of Pagan- 
 ism, he continued by unfolding the novel philosophy 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 165 
 
 imported into history by Christianity. God desires 
 that His creatures should be intelligent, associated in 
 community and good ; but He foresees that some of 
 them will be evil, which He does not effect but merely 
 permits, as subserving alternately the well-being of 
 the good and manifesting the beauty of the scheme of 
 the universe, as in a poem, by contrast. Hence arose 
 the two cities, " built by two principles of love the 
 city of earth by that self-love which tended to a scorn 
 of God ; the city of heaven by the divine love which 
 issued in the abnegation of self;" both being so inter- 
 laced and confounded in the present life that the 
 pilgrims of the heavenly state journeyed through the 
 city of men. The city of God was represented by the 
 patriarchs, the Jewish people, the righteous generally ; 
 but that of earth was forced to attach itself to things 
 of earth. Cain built the first city, Babylon, and 
 Romulus, like Cain a fratricide, built the second, 
 Eome. Babylon was the first Rome, and Rome the 
 second Babylon ; the end of the one empire was 
 confounded with the rise of the other. Both enjoyed 
 a similar duration and the same power, and showed the 
 same forgetfulness of God. St. Augustine summarized 
 history in a synchronical table, at the head of which 
 he placed the Assyrians, the Jews, and the kings of 
 Sicyon and of Argos, and continued it to the advent of 
 Christ and the progress of the Gospel. The city of 
 God was still increasing, and had not finished at the 
 fatal period of three hundred and sixty-five years which 
 the pagans had assigned for its duration, a period that 
 ended in 339, the very year in which the pagan temples 
 had been closed at Carthage. The problem as to the 
 end of man had divided the philosophers into two 
 
166 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 hundred and eighty-eight sects, all of whom had looked 
 for it in the present life, whilst Christianity placed it 
 in a future existence. It proved the emptiness of 
 earthly pleasures against the Epicureans, and confuted 
 Stoicism through the insufficiency of human virtues. 
 Man was born for society, but social justice can never 
 be fully realized on earth ; therefore a judgment was 
 necessary which would ultimately sever the two cities 
 and assign the one to ruin and the other to salvation ; 
 and although the Almighty had reserved the secret of 
 its happening, yet we may compare the world's dura- 
 tion to that of a week, upon the sixth day of which it 
 had already entered, and was thus approaching the 
 eternal Sabbath, which would be a season of repose, 
 brightened by intelligence and love. 
 
 This is a rapid and incomplete sketch of that 
 astonishing but ill- arranged work which at first sight 
 shocks us by its repetitions and omissions, which cost 
 St. Augustine eighteen years of toil amidst the labours 
 of his episcopate, and which, as its author composed 
 the last twelve books after the first ten had passed 
 from under his hand, w r as of necessity full of redun- 
 dancies. Yet the toil of penetrating its apparent 
 obscurities will be rewarded by finding a real arrange- 
 ment and a wealth of insight and enlightenment. It 
 shattered the pagan solution of the destinies of the 
 world, imported philosophy into the realm of history 
 by its novel doctrine, and sought for the secret of 
 human affairs, not in the aberration of the passions, 
 but in the mysteries of metaphysic, and the hard 
 questions of Providence, of liberty, of prescience, and 
 the natural end of things. It showed us ourselves in 
 the sphere we had thought our own, no longer as 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 167 
 
 filling the world, but as small and hardly visible, 
 absorbed by the Divinity which was ever enveloping 
 and moulding His creatures, and taught mankind that, 
 struggle as it might, it must be moved by God. 
 
 But great as was his achievement, St. Augustine 
 was not content, and wished to undertake a completer 
 treatise of universal history ; and as he was unable to 
 accomplish his design, he bequeathed it to the Spanish 
 priest Orosius. We cannot stay to analyze his work, 
 which gained celebrity, showed much talent, and an 
 occasional flash of the true Spanish genius. But 
 Paulus Orosius showed little of the prudent moderation 
 and sustained firmness of his predecessor, and many 
 were the illusions to which he succumbed. He main- 
 tained, for instance, that as Christianity extended, so 
 would the empire of death diminish in the world ; that 
 the era of blood would close when the Gospel had 
 mastered Europe ; and prophesied an eternal duration 
 to the brief peace which the Empire was then enjoying, 
 in which the Goths and Vandals would consent to 
 become the chief soldiers of Caesar. However, his 
 views were occasionally remarkable for their happy 
 temerity, as when he spoke of the vocation of the 
 barbarians to the Church, and, although more intensely 
 Roman than St. Augustine, declared that if at the 
 price of invasion and its attendant horrors, captivity, 
 famine, and outrage, he could see the Burgundians, 
 Huns, Alans, and Vandals saved for eternity, he would 
 thank God that he had been suffered to live in those 
 days. The Christian feeling thus prevailed over the 
 Boman national sentiment in his desire to initiate the 
 barbarians into the sacred mysteries in the midst of 
 the fall of the Empire, an auspicious event if it 
 
168 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 made a breach through which his brother might 
 enter. 
 
 Several years passed, and in 455 Salvian wrote his 
 work " De Gubernatione Dei." But circumstances 
 had changed ; there was no room then for illusion, for 
 Rome had actually fallen, and the invincible barbarians 
 had devoted seventeen days to the pillage of the world's 
 capital. Who could speak of the eternity of the 
 Empire then ? The pagans, amidst their cries of terror 
 and despair, asked where was the God of the Christians, 
 and Salvian replied by showing the causes, natural and 
 supernatural, of the ruin of Eome. He pointed to 
 them in the corruptions of a society which was dying 
 through the disorder of its institutions, and in the 
 degradation of manners fostered by the Roman laws, 
 insisting upon the superiority of the barbarians in this 
 respect. " The Franks are perfidious but hospitable ; 
 the Alans are impure but sincere ; the Saxons are cruel 
 but upright ; whereas we combine all their vices." He 
 maintained that the Vandals had been sent into Africa 
 to sweep away the filth with which the Romans had 
 defiled it, and declared that their legislation was 
 superior to that of Rome in not recognizing either 
 prostitution or divorce ; whilst he applauded the conduct 
 of those conquered Romans who preferred becoming 
 Germans to remaining subjects of the Empire, for 
 Salvian had taken the last step and passed over to the 
 side of the barbarians. Thus may we trace the pro- 
 gress of the philosophy of history; the new science 
 which in the last years of the fifth century had lost 
 none of its force. In the difficult time which was 
 about to follow infinite popularity was to surround 
 the name of Augustine. Charlemagne himself, in his 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 169 
 
 leisure moments, sought for lessons in the " City of 
 God;" Alfred the Great translated the work of Paulus 
 Orosius into Anglo-Saxon ; and the mind of Dante had 
 been so nourished that a canto of his " Purgatory" 
 was simply a paraphrase of a chapter of the " City 
 of God;" and Orosius had a place amongst the five 
 or six authors who formed the companions of his 
 solitude. 
 
 Thus the whole mediaeval period was trained in the 
 doctrines of these great men, and we must instance 
 among the many historians who imitated them the 
 celebrated German writer of the twelfth century, Otto 
 of Freysingen, uncle of the great emperor, Frederic 
 Barbarossa. That ancient bishop, although weighed 
 down by the number of his years, was not content 
 with writing the history of his own times, but extended 
 his views to the composition of an universal history, 
 and followed the scheme of St. Augustine in opposing 
 the City of God to the City of Man. Writing with 
 a thorough and somewhat severe freedom, he paused 
 occasionally to vindicate his authority as uncle, and to 
 warn his imperial kinsman in the words of the Psalmist 
 Et nunc reges intelligite ; erudimini qui judicatis 
 terram. And so the precursors of Bossuet were found, 
 and so numerous were the links of the chain which 
 bound his work to St. Augustine, that the connection 
 never for an instant escaped out of sight. 
 
 These, then, formed the three constituents of history : 
 the chronicle, which brought to it bare facts ; legend, 
 which afforded it colour and life; and philosophy, 
 which formed its soul, gave to it a coherent expla- 
 nation, and referred it ultimately to God as its First 
 cause. Henceforth it was necessary to the production 
 
 VOL. II. 8 
 
170 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of veritable history that the three elements should 
 unite and grow beneath the fostering wing of the 
 modern genius into a single organism capable of ex- 
 plaining and containing every fact. But to have pre- 
 pared the minds of their successors was not the sole 
 achievement of the men of whom we have treated, for 
 they did more by preparing the way for events. We 
 must insist upon this, for it is morally profitable to 
 show to writers and to thinkers the point to which 
 they may act, not only upon the sentiments, but on 
 the events of the future. Two things might have oc- 
 curred had the Christian writers of this time thought 
 and written otherwise than they did. Augustine, Paulus 
 Orosius, and Salvian might have taken the side of Eome 
 absolutely as against the barbarians, or have ranged 
 themselves in the ranks of the latter without pity for 
 Eome. Had they taken the course which seemed the 
 most natural one, and abandoned themselves to that 
 despair which is so common in our day, and in which 
 certain minds seem to find some excellence, they would 
 by their example have so discouraged the Church of 
 the West that the entire Christian population of its 
 component nations would have declared an unreserved 
 hostility against the barbarians. They would have 
 made the seeming enmity of the latter to God and the 
 human race a reality, and have brought upon Eome, 
 upon the Christian civilization, and upon humanity, a 
 series of incalculable calamities. On the other hand, 
 had they taken up the second position, and given a pre- 
 cipitate adhesion to the cause of the barbarians, they 
 would have made themselves judges in the place of 
 God, condemned Eome as the second Babylon to an 
 eternal ruin, and brought such a chastisement upon 
 
CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 171 
 
 her that hardly one stone would have remained upon 
 another; and thus they would have lent their aid to 
 elimination of the central point of the world, dis- 
 placed the rally-point of Christian life in the Middle 
 Age, and disturbed the whole economy of the succeed- 
 ing ages. They would have quenched the spark* of 
 light of which Kome was the sole preserver up to the 
 time of Charlemagne, and consequently would have 
 deprived humanity of the civilizing influences which 
 had been thus treasured up for its benefit. But with 
 a happier inspiration they evinced the courage, branded 
 by those who knew it not with the name of optimism, 
 which enabled them to regard those difficult and me- 
 nacing times with a firm and calm glance, and could 
 wisely distinguish the real property of the past amidst 
 the trembling destinies of the future. Without com- 
 mitting themselves to the side of the barbarians, they 
 met them half way, and applauded the Goths for the 
 clemency which had spared the Basilica of St. Peter 
 and St. Paul ; nor shall we find a single Christian 
 writer of the period who did not celebrate this generous 
 action of a conquering and success-maddened people. 
 By*this means they conciliated the barbarians, half 
 won from that moment, and thrust their swords back 
 into the scabbards, so that every chief amongst them 
 envied the glory of Alaric, and respected the altars 
 which had been blessed by the aged bishop or priest. 
 And as defeat was thus made more tolerable to the 
 vanquished, so did courageous zeal rein spire the 
 Christians, who perceived that after all their con- 
 querors were not devourers of men, and that as the 
 work of their conversion might be undertaken and ac- 
 complished, a lasting spirit of despair was not neces- 
 
172 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 sary. They might enter as pilgrims into the city of 
 God, and the wild-beast skin which covered the bar- 
 barian might vest a future citizen of the Eternal State. 
 Moreover, in taking the part of Eome in a certain 
 measure, and recalling its virtues and glory, they showed 
 that the city was still worthy of respect, and that if 
 she had merited a punishment for her crimes, God 
 had but stricken in order to warn, and that the time 
 for her consolation had arrived. They so worked 
 upon the barbarian mind by their pictures of her 
 ancient might that they produced the result described 
 by Jornandes, and caused Eome to reign through the 
 imagination, if not by force of arms ; and well has she 
 shown that her new method of empire was a thousand- 
 fold more powerful than that of old; for she entered 
 thereby on her novel destiny, and founded that spiritual 
 sovereignty of which she was always to remain the 
 centre. Those who had undertaken her defence against 
 the weapons and the invectives of the barbarians 
 formed, as it were, a circle round the tomb of St. 
 Peter, and, extolling it as the spot selected by God for 
 the centre of enlightenment, compelled the barbarians 
 who had encamped around the Capitol firstly to respect 
 and then to submit; and thus arose the mediaeval 
 economy wherein antiquity, regenerated in Eome, en- 
 lightened and disciplined the barbarism of a new era. 
 Such was one of the greatest examples of the influence 
 of literature, not merely over minds, but over events ; 
 such the nature of one of those glorious delegations of 
 power made occasionally by Providence to the genius 
 of mankind. 
 
173 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 In commencing our study of the Christian literature 
 with its prose, and placing eloquence and history 
 before its epopee, we have reversed, in some measure, 
 the commonly established order. Had it been our 
 object to examine an ancient literature such as that of 
 the Greeks, we should have found that for many ages 
 poetry alone was produced, and that it was only gra- 
 dually that prose emerged from its golden mists, for 
 the civilization of Paganism was cradled amidst fables. 
 The nations then, like children, understood no language 
 but that of the imagination, and the lapse of seven 
 ages, from the time of Homer to that of Herodotus, 
 was necessary in order that reason might gain courage 
 to address mankind in its natural language. 
 
 Christianity, on the contrary, could not suffer its 
 origin to be veiled by fiction, for it proposed facts and 
 dogmas which were defined verities, to the reason and 
 not merely to the imagination of the nations ; and 
 therefore during three centuries it spoke to them in 
 prose and prose alone. It was at the end of that 
 period that Christian poetry took its first and feeble 
 rise. And yet nothing seemed wanting to inspire it 
 in the greatness of passing events and the revolution 
 which was sweeping over the world, or in the emotions 
 
174 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of the soul and the inward agony which was upheaving 
 the depths of the conscience ; but the spectacle was 
 still too near at hand, and, as M. St. Marc Girardin has 
 admirably expressed it, the truth of that era was too 
 powerful to create poets, and could still only make 
 martyrs; for an interval must ever lie between deep 
 emotion and poetical inspiration ; and we shall find 
 that those silent ages were not too long for their work 
 of ripening the rich harvest of Christian art. 
 
 We may pass by the small band of unknown poets 
 who wrote at the time of the persecutions, and omit 
 several compositions, attributed sometimes to Tertullian, 
 and at others to St. Cyprian, but which were certainly of 
 contemporary date with those great men. The peace 
 of the Church was like a day-dawn, calling forth har- 
 monies from every side, and Christianity seemed as she 
 assumed in the person of Constantine the crown of the 
 Caesars to inherit also, so numerous were the Christian 
 versifiers, the laurel wreath of Virgil. Their great 
 number already calls for a division, and we, adopting 
 the great classification of the ancients, may divide them 
 into epic and lyric poets, for the Church had not at 
 that time reopened the theatre. 
 
 Thus the two orders in poetry were already existent, 
 and to the epic order we may assign, as did the ancients, 
 the didactic poetry, such as the instructions given by 
 the poet Commodianus against Paganism, or the poem 
 against the Semi-pelagians which was written by 
 Prosper of Aquitaine, and has since become so famous 
 through its imitation by Louis Eacine. But the prin- 
 cipal tendency and the chief effort of Christian poetry 
 from that era was to reduce the narratives of its religion 
 to its own laws. Its dominant idea was to lend to the 
 
POETEY. 175 
 
 Biblical traditions, which were the very foundations of 
 the faith, the brilliancy of the Latin versification and 
 some of the ornament which had been borrowed from 
 the pagan authors. We see some poets, like Dracontius, 
 St. Hilary of Aries, and Marius Victor, turning their 
 minds to the earliest narrations of the Bible, to the 
 scenes of Genesis and the lovable simplicity of an 
 infant world ; whilst others, as Juvencus and Sedulius, 
 confining themselves to the evangelical history, laboured 
 solely towards the reproduction, with harmony and 
 accuracy and a certain amount of poetical adornment, 
 of the text of the Gospel. However, the common 
 characteristic of all these poets and translators of Holy 
 Scripture into verse was a scrupulous and exact fidelity, 
 and thence followed on the one hand a remarkable 
 gravity and sobriety, a renunciation of that wealth of 
 epithet and hyperbole which had formerly roused the 
 emotions, so that even the sufferings of the Saviour, 
 the ingratitude of the Jews, and the coldness of the 
 Disciples, extracted no bitter epithet which had not 
 already fallen from the sacred writer himself, and the 
 general effect of the poems presented a certain solemnity 
 and grandeur. But, on the other hand, it must be con- 
 fessed that their sobriety often verged upon dryness; 
 that they contained neither episodes nor descriptions, 
 and hardly any paraphrases or commentaries, but simply 
 the text itself, adapted to the hexameter measure, which 
 was kept as close as was possible to the ancient form. 
 
 We can understand the motives which inspired these 
 labourers by the explanations given by the authors 
 themselves; for Sedulius, one of the most popular 
 amongst them, has accounted in his dedicatory epistle 
 to the Bishop Macedonius, for the influence which 
 
176 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 guided his pen. He declared that he desired to devote 
 to the service of the faith those studies which had been 
 commenced with a different aim, and to consecrate to 
 the truth the predestined instruments of vanity. 
 "For," said he, "I know that many spirits will not 
 accept the truth, nor willingly retain it, unless it be 
 presented to them beneath the flowers of poetry ; and I 
 thought that people of such a disposition should not be 
 repelled, but should be treated in accordance with their 
 natural wants, in order that each man might become the 
 voluntary captive of God according to his own genius !"* 
 Light is thrown upon this by our previous knowledge of 
 the Eoman schools : the whole order of instruction was 
 founded by the ancients and this was most wisely 
 preserved during the Middle Age upon the exercise of 
 the memory and the study of the poets. In Greece it 
 was commenced by Homer, and in the West by Virgil ; 
 but under the auspices of Virgil, the Christians and 
 the pagans of the fifth century learned by heart, and 
 imprinted upon their recollection, all the ideas, doc- 
 trines, and images of Paganism, and it was against 
 these that the early Christian poets strained every 
 nerve. They wrote under the idea of polemical contro- 
 versy, and made it their aim to dethrone the false gods 
 from the envied place which had been given them in the 
 memory and the hearts of children, and to enthrone 
 thereon a worthier deity. For this reason they laboured 
 to retain the pure and classic forms of Virgil, whilst 
 they cast their novel ideas into the ancient mould, at 
 the risk of beholding them burst through the form into 
 which they had been compressed, and finally destroy 
 the mould which had received them. 
 
 * Sedulius, Epist. dedicat. ad Macedonium. 
 
POETRY. 177 
 
 Some of them went so far as to reduce the Gospel 
 into cantos, and to make, like Faltonia Proba, a history 
 of the Saviour in three hundred hexameters, each com- 
 posed of two or more fragments of Virgil. But Sedu- 
 lius and Juvencus, without proceeding to this extremity, 
 aimed at preserving the language of antiquity, in which 
 they succeeded in many respects, and were not inferior 
 to any of the pagan poets of their day. We recognize 
 in their writings a constant imitation of Virgil, of 
 Ovid, and of Lucretius. It is, doubtless, often without 
 meaning, as for instance where the verse in which 
 Virgil represents Cassandra as raising her eyes in sup- 
 plication when her hands were bound, is made to ex- 
 press the action of the good thief upon the cross in 
 turning his eyes to Christ because his hands were nailed 
 to the wood of torture. More than once is this copy of 
 antiquity wanting in taste and accuracy ; but still the 
 poets who used it attained their object, and obtained 
 from it the result they desired, and another of which 
 they had never dreamed. They caused the verities of 
 Christianity under this poetic form to penetrate more 
 easily and more thoroughly the cultured classes of the 
 Roman world; this was their object, and to this they 
 attained. But that which they had never desired, and of 
 which they had never dreamed, but which they never- 
 theless effected in a marvellous manner, was the laying 
 hold later of a society which was no longer Roman, 
 which although Christian was barbarous, and by the 
 means of their Christian poetry penetrating it with the 
 taste, and to a certain point with the genius and tradi- 
 tions, of the literature of antiquity. In fact, Sedulius 
 and Juvencus, those two Virgilian Christians so to 
 speak, were destined to become the favourite instructors 
 
 8 t 
 
178 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 of the youth of the barbarous ages ; their evangelic 
 poems were to be placed in the hands of all, and to 
 begin the education of infancy. Having thus gathered 
 disciples, they also found imitators, not only in the 
 Latin but also in all the new languages which were 
 being framed upon Latin models ; and it was after their 
 example that the Anglo-Saxon Caedmon, that priest 
 who one day by divine grace found himself inspired 
 and became a poet, undertook to sing of the origin of 
 the world and the fall of the first man ; whilst later, 
 about the time of Charlemagne, the monk Ottfried did 
 not shrink from writing a great poem on the Harmony 
 of the Gospels, and was the first who forced the glorious 
 language of the Franks to resound with the praises of 
 Christianity. 
 
 Yet these frequent and long- sustained efforts did not 
 result in moulding the Christian epopee into the form 
 which might have seemed proper to it. For on seeing 
 Juvencus and Sedulius labouring, even in the fifth cen- 
 tury, to sing of the birth, the life, and the sufferings of 
 Christ; on seeing the whole Christian world filled with 
 the same idea, and every art, from painting to archi- 
 tecture, occupied in reproducing it under a thousand 
 forms ; and, lastly, on beholding the entire manhood 
 of the Church rushing, at the cry of the crusades, to 
 deliver the sepulchre of the Saviour, does it not seem 
 that the whole poetic effort must have tended to realize 
 the type of which it dreamed, and to treat in glorious 
 and immortal narrative of the advent and the mission 
 of Christ ? Yet it is this that Christian poetry will 
 never achieve. Doubtless it is true that poetry calls 
 for the intervention of the Divinity, but not of the 
 Divinity alone, for it is especially necessary to it that 
 
POETRY. 179 
 
 humanity should fill the scene. Poetry attaches itself 
 in preference to that which is human, because she finds 
 therein elements of passion, of nobility, of pathos, 
 of changefulness, and, consequently, a plenitude of 
 diverse and contrary emotions. And therefore the 
 Christian poetry found its principal resources in the 
 events, the temporal, warlike, political, and military 
 developments of Christendom. The conquests of 
 Charlemagne, chivalry as symbolized under the myth 
 of the Round Table, and the recovery of the Holy 
 Places, brought forth the chivalric romances and resulted 
 in the epopee of Tasso. The discovery by Christians 
 of an unbelieving world was to inspire the admirable 
 author of the "Lusiades." Thus it is always from 
 humanity that even Christian poetry seeks its principal 
 inspiration ; though it seeks also to bury itself in the 
 depths of the faith, and to return, as far as possible, to 
 that divine epopee which has for its three points the 
 Fall, Redemption, and Judgment. Yet even when it 
 has reached that subject which has never ceased to 
 torment mankind, it succeeds only in grasping the two . 
 human extremities, for the Divine mean still escapes it. 
 We see Milton, indeed, after the lapse of many ages, 
 when the Bible itself had felt the influence of the Pro- 
 testant controversy, using the boldest interpretation, 
 that he might turn the first pages of Genesis into a 
 poem ; but the hero that he took was a mortal man 
 capable of supreme misery the man who from the 
 beginning to the end of things is ever disquieting us 
 by his weakness and reassuring us by the impulse 
 which bears him back to God. Dante, likewise, causes 
 us to explore the three kingdoms of hell, of purgatory, 
 and of paradise ; but he peopled them with men of 
 
180 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 like nature to himself, and it was from their conversa- 
 tion that he evoked the floods of poetry with which 
 his century was inundated. On the other hand, 
 when Christian poetry sought to touch the mysteries 
 of redemption the knot of the divine epopee it 
 shrunk back ; and however great might be the genius 
 of those who ventured on it, it found itself always 
 arrested, floating vaguely amidst its own conceptions; 
 and whether it brought to the task the piety which 
 breathed through the writings in which Hroswitha 
 celebrated the infancy of the Saviour, or was evinced 
 by Gerson in his charming poem, " Josephina," which 
 was devoted to the same subject ; or through the 
 learned and elegant methods of the Revival, as em- 
 ployed by Sannazar, in his work " De Partu Virginis," 
 or Vida in his " Christiad;" or, lastly, was strong in 
 the boldness of the modern spirit, in the charms of 
 a dreamy imagination, and of a richly endowed mind, 
 like that of Klopstock, it still has always failed. And 
 the reason is, that the Christian world has still too 
 much faith, and that the august figure of Christ still 
 inspires so much respect that the hands which approach 
 it tremble. Painters have traced that Form because 
 there was no authentic image ; but poets were unable 
 to lend to it speech and action, for they were crushed 
 by the reality of the Gospel. Providence has willed 
 that nothing akin to poetry or to fiction should envelop 
 that fundamental dogma upon which the whole economy 
 of the world's civilization is reposing. 
 
 But side by side with Christian hymnody, which sur- 
 mounted with so much labour the difficulties of its 
 origin, stood that lyric poetry, the free outpouring of 
 the soul, which was only moulded into verse that it 
 
POETRY. 
 
 might be established and perpetuated. The production 
 of a lyric poetry was predestined from the earliest 
 times of Christianity. St. Paul himself exhorted the 
 faithful to sing hymns of praise, and we can mark 
 traces of them in the letter from Pliny to Trajan, or 
 that in which St. Justin described the liturgy used by 
 the Christians of his day. Again, an ancient legend 
 prevailed in the East to the effect that St. Ignatius, 
 the Bishop of Antioch, had beheld in vision the heaven 
 opened, and had heard the angels singing in double 
 choir the praises of the Holy Trinity : he had therefore 
 introduced the double chant into the Churches of the 
 East. It was a graceful and majestic idea that caused 
 the music of the Church to originate in heaven itself. 
 
 But although the East had adopted the Christian 
 hymnody from the beginning of the fifth century, the 
 same was not the case in the West. It was in the 
 time of St. Ambrose, and owing to a remarkable cir- 
 cumstance in his life, that church music was defini- 
 tively adopted in Italy. St. Augustine relates the fact 
 thus : the Empress Justina was persecuting St. Am- 
 brose, and the people of Milan watched day and night 
 around their bishop in order to protect him from her 
 fury. And he, touched by their fidelity and the long 
 nights passed in guarding his person, bethought him- 
 self of beguiling their interminable vigils by an in- 
 troduction into his Church of the Eastern method of 
 chanting the psalms and hymns. It spread gradually 
 thence over the whole of the Church; and St. Augus- 
 tine does not neglect to convey to us the profound im- 
 pression which those sacred songs exercised over him ; 
 for he says, in speaking of the day of his baptism, 
 " Thy hymns and canticles, my God, and the sweet 
 
182 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 chant of Thy Church stirred and penetrated my being. 
 These voices streamed upon my ears and caused the 
 truth to flow into my heart ; the emotions gushed up 
 therein ; lastly my tears poured forth, and I rejoiced in 
 them."* However, this man, who had such a profound 
 appreciation of music, perhaps from its very intensity 
 felt doubts as to its fitness, and asked himself whether 
 the pleasure given by the music did not injure the 
 meditation of the soul, and whether he did not give 
 too much attention to those harmonious modulations 
 which were so charming to the ear. Happily, however, 
 the scruples of Augustine did not survive in his own 
 mind nor in the Church, and so the cause of religious 
 music was gained. 
 
 St. Ambrose not only introduced the chant, but was 
 himself the composer of hymns to be sung in his own 
 Church. Numbers of these have been collected under 
 his name, which were more probably the work of his 
 disciples, or of later times, but which were composed 
 in conformity to his spirit and the rules which he had 
 laid down. Twelve only can, with certainty, be attri- 
 buted to him ; but they are full of grace and beauty, 
 thoroughly Roman in the gravity of their character, 
 and of a certain peculiar manliness amidst the tender 
 effusions of Christian piety, as if still animated by the ' 
 tone of primitive times. We may cite the following as 
 an instance : 
 
 Deus creator omnium 
 Polique rector, vestiens 
 Diem decoro lumine, 
 Noctem soporis gratia. 
 
 St. Ambrose himself acknowledged the authorship of 
 * St. Augustine, Confess, lib. ix. c. 6. 
 
POETRY. 183 
 
 this. Whilst its language was ancient, its versification 
 had something of the modern form, in that little strophe 
 of four iambic verses of eight syllables, which lends 
 itself so easily to replacing the quantity by the accent, 
 and thus paving a way for the rhyme, which, as we 
 have seen, was introduced early into Christian versifica- 
 tion, was used by St. Augustine himself in his psalm 
 against the Donatists, and recurred for twenty-four 
 verses, every two of which rhymed, in the hymn 
 addressed by Pope Damasus to St. Agatha. Thus the 
 sequence of the Middle Age had already appeared, 
 nearly all of which are thus cut into strophes of four 
 verses, each containing eight syllables, with this dif- 
 ference, that in the mediaeval poetry quantity was 
 replaced by the rhyme, which was to afford to the ear 
 the satisfaction which the ancient prosody would hence- 
 forth be unable to offer. It was a strange fact that it 
 was only upon the condition of breaking loose once and 
 for ever from the ancient forms, that the poetry of 
 Christianity was at last to attain that liberty without 
 which it must lack inspiration, which was to endow it 
 with the abundant wealth and strength which it pos- 
 sessed in the thirteenth century, and, finally, with the 
 majesty of the Dies Irce and the inexpressible grace 
 of the Stabat Mater. 
 
 Such, then, was the general aspect of Christian 
 poetry in its commencement. We must now demand 
 whether the century which has shown us so many men 
 of eloquence did not also produce some few who were 
 really touched by the beams of poetry ; whether we are 
 only to observe in them the obscure beginning of that 
 which was destined to become illustrious, or if they 
 did not already manifest some inspiration ? We may 
 
184 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 answer the question by separating from the mass two 
 men, St. Paulinus and Prudentius, who deserve to be 
 placed side by side and to be known by us. 
 
 If poetry could be found anywhere, it was surely in 
 those disquieted souls which came for refuge to the 
 Christian life, bruised by the long resistance of the flesh 
 and the passions. It was an age of tormented con- 
 sciences ; feeble minds were hesitating, stronger natures 
 were deciding, and found in the shock inspiration, elo- 
 quence, and poetry. Such was the state of Ambrose, 
 Augustine, and the many others whom we have seen 
 by their side. Those great souls had the courage to 
 break with the past, and in the effort they found that 
 which has always been its recompense, the strength 
 which comes from on high to aid the will. That 
 strength was, to some, the courage to act, to others 
 the courage to speak ; it came to some as eloquence, to 
 certain as philosophy, and to others, lastly, in the shape 
 of poetry. 
 
 Paulinus, who bore the surnames Pontius Meropius, 
 came of a great Eoman family, of senatorial rank. He 
 was born in the environs of Bordeaux, and received 
 his first education at the schools of Gaul, which 
 then possessed the most illustrious masters in the 
 West. The poet Ausonius had been the first tutor of 
 Paulinus' s youth, and had communicated to him that 
 versifying art which he had himself carried to a point of 
 such marvellous subtlety. Paulinus was rich from his 
 own patrimony and the demesne of his wife, and was 
 covered with every honour ; he had already reached the 
 consulate, and there was nothing to which at the age 
 of twenty-six years he might not have aspired; for 
 who amidst the continual revolutions which shook the 
 
POETRY. 185 
 
 throne of the Caesars could know that the descendant 
 of so many illustrious men might not one day be 
 called to sit thereon ? However, at that epoch, in 398, 
 the news reached Bordeaux that Paulinus had clan- 
 destinely, and without the knowledge of that Eoman 
 aristocracy to the whole of which he was related or 
 allied, been initiated into Christianity and had received 
 baptism. On his becoming a Christian he had retired 
 to his Spanish property, where he lived with his wife 
 in retirement, but not in penitence, detached from the 
 grandeurs of life, but not from its sweetness and 
 illusion, as far as we can perceive from the following 
 prayer in verse, which from that time he addressed to 
 God: "0 Supreme Master of all things, grant my 
 wishes if they are righteous. Let none of my days be 
 sad, and no anxiety trouble the repose of my nights. 
 Let the good things of another never tempt me, and 
 may my own suffice to those who ask my aid. Let joy 
 dwell in my house. Let the slave born on my hearth 
 enjoy the abundance of my stores. May I live sur- 
 rounded by faithful servants, by a cherished wife, and 
 by the children which she will bring me." These are 
 the wishes of a Christian, but not those of an anchorite. 
 Paulinus shortly after had a child born to him which 
 he lost at the end of eight days. This severed tie 
 broke all those which bound Therasia and himself to 
 the things of earth, and they both agreed to sell their 
 goods and distribute them to the poor, to lead thence- 
 forth a monastic life, and moreover to live in that 
 state of simple fraternity which was authorized by the 
 ancient customs of Christianity, and which caused 
 many a saint after his conversion to keep his wife in 
 the position of sister, as a sharer of his prayers and 
 
186 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 almsdeeds. Therasia also became the companion of 
 the retreat of Paulinus, and their letter to the 
 magnates of the Church was signed Paulinus et 
 Therasia peccatores. They left Spain and retired into 
 the depth of Italy, to Nola in Campania, near the tomb 
 of the martyr St. Felix, for whom Paulinus had con- 
 ceived a singular devotion, and lived there in poverty 
 and penitence. 
 
 This secession had at first surprised and then en- 
 raged the Eoman aristocracy. What frenzy could have 
 driven a man of such name and birth, clothed with so 
 many honours, and endowed with so much genius, to 
 abandon his hopes and break the succession of a 
 patrician house ? His relations did not forgive him, 
 his brothers disowned him, and the members of his 
 family who happened to come near him passed like a 
 torrent, without stopping. But when temporal society 
 rejected him, religious society received him with open 
 arms, and Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose congra- 
 tulated one another on counting another great doctor 
 in their ranks. Paulinus became, in fact, a consider- 
 able theologian ; but he had another talent within him, 
 for a poetic soul had gradually formed and revealed 
 itself amidst the interior agonies which his conversion 
 had cost him. Ausonius, on learning the change in 
 his disciple, had been at first smitten with despair, 
 and had written him a powerful letter, in which he 
 begged him no longer to afflict his master, thus: 
 " Disdain not the father of thy spirit. It was I who 
 was thy earliest master, the first to guide thy feet into 
 the path of honour. It was I who introduced thee 
 into the society of the Muses. Muses, divinities 
 of Greece, hear my prayer and restore a poet to 
 
POETBY. 187 
 
 Latium." * St. Paulinus answered from his remote 
 retreat, in verse, and in the following terms : " Why, 
 
 my father, dost thou recall in my favour the Muses, 
 whom I have renounced ? This heart, henceforth dedi- 
 cated to God, has no more room for Apollo nor for the 
 Muses. Formerly I was one with you in invoking, not 
 with the same genius, but the same ardour, a deaf 
 Apollo from his Delphian cave, in calling the Muses 
 divinities, and demanding from the woods and from 
 the mountains that gift of speech which is given by 
 God alone. But now a greater Deity enthralls my 
 soul." " Nothing," wrote Paulinus again to his 
 friend, " will tear you from my remembrance, during 
 the entire span of that age which is granted to 
 mortals. As long as I am captive in this body, and at 
 whatever may be the distance which severs us, I will 
 guard thee in the depth of my heart. Present every- 
 where for me, I shall behold you in thought, and 
 embrace you in soul; and when delivered from the 
 prison of this body I shall fly from earth into whatever 
 star the common Father may place me, thither shall 
 
 1 carry thee in spirit, and the last moment which will 
 release me from earth shall not deprive me of my 
 tenderness for you ; for that soul which survives our 
 organs which have perished and is sustained by its 
 celestial origin must of necessity preserve the affections, 
 as it retains its existence. Filled with life and with 
 memory, it cannot forget, as it cannot die."t 
 
 These were measures which Ausonius, with all his 
 wit and learning, never found. His wit had taught 
 him the artifices of the poetry of a decaying society 
 
 * Auson. ep. xxiv. ad Paulin. 
 t St. Paul. Carin. x. ii. 18 et seq. 
 
188 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 which excelled in acrostics, in playing upon words, 
 and every kind of subtlety, but had never taught 
 him the secret of that heartfelt poetry which gushed 
 forth in Paulinus and made him so greatly to surpass 
 his master. Paulinus repudiated indeed the inspira- 
 tion of the pagan muses, but he knew of an influence 
 which was more powerful. He did not abjure poetry in 
 his solitude at Nola, but still shared all the joys and 
 sorrows of his friends, and his verses reached every 
 place in which there was a tear to be dried or happiness 
 to be partaken. We find amongst his writings ac- 
 cordingly an Epithalamium composed for the wedding 
 of a Christian couple named Julian and Ya, in which 
 he saluted charmingly the virgin spouses whom Christ 
 was about to unite like two well-paired doves to the 
 light yoke of His chariot. He removed far away the 
 divinities who had formerly profaned marriage, Juno 
 and Venus, and dwelt upon the just, true, and touching 
 maxims of Christian matrimony, the necessary and 
 fertile equality of the spouses before God, the affran- 
 chisement of woman from her former state of slavery, 
 the conditions upon which he promised the presence of 
 the Saviour at their wedding : 
 
 Tali conjugio cessavit servitus Evse, 
 iEquavitque suum libera Sara virum ; 
 
 Tali lege suis nubentibus adstat Jesus 
 
 Pronubus, et vini nectare mutat aquam : * 
 
 Thoughts which have nothing in them of the classic 
 tone, and through which a thoroughly new spirit was 
 already breathing. 
 
 We find the same characteristic in the consolation 
 afforded by him to Christian parents upon the death of 
 
 * St. Paulin. Carm. xxii. Epithal. Juliani et Yae, v. 150. 
 
POETRY. 189 
 
 a child, in which, borrowing the most charming images 
 of the Faith, he represented the same child as playing 
 in heaven with the one whom he had himself lost, 
 the remembrance of whom had never been effaced from 
 his heart, although he had sat so many years as a 
 penitent at the tomb of Nola. " Live, young brothers, 
 a happy couple in that eternal participation, inhabit 
 those joyous dwellings, prevail both of you through 
 your innocence, and may your prayers be more power- 
 ful than the transgressions of your parents." 
 
 Vivite participes teternum vivite fratrcs, 
 
 Et laetos dignum par habitate locos ; 
 Innocuisque pares meritis peccata parentura, 
 
 Infantes, castis vincite suffragiis.* 
 
 This is far superior in charm to all the idyls of 
 Ausonius or the panegyrics of Claudian, and nowhere 
 before have we found such pathos, such life, and such 
 inspiration. We could instance many other religious 
 compositions, for the works of Paulinus are abundant, 
 but those in which the inexhaustible effusion of his 
 loving soul is especially manifested are the eighteen 
 pieces composed for the anniversary of the feast of St. 
 Felix. That martyr, to the service of whom Paulinus 
 was consecrated, had bound the soul of the latter by 
 the tie which the Scripture mentions as attaching the 
 soul of David to that of Jonathan ; and he never 
 wearied in relating the life, the miracles, the festivals, 
 the honours of St. Felix ; the pilgrimages which were 
 made to his tomb, the church raised above it, the 
 homage paid to him from every quarter of Italy, and 
 especially, as a theme which constantly recurred to his 
 pen, the description of the popular festival which was 
 
 * St. Paulin. Carm. xxxiii. De obitu Celsi pueri, v 615. 
 
190 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 celebrated in his memory. " The people filled the 
 roads with their motley swarms. Pilgrims arrived from 
 Lucania, Apulia, and Calabria, and others from sea- 
 bound Latium. Even the Samnites descended from 
 their mountains. Piety conquered the difficulty of the 
 journey ; there was no pause, and, unable to wait for 
 day, the pilgrims marched by the light of torches. 
 Not only did they bear their children in their bags, 
 but they often brought with them their ailing cattle. 
 Moreover 1 , the walls of Nola seemed to expand till it 
 equalled the royal city which enshrines the tombs of 
 Peter and Paul. The church was bright with the light 
 of lamps and tapers. "White veils were hung over the 
 gilded doors, the precinct was strewn with flowers, the 
 porch was crowned with fresh garlands, and spring 
 blossomed forth in the midst of winter." The poet 
 then addressed in self-recollection the following invo- 
 cation to the martyr. " Suffer me to remain seated at 
 thy gates ; let me cleanse thy courts every morning, and 
 watch every night for their protection. Suffer me to 
 end my days amid the employments which I love. 
 We take our refuge "within your hallowed pale, and 
 make our nest in your bosom. It is therein that we 
 are cherished and expand into a better life, and, casting 
 off the earthly burden, we feel something divine spring- 
 ing up within us, and the unfolding of the wings which 
 are to make us equal to the angels." 
 
 Et tuus est nido sinus. Hoc bene foti, 
 Crescimus, inque aliam mutantes corpora formam 
 Terrena exuimur sorcle, et subeuntibus alis 
 Vertimur in volucres divino semine verbi.* 
 
 These, again, are fine verses, but they are more, for 
 
 * St. Paulin. Natalis, iii. 
 
POETBY. 191 
 
 they were the chrysalis from which proceeded those still 
 more striking lines of Dante : 
 
 Non voccorgete voi que noi siam vermi 
 Nati a formar l'angelica Farfalla? 
 
 The idea is similar, and Dante's often-cited comparison 
 was first roughly sketched by a poet who sang long 
 before him. 
 
 We may have long studied the poets and have sought 
 in history for the true nature of poetry. After many 
 years of search we know what poetry is, but cannot 
 define it ; it is impossible for us to grasp and examine, 
 so to speak, face to face, that unknown thing which is 
 veiled from our eyes like Love in the tale of Psyche, 
 which only remained whilst invisible, the presence of 
 which was evidenced by its voice, its accent, and the 
 charm which surrounded it, but which evaporated on 
 being perceived. So when we encounter anywhere the 
 graces of imagination and an infinite tenderness of 
 heart, the indefinable charm which no art can give, and 
 the alternations of divine smiles and equally divine 
 tears, we declare without a moment's doubt that poetry 
 is there. 
 
 This man, then, was a Christian poet an undeniable 
 poet but he did not stand alone. By his side we find 
 a fellow, less tender perhaps, and less imbued with the 
 spirit of Petrarch, but even more truly a poet through 
 the abundance and richness of his compositions, and 
 this was Prudentius. Paulinus, in fact, was essen- 
 tially a bishop and a Father of the Church to whom 
 poetry and grace had been given in addition ; but the 
 principal function, the sole vocation and glory of Pru- 
 dentius, lay in his being the poet of the Christians. 
 
192 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Born in Spain at about the same time as Paulinus had 
 been born in Gaul, about a.d. 348, he had passed 
 through its schools, in which he had learnt eloquence, 
 the art, as he said, of deceiving in sonorous words. 
 After a striking success at the bar, after having 
 governed two cities of his native country in succession, 
 and having, lastly, been raised to some of the higher 
 dignities in the imperial hierarchy, of which he does 
 not define the nature, Prudentius, when fifty-seven 
 years of age, and at the summit of all the honour 
 which was open to a provincial advocate, grew weary of 
 his dignities and occupations, and resolved to return to 
 God; for his already whitening hair had warned him, as 
 he tells us in a kind of little preface to his works, that 
 it was time to consecrate what remained of his voice to 
 Him. Some of the different compositions which flowed 
 from his pen were devoted to theology and contro- 
 versy ; others to the inspiration of the lyric muse. 
 However, in spite of his intention of serving the 
 Catholic faith by discussion, as he boldly expressed it, 
 he did not exaggerate the force of the arms which he 
 was about to carry in the service of a holy cause, but 
 spoke of them with a humility which was not without 
 grace. "It is time to devote to God the remnant of 
 the voice. Let hymns accompany the hours of the day, 
 and let not the night be silent. Let heresies be com- 
 batted, the Catholic faith discussed, insults cast upon 
 the idols, glorious verses rendered to martyrs, and 
 praise to apostles. In the mansions of the wealthy, 
 rich services of plate are spread out, the golden goblet 
 gleams there, and yet the iron boiler is not wanting. 
 We see therein the vessel of clay and the broad and 
 heavy platter of silver, massy vessels of ivory, and 
 
POETRY. 193 
 
 others hewn from the elm or the oak. So does Christ 
 employ me as a valueless vessel for humble occupations, 
 and permits me to remain in a corner of my Father's 
 palace." 
 
 Hie paterno in atrio 
 
 Ut obsoletum vasculmn caducis 
 
 Christus aptat usibus, 
 
 Sinitque parte in anguli manere.* 
 
 We see that Prudentius announced himself at once 
 as a poet, theologian, and controversialist armed for 
 the fray ; but he was not about to undertake the part 
 in order to confine himself to turning theological 
 treatises into verse, and to express thoughts which 
 were not his own, with a fidelity which was often ser- 
 vile. He, on the contrary, found his inspiration and 
 his fire in himself alone, and the accents of the poet 
 betray more than once, especially in the two books 
 composed against Symmachus, the habits of the orator. 
 We have noticed how Symmachus had petitioned 
 Valentinian for the restoration of the altar of Victory, 
 and how, after an eloquent reply from St. Ambrose, 
 he had encountered the refusal of the emperor. But 
 his request survived in spite of this ; it passed from 
 hand to hand as the eloquent protest of Paganism 
 against those who were overthrowing its altars, and 
 it was on account of the power which it had retained 
 over the minds of men that Prudentius felt bound to 
 reply to it in two books of verse. 
 
 In the first of these he undertook to combat the 
 worship of the false gods by the ordinary arguments, 
 and then to celebrate, in triumphant accents, the 
 defection of the nobility and populace of Kome, who 
 
 * Prudent. Peristephanon, preface. 
 vol. n. 9 
 
194 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 had gradually passed from the service of these fictitious 
 divinities to that of Christ. He delighted in counting 
 all the families, the descendants of the Manlii and of 
 Brutus, who rallied one by one around the Laba- 
 rum. The idols remained abandoned, but the poet 
 did not ask for their destruction, but rather that, as 
 the deities had disappeared, their statues should be 
 saved, and should remain standing as immortal monu- 
 ments to witness to the past. He used the following 
 expressions, which are curious as showing us one of 
 the usages of Paganism, which archaeology has never 
 perfectly accounted for ; the old statues are often found 
 covered with a crust, the quality of which cannot always 
 be determined, and which changes their colour. Pru- 
 dentius said, in addressing the Roman senators 
 
 Marmora tabenti respergine tincta lavate, 
 
 O proceres ! liceat statuas consistere puras, 
 
 Artificum magnorum opera hsec pulclierrima nostra? 
 
 Ornamenta fiant patrise, nee decolor usus, 
 
 In vitium versa? monmnenta coinquinet artis* 
 
 They used to rub the statues of the gods with the 
 blood of the victims as a means of slaking the thirst 
 of Jupiter with the blood which he loved. These lines, 
 which have not been often cited, are very remarkable, 
 and we may notice generally in the works of this 
 poet a passion for art which caused a mind which was 
 thoroughly hostile to Paganism to demand, when once 
 the old religion had been suppressed, the preservation 
 of its statues, and to open widely to them the asylums 
 built and guarded by Kome for many centuries, which 
 were to receive, under the name of museums, all the 
 trophies of vanquished Paganism. 
 
 * Prudent, contra Symmach. i. 502. 
 
POETEY. 195 
 
 He replied, in his second book, to the arguments of 
 those who found the cause of the victories of Rome in 
 her piety towards the false gods, and sought for and 
 pointed to the real cause in the designs of Providence, 
 which used the Romans for the purpose of reconciling, 
 ruling, and civilizing all the nations of the West, that 
 a way might be laid open for Christianity, and her task 
 made more easy when the whole universe was subject 
 to the same law. Here his patriotic feeling broke out, 
 and he triumphed in the name of Roman greatness at 
 the refusal of Valentinian to rebuild the altar of Victory, 
 which had been destroyed for ever, to give place to a 
 higher protecting influence, and concluded by an ever- 
 memorable request to Honorius, the son of Theodosius, 
 for the abolition of the gladiatorial combats. He had 
 just depicted the amphitheatre as it rang with the cries 
 of the combatants. ''May Rome, the golden city, 
 no longer recognize such crimes as these. For this, I 
 adjure thee, most illustrious chief of the Caesarian 
 Empire, command that so odious a sacrifice should dis- 
 appear like the rest. This is the merit which the 
 tenderness of thy father desired to leave for thee. 
 ' My son,' he said, ' I leave thee thy share ; ' and so 
 he made over to thee the honour of this design. Make 
 then thine own, Prince, the glory which has been 
 reserved for this century. Thy father forbade that 
 the sovereign city should be polluted with the blood of 
 bulls ; do thou not permit that hecatombs of human 
 life should be offered therein. Let no one die any 
 more that his agony may form a sport ! Let the hate- 
 ful arena be content with its wild beasts, and no longer 
 afford the bloody spectacle of homicide ! And let Rome, 
 devoted to God, worthy of her prince, powerful by her 
 
 9 * 
 
196 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 courage, be so also through her innocence."* Here 
 was poetry put not only at the service of Christianity, 
 but of that humanity which it had so often betrayed. 
 
 It would be more instructive perhaps to examine the 
 theological poems of Prudentius, which dived into the 
 deepest difficulties of dogma; to analyze the poem 
 styled " Hamartigenia," in which he discussed all the 
 objections levelled against the divinity of Christ, or that 
 entitled " Psychomachia," in which he occupied him- 
 self with the origin of evil ; to note the boldness with 
 which the man who had up to that time been devoted to 
 the business and the disputes of the bar attacked the 
 highest metaphysical questions, discussed the existence 
 of the two principles of good and evil, explained how 
 the mind could perceive without the assistance of the 
 senses, and traced out the inner struggle between the 
 flesh and the spirit. He grasped and expressedth ese 
 truths with an energy which he might have borrowed 
 from Lucretius, and which recalled the language of 
 Kome's old philosopher-poet ; whilst on the other side 
 the reader might, from the Christian idea which reigned 
 throughout, imagine himself transported into that 
 paradise of Dante wherein the poet, emboldened by 
 the presence of Beatrice, dared to probe the most for- 
 midable topics of theology. 
 
 But perhaps Prudentius was even greater as a lyric 
 poet. We must look to his two collections styled the 
 " Cathemerinon " and the " Peristephanon " for these 
 hymns, twelve of which were devoted to the different 
 hours of the day or the different solemnities of the 
 Christian year, and fourteen to a celebration of the 
 anniversaries of the martyrs. It was in these especially 
 * Prudent, contra Symmach. ii. 1114 et seq. 
 
POETRY. 197 
 
 that he showed the research and perseverance with 
 which he had mastered all the forms of the ancient 
 versification. Thus all the Horatian metres were to be 
 found in these hymns, used in the same variety if not 
 with the same purity, and often with an attention to 
 rule which is surprising in a century of decline, 
 whilst whole passages might be cited as models of 
 ! a Latinity which was superior to that of the Latin 
 poets at the end of the second and even of the first 
 century. The two characteristics of his poetry were 
 gracefulness and force; the former appeared especially 
 in passages wherein he showed the earth pouring 
 forth her flowers to surround and veil the cradle of the 
 Saviour ; or where he described the Holy Innocents as 
 the flowers of martyrdom whom the sword had reaped 
 as the whirlwind reaps the budding roses, and who 
 play as children in heaven, and under the very altar 
 of God, with their palm and their crown. This again 
 was followed by a description of heaven, which in its 
 quaintness foreshadowed the loveliest paintings of 
 Fra Angelico da Fiesole ; and, in fact, when we listen 
 to Prudentius as he gracefully depicts the souls of the 
 blessed singing in chorus as they moved, and scarcely 
 brushing the lilies of the field which failed to bend be- 
 neath their footsteps, we might well imagine ourselves 
 gazing upon one of his heavenly pictures. 
 
 But the power of the poet appeared far more when 
 he described the conflicts of the martyrs ; and he 
 caught, as it were, all their fire when he represented 
 St. Fructuosus on the pile, St. Hippolytus at the heels 
 of the untamed horses, or St. Laurence on the gridiron. 
 The latter was one of the dearest memories of the 
 
198 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Eoman people, for that apostle and martyr of the faith 
 was also the martyr of charity, and had suffered for 
 refusing to give up not only the Christ whom he bore 
 in his heart, but those treasures also of the Church 
 which were hoarded for the nourishment of her poor ; 
 and Kome has shown her gratitude by the fact so 
 popular has the memory of the deacon, who was the 
 servant of the poor, ever remained that after the 
 Virgin there is no saint, including St. Peter himself, 
 who has had as many churches dedicated to him. 
 Prudentius sang of him, and was led through the 
 enthusiasm inspired by the face of the young saint to 
 put into his mouth the following prayer, which again 
 showed that Christian inspiration which surveyed the 
 destiny of Eome with a glance of assurance : " Christ, 
 only name beneath the sun, splendour and virtue of 
 the Father, author of the earth and the sky, and ^true 
 founded of these walls, Thou who didst place Rome as 
 the supreme head of all things, willing that the entire 
 universe should serve the people who bear the toga and 
 the sword, that the customs, genius, tongues, and wor- 
 ships of the hostile nations might be brought under 
 the same laws, behold how the human race hath 
 passed in its entirety beneath the law of Remus, and 
 opposing manners have approached in the same word 
 and the same thought. Christ, grant to Thy Romans 
 that their city may be Christian, that city through 
 which Thou hast given a like faith to all the cities of 
 the earth. May all the members of her Empire unite 
 in the same Creed. The world has bowed ; may its 
 sovereign city bend in its turn ; grant that Romulus 
 may become faithful, and Numa believe in Thee." 
 
POETKY. 199 
 
 Mansuescit orbis subditus, 
 Mansuescat summum caput. 
 Fiat fidelis Romulus, 
 Et ipse jam credat Numa* 
 
 But lofty thoughts and strong expressions are the 
 
 property of all men of eloquence, whilst gracefulness 
 
 is the distinction and inimitable characteristic of poets, 
 
 and, therefore, it marked as with a first seal all the 
 
 compositions of Prudentius. They always returned to 
 
 his own person with a great charm, and concluded with 
 
 thoughts which left a soothing influence upon the mind, 
 
 whether he showed the white dove escaping from the 
 
 pile of St. Eulalia, or invited young maidens to bring 
 
 baskets full of violets to the tomb of the virgin martyrs, 
 
 reserving to himself, as he said, " the task of weaving 
 
 garlands of verses, which, though pale and withered, 
 
 had yet a certain festal air ; " or whether, again, the 
 
 poet concluded his history of the martyrdom of St. 
 
 Romanus by this touching prayer : "I should wish, 
 
 ranked as I shall be on the left amongst the goats, to 
 
 be recognized from afar, and that to the prayers of 
 
 the martyr the merciful judge might turn and say, 
 
 ' Romanus has prayed to me ; let them bring me that 
 
 goat, let him stand as a lamb on my right hand, and 
 
 let him be vested in the fleece.' " 
 
 Vellem sinister inter hsedorum greges 
 Ut sum futurus, eminus dignoscerer, 
 Atque, hoc precante, dicerit rex optimus : 
 Romanus orat ; transfer hunc haedum mihi: 
 Sit dexter agnus, induatur vellere.f 
 
 This man, whose verses we are now admiring, was 
 destined not to remain without admirers. The 
 Middle Age rendered him a homage which was equal 
 
 * Peristeph. ii 412 et seq. 
 f Ibid. x. 1136 et seq. 
 
200 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 to that received by the most illustrious teachers, 
 Boethius, Bede, and St. Boniface. All the writers of 
 the seventh century loved to borrow his verses and place 
 them as examples by the side of the finest rhythms of^ 
 antiquity. In later times he was cited as the first and 
 the most famous of Christian poets. At last we find 
 St. Bruno, one of the most learned men of that 
 learned Germany of an epoch that is but little known, 
 one of the men of that Teutonic revival which we have 
 not studied yet, but may examine one day in company, 
 placing in the library of his Church a copy of Pru- 
 dentius, which thenceforth was scarcely ever out of 
 his hands. This poet held his post of honour up to 
 the Kevival. The Bevival entered the Christian school 
 and found therein Christian poets, ranked beneath 
 those pagan bards to whom, as befitted the most 
 eloquent, the first place had been granted. Virgil and 
 Horace still retained the honour which antiquity had 
 bestowed, but as for the poets of Christianity, since 
 their language was not of Ciceronian purity, since 
 Prudentius had been convicted of using seventy-five 
 words which had no precedent amongst earlier writers, 
 they were swept away and put to flight forthwith as a 
 barbarous crew which had been introduced into the 
 school under the pretext of their Christianity, that the 
 pagans might remain sole masters of the ground. 
 
 There were also some accessory reasons for the step. 
 Prudentius had become somewhat irksome with his 
 passionate devotion towards the martyrs, and these 
 numberless acts of homage to the saints were so many 
 damaging testimonies which must be suppressed or 
 silenced. In vain did some men of taste and learning, 
 as for instance Louis Vives, one of the most famous 
 
POETRY. 201 
 
 and zealous adherents of the Kevival, complain courage- 
 ously of this, and demand a resting-place for the 
 instructors of our fathers ; it was necessary that they 
 should disappear. 
 
 Let us be more equitable, let our admiration be wide 
 enough to render to the poets of the first centuries of 
 Christianity the justice which for so long a time was 
 not refused them ; and as Prudentius, fervent convert 
 and penitent as he was, tolerantly wished that even the 
 statues of the false gods should remain standing in the 
 Forum, so let us reclaim for the early Christian poets 
 their standing-place before the school. There would 
 be no rashness in the act ; and yet, in spite of all the 
 poetry to which we have been bound to point in the 
 works of these writers, which we have just traced in a 
 perhaps too lengthy analysis, we must at length affirm 
 that the true Christian poetry, and its very basis, was 
 not there, but in a quarter which we shall now proceed 
 to examine. 
 
 r 
 
202 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 CHRISTIAN ART. 
 
 We ought to have closed our history of the Christian 
 literature of the fifth century with that of poetry; and 
 yet when we sought for that poetical inspiration which 
 seemed to spring forth with such abundant life from the 
 great scenes of Christianity, it was with difficulty that 
 we found it. It did not lurk in those numerous epic 
 and dialectic compositions in which so many writers 
 laboured, with more exactness than originality, to bend 
 the stories of Scripture or the hard points of dogma to 
 the metres of Virgil and of Ovid. It is true that we 
 perceived the poetic ray upon the brow of two men of 
 different genius and destiny, St. Paulinus and Pru- 
 dentius, the former of whom renounced honour, fortune, 
 and the whole world in order to consume his days at 
 the tomb of St. Felix of Nola, though he never gave up 
 those sweet rhythms which flowed as naturally as tears, 
 and served, like tears, as an outflow of his feelings ; 
 whilst the latter devoted his last days to the service of 
 the faith, and employed himself in defending its doc- 
 trines and its glory. We saw how power and grace 
 combined to weave his verses into so many crowns, 
 which, as he said himself, he used to hang amongst 
 the fresh garlands with which the faithful decked the 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 203 
 
 sepulchres of the saints. Poetry doubtless existed 
 therein, but not entirely ; certainly not in such a measure 
 as might have been expected after three centuries of 
 persecution, after Constantine and the Nicene Council, 
 in the times of the Fathers, and in the days in which 
 the heroic anchorites flourished like so many plants of 
 the desert. Then if poetry cannot be found complete 
 there, it must have existed elsewhere. There must 
 have been some source whence it sprang in abundance 
 to flow on and spread abroad over the succeeding ages. 
 
 Symbolism is the common fount of all Christian 
 poetry. Symbolism is at once a law of nature and a 
 law of the human mind. It is a law of nature : for 
 what, after all, is creation but a magnificent language 
 which is speaking to us by night and by day ? The 
 heavens tell us of their author ; and all created beings 
 speak not only of Him who made them, but of each 
 other, the meanest and most obscure unfolding the 
 history of the sons of light and glory. What is the 
 returning bird of passage but the sign of the spring 
 which it brings with it, and of stars which have been, 
 coursing on for months ? And does not the fragile reed 
 which casts its shadow on the sand serve to register the 
 height of the sun on the horizon ? Thus do all exist- 
 ences bear mutual witness, arouse and summon one 
 another from one end of immensity to the other, and 
 thus do their continual combinations, their numberless 
 symbols and harmonies, form the poetry of the world 
 which we inhabit. 
 
 Thus the Almighty speaks by signs, and man in his 
 turn, when he speaks to God, exhausts the whole series 
 of signs which his intelligence can grasp. What 
 other language could the human intellect speak than 
 
204 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 that which it has received, and in which it has heen 
 formed ? And therefore prayer alone does not satisfy 
 man when he is addressing God ; he desires music and 
 those sacred ceremonies which also express in their 
 way, hy their development and the choice songs which 
 they contain, by their pauses and their advances, the 
 movements of the soul, its headlong flight towards the 
 infinite, and the want of power which forces it to halt 
 on the way. A sacrifice is wanted, too, to be the symbol 
 of adoration and of human impotence in presence of 
 the Divine Power. Therefore also the temple appears 
 to act as a grand and abiding witness, planted upon 
 the earth in order to mark the fact that intellects are 
 present which desire, after their own fashion, to attest 
 their efforts to reach their Creator. Thus the whole 
 of nature instructs mankind by symbols, and it is by 
 symbols that man replies to nature's Author. 
 
 The same idea appears in Christianity, and in 
 Scripture God spoke only in the language of symbol. 
 The entire Old Testament is full of realities, and has, 
 doubtless, an historical value, but, at the same time, all 
 the patriarchs and prophets represented Him who was 
 to come. Joseph and Moses were but the precursors 
 and, at the same time, the signs of Him who was one 
 day to accomplish the law, and in whom every type 
 was to find its reality. The New Testament, in its 
 turn, only addresses us in parables; and Christ Himself, 
 using the familiar language of rustic life, that kind of 
 life which is most natural and most grateful to humanity, 
 said one day, " I am the vine," and on another occa- 
 sion, " I am the good shepherd." It was the same in 
 the whole ulterior development of the New Testament. 
 St. Paul interpreted Scripture by means of allusions 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 205 
 
 and allegories ; the two mountains represented, ac- 
 cording to him, the two covenants, and the Red Sea, 
 which the Hebrews had crossed, became in his eyes the 
 symbol of baptism. Again, in the Apocalypse, that espe- 
 cially symbolic book, each figure was produced with a 
 mysterious meaning attached to it ; and when St. John 
 represented the new Jerusalem as resplendent with 
 gold and jewels, with its wall of precious stones and 
 its gates of pearl, it was not mere material splendour, 
 nor a flattery of the senses which he offered to the 
 men who were daily dying, braving martyrdom and re- 
 nouncing every treasure, as the supreme end of their 
 efforts ; for in the language of the East every precious 
 stone had a symbolical value, which was admitted 
 according to rule into all the ancient schools, and 
 represented in a mystic manner certain vague virtues 
 of the soul and certain forces of the human under- 
 standing or of divine grace. 
 
 Therefore, when the Christians had to compose their 
 language we need not wonder that, imitating the Bible, 
 they formed one that was figurative and full of types 
 and symbols ; or that when the first apostolic fathers, 
 St. Clement and St. Barnabas, interpreted the Scrip- 
 tures, allegory superabounded throughout their works 
 and in their interpretations. About the same time a 
 Christian writer named Hermas, whose history has 
 remained unknown, but whose book had preserved a 
 singular character of antiquity and beauty, wishing to 
 instruct the faithful, did so by means of parables, after 
 the fashion of the ancients. His book was divided 
 into three parts ; the visions, the precepts, and the 
 parables. In the visions, for instance, the Church was 
 represented to him under the figure of a young girl, of 
 
206 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 a queen, or of a mother whom age had already marked 
 with its character and endowed also with a sign of 
 authority. The institutions and callings to which God 
 had given the support of His will always appeared to 
 him beneath that living and sensible figure, and when 
 he desired to represent the diversity of human con- 
 ditions, he employed the following analogy. Hermas, 
 whilst walking one day in the country, saw a vine and 
 an elm, and paused to consider them. Thereupon the 
 shepherd appeared to him : " That vine," said he, 
 " bears much fruit, and the elm has none ; yet if the 
 climbing vine was not supported by it, it would produce 
 but little, and that of scanty value. Therefore, as it 
 can produce no fruit abundantly or of good quality 
 without the support of the elm, the elm is not less 
 fertile than the vine. The man of wealth is generally 
 poor in the eyes of the Lord, because his treasures 
 lead him away from God and his prayer is feeble. But 
 if he gives to the poor, the poor, who is rich in the 
 eyes of the Lord, and whose prayer is powerful, prays 
 for him, and .God answers it. Thus, if the rich lean 
 upon the poor man like the vine upon the elm, they 
 both become rich, the one by almsdeeds, the other by 
 prayer."* 
 
 We see that this symbolical language penetrated 
 and even became necessary to Christian manners. 
 After the period of liberty which Christianity enjoyed 
 up to the time of the first persecutions, the rulers of 
 the Church recognized the necessity of veiling its 
 mysteries in the discipline of the Secret, and they were 
 communicated gradually, so as not to be immediately 
 exposed to profanation from the unbelieving. The 
 * Hermas Pastor, i. 3, Similitude- Secunda. 
 
CHKISTIAN ART. 207 
 
 necessity of keeping the mysteries secret, and also of 
 a mutual recognition among Christians, led to the 
 adoption of rallying signals, intelligible to those alone 
 who had learnt their meaning, and consequently to a 
 symbolic system whereby Christians might interchange 
 ideas without laying them open to sacrilegious minds. 
 The number of these symbols also increased infinitely, 
 and at the end of the third century had become so great 
 that Meliton of Sardis, a father of the Greek Church, 
 wrote a book named the " Key," devoted to an expla- 
 nation of these symbols, which at that remote period 
 had so multiplied as to render a scientific interpretation 
 of them necessary. 
 
 In the fifth century St. Eucher wrote the Book of 
 Formulas for the spiritual understanding of the Scrip- 
 tures Liber formularum spiritualis intellig 'entice 
 in which he gave precisely the mystic sense of the 
 numbers, flowers, figures of animals, of plants, and 
 precious metals, which had all a meaning, and had 
 puzzled the ancient philosophy by their value and 
 mutual relation. He explained therein, after the 
 manner of a great symbolical dictionary, all the signs 
 then used in the language of theology, the figures of 
 the lion, the stag, the lamb, the dove, the palm, the 
 olive, the pomegranate, and many others. It showed 
 as it were the secret of Christian hieroglyphics, unveiled 
 voluntarily by a priest, when, as the danger of the 
 persecutions and with it the necessity of the discipline 
 of the Secret had vanished, the Church could satisfy 
 her inherent craving to communicate everything, 
 whereby it differed so entirely from the ancient priest- 
 hood whose theory and practice had ever been to hide 
 and to obscure. 
 
208 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 It is because all religions are necessarily symbolical, 
 that they become the guiding principle and cradle of the 
 arts, for all the arts are born beneath the shadow of a 
 religion. We need not wonder at this, for if. man is 
 obliged when he desires to say anything, to employ 
 figures which, precisely because they are material, always 
 remain inferior to his idea, much rather must the same 
 be the case when he undertakes to speak to God, of 
 God, of things invisible, of all the infinite conceptions 
 which the understanding can hardly grasp, of which it 
 catches a hasty glimpse, but which pass in a moment 
 like the lightning, and which, though it longs to arrest 
 them, have disappeared before we have been able to 
 compare the imperfect expression with the very idea 
 which it would render. This is why no sign can satisfy 
 man when he wishes to speak of these eternal things, 
 why all methods are employed, and so to speak come 
 all at once under his hand. All that the chisel, the 
 brush, or stones piled towards the heaven into in- 
 accessible heights can effect, all the harmonious 
 illusions that speech can produce when sustained by 
 music, may be used by man, and yet nothing result to 
 satisfy the just demands of his mind, when once it has 
 been occupied with these mighty and immortal ideas. 
 Yet in spite of that feebleness, the ideal which he 
 pursues suffers itself to be glimpsed at with a sort of 
 transparency ; and it is this transparence of the ideal 
 through the forms in which it is clothed that truly 
 constitutes poetry, which in its primitive aspect does 
 not lie only in verse nor in rhymed words, but in every 
 effort of the human will to grasp the ideal and to 
 render it either in colour, or in stone, or by any of the 
 means which have been granted to strike the senses 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 209 
 
 and to communicate to the understanding of another 
 the conceptions of one's own. 
 
 We see, then, that Christian art found its destined 
 cradle in those Catacombs which formed the cradle of 
 the Christian faith, and we must descend into them in 
 order to find the origin of the poetry which we have 
 sought in books. But the people who assembled there 
 were too fervent and full of emotion to be satisfied by- 
 one or two of the methods whereby man is able to 
 translate his thoughts. They were also too poor and 
 ignorant, too much composed of the lower classes of the 
 Roman society, to be able to carry perfection very far in 
 their use of the arts ; so they were obliged at once to 
 essay all the arts and all the methods whereby ideas 
 can be expressed, in order imperfectly to render those 
 emotions with which the glad tidings of the faith had 
 lately filled their hearts. We must picture to ourselves 
 the Catacombs as a vast labyrinth of subterranean 
 galleries, stretching for a considerable distance beneath 
 the suburbs and the Campagna of Rome. No less than 
 sixty of these Christian cemeteries have been counted, 
 and the circumvallations which they formed around the 
 ancient city extended, according to the popular tradition 
 which is repeated by the herdsmen of the Campagna, 
 as far as the sea. But on a descent into these sunless 
 haunts, one is more struck by their depths than by the 
 space over which they spread themselves. The entrance 
 to them lies chiefly through the old quarries of puzzo- 
 lano, which doubtless supplied material for the monu- 
 ments of Rome, and were the work of the ancients. 
 But beneath and beside these quarries the Christians 
 themselves have dug out of the granulated tufa other 
 galleries of a totally different form, which could never 
 
210 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 have served for the extraction of stone, but only for 
 the object for which they were used. All these galleries 
 descend to two, three, or four stories beneath the surface 
 of the earth, that is to say, to eighty, a hundred feet or 
 more ; they branch into countless windings, sometimes 
 ascending and sometimes descending, as if to balk the 
 steps of the persecutors when, engaged in their task, 
 they press upon the crowd of the faithful by whom their 
 approach had been heard. To right and left the face of 
 the wall is pierced by oblong horizontal niches, like the 
 shelves of a library, each shelf forming a burial-place, 
 which served, according to its depth, for one or more 
 bodies. As soon as the burial-place was filled, the 
 ledge was closed by blocks of marble, bricks, or what- 
 ever material chance threw in the way of these perse- 
 cuted workmen. Here and there these long corridors 
 opened into chapels, in which the mysteries were cele- 
 brated, or upon chambers in which the catechumens 
 received their instruction and penitents made their 
 expiation. 
 
 We must give immediate proof that these great 
 works were really those of the early Christian centuries, 
 the ages of persecution. Of this we have evidence in 
 the writings of Prudentius and St. Jerome, who both 
 descended there more than once to honour the sepul- 
 chres of the martyrs, and spoke of the place as much 
 with awe as with admiration. St. Jerome, when a 
 young student at Home, in the zeal of his soul, 
 descended every Sunday into these bowels of the earth, 
 and tells us that these occasions always recalled the 
 word of the prophet, Descendunt ad infernum viventes, 
 and the line of Virgil 
 
 Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent ; 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 211 
 
 a mingling of the great traditions of the faith with 
 secular associations which shows the double nature of 
 the education bestowed upon Jerome and his contem- 
 poraries.* 
 
 In fact, at first sight, the works of the Catacombs 
 show traces of the effects of terror and necessity ; but 
 on a closer inspection, they appear full of eloquence, 
 and had the monuments of architecture no other object 
 but that of instructing and moving the hearts of men, 
 no construction in the world would afford such mighty 
 and terrible lessons. For when we have penetrated 
 these depths of the earth, we learn perforce that which 
 is life's great lesson the severance of one's self from 
 what is visible, and even from that light itself whereby 
 all things are visible. The places of burial close in 
 upon the whole, as death envelopes life ; and even the 
 oratories which open here and there to right and left 
 are like so many days opening upon immortality to 
 console man in some measure for the night in which 
 he is living here. Thus did architecture achieve there 
 all that it was destined to achieve in after times, in 
 instructing, in moving, and in pervading everything. 
 
 Let those then who, when young, wander out on 
 their pilgrimages of travel descend into these vast 
 caverns, and tell us on their return if they did not find 
 emotions there that none of the great constructions of 
 antiquity, neither the remnants of the Coliseum, nor of 
 the Parthenon, nor of any other of the buildings which 
 seemed to have been destined to immortality, could 
 ever produce. 
 
 But this was not all, for these oratories were covered 
 with paintings, which were often of the rudest nature. 
 
 * St. Hieronym. in Ezechielem, c. 40. 
 
212 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 There were but few great artists amongst the Christians 
 of the early centuries, amongst those poor plebeians 
 whom Christianity preferred. The Apelles and Par- 
 rhasius of the time remained in the service of Nero, 
 and decorated his golden horse. It was the poverty- 
 stricken refuse which descended there, and yet some- 
 thing superhuman betrayed itself amidst the weakness 
 and powerlessness of a degraded art. On descending, 
 indeed, into those Catacombs, which appear to have been 
 dug in the remotest centuries, we can recognize the 
 faithfully observed tradition of the arts of antiquity, 
 and find paintings which may be said, without exagge- 
 ration, to show some remant of the old beauty, without 
 any evidence of that decline of the Eoman art which 
 was not strongly pronounced until the second century. 
 Thus the paintings themselves bear witness to the anti- 
 quity of the walls on which they were traced, and to 
 beliefs which they demonstrate ; and it was, in fact, 
 impossible for the nascent Christian art not to repro- 
 duce, in many respects, the traditions of art as they 
 existed in the classic epoch. Some pagans, like the 
 Scipios, had possessed painted and even subterranean 
 burial-places, in which they were accustomed to bury 
 the dead of the family, after the manner of the 
 Christians. In the tombs of the Scipios, the Nasos, 
 and others, paintings and cheerful designs, such as of 
 flowers, animals, Victories, and genii, have been found 
 spread over the walls, as if to enliven the sadness of 
 death. What wonder if the humble diggers (fossores), 
 as they were called, who were the first to decorate the 
 Christian burial-places and chapels, reproduced in many 
 ways the processes, figures, and subjects of the ancient 
 artists ? It was thus that the same allegorical figures, 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 213 
 
 which often seemed only fit for Paganism, such as Vic- 
 tories, or winged genii, adorned several Christian tombs ; 
 as, for instance, the three paintings of the cemetery of 
 St. Callistus, in which we find the figure of Orpheus 
 represented after the ancient manner. But the wisdom 
 of the Church, ever watchful over the simple ignorance 
 of her poor workmen, was careful to develop the symbol, 
 to purify it, and give it a novel significance. She- 
 achieved the same for art that she had achieved for 
 language ; it was necessary that she should adopt the 
 ancient tongue, but in doing so she had given to the 
 ancient terms a new sense, which was destined to add 
 a fresh fertility to eloquence. Orpheus figured amongst 
 these Christian types ; but, according to St. Clement of 
 Alexandria, he figured there as an image of Christ, 
 who also attracted all hearts, and stirred the coldest 
 rocks of the desert, and the fiercest beasts of the field ; 
 as he figured later in the Christian art of every century 
 down to the time of Calderon, who gave to one of the 
 most admirable of his Autos Sacramentales the title 
 of the Divine Orpheus. Likewise, archaeologists have 
 good reason in affirming that the figure of the Good 
 Shepherd, which the painters of the Catacombs repre- 
 sented on the archivolt of their oratories, was copied 
 from the antique. 
 
 The ancients used often to represent pastoral em- 
 ployments in their places of burial and elsewhere ; and 
 amongst those graceful pictures in which the painting 
 and sculpture of antiquity delighted, none was more 
 pleasing than that of the young shepherd bearing a kid 
 on his shoulder. The Christians in their turn adopted 
 for their sepulchres this figure of the shepherd, with 
 the chlamys and the complete details of his costume, 
 
214 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 and placed on his shoulder the traditional kid ; for the 
 ignorant artist, unfaithful to the text of the Gospel, 
 which speaks of a lamb, generally copied exactly from 
 the ancient picture, without troubling himself as to 
 conformity with Scripture. 
 
 This is the account given by the archaeologists, but 
 it is a somewhat exaggerated interpretation, and we 
 shall see how a deeper and more enlightened criticism 
 can throw sudden light upon an obscure point and 
 bring out all the significance and beauty of a 
 symbol. 
 
 It happened that at the very moment in which the 
 Christians were digging the Catacombs of St. Callistus 
 at Rome, at the end of the second century, there was a 
 question in the Church as to one of the gravest points 
 which she has ever mooted, as to whether the promise 
 of pardon to the sinner had been made for once or for 
 many times, and whether the lapsed could be admitted 
 to penance. A considerable sect, the Montanists, 
 presided over by the most illustrious of the seceders 
 from orthodoxy, namely Tertullian, maintained that 
 pardon was only extended to him who had sinned once, 
 but not to the man who had fallen again ; that the 
 good shepherd bears upon his shoulders the strayed 
 sheep indeed, but not the goat, which at the day of 
 judgment would be placed on the left of the judge, 
 whilst only the sheep would be seen on his right. The 
 Christians pointed, in objection, to the parable of the 
 good shepherd, whereupon he answered, with bitterness, 
 that the shepherd had gone in quest of the sheep, but 
 he could nowhere find that he had sought for the 
 goat; and in his work, " De Pudicitia," he reproached 
 the Bishop of Rome with going in search of goats 
 
CHEISTIAN ART. 215 
 
 instead of confining his attention to strayed sheep. 
 It was then that the merciful instinct of the Church 
 gave a loving and lofty answer to the pitiless men who 
 refused pardon to the weakness which fell once and 
 had fallen again, and caused the good shepherd to be 
 painted in the Catacombs, no longer with the lamb 
 alone on his shoulders, but with a goat, with that type 
 of the sinner who seemed lost for ever, but whom the 
 shepherd notwithstanding brings back in triumph on 
 his shoulders. And thus in the place in which some 
 have only seen an error of a workman, an awkward copy 
 of the antique, is unfolded a charming mystery of grace 
 and mercy. 
 
 Around this picture of the good shepherd, which 
 generally fills the keystone of the vault of the Cata- 
 combs, are arranged four compartments, separated from 
 one another by arches of flower designs. These gene- 
 rally contain paintings of four sacred subjects, two 
 taken from the Old and two from the New Testament, 
 put in apposition for the purpose of comparison and 
 parallel. These subjects scarcely vary. The most fre- 
 quently represented have been about twenty in number, 
 and this has been attributed to poverty of genius in 
 the artists of the time, who could never get beyond a 
 small circle of conventional models. Yet, if we examine 
 the subjects, we find that they are not always identical, 
 that they follow no absolute type, but are treated with 
 a certain freedom. Some of the representations, as, 
 for instance, that of the original fall, vary singularly, 
 according to their artists and their dates, and it is 
 evident that the restricted number of subjects is owing 
 to the need of symbolizing thereby a certain number 
 of dogmas, to their symbolical nature, and to their 
 
216 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 possessing a deeper meaning than that which they 
 express. Thus, the serpent placed between our two 
 first parents expresses sin ; the water running from the 
 rocks represents baptism ; Moses bringing down manna 
 from heaven symbolizes the Eucharist ; the figure of the 
 paralytic healed and bearing his pallet on his back 
 points to penance ; that of Lazarus expresses the idea 
 of the resurrection ; whilst the three children in the 
 furnace, Jonas cast into the sea, and Daniel in the 
 lions' den, symbolize martyrdom under its three prin- 
 cipal forms, by fire, by water, and by wild beasts. But 
 it is remarkable that reference was always made to the 
 triumphant martyrs who had been crowned of God, and 
 never, except in the case of St. Hippolytus, to those 
 who were contemporary. It was not till some age 
 afterwards that the Christians traced some pictures of 
 their martyrs in the Catacombs, but the Christians of 
 the times of persecution, those men whom Tacitus had 
 branded as the horror and shame of the human race, 
 never chose to depict what they had suffered themselves, 
 or the tortures they had seen inflicted upon their 
 fathers, their children, and their wives. This fact 
 surely demands our admiration, that, whilst pagan 
 art was wallowing in the grossest and most odious 
 realism, and whilst, in order to stir the senses of those 
 worn-out men, it was necessary to burn a slave at the 
 close of the tragedy of " Hercules on Mount Mt&," or 
 to outrage a woman on the stage in the course of some 
 play by Euripides, whilst this same realism held every 
 Eoman theatre, and reigned throughout the triumphant 
 city which queened it over the world, those few poor 
 and detested men, without influence, hidden beneath 
 the earth in places where they could hear, strictly 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 217 
 
 speaking, the yells of the crowd, whose cry was "the 
 Christians to the lions," could only give us as a type 
 the martyrdom of antiquity, but never that which they 
 were suffering themselves, or figures of the resurrec- 
 tion, and other graceful, amiable, and touching symbols, 
 thus affording us at once the finest example of an art 
 which loves not materialism, and of a charity which 
 can pardon and forget. 
 
 The Catacombs had not afforded an asylum to archi- 
 tecture and painting alone, although sculpture neces- 
 sarily found less place there as being the special art of 
 Paganism. The representations of the gods were less 
 often in pictures than statues, and therefore sculpture 
 did not now find such favour as painting. Doubtless 
 we find it employed from the earliest times to help out 
 words in the inscriptions which were placed upon the 
 tombs. Often did a sign, a hieroglyphic, or a symbol, 
 lightly traced with the point of a chisel, tell more than 
 many lines from the hand of the most skilful poet, who 
 would have sought to express the grief of those who 
 were left, or the faith of those who had been taken. Al- 
 ready had the ancients beautifully expressed the frailty of 
 human life by a flower upon the tomb, or the rapidity 
 of the days of man by a ship under sail; and the 
 Christians adopted these signs with that excellent 
 spirit and admirable good sense of the nascent Church, 
 which, as we have already seen from the history of 
 literature and of philosophy, took from antiquity all its 
 beauty and its worth. 
 
 And in adapting these signs the Church added new 
 ones, and gave consolation in death after her own 
 manner by placing on the tombs the dove with the 
 branch as a type of hope and of immortality ; the ark 
 
 VOL. II. 10 
 
218 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTUKY. 
 
 of Noah instead of the common bark, as the ark 
 which gathers mankind into a place of safety, and bears 
 it over the abyss ; and, lastly, the fish, as the mystic 
 sign of Christ, because the Greek word tx,6ug com- 
 prised the five initials of the various names by which 
 He was designated.* The latter sign had been agreed 
 upon among Christians ; had served as a rallying 
 signal and means of mutual recognition ; whilst the 
 fish also expressed the believer who had been dipped in 
 the waters of baptism. Thus a certain burial-place, 
 the inscription of which has been preserved, bore no 
 verse, nor even a word in prose, which could in any way 
 point to the dead, but only showed the fish and the five 
 miraculous loaves. Yet it was eloquent, for it said, 
 here lies a man who has been baptized and has tasted 
 the miraculous bread of the eucharist, and afforded 
 thus a forcible and expressive epitaph. Sometimes 
 words came in as an auxiliary, and sometimes with a 
 graceful simplicity, as in the case of that plain inscrip- 
 tion, TQTrog QihYiiAovog. Sometimes a word of tenderness 
 and gentleness appeared on the tomb of a child, 
 Glorentius felix agnellus Dei ; or at others the fear of 
 the judgment of God is expressed with a terrible excla- 
 mation, as in the inscription of the father of Benirosus, 
 Domine, ne quando adumbratur spiritus veneris. 
 
 Lastly, the inscription in verse burst forth and 
 spread over these sepulchres, and the true poetry in 
 rhyme set its seal upon the stones of the Catacombs. 
 The following verses relating to a child of four years 
 old, though of an extreme rudeness, are remarkable 
 from the classic association which they perpetuate : 
 
 * It)(tovs Xpccrros, Qeov vios, 2a>Tr)p. 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 219 
 
 Hie jacet infelix proprio Cicercula nomen 
 Innocens. qui vix semper in pace quiescat, 
 Cui cum bis biuos natura ut compleret annos, 
 Abstuiit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo. 
 
 Certainly one could not expect to find a line of Virgil 
 at the close of these Christian but barbarous verses. 
 But these tattered memories of antiquity apart, every- 
 thing then was popular and even coarse. We must not 
 wonder at the multitude of faults in orthography and 
 grammar, nor at the number of Latin words written in 
 Greek characters, nor the many other solecisms and 
 barbarisms of which these inscriptions are so full. It 
 was in this very thing that the glory of that ignorant, 
 coarse, and impoverished people lay; it was thus, 
 moreover, that they were destined to triumph over the 
 rich and powerful class above their heads, who inha- 
 bited the' gilded places beneath which they dug their 
 burial-places. No doubt, had these Christian stones 
 with their verses been brought to the rhetoricians of 
 Rome, they would have shrugged their shoulders and 
 asked how miserable Galilaeans who wrote so badly 
 could dream of reforming the human race. Yet it was 
 from the depths of those cemeteries and the poetry of 
 those tombs that the new art was to proceed which 
 would change the intellectual aspect of the world. 
 
 It would be our proper task to look for the destiny 
 of art at the precise epoch of which we are treating, 
 that is, after the period of the Catacombs, but it was 
 accessary first to trace out its roots. It was, in fact, 
 after Christian art had emerged from the Catacombs, 
 and after the era of persecutions had closed, that it was 
 seen to develop with more liberty and variety; that 
 its branches detached themselves, though still being 
 Dourished by the same sap and covered with the same 
 
 10 * 
 
220 CIVILIZATION IN~FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 flowers. Sculpture was still supervised and restrained, 
 for it was natural that suspicion should hover round 
 the sculptor at a time when it was so difficult to pre- 
 serve him from the perilous seduction exercised ovei 
 his mind hy the old images of Jupiter. Yet we musl 
 hesitate to believe that this art was forbidden in the 
 early ages of Christendom. We find a statue of St. 
 Hippolytus, in the time of the persecutions, of .incon- 
 testible authenticity and of as early date as the third 
 century, which is now placed in the library of the 
 Vatican. There are also statues of St. Peter and o1 
 the Good Shepherd, which date from the earliest Chris- 
 tian times. But it was especially in bas-relief and the 
 decoration of sarcophagi that sculpture placed its careei 
 and found its liberty. It generally represented thereir 
 the same subjects from the two Testaments that we 
 have remarked in the Catacombs ; and the aim likewise 
 was to render through symbols and figures the chie: 
 mysteries of the Christian faith. However, some nove! 
 subjects were added, as is shown by the admirable bul 
 unfinished studies upon the Christian sarcophagi of th( 
 fourth and fifth centuries. A great number of thes( 
 are to be found in the Vatican ; but they should be com- 
 pared with those at Ravenna, and the fine collectior 
 already made of them at Aries ; Rome, Ravenna, anc 
 Aries being the three great Imperial cities during the 
 fifth century, the latter for some time the capital of th( 
 Gauls, having succeeded Treves in that dignity. Ir 
 each of these towns a different school of Christiar 
 sculpture was formed, all possessing common rules 
 but each claiming a peculiar originality. The same 
 subjects were not equally popular in each place ; al 
 Aries, for instance, we find the passage of the Red Ses 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 221 
 
 treated as often as three times in the sarcophagi of 
 St. Trophimus. The breadth, s*cope, and life of these 
 point to the skill of a practised chisel, and are imitations 
 of the finest battle-pieces upon the ancient bas-reliefs. 
 At Aries, again, we may find historical subjects which 
 are to be met with nowhere else ; as, for instance, two 
 warriors kneeling before Christ like Constantine before 
 the Labarum, which signified the recognition of religious 
 truth by the temporal power, and the submission to 
 truth by the bearer of the sword ; an expressive and 
 simple image of a leading fact of the epoch in which 
 the temporal authority was bending the knee before 
 the truth which it had so often persecuted. We 
 may content ourselves with pointing to the pre- 
 sence of these great schools of sculpture which 
 found disciples in the other great cities of Italy 
 and Gaul, for we find Christian sarcophagi at 
 Parma, Milan, and on the shores of the Khine, 
 which, though of not an equal merit, do not the less 
 bear witness to a condition of the art which merits 
 study. We must not, as has been too often the case, 
 hasten to judge of the sculpture of these times by the 
 triumphal arch of Constantine at Rome, or say that, as 
 but four or five bas-reliefs of real merit can be found 
 there, which themselves had been pillaged from earlier 
 monuments, it stands as proof of the impotence of 
 the contemporary artists, who were incapable them- 
 selves of producing anything worthy of examination. 
 It is true that the frieze has been covered with the 
 most disproportionate figures, from which all the 
 sculpture of the fourth and fifth centuries has been 
 judged, but was it not a period when court artists 
 might under the favouring caprice of the prince crowd 
 
222 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the place which should have been filled by the works 
 of true merit with their coarse and miserable perfor- 
 mances ? Does not every epoch show the same ine- 
 quality in talent ? Is not the temple of Phigalia with 
 its rude carvings exactly contemporaneous with the 
 Parthenon upon which are displayed the unrivalled 
 compositions of Phidias ? However, side by side with 
 those trivial works which disgrace the monument which 
 bears them, we possess sarcophagi of incontestable 
 beauty, and there are several amongst those at Ra- 
 venna which testify to a great purity of conception. 
 Accordingly we cannot doubt that sculpture had not 
 perished, but was defending itself, preparatory to a 
 difficult journey across the dark ages, and if we lay to 
 the account of this art the capitals of our pillars, the 
 facades and the portals of our cathedrals, we shall gain 
 some idea of what it was destined to achieve. 
 
 Following sculpture and enjoying greater favour, came 
 painting, and if some were scandalized at the number 
 not only of sacred but of profane figures with which it 
 was the fashion to embellish the churches, the custom 
 was defended by the greatest minds of the time. It 
 is hard to conceive how it can be stated that the em- 
 ployment of images was a novelty in the Church, when 
 all the writings of the Fathers of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries were filled with witnessings to the reli- 
 gious use of images, and the place they had in the 
 decoration of all the basilicas, whether in the East or 
 West, with the exception of a certain number of 
 provinces, as for instance Judaea, where it was feared 
 they might offend the prejudices of the Jews. But 
 in spite of this, the evidence is unanimous, and in the 
 fifth century we find letters written by the anchorite 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 223 
 
 St. Nilus to Olympiodorus, the praetorian prefect, 
 praising his intention of decorating the basilica which 
 he had just founded with paintings. We have also 
 some letters in verse, a kind of poem, of St. Paulinus, 
 in which he explained the ornament with which he had 
 enriched the church at Nola, and described the pictures 
 which he caused to be drawn upon the porticoes. 
 
 Such is the proof and also the justification of the 
 use of painting in the Christian basilicas. This art 
 also was to be perpetuated in times which seemed the 
 most unfavourable to it, as is shown by the innumerable 
 Byzantine Virgins that are to be seen throughout 
 Italy, pictures that are very ancient and often nearly 
 effaced, and which may be recognized still at St. 
 Urbano della Cafarella, near Kome, in the subterranean 
 church of St. Peter, in St. Caecilia, in the church of 
 the Four Crowned Saints, and in that of St. Laurence, 
 which contains a succession of pictures dating from the 
 eighth to the thirteenth century ; of the time, that is 
 to say, in which the art was supposed to have been 
 entirely extinct. The genius of painting scarcely ap- 
 peared, indeed, in these generally coarse attempts ; but 
 it was not entirely eclipsed, and reappeared under 
 another form in the mosaics with which the churches 
 were adorned from the fifth to the thirteenth century; 
 for it was in 424 that Pope Celestine I. ornamented 
 in that manner the church of St. Sabina. In 433, 
 Sixtus III. caused those which still exist, after fourteen 
 hundred years, in the basilica of St. Mary Major, to be 
 executed ; and thus that representation of the bloodless 
 Cross decked with precious stones, with the figure of 
 the Virgin beneath, the history of the infancy of Christ 
 around, and the twenty scenes from the history of the 
 
224 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Old Testament at its side, dates entirely from the time 
 of that Pope. Little by little this mosaic work crept 
 into all the great Koman basilicas, such as St. Peter 
 and St. Paul; and, at length, in the capital of the 
 Christian world, and in the great cities of Italy, Milan, 
 Ravenna, Verona, and Venice, the apses of the churches 
 were filled with that imposing and resplendent delinea- 
 tion of Christ and the heavenly Jerusalem which 
 glowed so brightly, as if to reanimate the hopes of 
 the faithful amidst the perils of those ensanguined 
 centuries. 
 
 The mosaic filled the whole Romanesque period, 
 survived until the rise of the Gothic, and soon gained 
 possession of the ogival arcades of the churches built 
 by the Normans in Sicily; thus at Monreale and in 
 the Palatine chapel of Palermo, the traditional figures * 
 of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints still shine after 
 the conception of the artists who were contemporary 
 with Constantine and Theodosius. So obstinate was 
 the prevalent fidelity to the ancient types that it 
 extended even to borrowing images from antiquity, and 
 we may cite this as one of the knots which bound the 
 time of which we are treating to the Middle Age ; in 
 the baptistery of Ravenna, for instance, the Jordan was 
 represented after the pagan fashion, under the form of 
 a river-god, crowned with marine plants, and leaning 
 upon his urn, whence the streams gushed forth which 
 formed the sacred wave in which the Redeemer was 
 plunged. This imitation was so inveterate that it was 
 ceaselessly reproduced. At Venice, again, the four 
 Evangelists were accompanied by the four rivers of the 
 terrestrial paradise, to which they answered in the 
 symbolical language of the Church, the streams being 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 225 
 
 here also covered with seaweed and leaning upon their 
 urns. Charlemagne was scandalized at this, and la- 
 mented in the Caroline works that in the midst of the 
 sacred pictures rivers had been represented under pagan 
 emblems ; but Charlemagne could not get rid of them, 
 and we may still, in the cathedral of Autun and the 
 church of Vezelay, see the streams of the earthly para- 
 dise depicted under the form of classic deities supported 
 on their recumbent urns. 
 
 But painting and sculpture were still' only subsidiary 
 to architecture, which, in primitive ages, is always the 
 dominant art. And, in fact, to tell the truth, these 
 bas-reliefs, frescoes, and mosaics could only form the 
 monumental accessories of an edifice which would be 
 capable of sustaining and grouping them into a system 
 which would have a precise and extensive meaning, and 
 would afford them the means of truly instructing and 
 touching the hearts of men. This is hardly the place 
 in which to unfold the history of Christian architecture 
 from its rise in the Catacombs, or to trace out exhaus- 
 tively the first origin of the basilicas. We may shortly 
 state, however, that that origin seems to have been of 
 a double nature. On the one hand, the first churches 
 seem to have been nothing but a development, and, if 
 we may so express it, a germination of the sepulchral 
 chapels of the Catacombs. Those chapels were square, 
 or round, or polygonal, and nearly always terminated 
 by a vault surmounted by a dome. Gradually they 
 were divided into four compartments. When the per- 
 secuted Christians, those glorious members of the 
 Church, escaped from their obscurity, it seemed as if 
 their sepulchres burst through the earth, raised them- 
 selves over it, and formed its crown ; for the first 
 
 10 t 
 
226 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 chapels, the first Christian tombs, and the first bap- 
 tisteries which were constructed upon the face of the 
 earth, instead of being hidden within its depths, all 
 affected that form. The baptisteries were round, and 
 so were the first Christian burial-places, as, for in- 
 stance, the baptistery of St. John Lateran at Home, 
 the tomb of St. Constance, also at Eome, built by 
 Constantine for his sister and other illustrious members 
 of his family, and we may also cite the cathedral of 
 Brescia, which is a rotunda. In the East, that form 
 was destined to prevail and to form the cupola ; for 
 already the Church of the Holy Apostles, constructed 
 by Constantine, showed a cupola crowning the intersec- 
 tion of a Greek cross. In the case of St. Sophia, the 
 cupola was developed still more, until it extended on 
 every side, and, in some measure, absorbed the limbs 
 of the cross, thus forming the special Byzantine type 
 which was to remain peculiar to the East. 
 
 But another and not less incontestable origin was 
 that derived from the use made by the Christians of the 
 old Koman basilicas. Athens had possessed a portico, 
 named the Kingly Porch, which had served for the 
 audiences of the archon king, and Rome had imitated 
 this architecture. In the arcades wherein justice was 
 administered was comprised a building styled a basilica. 
 This was a vast palace, divided into three naves by 
 colonnades placed tier upon tier, and at the end was 
 the tribunal occupied by the judge and his assessors. 
 When Christianity had expanded and grown powerful, 
 it did not desire to borrow from antiquity its temples, 
 for they were too small ; but it borrowed its basilicas. 
 It is thus that the churches of Tyre and Jerusalem, of 
 which we have the description ; those of St. Peter and 
 
CHRISTIAN ART. 227 
 
 St. John Lateran, built by Constantine ; that of St. 
 Paul, founded by Theodosius ; and, lastly, the Basilica 
 of Nola, of which St. Paulinus has given us an account, 
 were all constructed. 
 
 But we do not exactly understand all that was sig- 
 nified by a church in these early Christian ages. It was 
 not simply a place to which a hasty visit of a half hour 
 was made once a week for the accomplishment of a 
 pious duty. The church was bound to embrace every 
 portion of the Christian society, and to be the image 
 and representation of the universal Church of the earth 
 in its whole hierarchy from the bishop to the humblest 
 penitent. Thus the bishop's throne was placed in the 
 apse ; around it were ranged the benches of his clergy, 
 to right and left ; separated in the two naves, lying 
 north and south, were the men and women, who were 
 admitted to participation in the mysteries ; at the 
 extreme end of the principal nave was the place for the 
 catechumens and some of the penitents ; and, lastly, in 
 the atrium, the vestibule, and the arcaded court which 
 separated the church from the street, were stationed the 
 penitents of lower degree, and another portion of the 
 catechumens. Thus all in their previously assigned 
 positions occupied a similar place in the sacred building 
 to that which they filled in the designs of Providence. 
 Moreover, the Church was bound to instruct men and 
 to attract them, that they might go forth informed 
 and touched, desirous too of returning as to a place in 
 which they had found truth, goodness, and beauty. 
 Accordingly the church was covered with symbolical 
 pictures, with lessons written beneath them in verse ; 
 every wall spoke, as in the case of the beautiful 
 frescoes which we have seen painted on those of St. 
 
228 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Germain des Pres, and there was no stone there which 
 had not something to teach to mankind. So with that 
 mingling of architecture, of painting, and of inscrip- 
 tions, multiplied occasionally to such an extent that in 
 St. Mark, at Venice, there is a whole poem of two 
 hundred and fifty verses on the walls. The church 
 contained a theology, a rule, and a sacred poem. It 
 was after this manner that the basilica of the first 
 Christian ages was conceived, and it was thus that 
 it was repeated and reproduced until it became the 
 dominant system of the West. 
 
 Nevertheless the East and the West were not without 
 connection, and during the whole period which sepa- 
 rated Charlemagne and Constantine, there was no 
 breach between these rival and often jealous sections 
 of the Church. Hence we find many mutual exchanges 
 and adaptations ; the Byzantine cupola invaded the 
 West and was annexed in Northern Italy to the ordi- 
 nary type of the Eoman basilicas. The style thus 
 formed, which has been named Romanesque, Lombard, 
 and inaccurately Byzantine, was continued on the 
 banks of the Rhine, and still shows excellent specimens 
 at Spires, Worms, Mayence, and Cologne. Those fine 
 churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries con- 
 found us by their grandeur and solemnity. Their 
 form was always that of the Roman basilica, with its 
 body divided into three naves, but with the cupola 
 crowning the centre of the cross, and sometimes the 
 apse itself. 
 
 Lastly came the Gothic period, having less to effect 
 than has been supposed, for the Romano-Byzantine 
 architecture had already pushed farther and raised 
 higher than had been dared by the contemporaries of 
 
ftnn siTTj 
 
 CHRISTIAN ART. tyt. TtfVS 29 
 
 Constantine and Theodosius, every portion of the 
 sacred building, especially in those great buildings of 
 the Rhineland, with their infinite wealth of detail, 
 their belfries which rose towards heaven on every side, 
 and their towers which seemed to defy all that anti- 
 quity had told of the giants. Gothic architecture was 
 destined to a last effort, like one rising from the dead 
 who would strive to raise the lid of his sepulchre and 
 end by breaking it. So the Gothic, in labouring to 
 raise the Byzantine arch, broke it in the midst, and 
 the pointed style was formed. With it broke forth 
 that architectural system whose marvels mayhap are 
 yet neither known nor admired enough ; for although 
 Kheims and Chartres are at our sides, we seem to ignore 
 them. We now go to the Parthenon and say that we 
 have never seen the like ; whereas marvels of a diffe- 
 rent grandeur and variety, and equally immortal, lie 
 around us. However,- this Gothic architecture was 
 still only the development of the Christian basilica as 
 it had been moulded in the fifth century ; and a near 
 inspection will show the same disposition and the re- 
 curring idea of the keel (navis) of the vessel ; and, in 
 fact, this nave and this vessel imitated the ark of Noah, 
 of which the Scripture spoke. But the arch of the 
 thirteenth century has so extended the cross that it was 
 necessary to support it by buttresses things unknown 
 to the ancients. Their weight was concealed by their 
 number; they were multiplied, lightened, and dimi- 
 nished, until they appeared as so many cables extended 
 to bind to the earth the heavenly bark, which other- 
 wise would escape, sail away, and disappear. 
 
 Such was the origin of the Gothic architecture, and 
 it points also to the origin of the Revival ; but we see 
 
230 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 that the Eevival preferred the rounder form and the 
 cupola which was so dear to the Byzantines. The 
 new St. Peter's, which was then reared upon the ruins 
 of the older church, was hut another mighty effort to 
 raise still higher into the air the dome which already 
 swelled over St. Sophia, St. Vitalis at Eavenna, and 
 St. Mark at Venice ; only the new shrine was to be 
 greater and vaster than had ever been seen. It was to 
 soar higher than had ever been reached ; for beneath 
 it was a generating tomb one of those burial-places 
 that are always full of life ; one of those germs that are 
 ever shooting forth and which, beneath the obscure 
 basilica which had veiled it, had laboured ceaselessly 
 to shape the walls which it found too strait. Above it 
 now* is suspended the loftiest dome that has ever been 
 built, nearly equalling the height of Egypt's greatest 
 pyramid, which is, after all, but a masterpiece of mate- 
 rialism, a mass of piled up masonry ; whereas great 
 waves of light and life ebb and flow beneath the 
 arches of St. Peter's. Its stones are instinct with 
 spirit, and, borne into the air by the hands of faith, 
 they command the neighbouring mountains. You start 
 from the lowest step of the basilica and your view is 
 cramped ; you mount the endless stairs, and, at last, 
 above the church and its cupola, you find the platform 
 and see from thence the hills sink down and disappear 
 on the plain ; and over them you may perceive the sea, 
 a sight never gazed upon by Komans in their triumphs 
 from the heights of the Capitol. 
 
231 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 We know how the ideas which formed the spirit of the 
 Roman civilization escaped the ruin of the Empire, 
 traversed the barbaric period, and descended to the 
 mediaeval epoch, of which they became at one time the 
 beacon light, at another the scandal. We have also 
 noticed the marvel of wisdom and accommodation by 
 which Christianity saved the feeble remnants of the 
 ancient worship, the greater part of literature, and the 
 whole legal system. Meanwhile, however, the baneful 
 influences of Paganism subsisted in the popular super- 
 stitions and occult sciences, in the policy of the princes 
 who busied themselves in reconstructing the absolutism 
 of the Caesars in their own interests, and those mytho- 
 logical fables which were ever relished, and which 
 tended to propagate the poison of the ancient licentious- 
 ness. Thus were perpetuated the two traditions of 
 good and evil ; thus a double bond linked the ages 
 which history has vainly separated ; and thus was 
 strengthened that wholesome but terrible law of rever- 
 sibility which causes us to reap the fruit of the merits 
 of our forefathers and to bear the burden of their 
 faults. 
 
 But beneath the current of ideas which dispute the 
 empire of the world lies that world itself such as labour 
 
232 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 has made it, with that treasure of wealth and visible 
 adornment which render it worthy of being the tran- 
 sient sojourn-place of immortal souls. Beneath the 
 true, the good, and the beautiful, lies the useful, which 
 is brightened by their reflection. No people has ever 
 more keenly appreciated the idea of utility than that 
 of Kome ; none has ever laid upon the earth a hand 
 more full of power, or more capable of transforming it, 
 nor more profusely flung the treasures of earth at the 
 feet of humanity. So we must also closely examine 
 what may be styled the material civilization of the 
 Empire, that we may know whether it also perished 
 entirely at the time of the invasions, or, if not, how 
 much of it was stored up for the ages to come. 
 
 At the close of the second century, before the bar- 
 barians had carried fire and sword across the frontiers, 
 the rhetorician Aristides celebrated, in the following 
 terms, the greatness of the Roman Empire : 
 " Romans, the whole world beneath your dominion 
 seems to be keeping a day of festival. From time 
 to time a sound of battle comes to you from the ends 
 of the earth, where you are repelling the Goth, the 
 Moor, or the Arab. But soon that sound is dispersed 
 like a dream. Other are the rivalries and different the 
 conflicts which you excite throughout the universe. 
 They are combats of glory, rivalries in magnificence 
 between provinces and cities. Through you gymnasia, 
 aqueducts, porticoes, temples, and schools are multi- 
 plied ; the very soil revives, and earth is but one vast 
 garden."* Similar also was the language of the stern 
 Tertullian : " In truth, the world becomes day by da 
 
 * Aristides, Eomse Encomium, oratio xiv. 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 233 
 
 richer and more cultivated ; even the islands are no 
 longer solitudes, the rocks have no more terrors for 
 the navigator ; everywhere there are habitations, popu- 
 lation, law, and life." In fact, we are at once struck 
 by the life which animated every quarter of the Empire, 
 and, therefore, every corner of the world; life which 
 was sustained by commerce, the greatness of which 
 lies in its faculty of thus carrying the sovereignty of 
 man over every sea and every land. The trade of 
 Rome flowed necessarily towards the East and the 
 North, and in the East she had inherited the ideas as 
 well as the conquests of Alexander. The Greeks had 
 penetrated Asia by two great routes one by land, the 
 other by sea ; the first led by the colonies on the 
 Euxine, the Tauric Chersonese, Olbia, and Theodosia. 
 From these places, and from Armenia, they reached 
 Media, Hyrcania, and Bactriana, in which last a 
 Grecian dynasty had sustained itself for a thousand 
 years ; and then, traversing the passes of the Imaus, 
 gained Little Bokhara, about the ninety-sixth degree 
 of longitude. Here there was a caravanserai of stone, 
 and to it the Seri brought their silks, furs, and steel 
 in bales, on which the price was marked, deposited 
 them, and departed. The buyers then came, examined 
 the merchandise, and, if it suited them, left the value 
 which the Seri had put upon it. The latter then 
 returned, and, if satisfied with the bargain, they left 
 their goods, and carried off the price. It took the 
 Seri seven months' march, according to Pomponius 
 Mela, * to reach their native country of Eastern Thibet, 
 and those dearly-purchased stuffs were handed over to 
 
 * Hullmann Handelsgeschichte der Griechen. 
 
234 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 workwomen, who unwove them in order to give them 
 a finer texture : ut matronce publice transluceant.* 
 
 The principal sea route open to ancient commerce 
 was that by Alexandria. Ptolemy Philadelphus had 
 formed ports upon the Eed Sea, and under the Bomans 
 120 ships sailed yearly from Myos Amos, weighing 
 anchor generally at the island of Pattala, at the mouth 
 of the Indus, though a small number pushed their 
 enterprise to the port of Palibothra, at the mouth of 
 the Ganges. They kept close to the shore of the 
 mainland and of the island of Ceylon. The vessels 
 employed in the commerce of the Indus carried there 
 fifty million sesterces every year, but the merchandise 
 they brought back sold for a hundred times as much. 
 It comprised silk, cotton, colouring materials, pearls 
 and jewels, ivory, steel of superior quality, lions, 
 leopards, panthers, and slaves, all 'this mass of wealth 
 being disembarked at Puteoli. 
 
 To the North, however, every facility for trade was 
 the creation of Eome herself. Her legions had con- 
 structed the roads which furrowed mountains, leaped 
 over marshes, and crossed so many different provinces 
 with a like solidity, regularity, and uniformity, and the 
 various races were lost in admiration at the mighty 
 works which were attributed in after times to Caesar, 
 to Brunehaut, or to Abelard. There were two routes 
 from Eome to the Danube, one by Aquileium and Lau- 
 riacum, another by Verona and Augsburg. Another 
 way ran from the Black Sea along the course of that 
 river and joined Vienna, Passau, Eatisbon, Augsburg, 
 Winterthur, Basle, Strasburg, Bonn, Cologne, Leyden, 
 
 * A native of Cos, named Pamphila, had first conceived the 
 idea of unravelling silk stuffs in order to re weave them. 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 235 
 
 and Utrecht. The Rhine and the Meuse were linked 
 by a canal ; another was destined to reach the Saone, 
 and thus the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the 
 Baltic were brought into communication. Beyond, 
 again, lay conquered Britain, divided into five provinces 
 and covered with a network of roads, which ended at 
 the wall of Hadrian. From these northern regions 
 the Koman merchants gained tin, amber, rich furs, and 
 the fair tresses which adorned the heads of patrician 
 matrons. But at length the barbarians came down 
 over all this, and it seemed as if the links which 
 bound the world were snapping. However, a connection 
 was maintained between Italy and Constantinople. 
 The capital of the Eastern Empire formed a place of 
 refuge for the Frankish kings whom their subjects had 
 rejected, or for the chiefs who were persecuted by 
 the kings. Childeric, Gondowald, Gontran Duke of 
 Auvergne found a retreat there ;* and on the other hand 
 Syrians were found at Orleans,! and a Syrian named 
 Eusebius even purchased the episcopal see of Paris.! 
 Moreover, the luxury which Koman commerce had 
 produced was not unknown to the West in the Carlo- 
 vingian period. The Franks found at Pavia silk 
 clothes of every colour, and foreign furs of all sorts, 
 brought thither by the merchants of Venice from the 
 treasures of the East, and the following anecdote, 
 
 * Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale (Fauriel) ; Recits Mero- 
 vingiens (Augustine Thierry). 
 
 f Gregory of Tours, in describing the solemn entry of King 
 Gontran into Orleans, says, " Et hinc lingua Syrorum, hinc 
 Latinorum, hinc etiara ipsorum Judaeorum in diversis laudibus 
 varie concrepabunt," lib. viii. 1. 
 
 I Raguemodus quoque Parissecse urbis episcopus obiit, Euse- 
 bius quidani negotiator genere Syrus, datis multis muneribus in 
 locum ejus subrogatus est. Oreg. Turon. x. 26. 
 
236 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 related by the monk of St. Gall, shows that Oriental 
 garments were in fashion even at the court of Charle- 
 magne. "On a certain feast day after mass, Charles 
 took his chief courtiers out hunting. The day was 
 cold and rainy, and the emperor wore a sheepskin coat ; 
 but the courtiers who had just come from Pavia, 
 whither the Venetians had recently brought all the 
 riches of the Orient from countries beyond the sea, 
 were clad, after their fashion on holy days, in robes 
 covered with the feathers of Phoenician birds, trimmed 
 with silk and the downy feathers of the neck and tail 
 of the peacock, and adorned with Tyrian purple and 
 fringes of cedar bark; upon some shone embroidered 
 stuffs, upon others the fur of dormice. In this array 
 they rode through the woods, and so they returned torn 
 by the branches of trees, thorns, and brambles, drenched 
 with rain, and stained with the blood of wild beasts and 
 the exhalations from their hides. ' Let none of us,' said 
 the mischievous Charles, ' change our clothes until the 
 time of going to rest, for they will dry quicker upon us.' 
 Immediately every one became more occupied with the 
 body than its covering, and looked about for a fire at 
 which to get warm. But in the evening, when they 
 began to doff the fine furs and delicate stuffs which had 
 shrivelled and shrunk at the fire, these fell to pieces 
 with a sound like the breaking of dry sticks. The poor 
 wretches groaned and lamented at having lost so much 
 money in a single day. But they had been ordered by 
 the emperor to present themselves before him on the 
 following day in the same apparel. They did so ; but 
 all, instead of making a brilliant show in their fine new 
 clothes, caused disgust at their dirty and colourless 
 rags. Thereupon Charles said to his groom of the 
 
THE MATEKIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 237 
 
 chamber with some irony, ' Just rub my coat a little 
 with your hands, and bring it back to me.' Then 
 taking in his hands the garment which had been 
 brought back to him clean and whole, and showing it to 
 the bystanders, he exclaimed, ' most foolish of men, 
 which of us now has the most precious and useful 
 attire ? Is it mine, which I bought for a single penny, 
 or yours, which has cost you not only pounds, but even 
 talents of silver?' "* 
 
 Thus was the tradition of commerce handed down to 
 the Middle Age, when the Church, far from declaring 
 herself hostile, became eminently its protectress. Her 
 councils condemned piracy, and by the mouths of her 
 pontiffs, Gregory VII., Pascal II., Honorius II., and 
 Alexander III., she pronounced against the right of 
 shipwreck. Innocent III., again, obliged a Seigneur de 
 Montfort, who had pillaged some Italian merchantmen, 
 to make restitution. But she more especially infused 
 fresh energy into commerce by her pilgrimages and cru- 
 sades. The former were frequent in the barbaric times, 
 and the inhabitants of the commercial town of Amalfi 
 possessed a benefice at Jerusalem. The Crusades had 
 the double effect of drawing the population of France 
 and Germany along the route of the Danube, and of 
 launching on the sea the vessels of Pisa, Genoa, and 
 Venice. Genoa and Venice succeeded to the Oriental 
 commerce of Greece and Eome,t and conducted it along 
 the same channels. Their route to the North was by 
 way of Caffa and Tana, upon the Black Sea, from 
 whence the caravans reached Ispahan, Balk, and 
 
 * Mon. St. Gall. lib. ii. xxvii. 
 
 f Bettinelli, Risorgimento d'ltalia, t. iv. ; Heeren, Essai sur 
 l'lnfluence des Croisades. 
 
238 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Bokhara ; whilst the way to the South lay by Alexan- 
 dria, where were stored the cargoes from India. But 
 Christian proselytism was destined to surmount the 
 barriers at which the cupidity of Borne had paused. 
 The mission of Carpinus was to pave the way for the 
 researches of Marco Polo, and Christopher Columbus 
 was to discover America, whilst striving to place the 
 wealth of Asia at the service of a new crusade. 
 
 Borne owed the methods by which she gathered in 
 the fruits of the earth to herself alone. Agriculture 
 was indeed the glory of a people which took its dic- 
 tators from the plough, and whose greatest poem, the 
 " Georgics," was the epopee of the fields. We must not 
 confound that admirable work with the didactic poetry 
 of the literature of the Decline, for it was due to an 
 entirely new inspiration, and Yirgil, in the place of a 
 golden era, sang of an age of iron : 
 
 Labor omnia vincit 
 Improbus, et duris urgens in rebus egestas ; 
 
 And caused the genius of his country to pass into his 
 verses 
 
 Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, 
 Hanc Remus et frater ; sic fortis Etruria crevit, 
 Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Boma. 
 
 Moreover, the agricultural system, which was their 
 boast at home, was carried by the Bomans to the end 
 of that world which the issue of their conflicts had 
 given them : Romanus sedendo vincit. In their eyes 
 the frontiers of the Empire were deemed more efficiently 
 protected by a line of harvests than by a wall of stone. 
 Accordingly, military colonies were established by 
 Trajan among the Dacians ; by Alexander Severus, 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 239 
 
 Probus, and Yalentinian on the German frontier; all 
 of which were provided with cattle and slaves, and 
 exempted from the tribute. Thus the crops which 
 seemed destined to tempt the barbarians really served 
 to ward them off. Koman establishments were placed 
 on the northern coasts of Gaul and on the remotest 
 promontories of Finisterre, and Germany bears witness 
 still to the agriculture of the Empire in the form of the 
 plough now used by the peasantry of Baden, and in 
 the vineyards first planted by Probus on the hills that 
 overhang the Ehine. 
 
 Yet it was Eome herself, through the detestable fiscal 
 system of the emperors and the opulence of the aristo- 
 cracy, that first sapped the foundations of this mag- 
 nificent system. The immense domains (latifundia 
 perdidere Italiam), entirely abandoned to slaves on the 
 one hand and the exactions of the tribute on the other, 
 were alike fatal to it. The peasant properly so called 
 passed over to the Bagaudes and the barbarians. At 
 length the Northern hordes swept down upon the 
 Empire ; half or two-thirds of the land was demanded 
 by the invaders ; but they still retained the Boman 
 coloni. 
 
 Legions of volunteers, however, were formed as time 
 went on, to assist these cultivators in their forced 
 labour. A young man of Latium, named Benedictus, 
 had rallied a certain number of Christians round him, 
 and imposed upon them a rule comprising poverty, 
 chastity, and obedience. These three virtues were 
 placed under the protection of labour, and six hours of 
 manual toil were exacted day by day. One day he 
 embraced his disciple Maurus, and, giving him a certain 
 measure of bread and wine, sent him forth to extend 
 
240 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the system to Gaul. Such was the origin of those 
 monastic colonies whose mission was to push the work 
 of clearing and civilizing into the marshes of Flanders 
 and the depths of the Black Forest, and enlarge the 
 limit of cultivation to the Baltic Sea. Thus the tradi- 
 tions of Rome did not perish, and agriculture, like 
 civilization, generally flourished again under Charle- 
 magne. The following extract, from the "Capitularies," 
 shows the care of that great monarch for husbandry, 
 and its satisfactory condition during his reign : " We 
 desire that our serfs should be kept in good estate, and 
 that no one should reduce them to poverty ; that none 
 of our officers should presume to attach them to their 
 service, to impose forced labour upon them, nor receive 
 from them any gift neither a horse, an ox, a sheep, a 
 lamb, nor anything but fruits, fowls, and eggs. When 
 the duty of carrying out any work upon our lands falls 
 upon any of our officers, either the ploughing, sowing, 
 reaping, or gathering the vintage, let each of them 
 provide for everything in its proper season, that it all 
 may be done in order. Let them carefully train the 
 vines committed to their charge ; let the wine be put 
 into well-seasoned vessels, and let them be careful that 
 nothing be lost. In proportion to the number of farms 
 under the supervision of an intendant shall be the 
 number of men allotted to him to tend the bees. The 
 yards of our chief farms must never produce less than 
 a hundred fowls and thirty geese; and the smaller ones 
 shall nourish, at least, twelve geese and fifty chickens. 
 Let the utmost care be taken that all the produce of 
 our farms lard, dried meats, wine, beer, butter, cheese, 
 honey, wax, and flour, are prepared with the greatest 
 cleanliness. We also desire that every kind of plant 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 241 
 
 should be cultivated in our gardens, namely, lilies, 
 roses, sage, cucumber, melon, pumpkin, pea, bean, 
 fennel, lettuce, rosemary, mint, poppy, and mallow." * 
 We do not smile at the sight of a great mind thus 
 stooping to details ; for it is a true mark of genius to 
 embrace the small things which mediocrity despises, as 
 the Almighty Himself gives laws to the stars without 
 forgetting the grain of dust, or the hyssop, smallest 
 of plants. Charlemagne counted his chickens as he 
 scolded the choristers of his chapel or the children in 
 his palace school, and it was thus that he was instru- 
 mental in re-establishing both the culture of the fields 
 and the culture of letters. 
 
 The face of the earth was transformed by the founda- 
 tion of cities, which shelter and develop social life. 
 Rome, as a city which had conquered the world, thought 
 that her surest method of preserving her dominion was 
 by covering it with towns like herself. Wherever her 
 legions travelled, they bore with them an emblem of the 
 mother city, quasi muratam civitatem. The camp was 
 in fact a military city, and the Roman idea of a town 
 was but an expansion of the permanent camp with its 
 square area, four gates, two intersecting streets, and the 
 praetorium or palace in the midst. There was, more- 
 over, no method by which the soil could be more 
 thoroughly taken in possession than by thus inclosing 
 its space, in forcing its .waters to flow through 
 aqueducts, and its stones to rise in porticoes and form 
 temples, thermae, and amphitheatres. The Empire 
 became, therefore, a network of towns, and the 
 itineraries mention one hundred and sixteen in 
 Germany alone. Britain numbered thirty-eight, and 
 
 * Capit. de Villis. v. 812. 
 vol. n. 11 
 
242 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Bath and Caerleon amongst them contained theatres, 
 palaces, and magnificent baths. Dorchester possessed 
 an amphitheatre, and St. Paul's and Westminster 
 Abbey, in London, occupy respectively the sites of 
 temples of Apollo and Diana. To these multitudinous 
 and magnificent centres of civilization the invasion of 
 the barbarians was at first most fatal. It was at the 
 outset furious and implacable in character, and Gildas 
 describes how the whole island of Britain was ravaged 
 by fire and sword, and how solid buildings fell on 
 every side beneath the blows of^ battering rams. The 
 Gothic provinces were invaded by the Suevi, the Alans, 
 and the Vandals ; and Spires, Strasburg, Reims, and 
 Mayence fell into heaps of ruins under their hands. 
 The imperial city of Treves, so long the abode of the 
 Court, where the splendours of the banks of the Tiber 
 had been in some measure reproduced on those of the 
 Moselle, became a mere sepulchre. Still greater was 
 the ruin in Italy, and the queen- city of the world was 
 made over to the soldiers of Alaric, who devoted two 
 long days to its pillage. The gardens of Sallust were 
 devoured by flames, and the golden tiles of the Capitol 
 and the bronze plates of the Pantheon were torn off 
 by the invaders. 
 
 But when their first fury had passed, the barbarians 
 were touched by the majesty of Borne, and laboured to 
 preserve their edifices. They desired to restore what 
 they had injured, to study the models which they had 
 never surpassed ; and the following letter from Cassi- 
 dorus to the Prefect of Borne on the subject of an 
 architect for the public buildings shows the sincerity of 
 this conservative feeling : " It is fit," he says, " that 
 the beauty of the Boman monuments should be skil- 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 243 
 
 fully guarded, that the admirable thickness of our 
 walls should be preserved by strict diligence. Let 
 your greatness know, therefore, that we have appointed 
 an architect for the buildings of Rome. He will 
 behold works more beautiful than any he has found in 
 books or conceived in thought, statues which still bear 
 the living features of famous men. He will see veins 
 running, muscles strained, and nerves stretched in 
 bronze. He will admire the horses of iron foaming 
 impetuously beneath the motionless metal. What 
 shall be said of columns which shoot forth like reeds ; 
 of the lofty constructions which are borne up by light 
 supports ; or of those marbles which are so skilfully 
 joined that nature seemed to have cast them in a single 
 piece ? The historian of the ages that are passed did 
 but number seven wonders of the world, but who that 
 has seen so many surprising things in a single city can 
 henceforth hold them as marvellous ? It will be merely 
 true if it is said that Rome is one great miracle."* The 
 Frankish kings adopted the same policy of reparation, 
 and we find them inhabiting the palace of Julian, 
 whilst Chilperic rebuilt the ruins of Soissons. 
 
 But there were other forces at work which prevented 
 the decay of the cities. In the first place their 
 interests were defended by their bishops, who became 
 of great importance in the barbaric period, both from 
 their generally superior culture, and from their using 
 their substantial but ill-defined temporal authority to 
 improve the condition of their episcopal towns. In 
 many cases also respect for the saint who reposed in 
 the cathedral procured immunities. St. Martin became 
 
 * Cassiod. Variorum, vii. 15 ; Formula ad prsefectum urbis de 
 architecto publicorum. 
 
 11 * 
 
244 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the protector of Tours, St. Aignan of Orleans, and 
 St. Hilary of Poitiers. The Church, in her capacity of 
 a civilizing agency, not only preserved hut constructed 
 cities; and her abbeys, as in the case of St. Gall, 
 became germs of new towns to which they gave a 
 name. These cities remained also the cradles of indus- 
 try. Kome had possessed the nine corporations of 
 Numa and colleges of workmen under the emperors, 
 and there were traces of the system during the bar- 
 baric period. The history of St. Eloi, his apprentice- 
 ship to Abbon, the overseer of the royal mint at 
 Limoges, and his subsequent career at Paris, shows us 
 the Christian workman with his labour transformed 
 and sanctified by religion. We find the workmen 
 among the Franks and Saxons beguiling their toil by 
 singing psalms, and the spirit of piety and brotherhood 
 at last issued in the labour confraternities of the 
 Middle Age. These organizations became a consider- 
 able power ; throughout France they effected the 
 emancipation of the commons, and in Italy they 
 formed the sinews of the sturdy republics of Lombardy. 
 Labour again was of the essence of the Florentine 
 constitution, and no one could be counted among the 
 citizens until he had been enrolled in one of the twelve 
 arts. Nor did this empire of industry crush the 
 aesthetic sentiment. Far from it; for companies of 
 workmen raised the Duomo of Florence and the church 
 of Or San Michele, and it was for them that the arcades 
 of the old palace were covered by Giotto with his 
 frescoes. 
 
 It only remains to us to notice briefly the difference 
 between the cities of Paganism and of Christendom. 
 Christianity had so to speak recovered the true life and 
 
THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE. 245 
 
 iffections of humanity. Every man had before been 
 burned as it were to the outer world, had passed his life 
 m the public square, or received his friends and clients 
 in his richly adorned atrium, whilst the narrow cham- 
 bers which opened upon the portico had been thought 
 *ood enough for the women, children, and slaves. But 
 Christianity had turned the heart of man inwards, had 
 *iven him the family life, and caused him to find his 
 lappiness within his house ; so he left it as little as 
 possible, and loved to embellish the spot in which his 
 lays were passed in the company of his wife and 
 mildren with woodwork, tapestry, rich furniture, and 
 jkilfully graven plate. Yet the Church preserved the 
 )ld type of house, but only in her monasteries, where 
 ;he time was passed in prayer or labour, and it was not 
 leeded that the cell should be home-like. Modern 
 .owns indeed seem at first sight far inferior to the 
 :ities of antiquity. Look for instance at Pompeii, a city 
 )f the third order, with its colonnades, porticoes, 
 .hermae, theatres, and circus. The pagan city had 
 small temples and gigantic amphitheatres, whilst the 
 Christian town was grouped around its cathedral, and 
 lad its hospital and school. The ancients, without 
 [uestion, understood the art of enjoyment far better 
 han ourselves, and we must despair of ever rivalling 
 heir pleasure-adapted cities, for our own are built for 
 abour, for suffering, and for prayer, and in this fact 
 loes their greatness consist. 
 
 [The preceding chapter, which was never completed, is pub- 
 ished merely in the shape of rough notes in the French edition, 
 t has been thought better to work it up here into a connected 
 orm. Tr.] 
 
246 
 
 CHAPTEK X. 
 
 THE EISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 
 
 We have hitherto studied only that uniform civiliza- 
 tion which in the fifth century extended from one 
 end of the Western Empire to the other. Two prin- 
 ciples were at issue within it, Paganism and Chris- 
 tianity, but without any distinction of place, under the 
 empire of a common legislation and a common lan- 
 guage. Whilst Virgil was solemnly read in the Forum 
 of Trajan at Eome, the grammarians were discussing 
 his works with the utmost zeal in the schools of York, 
 Toulouse, and Cordova. If St. Augustine \ from his 
 retreat at Hippo, dictated a new treatise against the 
 heresies of his time, all the Churches of Italy, of the 
 Gauls, and of Spain listened with attention. Thus at 
 first sight we can only discover one sole Latin litera- 
 ture, which, so to speak, began the education of all the 
 races of the West; a teaching which was to be con- 
 tinued through the barbarous epoch far forward into 
 the Middle Age, until the unity of the Christian society 
 was formed. Yet gradually we perceive differences of 
 genius piercing through the apparent community of the 
 literary tradition. Amongst the crowd of nations sub- 
 ject to the domination of Home, was there not one 
 which had preserved some remnant of its original 
 character ? Could one not discover in their laws, their 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 247 
 
 manners, their dialects, and even in the works of their 
 writers, some distinctive features, some inveterate in- 
 stincts, some irresistible vocation towards the part 
 which Providence intends them to perform in later 
 times, and which was to constitute their nationality ? 
 This is the question which remains for our discussion. 
 
 It has been customary to date the modern nation- 
 alities from the invasion of the barbarians and the 
 establishment of the German chiefs in the different 
 provinces of the West. Thus the history of the 
 Franks is made to commence with Clovis, the history 
 of Spain with Wamba, and that of Italy with Odoacer. 
 The history of language has been treated in a similar 
 way to that of nations ; and it is to the confusion of 
 the Germanic idioms with the Latin tongue idioms 
 which, it is said, presented analytical forms, possessed 
 articles, and employed prepositions that the origin of 
 the languages which were destined to become those of 
 modern Europe has been attributed. We shall sepa- 
 rate, in the first place, those countries in which the 
 Germanic wave submerged everything ; as, for instance, 
 England, where the British population was driven back 
 to make place for the new Anglo-Saxon race which 
 mastered the soil and imprinted on it the indelible and 
 characteristic mark of language ; and, again, Southern 
 Germany, as Khaetia and Noricum, formerly subject to 
 the Roman civilization, which almost entirely disap- 
 peared before the invasion of the Herulan, Lombard, 
 and Vandal races which filled those countries, and 
 handed them down to their descendants. But it was 
 far different in the case of those three great countries, 
 Italy, France, and Spain, over which the barbarians 
 only passed, like the waves of the Nile, to fertilize the 
 
248 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 land ; and it is in them that we may seek to trace out 
 the first features of the national genius, before even the 
 barbaric invasion, and before that mingling of idioms 
 to the intervention of which the birth of the modern 
 languages has for long, but erroneously, been exclu- 
 sively attributed. 
 
 "We must here consider those general causes which 
 could preserve a national spirit in each of the great 
 Roman provinces. They are three in number, namely, 
 a political cause ; another, which may be called a lite- 
 rary cause ; and, lastly, a cause arising from religion. 
 Rome never professed any great respect for her con- 
 quered nationalities. She often outraged them; but, 
 in the wisdom of her policy, never more than was 
 necessary for the interests of her domination. She left 
 a shadow of autonomy to the cities of Italy and the 
 great towns of the East and of Greece, and permitted 
 a kind of bond to subsist between the populations of 
 Gaul and Spain. In that organization of the Empire 
 of the West which resulted from the decrees of Diocle- 
 tian and Maximian, each of the three great dioceses, 
 Italy, Gaul, and Spain, was presided over by a vicar 
 charged to govern and to administer it. This vicar was 
 generally surrounded by a council composed of the 
 notable inhabitants of the province, and thence it fol- 
 lowed that each province had, as it were, its representa- 
 tion to defend its own interests and make known its 
 wants ; and from that diversity of interests, wants, and 
 resources, resulted the very wealth of the Empire ; for 
 every province supplied what was wanting to the others, 
 and thus became an ornament of that mighty Roman 
 society of the time of the Caesars. So true was it that 
 the Roman world derived a certain beauty and grandeur 
 
THE EISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 249 
 
 from the very variety which was produced in the midst 
 of its uniformity, that Claudian, the poet of the 
 Decline, in a composition in praise of Stilicho, repre- 
 sented the different provinces of the Empire gathering 
 round the goddess Eome and demanding her aid. They 
 were all personified with their attributes, the expres- 
 sions of the respective genius of each. Thus Spain, 
 then so peaceful, appeared crowned with branches of 
 olive, and bearing upon her garment the gold of the 
 Tagus ; Africa, burnt brown by the sun, had her brow 
 bound with the wheat-ears which she poured into the 
 lap of Home, as being the feeder of the Roman Empire, 
 and was crowned with a diadem of ivory ; Gaul, always 
 warlike, proudly tossed her hair and balanced two darts 
 in her hand ; whilst Britain came last, having her 
 cheeks tatooed, her head covered with the hide of a 
 sea-monster, and her shoulders with a long mantle of 
 azure, which imitated, by its flowing folds, the waves of 
 the ocean, as if the poet foresaw that this Britain, then 
 so barbarous, was destined one day to the empire of 
 the seas. 
 
 Thus diversity prevailed even in the order which 
 Rome had established in the government of her pro- 
 vinces. And this feature was far more strongly pro- 
 nounced in the obstinate resistance opposed by these 
 provinces to the Roman administration. In fact, the 
 power of Rome was not established and maintained 
 without much resistance, much passion, and much 
 rebellion. To the horrors of conquest succeeded all 
 the injustice of exaction and all the persecutions of the 
 tribute. In every province, side by side with the pre- 
 fect, who was at the head of the civil government, stood 
 the proctor of Caesar, charged with the financial admi- 
 
 11 t 
 
250 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 nistration. At the mere sight of the lictors of the 
 latter, the inhabitants of the country took to flight and 
 the houses of the city were closed ; for the Eoman fisc 
 was insatiable in its demands. It claimed, firstly, the 
 capitation, which was a personal impost, and the indic- 
 tion, a tax upon property ; and then, in extraordinary 
 cases, the superindiction, or extraordinary impost ; then 
 the chrysargyrum, or charge upon industry ; lastly, upon 
 the succession of the emperor, the crown tax ; which 
 was a gratuitous gift which no one could withhold with 
 impunity. Moreover, these repeated taxes were levied 
 with a cruelty and severity to which contemporary his- 
 torians bear witness. The tax-gatherers, or comptrollers 
 of the fisc, were spread throughout the rural districts, 
 and in order to evince their zeal and increase their 
 profits, entered the house and made children older and 
 old men younger, that they might bring them upon 
 their lists in the category of those between fifteen and 
 sixty, on whom the payment of the impost was obli- 
 gatory. When the value of any fortune was hard to 
 discover, they put slaves, wives, and children to the 
 torture, in order to extract the real extent of wealth 
 owned by the father of the family. It could hardly be 
 expected that the provinces should submit with good 
 grace to such unheard-of persecutions ; but it was in 
 vain that Constantine issued edicts to stop the cruelties 
 of the fiscal agents, which were pushed to such an 
 extent that after his time, the inhabitants of certain 
 provinces emigrated into the territory of the barbarians, 
 that they might find under the shelter of the German 
 tents a life less miserable than that which Borne meted 
 out to them under the roofs of their fathers. 
 
 At length this profound and bitter hatred broke forth 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 251 
 
 in the words and writings of the eminent men of 
 each province. We have already remarked the exist- 
 ence of an African party in Africa, and perceived 
 the reawakening there of the old spirit of Carthage. 
 This faction had raised a marble tomb to Hannibal, 
 and from his ashes were the avengers to arise who, in 
 their turn, were to go forth and punish Kome, when 
 Genseric weighed anchor in the harbour of Carthage 
 and proceeded to hold to ransom the once proud but 
 now fallen capital. In the meanwhile the African 
 spirit loved to dwell upon its grievances, and it had 
 found in St. Augustine an eloquent interpreter. In 
 spite of the deep charity of that great man, and the 
 love which he extended to Eome, in common with the 
 rest of the universe, the ancient African patriotism 
 showed itself in him frequently ; as, for instance, when 
 he reproached Maximus of Medaura for having made 
 a laughing-stock of those African names which were 
 after all those of his maternal language. "You can- 
 not," said he, "be so forgetful of your origin that, 
 though born in Africa and writing for Africans, yet, in 
 contempt of the natal land in which we both were 
 raised, you should proscribe the use of Punic- 
 names. " 
 
 We have seen the same spirit throughout that bold 
 chapter of the U. City of God," in which St. Augustine 
 dared to reproach Kome with the glory which was 
 stained with blood and crime, and dashed by weakness 
 and disgrace, and have heard the murmurs which arose 
 around his pulpit when he ascended it to tell of the fall 
 of Rome and her capture by Alaric. "Above all," said 
 many of his audience, " let him not speak of Rome, 
 nor say anything on the subject." And he was obliged 
 
252 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 to enter upon the easy task of defending and justifying 
 himself. So true was it that Africa then contained two 
 parties, one in favour of Rome, and another to which 
 St. Augustine was impelled by his patriotic zeal, and 
 this point, which we seem to have been the first to 
 insist upon, has never at least been gainsaid. 
 
 In Spain, a similar spirit was manifested in the 
 works of the priest Paulus Orosius. After pointing to 
 the conquests and the grandeur of Eome, he demanded 
 an account of the tears and blood which they had cost. 
 And in those days of supreme felicity for the Roman 
 people, when their triumphant leaders mounted the 
 Capitol, followed by many captives from many nations 
 chained one to another, "how many provinces," said he, 
 "were then lamenting their defeat, their humiliation, and 
 their servitude ! Let Spain say what she thinks of it. 
 Spain, who for two ages watered her fields with her own 
 blood, being at once incapable of repulsing or of bear- 
 ing with that inveterate foe. Then when hunted from 
 city to city, worn out by hunger and decimated by the 
 sword, the last and miserable effort of her warriors was 
 spent, firstly in massacring their wives and children, 
 and then in mutual slaughter."* 
 
 The resentment of Saguntum when abandoned by 
 the Romans and obliged to bury itself beneath its ruins, 
 lived again in the bitter words and implacable re- 
 proaches of this priestly writer. And if the bands of 
 the Empire were nearly breaking from the very violence 
 with which they had been strained, if political causes 
 were also at work in producing and nourishing a spirit 
 of opposition and isolation in each of the different pro- 
 vinces, we must also recognize the fact that the diversity 
 * Paul. Oros. lib. v. c. 1. 
 
THE KISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 253 
 
 of their languages also contributed to the same end. 
 Nothing seems more feeble than a language, nothing 
 less formidable to a conqueror than a certain number of 
 obscure words, an unintelligible dialect preserved by a 
 vanquished race. Yet a force lies within those words 
 which skilful conquerors and intelligent despots well 
 understand, and in which they will never let themselves 
 be deceived. We need only point in proof to those who 
 in our own days are suppressing a national idiom and 
 imposing Kuss as an obligatory language in the very 
 place in which it has met with, an invincible resistance. 
 The Romans likewise had encountered dialects which 
 resisted the sword, and over which the prefect of the 
 province or the proctor of the fisc could exercise no 
 coercion. The Latin tongue was, doubtless, propagated 
 early in many of the countries which the Koman con- 
 quest had invaded, as for instance in Narbonensis, in 
 Southern Spain. But the Latin which was established 
 there was the popular idiom spoken by the veteran 
 soldiers who were despatched to the colonies. It soon 
 became corrupted through the fusion of races by min- 
 gling with local dialects, and was formed into so many 
 particular idioms, the popular Latin of Gaul being diffe- 
 rent from that which prevailed beyond the Pyrenees. 
 Moreover, the older languages did not give way, and the 
 Greek survived in the southern provinces of Italy into 
 the heart of the Middle Age. Many districts, entirely 
 Greek in their character, existed in the kingdom of 
 Naples as late as the fifteenth century. In Northern 
 Italy, again, the language of the Ligurians, the inhabi- 
 tants of the mountains of Genoa, was preserved until 
 the fall of the Empire ; whilst the Etruscan still 
 lingered in the times of Aulus Gellius, and was not 
 
254 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 without effect upon the Latin which was spoken in the 
 neighbouring towns. Moreover, the ancient inscriptions 
 found in the Italic towns are often tainted with that 
 corruption from which the Italian language was one 
 day to proceed. In them were already to be found 
 such entirely modern forms as cinque, nove, sedice 
 mese, or such new words as bramosus for cupidus; testa 
 for caput ; brodium for jus. The declension of words 
 also had completely disappeared, and it was only 
 by the aid of particles that their functions could be 
 determined. 
 
 In Gaul, the Celtic language lasted into the fifth 
 century, and St. Jerome heard it still spoken at 
 Treves. In Spain, the old Iberian tongue disputed the 
 ground as it were foot by foot, fell back towards the 
 mountains, within the limits of which it was at last 
 confined, and became the Basque language still spoken 
 there in our own days, and which has left no less than 
 one thousand nine hundred words in modern Spanish. 
 Such then is the resistance which a language is 
 capable of offering. But what influence is that which 
 bestows so much power upon those syllables, which 
 in themselves might seem so ill adapted to neutralize 
 the effects of a conquest ? It is derived from the 
 thoughts, feelings, and recollections which they arouse 
 in man; it is from their containing the sentiments 
 which are most deeply rooted in his heart, from their 
 power of recalling the usages amidst which he was 
 born, the affections in which he has grown and lived. 
 A well-made language and all languages are well 
 formed when they are developed by themselves and 
 without foreign influences is but the natural product 
 of that soil which has seen its rise, and of the heaven 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 255 
 
 which has shone upon its birth ; it is in some measure 
 the very type of fatherland, and therefore as long as 
 its language subsists, the time has not come to despair 
 of a nation. 
 
 In the third place, religion itself, that power which 
 seemed destined to bring about unity everywhere, con- 
 tributed nevertheless to the preservation of the variety 
 and diversity of the provincial spirit. In fact, when the 
 Eoman Church was founded, it seemed as if a new 
 power had been granted to Eome, which would thence- 
 forth link to her destinies all the provinces of the 
 West. But it was no less true that that unity and 
 the power of the Eoman authority could only be main- 
 tained by respecting in some measure the individuality 
 and originality of national Churches. The wisdom and 
 good sense of the Eoman Church was greater in this 
 respect than that of the Eoman government, for she 
 knew how to respect the rights, privileges, institutions, 
 and liturgies which were peculiar to the different 
 provinces of the Empire. Accordingly, from the 
 earliest time, we find councils formed in every direction 
 for the religious representation of a whole province. 
 Africa was the first after Italy to afford an example of 
 this, and so numerous were these national assemblies 
 that from 397 to 419 Carthage alone saw fifteen 
 synods. This activity was imitated by the other 
 Churches. In Gaul, the councils followed in quick 
 succession upon that of Aries, in which the right of 
 the Holy See to intervene in the government of the 
 whole of Christendom was so distinctly proclaimed ; 
 and in Spain we find, in the year 506, the Council of 
 Illiberis, in which the rule of ecclesiastical celibacy 
 was so stringently laid down, followed by that of 
 
256 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 Saragossa, and lastly by the first of those councils of 
 Toledo which were destined in time to mould the civil 
 and public legislation of the nation. 
 
 Beside its councils, each province had its schools of 
 theology; such as Marmoutiers and Lerins in Gaul, 
 and Hippo in Africa. Each again of these schools had 
 its doctors to the memory of whom it deferred ; and 
 lastly each had its peculiar heresies which in some 
 measure reflected the character of each nation. Thus 
 Spain in the fourth century produced the Priscillianists, 
 Great Britain had her Pelagians, and Gaul gave forth 
 the Semipelagians. Italy alone had no heretics, the 
 reason of which we shall soon see. 
 
 Every Church had its saints, its national glory, who 
 also represented it on high. And accordingly the poet 
 Prudentius described the appearance of the Christian 
 nations before Christ the Judge on His descent at the 
 last day, each of them bringing its reliquary, with the 
 remains of those martyrs who would protect and shield 
 it from the divine justice. 
 
 Quum Deus dextram quatiens coruscam 
 Nube subnixus veniet rubente, 
 Gentibus justam positurus aequo 
 
 Pondere libram. 
 Orbe de magno caput excitata, 
 Obviam Christo properanter ibit 
 Civitas quaeque pretiosa portans 
 
 Dona canistris.* 
 
 Thus the sentiment which may be called religious 
 patriotism was of early rise. The Christian nation- 
 ality differed widely from that of antiquity, which 
 consisted in declaring everything foreign to be hostile : 
 hospes hostis. In the economy of the modern world, 
 
 * Prud. Peristeph. iv. v. 13 et seq. 
 
THE KISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 257 
 
 on the contrary, each nationality is but a function 
 assigned by Providence to a given people, for which 
 end it is developed, made strong, and endowed with 
 glory, but which it can only accomplish in harmony 
 with other races, and in the society of other nations ; 
 such is the peculiar property of modern nationalities. 
 Each of them has its social mission in the bosom of 
 that mighty society which is called the human race, 
 and this fact will appear on a review of those centuries 
 of the mediaeval period in which Italy so gloriously 
 fulfilled that duty of teaching which was her function 
 during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the epoch 
 of her great doctors ; in which France formed the right 
 hand of Christendom, and grasped the drawn sword 
 in her defence against all comers ; in which Spain and 
 Portugal came, by means of their fleets, under the 
 notice of those backward nations upon whom the light 
 of Christian civilization had not yet shone. Such was 
 the respective destiny and character of these nationali- 
 ties after their necessary transformation through the 
 hidden workings of Christianity ; and thus we see that 
 everything already contributed to the production and. 
 development of the individual and original genius of 
 each of the great provinces of the Koman Empire. 
 
 But we must now turn our attention to each of those 
 three great provinces in particular which were one day 
 to be, Italy, France, and Spain, and which already, 
 in some measure, bore the marks of their destiny. 
 Italy was the one fitted above all to preserve her his- 
 torical character ; for she was by far the older, had 
 lived longer under the same discipline, and the adverse 
 influences of her social war had had time to abate. 
 Therefore she preserved the impress of those two great 
 
258 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 characteristics which had shown themselves from the 
 very commencement of her civilization the presence 
 of the Etruscan and of the Koman element, the genius 
 of religion and the genius of government. The 
 Etruscans, who were especially a religious people, 
 communicated to the Komans their traditions, their 
 ceremonies, the use of auspices, and, in fact, whatever 
 tended to impress upon the Eternal City that theo- 
 cratic character which she has never put off. Home 
 has carried into all her works that good sense which 
 made her the mistress of the world, and has marked 
 everything with the seal of that eternal policy of hers, 
 the powerful memory of which has not yet been effaced. 
 And, therefore, we are not surprised at finding these 
 two principles the theological and the governing spirit 
 persistent in the Italian character of modern times. 
 We have already noticed that Italy produced no 
 heresies, and this was one sign of the good sense with 
 which she was deeply imbued, and which preserved her 
 from the subtleties of Greece and the dreams of the East. 
 Every system of error came in turn to find life and 
 popularity at Rome, and only met there with obscurity, 
 impotence, and death. Rome interfered in the great 
 dispute on Arianism ; she saved, on that occasion, the 
 faith of the world, and from one end to another of 
 the peninsula illustrious theologians started up in 
 defence of orthodoxy, such as Ambrose of Milan, 
 Eusebius of Vercelli, Gaudentius and Philaster of 
 Brescia, Maximus of Turin, Peter Chrysologus of 
 Ravenna, with many too numerous to mention. Above 
 all this theological agitation the Papacy soared aloft, 
 as the heir of the political spirit of the old Romans, 
 that is to say, of their perseverance, their good sense, 
 
THE EISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 259 
 
 their power, their faculty of comprehending what was 
 great, and their knowledge of the art of triumphing 
 over the mere interests of earth. But it owned one 
 gift in addition to those of old Rome, in that it was 
 unarmed, that it had no she-wolf nor eagle upon its 
 standards, and that it wielded the power of persuasion, 
 which was greater far than that of the sword. 
 
 At the moment which saw the government of the 
 world escaping from the feeble hands of the Csesars, in 
 the time of Valentinian III. and Theodosius II., that 
 falling dominion was restored by St. Leo, one of the 
 greatest of the older Popes. We had marked the fresh 
 vigour with which that famous man undertook the 
 direction of all the spiritual and temporal affairs of the 
 West, of the Empire, and of Christendom. On the 
 one hand, he intervened in the East, at Chalcedon, to 
 end the eternal disputes of the Greeks, and fix the 
 dogma of the Incarnation ; whilst, on the other, he 
 arrested Attila at the Mincio, and bequeathed to the 
 lasting gratitude of posterity the day whereon he res- 
 cued civilization in the West. The patriotism of the 
 Romans of old still lived in his highly tempered spirit, 
 and showed itself in that homily, which he preached 
 on the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, in which he 
 celebrated the destiny of the new Rome, and fondly 
 pointed to Providence itself as presiding over the 
 temporal greatness of the queenly city which had 
 paved a way by her conquests for the conversion of the 
 universe. 
 
 Thus from the fifth century Rome and Italy, now 
 become Christian, preserved the two great peculiarities 
 of the ancient Italy, and we have proof that they 
 retained it throughout the whole mediaeval period ; for 
 
260 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 at the close of the Carlovingian period, the theological 
 spirit on the one hand was manifest in that succession 
 of famous men, the two Saint Anselms, Peter Lom- 
 bard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventura, whilst 
 the political spirit so agitated the peninsula that the 
 humblest artisans of the towns formed corporations 
 whereby they might take part in the government of the 
 commonwealth, and was developed to such a point as 
 to bring forth in due time, in the person of Machiavel, 
 one of the greatest political writers of the world. 
 
 And these two elements, which formed the character- 
 istics of the Middle Age in Italy, were united in the 
 persons of such great Popes as St. Gregory the Great, 
 Gregory the Seventh, and Innocent the Third. And 
 they joined also in lending inspiration to the " Divine 
 Comedy," which would have been nothing had it not 
 stood out especially as the poem of theology and politics 
 in Italy, as they had been conceived and produced by 
 the mediaeval epoch. 
 
 We must ever carefully distinguish the two periods 
 in the destiny of Italy, and refrain from confounding 
 her medieval genius with that of the Kevival, or from 
 throwing upon that strong and manly Italy of old, 
 which was ready to suffer and to resist, the respon- 
 sibility of the actions of that more modern Italy 
 which owned as many tyrants as she had noblemen, 
 ended by degenerating into languor, forgetting her 
 destiny as she knelt at the feet of women, and losing 
 her time in the wretched exercises of an emasculate 
 poetry, or in sensual pleasures ; the Italy which still 
 bore her crown of flowers, but beheld all her other 
 diadems trampled under foot, and all her glories com- 
 promised in the dangers of an obscure future. How- 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 261 
 
 ever, mediaeval Italy rigidly preserved the character 
 which she had manifested from the earliest times of 
 the Western Empire. 
 
 In the case of Spain, the persistency of the pri- 
 mitive character was still more striking. When the 
 Eomans first penetrated that country, they found there 
 the ancient Iberian people mingled with Celts, and 
 remarked their singular gravity of character, which had 
 this especial peculiarity, that they never walked except 
 for the purpose of fighting, otherwise they sat still ; 
 their sobriety was equal to their obstinacy ; they fought 
 frequently, but in isolated groups, and their women 
 wore black veils. All these traits belong to the Spain 
 of modern times. Eoman culture made rapid strides 
 amongst them ; Sertorius founded a school at Orca, in 
 the heart of the country, and established there both 
 Greek and Latin masters. Metellus praised the poets 
 of Spain, whose laudation had not been displeasing to 
 himself. A certain foreign element was always observ- 
 able in that Hispano-Latin school which was destined 
 to such celebrity, and which successively produced 
 Portius Latro, the declaimer, the two Senecas, Lucan, 
 Quintilian, Columella, Martial, and Floras, two-thirds 
 in fact of the great writers of the second age of Eoman 
 literature. Yet, with the exception of the faultless 
 Quintilian, they all precisely presented that inflation, 
 elaboration, taste for mock brilliancy, exaggeration 
 in sentiment and idea, and prodigality of metaphor, 
 which make up the defects of the Spanish school. 
 They were all of them represented to a certain point 
 by that rhetorician, of whom Seneca speaks, who was 
 always longing to tell of mighty things, and was so 
 enamoured of size, that he kept bulky servants, bulky 
 
262 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 furniture, and a bulky wife, for which reason he was 
 nicknamed by his contemporaries Senecio grandio. 
 Thus early did Castilian bombast and exaggeration 
 develop. 
 
 Neither did the sacred literature of Spain appear 
 capable of greatly modifying these characteristics, for 
 it remained very poor up to the century of which we 
 are treating. It was doubtless a Spanish bishop, 
 Hosius of Cordova, who had presided at Nicaea, yet 
 we do not find either that he had written much, or 
 that his country had produced many doctors. But 
 another province was working for her, and indeed it 
 often happens in the history of literature, that some 
 country seems to labour but to perish, and finally to 
 disappear ; then we ask for the reason of such efforts, 
 for the purpose of productions of genius in a land soon 
 destined to be brought under the barbaric yoke, and at 
 last it appears that the genius of the fallen country of 
 that stifled nationality has taken refuge in a neigh- 
 bouring land. Thus Spain profited by all the labour 
 of Africa, and the spirit of Tertullian, of St. Cyprian, 
 and of St. Augustine was destined one day to cross 
 the strait and inflame the Spanish Church. Where in 
 fact did St. Augustine find his heirs, if not in the 
 country of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross ? 
 With a mystic literature as fertile as hers, modern 
 Spain was bound to possess a more abundant poetic 
 literature than had ever yet existed. And in fact we 
 have seen, that if this Christian literature of the fifth 
 century was at all productive in Spain, it was so espe- 
 cially in the shape of poetry, and that with an extra- 
 ordinary abundance ; for all those Christian poets, 
 Juvencus, Damasus, Dracontius, and the inexhaustible 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 263 
 
 Prudentius, were Spaniards. Prudentius was espe- 
 cially the poet of dogma, to which he bent his mind 
 with a singular energy, developing it with all the zeal 
 of a controversialist, and with all the exuberance which 
 afterwards appeared in the poetry of Lope de Vega and 
 of Calderon. But on a further examination we find 
 out the spirit of the poetry of Prudentius ; that he 
 was not content with throwing dogma into verse, but 
 that he brought it, as it were, on to the stage, by 
 personifying the human affections and passions, and 
 composing a poem, entitled " Psychomachia," in which 
 he opposed faith to idolatry, chastity to sensuality, 
 humility to pride, and charity to avarice. Nothing 
 assuredly could, at first sight, seem more fanciful than 
 such a composition. Was it worth while deserting that 
 pagan literature, then so charged with heavy allegory, 
 which personified the passions, the fatherland, or war, 
 sometimes Africa, at others Europe, only to create new 
 fictions, and people the field of Christian poetry with 
 unreal personages ? Yet we halt in our condemnation, 
 for the Middle Age was also to be smitten with a love 
 for allegory, and to delight in multiplying in infinite 
 number, and without the least vestige of idolatrous 
 intention, the personification of the human affections ; 
 as for instance on the magnificent portal of the cathe- 
 dral at Chartres, which shows us still the senses, vir- 
 tues, passions, in a word the whole moral encyclopaedia 
 of man, the " speculum chorale " of Vincent of Beau- 
 vais, represented by human figures, with happily chosen 
 attributes, and we find these allegories carved in stone 
 in every Western nation. 
 
 The Spanish drama effected more, for it placed them 
 in action upon the stage and endowed them with 
 
264 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 speech. It was the task of Calderon to take up the 
 subjects of Prudentius. In the Autos Sacrameritales 
 he personified grace, nature, the five senses, the seven 
 capital sins, the synagogue and the Gentile world, until 
 by his marvellous art he endowed with speech that 
 people of statues which had been produced by the 
 Middle Ages. He made them descend from their 
 niches, showed them to the assembled spectators, whom 
 he interested in them as in real personages, and so 
 mixed them with the characters of history that the 
 readers of the dramas of Calderon have to endure a 
 dialogue between Adam and Sin, and to welcome all 
 those other personifications which could only have thus 
 been kept alive by dint of the genius, fire, and in- 
 exhaustible spirit which filled these poets of Spain. 
 And this action passed not before a select and lettered 
 audience, nor a handful of courtiers from the court of 
 Philip III. and Philip IV., brought together to enjoy 
 the delicate pleasures of academicians, but before the 
 mighty crowd which filled the great square of Madrid, 
 which pressed together from every quarter to see the 
 allegory from one end to the other, and follow the 
 drama up to its prearranged close, upon which the 
 back of the theatre opened widely and discovered an 
 altar, a priest, and the bread and wine. 
 
 Perhaps it is less easy to grasp with the same pre- 
 cision the characteristics of the French genius in the 
 spirit of the Gallo-Komans of the fifth century. For 
 there, in fact, the Germanic impress was stronger, and 
 we cannot forget that the Franks have poured their 
 blood into ours, that their sword passed into the hands 
 of our fathers, that their traditions and language 
 brought aliment to our own. It is certain that on 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 265 
 
 passing the Alps or the Pyrenees, and crossing the 
 rivers of Southern Gaul, and especially the Loire, the 
 German mark is found to be more distinct as the North 
 is approached. Nevertheless, we are above all a Neo- 
 Latin people, the essence of our civilization came to 
 us from the Koman Conquest, though from no sudden 
 and unresisted invasion, for perhaps no other part of 
 Europe shows so remarkably both the attracting power 
 of the civilization of Eome and the resistance which 
 it encountered. 
 
 The conquest of Gaul by Caesar had indeed been 
 rapid, and was quickly consummated by his succes- 
 sors, but as quickly also appeared its impatience 
 against a foreign yoke. In the time of Vespasian, 
 Classicus and Tutor caused themselves to be pro- 
 claimed emperors, and forced the vanquished legions 
 to swear allegiance to the new eagles of Gaul. In the 
 third century, and the reign of Julian, Gaul, with 
 Spain and Britain, formed a Transalpine empire, the 
 leadership of which was successively held by Caesars 
 worthy of a better fate Posthumus, Victorinus, and 
 Tetricus, who, as warriors, statesmen, and highly- 
 principled men, would assuredly have been capable of 
 founding a durable empire had the season marked out 
 by Providence arrived. Lastly, when in the fifth cen- 
 tury Gaul was invaded by the Vandals, and had been 
 forgotten by the Court of Kavenna, a soldier named 
 Constantine, whom the soldiery of Britain had already 
 chosen, and around whose standard they were ranged, 
 was recognized by her as emperor. He remained for 
 five years the master of the Gallic provinces, took 
 possession of several cities, obliged Honorius to send 
 him the purple, and did not die till a.d. 411, after a 
 
 VOL. II. 12 
 
266 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 long succession of treasonable attempts on the part of 
 those around him. 
 
 "We must not mistake the motives which impelled 
 the Gauls thus to rebel against Rome and three times 
 to proclaim a Gallo-Roman empire, nor set it down to 
 their hatred of the Roman civilization, for if they 
 detested the tyranny, they loved the enlightenment of 
 the Imperial city. In fact, they always selected the 
 Roman insignia, and bestowed the purple upon the 
 generals whom they crowned. It was always their 
 desire to preserve the traditions of the Empire, purged 
 from the fiscal exactions and the egoism which sacri- 
 ficed every interest to the cravings of Lhe Roman popu- 
 lace, in order to provide them with bread and the 
 games of the circus partem et circenses and to save 
 Roman literature for their country, whose schools were 
 so flourishing that, from the earliest ages, the rheto- 
 ricians of Gaul supplied orators for the nascent cities of 
 Britain. 
 
 Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos.* 
 
 These schools reached so high a pitch of excellence 
 as to draw from Gratian that decree which conferred 
 such an increase of dignity upon the seminaries of 
 Treves. Ausonius witnesses to the popularity of the 
 crowd of grammarians and rhetoricians who taught at 
 Autun, Lyons, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux. In 
 fact, the passion for eloquence and a taste for the art 
 of oratory reappeared everywhere ; and whilst we may 
 mark the gradual extinction at Rome of the last embers 
 of the art which had produced Cicero, some remains of 
 it survived in Gaul, and showed themselves in a miser- 
 
 * Juvenal, Sat. xv. 3. 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 267 
 
 able but still recognizable form in tbe panegyrists of 
 the emperors. We have already incidentally con- 
 demned this custom, and scorned the ignominy of these 
 eulogiums, often addressed, as they were, to blood- 
 stained men by others who were greedy of gold, of 
 dignities, or of patronage ; but we must still own that 
 amidst this humiliation and littleness lurked the last 
 traditions of the oratorical art, and that such degene- 
 rate men as an Eumenius, a Pacatus, or a Mamertinus 
 bear witness at least to the taste and passion of the 
 Gauls of their day for eloquence and the science of 
 forcible and refined speaking. "What Cato said of the 
 Gallic race has always been true when he defined 
 their character prophetically and with his own admir- 
 able terseness in the words " Rem militarem et argute 
 loqui."* 
 
 There can be no better representative of the Gallo- 
 Koman spirit in this respect than Sidonius Apollinaris, 
 one of the chief writers of the fifth century. He was 
 born at Lyons about the year 430, and was probably of 
 Arvernic race, sprung from one of those wealthy Gothic 
 families which preserved the literary traditions of Rome, 
 and kept alive an hereditary bitterness against her 
 dominion. He had received his education from skilful 
 masters, and studiously guarded the remembrance of 
 them. The name of the man from whom he had 
 received lessons in poetry was Ennius, for the time had 
 come for that usurpation of classic names which soon 
 filled the schools with Ovids, Horaces, and Virgils. 
 His master in philosophy was called Eusebius. 
 Suddenly this young Gaul, who had thus been trained 
 
 * Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur, 
 Rem militarem et argute loqui. 
 
268 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 in the art of eloquence and in philosophical science, 
 found himself called to the highest dignity by the 
 accession of his father-in-law, Avitus, to the Imperial 
 throne. This wealthy Gaul named Avitus had, in fact, 
 just been set over the Eoman Empire by the Gothic 
 king Theodoric, and soon after his proclamation fell 
 beneath the hand of an obscure assassin. Sidonius 
 Apollinari3 had been summoned to Eome to pronounce 
 a public panegyric on his father-in-law in the presence 
 of the senate, and shortly after, on the murder of 
 Avitus, he pronounced at Lyons an eulogium upon 
 his successor Majorian. A little later, when Majorian 
 had disappeared in his turn, Sidonius, who was too 
 fertile in these eulogies, pronounced the panegyric on 
 Anthemius at Eome. He could not have judged his 
 conduct thus himself, for favours multiplied around him 
 in proportion to the number of his rhymes. He had 
 attained the highest honours in politics and literature, 
 his statue was placed in the Forum of Trajan at Eome 
 amongst the chief poets of the Empire, he had been 
 raised to patrician rank and the dignity of prefect of 
 Eome, and had in a word drained the cup of human 
 delights, when suddenly the weariness of temporal 
 advantage, which is apt to lay hold of higher souls, 
 seized upon him, so that in a short time he was found 
 to have become a convert, to have adopted a severer life, 
 and to have been carried by popular acclamation to the 
 episcopal chair of Clermont. Eenouncing thereupon 
 profane poetry and the distractions and wanderings of 
 a worldly life, he assumed the demeanour of a holy 
 bishop. But how could he renounce literature, the 
 first delight of his youth, and how avoid manifesting 
 in all that he wrote the trace of the spirit of the 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 269 
 
 Gallo-Eoman schools in which he had been nurtured ? 
 Accordingly, on reading his collected works, upon what- 
 ever epoch of his career we may light, whether we 
 have to do with the Eoman prefect or the Christian 
 bishop, we always find different sentiments expressed in 
 the same language. For, in fact, Sidonius Apollinaris 
 had desired above all things to gain skill in the art of 
 eloquence, and had gained it. Such, on the authority 
 of Gregory of Tours, was his power in this respect, 
 that he was capable of an immediate improvisation on 
 any given subject, and he himself is careful to inform 
 us, that being charged with the task of providing a 
 bishop for the people of Bourges, who were then 
 divided amongst themselves, he had only two watches 
 of the night, or six hours, in which to dictate the dis- 
 course which he had to pronounce on the occasion 
 before the assembled clergy and people. And there- 
 fore he begged excuse, if in consequence " an orato- 
 rical partition, historical authorities, poetical images, 
 grammatical figures, and the flashes which the rhetori- 
 cians strike out of their controversies," could not be 
 found there; his discourse was in fact merely simple 
 and clear, and that idea humiliated him.* 
 
 But he vindicated himself by his correspondence, in 
 which he aspired to imitate Pliny and Symmachus. 
 In this he seems so far to have succeeded that he was 
 prevailed upon to collect and publish them. All these 
 letters, in fact, show traces of the polish which was 
 bestowed upon them before handing them over to the 
 chances of publicity. But that which put Sidonius 
 Apollinaris most completely at his ease was the power 
 of rivalling his friend throughout the interchange of 
 * Sidon. Apollin. Ep. lib. vii. 9. 
 
 12 * 
 
270 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 correspondence in wit, research, refinement, and even 
 obscurity. He was fond of struggling against difficul- 
 ties, plunging into hazardous descriptions, and laying 
 open to the last details the life of the Eomans or the 
 barbarians of his time ; details which, though useful 
 for history, were tainted with all the vices of the Decline. 
 He put the finishing stroke to his achievements, and 
 fancied himself at the summit of literary glory, when he 
 succeeded in mingling with his friendly letters some 
 improvised verses and a few distichs which had sud- 
 denly occurred to his mind under circumstances which 
 he had not foreseen. It was upon these little poems, 
 composed out of hand at the desire of the emperor or 
 some other personage, that he especially prided himself. 
 Having, for instance, one day to pass over a torrent, he 
 stopped to look for a ford, but as he could not easily 
 find a convenient passage, he paused till the water had 
 lowered, and composed a distich which could be read at 
 will from one end or the other. 
 
 Prsecipiti modo quod decurrit tramite flumen 
 Tempore consumptum jam cito deficiet. 
 
 The superiority of these verses over those of Virgil 
 and Ovid lay in their capability of being thus reversed 
 
 Deficiet cito jam consumptum tempore flumen 
 Tramite decurrit quod modo prsecipiti.* 
 
 On other occasions he infused a greater measure of 
 grace and gallantry, so that on reading the verses which 
 he made to be inscribed on the goblet which Evodius 
 desired to offer to the Queen Eegnahilda, wife of Euric, 
 one might be reminded of the French wit of the seven- 
 teenth century. The princess was a thorough barbarian 
 
 * Sid. Apol. Ep. lib. ix. 14. 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 271 
 
 no doubt, but the lines were most refined. The cup 
 which was to be offered to her was in the form of a sea- 
 shell, and in allusion to the shape and the associations 
 attached to it by antiquity, Sidonius said, " The shell 
 whereupon the mighty Triton bore Venus can bear no 
 comparison with this one. Abase a little, we pray thee, 
 thy sovereign majesty, and receive, powerful patroness, 
 an humble gift. Happy is the water which, enclosed in 
 the resplendent metal, will touch the more resplendent 
 countenance of a lovely queen. For whenever she 
 deigns to plunge her lips therein, the reflection of her 
 face will whiten the silver cup."* 
 
 Nothing can be more graceful than this, and the most 
 elaborate madrigals would fail to excel the exquisite 
 gallantry of Sidonius Apollinaris. There is no indica- 
 tion that he had entered ecclesiastical orders at this 
 period, and he perhaps appears in the character of a 
 poet of the world. 
 
 Had he no other claim upon the attention of pos- 
 terity, Sidonius Apollinaris would present himself as a 
 man of wit, and so fulfil the second condition of Cato's 
 sketch of the Gallic character, " argute loqui" but he 
 would be far from the first, and nothing shows that he 
 had the zeal for action " rem militarem." But this was 
 not the case. On becoming a bishop, Sidonius had 
 adopted all the sentiments of his office, and in conse- 
 quence he was the defender of his episcopal city. "We 
 know how the great bishops of the fifth century became, 
 amidst the universal disorganization and the incessant 
 invasions of the barbarians, at once the civil and volun- 
 tary magistrates of their respective cities, and how their 
 moral authority often availed to sustain the courage of 
 * Sid. Apol. Ep. lib. iv. 8, ad Evodium. 
 
272 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 the citizens and to daunt and divide the barbarians. 
 Sidonius occupied at Clermont the outpost of the 
 Empire, the edge of the remnant of the Koman province, 
 and the frontiers of the kingdom which the emperors 
 had been obliged to make over to the Visigoths ; and 
 the Visigoths, discontented with their boundaries, 
 pushed themselves in daily attack upon the walls of 
 Clermont, and obliged Sidonius to struggle to obtain the 
 intervention of the emperor in order to stem the pro- 
 gress of barbarian conquest and spare the episcopal 
 city the horrors of invasion. He had long hoped, and 
 for long excited the bravery of his fellow-citizens, to 
 defend the city walls in despite of all the miseries 
 of famine and pestilence. An imperial deputation at 
 length waited upon the Visigothic monarch and pro- 
 posed a capitulation, by the terms of which Clermont 
 was to be abandoned to him on the consideration of his 
 respecting the rest of the Empire. Sidonius was sud- 
 denly made aware of this treaty. Whilst he had been 
 so energetically defending the walls of his episcopal city 
 the men in whom he had placed his hopes had betrayed 
 him. Thereupon he wrote to one of them the following 
 letter, in which we no longer find the old spirit of 
 refinement, but the energy, warmth, and dash which 
 marked the character of his race. " Such is at present' 
 the condition of this unhappy corner of the earth, that 
 it has suffered less from war than from peace. Our 
 servitude has become the price of another's safety. 
 misery ! the slavery of the Arverni, who, if one goes 
 back to their origin, had dared to call themselves the 
 brothers of the Komans, and to number themselves 
 among the races which issued from the blood of Ilion ! 
 If one stops at their modern glory, these are the men 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 273 
 
 who by their unaided efforts arrested the arms of the 
 public enemy, who from behind their ramparts defied 
 the assaults of the Goths, and struck back terror into 
 the barbarian camp. Behold, then, our reward for star- 
 vation, fire, sword, pestilence, spears that have fattened 
 in blood, warriors emaciated by privation ! This is the 
 glorious peace for which we have lived upon the herbs 
 plucked from the crevices of our rocks. Employ all 
 your wisdom to break so shameful an agreement. 
 Yes, if needs be, we should rejoice at seeing ourselves 
 again besieged, at again suffering from hunger, if we 
 might fight once more." * 
 
 In this man the French genius appears with all the 
 urbanity, with the lightness for which it has been so 
 often reproached, but also with that passionate feeling 
 of honour which will never be effaced. The latter 
 characteristic was preserved throughout those long ages 
 of barbarism, upon the threshold of which we are 
 standing. We may observe the remarkable fact that 
 during the whole Merovingian period, a certain num- 
 ber of illustrious personages may be seen who became 
 afterwards bishops, and in time canonized saints, called 
 to the courts of the kings and raised to the highest 
 dignities of the kingdom on account of their skill in 
 the art of speaking quia facundus erat and because 
 of their possessing the power which from that time 
 forward subjugated the minds of men. And again, if 
 we go farther, and plunge into the depths of the Middle 
 Ages at the time in which the French language first 
 was spoken, we shall notice that the chief characteristic 
 of that nascent literature was that it was military and 
 chivalric, and destined by those qualities to make the 
 * Sid. Apoll. Ep. lib. vii. 7, ad Graecum. 
 
274 CIVILIZATION IN FIFTH CENTURY. 
 
 tour of Europe ; the whole of Europe, nevertheless, 
 confirming that its origin was France, that it was born 
 in the land whose natives love the art of eloquence, but 
 better still the achievement of acts of prowess rem 
 militarem. 
 
 We have thus pointed out the origin of the three 
 great Neo-Latin nationalities in Spain, in Italy, and in 
 Gaul ; and at, the end of our proposed task we find 
 two points established ; the first being that the Eoman 
 world and its ancient civilization perished far less 
 suddenly than has been supposed ; that its resistance 
 to barbarism was long ; and that its good and its evil 
 institutions, its vices as well as its virtues, were pro- 
 longed into the Middle Age, and explained many of 
 those errors the source of which has been but imper- 
 fectly recognized. Thus astrology, and the exaggera- 
 tions of royal despotism, all the pedantry, and those 
 lingering memories of pagan art which can be detected 
 in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, are to 
 be^ traced back to a time-honoured origin, and formed so 
 mUny links by which the Middle Age clung to antiquity, 
 and which it did not desire to sever. 
 
 On tlE "other hand, we have established the position 
 that the Christian civilization contained already, and in 
 greater completeness than has been supposed, those 
 developments which have been generally attributed to 
 the times of barbarism. Thus the Church already pos- 
 sessed the Papacy and monasticism ; and in the sphere 
 of manners we have specified the independence of the 
 individual, the popular sentiment of liberty, and the 
 dignity of the woman. In the sphere of letters we 
 have marked how the philosophy of St. Augustine con- 
 tained in germ the scholastic labours of the mediaeval 
 
THE RISE OF THE NEO-LATIN NATIONS. 275 
 
 epoch. We have seen the " City of God " tracing 
 nobler views of history, and, lastly, discovered in the 
 Catacombs all the elements which were developed in 
 the modern basilicas. 
 
 And thus Providence employed a singular art and 
 a mighty course of preparation in the work of linking 
 together periods which, from the different spirits which 
 moved them, would seem fated to be for ever separate. 
 We see that when the Almighty desires to mould a 
 newer world, He gently and gradually breaks the ancient 
 edifice which must fall, and uses its materials con- 
 siderably in rearing the modern monument which is to 
 succeed. As in a beleaguered city the defenders begin 
 betimes behind the works which the enemy is attacking 
 to construct the fortification which is to succeed them, 
 and before which all the efforts of the besieging force 
 will fail, so also, while the ancient barrier of Eoman 
 civilization was falling stone by stone, the Christian 
 rampart was being formed behind which society might 
 find another entrenchment. And this spectacle should 
 serve us for an example and a lesson. The invasion 
 of the barbarians was without doubt the mightiest and 
 most terrible revolution that has ever occurred; and 
 yet we see the infinite care with which Providence 
 softened the blow in some respects, and broke the fall 
 of the ancient world. Let us also trust that our own 
 epoch will not be more unfortunate ; that if our old 
 fortress is fated to fall, new and solid defences will be 
 raised to protect us ; and, in fine, that the civilization 
 which has cost so much to God and to man will never 
 
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